November 2007 • VOLUME 27 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

Competition in science and dressage, impossible marriages?

An essay by H.G.Solari(*)

To physicists the news came as a shock: scientists at two important laboratories (Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. - USA-) had been involved in serious misconduct. They published fabricated results never obtained in their experiments (1). The review system had failed to detect the fraud and the works had been published in prestigious journals. The immediate reaction was the American Physical Society (APS) launching an inquiry into the general situation of ethics in physics. The results of this study (partially reported in (1)) brought to light something that anyone willing to see already knew: the pressure and distortions introduced into science by the competitive handling of the scientific field.

The Task Force organized by APS sent out a questionnaire to physicists in the USA, obtaining two distinctive responses, corresponding to scientists in training (PhD students and Postdoctoral fellows) and senior scientists. While the first group responded enthusiastically, the second group mostly disregarded the problem. We will come back to this dichotomy.

Scientists in training said that:

The only real answer to the ethics problem is for tenure review boards to stop rewarding the Science/Nature/PRL culture above all else (2)

Our scientific community promotes research of the surface and superficiality [to the] detriment of content and depth.

Many breaches of ethics arise from the pressure to publish . . .

To understand how the findings in physics relate to dressage, let me put forward a rough table of equivalences:

Translated into dressage, the findings in physics would be: horses (and young riders?) are saying

The only real answer to the ethics problem is for dressage associations to stop rewarding the 'ribbons-and-show-above-all-else' culture.

Our dressage community promotes seeking mechanical exactness and superficiality, to the detriment of beauty and harmony.

Many breaches of ethics arise from the pressure to win at shows.

The fact that the translation seems to work suggests the existence of a deeper relationship, and a common phenomenon between the scientists and the competitive dressage rider.

There is a striking similarity between the proclaimed values of the scientist and the dressage rider.

The values correspond to big words no one would dare to challenge (Truth, Correctness, Reason, Beauty, Harmony ...)

And yet… the precise meaning of them is difficult or impossible to explain outside dogmatism. In part because the precise meaning is determined by social elements. We learn to associate some objective attributes with characteristics of each value. I will further sustain that the original meaning has to be sought in the ancient Greeks and the relation to Nature, and was recovered during the Renaissance.

Harmony, for example, would be related to ease of movement, absence of tensions, and correspondence between the parts.

Truth would be a result/theory/abstraction that finds (so far) no contradictory results/observations and is in correspondence with natural observations.

However these quick definitions only translate the problem into recognizing tension or recognizing contradiction.

For example, the FEI wants to celebrate the “happy horse”. We would all agree that a rider that keeps his horse happy is to be congratulated. Yet I can see that some of the teams earning “happy horse” awards don't have horses that I would consider happy. Instead they correspond to rollkur-trained horses, with horses displaying resignation and fear.

Later in this essay there is a 'happy horse' quiz, which I invite you to do, to check how much you know about horses (and people).

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