There’s a neat article [1] in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist (although sadly, this particular article seems not to be online) in which Brian Hayes discusses the Monty Hall problem and people’s strong resistance to the official solution to it.
Now, folks like Jason have discussed the actual puzzle about probabilities in great detail (on numerous occasions). It’s a cool problem, I believe the official solution, and I’m not personally inclined to raise skeptical doubts about it. What I really like about Hayes’s article is how he connects it to the larger ongoing discussion in which scientists engage:
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
What’s up with the market?
Not the financial market, but the market for highly trained folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In particular, why do people keep talking about the need for a larger talent pool in STEM when so many Ph.D.s and postdocs are having a rough time finding permanent positions?
Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about what demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes of this apparently paradoxical state of affairs:
Standards for industry-funded research.
In the August 25, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, there’s an interview with Carol Henry (behind a paywall). Henry is a consultant who used to be vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC). In the course of the interview, Henry laid out a set of standards for doing research that she thinks all scientists should adopt. (Indeed, these are the standards that guided Henry in managing research programs for the California Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Petroleum Institute, and ACC.)
Here are Carol Henry’s research standards:
Data paparazzi.
In a comment on another post, Blatnoi asks for my take on a recent news item in Nature:
An Italian-led research group’s closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.
For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on ‘dark matter’ from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences … but beyond a quick flash of a slide, the collaboration has not shared the data. Many high-profile journals, including Nature, have strict rules about authors publicizing data before publication.
It now seems that some physicists have taken matters into their own hands. At least two papers recently appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org showing representations of PAMELA’s latest findings (M. Cirelli et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3867; 2008, and L. Bergstrom et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3725; 2008). Both have recreated data from photos taken of a PAMELA presentation on 20 August at the Identification of Dark Matter conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
I’d say this is a situation that bears closer examination.
Objectivity and other people.
As a follow-up to my last post, it looks like I should offer a more detailed explanation of why exactly scientific activity is a group activity — not simply as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of necessity. Helen E. Longino has already made this case very persuasively in her book Science as Social Knowledge (specifically the chapter called “Values and Objectivity”), so I’m going to use this post to give a sketch of her argument.
The upshot of the argument is that objective knowledge requires the involvement of other people in the building. All by yourself, there is no way to move beyond subjective knowledge.
First, what do we mean by “objective”?
Peer review and science.
Chad Orzel takes a commenter to task for fetishizing peer review:
Saying that only peer-reviewed articles (or peer-reviewable articles) count as science only reinforces the already pervasive notion that science is something beyond the reach of “normal” people. In essence, it’s saying that only scientists can do science, and that science is the exclusive province of geeks and nerds.
That attitude is, I think, actively harmful to our society. It’s part of why we have a hard time getting students to study math and science, and finding people to teach math and science. We shouldn’t be restricting science to refereed journals, we should be trying to spread it as widely as possible.
Peer review and refereed journals are a good check on science, but they do not define the essence of science. Science is, at its core, a matter of attitude and procedure. The essence of science is looking at the world and saying “Huh. I wonder why that happens?” And then taking a systematic approach to figuring it out.
I see what Chad is saying — and to the extent that science can be said to have an “essence” think he’s hit on a nice way to describe it. But I’m going to speak up for peer review here.
Colleagues behaving badly: symmetry considerations.
Go to Cosmic Variance at once to read Julianne Dalcanton’s musings on why spherical jerks (not the word she uses) are preferable to the asymmetric ones:
No one is surprised when a known, calibrated asshole acts up. We all just adjust the gain on our emotional response and carry on. I’ve been quite fond of many assholes through the years, and when I look back, the one trait they shared was that while they may have been ornery, they were at least predictable.
Go read the whole thing to explore the topology of the muppethuggers she’s been having to deal with lately.
Aetogate aftermath: paleontologists discuss the norms of their discipline.
Finally, here is the long awaited fourth part in my three part series examining the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee response to the allegations of scientific misconduct against Spencer Lucas and co-workers. Part 3 was a detailed examination of the “best practices” document (PDF) issued by this committee. In this post, I make a brief foray into the conversations paleontologists have been having online about their understanding of the accepted practices in their field.
As these conversations are ongoing (and some of them are happening on listservs to which I do not subscribe), what I present here is just a snapshot of how some members of the professional community of paleontologists (and those in related fields) describe the working rules of their professional activities and interactions. What’s striking to me, though, is that these scientists are responding to the Aetogate controversy by having these conversations.
Seeing is believing.
Blogging has been a bit light lately, in part because I was persuaded to teach half of a graduate seminar during the summer session. The first half of the seminar looked at philosophical approaches to epistemology (basically, a set of issues around what counts as knowledge and what could count as reasonable ways to build knowledge). The second half, which I am teaching, shifts the focus to what scientists seem to be doing when they build knowledge (or knowledge claims, or theories, or tentative findings).
In the course of our reading for this week, I came upon a couple passages in a chapter by Karin Knorr Cetina [1] that I found really striking:
The system as it currently exists.
Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf delivers a mission statement:
Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to “take it down”. We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog.
In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who are smart, talented, dedicated, hard-working, articulate, persuasive, and who do all the right things sometimes still fail. This is the nature of a winner-take-all system: there is an intrinsic randomness that influences to some extent who succeeds and who fails. It is the same in professional sports, law, medicine, performing arts, entertainment, comedy, business, entrepreneurialism, journalism, engineering, and most other professional career enterprises.
Many of us may not like this situation, but this is how things currently work. Academic science is not a … Care Bears tea party, and wishing that it were is not going to make it so.
I think this is a fine statement of purpose for a blog. But I think the community of academic science could — and should — set its sights higher.