The deal is rotten

Warning: This post contains strong language.

One of the official bloggers for the recent Neuroscience meeting was Pascal Wallisch, who blogs here. Over at Tideliar’s post conference examination of the SfN “offical” blogs, he posted this comment:

Upon seeing my posts, some senior people in my department have already strongly advised me to “stop fucking around” and “cut the shit” and focus on “the only thing that counts (papers)” instead. They were unambiguous about that.

I cannot begin to describe how much this anecdote upsets me. It’s an unwelcome reminder that I am a participant in a corrupt system.

Yes, corrupt. I can’t think of a better description of a system that not only allows, but seems to encourage this sort of utter disdain for everything but the narrowest of research goals. It’s the same myopia that seems to infect Scott Kern.

I bet the argument is not “nothing matters but papers,” but probably a more complex chain: papers matters because they get grants, and grants matter because universities are making hiring and tenure decisions based on grant and potential for grants.

I’m also willing to bet that this argument gets made a whole lot more in biomedical fields. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) don’t require any plans for broader impacts (unlike the National Science Foundation), probably on the basis that the benefits of medicine is seen as so self-explanatory. And NIH is, from my understanding, more likely to pay entire salaries than other agencies.

So good bye to education to our students (except our grad students and postdocs, because they’re the labour force, and damn it, they have to learn how to run the machine) or anyone else who will never be on a federal grant review panel. Screw them.

And thus is created the image of academia and science of being completely self-interested, hell bent only on preserving their own vested interests, and perceived as fat cat millionaires. And thus does public trust and interest erode, and politicians who vow to take on elites and intellectuals get voted into office and wreck science budgets and evidence-based policy.

While conversations about outreach projects like Rock Stars of Science and Science Cheerleaders go on, at least they are trying to do something. At least they have some a sense that there is a world out there beyond the “Submit now” buttons on journal websites.

Additional: Jerry Coyne's reflections on joining the blogosphere and passing four million views (ack!) is relevant to this discussion. I’ve added some emphasis:

I thought that my job was to dispense professorial wisdom to eager and untutored recipients, hungry to learn about evolution. Oy, was I wrong! I had no idea that among the readers would be many scientists and professional evolutionists, many of whom know a lot more than I do about topics I cover. And not only that, but philosophers, musicians, literature addicts, and even a Nobel laureate or two. I can hardly make a post in which I don’t learn more than I teach. And I don’t think I’ve ever written a single post in which I didn’t say something wrong. I appreciate the corrections, but it is humbling.

Photo by futureatlas.com on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Science cheerleaders

This is going to be a tough post to write. Nobody likes admitting, “I’m a close-minded bigot.”

But I think that’s how I’ve been about cheerleading.

I despise everything cheerleading represents. I hate how it’s about looking a certain way. I hate its reinforcement of conformity. I hate the encouragement of macho bullshit that makes up so much of sport. I hate the crass sexism of women on the sidelines. I hate the sexualization surrounding cheerleading, with all the creepy “barely legal” overtones. And I hate how much it reminds me and represents the harsh social stratification, and in some cases ostracism, that occurs in schools.

Cheerleading makes me gag.

Yeah. I have issues.

So this article and the video below leave me feeling utterly conflicted.



I’ve written about the need to have science “fans” in the ways that sports has “fans.” We scientists need evangelists, and I don’t doubt for one second that these women are wonderful evangelists.

My head and heart get the video, and what Randy Olson writes about them, like this:

There are A LOT of professional cheerleaders who are seriously interested in science and other STEM stuff. And when you watch this little video we made you see the women aren’t just vaguely connected with science careers — they are the real deal.

In each of the interviews the women also told their personal stories of discrimination, harassment and even abuse for being cheerleaders. We didn’t want to drag this first video down with the heaviness of their stories. But we will, eventually, make use of that material. They have fascinating stories which are not the least bit predictable.

Even though the whole concept of cheerleading still makes my guts churn.

Call me a bigot on this one. I probably deserve it. I’ll try to be better about it in the future.

Interesting is overrated

Scientists are usually cerebral people. We live in our heads. As Randy Olson has argued, that doesn’t help us. One of his main pieces of advice is, “Don’t be so cerebral.”

Bono helps make this point in this interview:

If you take musicians away from the stage too much, they become quite abstract in their heads. They start to use words like “interesting.” But people don’t want to see you do something interesting. They want something passionate or wild.

“Interesting” is the moment musicians scratch their chin. It ruins great and dramatic music. You listen to the Sex Pistols or Nirvana or the first MGMT album and you don't scratch your chin. You say, “Wow, that’s extraordinary.”

And I know that scientists are always saying something is interesting. I’m guilty of it myself, and I know because one of my research students told me flat out, “‘Interesting’ is overrated!”

No turning back for science

An article with a title like “Science’s dead end” seems like an active effort to troll the science blogosphere. Maybe author James Le Fanu has a point, but a quick search raise doubts as fast as you can type. He’s trained as a medical doctor, not a researcher. And he seems to be a cynical one, having written a piece with a similarly apocalyptic title, “The fall of medicine,” for the same magazine over ten years ago.

The outsider’s perspective is apparent in his first paragraph.

For science this is both the best and the worst of times. The best because its research institutions have never been so impressive, its funding never more lavish.

Yes, it’s so incredibly lavish that funding rates for most American federal agencies are way less than one funded proposal out of ten applications, so that good researchers devote weeks on end to revising and resubmitting in hopes of finding the resources to carry out their research.

Biomedical research alone received $62bn and over the last ten years that figure has almost doubled again, soaring past the hundred billion dollar mark and dwarfing the GDP of a dozen countries.

The National Institutes of Health budget did indeed double in the late 1990s and early part of the decade, but has been slightly declining for most of the decade. Meanwhile, applications have increased substantially over the same period.

From here.

Pose the question, What does it all add up to? and the answer, on reflection, seems surprisingly little—certainly compared to a century ago, when funding was an infinitesimal fraction of what it has become.

Ah, yes, the good ol’ days. The great thing about nostalgia is that there is no clear basis for comparison. I can just as easily bemoan how much manpower and money are poured into making a contemporary Hollywood movie compared to early in the last century, and make similar sighing sounds.

“The original King Kong was made with the special effects being the handiwork of only one talented animator, Willis O’Brien, and is widely regarded as a classic of cinema. The remake a few year ago involved a veritable army of special effects technicians, but is it better?”

Le Fanu spends several paragraphs recapping arguments made by John Horgan, saying that science must reach a point of diminishing returns.

It is difficult, even impossible, to imagine how so comprehensive an achievement can be surpassed. Once it is possible to say “this is how the universe came into being,” and so on, anything that comes after is likely to be something of an anticlimax.

But not everything in research is about surpassing what came before. It’s about contributing. I doubt few budding physicists have career plans that look like this:

1. Finish doctorate.
2. Get tenure.
3. Surpass Isaac Newton.

Science usually advances incrementally. It’s slow and painful, and it’s a tribute to the increasing numbers of scientists that we made the progress that Le Fanu acknowledges we have made.

Le Fanu’s bemoans that genetics can’t tell us why organisms are different – a claim I’ll leave to better geneticists than myself to dissect. He then goes on to the neuroscience, and doesn’t see much progress there, either.

While it might be possible to know everything about the physical materiality of the brain down to the last atom, its “product,” the five cardinal mysteries of the non-material mind are still unaccounted for: subjective awareness; free will; how memories are stored and retrieved; the “higher” faculties of reason and imagination; and that unique sense of personal identity that changes and matures over time but remains the same.

Le Fanu mixes claims of what science could achieve in the future (“it might be possible”) with what we know now (“are still unaccounted for”).

But Le Fanu retorts that we know the answer already.

The usual response is to acknowledge that perhaps things have turned out to be more complex than originally presumed, but to insist these are still “early days” to predict what might yet emerge. ... (B)ut it is possible, in broad outline, to anticipate what they will reveal. ... (A) a million scans of subjects watching a bouncing red ball would not progress understanding any further of how those neuronal circuits experience the ball as being round and red and bouncing.

