Somebody said -- and it is true -- that the key to long-run academic success is to create a research program. Being brilliant and insightful won't do it, unless you give your graduate students something to do.
That seems to be true of all academic disciplines, whether scientific, social scientific, or whatever.
One puzzle for those of us who tend to think that science reveals the truth about the world is why it should do so. It is just another social practice, after all. You constantly run into Popperians on the Internet, but philosophers of science will tell you the positivist project of finding some extra-scientific criterion for why science works hit a dead end.
Could it be that any research project will eventually, through some collective Bayesian process, either die out or become a science? Is that crazy?
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
The Liberal War on Science
Much has (quite properly) been said about the Bush administration's aversion to science. However, I'd be interested if there is anyone on the right saying something like this:
I admit that the second sentence is pretty easy to imagine, but we would find it pretty chilling if a respected rightist pundit warned scientists they needed to be "careful." And who wouldn't ridicule someone who admitted that most of their co-thinkers believe inquiry into an empirical relationship to be "inherently wrongheaded or absurd."
But when it comes to differences in sexual strategies between men and women (something EVERYBODY has in fact noticed in their own lives, and the absence of which would be completely inexplicable given all we know of evolutionary biology), someone as clever as Matthew Yglesias can, without embarrassment, provide dark warnings to scientists to be "careful", make sophistical arguments that the fact that everyone in every culture knows something to be the case makes it unlikely to be true, impugn the integrity of hundreds of researchers he doesn't know, and generally make a fool of himself.
[U]nlike a lot of my political fellow travelers I don't think this kind of inquiry into the relationship between global temperature and carbon dioxide emissions to be inherently wrongheaded or absurd, but I think people need to be much more careful about this stuff. To have an entire research program that seems dedicated to upholding enviro folk wisdom is odd and an awful lot of the specific empirical research turns out to be incredibly hollow.
I admit that the second sentence is pretty easy to imagine, but we would find it pretty chilling if a respected rightist pundit warned scientists they needed to be "careful." And who wouldn't ridicule someone who admitted that most of their co-thinkers believe inquiry into an empirical relationship to be "inherently wrongheaded or absurd."
But when it comes to differences in sexual strategies between men and women (something EVERYBODY has in fact noticed in their own lives, and the absence of which would be completely inexplicable given all we know of evolutionary biology), someone as clever as Matthew Yglesias can, without embarrassment, provide dark warnings to scientists to be "careful", make sophistical arguments that the fact that everyone in every culture knows something to be the case makes it unlikely to be true, impugn the integrity of hundreds of researchers he doesn't know, and generally make a fool of himself.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Is Race a Valid Scientific Concept?
The existence of sub-species isn't particularly controversial for non-human animals (as we say on the West Coast). But for obvious reasons it's a tricky one when it comes to a certain East African ape. Unfortunately, ignoring ethnic differences in susceptibilities to disease and (quite possibly) reactions to medicines will kill people, especially people who don't belong to the dominant ethncities in lands of advanced medicine. The New Republic has made an interesting discussion on the subject available to non-subscribers here and here.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Finally, some good news
Thoreau at Jim Henley's has read PLOS Biology, and comes back with this encouraging news:
Unfortunately, the effect is only temporary.
In a nutshell, there’s no contradiction between life and [the second law of] thermodynamics.
Unfortunately, the effect is only temporary.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
John Wiley & Sons reaches for the hammer
Via Razib, I see that John Wiley & Sons is engaging in some heavy-handed (and dubious) copyright enforcement against a science blogger.
It seems that Wiley's Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture published some taxpayer-financed research showing that mixing alcohol (and some other less interesting substances) with fruit may improve its shelf life and antioxidant qualities. Shelley Batts, one of Seed's collection of bloggers, published a chart from the article in the original version of this post.
The result was this letter:
I'm not really up on intellectual property law at all, let alone American copyright law, and I hesitate to opine as to what the law is (as opposed to what it would be if I had the dictatorial powers necessary to straighten things out.) But even if Wiley is within its legal rights, it should have to pay something in its reputation for this. The whole academic publications business survives on a business model of nothing but path dependence and inertia. To heck with them.
Update: Wiley has folded, blaming the misunderstanding on a junior staffer.
It seems that Wiley's Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture published some taxpayer-financed research showing that mixing alcohol (and some other less interesting substances) with fruit may improve its shelf life and antioxidant qualities. Shelley Batts, one of Seed's collection of bloggers, published a chart from the article in the original version of this post.
The result was this letter:
Re: Antioxidants in Berries Increased by Ethanol (but Are Daiquiris Healthy?) by Shelly Bats
http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/04/antioxidants_in_berries_increa.php
The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a table and graphs taken from a recently published paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. If these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action.
I'm not really up on intellectual property law at all, let alone American copyright law, and I hesitate to opine as to what the law is (as opposed to what it would be if I had the dictatorial powers necessary to straighten things out.) But even if Wiley is within its legal rights, it should have to pay something in its reputation for this. The whole academic publications business survives on a business model of nothing but path dependence and inertia. To heck with them.
