Anti-science ain't just on the Right

There are a lot of non-scientists who think you can be a well-rounded person without ever studying any math or science at all. Is there any curriculum at any serious university in this country in which you can graduate without taking some courses in writing or literature or art or a foreign language? No. Yet there are plenty in which math and science are left to those weirdo science majors.

Bravo, I say. There needs to be the "well rounded student." Hard science geeks who need to be exposed to poetry. Fine arts majors who need to spend time in the chem lab.

My experience, a BA in humanities, no hard science at all.
Then an MS about 5 years later. Now THAT at least presented some hard (or attempts at hard) science. Stat. Writing a thesis with data and hypothesis. I hated it at the time. And yet, it helped tremendously in my learning.

I think the reason for it's decline is because a number of students over the last 5-15 years have been growing up more and more in the shadow of homeschooling, evangelical control of the school boards, and now the ID bull. Then there's the fact that despite the education needed for computer related fields, these fields were rare and far between until the arrival of the home PC, the internet, etc. Now there are an endless number of software related careers that didn't exist 25 years ago. Then there's the government and it's supporters essentially telling us that you can run the country without a real education. Just use your gut instincts. And with the real money nowadays being in nepotism and cronyism, all you need is some start up funds to become rich. Use your parents home as collateral. Get a loan of $125K, donate $50K of it to the GOP, get your payback in the form of a lucrative $10 million Haliburton subcontract to rebuild schools in Iraq, don't build them, claim in the followup investigation that you did build them but that the terrorists kept blowing them up, and watch as the case gets closed when you donate another $100K of that $10 million to he GOP as an afterdinner tip. All the while outsourcing your labor to some non-existent firm in the Phillipine islands where the office consists of a one-room office over a sweatshop with a phone that routes all messages back to a U.S. answering service.

Why be a scientist when all you need is a startup loan to donate to the GOP to get your bid for that contract a little more consideration for your being a patriotic American. Heck! If you're lucky you might get to hear Tom Delay praise your company at a congressional committee meeting about how you represetn the American dream, a self made millionair. God bless America!!

MYOB'
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No, we can't have science "take a rest." We don't have too much science already. There are untold problems in our world that may be on the verge of a solution if the right science gets funded. Unfortunately we don't know what they are until some find them, and that won't happen if we stop now.

Science also plays a role in the development of art and culture. Much of our modern culture exists because of the breakthroughs made by science. Without science we'd have no radio, television, motion pictures etc. etc.

One of my best friends is a graduate student in English, working on his Ph.D. dissertation. He is regarded askance by the other English grads because he knows math. (He took three semesters of calculus as an undergrad.) His professors and his fellow grads are almost entirely innocent of the least trace of any science or math, but that sure doesn't stop them from opining about it. When they offer comments like "Well, a mathematician would say..." and he demurs, they get very defensive and irritated with him. He's the English department's one-man freak show, instead of being regarded as a scholar of rare breadth because he has some non-trivial knowledge outside his field. Perhaps if he had minored in philosophy instead...

Bravo, PZ. In my eyes you are the preminent defender of science and knowledge. You are an inspiration to all of us scientists and engineers. Keep up the great work!

Science is more highly rated than the humanities? In what parallel universe?

I have humanities colleagues who are perfectly fine with being innumerate. Many of them have this dismissive attitude towards the science faculty (my training though not my job at the moment) as being less cultivated, irremediably reductivist, and all around less nuanced than the humanities side of the street.

I ride to work with a cultural historian and last week I spent much of the drive explaining pop music to her and how to get to Van Morrison from Jackie Wilson (a straight shot).

The irony is that she was going to go in and lecture to a class on this.

We may not need more science students, but we definitely need more science literacy and a bunch more respect.

At least the President of my school understands this well.

I am not faculty at my school (though I teach as adjunct at a local community college), but many students over the years came to me for curriculum/career/life advice after I was their TA - I have this miraculous and incomprehensible talent for appearning trustworthy on surface although I am rotten in the core.

I always give them advice to take non-science classes and give them a suggestion list of several history, philosophy and English classes to consider.

Those are course taught by brilliant and inspiring people and I took grad courses with them (who cares about my grad school requirements - I took double the credit hours than needed) because of who they are.

Every campus has such people and we should tell students to take courses by campus stars (in the good sense of "star"). There are stars, i.e., inspiring teachers, in all departments, science and non-science, and every student should take the opportunity to get touched by their school's greatest teachers. Why else go to a particular school if not for the best people who are teaching there? Would you skip an E.O Wilson class if enrolled at Harvard, no matter what your major is? I know I wouldn't.

I agree with most of your points about science, but I have to oppose your tangential point about distribution requirements. I graduated from Cornell recently enough to still be angry about some of the crap I had to take to get my degree.

I started college with a healthy respect for the humanities, and I still respect several of them. But many of them are plagued by pseudo-intellectualism thick enough to make a scientist's head explode. They are formulaic: they hijack a bunch of big words from an avant garde field of science like string theory and mix them together with terrible metaphors, stylish words like "praxis" and "hermeneutics," and self-citations until they've assembled enough garbage to to fill a river barge. Publish and repeat. These papers turn out to be utterly meaningless if you sit down and actually decode them.

This only afflicts certain fields and stands in stark contrast to people doing good work in economics, history, writing, political science, and other reasonable humanities. But universities waste billions of dollars paying other, fake academics who waste students' time and are largely to blame for the public attitude of anti-intellectualism. All the rightwing talking points about intellectuals in general (the "out-of-touch Ivory Tower those-who-can't-teach" nonsense) rings completely true for fields like social theory and art criticism. Any time one of those professors appears in public, the meaning of the word "professor" is diminished in the eyes of anybody listening.

A good place to find the nonsense papers I'm talking about is http://www.ctheory.net. A quick skim over the articles turns up this typical example of their silliness: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=500. You can also Google the "Sokal Hoax" to see the very clever way that a physicist revealed the lack of intellectual standards in some social sciences. Feynman griped about the problem in his anecdotes, too. At best these people make one or two trivial, self-evident points in an absurdly convoluted way. At worst they are complete frauds.

Many university requirements don't really allow scientists to diversify their education by studying the arts. I never had a single distribution requirement I could fulfill by learning to paint or play a musical instrument or design a building. The requirements instead pointed me in the direction of people who pointlessly over-analyze somebody else's art. Art history, criticism, and theory fulfill many more requirements than art itself, and they usually drown a student's natural creativity beneath a sea of fashionable buzzwords. I can speak only for my own experiences, but I suspect the problem is widespread.

Sorry this is slightly off your topic, but I think it's important to recognize that undergrad science majors who hate their distribution requirements shouldn't be so quickly dismissed.

You haven't seen the anti-science side of the left? My PI works for the ag industry (I'm still a grad student), which gets a lot of BS from the hippies about transgenics. The way I see it, the hippies and the creationists are competing to see who can be the most anti-intellectual. Right now the creationists are winning, however.

I think part of the problem is that people in both science and the humanities still have this false dichotomy -- as if people in universities had only two choices: "science" vs the "humanities". In reality, the real problem isn't people shifting out of the sciences into the humanities, it's people shifting out of both scholarly domains into purely practical affairs like accounting and finance. Even though I'm a practicing scientist, I have a lot of respect for historians and other members of the humanities. Like us, they want to add to knowledge, not just pull in a good salary.

Don't forget the animal rights activists as well.... At least on the left, people are generally free to subscribe to whatever views they like, so not everyone shares these crazy anti-science ideas.

reminds me of 1968-1972: science is part of the establishment. science is killing the environment. science is making bombs, Agent Orange. science is wasting money on the Apollo lunar program. groovey ..... (actually, i still say "groovey".) yeah, and science set up and enabled the personal computer revolution, which many hippie types found their way to world domination ....

but seriously folks ...

okay, four factors.

first, college students have in my observation always been very keen judges of Where Their Bacon Lies. they might not be able to see reliably 10-20 years in the future, but, properly or not, most opt for careers which have some reasonable likelihood of panning out. why are Mr Gates and company having such a hard time finding computer science people to work for them? because they know there's no apparent future for software people in the United States. students also have a keen sense of a payoff to themselves gauged by a combination of financial and fulfillment. so, if the workload seems too high on a career path now or in the future to warrant what they'll get out of it, they'll avoid: "Danger Will Robinson!" competition in science might be getting tougher because the competition is and has been truly international rather than national.

second, if anything, science as performed today is TOO practical, too results focussed, too forced by the hands that feed it to be concerned about "are we getting our money's worth?" and "what is it good for?" the best science is today and always has been an educated waltz into the unknown, driven more by curiosity than anything else. the funding of science by the Department of Defense in earlier decades was extensive, but there were also few strings on it, because the funding was set up as part of an enlightened process, by people who understood what it really took to do science. ironically, by focussing science upon high payoff areas, the science that is done is more expensive, requiring bigger and better instruments and devices, and quick and massive assaults upon subjects of study in order to get results out quickly and control costs. the major science projects of the 20th century were actually long term, patient things, like the drilling program which the JOIDES Resolution and its sister ships were a part of which provided the clear documented evidence for plate tectonics.

third, like it or not, the United States is in economic decline, with resources available for discretionary spending dwindling, consumed increasingly for basic necessities, with federal and state resources consumed by adventures and subsidies to corporations, and ownership of these corporations and of government (who owns T-bills?) increasingly going to the wealthier groups in the world. thus, whatever things perceived as non-immediate or nice-but-not-necessary are going to bear these cuts: libraries (who uses them?), arts (troublemakers and traitors and perverts, no?), scientists (ivory tower dreamers and money wasters, right?).

four, science is changing. that is, the classic formulation of science as problem solving, classification, and quintessential book learnin' is being supplemented by the intrusion of computation, statistics, and information technology. i think we collectively are only beginning to understand how to grapple with these. we certainly don't know how to properly explain and use these tools in science-driven policy decisions, e.g., climate models, and we have a difficult time using them even in engineering, e.g., Space Shuttle debris impact models. this doesn't mean science is unimportant. it means there are groups of people supporting science who aren't formally considered scientists but probably should be. in this regard, i have been impressed with the jacks-of-all-trades kinds of rewards the Australian scientific community seems to grow. so scientists might not even understand what science is becoming. certainly, values-driven scholarship isn't science, e.g., biblical archaeology. but this other stuff? what is informatics?

and finally, to those who demean science and technology because of its association with power and the powerful: (a) to the extent science and technology are about reality and about controlling aspects of reality, it is natural that those in power would align themselves with it. sadly, many don't understand science so they end up alienating it and those who practice it. (b) language and media communications are also a technology, some of it very old, some of it new. which has the greater mote in the eye?

Well, this really isn't anything new. These dingbats with the New Age sympathies always squirm out of the woodwork as soon as the preciding Christian revival becomes unfashionable. I take this as a good omen that the next president will not be a religious zealot.

I really like the "lets put science on hold until we can make just use of the science we have". My God, that was boneheaded. Yes, by all means, lets halt what few wheels are turning towards the discovery of just what it is that makes an African prostitute immune to HIV. Let's stop this nonsense about looking for sustainable fusion reactions that don't leave radioactive byproducts. Less polluting manufacturing methods? Don't need 'em. How about those fancy space telescopes? What are you, some kind of pencil-neck? Get your heads out of the clouds -- we don't need to know anything about the universe. Hey, wouldn't some improved methods of agriculture be nice? I mean, we could alleviate hunger with those. Oh, no, I'm sorry... that would be science.

Whoever wrote that article can get bent.

Science is more highly rated than the humanities? In what parallel universe?

Ours. At least in terms of funding, that is. Science professors make more on average than humanities profs (of course, scientists tend to bring in millions of dollars in NIH and NSF grants, of which a rather large fraction which gets skimmed off by the universities as overhead).

Also, there is actually funding for grad students. When I went off to get my doctorate in microbiology, my parents were amazed that I was fully supported by the department. My father did a Masters in history and would have liked to have gotten a doctorate, but he just couldn't afford it -- the stipends that science graduate students get just aren't there in the humanities.

I didn't argue that scientists are better funded than the humanities. I had a (basically) free ride in grad school, though I alternated my NSF grant and TAing.

But I maintain that science has an odd place in the academic world. People like the results, but feel fine about knowing nothing about the practice. I have had colleagues argue the "different ways of knowing" schtick to place scientific method on the same level as shamanism.

C.P. Snow has a lot to answer for with his "two cultures" distinction.

I believe that all undergraduates should take a wide distribution of courses. There's going to be some dreck, sure, but there are also going to be stuff that couldn't have been imagined in advance. An undergraduate's study should be as broad as possible, it's not like you'll get the chance again

You're right about that. But I'm so spoiled--I teach the scientific method and research literacy to complementary and alternative medical practitioners who are motivated to learn and understand what they didn't get in their previous education, and apply it to reading research literature, and using the information from those articles in their practice.

However, my students are self-selected for my course, so I get the ones who've already chosen to seek this knowledge out. I'm on a study safety oversight board with a researcher who taught at a local Chinese medicine school, and the stories she tells me about anti-science attitudes among her students! Quantum this, and evil scientist conspiracy theory that--I'm afraid I wouldn't maintain my equanimity nearly as well as she did with it.

Yay for selection bias! (in this case)

Oh, my! The site that stimulated this topic proves that leftwing liberalism in its purest sense is no different than the group now referred to broadly as intelligent design (ID) protagonists although they like to think they are different from each other.

Being essentially alike both groups (Leftwingers and IDists) are struggling with the apparent brutal political and materialistic activity called application of science that is confused with the intrinsic science system that is simply an common approach aimed at coming up with results that everyone can agree on in the long term, the closes thing to "truth" that mankind can ever hope for.

Your random quote of the day triggers a thought:

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them.[Frank Herbert, Dune].

I would reword the above to:

When politics, religion and socio- ideology are intermingled without science, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them. [modified Herbert]

Here's Polly's version:

When politics and science are intermingled without religion and philosophy, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them [Polly Anna].

[Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart--Anne Frank]

It's true that science faculty have higher salaries on average than humanities. Within science, physicists and chemists make more than biologists, and across campus economists make more than geographers. It's also true that as a PhD student in science you are virtually guaranteed full (and more) funding, a better conference travel budget, a computer, and access to millions of dollars of equipment and resources. In the social sciences and humanities, a PhD student is lucky to get their own desk, often has to go into massive debt, and has more teaching/TAing responsibilities.

There are lots of rationalizations for these disparities, including retention of scientists in academia and the fact that it costs tons of money just to DO science at all, whereas it doesn't cost as much to, say, analyze Norse epic poetry. Science students get full funding because the cost of keeping a grad student alive is a miniscule percentage of most science budgets, but a significant dent in the budget of a humanities department.

None of this makes it "fair," though, especially in a society where status and prestige are inextricably linked to money, both how much you make and how much you control.

As for people, especially "intellectuals," who are willfully ignorant or hostile to science and mathematics...yes, they are annoying and misled. but they certainly aren't the norm among people I know in the humanities and social sciences. I have heard far more scientists snidely questioning the value, purpose and methods of academic study of culture or philosophy than vice versa.

Oh, my! The site that stimulated this topic proves that leftwing liberalism in its purest sense is no different than the group now referred to broadly as intelligent design (ID) protagonists although they like to think they are different from each other.

Whoa! Polly Anna thinks one example suffices to prove a general result. I guess we can conclude she's not a scientist.

The sleeper has awakened.

messianic delusions, Polly Anna?

no, only kidding. it's just that i decided to watch the whole 6 hour Sci-Fi channel remake of Dune yesterday, for whatever reason. i got to thinking it ought to be something The Decider should watch, especially Harkonnen comments about 'for every Fremen we kill, ten more spring up to fight us'. i guess it would be too much to ask The Decider to read the thing.