It would, indeed, be quite sad if the best science could do would be do the same simple experiment a million times. Fortunately, this is not what we do. Problems get tackled from many sides, at many different levels. Some work at the level of networks of cells. Others work at the level of cells and molecules.

But I think Le Fanu is more likely to reject answers as unsatisfactory. Brass and Haggard (2007) have empirical data that certainly seems relevant to the question of free will. One particular brain region, the fronto-median cortex, is a critical point in the decision making process to do something or not.

Think answers along those line would satisfy Le Fanu?

At a time when cosmologists can reliably infer what happened in the first few minutes of the birth of the universe, and geologists can measure the movements of continents to the nearest centimetre, it seems extraordinary that geneticists can’t tell us why humans are so different from flies, and neuroscientists are unable to clarify how we recall a telephone number.

We may not be able to say why a human can remember a phone number, but we can discuss why other kinds of organisms are able to remember certain kinds of information. But again, does Le Fanu really care that we have good explanations of how NMDA receptors can help create long lasting changes in synaptic strength in a variety of organisms in ways that are consistent with memory?

No. Because, near the end, we arrive at the logical conclusion: Mysticism.

(T)he distinctive feature of both the form and “organisation” of life (as opposed to its materiality) and the thoughts, beliefs and ideas of the mind is that they are unequivocally non-material in that they cannot be quantified, weighed or measured. And thus, strictly speaking, they fall outside the domain of the methods of science to investigate and explain.

Wow. Not only a Cartesian dualist, but a vitalist as well. That’s some seriously hard core rejection of science you’ve got right there. There are some dualists out there (for instance, see Hinson 2010 and Anckarsäter 2010 responding to Cashmore 2010), but vitalists are an fairly endangered species.

If Le Fanu lived at the turn of the last century instead of this one, he would have poo-poohed that DNA could tell us anything about inheritance across generations, or that action potentials and neurotransmitters could tell us anything about memory, or that electrical activity would reveal anything about states of consciousness. Because, after all, life and mind can’t be investigated by science. He would have written all of that off as a waste of time. And he would have been wrong.

It is Le Fanu, not science, that has reached a dead end.

Hat tip to PolymerPhD for spotting the article that just killed any chance of Sunday morning fun for me.

Reference

Anckarsäter H (2010). Has biology disproved free will and moral responsibility? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(27): E114. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1006466107

Brass M, Haggard P (2007). To do or not to do: The neural signature of self-control The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(34): 9141-9145. DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0924-07.2007

Cashmore AR. 2010. The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107(10): 4499-4504. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0915161107

Hinsen K. 2010. A scientific model for free will is impossible. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: In press. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1010609107

Photo by bennylin0724 on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Pssssst! Science bloggers

Hey fellow science bloggers,

This is just between you, me, and the lamp posts. Got it?

You remember Virginia Heffernan’s New York Times article on science blogging last week? Yeah. It was bad. She totally deserved to be called on it. She’s made at least one follow-up since, but it probably ain’t going to convince many people.

I’m tellin’ ya, though... don’t brush her off completely.

Yeah, let’s criticize that she didn’t get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping – she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation as a paper of record and quality. But let’s not pretend that her impression ain’t shared by anyone else.

For instance, she took heat for recommending a climate denialist blog. But that’s not the first time that blog got recommended by people who ought to know better. That tells me there’s something we can learn there.

When we read Heffernan’s piece, we don’t like it. She was bound to get a lot of, “You don’t know what you’re talking about” (which, like I said, she earned). But she’s not getting as much, “Would you like to learn?”

Now, because she is a public figure, and counts people like David Dobbs among her colleagues, we might be able to convince her we ain’t so bad. Win for us if we do.

But a lot of us are probably just going to give her up as a lost cause. “She didn’t like the science blogosphere? Tough noogies. Good riddance.”

Bora nailed it when he wrote about the power that the Science Blogs website in particular had, but it’s true for the rest of us. There’s probably a lot of other people who have reactions like Virginia, but don’t blab about them in such a public forum. So they go away all quiet-like, and nobody makes the effort to reach out and invite them back.

