Ethics 101
jstemwedel | January 11, 2007At the AAS meeting in Seattle, Rob Knop risked his own well-being to get the details on a poster that was, shall we say, waaaay out of the mainstream. Quoth Rob:
Now, don't get me wrong. There will be a lot of posters with data or theory that turns out to be wrong, and there are a lot of posters that disagree with each other and debate and dispute the best interpretation of the data. That's the normal process of science. The nuts here... they think they're participating in the normal process of science, but they do not understand it well enough to realize that they are just cranks, nothing…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006I'd like to take a moment to consider a recent comment on a fairly old post about a class meeting wherein my students and I considered some of the inconsistent views about animals with which people seem to walk around. Here's what the commenter said:
"But, as one of my students put it, 'Some of these people who want to shut down the animal research facilities should put a sock in it while they're still eating meat.'"
This suggests that your classroom discussion created a false impression in your students, perhaps due to your own false assumptions.
I've campaigned for ten years to end harmful…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006Uncle Fishy and RMD pointed me to this story in the New York Times about a last-minute extra assignment (due today) for students enrolled in "Critical Issues in Journalism" at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Not an extra credit assignment, mind you -- an extra assignment they all get to do just to pass the course, on account of the fact that the 200+ students enrolled in the class apparently had some trouble handling the exam without cheating:
...a Web site, RadarOnline.com, posted an account, attributed to an unidentified source, that said the Columbia Graduate…
jstemwedel | November 16, 2006Apparently John Murtha lost his bid to be the new Majority Leader in the House of Representatives to Rep. Steny Hoyer. In the run up to this decision, Murtha was reported as saying the House ethics reforms being proposed by Nancy Pelosi were "total crap".
As you can imagine, that got my attention.
Below the fold, a bit of the transcript of Murtha's interview with Chris Matthews where Murtha tries to put his comment in context.
MATTHEWS: But that's not what you said. Didn't you say it was total crap, what she was proposing?
MURTHA: What I said was, it's total crap, the idea we have to deal…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2006A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don't seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of "a life" (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more…
jstemwedel | July 19, 2006Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves -- paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source.
Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn't seem to…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2006Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon put up a post about gender essentialism that starts by citing this post at Mixing Memory on how people's representations of homosexuality affect their attitudes toward homosexuality. Because Chris's post cited my two posts (initially sparked by Jessica's post at Feministing), I came in for some criticism from Greensmile in this comment at Pandagon. As I believed these criticisms to be based on a misunderstanding of my position, I responded. Greensmile then was kind enough to read my posts and to respond that we seem to be having "the most violent agreement",…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2006I'm not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn't a scientist. But, given that I'm working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet:
Plagiarism is bad.
Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you've written and published before without indicating that you're recycling it) is bad.
Ghost-writing pieces for other "scholars" in what purports to be a scholarly anthology might be acceptable under some possible set of circumstances, but it's fishy enough that it's probably best presumed bad.
Citing pieces you've…
jstemwedel | June 27, 2006Chad thinks it's a good point in the week for internet quizzes. So, since I saw it at Arbitrary Marks, I took a quiz to determine my ethical style. (No, "bossy" isn't one of the possible results.)
What the quiz says about me after the jump.
Jean-Paul Sartre (100%)
Kant (97%)
John Stuart Mill (83%)
Jeremy Bentham (77%)
Stoics (73%)
Aquinas (63%)
Ayn Rand (59%)
Spinoza (55%)
Prescriptivism (49%)
Nel Noddings (46%)
St. Augustine (46%)
Plato (40%)
Nietzsche (39%)
Aristotle (35%)
David Hume (34%)
Epicureans (34%)
Ockham (27%)
Cynics (20%)
Thomas Hobbes (20…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006I think after this one, we'll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly:
You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn't mean you aren't also biased.
In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2006I'm following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous blogger. She raises lots of interesting issues about whether blogging is properly regarded as a species of journalism, and how the ethics of blogging might be related to the journalistic ethics of the "old media". As well, Armando turns up in the comments to disagree with Lindsay's analysis of the…
jstemwedel | June 17, 2006It's not just a science thing, it's also an ethics thing. The truth is good. Departures from it, more often than not, get you into trouble.
A couple examples:
The Guarantee of Medical Accuracy in Sex Education Act was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wouldn't you think that education would be premised on accurate information? What have we come to when it takes a law "to prohibit the federal government from providing assistance to any entity whose materials on human sexuality contain medically inaccurate information"?
Memo to the folks who are spinning this as an…
jstemwedel | June 14, 2006I'm not sure I realized it while I was writing it, but my last post (on whether scientific knowledge about the benefits of breast-feeding imposes any particular obligations) has me thinking about another kind of case where scientific knowledge might -- or might not -- bring ethical consequences.
That case? Global warming.
My big question, thinking about these two instances where scientific knowledge, individual decisions, and public policy all coalesce, is what the relevant differences are.
First, the disclaimer: I am not an expert in the scientific literature on the health effects of breast…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2006Wrestling overgrown rose bushes out of the ground may be harder than wrestling gators. (At the very least, it seems to take longer, while provoking less sympathy).
Anyway, while I'm recovering from that, here's a "classic" post from the old location. It was originally posted 5 January 2006, but the ethical issues are still fresh.
* * * * *
Since I'm in the blessed wee period between semesters, it's time to revisit some "old news" (i.e., stuff that I had to set aside in the end-of-semester crush). Today, a story from about a month ago, wherein the Rick Weiss of the Washington Post reports…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2006Even though it's outside the realm of science, given its relevance to recent discussions here, I just can't leave this story alone:
Via Nanopolitan, the latest on the sad case of Harvard sophomore and author(?) Kaavya Viswanathan, whose situation keeps unravelling. Viswanathan got herself a book contract while still a high school student, and then wrote (maybe) the young adult novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Recently, it has come to light that dozens of passages in that novel bear an uncanny resemblance to passages in two novels by Megan McCafferty. Some seem to…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2006In response to some interesting discussions with my students, I'm gearing up for a longish post on plagiarism's place in the pantheon of scientific misconduct. To the extent that scientists can provide a clear definition of misconduct, it's usually FFP: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. So, plagiarism is in there, but there's frequently a sense that it's not the same kind of ethical violation.
Before launching into my take on the issue, I thought it might be good to canvas the readership:
Is plagiarism just as heinous a crime against science as fabrication and falsification, or…
jstemwedel | March 27, 2006My students know that plagiarism is bad. You'd think a major wire service would know it, too.
But it would seem that maybe the Associated Press doesn't know that failing to properly cite sources is plagiarism. Or perhaps the AP does know, but doesn't care. When your business is built on the premise that you are a reliable source of information, it seems to me that this is a very bad strategy.
Over at Huffington Post, Larissa Alexandrovna relates the details. She did painstaking legwork to put together a story about changes to the U.S. guidelines about who gets access to classified…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2006Yesterday, I discussed what scientists supported by federal funds do, and do not, owe the public. However, that discussion was sufficiently oblique and ironic that the point I was trying to make may not have been clear (and, I may have put some of my male readers at greater risk for heart attack).
So, I'm turning off the irony and giving it another try.
The large question I want to examine is just what publicly-funded scientists owe the public. Clearly, they owe the public something, but is it the thing that Dean Esmay is suggesting that the public is owed?
So as not to present a "flash-…
jstemwedel | February 8, 2006Many a time, in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction. The temptation to invent has been very strong, particularly where recollection is hazy and I remember the substance of an event but not the details ... Then there are cases where I am not sure myself whether I am making something up. I think I remember but I am not positive.
--Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
Given the perhaps inevitable comparisons between memoirist-turned-novelist (all in the same book!) James Frey and recently resigned NASA press office operative George Deutsch, I…