Thoughts from Kansas

Nerdery

Category: Chatter

The Times takes on current debates in linguistics, and asks:

But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us.

All I can think is: "Never! The House of Mogh is dishonored for seven generations!" Then I remembered that Duras ultimately did get the rightful blame for the Khitomer massacre, and I felt better about it.

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:40 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Somebody's getting married

Category: Chatter

And that somebody's me! If this post goes up when I scheduled it to, the ceremony will have just started.

It's been a crazy year of planning, but everything seems ready to go as planned. Tomorrow we go on a honeymoon and I'm obliged to leave my computer behind, so no blogging until late August.

Debbie and I are both particularly grateful to Judge Vaughan Walker for the early wedding present he gave us this week. His decision striking down the hateful Proposition 8 is filled with powerful reminders of the importance of marriage in society at large, and its importance to married couples. Until marriage is accessible to every loving couple, we'll both feel like our marriage is incomplete, and we're grateful that Judge Walker helped move California and the nation so much closer to true equality.

On a less abstract level, I'm proud to say that my sister-in-law will be marrying the woman of her dreams next year, and we live in hope that her marriage will always and forever carry the same significance in law and custom that our marriage does today.

If anyone cares, there are wedding registries at Amazon.com and Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and no one would stop you from helping cover the costs of our honeymoon through Paypal:

Truth be told, though, we're just as happy to have you honor our wedding by giving to Equality California, which continues its work changing people's minds about marriage equality. Help them end marriage segregation!

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:30 PM • 39 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Who is a scientist?

Category: Academia • Philosophy of Science • Policy and Politics

T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which – briefly – argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains:

Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs [this one -Josh]:

- Does scientific research for a living,
- Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals,
- Is funded by granting agencies to do it,
- Does not just write about it, or study it, or do some of it as a grad student, or only teach it.

This wasn’t an official or proposed definition, as indicated by the qualifier “For the purpose of this post”. Others have raised objections to one or more of these. I don’t think they are all necessary and certainly none is sufficient. So, let’s go through the exercise and think of some criteria that would distinguish a “professional scientist”. Nowhere in here is there an implication that graduate students, industry scientists, government scientists, postdocs, or anyone else doesn’t “do science” when they are engaged in research, so let’s get beyond that straw man if we can.

As I noted in the last post, lots of people want to be called “scientist”, presumably because it carries some prestige. But if anyone who does an experiment is a “scientist”, then the term isn’t meaningful at all.

So, assuming that we want the term to mean something, what makes someone a scientist?

I disagree with his means of distinguishing grad students from "professional scientists." To my mind, a professional scientist is someone who is paid to do science. Grad students are usually paid to do science (either directly, as research assistants, or through teaching assistantships awarded to support them while they conduct their research), and are therefore professional scientists.

Publication in peer-reviewed literature is an important step in the process of science, but it is a lagging indicator and does not belong on the list in that form. Doing work one intends to publish, and which one presents to legitimate scientific peers for review (even through informal channels) should suffice. And I don't know why Gregory insists that the research must be funded by granting agencies. Scientists in industry or working for a government agency and supporting their research out of an operating budget are still professional scientists if they are doing legitimate science and being paid to do it. People getting funds from a granting agency but not doing legitimate science are still not scientists (e.g., homeopaths, cold fusion, astrology, woo of other sorts).

But saying that a professional scientist is someone who gets paid to be a scientist just brings us back to the closing question from that quotation: "what makes someone a scientist?"

It's helpful to consider some examples: Charles Darwin did not get paid to conduct scientific research. He had no academic degrees in science (or natural philosophy). But he was, by calling and by mindset, a scientist. He lived in an age where science was shifting from a gentleman's pursuit to a professional career option (like doctor or lawyer or parson), which makes the comparison somewhat illegitimate. Yet it also emphasizes that "professional scientist" is not an age-old category, and this debate is one that has a relatively brief and as-yet-unresolved history.

A slightly more modern example, Albert Einstein, did impressive scientific work while working as a patent clerk. The scientists who built the first atomic weapons were not grant-funded, but certainly advanced our understanding of fundamental physics as they were hurtling the world toward a fearsome future. The datasets generated by volunteer birders through Breeding Bird Surveys and Christmas Bird Counts are invaluable resources for ornithologists and ecologists. David Attenborough's films have captured new animal behaviors and brought many people to a deeper interest in science and natural history. He and his production crew have become expert in natural history and biology, and have developed new tools to investigate and record that behavior. A whole field of hobbyist biotechnology is taking off in rented lab spaces around the world. A web software developer spends his spare time tinkering with what may turn into the future of nuclear fusion. Then again, many of the professors who get grants and publish papers spend so much time administering their lab and writing grants and advising students and preparing lectures that they may not conduct any actual experiments (though they do observe and supervise the students and postdocs who are performing the research funded by those grants). Which of these folks are scientists?

An auto mechanic or a plumber might apply the scientific method to fixing your car or your toilet, but neither they nor anyone else thinks that makes them scientists. They aren't trying to increase our knowledge of the world, to derive general truths from their experimentation, and that's the goal of science.

This also eliminates some but not all of the birders who contribute to CBC and BBS bird occurrence datasets. Being able to recognize a birdcall and check a bird off your life list is not doing science. Making systematic observations about the world is a key part of science, but if the goal is not to test hypotheses and to use that to generate some sort of synthesis, it isn't science. But some birders, and some hunters and anglers, do make observations. They notice shifts in coloration or migration, and try to catalog and explain those shifts. They may lack the formal training and structure necessary to present their results at conferences or in journals, but I'm unwilling to say that they are not doing science, to say that they are not scientists in those moments. We'll call this science as an activity. It's something someone can do or not do, not a defining personality trait. It does not label the person, only the activity.

Darwin and Einstein were scientists wherever they went, whatever they did. Their mind were inexorably wired to constantly strive after organizing principles, and to find ways in the most mundane observations to test those principles. This is science as a mindset – science as avocation/vocation. I think David Attenborough shares that mindset, as does Richard Dawkins, though neither is currently pursuing a career in science. Dawkins shifted from employment as a biologist to become Professor for Public Understanding of Science in 1995, and has since retired to run a nonprofit foundation devoted to public advocacy on behalf of skepticism, atheism, science, and rationalism; all valid goals but not inherently scientific actions.

A successful grad student must be someone who pursues science in that latter sense. Some people leave graduate school because they do not pursue science in that sense (they are not scientists in that sense and do not want to become scientists in that sense), and others leave because they don't want to pursue science as a profession (they are not interested in science as a career, though they have the mindset). Senior professors, the ones spending all their time administering a lab and serving on panels and so forth, are scientists in the sense that science is their calling, even though they spend little time doing the hands-on part of the scientific work.

Some people with no scientific training still manage to gain the knowledge necessary to participate actively in the scientific enterprise. The amateur fusion researcher is taking ideas that had been kicked around by professionals in the field, and is slowly testing those ideas in his own time. A fusion scientist of my acquaintance responded to the article linked above about a web developer building and testing a new fusion reactor:

He's probably not achieving anything significant scientifically - but what a great hobby and learning experience for him, and what a great plug for fusion in general! Science, the olde fashioned way.

He's doing science. Not huge science, perhaps, but breaking new ground. To say he isn't a scientist because he isn't grant-funded or hasn't got a doctorate or is unlikely to publish in major journals seems to trivialize what science is, to make a PhD into a license to perform science rather than certificate of scientific accomplishment. And that impoverishes those with PhDs, those seeking PhDs, and those without PhDs who still want to and do contribute to the scientific effort.

So who is a scientist? I'd say: someone who seeks to expand the collective limits of knowledge about the natural world by developing generalized claims and testing them against empirical evidence. Science is an aspiration as much as an accomplishment, hence "seeks." Expanding our "collective" limits means that it is necessary to communicate results to other relevant experts, and that those experts agree that new findings are interesting and correct. I don't think a new occurrence record for a bird constitutes "science" in and of itself (though discovering a new species does), because new occurrence records to not, on their own, test some generalized principle (some such observations do test a hypothesis, and that's a different story). Some scientists do that with thought experiments and observation, others through meticulous lab work, and others by watching stones sink into the sward of a country estate.

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:44 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Don't Use Microsoft for Oil Rigs

Category: Policy and Politics

Deepwater Horizon Alarm Intentionally Disabled:

Testifying before a federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Transocean employee Michael Williams said that an alarm designed to warn the crew if combustible gases were in danger of igniting was deliberately disabled. …

Williams also told the panel that the computers used to control drilling operations on the rig froze regularly, resulting in blank blue screens, a phenomenon he said he and fellow employees ominously labeled, "the blue screen of death."

Seriously, Microsoft is not to be trusted.

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:39 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Simple questions for stupid questioners

Category: Creationism • Culture Wars • Policy and Politics

Disco. president Bruce Chapman wonders:

It is not clear why the number of academic freedom cases seem to be increasing. Is it because the iron hand of ideological conformity is squeezing professors more tightly? Or is it because more subjects of attack are fighting back in court?