We can do better than, “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.”

(Chad, David, and I seem to be on the same wavelength here).

Oh, and that photo? Taken by korafotomorgana. Put it on Flickr and let other people use it through Creative Commons.Salt o’ the earth, that one, I’m tellin’ ya.

Reaching out – way out

Recently, The Daily Show talked about how reaching out to the Muslim world had become one of NASA’s mandates (I wanted to embed the clip, but it’s not working properly). The incongruity (Muslims? Space?) is ripe for humour, of course.

This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

I  submit to you that scientific collaboration can occur despite political conflicts.

I submit to you that the United States was never held in higher esteem around the world than at this point in its history:

The best education money can buy

There’s a very interesting article in Time magazine about education and experimentation. It describes the efforts of economist Roland Fryer, Jr., to test whether there are ways to pay kids who do well in school.

Now, given that I’ve been reading, and occasionally blogging, about how financial incentives backfire, I was surprised to read that there seems to be some potential in this scheme. But I was even more surprised, and heartened, by the forthright scientific approach taken.

(W)hatever we do, (Fryer) says, we have to test it first — and fearlessly. “One thing we cannot do is, we cannot restrict ourselves to a set of solutions that make adults comfortable.”

Hat tip to the Heath Brothers blog, who point out another interesting thing that the article brings up: we often assume people know how to work on a problem when they don’t. Not quite the Dunning-Kruger effect, but perhaps related.

Crustacean nociception: The worry

Global warming. Evolution. Vaccines. Lobsters being cooked in pots.

The “lobster pain” question may not as headline-grabbing and contentious as the preceding issues on the list above, but it has something in common with all the rest.

Many people have strongly held opinions about the matter that don’t rely much on evidence. Animal rights people make “Being boiled hurts!” buttons. People associated with fisheries say things like, “No brain, no pain.”

People don’t debate the issue, they trade position statements. And they often say quite witless things in the process. Sometimes, arguments achieve a sentence to error ratio of 1:1.

Some people will hate our new paper on crustacean nociception and some will love it, not because of the science, but based on how it fits with their pre-existing beliefs. I’m betting some readers will fly right past the most important sentence in the paper:

We are not claiming that crustaceans do not feel pain.

That’s important, because it tries to maintain nuance, in case people try to simplify our research findings to fit their pre-existing positions. And sadly, I think it’s a matter of when, not if, someone tries to take the results in this paper out of context and try to make it say something it doesn’t. I’m half-expecting someone to accuse me of being in the pocket of “big fisheries.”

To those on both sides of the issue, I ask you to do the experiments. I don’t mean this in the literal sense that people should go buy an electrophysiology rig. I mean it in the sense of saying evidence matters. I know that is hard. The same day this paper was published, I found not one, but two articles about how resistant people are to evidence, even if – or perhaps especially if – it’s coming from a scientist.

If crustaceans have nociceptors, I want to know it. If they don’t have nociceptors, I want to know it. I don’t care who shows it, and I don’t care which way the outcome is. Stop the vicious circle of arguing in a vacuum, so we can make some informed decisions.

Picture from here.

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Genius is overrated

I sometimes think that one of the biggest problems of engaging people in science, either as a career or as an audience, is the notion that science is practiced by geniuses.

Not very many people think of themselves as geniuses, so they make themselves believe up front that they won’t be able to do it ot understand it.

The arts face a very similar problem. There’s this notion out there that it’s about creativity, and waiting for the muse, when often the reality is that 90% of the job is just showing up and doing the work.

Every cool science story that you read here, there, or elsewhere almost always has an extraordinary amount of grunt work behind it. I wish that element of science got a little more acknowledgement, though I’m not sure of the best way to do that.

Photo by Lamont Cranston on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Why science loses in the short term (but usually wins in the long term)

Over the last few months, there has been much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about strategy and tactics over how to communicate with non-scientists, and how to regain public trust over issues like climate change. A good example of this was a recent email exchange between Matt Nisbet and Randy Olson.

