Category Archives: Tribe of Science

Does having too much fun undermine your credibility?

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Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin lays into climate scientist Richard Lindzen. His post begins with reasons one might be inclined to take Lindzen’s views seriously:

Unlike nearly all “sceptics”, he’s a real climate scientist who has done significant research on climate change, and, also unlike most of them, there’s no evidence that he has a partisan or financial axe to grind.

But then, we find the 2001 Newsweek interview that gives Quiggin reason for pause:

Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He’ll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks in full, impeccably logical paragraphs, and he punctuates his measured cadences with thoughtful drags on a cigarette.

And Quiggin’s response:

Anyone who could draw this conclusion in the light of the evidence, and act on it as Lindzen has done, is clearly useless as a source of advice on any issue involving the analysis of statistical evidence.

I don’t want to get into a debate here about climate science (although the neighbors will likely oblige if you ask them nicely), nor even about the proper analysis of statistical evidence. Instead, I’d like to consider whether enjoying being a contrarian (or a consensus-supporter, for that matter) is a potential source of bias against which scientists should guard.

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How important is effective teaching to science professors anyway?

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Lately, I’ve been blogging a bit about science teaching. Most of my focus has been on teaching at the secondary level, but it turns out that there are issues to be tackled with science teaching at all levels, including the college level. You’d think, then, that when a scientist who has proven himself in the research arena (and even picked up a Nobel Prize) wants to direct his formidable talents toward improving undergraduate science instruction, he’d be in a good position to get things done.
Sadly, you’d be mistaken.

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“And I mean that in a good way” (or, the uses and misuses of labels)

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Last week Kevin Vranes wrote an interesting post about “skeptics”. One of the things he brought out is that, depending on the context, “skeptic” can be an approving label (here’s someone who won’t be fooled by flim-flam) or a term of abuse (there’s someone who stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the facts of the matter). As well, Kevin notes that, especially when scientists are dealing with folks from outside the scientific community (e.g., journalists or politicians), terms like “skeptics” and “the mainstream” can be used to designate something like tribal memberships: here are the people that are worth listening to, and there are the people whose opinions can be dismissed.
I think the issue of labels is an important one, not only in scientist-lay person interactions, but also in scientist-on-scientist contexts. While I agree with Kevin that some labeling sets us on the path to intellectual laziness, there are instances where labels can actually be useful. The trick, as always, is to figure out just how much weight a label can carry for us and then not pile on any more than that.

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Journalism, science, politics, and choosing sides.

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In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.
Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both rusty on the basics of scientific methodology and at least a little scared of thinking hard about technical issues, it was prompted by the particular strategy Chris Mooney set forth for his reporting in The Republican War on Science, and by Steve Fuller’s critique of that in his essay for the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris’s book. And, in a comment on my post, Steve Fuller brings us back to the question of the particular strategy Chris was using, and of the sorts of standards to which journalistic work guided by this strategy ought to be held. I think this is a fair question, but it brings us into the turbulent waters at the confluence of science and politics, where journalism may go beyond presenting an objective picture of the terrain and may exhort us to choose a side.
So you might want to grab a life-jacket before we begin.

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Fuller on Intelligent Design.

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As promised, here are some more thoughts on Steve Fuller’s contribution to the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney‘s book, The Republican War on Science. My last post on Fuller’s essay took up his picture of the workings of science, where it seemed to me he was gesturing toward the influence of democratic politics as an antidote to the influence of an elite scientific oligarchy in steering the course of science. In this post, I examine Fuller’s comments on democracy, science education, and the fortunes of Intelligent Design in the scientific community.

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Regardless of the specialty, they’re all geeks.

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Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript has posted his lighthearted take on the disciplines within the life sciences. Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers notes some important omissions while pointing out that the categories are more porous in real life. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles sets out a taxonomy of physics specialties.
If you think I’m going to give you the geek chart for chemistry or philosophy of science, you must be daft.

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The more you know …

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There are two features of science that I think a lot of people (myself included) find attractive.
One is that scientific representations of the world (theories and other theory-like things) give you powerful ways to organize lots of diverse phenomena and to find what unifies them. They get you explanatory principles that you can apply to different situations, set-ups, or critters.
The other is the empirical basis of much of our knowledge: by pointing your sense organs (and your mind) at a particular piece of the world, you can learn something about how that bit behaves, or about how it’s put together.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way these two attractive features can pull a person in opposite directions.

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