When I was a kid, my mother went back to school with the intention of getting the physics training she needed to pursue her dream of a career in astronomy. Part of this journey, of course, required that she be plunged into the life of a graduate student. It wasn’t any prettier then than it is now.
While my mom was in the thick of the horrors visited upon graduate students, she was a little bit freaked out by coverage of a parole hearing for one Theodore Streleski, an erstwhile math graduate student at Stanford who killed his advisor with a ball peen hammer. Streleski actually refused parole, essentially standing by his decision to off his advisor. What freaked my mom out was that she could kind of see his point.
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
The Areas of My Expertise
(Apologies to John Hodgman for swiping his nifty title.)
There has been some discussion in these parts about just who ought to be allowed to talk about scientific issues of various sorts, and just what kind of authority we ought to grant such talk. It’s well and good to say that a journalism major who never quite finished his degree is less of an authority on matters cosmological than a NASA scientist, but what should we say about engineers or medical doctors with “concerns” about evolutionary theory? What about the property manager who has done a lot of reading? How important is all that specialization research scientists do? To some extent, doesn’t all science follow the same rules, thus equipping any scientist to weigh in intelligently about it?
Rather than give you a general answer to that question, I thought it best to lay out the competence I personally am comfortable claiming, in my capacity as a trained scientist.
Optimism about the scientific community
The other day I was chatting with a colleague about teaching ethics to science majors. This colleague teaches ethics to business majors and was, I think, surprised at my general optimism. Teaching ethics to business majors*, it seems, can be discouraging.
As my colleague described it, the business majors seem to have a picture of the business world as a series of opportunities to savage, or be savaged by, one’s competitors (and while there are temporary alliances to gain advantage over others, in the end everyone is your competitor). Selling business majors on the idea of not doing things they can get away with, or of being virtuous when no one will notice it and reward it with a bonus, is Very Hard. Naive, non-business majors like me might think that being able to look at oneself in the mirror could be incentive enough not to prey on the weak, or cook the books, or whatever business people are tempted by nowadays. But business students explain, “What makes me feel good about myself is the size of my paycheck. That’s the good I should maximize.”
As sad as this conversation made me feel for my colleague, it made me feel very optimistic about the prospects of the community of science.
Defining terms (or, I got that ID survey, too)
Being identified as “pro-science” is pretty cool, given that some people get the idea (from my kvetching about ethics) that I’m against science. (I’m against sloppy or dishonest methodology masquerading as science, but that doesn’t make me an enemy of science.) But that was about the only part of the widely distributed ID survey that gave me the warm fuzzies.
What bugs me the most about the survey is that it isn’t looking for actual information — or, if it is, it’s very badly designed — so much as it is looking to force a certain response from the targeted respondants. Really, we’re talking question design on par with Stephen Colbert’s standard interview closer: “George W. Bush: great president, or the greatest president?”
Taking it personally
Today I had my first (non-virtual) class meetings of the spring semester. There’s nothing like having every available seat filled and then having folks stream in to sit on the floor to make an academic feel popular. (Of course, in the past, a significant portion of those who have gotten add-codes have then disappeared until the midterm, after which most of those disappeared for good. But right now I’m popular!)
When it came time to give “the talk” about academic integrity, I was less dispassionate than I have been in years past. It’s no secret that I think plagiarism is lame. But, in the vain hope that it might make a difference — that this might be the term with no instances of plagiarism — I decided to lay it on the line. Here’s a close approximation of what I told my classes:
Science’s neighborhood watch
The commenters here at ScienceBlogs are da bomb! Just look at the insight they contributed to my previous post on fakery in science. Indeed, let’s use some of that insight to see if we can get a little bit further on the matter of how to discourage scientists from making it up rather than, you know, actually doing good science.
Three main strategies emerged from the comments so far:
- Make the potential payoff of cheating very low compared to the work involved in getting away with it and the penalty you’ll face if caught (thus, making just doing good science the most cost-effective strategy).
- Clear out the deadwood in the community of science (who are not cheating to get Nobel prizes but instead to get tenure so they can really slack off).
- Make academic integrity and intellectual honesty important from the very beginning of scientific training (in college or earlier), so scientists know how to “get the job done” without cheating.
I like all of these, and I think it’s worth considering whether there are useful ways to combine them with one of the fraud-busting strategies mentioned in the previous post, namely, ratting out your collaborator/colleague/underling/boss if you see them breaking the rules. I’m not advocating a McCarthyite witch hunt for fakers, but something more along the lines of a neighborhood watch for the community of science.
Are fakers outliers or bellwethers?
Well, the new digs here at ScienceBlogs have thin walls (GrrlScientist, will you please turn down that stereo!), which means that sometimes we get sucked into the conversations our neighbors are having. And, almost as if this were the complex at Melrose Place (shut up!), a lot of us have been chattering about the same people, notably Hwang Woo Suk.
So, for example, I’ve been hearing Chris Mooney telling his guests that, peer review or no peer review, the community of scientists will always include some fakers. Through the air-vent, I’ve got PZ Myers musing on how detection (or not) of the fakers could be connected to how well-established or cutting-edge the faked research seems to be.
As it happens, I’ve always taken thin walls as an excuse to poke my head into a conversation, so here’s my take on fakers and the mechanisms within the tribe of science for dealing with them.
Humane treatment of scientists
While folks are often attentive to the harms scientists might do to other people (through unethical treatment of human subjects, or toxic dumping, or whatever), they seem not to worry so much about scientist-on-scientist cruelty. I’m not talking about having your boss in the lab force you to donate ova or anything. In fact, the kind of cruelty I have in mind today is much harder to pin on individual actors. Rather, it’s a sort of cruelty that seems to be built into the institutional structures of science.
Which, for the scientist, kind of sucks.