Nisbet:

When scientists... take action by responding with tit-for-tat attacks on climate skeptics, it... feeds a downward spiral of “war” and conflict rhetoric that appears as just more ideological rancor to the wider public.

Olson:

There comes a point where the public DOES want to see the science community stand up for themselves.

People arguing that scientists are losing to denialists in areas like climate science because they have taken a poor approach to communication are perhaps mischaracterizing the problem. The problem of what approach scientists use to communicate with non-scientists is a real problem, but it is minuscule in these cases.

Scientists have to, you know, do science in addition to communication with non-scientists. Denialists, as far as I can tell, can devote 100% of their time to communication.

If scientists want to win, we need to find a way to support a dedicated crew of people whose job is to do nothing else but do public relations. Why don’t national academies and organizations for the advancement of science have full-time, professional communicators?

The only organization that I can think of that is even close to the sort of “think tank” person who seems to be so routinely called for media interviews is the National Center for Science Education. They do a heroic job, but there’s only sixteen people listed on staff, including some whose job is in no way related to science.

Allocation of resources is a major problem, and time is a 100% non-renewable resource. People who can devote time to that will, in the short term, win.

The good news may be that because scientists are responsible for generating new knowledge, that can help in the long term. Ultimately, denialists cannot create anything new.

Image from here.

More reality science ideas

Quite a while ago (Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been blogging), I wrote an article about reality television shows for scientists.

A while back, Bitesize Bio took up the torch with a new list of science reality shows we should have, but don’t. I particularly liked:

Research project with the stars: B-list celebrities become first year graduate students and experience rotating through three labs, presenting their work to their department and trying to meet all of the expectations of any other PhD student. Watch them struggle with error bars and statistics, freak out at the MSDS for dihydrogen monoxide and laugh at their tantrums when the acetone destroys their manicures.

Of course, I like this idea in part because of the cheap help in the lab...

Overqualified

Sincere question, not rhetorical.

How and when and, for goodness’ sake, why did “overqualified” become a reason to turn someone away from employment?

This is starting to bother me a lot. I mean, I help run a Masters program, and am advisor on a major grant to create graduate opportunities for Hispanics, am the lead on one undergraduate research program and participate in another.

But I have my doubts. Reading things like this or this... don’t help.

The concept of “overqualified” just gnaws away at the whole reason for those programs. Not just ours, but nationally. Internationally.

How are you going to create a technically skilled work force in a society when there’s a threat that that very training can be held against them?

I understand that when there are too many applications too read, you’ve got to cut something somewhere. But it seems to me that, “Oh, they’ll just leave when the economy is better” is short-sighted. This is a fantastic opportunity to get amazingly smart people in your company. Imagine the energy and talent a hiring business could recruit today if it said, “nobody is overqualified.” Even if they do leave, you’ll probably have a better company at the end than when you started.

Somehow, I can’t help but think that what’s really leading to the concept of “overqualified” is that an employer doesn’t want an employee smarter than they are. Too likely to upset delicate workplace power relationships. Or something.

I clearly don’t get it.

Neuroethology on numb3rs

Whoa! Just had a major geek out at seeing some neuroethology research I wrote about only a few months ago show up in the opening scenes of numb3rs. Video clip and everything. Good on you, Ken Catania!

Additional:  A video clip from last night’s episode with Catania’s snake research is now up.

I want to be Carl Sagan, but can’t

I am nearly ready to throttle the next person who mentions Carl Sagan. There seems to be a new cliché emerging in science writing: “We need more Carl Sagans.” This shows up in the books Don’t be Such a Scientist, Unscientific America, and I just spotted Erik Klemetti, who wrote on the Eruptions blog:

We need our new Carl Sagans, Arthur C. Clarkes or Stephen Goulds - people who understand science and can advocate for it. I have trouble thinking of anyone filling those roles anymore.

And it’s very likely that nobody ever will fill those roles again. Look at the names that people toss around as science communicators (with an admitted bias toward my own field of biology).

Carl Sagan: Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dragons of Eden published in 1978.

