Those who follow the political blogs more closely than I do were probably aware eons ago that some of the A-list political bloggers significantly trimmed their blogrolls (while dubbing it, strangely enough, a blogroll “amnesty”). Others, like Terrance at the Republic of T (who is as close to the Platonic form of Serious and Engaging Blogger as any blogger of whom I’m aware), took note of this just recently, with a thougtful post about the interactions of the various “tiers” of the blogosphere and the ways hierarchies get entrenched. Chris Clarke and Pam Spaulding also wrote insightfully about this (and I find it reassuring that these smart and informed people are just now examining an issue which a lot of people might deem “so yesterday”).
Anyway, the reason I want to weigh in on the great blogroll purge is that I see a connection to issues that Zuska raised recently about the community — and hierarchies — within the scientific world.
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
How important are labs for learning science?
Steve Gimbel has a provocative post that suggests the costs of undergraduate lab classes may outweigh the benefits. Quoth Steve:
[E]verything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we’ve never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble their way through procedures that yield results that are not even close to what they were led to expect, and then plug and chug their way through scientific and error calculations that frankly mean little to them. I will freely admit that all my experiences in lab classes were a waste of intellectual time and curricular space that could have much better utilized.
Now, I’m supposed to be writing a serious academic paper right now*, but Steve, as a fellow philosopher who is well aware of my misspent scientific, actually emailed me to see if I’d weigh in on the (as did another blogger coming at the issue from the perspective of a working scientist). And, coincidentally, just the night before Steve published his post, my better half and I were reminiscing about our undergraduate experiences with laboratory classes. So really, what choice do I have but to respond?
A question for the scientific hivemind: Do IRBs get protocols from evil scientists?
One of my students raised a really good question in class today, a question to which I do not know the answer — but maybe you do.
We were discussing some of the Very Bad Experiments* that prompted current thinking** about what it is and is not ethically permissible to do with human subjects of scientific research. We had noted that institutions like our university have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that must approve your protocol before you can conduct research with human subjects. At this point, my student asked:
Dissent in professional communities.
This is another piece in the discussion currently raging about the latitude members of a profession ought to have to follow conscience over the dictates of the profession.
Professions are communities of a sort. What unites them is that the members of that community are taking on a certain set of shared values.
This does not mean all members of a given profession are unanimous about all their values. A profession does not assimilate its members like the Borg. Indeed, there’s something to be said for a professional community that reflects a diversity of values and perspectives — it gives people in that profession the opportunity to try to see things through someone else’s eyes. This needn’t make you change your stance on things, but it helps remind you that your stance isn’t the only one that a reasonable person (at least, a person reasonable enough to be a member of your profession) might hold.
The big question, as has become clear in this discussion, is what ought to happen when the values of an individual within a given profession are in tension with the “shared values” of the community — where the “shared values” I have in minds are the ones explicitly specified in the professional code governing that profession. Such a code can be like a mission statement for the profession: this is what we stand for. But what about the members of the profession who don’t endorse all those values?
What scientists believe and what they can prove (with a flowchart for Sir Karl Popper).
On the post in which I resorted to flowcharts to try to unpack people’s claims about the process involved in building scientific knowledge, Torbjörn Larsson raised a number of concerns:
The first problem I have was with “belief”. I have seen, and forgotten, that it is used in two senses in english – for trust, and for conviction. Rather like for theory, the weaker term isn’t appropriate here. I would say that theories gives us trust in repeatability of predicted observations, and that kind of trust counts as knowledge. In fact, already the trust repeated observations gives count as knowledge.
The second problem I have is with “the problem of induction”. Science has a set of procedures that observably generates robust knowledge, and the alleged problem is seldom seen. When the terrain and the map doesn’t agree, junk the map.
The third problem I have is with the specific diagrams. Real scientific knowledge production will not yield to any one diagram. So for the philosopher that raises a hypothetical “problem of induction” we could turn around the question and ask why the obvious “problem of description” (which ironically is a real problem of inductionisn’t bothersome. The scientist answer would probably be as above: “e puor si muove”.
… Without feeling like testability is the end-all of science the diagram is slanted away from testing towards a weaker and in the end nonfunctional descriptive science. Whether we call tested knowledge “a conclusion” or “a tentative conclusion” is irrelevant IMHO, it is a conclusion we will (have to) trust in.
The fourth (oy!) problem I have is with the conflated description the diagram alludes to. In the text there is a distinction between individual scientists and the scientific enterprise. Different entities will obviously use different approaches to knowledge, and if the individual doesn’t need to trust her findings the enterprise relies on such a trust.
These are reasonable concerns, so let me say a few words to address them.
Scientific and unscientific conclusions: now with pictures!
This is another attempt to get to the bottom of what’s bugging people about the case of Marcus Ross, Ph.D. in geosciences and Young Earth Creationist. Here, I’ve tried to distill the main hypotheticals from my last post on the issue into flowcharts*, in the hopes that this will make it easier for folks to figure out just what they want to say about the proper way to build scientific knowledge..
Knowledge, belief, and what counts as good science: More thoughts on Marcus Ross.
Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist “to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both ‘impeccable’ in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest,” I’m going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I’ve dealt with before (and it’s at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier.
Intellectual honesty in science: the Marcus Ross case.
By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as “impeccable”) about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.
Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.
Dramatists and scientists have something in common.
Yesterday, while transporting the sprogs to Science Scouts aquatic training maneuvers, I caught a few minutes of a City Arts & Lectures interview with Lewis Black. In the part of the interview I heard, Black discussed his efforts (over the course of eight years) to make it as a playwright, and he revealed a couple ways in which that career path might not be so different from that of the scientist:
What do scientists mean by ‘theory’?
In my basic concepts post on theory testing, I set out what I take to be a fairly standard understanding of “theory” in philosophy of science discussions: