Author: tom

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intellectual self-defence science

How Science Really Works

I want to make a radio documentary about how science really works. The popular imagination has been captured by a model of science which is incomplete and unhelpful. Science doesn’t produce neutral facts, it is process whose very nature is contested within the institution of science as well as from outside. Science is a complex social process, and may not even be a single unified thing.

This documentary I’m imagining would start in a University bar on a friday night, were we could hear some scientists talk about work in the lab in the way scientists all over the world do, not in the language of journal papers, grant applications and popular TV features, but as the work which they know intimately, with its set-backs, rivalries and esoteric rewards. We’d then visit a few important thinkers to get some vital alternative perspectives on how science works:

Steve Fuller from Warwick could tell us about the social construction of knowledge, about how science rewrites the history of discoveries to present an ideal of its process as logical and inevitable when in fact is it accidental and contingent. Someone could outline Feyerabend’s “Against Method” and we could see some scientists get irate at his deconstruction of the sacred cows of the naive, traditional model of how science works (which, in my experience, is what tends to happen when you throw Feyerabend at them).

Terence Kealey, VC of Buckingham University and author of “Sex, science and profits” will explode the myth that publicly funded research is good for the economy and outline his idea that “there’s no such thing as science, just scientists”.

Ben Goldacre will take us into the murky world of pharmaceutical research and show us the ways industry funding can distort “pure science”.

Finally, we tackle science and politics, talking to the climate researchers at the centre of the “Climate Gate” email scandal and show how the mistaken ideal of “science as objective” gets in the way of a proper understanding of the role of science in political debate. (Basically, my argument is that an overly idealised model of science leaves open the rhetorical space for an unhelpful cultural relativism, whereby the critical theorists can claim that science is just a social construction and the political fringes feel they can contest scientific consensus with a GCSE biology and the will to believe). We’ll talk to Jim Manzi who will outline his idea of causal density, showing why applying the scientific method to problems of society will not be as straightforward as the cheerleaders of scientific rationalism assume.

Now, who would like to make this documentary with me?

(NB I have not sought the involvement/permission of the people named in this post!)

See also
– Emotional Cartography book launch talk
– The Reality of Culture
– The Choice of Facts

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-01-27

  • Seeking to talk to someone who has experience/knowledge of Creative Commons licensing. Suggestions anyone? #

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tweets

Tweets for 2011-01-26

  • Want to spend a week in Sardinia learning about how to embed intrinsically motivated flexible learning in robots? http://bit.ly/emOtWE #
  • Now this is useful robotics http://vimeo.com/13514262 robot delivers you beer at work #
  • People of the twitterverse: can you recommend me a crowd-funding website and/or introductions to the same? #

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quotes

Quotes #264 & #265

Defined by their lesser knowledge, students can do nothing which does not confirm the most pessimistic image that the professor, in his most professional character is willing to confess to: they understand nothing, and they reduce the most brilliant theories to logical monstrosities or picturesque oddities as if their only role in life was to illustrate the vanity of the efforts which the professor squanders on them and which he will continue to squander despite everything out of professionals conscience with a disabused lucidity which only redoubles his merit. By definition the professor teaches as he ought to teach, and the meagre results with which he is rewarded can only reinforce his certainty that the great majority of his students are unworthy of the efforts he bestows upon them. Indeed the professor is as resigned to his students and their ‘natural’ incapacities as the ‘good colonist’ is to the ‘natives’, for he has no higher expectations than they just be the way they are.

And

In secondary and higher education, it is taken for granted that the language of ideas elaborated by the academic and scientific tradition and also the second-order language of allusions and cultural complicities are second nature to intelligent and gifted individuals; or better, that the ability to understand and to manipulate these learned languages – artificial languages, par excellence – where we see the natural language of human intelligence at work immediately distinguishes intelligent students from the rest. It is thanks to this ideology of a profession that academics can vouch for professional judgements as strictly equitable. But in reality they consecrate cultural privilege. Language is the most active and elusive part of cultural heritage which each individual owes to his background. This is because language does not reduce, as we often think, to a more or less extensive collection of words. As syntax, it provides us with a system of transposable mental dispositions. These go hand in hand with values which dominate the whole of our experience and, in particular, with a vision of society and of culture. They also involve an original relationship to words, reverential or free, borrowed or familiar, sparing or intemperate

Bourdieu, P., (1994), Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power. Polity Press, Cambridge, trans. Richard Teese, p6-7 & p8.

Categories
tweets

Tweets for 2011-01-25

  • got a spare ticket for Ani Difranco in Salford (and a lift from Sheffield) tonight! Anyone want? #

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tweets

Tweets for 2011-01-21

  • Is it a paradox that both sedatives and stimulants are pleasurable? @BrainStraining @vaughanbell #

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tweets

Tweets for 2011-01-20

  • reading Kealey's "Sex, science & profits", which is really a history of research funding + an argument that science doesn't -> ec. growth #
  • Dropping cats in zero-gravity, back when science was just innocent fun http://is.gd/pfmIuN, via @intrcnnctd #
  • I'd really like to archive my tweets to a wordpress category that isn't published on my blog front-page. Is this possible? #
  • Adventure, international travel, camaraderie, sex & passion. Mark Kennedy had to be paid £250,000, but you can be an activist for FREE. #
  • Can this be real? eye-lid controlling electrodes to produce 3D "shutter glasses" effect http://bit.ly/fQkzCP #
  • Trying not to get addicted to reading http://hackaday.com/ #
  • Richard Stallman in #Sheffield 5th of March http://bit.ly/etdhjn #
  • Test tweet. Soon to be deleted #
  • seeking dancer/visual artist for art-science installation about how the brain learns movements. Any volunteers or suggestions? #
  • Actually, maybe I should do an art-science piece about consciousness, in dramatic form. I could call it The Cartesian Theatre #

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tweets

Tweets for 2011-01-19

  • Test tweet. Soon to be deleted #
  • seeking dancer/visual artist for art-science installation about how the brain learns movements. Any volunteers or suggestions? #
  • Actually, maybe I should do an art-science piece about consciousness, in dramatic form. I could call it The Cartesian Theatre #

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tweets

Archiving tweets, but not posting them on the frontpage

I’m hoping that Twitter Tools, and this bit of code will help me achieve this.

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links

Links for December 2010

Categories
quotes

Brief Thoughts on Maps

The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees

Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps,Times Literary Supplement, Feb 4, 1977

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links

Links for November 2010, but a bit late

Categories
quotes

Quote #262

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face

Mike Tyson, attrib.

Categories
politics

The reality of culture

It’s been forty years since the first topless page 3 model in the Sun newspaper. There was a debate on Radio 4 between Bea Campbell and Jennie Bristow this morning, which I thought was illustrative of an important wider point.

Bea Campbell argued that the Sun’s page 3 sends the wrong message to men and women. In retort Jennie Bristow argued that if you didn’t like it you didn’t have to buy the Sun.

Now I think you can only make this argument if you don’t believe in culture.

My argument is not that “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” is an inherently ridiculous position (I don’t like aubergines, you say “don’t eat them”. Fair enough). My argument is that “if you don’t like it don’t buy it” is a ridiculous reply to arguments of the form made by Bea Campbell.

Ms Campbell offered a claim about the negative effect that the page 3 institution has on everybody, the men who see it, and the men who interact with those men, and the women who interact with those men. Now you could say “page 3 is liberating” or “page 3 celebrates women” or “page 3 is harmless” and although you would be wrong, you would at least be taking seriously the implication of Bea Campbell’s argument : that how we treat each other matters, that our idea of each other matters and that these things can be profoundly influenced by how individuals behave and what we collectively acknowledge as acceptable. In other words, it makes the assumption that beliefs and behaviours are communicable.

So it is interesting to me that Jennie Bristow sidesteps this debate and takes refuge in an argument borrowed from economic liberalism: you have a right to make free consumption choices without interference. Now this is an important position, but it does not preclude debate about the effects of individual consumption choices (nor about the systems of production and culture which determine individual consumption choices). I submit that this strategy of ignoring possible debate culture is particularly characteristic of my intellectual generation, and I think I know why.

