Federal funding and Planned Parenthood.

Posted on April 8, 2011April 8, 2011 by admin

Federal funding for Planned Parenthood is apparently a serious bone of contention in the budget slug-fest that threatens a government shutdown at midnight tonight. So it’s worth having a look at just what that federal funding does (and does not) do.

From Jodi Jacobson at RH Reality Check:

All (let me repeat this: ALL) of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding goes toward basic health care. Public funds account for roughly a third of Planned Parenthood’s $1 billion annual budget. These funds come from local, state and federal sources, but 90 percent come from Medicaid and other federal sources. Federal funds pay only for cancer screenings, birth control, family planning visits, annual exams, testing for HIV and other STIs, and other basic care.

Moreover, Planned Parenthood centers provide access to those who otherwise have NO other options. Seventy-three percent of Planned Parenthood health centers are in rural or medically underserved areas.
Planned Parenthood provides primary and preventive health care to many who otherwise would have nowhere to turn. According to the Guttmacher Institute, six in ten patients who receive care at a family planning health center like Planned Parenthood consider it their main source of health care. And for every dollar spent on this preventive care, we save four dollars in health costs averted by not preventing adverse outcomes. …

What will happen if Planned Parenthood is defunded? It is very simple. More women will die of otherwise preventable or treatable breast and cervical cancers and potentially of complications of infections such as HIV; more women will have unintended pregnancies leading to more women seeking abortions; fewer women raped or experiencing gender-based violence in their homes at the hands of intimate partners will get health care or referrals to shelters (of which of course there will be few anyway because funds for those also are being cut). More women who rely on Planned Parenthood to identify conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes will not get necessary referrals for treatment. More families will suffer.

You may recall that since 1976 the Hyde Amendment has barred the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.

Just so we’re clear about what’s at issue.

How can you have a university without a philosophy department?

Posted on April 6, 2011April 6, 2011 by admin

It’s no secret to readers of this blog (or residents of these United States who have been paying attention to the world that exists more than six inches from their faces) that the last few years have been rough for state budgets, and that the budget woes are especially noticeable for state university systems.

A recent case in point: owing to budget shortfalls in Nevada, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is poised to eliminate its Philosophy Department entirely. The current chair of that department, Todd Edwin Jones, has an eloquent piece in the Boston Review that explains some of the reasons that this budgetary strategy is likely to impoverish the UNLV educational experience. He writes:

Philosophy has prompted confusion and anger ever since Socrates, one of the first practitioners of the discipline, was sentenced to death in 399 B.C.E. for “corrupting the youth.” Puzzlement over why people study philosophy has only grown since Socrates’ era. It is not surprising that in hard economic times, when young people are figuring out how best to prepare themselves for the world, many state college administrators and the taxpayers they serve believe that offering classes in philosophy is a luxury they can’t afford.

Yet people think of philosophy as a luxury only if they don’t really understand what philosophy departments do. I teach one of the core areas of philosophy, epistemology: what knowledge is and how we obtain it. People from all walks of life—physicists, physicians, detectives, politicians—can only come to good conclusions on the basis of thoroughly examining the appropriate evidence. And the whole idea of what constitutes good evidence and how certain kinds of evidence can and can’t justify certain conclusions is a central part of what philosophers study. Philosophers look at what can and can’t be inferred from prior claims. They examine what makes analogies strong or weak, the conditions under which we should and shouldn’t defer to experts, and what kinds of things (e.g., inflammatory rhetoric, wishful thinking, inadequate sample size) lead us to reason poorly.

This is not to say that doctors, district attorneys, or drain manufactures cannot make decent assessments without ever taking a philosophy class. It’s also possible for someone to diagnose a case of measles without having gone to medical school. The point is that people will tend to do better if, as part of their education, they’ve studied some philosophy. (This is one of the reasons why undergraduate philosophy majors have the highest average scores on the standard tests used for admission to post-graduate study.) No matter what goals someone has, she can better achieve them through assessing evidence more effectively, which philosophy can teach her. Questions about whether this or that goal is one that is good to have or whether certain goals are consistent with other goals, in turn, concern ethics and values—other subjects that philosophers have long pursued.

Philosophy is sometimes described as revolving around “the big questions” — what can we know, how sure can we be, what do we value, how can we get along in a world where others have very different values than our own. etc. They aren’t big because they are insurmountable (although some of them are wicked-hard). Rather, they are big because they keep coming up in all sorts of contexts, and because getting them right (or more right than not) is important.

Philosophy classes make students grapple with these questions. In the process, they help students develop strategies for dealing with other questions in other context. In the process, philosophy students learn to think carefully, to argue clearly, to evaluate evidence, and to think through sensible objections to their own views. Philosophy students have to become proficient with language, both oral and written. They have to think analytically — and often, abstractly. Philosophy is a discipline that pushes book nerds to be more math-y (what with the formal logic most philosophy degrees require) and math geeks to be more verbal (with all those essays and class discussions).

Philosophy classes leave students with skills more broadly applicable than dissecting individual axons out of a fruit fly embryo.

Not, of course, that I want to argue that the value of a college education or its component parts lies solely in the delivery of practical jobs skills. (Indeed, I’ve argued against this view.) But if we want to rank the value of academic departments in terms of the valuable and/or widely transferable job skills they impart to their students, I reckon philosophy will hold its own against the more “practical” disciplines one might name.

These are skills we try just as hard to impart in “service” courses (i.e., those taken largely by students in other majors to fulfill general education or distribution requirements) as in courses aimed at our majors. Moreover, they are skills that our peers in other departments and college recognize that we have some skill in imparting, given that they call upon our expertise to do things like develop ethics curricula for their majors. (It is true that these ethics curricula are often spurred into existence by an outside accreditation agency for a discipline, or by funding agency strings attached to a training grant. This strikes me as more evidence that organizations beyond the ivory tower — including science and engineering organizations — identify a central strand of philosophy as important in the training of people entering these non-philosophy disciplines.)

Arguably, philosophy could also provide people with skills that are important to participating effectively — heck, to participating rationally in the governance of our nation, our states, our communities. As Jones writes:

It’s long been recognized that some tasks are best coordinated by governments, and that to succeed in these efforts, governments have to raise revenue from citizens. Since colonial times, Americans have recognized that education is one of the things that taxpayers need to support (and those were some lean times!). Sadly, over the last several decades, Americans seem to have grown accustomed to thinking that they can have roads, schools, fire departments, and Medicare without fully paying for them. Now that such thinking has proven a fantasy, taxpayers should have responded with a sensible, “We should have been paying for these things, and perhaps we should start.” Instead they have clamored to cut spending—usually on things that don’t directly concern them or whose immediate benefits aren’t apparent. Such thinking leads new Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval to propose a budget with enormous cuts to education (including elementary school). And it leads college administrators to insist that these cuts require eliminating the Philosophy Department.

(Bold emphasis added.)

An attentive philosophy student has a toolbox with which to analyze this magical taxpayer thinking, whether in terms of ethics or political theory, in terms of our ability to think down the links of a causal chain or our difficulties with empathy.

Surely, more facility with critical thinking, not less, is what it will take to bring us through a difficult economic climate.

Of course, when there’s not enough money in the budget (and when the populace and/or their elected representative have ruled out tax increases as a way to get enough money), stuff gets cut. Maybe some of that stuff really is of little value, but a lot of the things left to cut are going to hurt someone when they’re gone.

Eliminating a philosophy department may not cause the same degree of immediate harm as would, say, cutting off medical aid to the indigent or eliminating free school lunches for poor elementary school kids. But it will cause harm. Maybe that harm will take longer to smack the people of Nevada in the face, but this doesn’t mean that the impact won’t be devastating.

Autism Awareness Month: some links.

Posted on April 6, 2011April 6, 2011 by admin

Since April is Autism Awareness Month, here are some links to relevant posts worth reading:

At Shakesville, a guest post from LydiaEncyclopedia: Autism Acceptance For Autism Awareness Month:

Autism Awareness Month has been a thorn in my side for as long as I’ve been an adult. I am at heart an attention-seeker, so you would think having an entire month devoted to people like me would be a joy to behold. But that’s the problem behind Autism Awareness Month. It isn’t about me. It’s not about me—the autistic person. The entire conception of Autism Awareness Month doesn’t even revolve around autism, not the kind I have or the kind that anyone I know lives with. The ‘autism’ of Autism Awareness Month is a mysterious, esoteric, silent force, which magically swoops into the homes of unsuspecting families, and replaces regular, darling children with empty husks, ala the Changelings of ancient myths.

It’s not even entirely about the children who are these so-called “empty shells.” The entire focus of Autism Awareness Month seems to be divided between what sad, pathetic existences they must lead, and the potential for a real, neurotypical, normal child that lies just around the corner in the next type of chelation, cure, or therapy. Rather than shedding light on what autism is, Autism Awareness Month has served to cloud autism further in lies, half-truths, pity, and the tyranny of low expectations.

Also, a couple of the links dropped by the excellent Shakesville commenters on that post:

At Square 8, The ever-expanding list of neurotypical privilege.
(H/T codeman38)

At ballastexistenz, Hey, watch it, that’s attached!:

I am going to take cure to refer to removal of all things that have been defined by the medical profession, about my body, as disabilities, in the individual, medical sense that medical people make it. Some of the things I am about to describe may not sound like they are out of the ordinary. They aren’t. But at some point along the line, they have, in my life, become medicalized. For instance, certain particular genes generate things considered (in the medical/individual model of disability) disabling, but also a number of other things that taken alone would be ordinary. Since all those traits stem from the same genes, I have to conclude that they’d have to go as well, even the harmless or relatively ordinary bits. Cure, after all, does not pick and choose, it’s about removing all traces of the thing regarded as “a disability” medically. …

Cure means rearranging me on everything from the obvious physical level to the genetic level. Rearranging at the genetic level always entails surprises. Pull on one thing and you find it’s attached to ten other things you didn’t even notice and would never have predicted, because you didn’t know that gene dealt with all of those things at once instead of one tidy little thing at a time. Similarly, rearranging the brain and other parts of the body will always have effects you didn’t count on. This is what happens when you mess with systems that are complex and interconnected.

(H/T: KA101)

Finally, some interesting discussions of research:

At Cracking the enigma, How do siblings influence theory of mind development in children with autism?:

Research conducted in the past 15 years or so has consistently shown that children with siblings of a similar age tend to pass tests of “theory of mind” at a younger age than those without siblings. The implication is that the experience of interacting with siblings helps children to develop the concept that other people have minds and that their thoughts and beliefs are sometimes different from their own.

Children with autism typically struggle on tests of theory of mind. An interesting question, then, is what effect siblings have on theory of mind development in autism. Based on the literature on typically developing kids, we might expect siblings of autistic children to have a beneficial effect. We could even make a case that, because autistic kids may have fewer interactions with non-family members, siblings may be even more important than normal. Counterintuitively, however, a new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggests that having older siblings can have a detrimental effect on autistic children’s theory of mind development. …

The authors speculate that well-meaning older siblings may over-compensate for the autistic child’s difficulties. By treating them with kid gloves, they may somehow limit their development. Younger siblings might be less likely to do this and so have a more benign influence. However, it’s not clear why having older siblings would be worse than having none at all.

At The Autism Crisis, Are autistic people lost in space?:

In one short paper, Elizabeth Pellicano and colleagues claim to demolish Simon Baron Cohen’s systemizing account of autism. They also conclude that autistics’ strong visual search and probabilistic learning abilities fail in large-scale space, ergo in the real world. …

Well first, it’s an interesting task, even if it’s not a visual search task.

But even if autistics totally failed (they didn’t, and search all you want again, but you will find no rationale in this paper for the drop-off-a-cliff thresholds pushed by the authors), this task doesn’t map easily onto the authors’ sensational claims. These include that autistics can’t find “shoes in the bedroom, apples in a supermarket, or a favourite animal at the zoo” ergo can’t achieve independence.

Of course I want a whole lot more data, or an excellent rationale (none is provided) for not reporting most of it. And numerous possibilities were overlooked. …

No one knows how autistics would have performed if given accurate task instructions (to take the shortest path, as measured by the authors, to the target). Maybe someone else can bring up motor differences, which plausibly are relevant to this “true-to-life” task. And I wonder how clear, for autistics, the task instructions were with respect to revisits.

Autistics should be notorious by now for noticing aspects of tasks that nonautistics don’t (fantastic example at IMFAR last year), and for exploring more possibilities than nonautistics (examples here and here). Writing this off as a bad thing, as autistics being lost in space or some dire equivalent, is shortsighted to say the least.

Well, at least we won’t need search committees.

