Scientist/layperson relations
jstemwedel | January 18, 2010Session description: Debris in the North Pacific Gyre received unprecedented attention in 2009 with voyages from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Project Kaisei, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each voyage integrated online outreach into its mission, but emphasized very different aspects of the problem. What are the challenges of creating a major outreach effort from one of the most isolated places on earth? How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance "exciting findings live from the field!" with "highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our…
jstemwedel | January 6, 2010Coming up with a good definition is hard. And it's not obvious that people are even really talking about the same thing when they identify an action or a situation as displaying civility or incivility.
So I'm wondering what kind of insight we can get by looking at some particular situations and deciding which side of the line it feels like they belong on.
Before I put the situations on the table, let me be transparent about how I'm making my calls: I'm going to be asking myself whether it feels like the people involved are showing each other respect, and I'm going to make a special effort to…
jstemwedel | December 10, 2009For those of you who have heard me issue calls for dialogue (not debate) on the subject of research with non-human animals -- especially if you're in the Los Angeles area -- I'm pleased to announce that there's an event coming up in February that's aimed at fostering just such a dialogue, in the three-dimensional world. Here's the announcement:
Save the date!
Perspectives on the Science and Ethics of Animal-Based Research
UCLA, Covel Commons, 6pm-8:30pm, February 16th, 2010
With the goal of opening an on-going dialogue between individuals who are in favor or opposed to the use of animals in…
jstemwedel | December 9, 2009It's quite likely, if you're reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you've already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you've been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who's telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you're still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of…
jstemwedel | November 12, 2009There is a story posted at ProPublica (and co-published with the Chicago Tribune) that examines a particular psychiatrist who was paid by a pharmaceutical company to travel around the U.S. to promote one of that company's antipsychotic drugs. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist was writing thousands of prescriptions for that same antipsychotic drug for his patients on Medicaid.
You might think that there would be at least the appearance of a conflict of interest here. However, the psychiatrist in question seems certain that there is not:
In an interview and in response to written questions, […
jstemwedel | November 6, 2009At Terra Sigillata, Abel notes that the Director of Duke University's Catholic Center is butting in to researchers' attempts to recruit participants for their research. As it happens, that research involves human sexuality and attitudes toward sex toys.
Here's how Abel lays it out:
Father Joe Vetter, director of Duke University's Catholic Center, is protesting trial participant accrual for a study being conducted on campus directed by Dr Dan Ariely, the James B Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Fuqua School of Business (story and video). ...
Ariely and his postdoctoral fellow, Dr…
jstemwedel | November 4, 2009At Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer notes a disturbing double standard:
[T]here's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That's why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I'm seeing politicians complain that…
jstemwedel | October 28, 2009In a recent post, I issued an invitation:
I am always up for a dialogue on the issue of our moral relation to animals and on the ethical use of animals in scientific research. If folks inclined towards the animal rights stance want to engage in a dialogue right here, in the comments on this post, I am happy to host it.
(I will not, however, be hosting a debate. A dialogue is different from a debate, and a dialogue is what I'm prepared to host.)
That post has received upward of 250 comments, so there was certainly some sort of exchange going on. But, did we manage to have something…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2009Over at Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel expressed exasperation that Nature and New Scientist are paying attention to (and lending too much credibility to) an astronomical theory Ethan views as a non-starter, Modified Netwonian Dynamics (or MOND):
[W]hy is Nature making a big deal out of a paper like this? Why are magazines like New Scientist declaring that there are cracks in dark matter theories?
Because someone (my guess is HongSheng Zhao, one of the authors of this paper who's fond of press releases and modifying gravity) is pimping this piece of evidence like it tells us something.…
jstemwedel | October 16, 2009This, in turn, means that members of the public who strongly disagree with your stand may decide to track you down and let you know they disagree with you.
Apparently, this may become an issue for those who signed the Pro-Test petition in support of ethical and human scientific research with animals. From an email sent to signatories:
[A] few websites hosted by animal rights activists have encouraged their readerships to visit the list of Pro-Test signatories in order to find names and to contact those persons to express their opposition to animal research. While your email addresses on the…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2009On my earlier post, "Dialogue, not debate", commenter dave c-h posed some interesting questions:
Is there an ethical point at which engagement is functionally equivalent to assent? In other words, is there a point at which dialogue should be replaced by active resistance? If so, how do you tell where that point is? I think many activists fear that dialogue is a tactic of those who support the status quo to co-opt them into a process that is unlikely to lead to any real change because the power is unevenly divided.
What the commenter says about the activists' fears sounds about right to me…
jstemwedel | September 28, 2009At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on "the other side", rather than just hunkering down to their research and hoping to be left alone.
The big thing we talked about was the need to shift the terms of engagement.
The mode people seem most used to -- and the one that seems to make the least difference -- is the debate. In a debate, the point is…
jstemwedel | September 19, 2009The other day, while surfing the web, my better half came upon this semi-official looking symbol for psychohazards:
The verbiage underneath the symbol seem to indicate conditions that might have serious consequences for one's picture of the world and its contents, or for one's ability to come to knowledge about the world. A philosopher who was so inclined could go to town on this.
However, while this particular icon was new to me, this isn't the first time I've seen the term "psychohazard" in use.
A long time ago, I was an undergraduate with an internship working in a cancer pharmacology…
jstemwedel | August 19, 2009At Philosophers' Playground, Steve Gimbel ponders the pedagogically appropriate way to label William Dembski:
I'm wrapping up work on my textbook Methods and Models: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and have run into a question. ...
The evolutionary biology track's final piece deals with William Dembski's work on intelligent design theory. Therein lies the question. The way the exercises are laid out is in three parts labeled The Case, The Scientist, and Your Job. The second part is a brief biographical sketch (a paragraph, just a couple sentences about the person's…
jstemwedel | August 7, 2009For those of you who have been following the various online reviews of and reactions to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, you may be interested in the Firedoglake Book Salon discussion of the book. The discussion takes place Saturday (tomorrow), 5-7 pm Eastern (2-4 pm Pacific; those of you in other time zones can probably calculate your local time equivalent better than I), will include author Chris Mooney, and will be hosted by yours truly.
Given that I'm pretty convinced I have the best commentariat in the…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2009As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you're just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of "Crackergate", nor a…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2009In this post, I continue working through my thoughts in response to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book, Unscientific America. In this post, I focus on their discussion of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. You might guess, given that I'm a member of the science blogosphere, that I have some pretty strong views about what blogs might accomplish in terms of helping the public engage with science. You would be correct.
A fair portion of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (reviewed here) explores conditions of American life that make it…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2009Today Americans for Medical Progress has announced three recipients for academic year 2009-2010 of the Michael D. Hayre Fellowship in Public Outreach, designed to inspire and motivate the next generation of research advocates. From the AMP press release:
The importance of animal research to medical progress will be highlighted in projects by three graduate students selected as Michael D. Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach, Americans for Medical Progress announced today.
Gillian Branden-Weiss and Breanna Caltagarone, students the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2009In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I'd have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say -- so much that I'm breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I'm going to start here with a post about the public's end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I'll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I'll take up the much discussed issue of the book's treatment of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.by Chris Mooney and Sheril KirshenbaumBasic Books2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy -- they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public's broad…