Stephen Jay Gould: Breakthrough paper on punctuated equilibrium published in 1972.

E.O. Wilson: Breakthrough book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis published in 1975.

Richard Dawkins: Breakthrough book The Selfish Gene published in 1976.

David Attenborough: Major television series Life on Earth debuted in 1979.

David Suzuki: Began as host of The Nature of Things in 1979.

See a pattern? All these people rose to prominence for their work in the 1970s or so. Forget that the internet didn’t exist. This was a world where you could count the television channels on one hand and have fingers left over. This was a time of true mass media rather than pervasive media (which is what we now have).

You see the same thing in music. U2 may be the last band to achieve true “rock star” status. You see the same thing in television. Look at the list of highest rated television shows in the U.S., and you’ve got to go down into the 30s before hitting a show from this decade. People have more choices of what they can read and watch, and people are less famous than they used to be.

How could someone today get the opportunity to talk to people about science at the level that Carl Sagan did? There are a thousand weird, intangible factors that would all have to align in a way that you could not plan or predict. Neil deGrasse Tyson said in an interview on This Week in Science (1 Sept 2009 episode; free on iTunes) that one reason he gets contacted by the media so much is:

My office is eight blocks north of all the new gathering headquarters of the nation. ... When the universe flinches, they just send up an action cam. So I’m an easy date for them.

Don’t get me wrong, Tyson is fantastic at what he does (great interview here), but I’d wager there are many other scientists who would be just as effective on The Daily Show as Tyson was. But not everyone can just go to multiple television studios by taking a taxi to them after work.

Plus, most of the names on that list have done significant technical work that had made them reasonably well-known among their peers. With financial support for science going down and administrative responsibilities increasing, this isn’t exactly easy, either. This means that the huge number of scientists at universities with modest research programs are right out of the picture, no matter how much they might want to do outreach and might be good at it.

The conditions that allowed Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and the others to thrive have pretty much gone away. I’m irritated when people say that scientists don’t want to come down from their ivory towers. There’s an implication that the reason we haven’t seen another Sagan or Gould is that nobody wants to do it, and that scientists could do it if they put their minds to it.

I would bloody love to have Carl Sagan’s gig. I would love to be able to tell a lot of people very cool stories, and help them understand what science is about. But it’s not going to happen, no matter how hard I work.

Note: I swear to you, I started writing this post and all but finished it before I realized today was Carl Sagan day.

Storytelling in science, part 2

Earlier this week, I commented about the importance of stories, and how denialists of science have a lock on the “little guy fighting the establishment” story. I mused about what the counter story is to that.

As much as I hate to suggest this, I think I have one.

Zombie apocalypse.

You face an world of dangers that are slow and stupid but many and unrelenting. You have limited resources. If you let your guard down, that’s it. If you don’t have the weapons and some knowledge and a little technology, you’re done.

The zombies are the natural world, always throwing up little surprises like a new strain of H1N1 virus. We are finding out to our peril that some of our resources really are limited, or pose their own threat, like fossil fuels.

Scientists?

We’re the ones with shotguns and a stash of shells, baby.


We have decided to fight and we might just be able to help a lot of other people. When the shit hits the fan, the chips are down, you want scientists on your side, because they just might be the only thing standing between you and a a messy end.

(And for the record, I repeat: I hate zombie fiction! But happy Hallowe’en weekend, anyway!)

Picture from here. And yes, I put this up in full knowledge that I will never be one tiny fraction of that bad-ass.

Storytelling in science

When I saw the silent film version of The Lost World, I was amazed at how it set the template for monster movies for decades. Watch The Lost World, and you can see the mold being set for King Kong, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Godzilla, Varan the Unbelievable, Valley of the Gwangi, Gorgo, Cloverfield, and on the list goes.

It’s something that Randy Olson talks about in Don’t be Such A Scientist (which I reviewed here): there are a few really strong story narratives that we love to hear over and over again. If you want to have an audience for your science, it helps to know what those are, and tell people a story they want to hear.

I’ve had questions have been bugging me about this. First, why do we seem to have such a limited range of narratives that resonate and stick with us? Why do we love hearing the same basic story over and over again? Can we create new stories that are as powerful as the “hero’s journey”?

Second, do stories have opposites?

I think I need some examples to explain that question.

I read once a claim that any effective messages in advertising or branding has an opposite. If one business advertises low prices, its competitor sells quality. If one corporation pitches itself as family friendly, the other says, “Grow up.”

A recent post on the Respectful Insolence blog talked about a dubious magazine article, and blogger Orac noted:

Journalists do so love that cliché, don't they? It's an irresistable (sic) hook, cliché or not. People love reading about issues that we thought to be true but – surprise! surprise! – turn out not to be true. ... Framing an issue as arguing that conventional wisdom is wrong and highlighting a couple of “lone voices in the wilderness” warning, Cassandra-like, of impending disaster represent a time-honored journalistic trope, not to mention a story structure that goes back thousands of years to, well, Cassandra at least.

Same analysis over at Effect Measure:

Our main point was that it was a straw man argument built around the narrative device of the brave, mavericky truth teller who is shunned by colleagues and has to eat alone at conferences.

The “I’m an oppressed little guy fighting against a hide-bound establishment” is a story that you see when you look at denialists of all stripes.

What’s the counter-story? If the denialists are able to get such mileage out of claiming that they are oppressed by an evil conspiracy (even when they’re not), surely there’s some story that can be used to illustrate the slow, hard-won accumulation of evidence that is the way most science progresses.

Review: Don’t Be Such a Scientist

Let me try to apply one of the suggestions in Don’t Be Such a Scientist and practice a little concision:

I love this book. I devoured it in one evening.

Whew. Now, I can go back to my normal science mode.

Randy Olson has been working in Hollywood for over a decade, but he’s still one of us. He gets what being an academic scientist does to you: you become literal, critical, and absolutely focused on destroying error – and it never goes away. He gets us. But he also gets how other people see us, and Olson has a message for us, his former colleagues: For other people, it’s not just about the data, guys.

Olson isn’t the first person to say that persuading non-scientists about the truth of things requires more persuasion than just evidence. This has not been a popular message, particularly among a lot of my fellow science bloggers.^* These kinds of messages get characterized as weak-kneed capitulation, compromising the truth.

For that reason, Olson will probably face his strongest criticism for suggesting that scientists not be unlikeable. It sounds a lot like admonitions of other writers never to offend, which has generated a growling response that there are some people that we scientists want to offend: the people who deal out lies, errors, and untruths.

Olson has not cracked that hard problem: how to communicate with those nice people who are just like you and me, except for a few beliefs that are divorced from reality. You know the ones: the creationists, the climate change deniers, the anti-vaccine campaigners, the moon landing conspiracy theorists, the birthers, and so on. Olson’s tips and suggestions won’t matter when dealing with those people, but that’s not Olson’s book. It’s a book that somebody needs to write – badly – but Olson’s approach shouldn’t be dismissed because of that. He’s pointing out that when you launch a full out assault on your enemies, you risk inflicting a lot of casualties on people who might have been on side.

Part of what convinced that Olson is on the right track were uncomfortable moments reading this book when you recognize yourself, and think, “Oh, damn, he’s right.”

For instance, Olson talks about how being an academic means being critical. We academics forget that even honest and correct criticism can be very deflating.

Have you ever walked out of a movie that you loved, and you’re replaying some of those favourite moments and lines in your head... and one of the people you’re with points out something that’s completely illogical? Do you happily respond to that honest and correct criticism, “Wow, I’m so glad you pointed that out!” If so, you’re a better person than me, because my response was an irritated, “That’s not the point.” ^**

And yet, we scientists are routinely praised for pointing out those annoying little untruths. On the very day I received my copy of Olson’s book, one of my blog posts was picked as an editor’s choice specifically because it was critical.

On that note, I don’t think it’s any accident that the words highlighted in the blurbs on the back are the ones that say how critical this book is. After all, this book is aimed at scientists and academics, so if you want their respect, you’ve got to show them that you’re criticizing! In fact, the tone here is very amiable and affable. The most critical sections of the book seem more exasperated than stinging.

On a similar note, Olson also talks about how scientists are extremely literal. Here again, you don’t have to look further than recent stuff on the blogosphere. The new film Creation is starting to get reviews, and here’s Eugenie Scott’s review on Panda’s Thumb.

As someone with a stake in how the public understands evolution and it’s most famous proponent, the bottom line for me was that the science be presented accurately. The second was that the story of Darwin’s life be presented accurately.

Her bottom line is not whether the movie has a good story, is emotionally powerful, well acted, or any of the other dozens of things that most people look for in a movie. Her bottom line is accuracy. Such a scientist. For many, looking for that first is missing the point of why they watch a movie.

Finally, Olson has something in common with Adam Savage. It’s not just that they do science-y stuff on film. MythBusters host Savage was quoted as saying recently:

I realized that my humiliation and good TV go hand in hand.

Olson is not afraid to make a point at his own expense. Don’t Be Such a Scientist starts with Olson on the receiving end of a truly terrifying bawling out by an acting teacher. Those four pages alone are near worth the price of admission, but it’s not the lowest or most embarrassing moment for Olson in the book. This is self deprecation taken to a new high, and it’s an illustration of one of Olson’s key tactics for communication: don’t “rise above,” as he puts it. In other words, don’t be high and mighty. Audiences tend not to like such people.^*** I’ve tried to avoid righteous indignation on this blog, there are occasions where I bet someone reading it thought, “Boy, is he full of himself.”

There is more about this book that I’d like to comment on and explore, but I’ll leave them for later. I’m teaching a class on biological writing this semester, and I hope I can bring some of the issues Olson raises into the class. Don’t Be Such a Scientist is a rich source of ideas, and I’ll be riffing off them for some time to come.

Reference

Olson, R. (2009). Don't Be Such a Scientist. Island Press, 1-216 ISBN: 9781597265638

* That Olson mentions the tenor at scienceblogs.com as something damaging rather than helpful... let’s say I’ll be interested to read the response.

** For me, the movie was Edward Scissorhands.

*** I do have to wonder what Olson makes of the success of House, a show that has a character that seems to violate almost single suggestion that Olson has. The character is unlikeable, always rising above...

We live for the fame fame baby

I was watching an interview with Annie Lennox recently. She commented that a lot of people wanted to be famous, but they didn’t really know why.

There are at least two things involved in fame. One is blind, clueless luck. The other is more interesting.

Fame indicates that someone has done something meaningful to other people. To have done something that resonates and connects with other people. And I think this is what a lot of artist, communicators, politicians, and many others want to be famous, because it means they’ve connected with a lot of people.

In science, you can get famous by making some nifty discovery totally by accident. Maybe it’s easier to get famous that way. Being famous for creating meaning, and influencing lives, seems much rarer for scientists.

Maybe that should change. Maybe more scientists should try to become famous not for discoveries, but for influencing people in a positive way.

Rob Sawyer, we ♥ you!

Rob understands scientists are smokin’ hawt.

Previous posts on passion in science here and here.

Incentives, economy, and science

During an interview on the radio show This Week In Science, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson said something to the effect of:

Before it’s anything else, America is a capitalist country.

His point was that American interest in science, science education, and so on, would be driven by its effect on people’s wallets. But it got me thinking about Dan Pink’s recent TED talk on how financial incentives work only for a very limited set of tasks: very rote, defined, mechanical tasks. And I thought, “Is it any accident that this most capitalist of countries did so well throughout the first half of the 20^th century, when so much of the economy was based on rote, defined, mechanical tasks, like manufacturing?”

This is turn got me thinking about Richard Florida’s arguments that the “creative class” is becoming the significant driver of the economy. This fits with Pink’s thesis that we are increasingly being asked to solve “candle problems” in work. And science is about those hard, not easily defined, creative problems most of the time.

If you put those three things together, that America is the pre-eminent capitalist society of the world could, paradoxically, hurt its ability to retain its economic competitiveness.