Update: Wiley has folded, blaming the misunderstanding on a junior staffer.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
The Dispassionate Scientist or the White-Coated Fanatic?
As we pleasantly argue about how many Iraqis are likely to have died in the last few years, Andy makes the following point about the editor of the Lancet:
You can watch Dr. Richard Horton's speech at an anti-war demonstration in Manchester here. Horton wasn't one of the researchers, but he is ultimately responsible for the quality of the Lancet's stuff. Is it a problem that he is a passionate fellow, especially by standards applicable to Englishmen?
Similar questions come up about climate researchers, or conservation biologists and indeed any kind of scientists whose field intersects with a matter of public controversy. When we get to know them, it turns out that these people are not judicious, impartial types. They are fanatics. Should this lead us to distrust the science?
No. The "image of the dispassionate lab-coated scientist" is itself a product of 1950s-era Madison Avenue, better for selling soap than describing the dynamics of scientific discovery. Scientists are distinguished precisely by their ability to become passionate and blindly partisan about things -- like fruitfly pheromones and fluid dynamics -- that normal people find intensely boring. Republican and Democratic senators can have a drink after a party line vote; their staffers can date. Quantum loop gravity people, in contrast, despise string theorists with the kind of passion a DailyKos diarist would find unhinged.
Science doesn't work because it imagines that the participants can be neutral about their hypotheses. Their careers, their prospects of fame and quite possibly their ideological and existential commitments are bound up in them. Science works because there are clear methodological rules and because there is glory in successful criticism. Ideological biases are fine, especially when there are other people with the opposite ones.
One problem with the legal system is that it does seem to favour the kind of expert witness who is best at giving the appearance of being "above the fray." Judges don't want someone who shows their work -- they want someone whose demeanour makes them comfortable. There are understandable reasons for this, but it's a bit odd since the legal system is itself adversarial and devoted to the idea that truth will come from conflict of interest constrained by rules.
Update: There is a great thread at Cosmic Variance featuring a relatively accessible debate between string theorists and their enemies.
Update 2Via GNXP, I see that in pre-independence India, while Gandhi and Nehru's Congress Party largely attracted Brahmins with legal or journalistic training (something I had been aware of), the Hindu communalist RSS leadership, while also largely Brahmin in caste, were far more likely to have a scientific or technical training. Razib's discussion is quite interesting.
I don't deny the editor the right to hold views that are contrary to my own, and it is possible that in the fulness of time I'll admit that he was right. But, come on...he uses the study to introduce a fairly bombastic denunciation of Blair's "colonialism", "imperialism", "hate", etc. and announces at the end of his speech -- given at an antiwar rally where George Galloway was apparently also speaking -- that "We are the new resistance". This doesn't quite fit the image of the dispassionate lab-coated scientist who we'd turn to for an objective view of a complicated subject. I understand that his emotion might be the result of an honest belief that the war has unnecessarily killed a lot of people, but it still would be a lot more convincing (to me) if the study came from a journal that didn't appear to have such a passionate institutional commitment to the results that the study produced.
You can watch Dr. Richard Horton's speech at an anti-war demonstration in Manchester here. Horton wasn't one of the researchers, but he is ultimately responsible for the quality of the Lancet's stuff. Is it a problem that he is a passionate fellow, especially by standards applicable to Englishmen?
Similar questions come up about climate researchers, or conservation biologists and indeed any kind of scientists whose field intersects with a matter of public controversy. When we get to know them, it turns out that these people are not judicious, impartial types. They are fanatics. Should this lead us to distrust the science?
No. The "image of the dispassionate lab-coated scientist" is itself a product of 1950s-era Madison Avenue, better for selling soap than describing the dynamics of scientific discovery. Scientists are distinguished precisely by their ability to become passionate and blindly partisan about things -- like fruitfly pheromones and fluid dynamics -- that normal people find intensely boring. Republican and Democratic senators can have a drink after a party line vote; their staffers can date. Quantum loop gravity people, in contrast, despise string theorists with the kind of passion a DailyKos diarist would find unhinged.
Science doesn't work because it imagines that the participants can be neutral about their hypotheses. Their careers, their prospects of fame and quite possibly their ideological and existential commitments are bound up in them. Science works because there are clear methodological rules and because there is glory in successful criticism. Ideological biases are fine, especially when there are other people with the opposite ones.
One problem with the legal system is that it does seem to favour the kind of expert witness who is best at giving the appearance of being "above the fray." Judges don't want someone who shows their work -- they want someone whose demeanour makes them comfortable. There are understandable reasons for this, but it's a bit odd since the legal system is itself adversarial and devoted to the idea that truth will come from conflict of interest constrained by rules.
Update: There is a great thread at Cosmic Variance featuring a relatively accessible debate between string theorists and their enemies.
Update 2Via GNXP, I see that in pre-independence India, while Gandhi and Nehru's Congress Party largely attracted Brahmins with legal or journalistic training (something I had been aware of), the Hindu communalist RSS leadership, while also largely Brahmin in caste, were far more likely to have a scientific or technical training. Razib's discussion is quite interesting.
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