Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the Internet food fights are for idiots, so this is the last thing I'll say on the Hansen/SciAm stuff. I responded to John Rennie's SciAm post about Hansen here.
While I explained again my position on Hansen, I also raised what I think is an entirely valid criticism of Scientific American the magazine. Any way you get around it, no matter whether the editors and the board approved or not, SciAm printed a feature piece written by a CEO of a for-profit corporation in which that CEO mentioned his own company and his company's products and glorified his company's manufacturing processes multiple times. Imagine the uproar if Science, Nature or the New York Times had done that. To my sensibilities, that diminishes the credibility of the magazine and the other stories it prints. It's not an insult, it's an intellectual reaction.
I tried to be clear that I was criticizing the magazine and not John Rennie. But Rennie I think feels as if I'm attacking him, so he ends his response with:
Kevin, here's a lesson on rhetoric that ought to be unnecessary. If I write--Without intending in any way to question your wife's character, the way she's dressed leads me to conclude she's a whore.
--then I've insulted your wife.
Right, John. Game over, you win. What am I supposed to do now, bring your mom into it?
(Yo mamma so fat, she...
...naw, that's ok, I don't even know your mom.
Anyway, I don't really need an apology for this, but you might give my wife one. I'll let the readers decide whether you're an idiot or I'm an idiot, but you just don't use "your wife" and "whore" in the same sentence no matter what point you're trying to make, unless you're just trying to be an asshole.)
Comments
# 1 | jepalmer | February 5, 2006 12:29 AM
I agree with you that the original comment by Hansen in the press release was a bit jarring; it did not seem appropriate to me to stick a policy comment in the midst of the science. It was an odd editorial choice.
But this latest distinction you make - that SciAm should not allow CEOs (or consultants?) to write scientific articles about their company's field, when PIs can write articles about their research - seems a bit artificial. Given that most PIs are competing for large grants, any article they write that raises awareness and interest in their particular area of research can be seen as potentially lucrative PR. So where's the clear ethical line between PIs and CEOs?
Not that that justifies Rennie's odd comment about your wife!
# 2 | kevin | February 5, 2006 1:42 AM
Thanks for the comment. Your point is well taken, but here's are some differences:
-Scientists are supposed to disseminate their research results in journals as part of doing their research, and as part of the quid pro quo of getting a grant. They are getting public money, so they're supposed to be giving their results back to the public. Surely there is a difference between a PI disseminating a new research result and a CEO writing nothing new to science, but rather just doing a review of a well-known and well-worn subject that happens to be about their product?
-Getting the next grant is based on a peer review process that usually involves a few anonymous reviews and a panel review that takes into account the broader competition and the funds available. Since the reviwers and panel are judging on the "intellectual merit" and "broader impacts" of the proposed research (those are NSF's criteria), it's hard to see a journal article as PR that will influence the reviewers and panel toward the next reward, other than giving the panel/reviewer a sense of whether the supplicant is competent or not. The PR angle only works if the reviewers saw the article and were enthralled by it, but generally a reviewer is either in the field already and so isn't going to be swayed by such "advertising" or else a reviewer isn't in the field and so never saw the article anyway.
-The difference between a research scientist and a corp selling a product is the difference between two months funding of a 50K-80K salary and selling products for profit for a huge multinational corporation. Nobody's getting rich off research grants no matter how huge they are, as without any exceptions that I am aware of, the research institutions set the salary, and not the PI. The PI makes no profit off a grant, just their normal salary and the funds to carry out the research.
# 3 | jepalmer | February 5, 2006 6:59 AM
Your points are also well taken, but. . . .
-SciAm is not a traditional peer-reviewed journal. Writing research up in SciAm is not the same as writing up new, unpublished results for Science, does not satisfy the expectations of a grant as far as I am aware, and does not involve the same target audience or motives.
-You assume that "good PR" must target grant reviewers directly. I doubt that it does - on that level, personal interactions and relevant publications in peer-reviewed journals are vastly more important. However, generating public interest in an area of research could well result in more money being diverted there - given that politicians prefer to please their constitutents, and will hardly fund all worthwhile scientific areas equally.
-PIs with large and prestigious grants obviously do better, both in terms of money and respect, than PIs without them. Also, I must once again bring up consulting - many academic researchers consult for industry, but are not corporate officers. I'm not saying they do as well financially as a CEO does, but does the absolute quantity of money changing hands really affect how ethical an action is? (Russ Feingold certainly doesn't think so). It is very difficult to draw a clear line denoting who could or could not profit by writing a given article.
I haven't had the opportunity to read the coffee article that you mention, since I don't have a personal subscription to SciAm. I look forward to digging it up later and seeing how "well-worn" and/or self-aggrandizing it is. :) But unless I misunderstand, your objections seem to be directed towards the broader problem of mixing policy or profit with data. I would personally encourage fellow scientists to communicate with the public as much as possible, in the interest of public literacy and openness of research. But I would never expect someone writing about their own field to be perfectly objective, whether they're a PI, a CEO, or a graduate student. I just don't think that is a realistic expectation. (And actually, that's part of why I don't have a personal subscription to SciAm).
# 4 | ns | February 5, 2006 12:50 PM
FYI - There's a Photoshop-hacked picture of you battling it out with SciAm on Element List from a few days ago.
# 5 | kevin | February 5, 2006 1:21 PM
that's hilarious - thanks for the heads up
# 6 | John Casey | February 5, 2006 5:26 PM
Hey!
I read that article, and as a result, tried some espresso, and discovered that it was as good as ...ummm advertised.
My life is better as a result.
This has been a completely unpaid and unsolicited testimonial.
JC
# 7 | John Rennie | February 6, 2006 1:11 PM
Since I have no way of knowing whether you're married or who your wife is, it's hard to imagine that you really thought I was insulting your wife. It should also be clear to most literate people, if they look at the "whore" comment in context, that I'm giving you a hypothetical example of how preceding an insult with an "I don't mean to be personally insulting but..." disclaimer does nothing to make it less of an affront.
You decided to jump from our simple disagreement over whether Hansen's statement was inappropriate to an unfounded attack on Scientific American's integrity. And beyond the fact that I'm the editor of the magazine, and therefore have a pretty close tie to its integrity, you made this a personal attack on me by insinuating that my personal defense of Hansen might have been motivated by some shenanigans behind the scenes. Please don't pretend that you're not. You're clearly trying to draw a parallel between the case of the Illy article, which you called ethically questionable, and what I wrote about Hansen--otherwise why bring it up?
Here's what I think. I think you overreacted to my criticism of your Hansen position and lashed out at me and SciAm on reflex. Having answered your slights on SciAm's credibility, I'm happy to let the whole thing go. You and I both have better things to do.
# 8 | kevin | February 6, 2006 2:27 PM
Ok, two things.
1- Last night I was writing this up and it's even more relevant in light of JR's comment:
je - After thinking about your words and further discussion with a good friend and one of my main discussion buddies, I realized that I was holding SciAm to a scientific journal standard instead of to a journalism standard. The latter is clearly more appropriate, as SciAm is in the category of National Geographic or Popular Science (the former if you're feeling generous and the latter if you're not). They report on science rather than print new results, and you're right that what PIs do there is not much different than what Illy did. When a PI writes in SciAm they are disseminating their results to a wider audience, but also aggrandizing their research. So I'll drop the argument that there isn't a connection between Illy's product placement and PIs' "product" placement.
Holding SciAm to a journalistic standard, however, I still have a problem with the product placement. Extending this to PI "product placement" means that you can't take what's printed by a PI in SciAm as fully vetted science in the same esteem you would hold a peer reviewed article in a journal (whether or not SciAm peer reviews, and I would guess they do). So I think I was right in going after the mention of Hansen writing for SciAm, but for the wrong reasons. You don't need to believe in behind-the-scenes shenanigans to still conflate the willingness to condone Illy product placement with a willingness to not fully vet the forthrightness of a PI article.
By journalistic standards that I accept (and I didn't go to journalism school, so there might be some theory or standard practice that I'm missing), a news or feature article on a topic should be written by a (mostly) disinterested journalist who collects various views on the topic. That breaks down when a financial stakeholder writes the article and mentions his own corporation without also discussing others in a similar light. That this smells fishy just seems obvious to me.
I've given a bimodal choice (journalism standard or science journal standard). Should SciAm be placed in a different category in which items like the Illy article are perfectly acceptable? I can think of a hypothetical example: the journal or newsletter Green Building Practices, in which a contractor or CEO of a corporation writes a "this is what we're doing" article. But as a reader and a consumer of the magazine, I'm not willing to give SciAm that latitude.
And JC, they really do make good coffee.
2- JR - Obviously you weren't directly slandering my wife. But to make the point you're trying to make doesn't require going down that road. Especially when you're accusing me of indirectly insulting you by saying that I'm *not* insulting you. So you turn around with, "ok, this is just a hypothetical and I'm not using it to insult you, but let me give you this rhetorical example...." and then the whore comment. It's just ill advised. If you still need to make it personal, at least make it a point about my dog or my hair or something.
Rhetoric and writing styles vary across individuals. Mine is to write it as I see it. Although I love nuance and use it, when I'm actually insulting somebody I just come out and do it. I was being sincere when I wrote, "I am honestly not going after John Rennie's integrity here." I still am being sincere. And I still have a problem with the Illy article and I still conflate it with being less willing to believe other articles, as described above. But I'll take back any innuendo on behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
Still, I hope you can see how the average reader could read the Illy article and think, "Wow, I wonder how much Illy paid SciAm to let them run that story," which is exactly what my reaction was when I read it in 2002 (and I wasn't the only one who had that reaction....I read it while out to sea and if I remember correctly, others in the scientific contingent felt the same way).
As far as, "I think you overreacted to my criticism of your Hansen position and lashed out at me and SciAm on reflex." Sure, that's possible.
# 9 | John Rennie | February 7, 2006 10:13 AM
Thank you, I appreciate that you're at least open to the possibility that you overreacted. As for whether my comment was inappropriate, that's possible, too; my feeling is that you opened the door to it when you tried to discredit Scientific American's integrity instead of sticking to our disagreement over Hansen. From where I sit, they're equally ugly. Let's call it even on that score.
You wrote: "Holding SciAm to a journalistic standard, however, I still have a problem with the product placement. Extending this to PI 'product placement' means that you can't take what's printed by a PI in SciAm as fully vetted science in the same esteem you would hold a peer reviewed article in a journal (whether or not SciAm peer reviews, and I would guess they do). So I think I was right in going after the mention of Hansen writing for SciAm, but for the wrong reasons. You don't need to believe in behind-the-scenes shenanigans to still conflate the willingness to condone Illy product placement with a willingness to not fully vet the forthrightness of a PI article."
I'm still trying to understand what that means, and I'd rather not bother because, as I said before, we should both just move on. But you still seem to be trying to justify your attack on SciAm on broad grounds, and I can't ignore that.
You continue to call the Illy article "product placement" even though I think I've explained sufficiently that it was not. "Product placement" involves negotiation or quid pro quo on both sides, and that never happened. Illy wrote the article; we liked the article; we published the article--done. Is the article effectively promotional for Illy in some ways? To a degree, inevitably yes. Articles by scientists are inevitably promotional for them, too. That's why as editors we work to negate the self-promotions in the manuscripts as much as we reasonably can, by widening discussions, mentioning competitors, etc., all to make the article good anyway. The fact that you and some of your other readers seem to have liked the article suggests we succeeded.
With respect to Hansen, I'm still waiting to hear you make a concrete statement of what seems inappropriate. Do you object to Hansen's having written for SciAm in the first place? Do you think the article was not well vetted; if so, why? Do you object to my mentioning Hansen's article incidentally in a discussion about Hansen and his work? Do you think there is some "non-transparent" arrangement that SciAm or I have with Hansen? If so, what exactly do you think that is?
As I've said before, if you level a specific allegation, I'll respond to it truthfully. But if you can't or won't be more specific in pointing the finger of suspicion, then I think you should really back down and stop defending the proposition that SciAm is somehow suspect in this.
# 10 | intjudo | August 23, 2006 8:57 PM
When you use rhetorical tricks to make it necessary for someone to "lose face" in order alter their opinion you are hindering the process of discovering-truth-via-consensus-and-verifiable-evidence, not advancing it. If the motivation for this discussion were the mutual exploration of truth using rational techniques, rather than a contest regarding who's going to "back down," it would be a lot more productive.