Herbert said a lot of things in Dune, many being decidedly anti-science. but, hey, it's great fiction. too bad the books Heretics of Dune and beyond weren't as good. and i just can't imagine any American public tolerating God Emperor of Dune, not any time soon.

There are lots of rationalizations for these disparities, including retention of scientists in academia and the fact that it costs tons of money just to DO science at all, whereas it doesn't cost as much to, say, analyze Norse epic poetry. Science students get full funding because the cost of keeping a grad student alive is a miniscule percentage of most science budgets, but a significant dent in the budget of a humanities department.

i've often wondered how much of the antagonism between science and humanities departments on campuses arises because it does cost significant money to do science at all, and humanities scrape to pay 'just for people and books'.

now, departments dedicated to non-applied mathematics are interesting . i don't think they feel tied to anyone and ally themselves from issue to issue and time to time.

As someone who switched from humanities to the sciences, I can understand the hostility between the two "camps." Really, they shouldn't be two camps, since they could benefit from working together, but many colleges set up a false dichotomy.

For example, most colleges are rather balkanized in terms of funding and governance. At my school, most sciences are in a separate college within the university. Chem labs are shiny and new, whereas the English class rooms are practically rotting.

Part of the problem? Gen eds. These form the core curriculum at a lot of universities so we students can be "well rounded." Good idea, bad execution. I took science gen-eds as a history major and english gen-eds as a biology major. They last thing they do is ingratiate students towards "the other side." At my university, often they are composed of a professor reading dumbed down material off a powerpoint to a class of nearly 500 people. Some choice courses include "Life With Animals" and "Talking Culture." Students end up thinking that other disciplines are useless and trivial.

Sure, there are good gen-eds, after all, I was a girl who was homeschooled and taught creation science and I ended up in biology because of some really good professors, but a lot of them just engender hostility. If universities and academia are to become "whole" again, new vitality needs to be injected into core curriculums.

A generation or two ago leftism and anti-science almost went together. One of the few bright spots in watching the world evolve as I pass through middle-age is seeing the left lose some of its anti-science paranoia, and seeing scientists enlarge their involvement in politics beyond the die cast by Manhattan Project alumni. But neither political pole is resistant to magical thinking and lazy rationalizations. Should I live so long, I won't be surprised to see the left reclaiming the mantle of non-scientific disrespectability.

Science is a field whose practitioners, like those in English literature or American history or philosophy, pursued it because of a love of knowledge.

Damn straight. I don't know why there's a perceived binary relationship between the humanities and science. We're all in the pursuit of knowledge, after all. We just go about it in slightly different ways. (Not to mention it's pretty silly to lump all things in two categories. The difference between marxist theory and clay sculpture, or pure mathematics and plant biology can't be greater than the difference between psychology and medicine, say.)

All the rightwing talking points about intellectuals in general (the "out-of-touch Ivory Tower those-who-can't-teach" nonsense) rings completely true for fields like social theory and art criticism.

Oi. The social needs analysing. There's no use exploring the uiniverse if we can't critique ourselves, and the social stuff that constitutes the self. I don't particularly like the word praxis either, but that's what peer review, and argument is for. If you're bothered about the state of critical theory, feel free to do some observation and theorising yourself, and discuss it with a student or professor of the subject. The subject ain't homogenous or static. Personally, I find social theory to be fascinating and remarkably useful.

Science is a field whose practitioners, like those in English literature or American history or philosophy, pursued it because of a love of knowledge.

Damn straight. I don't know why there's a perceived binary relationship between the humanities and science. We're all in the pursuit of knowledge, after all. We just go about it in slightly different ways. (Not to mention it's pretty silly to lump all things in two categories. The difference between marxist theory and clay sculpture, or pure mathematics and plant biology can't be greater than the difference between psychology and medicine, say.)

All the rightwing talking points about intellectuals in general (the "out-of-touch Ivory Tower those-who-can't-teach" nonsense) rings completely true for fields like social theory and art criticism.

Oi. The social needs analysing. There's no use exploring the uiniverse if we can't critique ourselves, and the social stuff that constitutes the self. I don't particularly like the word praxis either, but that's what peer review, and argument is for. If you're bothered about the state of critical theory, feel free to do some observation and theorising yourself, and discuss it with a student or professor of the subject. The field ain't homogenous or static. Personally, I find social theory to be fascinating and remarkably useful.

Didn't mean that to sound as agressive, or twice-posted, as it did...
I heard a rumour once that the science and arts students were deliberately kept apart from each other, and separate cultures created, so they wouldn't get together and become politically active. Because neither of them have much chance of getting real jobs when they leave, they don't have much to lose from rioting and burning stuff.

At best these people make one or two trivial, self-evident points in an absurdly convoluted way.

I wouldn't call modifying the habitual practice of excluding women from clinical trials, reforming the way rape victims had been treated in emergency rooms, or examining the received wisdom on routine mastectomies for breast cancer in light of the scientific evidence "trivial".

And one does have to wonder why, if these practice reforms were so "self-evident", they weren't already being carried out before being scrutinized in light of feminist and social justice theory and post-modern analysis (among other factors).

Medicine is so messed up that even scholars in the humanities can tell. It's the case that proves the rule, RavenT.

Unless things have changed in the past two years, science, along with it's brother math, are the least taken-care of subjects in public schools, at least in Maryland. They are the two areas of which you are required to take the fewest classes, and we have to create special math and science classes because so few kids are actually progressing quickly enough. Reading is where the focus was for me since middle school. We even had take time in art class to learn about reading comprehension.

I can't even remember the last time I had extended contact with someone in the sciences (I'm a musicologist). My roommate through all four undergrad years was a CS major. That was probably it.

As an undergraduate music major, I was required to take one class in science or math. Not one each. One. It pissed me off, because I wanted to take more science, just for fun. I'd have liked to complete the entire chem lab course track.

But nope. Specialization killed that pretty quick.

It's the case that proves the rule, RavenT.

That's just a folk saying, not a logical proof. It's equivalent to assuming the conclusion, which is a logical fallacy.

Just because medicine is messed up demonstrates exactly nothing about social theory. By Occam's Razor, it's more parsimonious to assume the social theorists repeatedly got the right answer for the right reasons in these cases, rather than by a convoluted string of wrong reasons that defied probability by exactly canceling each other out.

(PZ, you'll notice I didn't resort to the Middle High German etymology of "prove" this time, purely out of respect for you :)

Absent any other data, you're right: social theory successfully tackled sexist notions in medicine. But there is other data, which suggests that social theory either got it right by accident, or was not needed to get it right.

It's worth noting that Alan Sokal agrees that there's plenty of robust critique of medicine and other fields on feminist and other grounds. His problem isn't with feminist or antiracist critiques that refute research first and then show how sexist or racist bias caused the researcher to come to erroneous conclusions. Rather, it's with postmodernists who publish incomprehensible papers that say that reality doesn't exist, or defend those who do.

Now, Sokal is about the most academically moderate critic of postmodernism. More bang-on-table critics bash the entire existence of Af-Am and Gender Studies departments, or at least their political roots; conservatives would prefer it if rightist think tanks took over the entire non-scientific academia. But in the last ten years, Sokal has dominated the science side of the science wars, which has done a lot to exclude more extreme critics of social science from the debate.

Troutnut said:
You can also Google the "Sokal Hoax" to see the very clever way that a physicist revealed the lack of intellectual standards in some social sciences.

Dude, take off your flannel, Kurt Cobain's dead, the 90s are long gone.

Sokal brilliantly skewered the worst excesses of the writing style of a faddish minority of postmodernists (a decade ago). You want to hear something really fucking idiotic? A scientist at the human genome project, around the same time, said that sequencing the human genome would enable scientists to play a simulated recording of the singing voice of an unborn child for its parents.

Please don't pretend that grandstanding morons are unique to the humanities and/or absent from science. Luckily for many, the strict (and usually excruciatingly dully deployed) style standards for scientific writing are pretty good protection from sounding like an idiot. Or actually, sounding like anything at all.

The social sciences are by far the most self-critical disciplines, arguably too much so. It'd be nice to see an ounce of that from most scientists.

I wouldn't call modifying the habitual practice of excluding women from clinical trials, reforming the way rape victims had been treated in emergency rooms, or examining the received wisdom on routine mastectomies for breast cancer in light of the scientific evidence "trivial".

Can any of these things be attributed to social theorists publishing in social theory journals? I doubt it, but I don't read their tripe any more than I read FreeRepublic, so I may have missed something. One can only tolerate so much before veins start to pop.

Reread my post and you'll see I'm not condemning all social sciences (nor even all of sociology). And I certainly don't oppose careful study of social issues, but most approaches I've seen are completely stupid. The only thing dumber than an idiot is a group of idiots, and those fields are infested with them, groupthinking their way down the road to insanity at twice the speed of the neoconservatives. I dislike the specific self-absorbed corners of academia which build their own imaginary universes and suck in unrecoverable hours of student time and university money like a black hole. The worst offending philosophy I've found is "radical constructionism." The lucky uninitiated can find it summarized on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructionism

These people suggest -- with a straight face, no less -- that even the basic findings of science are mere social constructs. Gravity. Levers. Germs. Magnetism. Light. Evolution. Their intellectual standards make the Discovery Institute look good. The only other thing that can do that is Ralph Wiggum.

Absent any other data, you're right: social theory successfully tackled sexist notions in medicine. But there is other data, which suggests that social theory either got it right by accident, or was not needed to get it right.

I'd be interested in seeing your data on that. Given the number and variety of examples it applies to (I only cited a few), that's a rather sweeping claim.

It's worth noting that Alan Sokal agrees that there's plenty of robust critique of medicine and other fields on feminist and other grounds. His problem isn't with feminist or antiracist critiques that refute research first and then show how sexist or racist bias caused the researcher to come to erroneous conclusions.

Yes, I wasn't objecting to that, just to troutnut's characterization of social theorists' points as trivial and self-evident at best, frauds at worst. That's why I presented examples to refute his argument, examples which Sokal would (I assume) agree with.

It also sounds like the existence of robust feminist (and other) critique of medicine contradicts your assertion in the first paragraph about getting it right by accident or not being necessary. How does it qualify as "robust" if it's either a) mistaken, or b) superfluous?

Dude, take off your flannel, Kurt Cobain's dead, the 90s are long gone.

Sokal brilliantly skewered the worst excesses of the writing style of a faddish minority of postmodernists (a decade ago).

I know it's been around for a while, but it's still a great example for anyone who hasn't seen the fraud of social theory first-hand. Classes I took a few years ago were filled with precisely the kind of crap Sokal called out, and I really doubt the field has redeemed itself yet. And Sokal's point was about not their writing style, but their indifference toward actual substance. The style just made it funny.

Reread my post and you'll see I'm not condemning all social sciences (nor even all of sociology).

Well, if I misread you, I apologize. But if you use terms like "completely true" (below), I think you run the risk of being misread that way.

All the rightwing talking points about intellectuals in general (the "out-of-touch Ivory Tower those-who-can't-teach" nonsense) rings completely true for fields like social theory and art criticism.

Like I said, if I misread you, I apologize. But I am not sure I misread that, since "completely" seems like you meant all of social theory.

Can any of these things be attributed to social theorists publishing in social theory journals?

Publishing in journals, like publishing in a science journal, isn't going to do much at all, no. It will expose your ideas for critisism and evaluation, but that's about it. Practical applications can made by a range of other people, later, or your theories can be used to expand another person's argument. In an era of growing anti-intellectualism, where less appreciation is given to abstract throught and theory over concrete applications, universities (in this country at least... or my uni at least) are definitely under pressure to justify superficially unproductive departments.

The social sciences are by far the most self-critical disciplines, arguably too much so.

Good point. Sometimes it just seems like a huge 200 year stoush...

This is very sad, and very worrying.

To some extent, it is happening over here, as well.

Warning.

This is how civilisations fall, by internal decay.
Only then can a barbarian push from the outside topple the already rotten structure.

Troutnut wrote:

I dislike the specific self-absorbed corners of academia which build their own imaginary universes and suck in unrecoverable hours of student time and university money like a black hole.

Hey! What's your problem with math? :)

Hey! What's your problem with math? :)

It was my major. :(

PZ, Great post! Thanks for raising this discussion topic. I think this is an important topic that deserves more attention. Liberals seems to have a slightly better batting average with science lately, but they aren't a perfect group. By the way, thanks for quickly jumping on the earlier recent embarrassment.

I think that Melissa might be on to something with her comments about gen eds not always being a great way to show undergraduates students a look into another field. While a gen ed might be needed to get some basic background, liberal arts students should take a couple of upper level courses outside of their area. I believe that UMM requires at least one such course (a good first step). Serious students should be advised to pursue more.

That's just a folk saying, not a logical proof. It's equivalent to assuming the conclusion, which is a logical fallacy.

Um, no. It's simply an acknowledgement that the existence of exceptions does not make a descriptive principle useless.

By and large, those fields are absolutely useless -- and I'm considering meaningful intellectual discovery to be 'useful', here. Pointing to one branch of inquiry where they seem to have contributed something useful is nice, until you realize how easy the target is.

The way I have always put matters is that one needs to understand science for humanistic reasons: without it, one fails to understand one of the most important cultural products of humanity ever. Conversely, one needs a humanistic approach to understand science. This is what I have mentioned earlier about science shading into philosophy. Similarly with technology - to design an artifact entails making ethical and aesthetic decisions.

Dan: What would have stopped you from doing chemistry and music? Money? Time?

BTW, as for the "social critiques of biology" Paul Gross has an interesting retort to the old canard about "feminist embryology" etc. in the collection A House Built on Sand.

Ho-hum:

I recall talking to one of my colleagues who mentioned that one of the wearying things about his work was that when he talked about what he did at parties, he could count on someone saying that they hated his entire field. He was a mathematician.

I feel his pain (chemistry). Every party, every introduction with the standard, "what-do-you-do-for..." gets met with the same grimace and, "yeah I got an X [where X = B,C,D,E] in general chemistry, I hated it"

Dear All,

First of all, let me say I'm very pleased that my diary sparked this discussion, which was its purpose.

I don't have more time now to respond, sadly, but I would very much like to do so later.

I do feel that my position (questions, more than a fixed position) has been somewhat mischaracterized, though, so I just wanted to register that objection.

The author of this article does make many strong points, though, and I sincerely appreciate that they've taken to time to do so.

Quickly, though, perhaps the grossest distortion has to do with my claimt that Science hasn't been cultivated due to a love of learning. I'm not at all (at all) saying that the practitioners are soulless. I'm saying that social patronage of Science in this country is not patronage intended to facilitate the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The patronage patterns and infrastructure for the pursuit of science have to do with its perceived social utility.

I'm saying that that utility should be examined. Science education cannot and ought not be understood independently of the applications it has because those applications are the reason for its relative social prestige.

Ask anyone whether kids should learn more science or art and they'll probably say the former, based on an ethos that rewards "hard" knowledge as opposed to "soft."

I'm questioning the social status of Science, not its intrinsic merits as a discipline of learning.

I'm all for learning, the more the better. I'm just saying that there are only so many resources and given that, there is a zero-sum dimension to patterns of patronage and support. The more there is of science, the less there is of something else.

I think that the balance of learning ought to be reconsidered because in my view science is perhaps disproportionately valued by society right now.

Sorry, have to go, more later.

Thanks again for the discussion, it's very productive and important.

Try talking to some scientists. You won't find many who went into it for the utility. We went into it for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

In my discipline, the ones who go into it with utilitarian goals usually end up in MD programs.

Please don't blame computer science for the falling number of (hard-) science students; we've seen our numbers drop 40% or more since the dot-com crash. At my (liberal arts) university, chemistry and biology are *encouraging* us to "poach" some of their students, since they have too many.