Posted on April 1, 2011April 1, 2011 by admin

Academics have long suspected that the bean-counters at colleges and universities would happily do away with tenured faculty if they could. Indeed, from the administrative perspective, the only advantage to the tenured and tenure track faculty over non-tenure track folks (who can be paid less, given fewer benefits, assigned five course loads, and needn’t be rehired the next term) is that you can make them serve on committees. (Actually, non-tenured folks also get pressed into committee service, but it strikes me as pretty exploitative.)

Now, according to a story from the Chronicle of Higher Education, there may be one less flavor of committee for service by the tenured and tenure-track — plus, the bean-counters may finally have a way to shrink the tenured professoriate until it’s small enough to drown in a bath tub.

The state of Illinois is close to finalizing details of a plan to make tenured faculty posts “hereditary positions”. This would mean that a tenured professor in chemistry (for example) could, upon her demise or retirement, leave that professorship (with tenure still intact) to “an appropriately trained designee”. Under the plan, the designee could be a spouse, or one’s child, or a sibling. The designee could also be one’s favorite grad student or post doc of all time. The department would get to maintain that tenured billet and would, presumably, have a qualified chemist in it without the time and effort of a search committee. As the article notes:

To pass on one’s position, professors will be required to file an “academic will” laying out the order of succession for administrative approval. Without such a plan — or if the persons specified in the plan are judged to be lacking the appropriate training — the position will revert to the non-tenure track pool for its erstwhile occupant’s department.

Here, the department still avoids the hassle of a search for a new tenured or tenure track professor.

According to the Chronicle article, an issue yet to be resolved in this plan is whether professors will be allowed to pass on their tenured position to their heirs upon retirement (rather than having to die to trigger the succession).

UIUC History Professor Linda Ethelred noted, “Our suspicion is that some faculty would happily retire, rather than staying in those posts past their prime, if they could appoint their own replacements. But retired faculty cost university systems money and the administration wants to cut one of those expenses, either the expense of maintaining the retiree or of maintaining the tenured post.”

What this plan would mean for university departments, if implemented, is not entirely clear. Maybe allowing senior faculty to choose their own successors would generally preserve a department’s strength in a particular area of specialization, but maybe it would entrench focus on an area that is some distance from where “the future of the discipline” is judged to be. Possibly, though, hereditary tenured posts will encourage more collegial relations within a department. If your senior colleague is in the position to pick your future colleague, helping that colleague to understand the value of your approach to the discipline (and working hard to appreciate the value of her approach to the discipline) strikes me as a pragmatic move, one that may positively influence her academic will-making. Indeed, it might even lead to productive conversations and collaborations before she shuffles off this mortal academic coil.

A totally separate issue is what this plan might mean for the family life of tenured and tenure track faculty.

Could this be favorable to couples who have trained in the same academic discipline? The chances of both partners getting academic posts at all, let alone in the same location, are frighteningly small in some fields. Here, if one has landed the tenure track job, the other may finally have a reasonable expectation of someday also having such a post. If a couple’s employment will be sequential rather than simultaneous, potentially this could change the realities of child-rearing, too — the partner providing the hands-on care for the children would no longer be abandoning hope of a tenured post and a fulfilling research agenda, but merely deferring it. (This is a place, I reckon, where it might matter a lot if the final plan allows the transfer of a tenured post on retirement as well as death. Personally, I like it when I’m worth more to my better half alive than dead.)

And who even knows what influence this might have on parental pressure to follow in professorial footsteps, or on offspring’s rebellion in the face of such pressure, or on the shape of sibling rivalry in families with multiple offspring. Indeed, the potential competition between an offspring pursuing the professorial parent’s field of study and that parent’s best graduate student might make for some very awkward dinner table conversation.

There are probably legal ramifications that need to be explored. For example, in divorce proceedings, would a tenured position acquired during the marriage be counted as community property? (I have no idea what the situation is in Illinois, but California is a community property state, and I expect the administrations of the University of California and California State University systems are looking at the Illinois plan with some interest.)

And, especially relevant in scientific disciplines, will federal funding agencies recognize such a transfer of academic posts and transfer the remainder of an ongoing grant to the academic heir of the original grantee?

Color me cynical, but I worry that some of these complications are features rather than bugs. The more ways there are to actually disqualify the designated academic heirs, or to practically undercut their ability to perform the duties of the job (like keeping a lab funded), the better the odds that the corresponding tenured posts will be abolished and replaced with non-tenure track positions that are much more subject to the whims of budget-focused administrations.

We’ll see how this plays out.

Dispatch from PSA 2010: Symposium session on ClimateGate.

Posted on November 5, 2010November 5, 2010 by admin

The Philosophy of Science Association Biennial Meeting included a symposium session on the release of hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Given that we’ve had occasion to discuss ClimateGate here before, i thought I’d share my notes from this session.

Symposium: The CRU E-mails: Perspectives from Philosophy of Science.

Naomi Oreskes (UC San Diego), gave a talk called “Why We Resist the Results of Climate Science.”

She mentioned the attention brought to the discovery of errors in the IPCC report, noting that while mistakes are obviously to be avoided, it would be amazing for there to be a report that ran thousands of pages that did not have some mistakes. (Try to find a bound dissertation — generally only in the low hundreds of pages — without at least one typo.) The public’s assumption, though, was that these mistakes, once revealed, were smoking guns — a sign that something improper must have occurred.

Oreskes noted the boundary scientists of all sorts (including climate scientists) have tried to maintain between the policy-relevant and the policy-prescriptive. This is a difficult boundary to police, though, as climate science has an inescapable moral dimension. To the extent that climate change is driven by consumption (especially but not exclusively the burning of fossil fuels), we have a situation where the people reaping the benefits are not the ones who will be paying for that benefit (since people in the developed world will have the means to respond to the effects of climate change and those in the developing world will not). The situation seems to violate our expectations of intergenerational equity (since future generations will have to cope with the consequences of the consumption of past and current generations), as well as of inter-specific equity (since the species likely to go extinct in response to climate change are not the ones contributing the most to climate change).

The moral dimension of climate change, though, doesn’t make this a scientific issue about which the public feels a sense of clarity. Rather, the moral issues are such that Americans feel like their way of life is on trial. Those creating the harmful effects have done something wrong, even if it was accidental.

And this is where the collision occurs: Americans believe they are good; climate science seems to be telling them that they are bad. (To the extent that people strongly equate capitalism with democracy and the American way of life, that’s an issue too, given that consumption and growth are part of the problem.)

The big question Oreskes left us with, then, is how else to frame the need for changes in behavior, so that such a need would not make Americans so defensive that they would reflexively reject the science. I’m not sure the session ended with a clear answer to that question.

* * * * *

Wendy S. Parker (Ohio University) gave a talk titled “The Context of Climate Science: Norms, Pressures, and Progress.” A particular issue she took up was the ideal of transparency and how it came up in the context of climate scientists interactions with each other and with the public.

Parker noted that there had been numerous requests for access to raw data by people climate scientists did not recognize as part of the climate science community. The CRU denied many such requests, and the ClimateGate emails made it clear that the scientists generally didn’t want to cooperate with these requests.

Here, Parker observed that while we tend to look favorably on transparency, we probably need to say more about what transparency should amount to. Are we talking about making something available and open to scrutiny (i.e., making “transparency” roughly the opposite of “secrecy”)? Are we talking about making something understandable or usable, perhaps by providing fully explained nontechnical accounts of scientific methods and findings for the media (i.e., making “transparency” roughly the opposite of “opacity”)?

What exactly do we imagine ought to be made available? Research methods? Raw and/or processed data? Computer code? Lab notebooks? E-mail correspondence?

To whom ought the materials to be made available? Other members of one’s scientific community seems like a good bet, but how about members of the public at large? (Or, for that matter, members of industry or of political lobbying groups?)

And, for that matter, why do we value transparency? What makes it important? Is it primarily a matter of ensuring the quality of the shared body of scientific knowledge, and of improving the rate of scientific progress? Or, do we care about transparency as a matter of democratic accountability? As Parker noted, these values might be in conflict. (As well, she mentioned, transparency might conflict with other social values, like the privacy of human subjects.)

Here, if the public imputed nefarious motives to the climate researchers, the scientists themselves viewed some of the requests for access to their raw data as attempts by people with political motivations to obstruct the progress (or acceptance) of their research. It was not that the scientists feared that bad science would be revealed if the data were shared, but rather that they worried that yahoos from outside the scientific community were going to waste their time, or worse to cherry pick the shared data to make allegations that the scientists to which would then have to respond, wasting even more time.

In the numerous investigations that followed on the heels of the leak of stolen CRU e-mails, about the strongest charge against the involved climate scientists that stood was that they failed to display “the proper degree of openness”, and that they seemed to have a ethos of minimal compliance (or occasionally non-compliance) with regard to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. They were chided that the requirements of FOIA must not be seen as impositions, but as part of their social contract with the public (and something likely to make their scientific knowledge better).

Compliance, of course, takes resources (one of the most important of these being time), so it’s not free. Indeed, it’s hard not to imagine that at least some FOIA requests to climate scientists had “unintended consequences” (in terms of the expenditure of tim and other resources) on climate scientists that were precisely what the requesters intended.

However, as Parker noted, FOIA originated with the intent of giving citizens access to the workings of their government — imposing it on science and scientists is a relatively new move. It is true that many scientists (although not all) conduct publicly funded research, and thereby incur some obligations to the public. But there’s a question of how far this should go — ought every bit of data generated with the aid of any government grant to be FOIA-able?

Parker discussed the ways that FOIA seems to demand an openness that doesn’t quite fit with the career reward structures currently operating within science. Yet ClimateGate and its aftermath, and the heightened public scrutiny of, and demands for openness from, climate scientists in particular, seem to be driving (or at least putting significant pressure upon) the standards for data and code sharing in climate science.

I got to ask one of the questions right after Parker’s talk. I wondered whether the level of public scrutiny on climate scientists might be enough to drive them into the arms of the “open science” camp — which would, of course, require some serious rethinking of the scientific reward structures and the valorization of competition over cooperation. As we’ve discussed on this blog on many occasions, institutional and cultural change is hard. If openness from climate scientists is important enough to the public, though, could the public decide that it’s worthwhile to put up the resources necessary to support this kind of change in climate science?

I guess it would require a public willing to pay for the goodies it demands.

* * * * *

The next talk, by Kristin Shrader-Frechette (University of Notre Dame), was titled “Scientifically Legitimate Ways to Cook and Trim Data: The Hacked and Leaked Climate Emails.”

Shrader-Frechette discussed what statisticians (among others) have to say about conditions in which it is acceptable to leave out some of your data (and indeed, arguably misleading to leave it in rather than omitting it). There was maybe not as much unanimity here as one might like.

There’s general agreement that data trimming in order to make your results fit some predetermined theory is unacceptable. There’s less agreement about how to deal with outliers. Some say that deleting them is probably OK (although you’d want to be open that you have done so). On the other hand, many of the low probability/high consequence events that science would like to get a handle on are themselves outliers.

So when and how to trim data is one of those topics where it looks like scientists are well advised to keep talking to their scientific peers, the better not to mess it up.

Of the details in the leaked CRU e-mails, one that was frequently identified as a smoking gun indicating scientific shenanigans was the discussion of the “trick” to “hide the decline” in the reconstruction of climatic temperatures using proxy data from tree-rings. Shrader-Frechette noted that what was being “hidden” was not a decline in temperatures (as measured instrumentally) but rather in the temperatures reconstructed from one particular proxy — and that other proxies the climate scientists were using didn’t show this decline.

The particular incident raises a more general methodological question: scientifically speaking, is it better to include the data from proxies (once you have reason to believe it’s bad data) in your graphs? Is including it (or leaving it out) best seen as scrupulous honesty or as dishonesty?

And, does the answer differ if the graph is intended for use in an academic, bench-science presentation or a policy presentation (where it would be a very bad thing to confuse your non-expert audience)?

As she closed her talk, Shrader-Frechette noted that welfare-affecting science cannot be treated merely as pure science. She also mentioned that while FOIA applies to government-funded science, it does not apply to industry-funded science — which means that the “transparency” available to the public is pretty asymmetrical (and that industry scientists are unlikely to have to devote their time to responding to requests from yahoos for their raw data).

* * * * *

Finally, James McAllister (University of Leiden) gave a talk titled “Errors, Blunders, and the Construction of Climate Change Facts.” He spoke of four epistemic gaps climate scientists have to bridge: between distinct proxy data sources, between proxy and instrumental data, between historical time series (constructed of instrumental and proxy data) and predictive scenarios, and between predictive scenarios and reality. These epistemic gaps can be understood in the context of the two broad projects climate science undertakes: the reconstruction of past climate variation, and the forecast of the future.

As you might expect, various climate scientists have had different views about which kinds of proxy data are most reliable, and about how the different sorts of proxies ought to be used in reconstructions of past climate variation. The leaked CRU e-mails include discussions where climate scientists dedicate themselves to finding the “common denominator” in this diversity of expert opinion — not just because such a common denominator might be expected to be closer to the objective reality of things, but also because finding common ground in the diversity of opinion could be expected to enhance the core group’s credibility. Another effect, of course, is that the common denominator is also denied to outsiders, undermining their credibility (and effectively excluding them as outliers).

McAllister noted that the emails simultaneously revealed signs of internal disagreement, and of a reaching for balance. Some of the scientists argued for “wise use” of proxies and voiced judgments about how to use various types of data.

The data, of course, cannot actually speak for themselves.

As the climate scientists worked to formulate scenario-based forecasts that public policy makers would be able to use, they needed to grapple with the problems of how to handle the link between their reconstructions of past climate trends and their forecasts. They also had to figure out how to handle the link between their forecasts and reality. The e-mails indicate that some of the scientists were pretty resistant to this latter linkage — one asserted that they were “NOT supposed to be working with the assumption that these scenarios are realistic,” rather using them as internally consistent “what if?” storylines.

One thing the e-mails don’t seem to contain is any explicit discussion of what would count as an ad hoc hypothesis and why avoiding ad hoc hypotheses would be a good thing. This doesn’t mean that the climate scientists didn’t avoid them, just that it was not a methodological issue they felt they needed to be discussing with each other.

This was a really interesting set of talks, and I’m still mulling over some of the issues they raised for me. When those ideas are more than half-baked, I’ll probably write something about them here.

Kids and drugs: difficulty with definitions.

Posted on October 23, 2010October 23, 2010 by admin

I’ve become aware that discussions, both heated and measured, are raging in other parts of the blogosphere about the collisions between drug law, educational initiatives, and governmental agencies responsible for looking out for the welfare of children (e.g., see here, here, and here.) At the moment, looking at hundreds of papers to grade, a soccer game to coach, and a bunch of other tasks that will be significantly harder to complete (but that must be completed within the next few days), I am not jumping into that fray.

However, it did put me in mind of some of the ways our parenting has interacted with the elementary school’s programing, including Red Ribbon Week, an anti-drug educational initiative that generally falls shortly before Halloween (and, coincidentally, that often coincides with National Chemistry Week. Four years ago, when both Free-Ride offspring were in the lower grades, celebrating Red Ribbon Week mostly amounted to wearing sunglasses or crazy socks or whatever that day’s Red Ribbon “theme” called for. But there was also a wee bit of discussion in the classroom about drugs. As originally reported in this post, the Free-Ride parents decided to see what the sprogs had learned:

Continue reading→

The future of higher education, according to the rumor mill.

Posted on August 31, 2010August 31, 2010 by admin

I’m getting this third-hand, and I’m always cautious about predictions of future events, but here’s someone’s vision of higher education yet-to-come:

Professors will totally need to incorporate online elements, especially social media elements, into their courses if they are to have a prayer of engaging their students.
They will also need to get students to accept the idea that since the jobs are being outsourced to other countries, they (the students) will need to be ready to move to those countries. (No word on whether students are to be prepared for the prevailing wages in those countries, or on whether those countries are likely to welcome our students as job-seeking immigrants.)
The end of new tenure track faculty.

Excuse me, but I was promised a zombie apocalypse.

Am I asking too little of the First Amendment?

Posted on July 6, 2010July 6, 2010 by admin

I noticed a short item today at Inside Higher Education about Mike Adams, an associate professor of of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington , who is suing the university on the grounds that his promotion to full professor was denied due to his conservative Christian views. (Apparently, this legal action has been underway since 2007.)
I know very few details of the case, so I’m in no position to opine about whether Adams should or should not have been promoted. But there’s one element of the case that seems to be legally interesting:

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John Tierney thinks he’s being daring.

Posted on June 8, 2010June 8, 2010 by admin

The title of John Tierney’s recent column in the New York Times, “Daring to Discuss Women’s Potential in Science”, suggests that Tierney thinks there’s something dangerous about even raising the subject:

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.
This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:
1) Would it be safe during the “interactive discussions” for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science?
2) How could these workshops reconcile the “existence of gender bias” with careful studies that show that female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants?

I’m not up for a detailed reply to Tierney today, nor a serious look at the literature he mentions (or at the literature he doesn’t mention). Maybe I’ll be able to double back for that once I clear some of the more pressing items from my to-do list. But I would like to throw out a few observations that are relevant to the discussion.

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