“Don’t be afraid to tell the journalist what the story is”

By this I mean you are allow to not answer the question. This feels weird, since it violates conversational and academic rules, but the thing the journalist should be interested in is the real story. The questions just exist to get to that (which is why Ed says he often asks pretty vague questions). If you think the journalist is asking the wrong question, don’t answer it – tell them what the right question is.

If you restrict yourself to answering the wrong questions, the risk for everyone is that the (mistaken) framing stays in place, just with a few qualifications from you. For example, if the journalist is researching a study which says “fabulous brain training method boosts IQ” your comments that the study has flaws, or is a provisional result only, will lead to the headline “fabulous brain training method boosts IQ”. Or, if you are lucky, “fabulous brain training method might boost IQ”. And down in paragraph 4 will be some quote from you warning people not to get carried away.

Far better would be to give the journalist an alternative story, rather than some doubts. Tell them “no brain training method you can pay for works any better than free methods which are available to everyone”. Or “the brain is a machine which runs on blood, the best thing for your brain is physical exercise, not brain training”. This is news people can use. If you really disagree with a study, offering an alternative narrative is your best chance of that study being put in the correct context. “You don’t beat owt with nowt”, as they say.

This is what – I think – Ed is getting at when he says he wants the context from scientists, the “something interesting that I couldn’t have predicted”.

Further reading: George Lakoff “Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate” (an actual book, so no hyperlink!)

Link: Ed Yong: “A Guide for Scientists on Giving Comments to Journalists“

• Project Nim
• Life Without Memory: The Case of Clive Wearing
• Awakenings (not strictly a documentary)

And, an honourable mention for

• Memento

Cumulative science inherently supports replication. For most of science, what counts on news is based on what has been done before – not just in an abstract theoretical sense, but in the sense that it relies on those results being true to make the experiments work. Since I’m a psychologist, and my greatest expertise is in my own work, I’ll give you an example from this recent paper. It’s a study of action learning, but we use a stimulus control technique from colour psychophysics (and by ‘we’, I really mean Martin, who did all the hard stuff). As part of preparing the experiment we replicated some results using stimuli of this type. Only because this work had been done (thanks Petroc!) could we design our experiment; and if this work didn’t replicate, we would have found out in the course of preparing for our study of action learning. Previously in my career I’ve had occasion to do direct replications, and I’ve almost always found the effect reported. I haven’t agreed with the interpretation of why the effect happens, or I’ve found that my beliefs about the effect from just reading the literature were wrong, but the effect has been there.

It is important that replication is possible, but I’ve been bemused that there has been such a noise about creating space for additional formal replications. It makes me wonder what people believe about psychology. If a field was one where news was made by collecting isolated interesting phenomena, then I there would be more need for structures to support formal replication. Should I take the reverse lesson from this – the extent to which people call for structures to support formal replication is evidence of the lack of cumulative science in psychology?

The rhetoric of wonder is all about encouraging participation. But this infantilising power dynamic is not conducive to confident involvement or critical inquiry.

Righteously snarky CiF, Prof Brian Cox: physicist or priest? Many popular scientists are atheist, so why are they so happy to use the misty-eyed language of religion? by
Eliane Glaser

Unfortunately, I included some loose words in my article that implied things I don’t believe and wasn’t arguing. Exhibit A:

Then along comes a cyclist, who seems to believe that the rules aren’t made for them, especially the ones that hop onto the pavement, run red lights, or go the wrong way down one-way streets.

This wrongly suggests both that I think the typical cyclists breaks the law (they don’t), and/or that motorists are enraged by cyclists’ law breaking. This is not the case, rather I am arguing that motorists are engaged by cyclists’ perceived rule breaking, where I mean rule in the sense of ‘convention’. Cyclists habitually, legally, and sensibly break conventions of car-driving such as waiting in queued traffic, moving at the speed limit or not under-taking.

Exhibit A has now been changed in the article to the more pleasing:

Then along come cyclists, innocently following what they see are the rules of the road, but doing things that drivers aren’t allowed to: overtaking queues of cars, moving at well below the speed limit or undertaking on the inside.

So, my bad and apologies for this. I should have been a lot clearer than I was. I’m just grateful that a few people understood what I was getting at (if you read the whole article I hope the correct interpretation I supported by the rest of the phrasing I use). The amount and vehemence of feedback has been quite surprising. Lots of people thought I was a frustrated driver who hated cyclists. In fact, the bike is my main form of transport. I’ve ridden nearly every day for over ten years (and been hit by a car once). For this article I was trying not to sound like the self-righteous cycling proto-fascist I feel like sometimes. I obviously succeeded. Perhaps too well.

Other people thought I was claiming that this was the only factor affecting road-user’s attitudes. I don’t think this. Obviously selective memory (for bad cyclists or drivers), in- group/out-group effects and the asymmetry in vulnerability all play a role. I did write a version of the article which laid out the conceptual space a bit clearer, but I decided it was boring to read, and really I wanted to talk about evolutionary game theory and make a novel – and, I thought, interesting – claim.

I sometimes think I should get “Telling the truth, just not the whole truth” translated into Latin so I can use it as the motto for the column. Each one I write someone comes back to me with something I missed out. If I tried to be comprehensive I’d end up with a textbook, instead of a 800 word magazine column. I don’t want to write textbooks, so I’m reasonably happy with leaving things out, but I do worry that there is a line you cross when telling some of the truth amounts to a deception or distortion of the whole truth. I’m trying, each time, not to cross that line. Feedback on how to manage this is welcome.

There were many other comments of all shades. You can ‘enjoy’ some of them on the BBC Future facebook page here. If you did leave a comment on email/facebook/twitter I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to all of them. I hope this post clarifies things a bit.

• Feedback for Learning:Seven Keys to Effective Feedback: ‘Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning’
• Critiquing the “who needs college, anyway?” meme
• Using genetic algorithms to find Starcraft 2 build orders
• The 7 Requirements of All Effective Scientists
• Wikipedia: Mendelian randomization
• ‘any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity’
• Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes. By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes,
• Knightmare: ‘For an entire generation of British children, it was the televisual equivalent of owning a terminally ill hamster’
• “Inbox Pause” — adds a pause/unpause button to your Gmail
• What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?
• FollowUpThen: forward an email to be sent back to you at a specified later point
• Vaughan summarises Paul Rozin’s list of 7 types of descriptive study which are undervalued by psychology
• ‘Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our lives as we emulate a few of their cultural practices. They remind us that our way is not the only way.’

Work for 6 years. The 7th, go alone or among strangers, so the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become

Either Vinay, or via Vinay

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Thomas Edison, attib.

Using the correct bootstrap method, this is what you get:

So what you can see is that, basically, the bootstrap is little improvement over the t-test. Perhaps a marginal amount. As Cosma pointed out, the ex-gaussian / reaction time distributions I’m using look pretty normal at lower sample sizes, so it isn’t too surprising that the t-test is robust. Using the median rather than the mean damages the sensitivity of the bootstrap (contra my previous, erroneous, results). My intuition is that the mean, as a statistic, is influenced by the whole distribution in a way the median isn’t, so it a better summary statistic (statisticians, you can tell me if this makes sense). The mean test is far more sensitive, but, as discussed previously, this is because it has an unacceptably high false alarm rate which is insufficiently penalised by d-prime.

Update: Cosma’s notes on the bootstrap are here and recommened if you want the fundamentals and are already degree-level comfortable with statistical theory.

Corrected boostrap function:

function H=bootstrap(s1,s2,samples,alpha,method)

difference=mean(s2)-mean(s1);

for i=1:samples
    
    sstar=[s1 s2];
    
    boot1=sstar(ceil(rand(1,length(s1))*length(sstar)));
    boot2=sstar(ceil(rand(1,length(s2))*length(sstar)));
    
    if method==1
        a(i)=mean(boot1)-mean(boot2);
    else
        a(i)=median(boot1)-median(boot2);    
    end
    
end

CI=prctile(a,[100*alpha/2,100*(1-alpha/2)]);

H = CI(1)>difference | CI(2)
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“The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state.” (p.332)
Our attitude to debt is a symptom of this erosion of social economies by currency economies. Mutually agreed, honour, credit is replaced by state-backed, economic credit. Loans which inexorably grow due to interest are enforced by brutal laws against debtors. This is the context for the rapacity of European colonialists – they were driven on by the tyranny of interest.
“All this helps explain why the church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise. Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds they set out to conquer” (p. 319)


It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.  The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement, then gradually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African slavery, and “indentured service” (p.350)

This is a scandal not just because the system occasionally goes haywire, as it did in the Putumayo, but because it plays havoc with our most cherished assumptions about what capitalism really is—particularly that, in its basic nature, capitalism has something to do with freedom. For the capitalists, this means the freedom of the marketplace. For most workers, it means free labor. Marxists have questioned whether wage labor is ultimately free in any sense (since someone with nothing to sell but his or her body cannot in any sense be considered a genuinely free agent), but they still tend to assume that free wage labor is the basis of capitalism.
Our dominant image of the origins of capitalism continues to be the English workingman toiling in the factories of the industrial revolution, and this image can be traced forward to Silicon Valley, with a straight line in between. All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons disappear, or if we must speak of them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road. Like sweatshops, this is assumed to be a stage that industrializing nations had to pass through, just as it is still assumed that all those millions of debt peons and contract laborers and sweatshop workers who still exist, often in the same places, will surely live to see their children become regular wage laborers with health insurance and pensions, and their children, doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs.”(p351)

With this framing, Graeber repaints Adam Smith’s economic account – “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” etc – as a purely moral account, a utopia utterly unlike the actual economic conditions Smith lived in.

To understand the history of capitalism, however, we have to begin by realizing that the picture we have in our heads, of workers who dutifully punch the clock at 8:00 a.m. and receive regular remuneration every Friday, on the basis of a temporary contract that either party is free to break off at any time, began as a utopian vision, was only gradually put into effect even in England and North America, and has never, at any point, been the main way of organising the production for the market, ever, anywhere.

This is actually why Smith’s work is so important. He created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin; a world where men and women were free to simply calculate their interests in full knowledge that everything had been prearranged by God to ensure that it will serve the greater good. (p.354).

For some critical commentary see here: http://onthespiral.com/review-reactions-debt-first-years, the Crooked Timber seminar (ht Alex)
Update 30/12/12. There’s an important point about rights being conceptualised as property, which Gemma summarises well:
Our freedom is defined as a right, which we own, as opposed to Graeber’s view that rights are actually obligations on others (e.g. our right to free speech is actually others obligations to allow my free speech). Rights have been defined in this way to justify debt-peonage or even slavery – if we own our rights, like property, then we are free to give them away or even sell them (p206).

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