That’s not to say that there weren’t serious issues raised by the whole incident. Many of these lie in the realm of journalistic ethics, at least as understood by people you might regard as affiliated with old school journalistic outlets (notwithstanding the fact that many such outlets currently have a significant online presence). The analyses by Paul Raeburn, Curtis Brainard, and John Rennie all do a nice job setting out the central issues in case, so do click through to read them if you haven’t already.

I know some are of the view that the new-ish medium of blogging is a blank slate that need not be bound by the old rules of the old media, or that bloggers are not journalists (especially if their day jobs are something other than being journalists) and thus needn’t worry about the ethical constraints the J-school crowd take to be important. But I’m starting to wonder if bloggers can really claim that much freedom to self-identify their roles when for practical purposes their writing is functioning as journalism. Especially for a media group that fought to have its bloggers’ output indexed by Google News (as Seed Media Group did), setting aside recognized standards of journalistic ethics without serious consideration and a positive argument for why they should not apply to one’s blogging empire seems pretty shortsighted.

I’m also aware that some saw an irony in science journalists taking such umbrage at the breeching of the separation between editorial content and advertising at ScienceBlogs given that journalism as an industry seems to have an ample supply of publishers, editors, reporters, and such looking to stretch the rules as far as they will go. The tendency toward such behaviors is exactly why an industry or profession might want to articulate ethical codes — to say, “We should do better than this.” As John Rennie writes:

I’m by no means implying that digital media should shut up and listen to print media because it has all the answers. Far from it: print media needs to listen to digital these days more often than the reverse. Nevertheless, the ethics of journalism and the implicit covenants that publications have with their readers are topics with which traditional media have decades of experience. …

The American Society of Magazine Editors maintains a set of guidelines to help editors (and publishers) stay in the best ethical graces of the profession. Not that editors and publishers don’t in fact try to bend those rules, or outright ignore them. … Nor is it always easy to determine whether a particular sponsorship opportunity crosses the line. The guidelines don’t end discussion; but they are a place to start it.

Trying to do better does not mean that you always do as well as you hope to. It doesn’t mean you’re immune from misjudging a situation, or making the wrong call. But it does mean that you feel the pull of your duty to the interested parties — here, ScienceBlogs readers — for whom you’re trying to do better. We’re not just writing for ourselves here, we’re writing for an audience. That audience has a right to expect us to deal with them honestly and in good faith.

I suspect that some of the science journalists ScienceBlogs lost in the wake of PepsiGate had expected better from Seed Media Group than they might have from the old media. When you find out you’re affiliated with an organization that doesn’t share some of your core values, and when that affiliation is voluntary, severing the association makes perfect sense.

Some have objected that people should stay to try to influence the organization to adopt better values (where “better” is obviously better by the lights of the folks inclined to leave). For some people, this would feel like the best path forward. For others, the individual cost they might bear by staying (in terms of lost professional credibility, or the amount of effort it might take to nudge the organization even a little, or the amount of frustration they might have to eat for putting in that effort) just wouldn’t seem worth it.

Besides, if you’ve had enough experience of trying to nudge the organization where none of your efforts have produced discernible results and all of the mistakes that the organization had opportunity to learn from have been repeated and amplified, you update your prior probabilities (as the Bayesians are wont to say).

All of which is to say, I think I understand why some Sb bloggers left as l’affaire PepsiCo made impact, why some left after a longer interval, and why some are hanging on tight to Sb. And I hope I have enough empathy and regard for all of these bloggers to respect that they have made (and are making) the best decisions in light of their own values and interests, their own stamina and limits, their own relationship with blogging as an activity and this network of bloggers as a community.

Likewise, I hope they will enough empathy and regard for me to respect my decision at this juncture.

Since January 2006, I have been part of ScienceBlogs. I feel extremely fortunate to have been a part of this grand experiment in communicating about science and the scientific life with a broader public, and tremendously grateful to Christopher Mims for inviting my tiny little blog about ethics and science along for the ride.

Being part of the Sb community has given my blog more visibility and reach to an audience I would never have had operating solely through the standard channels of academic publishing. It has fostered fruitful interactions with other bloggers in the network, and lasting friendships with many more of those bloggers. Most importantly (to me, anyway), the soapbox Sb has given me nucleated an amazing community of commenters — some of the smartest, wittiest, most insightful people I’ve had the pleasure of engaging online or off.

Blogging has been a growth experience for me. Writing here for an audience that writes back (whether through comments, separate blog posts, or emails) has helped me to appreciate more complexities, and to think about very compelling objections to the views I started out with. These bloggy interactions keep me learning a great deal about the practical challenges of navigating the evolutionary landscape of a scientific career while still being guided by the ethical standards. You, my readers, have stretched me to communicate more effectively to a broad audience.

The direction I find myself growing as a blogger, at this stage, diverges from the direction Seed Media Group and ScienceBlogs have been growing. I have valued the community here (and have had occasion to labor very hard on its behalf), but my heart and my head say that it’s time for me to move on and wish Sb well in its endeavors without me.

I will still be blogging — one of the unexpected parts of this experience has been the extent to which blogging has become part of my own process for learning and teaching and doing my research, so I don’t want to abandon what’s working for me.

Adventures in Ethics and Science will have a new home at Scientopia, a brand new collective of people writing about science in its various aspects because they love to do so. I recognize that Seed Media Group has an interest in selling ads to make a profit, and I think there’s a place in the blogosphere for profit-driven blog networks. However, my own preference at this stage of my blogging life is to move to a home where monetizing my page views is not the driving concern.

Thanks to Chris Mims, Katherine Sharpe, Ginny Hughes, Erin Johnson, Arikia Millikan, and Evan Lerner for their efforts on behalf of me, the other bloggers, and Sb as a whole, and thanks to Adam Bly for making this adventure in science communication a reality. Thanks to the other bloggers for setting such a high standard and for blogging about so many interesting things. Most of all, thanks to my readers for pushing me every single day to be a better blogger.

It’s been a wild ride, and I’m hopeful that you will stay tuned (at the new channel) to see how the next chapter unfolds.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK.

Younger offspring: If I got up really early –

Dr. Free-Ride: I hope you won’t.

Younger offspring: No, I won’t, but if I got up really early, way before it’s time to wake up, like, midnight, and I tried to open my eyes and wake up, would I not be able to because my nerves are tired?

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmmm.

Younger offspring: Because I think if I decided to wake up at midnight I wouldn’t be able to. I won’t be able to open my eyes or get out of bed.

Dr. Free-Ride: I think you might be right about that. If your body needs sleep, it needs sleep. And your sleepy body might not let you disturb that sleep through sheer force of will.

Younger offspring: Would I not be able to open my eyes or get out of bed because my nerves are too tired?

Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know that it would be your nerves specifically. I guess if you’re unconscious it’s part of your brain that’s doing the sleeping. But maybe the purpose of that is as much to do with the rest of your body as your brain.

Younger offspring: But the brain is what lets me dream when I’m asleep, right?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes.

Younger offspring: So it would be doing stuff when I tried to wake up.

Dr. Free-Ride: You might even be having a dream that you had woken up but didn’t have the power to open your eyes or move your arms or legs.

Younger offspring: If it’s not that my nerves are too tired, why can’t I just wake myself up in the middle of the night?

Dr. Free-Ride: I guess when the body needs down-time, to make repairs or just take a break, it needs the down-time. It might not matter how much you want to be awake — if your body needs to sleep, it will sleep. Sometimes you can see this happen when people fall asleep in class.

Younger offspring: (shocked) They do?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, sometimes. I guess school is interesting enough for you and your classmates that none of you do that.

Younger offspring: Have you?

Dr. Free-Ride: Umm, maybe once or twice I’ve almost fallen asleep in a class.

Younger offspring: What class?

Dr. Free-Ride: I’m sure it had nothing at all to do with the class, that it was only because I hadn’t gotten enough sleep and my body needed rest right away, since all of the classes I took were really interesting.

Younger offspring: You should have gotten more sleep at bedtime.

Dr. Free-Ride: I might say the same thing to you.

Younger offspring: But, do you think this would be a good science question for the sprog blog?

When the college revised the general education requirements a few years ago, one of the new courses created had as one of its key goals to teach students the difference between primary and secondary sources. Which, again, left me feeling like it didn’t really fit our program– as far as I’m concerned, the “primary source” in physics is the universe. If you did the experiment yourself, then your data constitute a primary source. Anything you can find in the library is necessarily a secondary source, whether it’s the original research paper, a review article summarizing the findings in some field, or a textbook writing about it years later.

In many cases, students are much better off reading newer textbook descriptions of key results than going all the way back to the “primary source” in the literature. Lots of important results in science were initially presented in a form much different than the fuller modern understanding. Going back to the original research articles often requires deciphering cumbersome and outdated notation, when the same ideas are presented much more clearly in newer textbooks.

That’s not really what they’re looking for in the course in question, though– they don’t want it to be a lab course. But then it doesn’t feel like a “research methods” class at all– while we do occasional literature searches, for the most part that’s accomplished by tracing back direct citations from recent articles. When I think about teaching students “research methods,” I think of things like teaching basic electronics, learning to work an oscilloscope, basic laser safety and operation, and so on. The library is a tiny, tiny part of what I do when I do research, and the vast majority of the literature searching I do these days can be done from my office computer.

I’m going to share some observations which maybe complicate Chad’s “two cultures” framing of research (and of what sorts of research methods one might reasonably impart to undergraduates in a course focused on research methods in a particular discipline).

First, on the science side, I think there’s value for students in digging up, and digging through, the primary literature of the discipline in which they are learning to do research. Sure, you don’t want the primary literature to seem more authoritative as a source of knowledge than the actual experimental system a student is studying*. But neither, I think, does it make sense to just throw an experimental system at a student and say “Here, come up with a good research question and figure out how to answer it.” Having some sensible starting point, in terms of both theoretical background for the phenomena being studied and experimental methods**, makes it more likely that the student learning how to do research will make some progress rather than being paralyzed by an overabundance of possible approaches.

And, at least for some scientific fields (like chemistry), what’s in even the most recent textbooks may not be enough to give insight to how to tackle a particular experimental system. Textbooks may give very good explanations of the general principles underlying particular kinds of behavior without given specific empirical results for an instance of that behavior you want to explore further. Plus, textbooks are largely silent about the specific details of experiments that have been useful in building the knowledge we have of either specific phenomena or large classes of related phenomena.

In my undergraduate studies in chemistry, I’m actually having a hard time thinking of a research experience where it wasn’t the case that some piece of the primary literature gave important information about how to start poking at the chemical phenomenon that was the focus of the research.

Indeed, I think engaging with the primary scientific literature can also help students get a fuller understanding of what the activity of scientific research is about. In a post of yore about undergraduate research, I wrote:

1. Making knowledge is different from learning knowledge.

One of the important things undergraduate research can do is give a student insight to the activities behind the production of the knowledge she has been learning in class. There’s a way in which this can be unexpectedly frustrating — it’s hard to get research to work, and thus your attempts to build a wee chunk of new knowledge may founder, something that can especially bug the student who has an easy time learning stuff from textbooks or class. However, a research experience can also make you attentive to the labor, ingenuity, and moments of good luck behind all that solid knowledge in your texbooks.

2. Scientific research can turn on creativity.

Figuring out how to approach a problem in the lab — one that no one else has solved — can be fun. For the student who thought being good at science was a matter of having a good memory and a solid sense of the underlying principles of a subject, seeing the role creativity can play is frequently a joyful awakening.

How could the primary literature contribute to conveying these lessons?

One way is by exposing some intermediate moments in the process of building the scientific knowledge deemed “finished” enough to appear in the textbooks — showing students that even results robust enough to publish are not necessarily a clear and comprehensive window into just what’s going on with the phenomenon being studied. In other words, scientific knowledge is hardly ever built in one shot. Rather, it takes a bunch of “finished” research projects — plus some insight into how they fit together. Maybe understanding this point is not the primary goal of most undergraduate research experiences in the sciences, but I’d hope it’s at least a secondary goal.

On a related note, watching the evolution of experimental approaches to a particular system through different articles in the primary literature can help students grapple with the fact that scientific research involves both trial and error and creativity. When you’re trying to find out facts about the word that no one knows yet, the best method for how to find those facts (or how to recognize them when you’ve found them) is not obvious up front. Seeing the range of things that grown-up scientists have tried to get at new knowledge makes this uncertainty more vivid — and may also help students come up with some new approaches inspired by those described in the primary literature.

Finally, to the extent that undergraduates learning research methods in science may be on a track to becoming grown-up scientists themselves, it’s good for them to learn norms of the tribe of science. These include expectations about what sorts of things they should communicate to other members of the tribe when reporting their results, and norms about giving other members of the tribe credit for their discoveries and methodological innovations. Getting comfortable with some exemplars from the primary literature helps them see what scientific papers in their field look like and gives them some experience in extracting the information they need. As well, “reading around” in the area of their research projects can help students identify (and cite) where our background knowledge as it stands now came from, and who set out the experimental methods that serve as the starting point for the students’ tinkering. Plus, facility working through the details of research papers seems like an essential skill for a future scientist who want to keep up with the literature — waiting around for these details to make the next edition of the textbook is bound to slow down the progress of one’s own research.

It’s also worth noting that research in the humanities is not necessarily as different from research in physics as Chad imagines. In philosophy, when reading around in our research area, we also use the trick of tracing back direct citations from recent articles. Our searches of the literature can also be conducted from our office computers using electronic databases (and, increasingly, electronic journals). And the literature search is, as in the sciences, a relatively small component of the research.

Say your project is to figure out the right analysis of a concept like “cause”. Reading how other philosophers have analyzed that concept is where you start, but not where you end. Rather, you have to work out what’s wrong (and what’s right) with those analyses. You have to work out a methodology for distinguishing reasonable accounts of that concept from unreasonable ones. Maybe you have to come up with a set of plausible test-cases, or evidence to counter some of the assumptions on which other analyses of the concept have been grounded.

It’s not exactly mixing up solutions or twiddling oscilloscope knobs, but research in the humanities involves something like engagement with the phenomenon you’re trying to understand. It’s more than just synthesizing all of what others have already said about that phenomenon. Here too, even in the humanities, the primary literature can provide an array of methodological exemplars, giving you some ideas about how to move forward and break new ground.