Culture used to be a real thing, by which I mean part of the lingua franca of public discussion, but the theorisation of culture was commanded by post-modernists and critical-theorists who abdicated all responsibility for making arguments which were comprehensible to the rest of us, and who systematically degraded collective faith in truth and reality. Years of this have created a diminished intellectual public sphere, ripe for colonisation by fundamentalists (religious and economic) and scientism. Hence the current idolisation of ‘evidence-based’ policies and decisions, as if an ‘evidence-base’ will save you from the need to have ideological commitments, and the celebration of limp claims about society and human nature by those with a scientific background.

In the arena of religious debate, witness the shallowness of theology from the ongoing Dawkins vs the Fundamentalists sideshow. In my own field, Ben Goldacre wrote recently about the phenomena of adopting a posture of disbelief in psychological phenomena until neuroscientific correlates can be demonstrated (something I called elsewhere neuroessentialism). Similarly, the recent Common Cause report, while having many important things to say, displays an almost child-like awe for the “large body of evidence” supporting various claims it uses in its argument about charity campaigning.

Scientific evidence does not save you from having to think about situations for which we do not have direct evidence, nor does it save you from discussing values. Why would you act as if it did? Surely only because you thought you had nothing else to reply on. We let the post-modernists convince us that there are no forms of reasoned debate, no methods of mutual approach which are not entirely arbitrary. The scientists demonstrated that truth is not arbitrary in the realm of the measurable, and now we are inappropriately welcoming them in to fill the void left in the rest of our intellectual lives.

Culture exist, ideas exist, what we believe matters and can be discussed and changed. We have a collective responsibility to consider these things. This is not the age of “if you don’t like it, ignore it”, this is the age of “we are in this together”. All of us.

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links

Links for October 2010

Categories
books events Me psychology

The Narrative Escape

My ebook “The Narrative Escape” was published last week by 40k books. ‘The Narrative Escape’ is a long essay about morality, psychology and stories and is availble in Kindle format (this means you can get it for you iPhone, iPad or in PDF too). From the ebook blurb:


We instinctively tell stories about our experiences, and get lost in stories told by other people. This is an essay about our story-telling minds. It is about the psychological power of stories, and about what the ability to enjoy stories tells us about the fundamental nature of mind.

My argument in ‘The Narrative Escape’ begins by exploring Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience, looking at them as an example of moral decision making – particularly for that minority that choose to disobey in the experiment. A fascinating thing about these experiments is that although they tell us a lot about what makes people obey authority, they leave mysterious that quality that makes people resist tyrannical authority. I then go on to contrast this moral disobedience, with conventional psychological investigations of morality (for example the work of Lawrence Kohlberg). In using descriptions of moral dilemmas to ask people about their moral reasoning this research, I argue, misses something essential about real-world moral choices. This element is the ability to realise that you are acting according to someone else’s version of what is right and wrong, and to step outside of their definition of the situation. This is the “narrative escape” of the title. The essay also talks about dreams, stories and story-telling and other topics which I hope will be of interest.

There is also an interview with me available here, which discusses the ebook and some other more and less related topics.

The essay is available in Italian as “La Fuga Narrativa”
Amazon.com Link for the English edition.
…And coming soon in Portuguese, I’m told!

Categories
books sheffield

Yellow Caribou Readers is a book group in Sheffield

The Yellow Caribou Readers is a book group in Sheffield, England. We like literature, arts and culture in the wider sense, and the fantastic pubs of our hometown. We meet monthly and new members are always welcome. The website is sites.google.com/site/yellowcariboureaders/.