On the other hand, please don't credit students with incredible insight in steering away from the field. Most of the research and statistics seems to indicate that outsourcing is way overblown. Computer jobs are still among the top growth areas in the economy, and projected to be there as far out as I've seen anybody make projections, but we don't have nearly the graduates to fill them.

- humble assistant professor of the new handmaid of the sciences

Well, it does sound from the comment as though the original poster isn't discussing the motivations of the scientists themselves, but rather of the organizations that fund them. This is a fairer critique, but my initial reaction (as a humanities scholar and a reader-responsist) is to call intentional fallacy. What do we care why science is being funded, if the practical application is the increase of knowledge and learning? This is one of those situations, to my mind, in which the shadowy intentions of our grant-dispersing overlords are of limited consequence. Okay, so maybe the Real Genius kids built an awesome laser that was secretly supposed to be part of an orbiting death machine, and it's good that they nipped that project in the bud, but does that make the laser any more awesome? Maybe 80s movies don't make the best analogies... my point is that the NSF, for instance, could be entirely composed of anti-learning philistines, and as long as they kept doling out money to the kind of scientists whose responses we see in this post, I for one wouldn't care.

I feel for Zeno's friend, the math-knowing humanities major. I've definitely experienced that kind of anti-science attitude in my English department, though often it's less outright hostility and more dismissiveness or misrepresentation. But I also teach an electronic literature class that's full of students from engineering and comp sci and so forth, and while they like the class, they never mind telling me how much they usually hate English and how little use they have for reading. There are certainly exceptions; I've had a few genuinely well-rounded students. But I don't think either side can claim a monopoly on dismissive attitudes.

I agree that gen-eds don't help, and paradoxically, I don't think that strict core requirements in college help either -- they don't change people's attitudes, they just force them to sit grumpily through some classes they feel are wastes of time. Having taught for three years at a state school, this seems a little like a fever dream, but I recall students at my no-core liberal arts college taking a wide range of classes just because they wanted to. I took physics and calculus; bio major friends took English and theater; several friends who'd come in intending to be psych majors or medievalists took one geology class and switched fields. How do we make that happen across the board? Perhaps both "sides" need on-campus marketing teams.

This discussion reminds me (somehow) of the ridiculous weirdness that happened when Rumsfeld was given an award for worst speech of some kind, by some group. Sorry, don't remember any of the details, it was the thing he said about known unknowns and so on.

My impression at the time, until now not formalized into words, was that most scientists got what he was trying to say - go out, learn stuff, and find out that there are things you don't know that you previously didn't even know existed. And most Arts-majors (for lack of a better term) had no problem decoding what he said; his speech was fine, and completely comprehensible.

So a person with sufficient breadth of education - either a scientist with a good background in humanities, or a humanities-person (argh, need a term here) with some good exposure to the scientific method, would have had no problem grasping what he said.

Rumsfeld's still a dick-head, though. That part of his speech just didn't deserve an incomprehensibility award.

Thanks for posting this, PZ. Please keep up the good work. Procrastinating is more fun if I still get to use my brain while avoiding work.

A related topic for discussion might be the recent Tom Wolfe lecture: The Human Beast. Here's a quote:

"One of Homo loquax's first creations after he learned to talk was religion. Since The Origin of Species in 1859 the doctrine of Evolution has done more than anything else to put an end to religious faith among educated people in Europe and America; for God is dead. But it was religion, more than any other weapon in Homo loquax's nuclear arsenal, that killed evolution itself 11,000 years ago. To say that evolution explains the nature of modern man is like saying that the Bessemer process of adding carbons to pig iron to make steel explains the nature of the modern skyscraper." Available here: http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/wolfe/lecture.html

I've always thought it was funny that people seemed to assume scientists can't read poetry or poets can't appreciate science. I majored the first time in English and Psychology and then went back for another undergrad degree in what turned out to be Physics. I used to end up reading quite a lot of Austen during finals, and the first time one of my professors went over how quantum mechanics worked, I laughed out loud because it was so exquisitely Carrollian. People in both departments used to ask me if I was sure I belonged there.

I went into biology because I really like knowing how it all works. I ended up in entomology because it was so much fun that I would disappear into the lab for so long my friends would get worried about me. But at the same time I really like the useful aspects of biology, which is why I ended up in the agricultural side of entomology. Learning for learning's sake is fine, but getting things done is nice too.

Jess, you wrote:

"What do we care why science is being funded, if the practical application is the increase of knowledge and learning? This is one of those situations, to my mind, in which the shadowy intentions of our grant-dispersing overlords are of limited consequence. "

I think we should care a great deal about the sources of funding because the patrons (presumably) are expecting some kind of a return on their investment and are poised to seize upon that research which they can employ to very specific ends.

Science is practiced within a social context and its findings have real-world implications, regardless of whether individual researchers intended them to.

These implications are a factor in my proposition that Science is overrated, because I'm not saying it's intrinsically overrated (as a virtuous search for knowledge) but that it's socially overrated, which is what accounts for its social status.

How about this: If Iran was funding research in nuclear physics and claimed a right to the findings, would the researcher be ethically obligated to consider the reasons the research was being funded? Or would it be enough to do the research, cash the checks, and let the chips fall where they may?

Is this not a valid ethical question?

We do enter science for the love of learning. I know I did. But that's not how many non-scientists see it; they're strictly utilitarian. Politicians, the media, the people, if something doesn't have practical application right now, then it's worthless. When people ask us what we do, unless you can answer something on the line of "it helps cure cancer", many of them will think you're a lazy bastard who got into this to avoid real work and sits on a desk all day making stuff up and wasting their money.

And the academic attitude that science is indeed made-up doesn't help one bit. Sure, soon someone will say again that's just a bunch of extremists. But it works in the same way as for fundamentalists: the extremists shout really loud, and those are the only voices we hear. Any moderates are drowned out.

Another issue making the situation worse are speech codes, basically the colleges saying what the bloody US government wouldn't dare, that any form of free speech that might offend another student must be banned or limited. This fits in real nicely with the addiction of one of the more interesting nuts making a circuit on some campuses, Google "Edwin Nichols" Ph.D. You probably won't find anything (I didn't) to indicate what this guy is really about, but Penn & Teller filmed this clown making these statements in his college seminar and publications:

"Students are product, so should be treated as such."
"Black people are naturally late, so you shouldn't chastise them when they don't show up to work on time."

And numerous other racist and anti-diversity statements. Which is ironic, since his seminars are on ways to circumvents racial and social biases in order to promote diversity. In reality its more like, "If you are on a job, shut up and don't make waves, calling people for not being at work on time or other bad habits isn't 'efficient'." And in his mind, the greatest goal of colleges is to "efficiently" produce nice worker clones that don't rock the boat, thus making all those companies he also consults for more profitable. What it does in reality is exagerate or introduce more stereo types, turn out people that don't actually think or argue and undermine the capacity of students to innovate. After all, how the hell do you come up with ideas, if having, never mind expressing, them is taboo from the moment you set foot on a campus?

Needless to say the anti-intellectual professors on campus love the guy, which is why he keeps getting invited back. Both the extreme hippy and extreme right wing ones, since both basically want to produce non-thinking clones that do little more than repeat the professors and never ever dare to think or argue differently. Adding this to the list of other things people have pointed out just makes it even scarier.

In fact.. This is exactly the world view in PZ's earlier "Please try not to be 'nice' to everyone" article.

By the way, when I said the purpose of Science was to make stealth bombers, I was using hyperboli and irony. What I meant was that its social value (as evidenced by such indicators as allocation of funding) is as high as it is because of its potential to yield such things as stealth bombers. I might as well have said its purpose is to cure cancer, but I was being pointed because I think that the fact that scientific research is used to develop ways to kill one another cannot be factored out of a question having to do with the relative social value of science.

Social value can be measured according to positive and negative utility to society. I said it's overrated because I think its funding and general esteem results from a sort of Modernist Triumphalism that implicitly or explicitly holds that Social Progress is in large part beholden to Scientific Progress.

This is one of the premises I think needs to be examined, and from many angles.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out that some people, in defending the value of science point to its utility (computers, television, medicine) while others defend it by denying that utility should be a factor at all.

So just be reading the responses here it seems as if there's a real point of uncertainty about whether or not we ought to consider Science's social impact or not.

Is it knowledge for knoweldge's sake or is it knowledge for the sake of Social Good?

Both can be true, of course, but they could at times be mutually exclusive.

There's a lot to think about here and obviously nothing can be concluded in a forum like this, but if you take these issues away and let them simmer for a few years perhaps they'll have proven worthy of serious deliberation after all.

Also, please don't presume to know the reasons for my hypothesis.

You do yourselves (and me, for that matter) a serious disservice to dismiss what I'm (admittedly clumsily) trying to articulate as so much nonsense.

It's not, this much I'm sure of.

Overstated? Perhaps.

Misinformed in some of the details? Perhaps.

But there are very serious issues underlying what I'm trying to express that are not the least bit nonsensical.

Thanks.

I've always thought it was funny that people seemed to assume scientists can't read poetry or poets can't appreciate science.

I think the real problem is that it's a lot easier to find scientists who appreciate poetry (I happen to be one) than poets who appreciate science. That's not a placing of blame, because I think it's a complicated situation with multiple causes not all of which lie with the poets themselves. It was not always thus, viz. Dante whose cosmology reflects a detailed understanding of the best medieval science (or proto-science if you prefer).

Oh, and another thing. My dear PZ, did you really gather from my diary that I am "anti-science," as implied by your title here?

Did I imply at all that I was "anti-science?"

I'm just talking about science's place in the hierarchy of educational disciplines, wondering why science is higher on that hierarchy than other things, like poetry, e.g.

Please do not misread me, I am not anti-science, though I freely admit that I am highly intuitive and thus not particularly inclined towards "scientific thinking," whatever that might mean.

I'm a bit more complex as a person than I feel you're giving me credit for.

:)

I'm going to try to offer some more context here for the sake of understanding.

The debate begin when a scientist I was chatting with off-handedly bewailed the fact that fewer and fewer Americans were pursuing science, as evidenced by the fact that only 4% of all college students major in the sciences.

My first reaction was, Ok, so what? I didn't mean that rhetorically and I didn't mean that derisively, I just meant that that information alone isn't very illuminating. Why PRECISELY did my interlocutor believe this represented a crisis situation?

This was the context.

I immediately thought of some hypothetical ways in which the decrease of learning in the sciences might be beneficialy to society.

For instance, if the decrease meant that more students were studying ethics instead, maybe that's good. Maybe RIGHT NOW our society has more need for an ethically-oriented citizenry than a scientifically oriented one.

Or maybe not, but I don't think that proposition is absurd on its face. I think a very productive argument can arise from that.

The point is that without a tremendous amount of supporting data and more importantly, a vision about what a Good Society looks like, the decrease alone doesn't tell us much.

My point was that I think it seems urgent not because anyone's actually took the time to crunch the numbers or to develop a comprehensive theory about how much science how many people need to know, but because Science has attained the status of Icon in the world of learning.

It occupies a place in society roughly comparable to that theology once occupied as Queen of the Arts.

My point is that, inasmuch as ONE discipline is "normative," acknowledged to be of high value by academics, the media, the general public, etc. that discipline is Science.

People think it's hard, of course, and not for everyone, which only serves to increase its prestige.

My contention is that for me to even suggest that Science is overrated elicits impassioned pleas to the contrary NOT PRIMARILY because of cool argumentation (although such may underlie some responses), but because to suggest it alone hits a nerve that makes it very hard for people to realize the depth of their unexamined premises in the matter.

At bottom, I think that the model which establishes Science as Hard and Arts as frilly is a deep one and one that I think governs so much of our thinking in many ways that we're not even conscious of.

What if the Arts occupied the same status in our society now as Science does?

Really, what if?

That's kind of all I'm saying. What would society look like if Art and Philosophy saw patronage levels and prestige allocation and curricular dominance at the level science currently enjoys and Science was forced to fight for scraps?

Why is this question not worth asking?

I don't know about social theory, but I'm sure curious about the claim made above that it was responsible for medicine starting to drop its sexist notions and practices. Some of the following notions are naive, but anyway: It would be more parsimonious to think that the science simply got around to study the problems earlier sexist notions made. Or in other cases that the science become so refined it made sense to start distinguish between male and female body types and problems. Or possibly that the new generations medical researchers and MD's were simply less prejudiced.

archgoon wrote:
"Troutnut wrote:

I dislike the specific self-absorbed corners of academia which build their own imaginary universes and suck in unrecoverable hours of student time and university money like a black hole.

Hey! What's your problem with math? :)"

This depends on how you see maths foundations. As I see it, its basis are based on observations of how the real world works, and interactions with sciences continue to affect its basis and methods. This is in my mind why parts of math can be used to support parts of sciences or model parts of reality, while other corners of academia certainly seem able to act like more or less complete black holes.

Keith Douglas says:
"The way I have always put matters is that one needs to understand science for humanistic reasons: without it, one fails to understand one of the most important cultural products of humanity ever. Conversely, one needs a humanistic approach to understand science. This is what I have mentioned earlier about science shading into philosophy. Similarly with technology - to design an artifact entails making ethical and aesthetic decisions."

I think this is important. There is plenty of knowledge and synergism to be found here. What Zeno and others says about
learning the methods and results of the different fields is a part of the synergism too. And there are certainly parts of basic or practical science that needs and uses both ethical and aesthetic methods too. (For example, ethics guiding medical research, or aesthetics (of sorts) guiding theoretical physics hypotheses.)

I don't really see why one can't be a humanist and scientist both. Science is a prime example of looking at the world from the human perspective (since we must).

I think we especially see that when we are looking at the scales that we and our instruments inhabit. We are in the middle of all scales. Our instruments and theories have as much problem to look at very small scales, velocities, masses or temnperatures as very large. If you are trying to disavow the human perspective you can perhaps try to say that IR and UV cutoffs are essential to all realistic fundamental theories. But the fact is that it is basically a result of us humans being found where chemistry is interesting.

I don't know about social theory, but I'm sure curious about the claim made above that it was responsible for medicine starting to drop its sexist notions and practices. Some of the following notions are naive, but anyway: It would be more parsimonious to think that the science simply got around to study the problems earlier sexist notions made. Or in other cases that the science become so refined it made sense to start distinguish between male and female body types and problems. Or possibly that the new generations medical researchers and MD's were simply less prejudiced.

I grant that we cannot replicate the original circumstances in such a way as to fulfill all 4 of Koch's postulates to definitively establish causality. Still, the alignment and degree of correlation of the stimuli (action by political groups based on critiques grounded in social theory) and the reponses of medicine (more inclusiveness), along similar axes (gender, race, and class) in a comparable time frame, does make it kind of hard to imagine it all being a huge series of coincidences and ex nihilo mass changes in a population's attitude as the most parsimonious explanation.

In other words, you really see this example:

women's health care movement pushes medical profession to examine the issue of unnecessary radical mastectomies, followed by increase in rate of lumpectomies, decrease in rate of mastectomies

(and dozens of similar examples by the women's health-care movement, racial- and class-based movements, and various disease advocacy groups)

as more parsimoniously explained by:

the stimulus had no effect, but shortly afterward, the profession happened to change in just the way the stimulus was pushing for, several dozen times over

than by:

the stimulus repeatedly produced a response in the expected direction?

If so, we do not mean the same thing by "parsimony".

Perhaps Alon and Caledonian could clarify this with all the data they have access to on the superfluity of social critiques of medicine to actual practice and outcomes.

Ethics IS a branch of science. Specifically, it's a subset of mathematics called "Game Theory".

Of course, you may subscribe to the notion that ethical principles are entirely arbitrary... in which case studying them seems rather pointless.

Oh, my goodness! For God's sake Weeping for Brunhilde stand your ground and "Wipe Brunhilde's Tears" for a change, you started all this and now your socioideologically vascillating all over the place, worse than Poor Polly sometimes!

At least I am naïve and my reactions are based in goodness, come what may.

Your vacillating is an argument for application of the scientific method on the subject. At least show a little bit of neo-Kantism.

WFB said:
The debate begin when a scientist I was chatting with off-handedly bewailed the fact that fewer and fewer Americans were pursuing science, as evidenced by the fact that only 4% of all college students major in the sciences.

This is a false premise in terms of impact on the American scientific industry which is not severe, and note I say industry, e.g. assembly line output, rather than basic intellectual endeavor. It is being fueled by immigration (Asia, Eastern Europe with still a trickle of more developed countries) just like the more common jobs that "Americans" do not want to do.

Now, could it be that this imbalance between the production mentalities irregardless of the ends versus the pure search for truth is what has turned away typical "Americans" or is it the low pay?

[Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart--Anne Frank]

RavenT,
You say you have a correlation between political groups (women's health care movement?) and medicin. That is fine but not compelling if there is no causal connection established. Also, I suggested other mechanisms that could also be correlated so we have to show they have less correlation, I think.

You also say "political groups based on critiques grounded in social theory" and there you loose me totally. Political agenda groups are established with and without theories. Perhaps you have another correlation here too?

The last part of your comment seems to rely on that I didn't propose internal or external mechanisms that are working regardless of social theory. But I did.

I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of time to say anything substantive right now. I will say that as an historian of science who has his feet in both the worlds of humanities and sciences, I'm pleased as punch to see that no one here has fallen into the "either/or" trap.

That is fine but not compelling if there is no causal connection established.

Of course, absent a series of robust RCTs, we'll never draw a 100% causal connection with certainty, so we have to evaluate what evidence there is from a best evidence point of view.

However, I've studied a lot of the background literature, and if the clinicians themselves draw causal connections in their literature from social theory to their models, practice, and outcomes, I'm satisfied that there is enough expert consensus to consider it at least provisionally established.

Do a PubMed search on any of the following relevant terms:

"qualitative research" (as of this moment, 4991 hits)

"feminist theory" (104 hits)

"social justice" (6516 hits)

"grounded theory" (1935 hits)

"participatory action research" (185 hits)

Like any other clinical field, there's chaff articles as well as wheat, but there are plenty of decent articles from which you can get an overview of the background literature on how different aspects of social theory have had an impact on medical and nursing practice, public health, medical education, and policy.

You also say "political groups based on critiques grounded in social theory" and there you loose me totally. Political agenda groups are established with and without theories. Perhaps you have another correlation here too?

Nothing complicated there--feminist groups tend to be informed by feminist theory (among others), Marxist groups by Marxist theory (among others), and so forth. As a result, their critiques are naturally colored by those perspectives, just as the views of free-market enthusiasts are colored by perspectives like those of von Mises and Hayek.

However, when you say "[p]olitical agenda groups are established with and without theories," this doesn't really make any sense. Every approach to social phenomena is informed by some set of presumptions about the world, and some body of thought about what means what.

Granted, a body of thought that's different from yours (such as, I presume, feminism or Marxism) is probably going to be more noticeable than would be your own body of thought about social matters, so it may seem to you that there are some political groups that "don't have" an ideological perspective or grounding view of the social world, which is to say, a social theory. But this cannot be true.

The last part of your comment seems to rely on that I didn't propose internal or external mechanisms that are working regardless of social theory. But I did.

I'm not sure what you mean by mechanisms. You proposed:

It would be more parsimonious to think that the science simply got around to study the problems earlier sexist notions made.

I'm not sure what kind of mechanism "got around to" is. And recognizing that a problem is an outgrowth of sexism is a feminist concept, is it not? So I think we are saying the same thing on this one.

Or in other cases that the science become so refined it made sense to start distinguish between male and female body types and problems.

I totally don't understand this one at all--when did it ever "make sense" scientifically not to distinguish between male and female body types and problems--in other words, why would this be new? Science has been studying the distinction between male and female body types and problems for centuries.

Male scientists had no problem declaring female brains qualitatively different enough to pronounce them "inferior" in the 19th century, yet suddenly in the 20th century, the concept that female and male cardiovascular systems are so different that cutting corners on clinical trials by only including males results in increased female morbidity and mortality is such a huge surprise? What mechanism do you postulate that would make science "forget" that males and females are so different from each other?

Feminist and Marxist gender, economic, and class analyses of the context of clinical trials explain the situation more parsimoniously than "science temporarily forgot", in my opinion.

Or possibly that the new generations medical researchers and MD's were simply less prejudiced.

Again, that's simply a description, not a mechanism. After all, the older generation was young once, so if it's strictly an age thing, that fails to explain the difference between the two groups. If it were strictly age, the effect would disappear as the younger generation grew old enough to attain comparable power to the previous generation.

If there is a mechanism that accounts for the difference, now that would be an interesting line of inquiry. But again, you are couching it in terms of "prejudice", which seems again to be informed by feminist concepts.

So I think we are actually perhaps closer conceptually on this issue than it seemed at first, because it seems your proposed alternative mechanisms still incorporate social theory concepts such as "sexism" and "prejudice".

I recall something from long ago about research into rat courtship. Initially it focused on what the male rat does to the female rat, but as more women got into biology, we started seeing a lot of work on what the female rat does to the male rat.

And I've seen accounts of similar sorts of conflicts elsewhere in animal-behavior research, like nonhuman-primate behavior.

So I think that it may have been feminist activism in general, combined with making a case of "Look at what you've been ignoring", that made a difference. And not "critical theory" nonsense.

weeping for brunnhilde: The road between pure science and technology (never mind actual use of artifacts) is very long and often unpredictable. If the Iranians (or the Estonians, or the Timorese) are genuinely doing pure research in nuclear physics, then let them. Pure research is (by definition) simply knowing for the sake of understanding. Of course, in most places funders don't appreciate what I have just said and fund for the sake of action when really that's not what the people being funded are doing. As for the technology, should we be worried? Well, one should be alarmed at dangerous technologies everywhere, not just in those countries considered to be the current enemy. I might add also that developing the basic research can be seen to be morally neutral by the fact that it supports two plans of action: If you find a scientific law of the form B if A, then you have two possible policies: refrain from A in attempt to curtail B, or make A happen in order to get B. Note that the refraining policy is not guaranteed to work; B may arise some other way. Also note that this applies always. In the case of nuclear physics, for example, there are non-weapon technologies like medical intervention on radiation burns that "invert" the direction of the law statement from that used in weapons.

Torbjörn Larsson: A slight addendum that might help: Most medical research I'd call technological research. (See above.) As for the aesthetic dimension in particle physics and what not, I must confess I do not know what to say here. I acknowlege the reaction to the beauty of understanding, but I do not at present understand how it should or even does guide research. Basically, I'm asking how beauty affects warrant - and as far as I can tell, it doesn't. Maybe beauty is motivational, in which case it fits into the "context of discovery".

Caledonian: What an incredibly bizarre comment. Even the fans of game theory I know don't make that claim. (Mind you, I don't know many neoclassical economists, which might explain it.) Care to explain? (Incidentally, you might also want to read the criticisms of game theory available in the literature before continuing. :))

In (semi) defense of My Left Wing http://www.myleftwing.com , there was a wide range of opinion regarding Weepings front page post. If I had to charachterize it, the majority disagree with his contention.

In any event, it sparked an interesting discussion. I would urge people to check out the full thread for themselves before making broad generalizations about anti-intellectualism, or anti-science attitudes of the left, in general, and of My Left Wing, in particular.

Keith Douglas: Thanks for your thoughtful response.

"The road between pure science and technology (never mind actual use of artifacts) is very long and often unpredictable. If the Iranians (or the Estonians, or the Timorese) are genuinely doing pure research in nuclear physics, then let them. Pure research is (by definition) simply knowing for the sake of understanding."

But even Pure Research seeks to understand something, doesn't it? In other words, there are decisions made to study A and not B, right? Or maybe I'm wrong, I'm not a scientist but if you're studying nuclear physics, there are probably general ideas about precisely what you seek to understand, no?

"Of course, in most places funders don't appreciate what I have just said and fund for the sake of action when really that's not what the people being funded are doing."

Right. I'm not talking about waht the people being funded are doing so much as I'm talking about the uses to which their research can potentially be put. These expectations are a factor in why Science is funded as it is. It is in this regard that I'm suggesting Science is "overrated." I.e., I'm not talking about its intrinsic merit, but in the expectations society places upon the work, the relative importance assigned to scientific as opposed to poetic work, for example.

I'm not an absolutist, I just think there's a lot of room for nuanced discussion of the hypothesis that Science is overrated.

Thanks again for your response.

And roysol, just a quick note, a lot of the people who disagreed with me didn't understand the nature of my "argument," which was more of a meditation, really.

My chief concern is that I wasn't clear enough in writing and left myself open to a lot of mischaracterizations.

My fault, I know. I do the best I can with the time allotted to me to write.

What Good is History?

I just wanted to call to everyone's attention a diary I wrote months ago about the value of history. As an historian I spend a lot of time thinking about that and just wanted to let everyone know that I by no means reserve scepticism or questions of accountability to the public good for Science.

Perhaps history is "overvalued."

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3750

RavenT,
Thanks for your informing answers. I have nothing whatsoever to say on the direct correlation you now demonstrate between social theory and medicine. I conceede your prior correlation, and I concede this one. It is interesting.

"However, when you say "[p]olitical agenda groups are established with and without theories," this doesn't really make any sense."

I'm sorry if I was vague, it made sense to me. What I meant was that some agenda groups are established before the body of the theory is worked out and established. Where I live it was so with the resistance to joining the EU; the sentiment was established well before there was a comprehensive body of theory behind.

"I'm not sure what you mean by mechanisms."

Perhaps processes were more apt.

"And recognizing that a problem is an outgrowth of sexism is a feminist concept, is it not?"

Certainly not! If there was health problems occuring because women were treated after a male laden practise, the statistics and recognition would come anyway.

"when did it ever "make sense" scientifically not to distinguish between male and female body types and problems"

Lots of cases, I'm sure. Standardisising equipments and procedures, for one. It is merely if there is a difference that makes a nonoptimal result it makes sense to consider distingushing. (And I bet economics comes in here, unfortunately.)

"What mechanism do you postulate that would make science "forget" that males and females are so different from each other?"

This is the question in reverse, I think. I'm not sure if it is relevant?

"Feminist and Marxist gender, economic, and class analyses of the context of clinical trials explain the situation more parsimoniously than "science temporarily forgot", in my opinion."

What is a "Marxist gender"? Marxism and its so called analyses have been falsified long ago, I think. You mischaracterises what I said by saying "science temporarily forgot".

That science started out with standardised ideas (unfortunately not checked too well) and that growing knowledge (medical statistics on females results) and changing social climate affected medical practisioners is more parsimonous than that outside sciences did.

"After all, the older generation was young once, so if it's strictly an age thing, that fails to explain the difference between the two groups. If it were strictly age, the effect would disappear as the younger generation grew old enough to attain comparable power to the previous generation.

If there is a mechanism that accounts for the difference, now that would be an interesting line of inquiry. But again, you are couching it in terms of "prejudice", which seems again to be informed by feminist concepts."

See changing social climate, above. Where I live, the equality movement started well before feminist theory become known in society.

Keith Douglas says:

"I acknowlege the reaction to the beauty of understanding, but I do not at present understand how it should or even does guide research. Basically, I'm asking how beauty affects warrant - and as far as I can tell, it doesn't. Maybe beauty is motivational, in which case it fits into the "context of discovery"."

Um, yes, your analysis seems to be entirely correct. I overstated the effects of aesthetic in physics. I do belive that things like parsimoniosity, symmetry, conservation et cetera are percieved and sought for its aesthetic values nearly as much as that some of these things seems to work best. But you are right, it is probably entirely motivational.

RavenT,
"Where I live, the equality movement started well before feminist theory become known in society."

I should close this line of reasoning off by pointing out that the equality movement (or whatevere it was called in english) meant that women were to be considered too. I think it is believed this was the original problem behind slow recognition of bad practices against women.

Hej, Torbjörn--

Sorry to take so long to get back to you. Busy + sick as a dog is a really bad combination :(.

"when did it ever "make sense" scientifically not to distinguish between male and female body types and problems". Lots of cases, I'm sure. Standardisising equipments and procedures, for one. It is merely if there is a difference that makes a nonoptimal result it makes sense to consider distingushing. (And I bet economics comes in here, unfortunately.)

Yes, that (economics) is the point I was getting at.

"Feminist and Marxist gender, economic, and class analyses of the context of clinical trials explain the situation more parsimoniously than "science temporarily forgot", in my opinion." What is a "Marxist gender"? Marxism and its so called analyses have been falsified long ago, I think. You mischaracterises what I said by saying "science temporarily forgot".

Well, I didn't mean to mischaracterize you--sorry about that! But that is how what you originally said:

Or in other cases that the science become so refined it made sense to start distinguish between male and female body types and problems.

sounded to me. We are talking about the realization in the 1990s that using only men (and relatively young men at that) in clinical trials proved not representative of the way the disease manifested in women. But my point, which I illustrated with the brain example, is that science has known for centuries that men's and women's physiology is very different.

For centuries, the scientific method has been very clear about (ideally) only changing one variable at a time. And for (granted, fewer) centuries, it has had a statistical technique (stratification) for dealing with those cases where the ideal was impossible.

This was never about the science, which is very clear-cut that those known physiological differences make overextrapolation of the male results highly suspect in terms of validity. It was about the economics--if you exclude women, you don't have to take on the risk of someone becoming pregnant and suing for damages to the fetus, nor do you have to perform more complicated statistical analysis to take female physiology into account. They compromised on the science and on the risk to women from the lessened validiity of the results for economic reasons.

So when you said the science "became more refined", I took that to mean that you were saying that science was only in the 1990s becoming aware of those differences. I am sorry to have mischaracterized you.

That science started out with standardised ideas (unfortunately not checked too well) and that growing knowledge (medical statistics on females results) and changing social climate affected medical practisioners is more parsimonous than that outside sciences did.

I disagree--hormones have been known about for centuries, men and women have been known to be different enough that pronouncing women "inferior" on that basis was a 19th-century cottage industry, the scientific method has always been about varying only one thing at a time, and stratification is a tool they've had access to for a couple of centuries. This was not a case of science's standardized ideas.

Where I live, the equality movement started well before feminist theory become known in society.

It is true that Scandinavia has a much better record on female equality than the United States has. Still, I don't agree that they are separate--that they mutually inform each other seems to me a more valid model. Theory is informed by data from society, which in turns leads to extension of the theory which is put into practice in society, where it is borne out or rejected. It's a spiral model, rather than a waterfall model, if that analogy from software engineering makes sense.

RavenT,
I hope you are feeling better now!

"I disagree--hormones have been known about for centuries, men and women have been known to be different enough that pronouncing women "inferior" on that basis was a 19th-century cottage industry, the scientific method has always been about varying only one thing at a time, and stratification is a tool they've had access to for a couple of centuries. This was not a case of science's standardized ideas."

I must be dense, I don't see why the refusal to separate out treatments (where beneficiary) isn't the same as keeping one treatment.

""Where I live, the equality movement started well before feminist theory become known in society."

It is true that Scandinavia has a much better record on female equality than the United States has. Still, I don't agree that they are separate--that they mutually inform each other seems to me a more valid model. Theory is informed by data from society, which in turns leads to extension of the theory which is put into practice in society, where it is borne out or rejected. It's a spiral model, rather than a waterfall model, if that analogy from software engineering makes sense."

I agree.