Advocacy as a Scientific Strategy : The Mitroff

In September 1971, in connection with the debate over the United States Anti-Ballistic Missile System, an ad hoc committee for the Operations Research Society of America [ORSA, 1971] published a set of guidelines for doing scientific research. The ORSA committee members were concerned that many people who claim to be scientists operate in violation of these guidelines. Their feelings could be summarized as follows: Most so-called scientists either do not understand or cannot bring themselves to follow the scientific method. They solve problems in a biased fashion just as non-scientists do. The result is that most of the scientific literature is pure garbage. Worse yet, the scientists cannot even recognize it as garbage. The committee felt that publication of the guidelines was unlikely to have a significant effect on the behavior of scientists. To give their report some impact, the committee tried to generate a controversy over the guidelines by publishing papers under the fictitious name of Ian Mitroff. (Mitroff is Russian slang for hoax.)