Categories
quotes science

Quote #261: The art of the soluble and the aches of incomprehension

Like other amateurs, Koestler finds it difficult to understand why scientists seem so often to shirk the study of really fundamental or challenging problems. With Robert Graves he regrets the absence of ‘intense research’ upon variations in the – ah – ’emotive potentials of the sense modalities’. He wonders why ‘the genetics of behaviour’ should still be ‘uncharted territory’ and asks whether this may not be because the framework of Neo-Darwinism is too rickety to support an inquiry. The real reason is so much simpler: the problem is very, very difficult. Goodness knows how it is to be got at. It may be outflanked or it may yield to attrition, but probably not to a direct assault. No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. The most he can hope for is the kindly contempt earned by the Utopian politician. If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
Although much of Koestler’s book has to do with explanation, he seems to pay little attention to the narrowly scientific usages of the concept. Some of the ‘explanations’ he quotes with approval are simply analgesic pills which dull the aches of incomprehension without going into their causes. The kind of explanation the scientist spends most of his time thinking up and testing – the hypotheses which enfolds the matters to be explained among its logical consequences – gets little attention.

Peter Medawar, from a review of Arthur Koestler’s “The Act of Creation” (New Statesman, 19 June 1964) and republished in ‘The Art of the Soluble’ (1967)

Categories
psychology quotes

World without end

It is possible to see why, despite all the poverty and the hardships and dependence, the agricultural society of the early Middle Ages – and of the later Middles Ages too in many regions – should have been relatively unreceptive to the militant eschatology of the unprivileged. To an extent which can hardly be exaggerated peasant life was shaped and sustained by custom and communal routine. In the wide northern plains peasants were commonly grouped together in villages; and there the inhabitants of a village followed an agricultural routine which had been developed by the village as a collectivity. Their strips of land lay closely interwoven in the open fields, and in ploughing, sowing an reaping they must often have worked as a team. Each peasant has the right to use the ‘common’ to a prescribed extent and all the livestock grazed there together. Social relationships within the village were regulated by norms which, though they varied from village to village, had the sanction of tradition and were always regarded as inviolable. And this was true not only of relationships between villagers themselves but of the relationship between each villager and his lord. In the course of long struggles between conflicting interests each manor had developed its own laws which, once established by usage, prescribed the rights and obligations of each individual. To this ‘custom of the manor’ the lord himself was subject; and the peasants were commonly most vigilant in ensuring that he did in fact abide by it. Peasants could be vary resolute in defending their traditional rights and even on occasion in extending them. They could afford to be resolute, for the population was sparse and labour much in demand; this gave them an advantage which to some extent offset the concentration of landed property and of armed force in the hands of their lords. As a result the manorial regime was by no means a system of uncontrolled exploitation of labour. If custom bound the peasants to render dues and services, it also fixed the amounts. And to most peasants it gave at least that basic security which springs from the hereditary and guaranteed tenancy of a piece of land.
The position of the peasant in the old agricultural society was much strengthened, too, by the fact that – just like the noble – he passed his life firmly embedded in a group of kindred. The large family to which the peasant belonged consisted of blood-relatives by male and female descent and their spouses, all of them bound together by their ties with the head of the group – the father (or, failing him, mother) of the senior branch of the family. Often this kinship-group was officially recognised as the tenant of the peasant holding, which remained vested in it so long as the group survived, Such a family, sharing the same ‘pot, fire and loaf’, working the same unpartitioned fields, rooted in the same piece of earth for generations, was a social unit of great cohesiveness – even though it might itself be riven at times by bitter internal quarrels. And there is no doubt that the individual peasant gained much from belonging to such a group. Whatever his need, and even if he no longer lived with the family, he could always claim succour from his kinsfolk and be certain of receiving it. If the ties of blood bound they also supported every individual.
The network of social relationships into which a peasant was born was so strong and was taken so much for granted that it precluded any very radical disorientation. So long as that network remained intact peasants enjoyed not only a certain material security but also – which is even more relevant – a certain sense of security, a basic assurance which neither constant poverty nor occasional peril could destroy. Moreover such hardships were themselves taken for granted, as part of a state of affairs which seemed to have prevailed from all eternity. Horizons were narrow, and this was as true of social and economic as of geographical horizons. It was not simply that contact with the wide world beyond the manor boundaries was slight – the very thought of any fundamental transformation of society was scarcely conceivable. In an economy which was uniformly primitive, where nobody was very rich, there was nothing to arouse new wants; certainly nothing which could stimulate men to grandiose phantasies of wealth and power.

Norman Cohn, ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages’ (1957/2004, p55-56).

Categories
quotes

Quote #259: On Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers, on the blog Kung Fu Monkey, as quoted on rec.arts.sf.written by James Nicoll, via here and Paul Krugman (h/t WJJ)

Categories
quotes

Quote #258


After I’m gone, some of you will seclude yourselves in the forests and mountains to meditate, while others may drink rice wine and enjoy the company of women. Both kinds of Zen are fine, but if some become professional clerics, babbling about “Zen as the Way,” they are my enemies.

Ikkyu (1394-1481, zen priest and poet), trans. John Stevens, via dissolving path

Categories
links

Links for September 2010

Categories
quotes

Quote #257

Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.

Galileo Galilei (1564 -1642), via James V Stone

Categories
Uncategorized

Links for August 2010

Categories
quotes

The narrative construction of reality


Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and “narrative necessity” rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness,

Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21.

Categories
Uncategorized

Links for June-July 2010

Categories
quotes science

Quote #255: Friedman on theory


Viewed as a language, theory has no substantive content; it is a set of tautologies. Its function is to serve as a filing system for organizing empirical material and facilitating our understanding of it; and the criteria by which it is to be judged are appropriate to a filing system. Are the categories clearly and precisely defined? Are they exhaustive? Do we know where to file each individual item, or is there considerable ambiguity? Is the system of headings and subheadings so designed that we can quickly find an item we want, or must we hunt from place to place? Are the items we shall want to consider jointly filed? Does the filing system avoid elaborate cross-references?

Milton Friedman, in Essays in Positive Economics (1953). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (thanks Dan!)

Categories
psychology science

Homeopathy Generics

Simon Singh approached his debate with homeopathy-promoting MP David Tredinnick all wrong this morning. He dived into a critique of the studies Tredinnick presented, thus allowing him to maintain the advantage of framing the debate and losing most of the audience with discussion of statistics and control groups [1].

Instead, he should have laughed at the MP and said gently something like “It is undoubtedly true that homeopathy does work, the only question is about why it works. All the evidence suggests that the effect is due to a combination of the power of individual’s beliefs about homoeopathy and the healing benefits of a meaningful relationship with a physician. For every 1 study that says, like David Tredinnick’s three, that homeopathy has benefits beyond those of placebo there are 50 which suggest that homeopathy medicines are inert and all the properties ascribed to them are properties of belief and relationships. Because of this, we need to ask if we want to allow a misguided homeopathy industry to charge us for medicines which we know to be snake oil, and whether there is not some less expensive and less deceitful way we can access the powerful healing effects that placebos such as homeopathy provide.”

On that last point, I’ve had an idea. Homeopathy is fake medicine, and obviously this has lots of benefits. All the power of placebos! Minimal risk and side-effects! Safe to use in combination with conventional medicine! The only downside I can see is that only patients you allow to remain misinformed can benefit and that the homeopathy industry has all this rigmarole involved in the preparation and delivery of the product that necessarily makes it expensive. So why not sell fake homopathic medicine? I don’t see how homeopaths could object if the medical establishment turns their strategy back on them. We could even use their experimental methods to replicate the successful results they’ve found with homeopathic treatment for our fake-homeopathic treatment. Instead of branded pharmaceuticals you can buy generic pharmaceuticals which have the same chemical composition at the fraction of the price, why can’t we buy homeopathy generics which are equally inert? Doctors could be free to prescribe them, saving the NHS money and simultaneously allowing patients access to all the wonderful benefits of placebo.

[1] Not that discussion of statistics and control groups is a bad thing, or a guaranteed way to lose your audience, I just think Singh lost his because of the way he discussed statistics and control groups, and because it wasn’t essential to the wider issues

Categories
links

Links for May 2010

Categories
links politics

Quote #254: Democracy

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken