Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Email her at dr.freeride@gmail.com.
Yo dawg! This is a soccer tournament weekend for the Free-Rides. (First game: 8:00 AM. Time of departure from Casa Free-Ride: 6:30 AM. Zombification complete!)
At the moment, the younger offspring and I are chilling before the younger offspring's team's second game; the younger offspring is watching Fred videos, while I am filling in gaps in my knowledge with the help of Know Your Meme.
Know Your Meme is a good way to catch up on memes that are currently part of the collective memory of the internets, but which might have peaked before some of us Luddites were sufficiently plugged in to be paying attention. And the videos explaining them do a nice job placing the memes in a larger cultural context and providing some analysis of why they caught on.
Here's an episode that had me and my better half giggling last night:
Be sure to stay near the pause button -- some of the images go by quickly, and you're going to want to be able to read the captions. (The last one is our favorite.)
Father Joe Vetter, director of Duke University's Catholic Center, is protesting trial participant accrual for a study being conducted on campus directed by Dr Dan Ariely, the James B Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Fuqua School of Business (story and video). ...
Ariely and his postdoctoral fellow, Dr Janet Schwartz, received IRB approval to recruit female study participants from the Duke campus community to examine the influence of Tupperware-like sex toy parties on sexual attitudes. A recruitment advert had been posted on the university website, as is commonly done for any clinical or social science study, but was pulled yesterday following the objection of Rev Vetter.
If I understand his quotes correctly, Vetter believes that studying sex toys somehow condones behavior that threatens relationships:
"It's not fostering relationships, and it seems to me that one of the things that we want young people to do is to figure out how to have deep, intimate friendships and relationships," he said. "I would draw the line at a different place. I don't think that it's a good idea."
I'm not privy to the hypothesis being tested but I suspect that the team is investigating how social norms toward adult products are influenced by groupthink. Ariely has not commented publicly on this story other than to say, rightfully so, that he won't comment so as to not contaminate the results. However, I suspect that it may now be too late.
Dr. Free-Ride: I wanted to ask you guys a question. I think maybe I asked you this question (or something like it) some time ago, but you were a lot younger and, you know, you keep growing and changing and stuff. So the question is, when someone tells you something about science, how can you tell if that person knows what they're talking about?
[T]here's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That's why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I'm seeing politicians complain that research to help other drug addicts quit is a waste of money.
Maybe it's because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts - probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them. But we should get angry about these cheap shots. A crack addict will die faster than a smoker. A crack addict can rarely hold down a job or be a parent. His/her illegal addiction poses a bigger danger to society than a smoker's does. Most importantly, a crack addict, like a smoker, can quit. Tobacco is still a significant public health problem, and I want to do all we can to help smokers (like my mom) quit, but crack, meth, etc. utterly destroys families and communities. We should be leveraging scientific research every way we can to help these people - not throwing them away or taking shots at them because they're "bad," or because we can't relate to them. They're real people. They have families.
Here, I want to pick up on the question of what kind of research the public (or the pundits trying to prod the public one direction or another) have a hard time getting behind. We've discussed the general issuebefore, and even spent a little time talking about the specific issue of research with addict populations. But we haven't dealt head-on with the kind of objection that a segment of the American public may have, specifically, with putting up public funding to support research on the effects of drugs on people's bodies, brains, behaviors; on effective ways to treat or manage dependence or addition; on genetic or environmental factors that might make some people more susceptible to dependence or harm.
A very large and vocal swath of America views illegal drug use as a moral failing. These same people nearly always believe that those with moral failings deserve to suffer. In their eyes, anything that reduces the suffering of those with moral failings is evil. ...
The problems you have described are a direct result of our culture's long standing tradition of framing undesirable behaviors as moral failings.
Let's consider the proposal that resistance to funding scientific research on drugs of abuse or on treatment is, at bottom, motivated by the view that taking drugs is a moral failing.
In a year where lots of folks are waiting for the signs of economic recovery to be manifest in their daily lives, and where public school budgets have been even more hard hit than they were a year ago, your generosity helped us significantly surpass the impact of our October 2008 drive.
I've been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a "fking lib." I've been called the author of "heinous tripe."
J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title" "Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine." In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug. "The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit's house must be damn good," he wrote. Later, he sent a revised version that omitted rape and replaced it with the image of me drinking Offit's Kool-aid. That one was later posted at the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. You can read that blog here.
I've been told I'll think differently "if you live to grow up." I've been warned that "this article will haunt you for a long time." Just now, I got an email so sexually explicit that I can't paraphrase it here. Except to say it contained the c-word and a reference to dead fish.
Since the scientific issues around vaccination (including the lack of evidence to demonstrate a link between vaccinations and autism) are well-covered in these parts (especially at Orac's pad and by Mike The Mad Biologist), I just want to speak briefly about the strategy that seems to be embodied by these reactions to Wallace's article.
Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Email her at dr.freeride@gmail.com.