Or is it because he's making numbers up from thin air? Might it be not clear that the number of academic freedom cases is increasing? Could Chapman's staff be ginning up meritless claims of academic freedom violations so he has things to blog about?

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:19 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Deep Thought

Category: Chatter

Convention centers and convention center hotels should offer free internet access. There's no excuse not to do so.

And no, Louisville Convention Center, it does not cost $100/day to provide access in your exhibit hall. Hell will freeze over before I or any sane person would pay anything like that. Frankly, hotel-near-the-Louisville-Convention-Center, $12.95 is too much to spend per day. Charge a dollar a day if it makes you feel better.

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:41 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Happy Birthday to me!

Category: Chatter

I'm another year older, as is Mick Jagger!

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:50 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Backfiring

Category: Creationism • Culture Wars • Policy and Politics

An interesting new article today at the Skeptic's Dictionary, explaining the backfire effect. Several recent papers have found that information contradicting people's initial beliefs can actually increase their acceptance of those beliefs. This is true in political contexts and in religious context. In one example, people given false information about a Supreme Court nominee (which played to their biases) wound up retaining their heightened negative views of the nominee after having the negative claims refuted.

Skeptic's Dictionary author Robert Carroll concludes:

The backfire effect should be distinguished from the continued influence effect, whereby one learns "facts" about an event that later turn out to be false or unfounded, but the discredited information continues to influence reasoning and understanding even after one has been corrected. The backfire and continued influence effects should be disheartening to those who think that the first step in arguing with those who base their beliefs on misinformation should be to get their opponents to see what the facts are. Correcting errors may be pointless when dealing with some people. Critical thinkers, one would hope, would want errors corrected. At the very least, getting the facts right might prevent some faulty inferences and prevent one from behaving in ways that could prove harmful. For example, getting the facts straight about tobacco and alcohol would be a first step in guidance toward reasonable actions regarding those substances. Johnson and Seifert have argued that providing a plausible causal alternative, rather than simply negating misinformation, mitigates the continued influence effect. They may be right for some beliefs, but I have not found that providing a causal alternative to astrologers, acupuncturists, homeopaths, parapsychologists, or defenders of applied kinesiology, for example, has had much effect on true believers. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, and woo-woo beliefs seem impenetrable to facts that contradict them. Changes in these beliefs seem more likely to occur outside of direct confrontation with opponents.

These scientific findings seem relevant to the backlash debate of a couple weeks ago.

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:45 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Netroots Nation

Category: Policy and Politics

I spent the last few days at the 5th Netroots Nation, in Las Vegas. As always, the conference has been a whirlwind of political geekery and good, clean fun. This year featured a video address by the President, and Q&A sessions with the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate, not to mention two panels on the use of snark in politics.

My obligations here finished early. I'd been involved with three panel submissions, of which two were approved: one about politicized sciences and the other on politicized education. My colleague Steve Newton took over on the latter panel, organized by Texas Freedom Network and featuring two candidates for Texas State Board of Education as well as TFN's Dan Quinn and the incomparably Michael Bérubé. Both panels went off on Thursday, leaving the rest of the meeting to schmooze.

My panel was the first session of the conference, and featured DailyKos's DemfromCT, aka Greg Dworkin, a doctor who has spent the last few years trying to increase public preparedness around pandemic flu as well as vaccination more generally. He's got a nice post summarizing his talk up at DailyKos, connecting flu preparedness, the importance of the internet and bloggers in reaching out to the public, and the whooping cough epidemic in California being driven by anti-science anti-vaccine beliefs. I spoke about the usual thing, as you can see in the video above. And I was followed by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, co-authors of Merchants of Doubt, a great history of the global warming denial movement. Hopefully the video of the full conversation will be posted soon.

I'd asked the panelists to present a somewhat positive account at least of the science, if not the politics of the issue, on the assumption that we'd have plenty of time in the discussion to cover the bad stuff, and I think that worked out well. During a discussion of the balance between the need for expertise and transparency in communicating science, I managed to work in a mention of #sbFAIL and Pepsiblog, pointing out that they had legitimate experts, but lacked the openness that makes real blogs effective in science communications.

We also talked about science journalism, and about the common theme of all these forms of science denial: a rejection of the value of expertise. Alas that I couldn't show Don McLeroy's famous "Someone has to stand up to experts" rant. Check out good summaries of the panel at Northwest Progressive Institute, ClimateScienceWatch,and Delaware Liberal.

Hopefully I'll figure out how to get my Keynote slides into Slideshare soon, so you can see them in better quality than the video above could capture.

Now I'm off to another conference, and am sending this from the free wireless network at the Las Vegas airport.

Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:31 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks