Let’s look at how Bhattacharjee sets the scene in the article:

[I]n the spring of 2010, a graduate student noticed anomalies in three experiments Stapel had run for him. When asked for the raw data, Stapel initially said he no longer had it. Later that year, shortly after Stapel became dean, the student mentioned his concerns to a young professor at the university gym. Each of them spoke to me but requested anonymity because they worried their careers would be damaged if they were identified.

The bold emphasis here (and in the quoted passages that follow) is mine. I find it striking that even now, when Stapel has essentially been fully discredited as a trustworthy scientist, these two members of the scientific community feel safer not being identified. It’s not entirely obvious to me if their worry is being identified as someone who was suspicious that fabrication was taking place but who said nothing to launch official inquiries — or whether they fear that being identified as someone who was suspicious of a fellow scientist could harm their standing in the scientific community.

If you dismiss that second possibility as totally implausible, read on:

The professor, who had been hired recently, began attending Stapel’s lab meetings. He was struck by how great the data looked, no matter the experiment. “I don’t know that I ever saw that a study failed, which is highly unusual,” he told me. “Even the best people, in my experience, have studies that fail constantly. Usually, half don’t work.”

The professor approached Stapel to team up on a research project, with the intent of getting a closer look at how he worked. “I wanted to kind of play around with one of these amazing data sets,” he told me. The two of them designed studies to test the premise that reminding people of the financial crisis makes them more likely to act generously.

In early February, Stapel claimed he had run the studies. “Everything worked really well,” the professor told me wryly. Stapel claimed there was a statistical relationship between awareness of the financial crisis and generosity. But when the professor looked at the data, he discovered inconsistencies confirming his suspicions that Stapel was engaging in fraud.

If one has suspicions about how reliable a fellow scientist’s results are, doing some empirical investigation seems like the right thing to do. Keeping an open mind and then examining the actual data might well show one’s suspicions to be unfounded.

Of course, that’s not what happened here. So, given a reason for doubt with stronger empirical support — not to mention the fact that scientists are trying to build a shared body of scientific knowledge (which means that unreliable papers in the literature can hurt the knowledge-building efforts of other scientists who trust that the work reported in that literature was done honestly), you would think the time was right for this professor to pass on what he had found to those at the university who could investigate further. Right?

The professor consulted a senior colleague in the United States, who told him he shouldn’t feel any obligation to report the matter.

For all the talk of science, and the scientific literature, being “self-correcting,” it’s hard to imagine the precise mechanism for such self-correction in a world where no scientist who is aware of likely scientific misconduct feels any obligation to report the matter.

But the person who alerted the young professor, along with another graduate student, refused to let it go. That spring, the other graduate student examined a number of data sets that Stapel had supplied to students and postdocs in recent years, many of which led to papers and dissertations. She found a host of anomalies, the smoking gun being a data set in which Stapel appeared to have done a copy-paste job, leaving two rows of data nearly identical to each other.

The two students decided to report the charges to the department head, Marcel Zeelenberg. But they worried that Zeelenberg, Stapel’s friend, might come to his defense. To sound him out, one of the students made up a scenario about a professor who committed academic fraud, and asked Zeelenberg what he thought about the situation, without telling him it was hypothetical. “They should hang him from the highest tree” if the allegations were true, was Zeelenberg’s response, according to the student.

Some might think these students were being excessively cautious, but the sad fact is that scientists faced with allegations of misconduct against a colleague — especially if they are brought by students — frequently side with their colleague and retaliate against those making the allegations. Students, after all, are new members of one’s professional community, so green one might not even think of them as really members. They are low status, they are learning how things work, they are judged likely to have misunderstood what they have seen. And, in contrast to one’s colleagues, students are transients. They are just passing through the training program, whereas you might hope to be with your colleagues for your whole professional life. In a case of dueling testimony, who are you more likely to believe?

Maybe the question should be whether your bias towards believing one over the other is strong enough to keep you from examining the available evidence to determine whether your trust is misplaced.

The students waited till the end of summer, when they would be at a conference with Zeelenberg in London. “We decided we should tell Marcel at the conference so that he couldn’t storm out and go to Diederik right away,” one of the students told me.

In London, the students met with Zeelenberg after dinner in the dorm where they were staying. As the night wore on, his initial skepticism turned into shock. It was nearly 3 when Zeelenberg finished his last beer and walked back to his room in a daze. In Tilburg that weekend, he confronted Stapel.

It might not be universally true, but at least some of the people who will lie about their scientific findings in a journal article will lie right to your face about whether they obtained those findings honestly. Yet lots of us think we can tell — at least with the people we know — whether they are being honest with us. This hunch can be just as wrong as the wrongest scientific hunch waiting for us to accumulate empirical evidence against it.

The students seeking Zeelenberg’s help in investigating Stapel’s misbehavior found a situation in which Zeelenberg would have to look at the empirical evidence first before he looked his colleague in the eye and asked him whether he was fabricating his results. They had already gotten him to say, at least in the abstract, that the kind of behavior they had reason to believe Stapel was committing was unacceptable in their scientific community. To make a conscious decision to ignore the empirical evidence would have meant Zeelenberg would have to see himself as displaying a kind of intellectual dishonesty — because if fabrication is harmful to science, it is harmful to science no matter who perpetrates it.

As it was, Zeelenberg likely had to make the painful concession that he had misjudged his colleague’s character and trustworthiness. But having wrong hunches is science is much less of a crime than clinging to those hunches in the face of mounting evidence against them.

Doing good science requires a delicate balance of trust and accountability. Scientists’ default position is to trust that other scientists are making honest efforts to build reliable scientific knowledge about the world, using empirical evidence and methods of inference that they display for the inspection (and critique) of their colleagues. Not to hold this default position means you have to build all your knowledge of the world yourself (which makes achieving anything like objective knowledge really hard). However, this trust is not unconditional, which is where the accountability comes is. Scientists recognize that they need to be transparent about what they did to build the knowledge — to be accountable when other scientists ask questions or disagree about conclusions — else that trust evaporates. When the evidence warrants it, distrusting a fellow scientist is not mean or uncollegial — it’s your duty. We need the help of other to build scientific knowledge, but if they insist that they ignore evidence of their scientific misbehavior, they’re not actually helping.

Bhattacharjee writes:

[I]n the spring of 2010, a graduate student noticed anomalies in three experiments Stapel had run for him. When asked for the raw data, Stapel initially said he no longer had it. Later that year, shortly after Stapel became dean, the student mentioned his concerns to a young professor at the university gym. Each of them spoke to me but requested anonymity because they worried their careers would be damaged if they were identified.

The professor, who had been hired recently, began attending Stapel’s lab meetings. He was struck by how great the data looked, no matter the experiment. “I don’t know that I ever saw that a study failed, which is highly unusual,” he told me. “Even the best people, in my experience, have studies that fail constantly. Usually, half don’t work.”

In the next post, we’ll look at how this other professor’s curiosity about Stapel’s too-good-to-be-true results led to the unraveling of Stapel’s fraud. But I think it’s worth pausing here to say a bit more on how very odd a training environment Stapel’s research group provided for his students.

None of his studies failed. Since, as we saw in the last post, Stapel was also conducting (or, more accurately, claiming to conduct) his students’ studies, that means none of his students’ studies failed.

This is pretty much the opposite of every graduate student experience in an empirical field that I have heard described. Most studies fail. Getting to a 50% success rate with your empirical studies is a significant achievement.

Graduate students who are also Trekkies usually come to recognize that the travails of empirical studies are like a version of the Kobayashi Maru.

Introduced in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the Kobayashi Maru is a training simulation in which Star Fleet cadets are presented with a civilian ship in distress. Saving the civilians requires the cadet to violate treaty by entering the Neutral Zone (and in the simulation, this choice results in a Klingon attack and the boarding of the cadet’s ship). Honoring the treaty, on the other hand, means abandoning the civilians and their disabled ship in the Neutral Zone. The Kobayashi Maru is designed as a “no-win” scenario. The intent of the test is to discover how trainees face such a situation. Owing to James T. Kirk’s performance on the test, Wikipedia notes that some Trekkies also view the Kobayashi Maru as a problem whose solution depends on redefining the problem.

Scientific knowledge-building turns out to be packed with particular plans that cannot succeed at yielding the particular pieces of knowledge the scientists hope to discover. This is because scientists are formulating plans on the basis of what is already known to try to reveal what isn’t yet known — so knowing where to look, or what tools to use to do the looking, or what other features of the world are there to confound your ability to get clear information with those tools, is pretty hard.

Failed attempts happen. If they’re the sort of thing that will crush your spirit and leave you unable to shake it off and try it again, or to come up with a new strategy to try, then the life of a scientist will be a pretty hard life for you.

Grown-up scientists have studies fail all the time. Graduate students training to be scientists do, too. But graduate students also have mentors who are supposed to help them bounce back from failure — to figure out the most likely sources of failure, whether it’s worth trying the study again, whether a new approach would be better, whether some crucial piece of knowledge has been learned despite the failure of what was planned. Mentors give scientific trainees a set of strategies for responding to particular failures, and they also give reassurance that even good scientists fail.

Scientific knowledge is built by actual humans who don’t have perfect foresight about the features of the world as yet undiscovered, humans who don’t have perfectly precise instruments (or hands and eyes using those instruments), humans who sometimes mess up in executing their protocols. Yet the knowledge is built, and it frequently works pretty well.

In the context of scientific training, it strikes me as malpractice to send new scientists out into the world with the expectation that all of their studies should work, and without any experience grappling with studies that don’t work. Shielding his students from their Kobayashi Maru is just one more way Diederik Stapel cheated them out of a good scientific training.

I suppose it’s logically possible for a scientist to commit misconduct in a limited domain — say, to make up the results of his own research projects but to make every effort to train his students to be honest scientists. This doesn’t strike me as a likely scenario, though. Publishing fraudulent results as if they were factual is lying to one’s fellow scientists — including the generation of scientists one is training. Moreover, most research groups pursue interlocking questions, meaning that the questions the grad students are working to answer generally build on pieces of knowledge the boss has built — or, in Stapel’s case “built”. This means that at minimum, a fabricating PI is probably wasting his trainees’ time by letting them base their own research efforts on claims that there’s no good scientific reason to trust.

And as Bhattacharjee describes the situation for Stapel’s trainees, things for them were even worse:

He [Stapel] published more than two dozen studies while at Groningen, many of them written with his doctoral students. They don’t appear to have questioned why their supervisor was running many of the experiments for them. Nor did his colleagues inquire about this unusual practice.

(Bold emphasis added.)

I’d have thought that one of the things a scientist-in-training hopes to learn in the course of her graduate studies is not just how to design a good experiment, but how to implement it. Making your experimental design work in the real world is often much harder than it seems like it will be, but you learn from these difficulties — about the parameters you ignored in the design that turn out to be important, about the limitations of your measurement strategies, about ways the system you’re studying frustrates the expectations you had about it before you were actually interacting with it.

I’ll even go out on a limb and say that some experience doing experiments can make a significant difference in a scientist’s skill conceiving of experimental approaches to problems.

That Stapel cut his students out of doing the experiments was downright weird.

Now, scientific trainees probably don’t have the most realistic picture of precisely what competencies they need to master to become successful grown-up scientists in a field. They trust that the grown-up scientists training them know what these competencies are, and that these grown-up scientists will make sure that they encounter them in their training. Stapel’s trainees likely trusted him to guide them. Maybe they thought that he would have them conducting experiments if that were a skill that would require a significant amount of time or effort to master. Maybe they assumed that implementing the experiments they had designed was just so straightforward that Stapel thought they were better served working to learn other competencies instead.

(For that to be the case, though, Stapel would have to be the world’s most reassuring graduate advisor. I know my impostor complex was strong enough that I wouldn’t have believed I could do an experiment my boss or my fellow grad students viewed as totally easy until I had actually done it successfully three times. If I had to bet money, it would be that some of Stapel’s trainees wanted to learn how to do the experiments, but they were too scared to ask.)

There’s no reason, however, that Stapel’s colleagues should have thought it was OK that his trainees were not learning how to do experiments by taking charge of doing their own. If they did know and they did nothing, they were complicit in a failure to provide adequate scientific training to trainees in their program. If they didn’t know, that’s an argument that departments ought to take more responsibility for their trainees and to exercise more oversight rather than leaving each trainee to the mercies of his or her advisor.

And, as becomes clear from the New York Times Magazine article, doing experiments wasn’t the only piece of standard scientific training of which Stapel’s trainees were deprived. Bhattacharjee describes the revelation when a colleague collaborated with Stapel on a piece of research:

Stapel and [Ad] Vingerhoets [a colleague of his at Tilburg] worked together with a research assistant to prepare the coloring pages and the questionnaires. Stapel told Vingerhoets that he would collect the data from a school where he had contacts. A few weeks later, he called Vingerhoets to his office and showed him the results, scribbled on a sheet of paper. Vingerhoets was delighted to see a significant difference between the two conditions, indicating that children exposed to a teary-eyed picture were much more willing to share candy. It was sure to result in a high-profile publication. “I said, ‘This is so fantastic, so incredible,’ ” Vingerhoets told me.

He began writing the paper, but then he wondered if the data had shown any difference between girls and boys. “What about gender differences?” he asked Stapel, requesting to see the data. Stapel told him the data hadn’t been entered into a computer yet.

Vingerhoets was stumped. Stapel had shown him means and standard deviations and even a statistical index attesting to the reliability of the questionnaire, which would have seemed to require a computer to produce. Vingerhoets wondered if Stapel, as dean, was somehow testing him. Suspecting fraud, he consulted a retired professor to figure out what to do. “Do you really believe that someone with [Stapel’s] status faked data?” the professor asked him.

“At that moment,” Vingerhoets told me, “I decided that I would not report it to the rector.”

Stapel’s modus operandi was to make up his results out of whole cloth — to produce “findings” that looked statistically plausible without the muss and fuss of conducting actual experiments or collecting actual data. Indeed, since the thing he was creating that needed to look plausible enough to be accepted by his fellow scientists was the analyzed data, he didn’t bother making up raw data from which such an analysis could be generated.

Connecting the dots here, this surely means that Stapel’s trainees must not have gotten any experience dealing with raw data or learning how to apply methods of analysis to actual data sets. This left another gaping hole in the scientific training they deserved.

It would seem that those being trained by other scientists in Stapel’s program were getting some experience in conducting experiments, collecting data, and analyzing their data — since that experimentation, data collection, and data analysis became fodder for discussion in the ethics training that Stapel led. From the article:

And yet as part of a graduate seminar he taught on research ethics, Stapel would ask his students to dig back into their own research and look for things that might have been unethical. “They got back with terrible lapses­,” he told me. “No informed consent, no debriefing of subjects, then of course in data analysis, looking only at some data and not all the data.” He didn’t see the same problems in his own work, he said, because there were no real data to contend with.

I would love to know the process by which Stapel’s program decided that he was the best one to teach the graduate seminar on research ethics. I wonder if this particular teaching assignment was one of those burdens that his colleagues tried to dodge, or if research ethics was viewed as a teaching assignment requiring no special expertise. I wonder how it’s sitting with them that they let a now-famous cheater teach their grad students how to be ethical scientists.

The whole “those who can’t do, teach” adage rings hollow here.

There’s not much to say about the badness of a scientist making results up. Science is supposed to be an activity in which people build a body of reliable knowledge about the world, grounding that knowledge in actual empirical observations of that world. Substituting the story you want to tell for those actual empirical observations undercuts that goal.

But Bhattacharjee’s article is fascinating because it goes some way to helping illuminate why Stapel abandoned the path of scientific discovery and went down the path of scientific fraud instead. It shows us some of the forces and habits that, while seemingly innocuous taken individually, can compound to reinforce scientific behavior that is not helpful to the project of knowledge-building. It reveals forces within scientific communities that make it hard for scientists to pursue suspicions of fraud to get formal determinations of whether their colleagues are actually cheating. And, the article exposes some of the harms Stapel committed beyond publishing lies as scientific findings.

It’s an incredibly rich piece of reporting, one which I recommend you read in its entirety, maybe more than once. Given just how much there is to talk about here, I’ll be taking at least a few posts to highlight bits of the article as nourishing food for thought.

Let’s start with how Stapel describes his early motivation for fabricating results to Bhattacharjee. From the article:

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

(Bold emphasis added.)

It’s worth noting here that other scientists — plenty of scientists who were never cheaters, in fact — have also pursued science as a quest for beauty, elegance, and order. For many, science is powerful because it is a way to find order in a messy universe, to discover simple natural laws that give rise to such an array of complex phenomena. We’ve discussed this here before, when looking at the tension between Platonist and Aristotelian strategies for getting to objective truths:

Plato’s view was that the stuff of our world consists largely of imperfect material instantiations of immaterial ideal forms -– and that science makes the observations it does of many examples of material stuff to get a handle on those ideal forms.

If you know the allegory of the cave, however, you know that Plato didn’t put much faith in feeble human sense organs as a route to grasping the forms. The very imperfection of those material instantiations that our sense organs apprehend would be bound to mislead us about the forms. Instead, Plato thought we’d need to use the mind to grasp the forms.

This is a crucial juncture where Aristotle parted ways with Plato. Aristotle still thought that there was something like the forms, but he rejected Plato’s full-strength rationalism in favor of an empirical approach to grasping them. If you wanted to get a handle on the form of “horse,” for example, Aristotle thought the thing to do was to examine lots of actual specimens of horse and to identify the essence they all have in common. The Aristotelian approach probably feels more sensible to modern scientists than the Platonist alternative, but note that we’re still talking about arriving at a description of “horse-ness” that transcends the observable features of any particular horse.

Honest scientists simultaneously reach for beautiful order and the truth. They use careful observations of the world to try to discern the actual structures and forces giving rise to what they are observing. They recognize that our observational powers are imperfect, that our measurements are not infinitely precise (and that they are often at least a little inaccurate), but those observations, those measurements, are what we have to work with in discerning the order underlying them.

This is why Ockham’s razor — to prefer simple explanations for phenomena over more complicated ones — is a strategy but not a rule. Scientists go into their knowledge-building endeavor with the hunch that the world has more underlying order than is immediately apparent to us — and that careful empirical study will help us discover that order — but how things actually are provides a constraint on how much elegance there is to be found.

However, as the article in the New York Times Magazine makes clear, Stapel was not alone in expecting the world he was trying to describe in his research to yield elegance:

In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,’” Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.

The journal editors’ preference here connects to a fairly common notion of understanding. Understanding a system is being able to identify that components of that system that make a difference in producing the effects of interest — and, by extension, recognizing which components of the system don’t feature prominently in bringing about the behaviors you’re studying. Again, the hunch is that there are likely to be simple mechanisms underlying apparently complex behavior. When you really understand the system, you can point out those mechanisms and explain what’s going on while leaving all the other extraneous bits in the background.

Pushing to find this kind of underlying simplicity has been a fruitful scientific strategy, but it’s a strategy that can run into trouble if the mechanisms giving rise to the behavior you’re studying are in fact complicated. There’s a phrase attributed to Einstein that captures this tension nicely: as simple as possible … but not simpler.

The journal editors, by expressing to Stapel that they liked simplicity more than messy relationships between multiple variables, were surely not telling Stapel to lie about his findings to create such simplicity. They were likely conveying their view that further study, or more careful analysis of data, might yield elegant relations that were really there but elusive. However, intentionally or not, they did communicate to Stapel that simple relationships fit better with journal editors’ hunches about what the world is like than did messy ones — and that results that seemed to reveal simple relations were thus more likely to pass through peer review without raising serious objections.

So, Stapel was aware that the gatekeepers of the literature in his field preferred elegant results. He also seemed to have felt the pressure that early-career academic scientists often feel to make all of his research time productive — where the ultimate measure of productivity is a publishable result. Again, from the New York Times Magazine article:

The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.

(Bold emphasis added.)

The sunk time clearly struck Stapel as a problem. Making a careful study of the particular psychological phenomenon he was trying to understand hadn’t yielded good results — which is to say, results that would be recognized by scientific journal editors or peer reviewers as adding to the shared body of knowledge by revealing something about the mechanism at work in the phenomenon. This is not to say that experiments with negative results don’t tell scientists something about how the world is. But what negative results tell us is usually that the available data don’t support the hypothesis, or perhaps that the experimental design wasn’t a great way to obtain data to let us evaluate that hypothesis.

Scientific journals have not generally been very interested in publishing negative results, however, so scientists tend to view them as failures. They may help us to reject appealing hypotheses or to refine experimental strategies, but they don’t usually do much to help advance a scientist’s career. If negative results don’t help you get publications, without which it’s harder to get grants to fund research that could find positive results, then the time and money spent doing all that research has been wasted.

And Stapel felt — maybe because of his hunch that the piece of the world he was trying to describe had to have an underlying order, elegance, simplicity — that his hypothesis was right. The messiness of actual data from the world got in the way of proving it, but it had to be so. And this expectation of elegance and simplicity fit perfectly with the feedback he had heard before from journal editors in his field (feedback that may well have fed Stapel’s own conviction).