None of this is to say that every pass at teaching undergraduates about research methods in a field needs to be focused on information literacy (as we’re now describing the skills involved in doing a good literature search). But I don’t think we should write off the pedagogical value of poking around in the primary literature, even for science students.
_______
*This is where the Scholastics went overboard in the era before the scientific revolution, the joke being that they thought the right way to determine how many teeth a horse had was to see what Aristotle had said on the subject, rather than heading over to the stable to look at the dental endowment of actual horses.

**Or analytic and/or computational methods, for those learning something about the research theoreticians do.

Dr. Free-Ride: What did you guys learn from that story on the radio about the yellow-bellied marmot?

Elder offspring: That, in the short term, climate change is good for some species.

Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me more about that.

Elder offspring: Well, it made the marmots increase in size and numbers.

Elder offspring: I was going to say that!
.
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, tell me some other stuff. What else happened when the marmots got bigger and there were more females that survived?

Elder offspring: Well, the population of their foes got bigger.

Dr. Free-Ride: Foes such as?

Younger offspring: Such as wolves, foxes, coyote –

Elder offspring: Not wolves.

Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t remember them mentioning wolves in the story.

Younger offspring: I don’t care!

Dr. Free-Ride: I would imagine that if a wolf had a nice big, fat, yellow-bellied marmot, that might look like a tasty meal. But let’s back up a bit. Why are the marmots getting bigger?

Younger offspring: Because of the climate change, their hibernation gets shorter, and the snow melts quicker, so they have less time to thinnen up* when they’re hibernating, and they are like one pound heavier than they were before.

Dr. Free-Ride: It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I guess when you’re the size of a marmot, on pound is a significant percentage of your total weight. What are some other consequences of climate change that they mentioned in the story?

Elder offspring: Hotter summers equals summer droughts equals bad for yellow-bellied marmots.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why are summer droughts bad for yellow-bellied marmots?

Elder offspring: Because then they won’t find stuff to drink!

Dr. Free-Ride: Maybe it also affects stuff to eat — what kinds of plants can grow? Or, if they eat critters, what kind of critters can survive on the plants that can grow during the drought?

Elder offspring: Yeah, OK.

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you remember where this story was set?

Elder offspring: Colorado.

Younger offspring: In the Rocky Mountains.

Dr. Free-Ride: What I thought was interesting was that at first it sounded like it was just a story about the yellow-bellied marmot, but it ended up being about more than the marmots.

Elder offspring: It’s a story about climate change.

Younger offspring: It’s about the ecosystem and what happens to it when there’s climate change.

Dr. Free-Ride: And it occurs to me that we have a back yard ecosystem that changed significantly in May.

Elder offspring: Oh yes, Snowflake.

Dr. Free-Ride: What kinds of impacts has Snowflake has on our back yard ecosystem?

Elder offspring: Om nom nom nom-ing weeds.

Younger offspring: And nasturtiums.

Elder offspring: Dandelions, carrot sticks.

Younger offspring: Nasturtiums.

Elder offspring: More dandelions, dropped apples, alfalfa pellets, timothy hay.

Younger offspring: Lemon balm, lemon thyme.

Elder offspring: Mint, nasturtium.

Younger offspring: And chewing on sticks from the apple tree.

Dr. Free-Ride: And besides eating?

Elder offspring: She generates fertilizer for the garden.

Dr. Free-Ride: Here’s the thing: there’s at least one big, noticeable change in our ecosystem since Snowflake came, although I think it’s most noticeable in the side yard.

Elder offspring: Oh yeah, less nasturtium.

Dr. Free-Ride: We started out using the nasturtium as a tool of persuasion when it was time to get Snowflake to hop into the hutch at night.

Younger offspring: And when we were away, “offspring’s friend”** [who was bunny-sitting for us] used, like all of them.

Dr. Free-Ride: I suspect that we might have run into that problem ourselves, although maybe not as quickly, since we weren’t offering big bouquets of nasturtiums every night. Nasturtiums are self seeding, but if you pick all the flowers before they make new seeds, you end up running out of nasturtiums. So the nasturtiums suddenly had a predator that they didn’t have to deal with before.

Younger offspring: Yikes.

Dr. Free-Ride: On the subject of ecosystems, why do we put Snowflake in her hutch at night rather than leaving her in the run?

Elder offspring: So she won’t get eaten by predators.

Dr. Free-Ride: In other words, we’ve been working hard not to introduce a richer ecosystem into our back yard than is already there. We’re trying to keep away–

Younger offspring: Raccoons, cats —

Elder offspring: Owls, hawks, eagles –

Dr. Free-Ride: Opossums.

Elder offspring: Killer snails.

Dr. Free-Ride: You know, the killer snails are more interested in killing my eggplant plants than in killing our rabbit.

Younger offspring: (laughing hysterically)

Dr. Free-Ride: You laugh, but you would be very sad if you came out in the morning to find a bunny skeleton covered with snails.

Elder offspring: They would eat the bones too.

Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t want to meet your killer snails. I would have to face them with a killer soapy bucket of merciful deliverance.

Elder offspring: You mean bucket of death?

Dr. Free-Ride: To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to.
______
*Obviously, thinnening up is the opposite of fattening up.

**Name redacted in the actual conversation by the younger Free-Ride offspring.

From the AMP press release:

Two Ph.D. candidates in neuroscience have been selected by Americans for Medical Progress as the 2010-11 Michael D. Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach.  Elizabeth Burnett and Scott Dobrin are in the Neuroscience Program at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  Both share a passion for science education and advocacy and are leaders of the Wake Forest University Brain Awareness Council.

Their project, Speaking Honestly – Animal Research Education (SHARE), is designed to guide educators in leading classroom discussions on the humane use of animals in research in an engaging and interactive manner. Teachers will be provided with the necessary tools to discuss the subject employing modern instructional approaches. 

Most importantly, rather than championing a specific viewpoint, SHARE will lead students to develop their own opinions based on factual information regarding both animal rights and animal welfare points of view.  In an effort to reach as many educators as possible, Dobrin and Burnett will present and publish data on the methodology and efficacy of this teaching technique, reporting specifically on changes in opinions, attitudes and overall learning.  In addition, they will design a website where lesson plans, video tutorials and the data they have collected can be found, so teachers may create the same educational activity in other classrooms.

I will be watching for that website.

There’s more information about the 2010-2011 Fellows, about the Hayre Fellowship program, and about the late Michael D. Hayre, for whom the Fellowship was named, on the AMP website.

My congratulations to Elizabeth Burnett and Scott Dobrin. I’m excited to hear how it goes.

Because no one has ever taken the time to explain this issues in any detail. (You’d think someone who knew how to search for images could stretch just a little bit to search for words.)

This is pretty tired (and tiring) territory, and PZ and Sheril have already taken a good crack at laying things out. But given that the blogger who professes to be seeking enlightenment seems to style himself as at least an armchair philosopher, I’d like to offer a few comments.

It’s well and good to say that you don’t trust your own moral intuitions, and to prefer an argument (supported by evidence) that X is unethical.

However, it’s pretty assy to dismiss not just the intuitions but the actual experiences of a significant number of people who tell you (repeatedly), that they are harmed by X. To dismiss these experiences while saying, “No, give me an argument against X,” is clueless at best.

Look, central to the project of being ethical is recognizing that it’s not all about you. It is not enough to evaluate courses of action on the basis of first principles that seem plausible to you, or of actual experiences you have had — how things impact others matters. That means that listening to what people are telling you about how X impacts them is a pretty crucial step — one that ought to inform not just your thoughts but your actions.

Unless you think, in the interests of your own understanding, it is permissible to continue doing X and doing harm. (Have you submitted the protocol with your justification for this to the IRB? I’m guessing not.)

If you want to keep messing around with the armchair philosophy thing, I recommend that you look into a little thing called the thought experiment. Not that thought experiments will necessarily help you wrap your head around the lived reality of people who are not you — ultimately, you’re going to have to trust their testimony on it, since they have privileged access to their own experience. But if you set them up right (e.g., on Mars, or a million years in the future), your thought experiments may have less likelihood of doing actual harm in the moral realm you say you are trying to understand.

Finally, if you are called out for creating harm by doing X and you respond that you are dealing with it by getting ready to read a philosophical discourse on X by a famous philosopher (who, as it happens, seems to get included in lists of sexy philosophers) — rather than, say, by taking a break from doing X to seriously evaluate the harm people are telling you about right now — then I would submit that you have a pretty messed up picture of what “being ethical” involves.

This calls for some videotainment!

This video is making me think that classic Star Trek might be the medium through which the young kids nowadays can help their aging parents to appreciate the popular music.

Also, it makes me suspect that there was a lot more drinking and dancing in three seasons of Trek than I had originally appreciated. (Granted, it’s concentrated here, but still.) It is a credit to the dramatic abilities of the cast members that these scenes generally seemed less cheesy at the time, in the context of the episodes in which they appeared. (Even Shatner’s scenes.)

Hat-tip to the Evil Monkey; I owe you an earworm.

Elder offspring: (Piteous wailing.)

Dr. Free-Ride: That’s rather inarticulate.

Elder offspring: (Poses like the figure in “The Scream”)

Dr. Free-Ride: While this shows that you’ve been educated about art, it doesn’t really answer my question. Here, have a look at the concerns that their document lists. Are there particular of these concerns that you think are reasonable and particular one that you, personally, maybe think are not?

Elder offspring: Hmmm … I guess they’re all reasonable concerns.

Dr. Free-Ride: But then we get to the guidelines pediatricians should recommend for parents based on these concerns, and I know that this is where you sometimes express a disagreement: “Limit children’s total media time (with entertainment media) to no more than 1 to 2 hours of quality programming per day.”

Elder offspring: So if we watch something really bad, then we don’t count that?

Dr. Free-Ride: Um, I don’t think we’re supposed to let you watch something that’s really bad at all.

Elder offspring: Drat! Why does it have to be one to two hours a day? That doesn’t take happiness into account.

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, happiness! What do you think your pediatrician would say in response to that? Or one of the pediatricians who doesn’t know you but was involved in making up the guidelines?

Elder offspring: (putting on a voice somewhere between pompous and stodgy) Happiness isn’t an important factor.

Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t think they’d say that, necessarily. I mean some of the thing they talk about up near the top [of the document], the effects of television they worry about — “violent and aggressive behavior, obesity, poor body concept and self-image, substance use, and early sexual activity” —

Elder offspring: Yes, I know.

Dr. Free-Ride: So they’re saying that if too much unsupervised exposure to stuff on TV actually leads to some of those things they list, I think their argument is that, in the long run, you won’t be as happy as you might be otherwise.

Elder offspring: Hmmph.

Dr. Free-Ride: Well, how might you respond to that?

Elder offspring: Kids should get no more that four hours of screen time a day.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why four hours?

Elder offspring: Because then their parents can shoo them outside after their four hours are up and the children will still be happy.

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, you think there should be a compromise. You think two hours is too little.

Elder offspring: Yes!

Dr. Free-Ride: What does the two hour limit cut into for you? What would you be doing in terms of screen time if you had more than two hours a day? Do you want to make a positive argument for the value of those activities for you developing brain and social skills?

Elder offspring: You can learn things from video games.

Dr. Free-Ride: Like what?

Elder offspring: Like definitions of words

Dr. Free-Ride: Of course, you could do that reading books.

Elder offspring: Yes. You can also learn the spellings of words you always misspell, or that plants use chlorophyl — which is something I worked out from a Pokemon game, where on of the grass-type Pokemon’s abilities was chlorophyll, and it said that in sunny weather, the Pokemon’s speed goes up.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. So, where do you spend most of your time online?

Elder offspring: YouTube and forums, and Photoshop (but that’s not online, just on the computer).

Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me about what you get out of Photoshop?

Elder offspring: I create images.

Dr. Free-Ride: You’re doing art using new media, huh?

Elder offspring: Yeah.

Dr. Free-Ride: And what do you do in forums?

Elder offspring: Stuff.

Dr. Free-Ride: Have you made any friends on those forums?

Elder offspring: Do I wish to say?

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Well you could talk about potentially whether you might have made some —

Elder offspring: I don’t wish to talk.

Dr. Free-Ride: You don’t want to talk about your — hmm, now I’m curious about your forum activity. But I am not going to be one of those parents who spies on you online.

Elder offspring: Good.

Dr. Free-Ride: But, you could ask the pediatricians who came up with the guidelines, what’s wrong with interacting with people online? Isn’t interaction with other people a good thing, a part of how I become a fully integrated human being?

Elder offspring: I can talk to people around the world from my computer, at home.

Dr. Free-Ride: That’s some that you value, something you think is not necessarily going to turn you violent or maladapted —

Elder offspring: No, of course not!

Dr. Free-Ride: — or hurt your body image?

Elder offspring: Why would it?!

Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, that’s a good question. What we’ve got here is a whole bunch of claims about screen time that are supposed to support these recommendations. But you, as a critical consumer of information, might want to ask …

Elder offspring: How do you know screen time does that stuff to kids?

Dr. Free-Ride: So, how much evidence there is?

Elder offspring: I don’t know.

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you think your pediatrician does, or knows how to find out, anyway?

Elder offspring: I don’t know.

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you think it’s worth asking your pediatrician when you see her?

Elder offspring: Maybe.

Dr. Free-Ride: It would be interesting to see the information the pediatricians looked at to decide what they think they know about TV.

Elder offspring: “Limit children’s total media time (with entertainment media) to no more than 1 to 2 hours of quality programming per day”? What the heck does it mean by quality programming?

Dr. Free-Ride: So you’d like a more precise definition of “quality”?

Elder offspring: If I watch something bad?

Dr. Free-Ride: Well, maybe it’s not so bad if you watch it with an adult and discuss it?

Elder offspring: No, if it’s low quality, is it part of the two hours you’re limited to?

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm, I suspect that the recommendation means we should only let you watch high quality programming, and no more than two hours of that.

Elder offspring: These are recommendations for children and adolescents … how old do you have to be before they don’t apply anymore?

Dr. Free-Ride: You could ask her that. Also, check out recommendation #7.

Elder offspring: “Use the videocassette recorder wisely to show or record high-quality, educational programming for children.”

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what my question with that would be?

Elder offspring: Why educational? What’s high quality?

Dr. Free-Ride: No, who uses a VCR anymore?

Elder offspring: Ha!

Dr. Free-Ride: So, do you think the pediatricians are making these recommendations because they have positive evidence that more than two hours of screen time will rot your brain and destroy your body?

Elder offspring: Not really.

Dr. Free-Ride: They may be using something called the “precautionary principle,” which is the idea that if we don’t know what the effects are of something, we should be cautious about it

Elder offspring: Hmm,

Dr. Free-Ride: So if we don’t know what it’s going to do to a kid to watch eight hours of television a day, we should not blithely let a kid watch eight hours of TV a day.

Elder offspring: What?!

Dr. Free-Ride: I mean, if you don’t know what it would do to a kid to eat three pounds of sand, would you say, go ahead and eat three pounds of sand and we’ll find out?

Elder offspring: No. I’d say, go ahead and eat one and a half pounds of sand.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Maybe part of what’s going on with this policy is people have raised concerns, maybe some of the research about what actually happens is still going on, and in the meantime they’re trying to be careful. They might be saying, if we don’t know but there’s a chance it could do something bad, we should watch this carefully rather than saying, go on, do whatever you want here.

Elder offspring: If you tried to study what eight hours of TV would do, wouldn’t it do different things to different kids? And couldn’t it be different for kids living in different countries, watching different shows or playing different video games?

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you think it’s worth asking what the actual research says, and how the researchers drew their conclusions?

Elder offspring: Mmm … I don’t know.

Dr. Free-Ride: You don’t think, if you found out that the evidence was ambiguous, that you might have grounds to challenge these recommendations, or your parents’ reliance on them?

Elder offspring: You might still limit our screen time then.

Dr. Free-Ride: Sure, but then it would just be because we’re unreasonable parents.

Today, during one such schlep, the following exchange occurred.

Younger offspring: If I walk in the shady parts instead of the sunny parts, bees and wasps won’t try to sting me.

Dr. Free-Ride: Oh. So, you think bees and wasps prefer to be in the sun, so you’ll be safer in the shade?

Younger offspring: (after a moment’s thought) No, they don’t. I’m not safe anywhere.

Dr. Free-Ride: See, I thought you had an interesting hypothesis about the bees and wasps, and that we could talk about it.

Younger offspring: But I don’t think it’s true.

Dr. Free-Ride: I just wanted to talk with you about your hunch, and reasons why bees might prefer sun over shade.

Younger offspring: I know.

Dr. Free-Ride: And instead, I’ve made you feel less safe! Totally not what I was going for.

Dr. Free-Ride: You two are both exploring the internet more lately, and you know that one of the things people use the internet for is to sell you stuff, right?

Younger offspring: Yeah.

Elder offspring: Yeah.

Dr. Free-Ride: So how do you tell if the people selling you stuff are telling the truth about what they’re selling?

Elder offspring: Rave reviews about the item.

Dr. Free-Ride: Rave reviews about the item from whom?

Elder offspring: From … people who bought the item.

Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. How do you tell if the people reviewing the item really bought it?

Elder offspring: Hmm.

Dr. Free-Ride: Actually, can you think of a situation where someone reviewing the item might not be the most trustworthy person to get a review from?

Elder offspring: Let’s see … If they have a record of stealing, snatching, or paid to do something.

Dr. Free-Ride: Can you say more about that?

Elder offspring: Like, being bribed to say good things about the item.

Dr. Free-Ride: I see. What if they weren’t bribed exactly but — say someone posted a review on one of your Harvest Moon forums about a new Harvest Moon game and you found out later that the person posting the review worked for the company that makes Harvest Moon?

Elder offspring: Then I couldn’t just go on that review. I’d have to talk to some people who played the game but didn’t work for Marvelous Interactive.

Dr. Free-Ride: Why wouldn’t it be enough for you to have the Marvelous Interactive employee tell you, “Look, it’s a really good game!”?

Elder offspring: Well, Marvelous Interactive is in Japan, and the Japanese people who play the games might have different opinions of them than most of the American players. And if they work for the company that makes it, they might be lying. But all the Harvest Moon games I’ve played have been pretty good.

Dr. Free-Ride: I’m not even sure that they’d necessarily be lying. But the people who work for the company that makes the game have an interest in you doing what?

Elder offspring: Buying the game.

Dr. Free-Ride: What if there was someone who was making a lot of posts to these forums you frequent, and you started to feel like, “Wow, here’s someone whose opinion I think I can trust,” and then you found out later that that person was an employee of the company making the games she was reviewing, and she had hidden that fact?

Elder offspring: Then I would shun her! And then not buy the game.

Dr. Free-Ride: Well, it might still be a good game. But …

Elder offspring: … I’d want to hear about what it was like from someone else who played it and who wasn’t trying to hide the fact that they worked for the company that makes it.

Dr. Free-Ride: This kind of situation is sometimes called a conflict of interest. Sometimes the people who are telling you stuff, even if they believe it, may have a strong reason to believe that stuff themselves that doesn’t apply to you.

Younger offspring: Like the reason that they want you to buy the game so their company will make money.

Dr. Free-Ride: So my question is, what kind of information do you want about someone on the internet who’s telling you “This is a great product!” or “These are the facts!”? What kind of information do you need to know before you take their word for it?

Elder offspring: I don’t know.

Dr. Free-Ride: If someone told you, “This new movie is the best movie ever!” would you believe them automatically, or would you need to know more?

Younger offspring: I’d want to see the movie, or toy, or game, or whatever myself so I could decide whether I liked it.

Dr. Free-Ride: You trust your own opinion more than other people’s opinions anyway, huh?

Younger offspring: Mmm-hmm. I won’t trust them until I actually see it myself.

Dr. Free-Ride: I see. No product reviews for you. You just want the products.

Younger offspring: Not all of them.

Dr. Free-Ride: What if there’s someone on the internet who’s not actually trying to sell you a product, but rather they’re trying to tell you what the facts are? What if someone has a webpage that says it’s actually good for kids your ages to drink a lot of coffee? I see from your incredulous looks at me that right off, you’d be skeptical of that particular claim, but maybe you think caffeine isn’t good for kids because the grown-ups are plotting to keep kids from drinking their coffee. What kinds of information would you need to be able to evaluate a claim like that on the internet?

Younger offspring: I don’t know.

Dr. Free-Ride: Well, there’s a lot of information on the web, a lot of pages claiming here’s what you need to know about health, here’s what you need to know to make a wart go away, here’s what you need to know to build a tree house, here’s what you need to know about dinosaurs or the environment or space. How do you tell which information out there is good information?

Younger offspring: Mmmm …

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you have any ideas? Because if you don’t, I’m a little scared to let you play in the internet.

Younger offspring: What was the question again?

Dr. Free-Ride: How do you tell which of the websites that are out there are giving reasonable information that’s based on facts?

Elder offspring: Google?

Younger offspring: Wikipedia.

Dr. Free-Ride: Did you know that Google actually has sponsored search results? Do you know what that means?

Elder offspring: It means that they’re paid to show those results.

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, it means someone has paid Google money to put their link at the top of the search results. Of course, Google labels those sponsored results so you can tell which ones someone is paying for you to see. You can tell that they’re not necessarily high in the search results because a lot of people are linking to them.

Younger offspring: Can you check to see if some things on Google are not sponsored?

Dr. Free-Ride: There are plenty of things on Google that are not sponsored. But the other thing you should know about Google — do you know how they determine the order, more or less, of the pages in your search results?

Elder offspring: No.

Dr. Free-Ride: It’s by how many other sites link to it.

Elder offspring: Oh.

Dr. Free-Ride: And sometimes other sites link to it because it’s true, or credible, or based on good arguments and good facts that people have been able to check, but sometimes people link to a site on the internet to point and laugh and say, “This is ridiculous!” But the pointing and laughing doesn’t necessarily show up on the page that a lot of other pages linked to to point and laugh.

Younger offspring: So you can’t tell the links in Google are good just because they’re near the top of the list.

Dr. Free-Ride: This brings us back to the larger question. There’s a lot of people out there on the internet putting a lot of things forward as true. What kind of strategies do you guys have for figuring out what you can trust?

Elder offspring: I don’t know.

Dr. Free-Ride: You spend a lot of time on the internet to not have a strategy about this.

Elder offspring: I really only go to a few particular sites where we talk about games.

Dr. Free-Ride: I guess that’s true. You’ve been hanging out in forums. Do you feel like you’ve had a chance to get to know the other posters there?

Elder offspring: Yeah.

Dr. Free-Ride: Are there some whose opinions you trust more than others?

Elder offspring: Yeah.

Dr. Free-Ride: How do you form that judgment about whose opinion you can trust and whose you can’t?

Elder offspring: Well, we’re talking about what we like or don’t like about particular games. I basically have my own opinions about the games I’ve played. The other people whose opinions are pretty similar on the games I’ve played are the ones whose opinions I look for about the games I haven’t played yet. But we could still end up disagreeing about those once I play them.

Dr. Free-Ride: Trust could be trickier here, since most of what you’re talking about is subjective judgments about games.

Younger offspring: I post on that forum, too.

Dr. Free-Ride: I didn’t know that. I do know that you have conversations in real life with your schoolmates about stuff. Do you ever talk about who’s a good teacher, or who’s a mean teacher, or who doesn’t play fair on the playground?

Younger offspring: Yeah, I talk about that with my actual friends — the ones who are my friends all the time, no matter who’s watching, not nice when they feel like it and mean when their other friends are around. Some of my classmates lie.

Dr. Free-Ride: Are you able to recognize when they’re lying?

Younger offspring: Well, I recognize now who’s going to lie to me.

Dr. Free-Ride: Maybe they don’t always lie, but when you found out that they lied to you before, how did it change things?

Younger offspring: If I catch them in a lie, the next time they try to tell me something, I feel like they’re lying.

Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, there are some people who are convincing liars. You think you can trust them and then find out that you can’t, and that really hurts.

Elder offspring: Trust can break.