Tag Archives: pop culture

Individual misconduct or institutional failing: “The Newsroom” and science.

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I’ve been watching The Newsroom*, and in its second season, the storyline is treading on territory where journalism bears some striking similarities to science. Indeed, the most recent episode (first aired Sunday, August 25, 2013) raises questions about trust and accountability — both at the individual and the community levels — for which I think science and journalism may converge.

I’m not going to dig too deeply into the details of the show, but it’s possible that the ones I touch on here reach the level of spoilers. If you prefer to stay spoiler-free, you might want to stop reading here and come back after you’ve caught up on the show.

The central characters in The Newsroom are producing a cable news show, trying hard to get the news right but also working within the constraints set by their corporate masters (e.g., they need to get good ratings). A producer on the show, on loan to the New York-based team from the D.C. bureau, gets a lead for a fairly shocking story. He and some other members of the team try to find evidence to support the claims of this shocking story. As they’re doing this, they purposely keep other members of the production team out of the loop — not to deceive them or cut them out of the glory if, eventually, they’re able to break the story, but to enable these folks to look critically at the story once all the facts are assembled, to try to poke holes in it.** And, it’s worth noting, the folks actually in the loop, looking for information that bears on the reliability of the shocking claims in the story, are shown to be diligent about considering ways they could be wrong, identifying alternate explanations for details that seem to be support for the story, etc.

The production team looks at all the multiple sources of information they have. They look for reasons to doubt the story. They ultimately decide to air the story.

But, it turns out the story is wrong.

Worse is why key pieces of “evidence” supporting the story are unreliable. One of the interviewees is apparently honest but unreliable. One source of leaked information is false, because the person who leaked it has a grudge against a member of the production team. And, it turns out that the producer on loan from the D.C. bureau has doctored a taped interview that is the lynchpin of the story to make it appear that the interviewee said something he didn’t say.

The producer on loan from the D.C. bureau is fired. He proceeds to sue the network for wrongful termination, claiming it was an institutional failure that led to the airing of the now-retracted big story.

The parallels to scientific knowledge-building are clear.

Scientists with a hypothesis try to amass evidence that will make it clear whether the hypothesis is correct or incorrect. Rather than getting lulled into a false sense of security by observations that seem to fit the hypothesis, scientists try to find evidence that would rule out the hypothesis. They recognize that part of their job as knowledge-builders is to exercise organized skepticism — directed at their own scientific claims as well as at the claims of other scientists. And, given how vulnerable we are to our own unconscious biases, scientists rely on teamwork to effectively weed out the “evidence” that doesn’t actually provide strong support for their claims.

Some seemingly solid evidence turns out to be faulty. Measuring devices can become unreliable, or you get stuck with a bad batch of reagent, or your collaborator sends you a sample from the wrong cell line.

And sometimes a scientist who is sure in his heart he knows what the truth is doctors the evidence to “show” that truth.

Fabricating or falsifying evidence is, without question, a crime against scientific knowledge-building. But does the community that is taken in by the fraudster bear a significant share of the blame for believing him?

Generally, I think, the scientific community will say, “No.” A scientist is presumed by other members of his community to be honest unless there’s good reason to think otherwise. Otherwise, each scientist would have to replicate every observation reported by every other scientist ever before granting it any credibility. There aren’t enough grant dollars or hours in the day for that to be a plausible way to build scientific knowledge.

But, the community of science is supposed to ensure that findings reported to the public are thoroughly scrutinized for errors, not presented as more certain than the evidence warrants. The public trusts scientists to do this vetting because members of the public generally don’t know how to do this vetting themselves. Among other things, this means that a scientific fraudster, once caught, doesn’t just burn his own credibility — he can end up burning the credibility of the entire scientific community that was taken in by his lies.

Given how hard it can be to distinguish made-up data from real data, maybe that’s not fair. Still, if the scientific community is asking for the public’s trust, that community needs to be accountable to the public — and to find ways to prevent violations of trust within the community, or at least to deal effectively with those violations of trust when they happen.

In The Newsroom, after the big story unravels, as the video-doctoring producer is fired, the executive producer of the news show says, “People will never trust us again.” It’s not just the video-doctoring producer that viewers won’t trust, but the production team who didn’t catch the problem before presenting the story as reliable. Where the episodes to date leave us, it’s uncertain whether the production team will be able to win back the trust of the public — and what it might take to win back that trust.

I think it’s a reasonable question for the scientific community, too. In the face of incidents where individual scientists break trust, what does it take for the larger community of scientific knowledge-builders to win the trust of the public?

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* I’m not sure it’s a great show, but I have a weakness for the cadence of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue.

** In the show, the folks who try to poke holes in the story presented with all the evidence that seems to support it are called the “red team,” and one of the characters claims its function is analogous to that of red blood cells. This … doesn’t actually make much sense, biologically. I’m putting a pin in that, but you are welcome to critique or suggest improvements to this analogy in the comments.

CD review: Baba Brinkman, “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised”

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Baba Brinkman, "The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised"

Baba Brinkman
“The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised”
Lit Fuse Records, 2011

This is an album that is, in its way, one long argument (in 14 tracks) that the theory of evolution is a useful lens through which to make sense of our world and our lives. In making this argument, Brinkman also plays with standard conventions within the rap genre, pointing to predecessors and influences (not only rappers but also the original Chuck D), calling out enemies, bragging about his rapping prowess, and centering himself as an illustrative example of the processes he’s describing. There is also a healthy dose of swearing (as befits the genre). The ordering of the tracks is clearly thematic, with a substantial stretch near the middle of the album focused on sexual selection. Most of the tracks hold up well enough that you could listen to the album on shuffle, but I recommend listening to the whole thing in order first to get the fullest impact.

The first track, “Natural Selection 2.0,” opens by taking aim at people who can’t or won’t wrap their heads around the explanatory power of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Brinkman specifically targets creationists and other “Darwin-haters” for scorn, but his focus is less on their bad arguments than on their resistance to evolutionary biology’s good ones.

Track 2, “Black-eyed Peas,” borrows a strategy from Origin of Species and connects natural selection with the principles of domestication. Here, Brinkman includes not just cattle and peaches and black-eyed peas, but also artists struggling for survival within the music industry (including Black-Eyed Peas), and the chorus features a Fugees sample that rewards listeners of a certain age for surviving as long as they have.

Track 3, the catchy as Hell “I’m A African 2.0,” flips an Afrocentric anthem into a celebration of the common origins of all humanity. The verses also gesture towards ways that archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists are scientists taking different angles, and producing different evidence, on the same natural processes.

In track 4, “Creationist Cousins 2.0,” Brinkman offers a description of dinner-table debates about evolutionary theory that is really a song about the strategy of engagement (with hypotheses, empirical data, and objections) central to scientific knowledge-building. It’s also a song that reflects Brinkman’s faith that rational argumentation from evidence we can agree upon should ultimately lead us to shared conclusions. The reality of dialogic exchanges (and of scientific knowledge-building) is more complicated, but it’s hard to fully do justice to any real practice you’re trying to describe in a four minute song.

Track 5, “Survival of the Fittest 2.0,” starts with a shout-out to a bunch of evolutionary psychologists and then takes up the question of how to understand violent behavior and what might be construed as “poor life choices” in the environment of American inner cities. Brinkman pushes the gangsta rap genre’s description of harsh living conditions further by examining whether thug life might embody rational reproductive and survival strategies, all the while pointing us toward the possibility of addressing the economic and social inequalities in the environment that make these behaviors adaptive.

Track 6, “Group Selection 2.0,” simultaneously calls out Social Darwinism as unscientific (“Just because something exists in a state of nature/Doesn’t give it a moral basis, that’s a false correlation”) and explores the value of altruistic behavior. Here, Brinkman explicitly voices openness to group selection as a real evolutionary mechanism (“Some people say group selectionism is false/But I say let the evidence call it”).

Track 7, “Worst Comes to Worst 2.0,” continues the exploration of how much environment matters to what kinds of traits or behaviors are adaptive or maladaptive. Brinkman notes that Homo sapiens are apex predators who have a choice about whether to maintain environments in which violence against other humans works as an adaptive strategy. Since violence isn’t something to which our genes condemn us, he holds open the possibility that we could remake our environment to favor human behavior as “peaceful as Galapagos finches”.

Track 8, “Dr. Tatiana,” is an ode to the multifarious ways in which members of the animal kingdom knock boots (and a shout-out to the author noted for documenting them), as well as the track on the album least likely to be approved as a prom theme (although the decorating committee could have a lot of fun with it). It makes a compelling musical environment for examining the environments and intraspecies competitions in which particular intriguing mating practices might make sense.

Track 9, “Sexual Selection 2.0,” considers the hypothesis that complex language in general, and Baba Brinkman’s aptitude for rhyming in particular, is something that might have evolved to help win the competition for mates. Brinkman’s hip hop flow is enticing, but in this song it exposes his adaptationist assumption that all the traits that have persisted in our population got there because they were selected for to help us evade predators, combat parasites, or get laid. What would Stephen Jay Gould say?

Track 10, “Hypnotize 2.0,” continues in the theme of sexual selection, exploring secondary sexual characteristics (including, perhaps, mad rhyming skills) as adaptive traits:

So now this whole rap thing seems awfully strange

Talkin’ ‘bout, “He got game, and he’s not real

And he’s got chains” but wait, that’s a peacock’s tail!

‘Cause you never hear them say they got it cheap on sale

Which means that bling is meant to represent

How much they really spent, and at the end of the day
That’s the definition of a “fitness display”


Like a bowerbird’s nest, which takes hours of work

And makes the females catch a powerful urge

Just like a style of verse or an amazing flow

But it takes dedication and it takes a toll

‘Cause the best displays are unfakeable

The lyrics here make the suggestion, not explored in depth, that mimetic posers in the population may complicate the matter of mate selection.

Track 11, “Used To Be The Man,” fits nicely in the neighborhood of hip hop songs expressing young men’s anxiety and nostalgia for a world where they feel more at home. The lyrics note that we may be dragging around traits (like impressive upper body strength) that are no longer so adaptive, especially in rapidly changing social environments. Here, Brinkman gives eloquent voice to pain without committing a fallacious appeal to nature.

Track 12, “Don’t Sleep With Mean People,” is an up-tempo exhortation to take positive action to improve the gene pool. Here, you might worry that Brinkman hasn’t first established meanness as a heritable trait. However, doubters that being a jerk has a genetic basis (of which I am one) may be persuaded by the infectious chorus that a social penalty for being a jerk could improve behavior, if not the human genome.

Track 13, “Performance, Feedback, Revision 2.0,” suggests the ubiquity and usefulness of processes similar to natural selection in other parts of our lives. The album version (2.0) differs from the original (which you can find here) in instrumentation, precise lyrics, and and overall feel. Noticing this, a dozen tracks in to the album, made this listener consider whether the song functions like a genotype, with the particular performance of the song as the phenotypic expression in a particular environment.

In the last track of the album, “Darwin’s Acid 2.0,” Brinkman explores what the world of nature and of human experience looks like if you embrace the theory of evolution. The vision he weaves is of a world that is not grim or nihilistic, but intelligible and hopeful, where it is our responsibility to make good.

“The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” is — to me, anyway — a compelling rap album, with its balanced mix of tracks featuring flashy dextrous delivery, slower jams, and shout-along anthems. It’s worth noting, of course, that while I haven’t yet hit the post-menopausal granny demographic that Brinkman identifies (in “Sexual Selection 2.0”) as central to his existing fan base, my CD shelf is mostly stuck in the 20th Century, with Run DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Beastie Boys, De La Soul, and Arrested Development — the band, not the show — as my rap touchstones. However, these tracks also find favor with my decidedly 21st Century offspring, whose appreciation of the scientific content and clever wordplay would not have been granted if they didn’t like the music. (Note to Mr. Brinkman: My daughters are now more likely to seek out a Baba Brinkman show than a gangsta rap show, but they will be restricting their efforts in propagating your lyrical dexterity — is that what the kids are calling it nowadays? — to Tumblr and the Twitterverse, at least while they’re living under my roof.)

While some (including The New Yorker) have compared Mr. Brinkman to Eminem in his vocal delivery, to my ear he is warmer and more melodic. As an unapologetic Richard Dawkins fanboy, he sometimes comes across like a hardcore adaptationist (rapping about bodies as mere machines for spreading our genes), but he also takes group selection seriously (as in track 6). Perhaps future work will give rise to a levels-of-selection rap battle between partisans of group selection, individual selection, and gene-level selection.

Baba Brinkman’s professed admiration for the work of evolutionary psychologists doesn’t manifest itself in this album in defenses of results based on blatantly bad methodology (at least as far as I can tell). “Creationist Cousins 2.0” does, however, include a swipe at a “gender feminist sister” — gender feminist being, of course, a label originated by a hater (and haters gonna hate). It’s not clear that any of this warrants an answer song, but if it did, I would be rooting for Kate Clancy, DNLee, and the appropriate counterpart of DJ Spinderella to deliver the response.

What’s notable in “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” besides Baba Brinkman’s lyrical mastery is how exquisitely attentive he is to the importance of environment — not just its variability, but also the extent to which humans may be able to change our social, economic, and political environment to make traits we like bumping up against in the world more adaptive. Given that much visceral resistance to evolutionary theory seems grounded in a worry that it reduces humans to helpless cogs in a mechanism, or robots programmed to do the bidding of their genes, this reminder that environment can be every bit as much a moving part in the system as genes is a good one. The reality that could be that Brinkman offers here is fiercely optimistic:

In each of these cases, our intentional efforts
Can play the part of environmental pressures
I can say: “This is a space where a peaceful existence
Will never be threatened by needless aggression”
I can say: “This is an ecosystem where people listen
Where justice increases over egotism
This is a space where religions achieve co-existence
And racism decreases with each coalition”

As Darwin wrote, and Brinkman agrees, there is a grandeur in this view of life.

UPDATE:
Via Twitter, I’ve been reminded to point out that the album is a collaboration between Baba Brinkman and DJ and music producer Mr. Simmonds, “who is as responsible for the sound as [Baba Brinkman is] for the ideas”.

* * * * *
Baba Brinkman’s website

Videos of ancestral versions of the songs, produced with funding from the Wellcome Trust

Wikipedia, the DSM, and Beavis.

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There are some nights that Wikipedia raises more questions for me than it answers.

The other evening, reminiscing about some of the background noise of my life (viz. “Beavis and Butt-head”) when I was in graduate school, I happened to look up Cornholio. After I got over my amusement that its first six letters were enough to put my desired search target second on the list of Wikipedia’s suggestions for what I might be looking for (right between cornhole and Cornholme, I read the entry and got something of a jolt at its diagnostic tone:

After consuming large amounts of sugar and/or caffeine, Beavis sometimes undergoes a radical personality change, or psychotic break. In one episode, “Holy Cornholio”, the transformation occurred after chewing and swallowing many pain killer pills. He will raise his forearms in a 90-degree angle next to his chest, pull his shirt over his head, and then begin to yell or scream erratically, producing a stream of gibberish and strange noises, his eyes wide. This is an alter-ego named ‘Cornholio,’ a normally dormant persona. Cornholio tends to wander aimlessly while reciting “I am the Great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!” in an odd faux-Spanish accent. Sometimes Beavis will momentarily talk normally before resuming the persona of Cornholio. Once his Cornholio episode is over, Beavis usually has no memory of what happened.

Regular viewers of “Beavis and Butt-head” probably suspected that Beavis had problems, but I’m not sure we knew that he had a diagnosable problem. For that matter, I’m not sure we would have classified moments of Cornholio as falling outside the broad umbrella of Things Beavis Does to Make Things Difficult for Teachers.

But, the Wikipedia editors seem to have taken a shine to the DSM (or other relevant literature on psychiatric conditions), and to have confidence that the behavior Beavis displays here is properly classified as a psychotic break.

Here, given my familiarity with the details of the DSM (hardly any), I find myself asking some questions:

  • Was the show written with the intention that the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation be seen as a psychotic break?
  • Is it possible to give a meaningful psychiatric diagnosis of a cartoon character?
  • Does a cartoon character need a substantial inner life of some sort for a psychiatric diagnosis of that cartoon character to make any sense?
  • If psychiatric diagnoses are based wholly on outward behavioral manifestations rather than on the inner stuff that might be driving that behavior (as may be the case if it’s really possible to apply diagnostic criteria to Beavis), is this a good reason for us to be cautious about the potential value of these definitions and diagnostic criteria?
  • Is there a psychology or psychiatry classroom somewhere that is using clips of the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation in order to teach students what a psychotic break is?

I’m definitely uncomfortable that this fictional character has a psychiatric classification thrust upon him so easily — though at least, as a fictional character, he doesn’t have to deal with any actual stigma associated with such a psychiatric classification. And, I think perhaps my unease points to a worry I have (and that Katherine Sharpe also voices in her book Coming of Age on Zoloft) about the project of assembling checklists of easy-to-assess symptoms that seem detached from the harder-to-assess conditions in someone’s head, or in his environment, that are involved in causing the symptoms in the first place.

Possibly Wikipedia’s take on Beavis is simply an indication that the relevant Wikipedia editors like the DSM a lot more than I do (or that they intended their psychiatric framing of Beavis ironically — and if so, well played, editors!). But possibly it reflects a larger society that is much more willing than I am to put behaviors into boxes, regardless of the details (or even existence) of the inner life that accompanies that behavior.

I would welcome the opinions and insight of psychiatrists, psychologist, and others who run with that crowd on this matter.

Getting kids interested in math careers may require a hero.

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Back when I was a high school math geek, our math team would go to meets that occasionally had tables set up to encourage us to pursue various careers that would make use of our mad math skillz. The one such profession where the level of encouragement far outstripped our teenaged interest was the actuarial field. Indeed, more than the objective boringness of the field (to the extent that we had enough information to evaluate that) it may have been the vehement protests of how not-boring actuarial work and actuaries are (really!) that persuaded us that actuarial work was probably pretty boring.

Recently, I think I have hit upon something that might help actuaries turn this perception around. They need a superhero.

Seriously, if any comic book superhero of note had been an actuary as his cover job, actuarial work would have gotten an automatic boost in the estimation of teen geeks. Journalism? Cool, because that was Superman’s day job. Millionaire-industrialist-playboy-philanthropist? Definitely an acceptable career path, since that was Batman’s day job. Librarian? Cool not just because of the access to all those books and periodicals, but also because it was Batgirl’s day job. High school student? Not cool, exactly, but more tolerable on account of being Spiderman’s day job.

Having a superhero who alternated nights of crime-fighting with days assessing risk would raise the esteem of actuarial science among high school mathletes.

There are details that would need to be worked out, of course.

The name for this superhero? Let’s pencil in The Numerator. (“He always comes out on top!”)

His origin story? Probably it would involve looking up from his calculations and crying, “Egad! Crime does pay!” After which, of course, he would dedicate himself to fighting that crime (else we’re looking at the origin story of a supervillain).*

My guess is that The Numerator is going to be one of those superheros that relies on cool gadgets and knowledge rather than on actual superhuman strength or powers — more like Batman than Spiderman. (Otherwise, we’re looking at him getting his fingers caught in a radioactive adding machine, thereby ending up with the power to shoot calculator tape from his fingers, which … I don’t think so.) His utility belt probably includes actuarial tables and a slide-rule. But maybe he’s also a synesthete who can look at the numbers and smell evil.

His nemeses? Undoubtedly they will be legion — corporate crooks, purveyors of Ponzi schemes — but one of them might be Pay-Day Shark. This supervillain, tricked out in a sharkskin suit, will be happy to give you an advance on your paycheck as long as you’re ready to pay interest and fees that end up being about 400% of the amount you’re borrowing. When you can’t pay, he’ll threaten you will his tank of hungry and ill-tempered (but not laser-sight-equipped) sharks. He may even let his pretties eat one of your limbs. But Pay-Day Shark wants to help you — he’ll loan you a prosthetic limb, for a reasonable fee.

Who can save you from his clutches? The Numerator!

DC Comics? Marvel Comics? American Academy of Actuaries? I think we have something here. Let’s talk.

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*It possible that linking actuarial science with supervillainy might also make young geeks hold it in higher esteem. Maybe someone should perform a risk-benefit analysis of this … but who?