A career calculation paired with a strong metaphysical commitment to underlying simplicity seems, then, to have persuaded Diederik Stapel to let his hunch weigh more heavily than the data and then to commit the cardinal sin of falsifying data that could be presented to other scientists as “evidence” to support that hunch.

No one made Diederik Stapel cross that line. But it’s probably worth thinking about the ways that commitments within scientific communities — especially methodological commitments that start to take on the strength of metaphysical commitments — could have made crossing it more tempting.

TSA established a committee to review the prohibited items list based on an overall risk-based security approach. After the review, TSA Administrator John S. Pistole made the decision to start allowing the following items in carry-on bags beginning April 25th:

• Small Pocket Knives – Small knives with non-locking blades smaller than 2.36 inches and less than 1/2 inch in width will be permitted
• Small Novelty Bats and Toy Bats
• Ski Poles
• Hockey Sticks
• Lacrosse Sticks
• Billiard Cues
• Golf Clubs (Limit Two)

This is part of an overall Risk-Based Security approach, which allows Transportation Security Officers to better focus their efforts on finding higher threat items such as explosives. This decision aligns TSA more closely with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards.

These similar items will still remain on the prohibited items list:

• Razor blades and box cutters will remain prohibited in carry-on luggage.
• Full-size baseball, softball and cricket bats are prohibited items in carry-on luggage.

As Mayo notes, this particular framing of what does or does not count as a “higher threat item” on a flight has not been warmly embraced by everyone.

Notably, the Flight Attendants Union Coalition, the Coalition of AIrline Pilots Associations, some federal air marshals, and at least one CEO of an airline have gone on record against the rule change. Their objection is two-fold: removing these items from the list of items prohibited in carry-ons is unlikely to actually make screening lines at airports go any faster (since now you have to wait for the passenger arguing that there’s only 3 ounces of toothpaste left in the tube, so it should be allowed and the passenger arguing that her knife’s 2.4 inch blade is close enough to 2.36 inches), and allowing these items in carry-on bags on flights is likely to make those flights more dangerous for the people on them.

But that’s not the way the TSA is thinking about the risks here. Mayo writes:

By putting less focus on these items, Pistole says, airport screeners will be able to focus on looking for bomb components, which present a greater threat to aircraft. Such as:

bottled water, shampoo, cold cream, tooth paste, baby food, perfume, liquid make-up, etc. (over 3.4 oz).

They do have an argument; namely, that while liquids could be used to make explosives sharp objects will not bring down a plane. At least not so long as we can rely on the locked, bullet-proof cockpit door. Not that they’d want to permit any bullets to be around to test… And not that the locked door rule can plausibly be followed 100% of the time on smaller planes, from my experience. …

When the former TSA chief, Kip Hawley, was asked to weigh in, he fully supported Pistole; he regretted that he hadn’t acted to permit the above sports items during his reign service at TSA:

“They ought to let everything on that is sharp and pointy. Battle axes, machetes … bring anything you want that is pointy and sharp because while you may be able to commit an act of violence, you will not be able to take over the plane. It is as simple as that,” he said. (Link is here.)

I burst out laughing when I read this, but he was not joking:

Asked if he was using hyperbole in suggesting that battle axes be allowed on planes, Hawley said he was not.

“I really believe it. What are you going to do when you get on board with a battle ax? And you pull out your battle ax and say I’m taking over the airplane. You may be able to cut one or two people, but pretty soon you would be down in the aisle and the battle ax would be used on you.”

There does seem to be an emphasis on relying on passengers to rise up against ax-wielders, that passengers are angry these days at anyone who starts trouble. But what about the fact that there’s a lot more “air rage” these days? … That creates a genuine risk as well.

Will the availability of battle axes make disputes over the armrest more civil or less? Is the TSA comfortable with whatever happens on a flight so long as it falls short of bringing down the plane? How precisely did the TSA arrive at this particular assessment of risks that makes an 8 ounce bottle of conditioner more of a danger than a hockey stick?

And, perhaps most troubling, if the TSA is putting so much reliance on the vigilance and willingness to mount a response of passengers and flight crews, why does it look like they failed to seek out input from those passengers and flight crews about what kind of in-flight risks they are willing to undertake?

Maybe the risk of being crushed to death (or burned to death, or what have you) is just a trade-off poor people are (or should be) willing to accept to draw a salary. At least, that seems to be the take-away message from the crowd arguing that it would cost too much to have safety regulation (and enforcement) with teeth.

It is hard not to consider how this kind of attitude might get extended to other kinds of workplaces — like, say, academic research labs — given that last week UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran was also scheduled to return to court for a preliminary hearing on the felony charges of labor code violations brought against him in response to the 2008 fire in his laboratory that killed his employee, Shari Sangji.

Jyllian Kemsley has a detailed look at how Harran’s defense team has responded to the charges of specific violations of the California Labor Code, charges involving failure to provide adequate training, failure to have adequate procedures in place to correct unsafe conditions or work practices, and failure to require workers wear appropriate clothing for the work being done. Since I’m not a lawyer, it’s hard for me to assess the likelihood that the defense responses to these charges would be persuasive to a judge, but ethically, they’re pretty weak tea.

Sadly, though, it’s weak tea of the exact sort that my scientific training has led me to expect from people directing scientific research labs in academic settings.

When safety training is confined to a single safety video that graduate students are shown when they enter a program, that tells graduate students that their safety is not a big deal in the research activities that are part of their training.

When there’s not enough space under the hood for all the workers in a lab to conduct all the activities that, for safety’s sake, ought to be conducted under the hood — and when the boss expects all those activities to happen without delay — that tells them that a sacrifice in safety to produce quick results is acceptable.

When a student-volunteer needs to receive required ionizing radiation safety training to get a film badge that will give her access to the facility where she can irradiate her cells for an experiment, and the PI, upon hearing that the next training session in three weeks away, says to the student-volunteer, “Don’t bother; use my film badge,” that tells people in the lab that the PI is unwilling to lose three weeks of unpaid labor on one aspect of a research project just to make the personnel involved a little bit safer.

When people running a lab take an attitude of “Eh, young people are going to dress how they’re going to dress” rather than imposing clear rules for their laboratories that people whose dress is unsafe for the activities they are to undertake don’t get to undertake them, that tells the personnel in the lab that whatever cost is involved in holding this line — losing a day’s worth of work, being viewed by one’s underlings as strict rather than cool — has been judged too high relative to the benefit of making personnel in the lab safer.

When university presidents or other administrators proclaim that knowledge-builders “must continue to recalibrate [their] risk tolerance” by examining their “own internal policies and ask[ing] the question—do they meet—or do they exceed—our legal or regulatory requirements,” that tells knowledge-builders at those universities that people with significantly more power than them judge efforts to make things safer for knowledge-builders (and for others, like the human subjects of their research) as an unnecessary burden. When institutions need to become leaner, or more agile, shouldn’t researchers (and human subjects) do their part by accepting more risk as the price of doing business?

To be sure, safety isn’t free. But there are also costs to being less safe in academic research settings.

For example, personnel develop lax attitudes toward risks and trainees take these attitudes with them when they go out in the world as grown-up scientists. Surrounding communities can get hurt by improper disposal of hazardous materials, or by inadequate safety measures taken by researchers working with infectious agents who then go home and cough on their families and friends. Sometimes, personnel are badly injured, or killed.

And, if academic scientists are dragging feet on making things safer for the researchers on their team because it takes time and effort to investigate risks and make sensible plans for managing them, to develop occupational health plans and to institute standard operating procedures that everyone on the research team knows and follows, I hope they’re noticing that facing felony charges stemming from safety problems in their labs can also take lots of time and effort.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times reports that Patrick Harran will stand trial after an LA County Superior Court judge denied a defense motion to dismiss the case.

Bissette argues that the response those of us with chemistry backgrounds often take to the successful marketing of “chemical free” products, namely, pointing out that the world around us is made of chemicals, fails to engage with people’s real concerns. He writes:

Look at the history of our profession – from tetraethyl lead to thalidomide to Bhopal – and maintain with a straight face that chemphobia is entirely unwarranted and irrational. Much like mistrust of the medical profession, it is unfortunate and unproductive, but it is in part our own fault. Arrogance and paternalism are still all too common across the sciences, and it’s entirely understandable that sections of the public treat us as villains.

Of course it’s silly to tar every chemical and chemist with the same brush, but from the outside we must appear rather esoteric and monolithic. Chemphobia ought to provoke humility, not eye-rolling. If the public are ignorant of chemistry, it’s our job to engage with them – not to lecture or hand down the Truth, but simply to talk and educate. …

[A] common response to chemphobia is to define “chemicals” as something like “any tangible matter”. From the lab this seems natural, and perhaps it is; in daily life, however, I think it’s at best overstatement and at worst dishonest. Drawing a distinction between substances which we encounter daily and are not harmful under those conditions – obvious things like water and air, kitchen ingredients, or common metals – and the more exotic, concentrated, or synthetic compounds we often deal with is useful. The observation that both groups are made of the same stuff is metaphysically profound but practically trivial for most people. We treat them very differently, and the use of the word “chemical” to draw this distinction is common, useful, and not entirely ignorant. …

This definition is of course a little fuzzy at the edges. Not all “chemicals” are synthetic, and plenty of commonly-encountered materials are. Regardless, I think we can very broadly use ‘chemical’ to mean the kinds of matter you find in a lab but not in a kitchen, and I think this is how most people use it.

Crucially, this distinction tends to lead to the notion of chemicals as harmful: bleach is a chemical; it has warning stickers, you keep it under the sink, and you wear gloves when using it. Water isn’t! You drink it, you bathe in it, it falls from the sky. Rightly or wrongly, chemphobia emerges from the common usage of the word ‘chemical’.

There are some places here where I’m not in complete agreement with Bissette.

My kitchen includes a bunch of chemicals that aren’t kept under the sink or handled only with gloves, including sodium bicarbonate, acetic acid, potassium bitartrate, lecithin, pectin, and ascorbic acid. We use these chemicals in cooking because of the reactions they undergo (and the alternative reactions they prevent — those ascorbic acid crystals see a lot of use in our homemade white sangria preventing the fruit from discoloring when it comes in contact with oxygen). And, I reckon it’s not just people with PhDs in chemistry who recognize that chemical leaveners in their quickbreads and pancakes depend on some kind of chemical reaction to produce their desired effects. Notwithstanding that recognition of chemical reactivity, many of these same folks will happily mix sodium bicarbonate with water and gulp it down if that batch of biscuits isn’t sitting well in their tummies, with nary a worry that they are ingesting something that could require a call to poison control.

Which is to say, I think Bissette puts too much weight on the assumption that there is a clear “common usage” putting all chemicals on the “bad” side of the line, even if the edges of the line are fuzzy.

Indeed, it’s hard not to believe that people in countries like the U.S. are generally moving in the direction of greater comfort with the idea that important bits of their world — including their own bodies — are composed of chemicals. (Casual talk about moody teenagers being victims of their brain chemistry is just one example of this.) Aside from the most phobic of the chemophobic, people seem OK with the idea that their bodies use chemical (say, to digest their food) and even that our pharmacopeia relies on chemical (that can, for example, relieve our pain or reduce inflammation).

These quibbles aside, I think Bissette has identified the central concern at the center of much chemophobia: The public is bombarded with products and processes that may or may not contain various kinds of chemicals for which they have no clear information. They can’t tell from their names (if those names are even disclosed on labels) what those chemicals do. They don’t know what possible harms might come from exposure to these chemicals (or what amounts it might take for exposure to be risky). They don’t know why the chemicals are in their products — what goal they achieve, and whether that goal is one that primarily serves the consumers, the retailers, or the manufacturers. And they don’t trust the people with enough knowledge and information to answer these questions.

Maybe some of this is the public’s distrust for scientists. People imagine scientists off in their supervillain labs, making plans to conquer non-scientists, rather than recognizing that scientists walk among them (and maybe even coach their kids’ soccer teams). This kind of distrust can be addressed by scientists actually being visible as members of their communities — and listening to concerns voiced by people in those communities.

A large part of this distrust, though, is likely distrust of corporations, claiming chemistry will bring us better living but then prioritizing the better living of CEOs and shareholders while cutting corners on safety testing, informative labeling, and avoiding environmental harms in the manufacture and use of the goodies they offer. I’m not chemophobic, but I think there’s good reason for presumptive distrust of corporations that see consumers as walking wallets rather than as folks deserving information to make their own sensible choices.

Scientists need start addressing that element of chemophobia — and join in putting pressure on the private sector to do a better job earning the public’s trust.

At the center of the research scandal is the death of Dan Markingson, who was a human subject in a clinical trial of psychiatric drugs. Detailed background on the case can be found here, and Judy Stone has blogged extensively about the ethical dimensions of the case.

Elliott writes:

Very few signers come from the University of Minnesota. In fact, only two people from the Center for Bioethics have signed: Leigh Turner and me. This is not because any faculty member outside the Department of Psychiatry actually defends the ethics of the study, at least as far as I can tell. What seems to bother people here is speaking out about it. Very few faculty members are willing to register their objections publicly.

Why not? Well, there are the obvious possibilities – fear, apathy, self-interest, and so on. At least one person has told me she is unwilling to sign because she doesn’t think the petition will succeed. But there may be a more interesting explanation that I’d like to explore. …

Why would faculty members remain silent about such an alarming sequence of events? One possible reason is simply because they do not feel as if the wrongdoing has anything to do with them. The University of Minnesota is a vast institution; the scandal took place in a single department; if anyone is to be blamed, it is the psychiatrists and the university administrators, not them. Simply being a faculty member at the university does not implicate them in the wrongdoing or give them any special obligation to fix it. In a phrase: no guilt, hence no responsibility.

My view is somewhat different. These events have made me deeply ashamed to be a part of the University of Minnesota, in the same way that I feel ashamed to be a Southerner when I see video clips of Strom Thurmond’s race-baiting speeches or photos of Alabama police dogs snapping at black civil rights marchers. I think that what our psychiatrists did to Dan Markingson was wrong in the deepest sense. It was exploitative, cruel, and corrupt. Almost as disgraceful are the actions university officials have taken to cover it up and protect the reputation of the university. The shame I feel comes from the fact that I have worked at the University of Minnesota for 15 years. I have even been a member of the IRB. For better or worse, my identity is bound up with the institution.

These two different reactions – shame versus guilt – differ in important ways. Shame is linked with honor; it is about losing the respect of others, and by virtue of that, losing your self-respect. And honor often involves collective identity. While we don’t usually feel guilty about the actions of other people, we often do feel ashamed if those actions reflect on our own identities. So, for example, you can feel ashamed at the actions of your parents, your fellow Lutherans, or your physician colleagues – even if you feel as if it would be unfair for anyone to blame you personally for their actions.

Shame, unlike guilt, involves the imagined gaze of other people. As Ruth Benedict writes: “Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not.”

As Elliott notes, one way to avoid an audience — and thus to avoid shame — is to actively participate in, or tacitly endorse, a cover-up of the wrongdoing. I’m inclined to think, however, that taking steps to avoid shame by hiding the facts, or by allowing retaliation against people asking inconvenient questions, is itself a kind of wrongdoing — the kind of thing that incurs guilt, for which no audience is required.

As well, I think the scholars and researchers at the University of Minnesota who prefer not to take a stand on how their university responds to ethically problematic research, even if it is research in someone else’s lab, or someone else’s department, underestimate the size of the audience for their actions and for their inaction.

A hugely significant segment of this audience is their trainees. Their students and postdocs (and others involved in training relationships with them) are watching them, trying to draw lessons about how to be a grown-up scientist or scholar, a responsible member of a discipline, a responsible member of a university community, a responsible citizen of the world. The people they are training are looking to them to set a good example on how to respond to problems — by addressing them, learning from them, making things right, and doing better going forward, or by lying, covering up, and punishing people harmed by trying to recover costs from them (thus sending a message to others daring to point out how they have been harmed).

There are many fewer explicit conversations about such issues than one might hope in a scientist’s training. In the absence of explicit conversations, most of what trainees have to go on is how the people training them actually behave. And sometimes, a mentor’s silence speaks as loud as words.

Baba Brinkman
“The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised”
Lit Fuse Records, 2011

This is an album that is, in its way, one long argument (in 14 tracks) that the theory of evolution is a useful lens through which to make sense of our world and our lives. In making this argument, Brinkman also plays with standard conventions within the rap genre, pointing to predecessors and influences (not only rappers but also the original Chuck D), calling out enemies, bragging about his rapping prowess, and centering himself as an illustrative example of the processes he’s describing. There is also a healthy dose of swearing (as befits the genre). The ordering of the tracks is clearly thematic, with a substantial stretch near the middle of the album focused on sexual selection. Most of the tracks hold up well enough that you could listen to the album on shuffle, but I recommend listening to the whole thing in order first to get the fullest impact.

The first track, “Natural Selection 2.0,” opens by taking aim at people who can’t or won’t wrap their heads around the explanatory power of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Brinkman specifically targets creationists and other “Darwin-haters” for scorn, but his focus is less on their bad arguments than on their resistance to evolutionary biology’s good ones.

Track 2, “Black-eyed Peas,” borrows a strategy from Origin of Species and connects natural selection with the principles of domestication. Here, Brinkman includes not just cattle and peaches and black-eyed peas, but also artists struggling for survival within the music industry (including Black-Eyed Peas), and the chorus features a Fugees sample that rewards listeners of a certain age for surviving as long as they have.

Track 3, the catchy as Hell “I’m A African 2.0,” flips an Afrocentric anthem into a celebration of the common origins of all humanity. The verses also gesture towards ways that archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists are scientists taking different angles, and producing different evidence, on the same natural processes.

In track 4, “Creationist Cousins 2.0,” Brinkman offers a description of dinner-table debates about evolutionary theory that is really a song about the strategy of engagement (with hypotheses, empirical data, and objections) central to scientific knowledge-building. It’s also a song that reflects Brinkman’s faith that rational argumentation from evidence we can agree upon should ultimately lead us to shared conclusions. The reality of dialogic exchanges (and of scientific knowledge-building) is more complicated, but it’s hard to fully do justice to any real practice you’re trying to describe in a four minute song.

Track 5, “Survival of the Fittest 2.0,” starts with a shout-out to a bunch of evolutionary psychologists and then takes up the question of how to understand violent behavior and what might be construed as “poor life choices” in the environment of American inner cities. Brinkman pushes the gangsta rap genre’s description of harsh living conditions further by examining whether thug life might embody rational reproductive and survival strategies, all the while pointing us toward the possibility of addressing the economic and social inequalities in the environment that make these behaviors adaptive.

Track 6, “Group Selection 2.0,” simultaneously calls out Social Darwinism as unscientific (“Just because something exists in a state of nature/Doesn’t give it a moral basis, that’s a false correlation”) and explores the value of altruistic behavior. Here, Brinkman explicitly voices openness to group selection as a real evolutionary mechanism (“Some people say group selectionism is false/But I say let the evidence call it”).

Track 7, “Worst Comes to Worst 2.0,” continues the exploration of how much environment matters to what kinds of traits or behaviors are adaptive or maladaptive. Brinkman notes that Homo sapiens are apex predators who have a choice about whether to maintain environments in which violence against other humans works as an adaptive strategy. Since violence isn’t something to which our genes condemn us, he holds open the possibility that we could remake our environment to favor human behavior as “peaceful as Galapagos finches”.

Track 8, “Dr. Tatiana,” is an ode to the multifarious ways in which members of the animal kingdom knock boots (and a shout-out to the author noted for documenting them), as well as the track on the album least likely to be approved as a prom theme (although the decorating committee could have a lot of fun with it). It makes a compelling musical environment for examining the environments and intraspecies competitions in which particular intriguing mating practices might make sense.

Track 9, “Sexual Selection 2.0,” considers the hypothesis that complex language in general, and Baba Brinkman’s aptitude for rhyming in particular, is something that might have evolved to help win the competition for mates. Brinkman’s hip hop flow is enticing, but in this song it exposes his adaptationist assumption that all the traits that have persisted in our population got there because they were selected for to help us evade predators, combat parasites, or get laid. What would Stephen Jay Gould say?

Track 10, “Hypnotize 2.0,” continues in the theme of sexual selection, exploring secondary sexual characteristics (including, perhaps, mad rhyming skills) as adaptive traits:

So now this whole rap thing seems awfully strange

Talkin’ ‘bout, “He got game, and he’s not real

And he’s got chains” but wait, that’s a peacock’s tail!

‘Cause you never hear them say they got it cheap on sale

Which means that bling is meant to represent

How much they really spent, and at the end of the day
That’s the definition of a “fitness display”


Like a bowerbird’s nest, which takes hours of work

And makes the females catch a powerful urge

Just like a style of verse or an amazing flow

But it takes dedication and it takes a toll

‘Cause the best displays are unfakeable

The lyrics here make the suggestion, not explored in depth, that mimetic posers in the population may complicate the matter of mate selection.

Track 11, “Used To Be The Man,” fits nicely in the neighborhood of hip hop songs expressing young men’s anxiety and nostalgia for a world where they feel more at home. The lyrics note that we may be dragging around traits (like impressive upper body strength) that are no longer so adaptive, especially in rapidly changing social environments. Here, Brinkman gives eloquent voice to pain without committing a fallacious appeal to nature.

Track 12, “Don’t Sleep With Mean People,” is an up-tempo exhortation to take positive action to improve the gene pool. Here, you might worry that Brinkman hasn’t first established meanness as a heritable trait. However, doubters that being a jerk has a genetic basis (of which I am one) may be persuaded by the infectious chorus that a social penalty for being a jerk could improve behavior, if not the human genome.

Track 13, “Performance, Feedback, Revision 2.0,” suggests the ubiquity and usefulness of processes similar to natural selection in other parts of our lives. The album version (2.0) differs from the original (which you can find here) in instrumentation, precise lyrics, and and overall feel. Noticing this, a dozen tracks in to the album, made this listener consider whether the song functions like a genotype, with the particular performance of the song as the phenotypic expression in a particular environment.

In the last track of the album, “Darwin’s Acid 2.0,” Brinkman explores what the world of nature and of human experience looks like if you embrace the theory of evolution. The vision he weaves is of a world that is not grim or nihilistic, but intelligible and hopeful, where it is our responsibility to make good.

“The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” is — to me, anyway — a compelling rap album, with its balanced mix of tracks featuring flashy dextrous delivery, slower jams, and shout-along anthems. It’s worth noting, of course, that while I haven’t yet hit the post-menopausal granny demographic that Brinkman identifies (in “Sexual Selection 2.0″) as central to his existing fan base, my CD shelf is mostly stuck in the 20th Century, with Run DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Beastie Boys, De La Soul, and Arrested Development — the band, not the show — as my rap touchstones. However, these tracks also find favor with my decidedly 21st Century offspring, whose appreciation of the scientific content and clever wordplay would not have been granted if they didn’t like the music. (Note to Mr. Brinkman: My daughters are now more likely to seek out a Baba Brinkman show than a gangsta rap show, but they will be restricting their efforts in propagating your lyrical dexterity — is that what the kids are calling it nowadays? — to Tumblr and the Twitterverse, at least while they’re living under my roof.)

While some (including The New Yorker) have compared Mr. Brinkman to Eminem in his vocal delivery, to my ear he is warmer and more melodic. As an unapologetic Richard Dawkins fanboy, he sometimes comes across like a hardcore adaptationist (rapping about bodies as mere machines for spreading our genes), but he also takes group selection seriously (as in track 6). Perhaps future work will give rise to a levels-of-selection rap battle between partisans of group selection, individual selection, and gene-level selection.

Baba Brinkman’s professed admiration for the work of evolutionary psychologists doesn’t manifest itself in this album in defenses of results based on blatantly bad methodology (at least as far as I can tell). “Creationist Cousins 2.0″ does, however, include a swipe at a “gender feminist sister” — gender feminist being, of course, a label originated by a hater (and haters gonna hate). It’s not clear that any of this warrants an answer song, but if it did, I would be rooting for Kate Clancy, DNLee, and the appropriate counterpart of DJ Spinderella to deliver the response.

What’s notable in “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” besides Baba Brinkman’s lyrical mastery is how exquisitely attentive he is to the importance of environment — not just its variability, but also the extent to which humans may be able to change our social, economic, and political environment to make traits we like bumping up against in the world more adaptive. Given that much visceral resistance to evolutionary theory seems grounded in a worry that it reduces humans to helpless cogs in a mechanism, or robots programmed to do the bidding of their genes, this reminder that environment can be every bit as much a moving part in the system as genes is a good one. The reality that could be that Brinkman offers here is fiercely optimistic:

In each of these cases, our intentional efforts
Can play the part of environmental pressures
I can say: “This is a space where a peaceful existence
Will never be threatened by needless aggression”
I can say: “This is an ecosystem where people listen
Where justice increases over egotism
This is a space where religions achieve co-existence
And racism decreases with each coalition”

As Darwin wrote, and Brinkman agrees, there is a grandeur in this view of life.

UPDATE:
Via Twitter, I’ve been reminded to point out that the album is a collaboration between Baba Brinkman and DJ and music producer Mr. Simmonds, “who is as responsible for the sound as [Baba Brinkman is] for the ideas”.

* * * * *
Baba Brinkman’s website

Videos of ancestral versions of the songs, produced with funding from the Wellcome Trust

The most recent impetus for my thinking about it was this tech blogger’s response to behavior that felt unwelcoming at a conference (behavior that seems, in fact, to have run afoul of that conference’s official written policies)*, but there are plenty of other examples one might find of “naming and shaming”: the discussion (on blogs and in other media outlets) of University of Chicago neuroscientist Dario Maestripieri’s comments about female attendees of the Society for Neuroscience meeting, the Office of Research Integrity’s posting of findings of scientific misconduct investigations, the occasional instructor who promises to publicly shame students who cheat in his class, and actually follows through on the promise.

There are many forms “naming-and-shaming” might take, and many types of behavior one might identify as problematic enough that they ought to be pointed out and attended to. But there seems to be a general worry that naming-and-shaming is an unethical tactic. Here, I want to explore that worry.

Presumably, the point of responding to bad behavior is because it’s bad — causing harm to individuals or a community (or both), undermining progress on a project or goal, and so forth. Responding to bad behavior can be useful if it stops bad behavior in progress and/or keeps similarly bad behavior from happening in the future. A response can also be useful in calling attention to the harm the behavior does (i.e., in making clear what’s bad about the behavior). And, depending on the response, it can affirm the commitment of individuals or communities that the behavior in question actual is bad, and that the individuals or communities see themselves as having a real stake in reducing it.

Rules, professional codes, conference harassment policies — these are some ways to specify at the outset what behaviors are not acceptable in the context of the meeting, game, work environment, or disciplinary pursuit. There are plenty of contexts, too, where there is no written-and-posted official enumeration of every type of unacceptable behavior. Sometimes communities make judgments on the fly about particular kinds of behavior. Sometimes, members of communities are not in agreement about these judgments, which might result in a thoughtful conversation within the community to try to come to some agreement, or the emergence of a rift that leads people to realize that the community was not as united as they once thought, or ruling on the “actual” badness or acceptability of the behavior by those within the community who can marshal the power to make such a ruling.

Sharing a world with people who are not you is complicated, after all.

Still, I hope we can agree that there are some behaviors that count as bad behaviors. Assuming we had an unambiguous example of someone engaging in such a behavior, should we respond? How should we respond? Do we have a duty to respond?

I frequently hear people declare that one should respond to bad behavior, but that one should do so privately. The idea here seems to be that letting the bad actor know that the behavior in question was bad, and should be stopped, is enough to ensure that it will be stopped — and that the bad behavior must be a reflection of a gap in the bad actor’s understanding.

If knowing that a behavior is bad (or against the rules) were enough to ensure that those with the relevant knowledge never engage in the behavior, though, it becomes difficult to explain the highly educated researchers who get caught fabricating or falsifying data or images, the legions of undergraduates who commit plagiarism despite detailed instructions on proper citation methods, the politicians who lie. If knowledge that a certain kind of behavior is unacceptable is not sufficient to prevent that behavior, responding effectively to bad behavior must involve more than telling the perpetrator of that behavior, “What you’re doing is bad. Stop it.”

This is where penalties may be helpful in responding to bad behavior — get benched for the rest of the game, or fail the class, or get ejected from the conference, or become ineligible for funding for this many years. A penalty can convey that bad behavior is harmful enough to the endeavor or the community that its perpetrator needs a “time-out”.

Sometimes the application of penalties needs to be private (e.g., when a law like the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act makes applying the penalty publicly illegal). But there are dangers in only dealing with bad behavior privately.

When fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are “dealt with” privately, it can make it hard for a scientific community to identify papers in the scientific literature that they shouldn’t trust or researchers who might be prone to slipping back into fabricating, falsifying, or plagiarizing if they think no one is watching. (It is worth noting that large ethical lapses are frequently part of an escalating pattern that started with smaller ethical infractions.)

Worse, if bad behavior is dealt with privately, out of view of members of the community who witnessed the bad behavior in question, those members may lose faith in the community’s commitment to calling it out. Keeping penalties (if any) under wraps can convey the message that the bad behavior is actually tolerated, that official policies against it are empty words.

And sometimes, there are instances where the people within an organization or community with the power to impose penalties on bad actors seem disinclined to actually address bad behavior, using the cover of privacy as a way to opt out of penalizing the bad actors or of addressing the bad behavior in any serious way.

What’s a member of the community to do in such circumstances? Given that the bad behavior is bad because it has harmful effects on the community and its members, should those aware of the bad behavior call the community’s attention to it, in the hopes that the community can respond to it (or that the community’s scrutiny will encourage the bad actor to cease the bad behavior)?

Arguably, a community that is harmed by bad behavior has an interest in knowing when that behavior is happening, and who the bad actors are. As well, the community has an interest in stopping the bad behavior, in mitigating the harms it has already caused, and in discouraging further such behavior. Naming-and-shaming bad actors may be an effective way to secure these interests.

I don’t think this means naming-and-shaming is the only possible way to secure these interests, nor that it is always the best way to do so. Sometimes, however, it’s the tool that’s available that seems likely to do the most good.

There’s not a simple algorithm or litmus test that will tell you when shaming bad actors is the best course of action, but there are questions that are worth asking when assessing the options:

• What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior, which is observable to at least some members of the community, goes unchallenged?
• What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior, which is observable to at least some members of the community, gets challenged privately? (In particular, what are the potential consequences to the person engaging in the bad behavior? To the person challenging the behavior? To others who have had occasion to observe the behavior, or who might be affected by similar behavior in the future?)
• What are the potential consequences if this piece of bad behavior, which is observable to at least some members of the community, gets challenged publicly? (In particular, what are the potential consequences to the person engaging in the bad behavior? To the person challenging the behavior? To others who have had occasion to observe the behavior, or who might be affected by similar behavior in the future?)

Challenging bad behavior is not without costs. Depending on your status within the community, challenging a bad actor may harm you more than the bad actor. However, not challenging bad behavior has costs, too. If the community and its members aren’t prepared to deal with bad behavior when it happens, the community has to bear those costs.
_____
* Let me be clear that this post is focused on the broader question of publicly calling out bad behavior rather than on the specific details of Adria Richards’ response to the people behind her at the tech conference, whether she ought to have found their jokes unwelcoming, whether she ought to have responded to them the way she did, or what have you. Since this post is not about whether Adria Richards did everything right (or everything wrong) in that particular instance, I’m going to be quite ruthless in pruning comments that are focused on her particular circumstances or decisions. Indeed, commenters who make any attempt to use the comments here to issue threats of violence against Richards (of the sort she is receiving via social media as I compose this post), or against anyone else, will have their information (including IP address) forwarded to law enforcement.

If you’re looking for my take on the details of the Adria Richards case, I’ll have a post up on my other blog within the next 24 hours.

Prior to the emergence of a scientific method that stressed objectivity, Machamer says, most people thought knowledge came from divine inspiration (whether written in holy books or transmitted by religious authorities) or from ancient sources that were only shared with initiates (think alchemy, stone masonry, and healing arts here). Knowledge, in other words, was a scarce resource that not everyone could get his or her hands (or brains) on. To the extent that a person found the world intelligible at all, it was probably based on the story that someone else in a special position of authority was telling.

How did this change? Machamer argues that it changed when people started to think of themselves as individuals. The erosion of feudalism, the reformation and counter-reformation, European voyages to the New World (which included encounters with plants, animals, and people previously unknown in the Old World), and the shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric view of the cosmos all contributed to this shift by calling old knowledge and old sources of authority into question. As the old sources of knowledge became less credible (or at least less monopolistic), the individual came to be seen as a new source of knowledge.

Machamer describes two key aspects of individuality at work. One is what he calls the “Epistemic I.” This is the recognition that an individual can gain knowledge and ideas directly from his or her own interactions with the world, and that these interactions depend on senses and powers of reason that all humans have (or could have, given the opportunity to develop them). This recognition casts knowledge (and the ability to get it) as universal and democratic. The power to build knowledge is not concentrated in the hands (or eyes) of just the elite — this power is our birthright as human beings.

The other side of individuality here is what Machamer calls the “Entrepreneurial I.” This is the belief that an individual’s insights deserve credit and recognition, perhaps even payment. This recognition casts the individual who has it as a leader, or a teacher — definitely, as a special human worth listening to.

Pause for a moment to notice that this tension is still present in science. For all the commitment to science as an enterprise that builds knowledge from observations of the world that others must be able to make (which is the whole point of reproducibility), scientists also compete for prestige and career capital based on which individual was the first to observe (and report observing) a particular detail that anyone could see. Seeing something new is not effortless (as we’ve discussed in the last two posts), but there’s still an uneasy coexistence between the idea of scientific knowledge-building as within the powers of normal human beings and the idea of scientific knowledge-building as the activity of special human beings with uniquely powerful insights and empirical capacities.

The two “I”s that Machamer describes came together as thinkers in the 1600s tried to work out a reliable method by which individuals could replace discredited sources of “knowledge” and expand on what remained to produce their own knowledge. Lots of “natural philosophers” (what we would call scientists today) set out to formulate just such a method. The paradox here is that each thinker was selling (often literally) a way of knowing that was supposed to work for everyone, while simultaneously presenting himself as the only one clever enough to have found it.

Looking for a method that anyone could use to get the facts about the world, the thinkers Machamer describes recognized that they needed to formulate a clear set of procedures that was broadly applicable to the different kinds of phenomena in the world about which people wanted to build knowledge, that was teachable (rather than being a method that only the person who came up with it could use), and that was able to bring about consensus and halt controversy. However, in the 1600s there were many candidates for this method on offer, which meant that there was a good bit of controversy about the question of which method was the method.

Among the contenders for the method, the Baconian method involved cataloguing many experiences of phenomena, then figuring out how to classify them. The Galilean method involved representing the phenomena in terms of mechanical models (and even going so far as to build the corresponding machine). The Hobbesian model focused on analyzing compositions and divisions of substances in order to distinguish causes from effects. And these were just three contenders in a crowded field. If there was a common thread in these many methods, it was describing or representing the phenomena of interest in spatial terms. In the seventeenth century, as now, seeing is believing.

In a historical moment when people were considering the accessibility and the power of knowledge through experience, it became clear to the natural philosophers trying to develop an appropriate method that such knowledge also required control. To get knowledge, it was not enough to have just any experience -– you had to have the right kind of experiences. This meant that the methods under development had to give guidance on how to track empirical data and then analyze it. As well, these methods had to invent the concept of a controlled experiment.

Whether it was in a published dialogue or an experiment conducted in a public space before witnesses, the natural philosophers developing knowledge-building methods recognized the importance of demonstration. Machamer writes:

Demonstration … consists in laying a phenomenon before oneself and others. This “laying out” exhibits the structure of the phenomenon, exhibits its true nature. What is laid out provides an experience for those seeing it. It carries informational certainty that causes assent.” (94)

Interestingly, there seems to have been an assumption that once people hit on the appropriate procedure for gathering empirical facts about the phenomena, these facts would be sufficient to produce agreement among those who observed them. The ideal method was supposed to head off controversy. Disagreements were either a sign that you were using the wrong method, or that you were using the right method incorrectly. As Machamer describes it:

[T]he doctrines of method all held that disputes or controversies are due to ignorance. Controversies are stupid and accomplish nothing. Only those who cannot reason properly will find it necessary to dispute. Obviously, as noted, the ideal of universality and consensus contrasts starkly with the increasing number of disputes that engage these scientific entrepreneurs, and with the entrepreneurial claims of each that he alone has found the true method.

Ultimately, what stemmed the proliferations of competing methods was a professionalization of science, in which the practitioners essentially agreed to be guided by a shared method. The hope was that the method the scientific profession agreed upon would be the one that allowed scientists to harness human senses and intellect to best discover what the world is really like. Within this context, scientists might still disagree about the details of the method, but they took it that such agreements ought to be resolved in such a way that the resulting methodology better approximated this ideal method.

The adoption of shared methodology and the efforts to minimize controversy are echoed in Bruce Bower’s [2] discussion of how the ideal of objectivity has been manifested in scientific practices. He writes:

Researchers began to standardize their instruments, clarify basic concepts, and write in an impersonal style so that their peers in other countries and even in future centuries could understand them. Enlightenment-influenced scholars thus came to regard facts no longer as malleable observations but as unbreakable nuggets of reality. Imagination represented a dangerous, wild force that substituted personal fantasies for a sober, objective grasp of nature. (361)

What the seventeenth century natural philosophers Machamer describes were striving for is clearly recognizable to us as objectivity -– both in the form of an objective method for producing knowledge and in the form of a body of knowledge that gives a reliable picture of how the world really is. The objective scientific method they sought was supposed to produce knowledge we could all agree upon and to head off controversy.

As you might imagine, the project of building reliable knowledge about the world has pushed scientists in the direction of also building experimental and observational techniques that are more standardized and require less individual judgment across observers. But an interesting side-effect of this focus on objective knowledge as a goal of science is the extent to which scientific reports can make it look like no human observers were involved in making the knowledge being reported. The passive voice of scientific papers — these procedures were performed, these results were observed — does more than just suggest that the particular individuals that performed the procedures and observed the results are interchangeable with other individuals (who, scientists trust, would, upon performing the same procedures, see the same results for themselves). The passive voice can actually erase the human labor involved in making knowledge about the world.

This seems like a dangerous move when objectivity is not an easy goal to achieve, but rather one that requires concerted teamwork along with one’s objective method.
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[1] “The Concept of the Individual and the Idea(l) of Method in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” in Peter Machamer, Marcello Pera, and Aristides Baltas (eds.), Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives. Oxford University Press, 2000.

[2] Bruce Bower, “Objective Visions,” Science News. 5 December 1998: Vol. 154, pp. 360-362

The problem of how to see what is really there is not a new one for scientists. In her book The Scientific Renaissance: 1450-1630 [1], Marie Boas Hall describes how this issue presented itself to Renaissance anatomists. These anatomists endeavored to learn about the parts of the human body that could be detected with the naked eye and the help of a scalpel.

You might think that the subject matter of anatomy would be more straightforward for scientists to “see” than the cells Fred Grinnell describes [2] (discussed in the last post), which require preparation and staining and the twiddling of knobs on microscopes. However, the most straightforward route to gross anatomical knowledge -– dissections of cadavers -– had its own challenges. For one thing, cadavers (especially human cadavers) were often in short supply. When they were available, anatomists hardly ever performed solitary dissections of them. Rather, dissections were performed, quite literally, for an audience of scientific students, generally with a surgeon doing the cutting while a professor stood nearby and read aloud from an anatomical textbook describing the organs, muscles, or bones encountered at each stage of the dissection process. The hope was that the features described in the text would match the features being revealed by the surgeon doing the dissecting, but there were doubtless instances where the audio track (as it were) was not quite in sync with the visual. Also, as a practical matter, before the invention of refrigeration dissections were seasonal, performed in the winter rather than the warmer months to retard the cadaver’s decomposition. This put limits on how much anatomical study a person could cram into any given year.

In these conditions, most of the scientists who studied anatomy logged many more hours watching dissections than performing dissections themselves. In other words, they were getting information about the systems of interest by seeing rather than by doing -– and they weren’t always seeing those dissections from the good seats. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that anatomists greeted the invention of the printing press by producing a number of dissection guides and anatomy textbooks.

What’s the value of a good textbook? It shares detailed information compiled by another scientist, sometimes over the course of years of study, yet you can consume that information in a more timely fashion. If it has diagrams, it can give you a clearer view of what there is to observe (albeit through someone else’s eyes) than you may be able to get from the cheap seats at a dissection. And, if you should be so lucky as to get your own specimens for study, a good textbook can guide your examination of the new material before you, helping you deal with the specimen in a way that lets you see more of what there is to see (including spatial relations and points of attachment) rather than messing it up with sloppy dissection technique.

Among the most widely used anatomy texts in the Renaissance were “uncorrupted” translations of On the Use of the Parts and Anatomical Procedures by the ancient Greek anatomist Galen, and the groundbreaking new text On the Fabric of the Human Body (published in 1543) by Vesalius. The revival of Galen fit into a pattern of Renaissance celebration of the wisdom of the ancients rather than setting out to build “new” knowledge, and Hall describes the attitude of Renaissance anatomists toward his work as “Galen-worship.” Had Galen been alive during the Renaissance, he might well have been irritated at the extent to which his discussions of anatomy -– based on dissections of animals, not human cadavers –- were taken to be authoritative. Galen himself, as an advocate of empiricism, would have urged other anatomists to “dissect with a fresh eye,” attentive to what the book of nature (as written on the bodies of creatures to be dissected) could teach them.

As it turns out, this may be the kind of thing that’s easier to urge than to do. Hall asks,

[W]hat scientific apprentice has not, many times since the sixteenth century, preferred to trust the authoritative text rather than his own unskilled eye? (137)

Once again, it requires training to be able to see what there is to see. And surely someone who has written textbooks on the subject (even centuries before) has more training in how to see than does the novice leaning on the textbook.

Of course, the textbook becomes part of the training in how to see, which can, ironically, make it harder to be sure that what you are seeing is an accurate reflection of the world, not just of the expectations you bring to your observations of it.

The illustrations in the newer anatomy texts made it seem less urgent to anatomy students that they observe (or participate in) actual dissections for themselves. As the technique for mass-produced illustrations got better (especially with the shift from woodcuts to engravings), the illustrators could include much more detail in their images. Paradoxically, this could be a problem, as the illustrator was usually someone other than the scientist who wrote the book, and the author and illustrator were not always in close communication as the images were produced. Given a visual representation of what there is to observe and a description of what there is to observe in the text, which would a student trust more?

Bruce Bower discusses this sort of problem in his article “Objective Visions,” [3] describing the procedures used by Dutch anatomist Berhard Albinus in the mid-1700s to create an image of the human skeleton. Bower writes:

Albinus carefully cleans, reassembles, and props up a complete male skeleton; checks the position of each bone in comparison with observations of an extremely skinny man hired to stand naked next to the skeleton; he calculates the exact spot at which an artist must sit to view the skeleton’s proportions accurately; and he covers engraving plates with cross-hatched grids so that images can be drawn square-by-square and thus be reproduced more reliably. (360)

Here, it sounds like Albinus is trying hard to create an image that accurately conveys what there is to see about the skeleton and its spatial relations. The methodology seems designed to make the image-creation faithful to the particulars of the actual specimen — in a word, objective. But, Bower continues:

After all that excruciating attention to detail, the eminent anatomist announces that his atlas portrays not a real skeleton, but an idealized version. Albinus has dictated alterations to the artist. The scrupulously assembled model is only a spingboard for insights into a more “perfect” representation of the human skeleton, visible only to someone with Albinus’ anatomical acumen. (360)

Here, Albinus was trying to abstract away from the peculiarities of the particular skeleton he had staged as a model for observation in order to describe what he saw as the real thing. This is a decidedly Platonist move. Plato’s view was that the stuff of our world consists largely of imperfect material instantiations of immaterial ideal forms -– and that science makes the observations it does of many examples of material stuff to get a handle on those ideal forms.

If you know the allegory of the cave, however, you know that Plato didn’t put much faith in feeble human sense organs as a route to grasping the forms. The very imperfection of those material instantiations that our sense organs apprehend would be bound to mislead us about the forms. Instead, Plato thought we’d need to use the mind to grasp the forms.

This is a crucial juncture where Aristotle parted ways with Plato. Aristotle still thought that there was something like the forms, but he rejected Plato’s full-strength rationalism in favor of an empirical approach to grasping them. If you wanted to get a handle on the form of “horse,” for example, Aristotle thought the thing to do was to examine lots of actual specimens of horse and to identify the essence they all have in common. The Aristotelian approach probably feels more sensible to modern scientists than the Platonist alternative, but note that we’re still talking about arriving at a description of “horse-ness” that transcends the observable features of any particular horse.

Whether you’re a Platonist, an Aristotelian, or something else, it seems pretty clear that scientists do decide that some features of the systems they’re studying are crucial and others are not. They distinguish what they take to be background from what they take to be the thing they’re observing. Rather than presenting every single squiggle in their visual field, they abstract away to present the piece of the world they’re interested in talking about.

And this is where the collaboration between anatomist and illustrator gets ticklish. What happens if the engraver is abstracting away from the observed particulars differently than the anatomist would? As Hall notes, the engravings in Renaissance anatomy texts were not always accurate representations of the texts. (Nor, for that matter, did the textual descriptions always get the anatomical features right — Renaissance anatomists, Vesalius included, managed to repeat some anatomical mistakes that went back to Galen, likely because they “saw” their specimens through a lens of expectations shaped by what Galen said they were going to see.)

On top of this, the fact that artists like Leonardo Da Vinci studied anatomy to improve their artistic representations of the human form spilled back to influence Renaissance scientific illustrators. These illustrators, as much as their artist contemporaries, may have looked beyond the spatial relations between bones or muscles or internal organs for hidden beauty in their subjects. While this resulted in striking illustrations, it also meant that their engravings were not always accurate representations of the cadavers that were officially their subjects.

These factors conspired to produce visually arresting anatomy texts that exerted an influence on how the anatomy students using them understood the subject, even when these students went beyond the texts to perform their own dissections. Hall writes,

[I]t is often quite easy to “see” what a textbook or manual says should be seen. (141)

Indeed, faced with a conflict between the evidence of one’s eyes pointed at a cadaver and the evidence of one’s eyes pointed at an anatomical diagram, one might easily conclude that the cadaver in question was a weird variant while the diagram captured the “standard” configuration.

Bower’s article describes efforts scientists made to come up with visual representations that were less subjective. Bower writes:

Scientists of the 19th century rapidly adopted a new generation of devices that rendered images in an automatic fashion. For instance, the boxy contraption known as the camera obscura projected images of a specimen, such as a bone or a plant, onto a surface where a researcher could trace its form onto a piece of paper. Photography soon took over and further diminished human involvement in image-making. … Researchers explicitly equated the manual representation of items in the natural world with a moral code of self-restraint. … A blurry photograph of a star or ragged edges on a slide of tumor tissues were deemed preferable to tidy, idealized portraits. (361)

Our naïve picture of objectivity may encourage us that seeing is believing, and that mechanically captured images are more reliable than those rendered by the hand of a (subjective) human, but it’s important to remember that pictures -– even photographs -– have points of view, depend on choices made about the conditions of their creation, and can be used as arguments to support one particular way of seeing the world over another.

In the next post, we’ll look at how Seventeenth Century “natural philosophers” labored to establish a general-use method for building reliable knowledge about the world, and at how the notion of objectivity was connected to these efforts, and to the recognizable features of “the scientific method” that resulted.
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[1] Marie Boas Hall, The Scientific Renaissance: 1450-1630. Dover, 1994.

[2] Frederick Grinnell, The Scientific Attitude. Guilford Press, 1992.

[3] Bruce Bower, “Objective Visions,” Science News. 5 December 1998: Vol. 154, pp. 360-362

Objectivity is a value – perhaps one of the values that scientists and non-scientists most strongly associate with science. So, it’s worth thinking about how scientists understand that value, some of the challenges in meeting the ideal it sets, and some of the historical journey that was involved in objectivity becoming a central scientific value in the first place. I’ll be splitting this discussion into three posts. This post sets the stage and considers how modern scientific practitioners describe objectivity. The next post will look at objectivity (and its challenges) in the context of work being done by Renaissance anatomists. The third post will examine how the notion of objectivity was connected to the efforts of Seventeenth Century “natural philosophers” to establish a method for building reliable knowledge about the world.

First, what do we mean by objectivity?

In everyday discussions of ethics, being objective usually means applying the rules fairly and treating everyone the same rather than showing favoritism to one party or another. Is this what scientists have in mind when they voice their commitment to objectivity? Perhaps in part. It could be connected to applying “the rules” of science (i.e., the scientific method) fairly and not letting bias creep into the production of scientific knowledge.

This seems close to the characterization of good scientific practice that we see in the National Academy of Science and National Research Council document, “The Nature of Science.” [1] This document describes science as an activity in which hypotheses undergo rigorous tests, whereby researchers compare the predictions of the hypotheses to verifiable facts determined by observation and experiment, and findings and corrections are announced in refereed scientific publications. It states, “Although [science’s] goal is to approach true explanations as closely as possible, its investigators claim no final or permanent explanatory truths.” (38)

Note that rigorous facts, verification of those facts (or the information necessary to verify them), correction of mistakes, and reliable reports of findings all depend on honesty – you can’t perform these activities by making up your results, or presenting them in a deceptive way, for example. So being objective in the sense of following good scientific methodology requires a commitment not to mislead.

But here, in “The Nature of Science,” we see hints that there are two closely related, yet distinct, meanings of “objective”. One is what anyone applying the appropriate methodology could see. The other is a picture of what the world is really like. Getting a true picture of the world (or aiming for such a picture) means seeking objectivity in the second sense -– finding the true facts. Seeking out the observational data that other scientists could verify -– the first sense of objectivity -– is closely tied to the experimental method scientists use and their strategies for reporting their results. Presumably, applying objective methodology would be a good strategy for generating an accurate (and thus objective) picture of the world.

But we should note a tension here that’s at least as old as the tension between Plato and his student Aristotle. What exactly are the facts about the world that anyone could see? Are sense organs like eyes all we need to see them? If such facts really exist, are they enough to help us build a true picture of the world?

In the chapter “Making Observations” from his book The Scientific Attitude [2], Fred Grinnell discusses some of the challenges of seeing what there is to see. He argues that, especially in the realms science tries to probe, seeing what’s out there is not automatic. Rather, we have to learn to see the facts that are there for anyone to observe.

Grinnell describes the difficulty students have seeing cells under a light microscope, a difficulty that persists even after students work out how to use the microscope to adjust the focus. He writes:

The students’ inability to see the cells was not a technical problem. There can be technical problems, of course -– as when one takes an unstained tissue section and places it under a microscope. Under these conditions it is possible to tell that something is “there,” but not precisely what. As discussed in any histology textbook, the reason is that there are few visual features of unstained tissue sections that our eyes can discriminate. As the students were studying stained specimens, however, sufficient details of the field were observable that could have permitted them to distinguish among different cells and between cells and the noncellular elements of the tissue. Thus, for these students, the cells were visible but unseen. (10-11)

Grinnell’s example suggests that seeing cells, for example, requires more than putting your eye to the eyepiece of a microscope focused on a stained sample of cells. Rather, you need to be able to recognize those bits of your visual field as belonging to a particular kind of object -– and, you may even need to have something like the concept of a cell to be able to identify what you are seeing as cells. At the very least, this suggests that we should amend our gloss of objective as “what anyone could see” to something more like “what anyone could see given a particular conceptual background and some training with the necessary scientific measuring devices.”

But Grinnell makes even this seem too optimistic. He notes that “seeing things one way means not seeing them another way,” which implies that there are multiple ways to interpret any given piece of the world toward which we point our sense organs. Moreover, he argues,

Each person’s previous experiences will have led to the development of particular concepts of things, which will influence what objects can be seen and what they will appear to be. As a consequence, it is not unusual for two investigators to disagree about their observations if the investigators are looking at the data according to different conceptual frameworks. Resolution of such conflicts requires that the investigators clarify for each other the concepts that they have in mind. (15)

In other words, scientists may need to share a bundle of background assumptions about the world to look at a particular piece of that world and agree on what they see. Much more is involved in seeing “what anyone can see” than meets the eye.

We’ll say more about this challenge in the next post, when we look at how Renaissance anatomists tried to build (and communicate) objective knowledge about the human body.
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[1] “The Nature of Science,” in Panel on Scientific Responsibility and the Conduct of Research, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine. Responsible Science, Volume I: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1992.

[2] Frederick Grinnell, The Scientific Attitude. Guilford Press, 1992.

Today, an article by Paul Basken at The Chronicle of Higher Education shares some more details of the study:

The study, outlined on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, involved a survey of 2,338 Americans asked to read an article that discussed the risks of nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials at the atomic scale.

Of participants who had already expressed wariness toward the technology, those who read the sample article—with politely written comments at the bottom—came out almost evenly split. Nearly 43 percent said they saw low risks in the technology, and 46 percent said they considered the risks high.

But with the same article and comments that expressed the same reactions in a rude manner, the split among readers widened, with 32 percent seeing a low risk and 52 percent a high risk.

“The only thing that made a difference was the tone of the comments that followed the story,” said a co-author of the study, Dominique Brossard, a professor of life-science communication at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The study found “a polarization effect of those rude comments,” Ms. Brossard said.

The study, conducted by researchers at Wisconsin and George Mason University, will be published in a coming issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. It was presented at the AAAS conference during a daylong examination of how scientists communicate their work, especially online.

If you click through to read the article, you’ll notice that I was asked for comment on the findings. As you may guess, I had more to say on the paper (which is still under embargo) and its implications than ended up in the article, so I’m sharing my extended thoughts here.

First, I think these results are useful in reassuring bloggers who have been moderating comments that what they are doing is not just permissible (moderating comments is not “censorship,” since bloggers don’t have the power of the state, and folks can find all sorts of places in the Internet to state their views if any given blog denies them a soapbox) but also reasonable. Blogging with comments enabled assumes more than transmission of information, it assumes a conversation, and what kind of conversation it ends up being depends on what kind of behavior is encouraged or forbidden, who feels welcome or alienated.

But, there are some interesting issues that the study doesn’t seem to address, issues that I think can matter quite a lot to bloggers.

In the study, readers (lurkers) were reacting to factual information in an online posting plus the discourse about that article in the comments. As the study is constructed, it looks like that discourse is being shaped by commenters, but not by the author of the article. It seems likely to me (and worth further empirical study!) that comment sections in which the author is engaging with commenters — not just responding to the questions they ask and the views they express, but also responding to the ways that they are interacting with other commenters and to their “tone” — have a different impact on readers than comment sections where the author of the piece that is being discussed is totally absent from the scene. To put it more succinctly, comment sections where the author is present and engaged, or absent and disengaged, communicate information to lurkers, too.

Here’s another issue I don’t think the study really addresses: While blogs usually aim to communicate with lurkers as well as readers who post comments (and every piece of evidence I’ve been shown suggests that commenters tend to be a small proportion of readers), most are aiming to reach a core audience that is narrower than “everyone in the world with an internet connection”.

Sometimes what this means is that bloggers are speaking to an audience that finds comment sections that look unruly and contentious to be welcoming, rather than alienating. This isn’t just the case for bloggers seeking an audience that likes to debate or to play rough.

Some blogs have communities that are intentionally uncivil towards casual expressions of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. Pharyngula is a blog that has taken this approrach, and just yesterday Chris Clarke posted a statement on “civility” there that leads with a commitment “not to fetishize civility over justice.” Setting the rules of engagement between bloggers and posters this way means that people in groups especially affected by sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., have a haven in the blogosphere where they don’t have to waste time politely defending the notion that they are fully human, too (or swallowing their anger and frustration at having their humanity treated as a topic of debate). Yes, some people find the environment there alienating — but the people who are alienated by unquestioned biases in most other quarters of the internet (and the physical world, for that matter) are the ones being consciously welcomed into the conversation at Pharyngula, and those who don’t like the environment can find another conversation. It’s a big blogosphere. That not every potential reader does not feel perfectly comfortable at a blog, in other words, is not proof that the blogger is doing it wrong.

So, where do we find ourselves?

We’re in a situation where lots of people are using online venues like blogs to communicate information and viewpoints in the context of a conversation (where readers can actively engage as commenters). We have a piece of research indicating that the tenor of the commenting (as perceived by lurkers, readers who are not commenting) can communicate as much to readers as the content of the post that is the subject of the comments. And we have lots of questions still unanswered about what kinds of engagement will have what kinds of effect on what kinds or readers (and how reliably). What does this mean for those of us who blog?

I think what it means is that we have to be really reflective about what we’re trying to communicate, who we’re trying to communicate it to, and how our level of visible engagement (or disengagement) in the conversation might make a difference. We have to acknowledge that we have information that’s gappy at best about what’s coming across to the lurkers, and attentive to ways to get more feedback about how successfully we’re communicating what we’re trying to communicate. We have to recognize that, given all we don’t know, we may want to shift our strategies for blogging and engaging commenters, especially if we come upon evidence that they’re not working the way we thought they were.

* * * * *
In the interests of spelling out the parameters of the conversation I’d like to have here, let me note that whether or not you like the way Pharyngula sets a tone for conversations is off topic here. You are, however, welcome to share in the comments here what you find makes you feel more or less welcome to engage with online postings, whether as a commenter or a lurker.
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[1] Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, “Science, New Media, and the Public.” Science 4 January 2013:Vol. 339, pp. 40-41.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1160364

Lehrer’s behavior was clearly out of bounds for anyone hoping for a shred of credibility as a journalist or non-fiction author. However, at the time, I opined in a comment:

At 31, I think Jonah Lehrer has time to redeem himself and earn back trust and stuff like that.

Well, the events of this week stand as evidence that having time to redeem oneself is not a guarantee that one will not instead dig the hole deeper.

You see, Jonah Lehrer was invited to give a talk this week at a “media learning seminar” in Miami, a talk which marked his first real public comments a large group of journalistic peers since his fabrications and plagiarism were exposed — and a talk for which the sponsor of the conference, the Knight Foundation, paid Lehrer an honorarium of $20,000.

At the New York Times “Arts Beat” blog, Jennifer Schuessler describes Lehrer’s talk:

Mr. Lehrer … dived right in with a full-throated mea culpa. “I am the author of a book on creativity that contains several fabricated Bob Dylan quotes,” he told the crowd, which apparently could not be counted on to have followed the intense schadenfreude-laced commentary that accompanied his downfall. “I committed plagiarism on my blog, taking without credit or citation an entire paragraph from the blog of Christian Jarrett. I plagiarized from myself. I lied to a journalist named Michael Moynihan to cover up the Dylan fabrications.”

“My mistakes have caused deep pain to those I care about,” he continued. “I’m constantly remembering all the people I’ve hurt and let down.”

If the introduction had the ring of an Alcoholics Anonymous declaration, before too long Mr. Lehrer was surrendering to the higher power of scientific research, cutting back and forth between his own story and the kind of scientific terms — “confirmation bias,” “anchoring” — he helped popularize. Within minutes he had pivoted from his own “arrogance” and other character flaws to the article on flawed forensic science within the F.B.I. that he was working on when his career began unraveling, at one point likening his own corner-cutting to the overconfidence of F.B.I. scientists who fingered the wrong suspect in the 2004 Madrid bombings.

“If we try to hide our mistakes, as I did, any error can become a catastrophe,” he said, adding: “The only way to prevent big failures is a willingness to consider every little one.”

Not everyone shares the view that Lehrer’s apology constituted a full-throated mea culpa, though. At Slate, Daniel Engber shared this assessment:

Lehrer has been humbled, and yet nearly every bullet in his speech managed to fire in both directions. It was a wild display of self-negation, of humble arrogance and arrogant humility. What are these “standard operating procedures” according to which Lehrer will now do his work? He says he’ll be more scrupulous in his methods—even recording and transcribing interviews(!)—but in the same breath promises that other people will be more scrupulous of him. “I need my critics to tell me what I’ve gotten wrong,” he said, as if to blame his adoring crowds at TED for past offenses. Then he promised that all his future pieces would be fact-checked, which is certainly true but hardly indicative of his “getting better” (as he puts it, in the clammy, familiar rhetoric of self-help).

What remorse Lehrer had to share was couched in elaborate and perplexing disavowals. He tried to explain his behavior as, first of all, a hazard of working in an expert field. Like forensic scientists who misjudge fingerprints and DNA analyses, and whose failings Lehrer elaborated on in his speech, he was blind to his own shortcomings. These two categories of mistake hardly seem analogous—lab errors are sloppiness, making up quotes is willful distortion—yet somehow the story made Lehrer out to be a hapless civil servant, a well-intentioned victim of his wonky and imperfect brain.

(Bold emphasis added.)

At Forbes, Jeff Bercovici noted:

Ever the original thinker, even when he’s plagiarizing from press releases, Lehrer apologized abjectly for his actions but pointedly avoided promising to become a better person. “These flaws are a basic part of me,” he said. “They’re as fundamental to me as the other parts of me I’m not ashamed of.”

Still, Lehrer said he is aiming to return to the world of journalism, and has been spending several hours a day writing. “It’s my hope that someday my transgressions might be forgiven,” he said.

How, then, does he propose to bridge the rather large credibility gap he faces? By the methods of the technocrat, not the ethicist: “What I clearly need is a new set of rules, a stricter set of standard operating procedures,” he said. “If I’m lucky enough to write again, then whatever I write will be fully fact-checked and footnoted. Every conversation will be fully taped and transcribed.”

(Bold emphasis added.)

How do I see Jonah Lehrer’s statement? The title of this post should give you a clue. Like most bloggers, I took five years of Latin.* “Mea culpa” would describe a statement wherein the speaker (in this case, Jonah Lehrer) actually acknowledged that the blame was his for the bad thing of which he was a part. From what I can gather, Lehrer hasn’t quite done that.

Let the record reflect that the “new set of rules” and “stricter set of standard operating procedures” Lehrer described in his talk are not new, nor were they non-standard when Lehrer was falsifying and plagiarizing to build his stories. It’s not that Jonah Lehrer’s unfortunate trajectory shed light on the need for these standards, and now the journalistic community (and we consumers of journalism) can benefit from their creation. Serious journalists were already using these standards.

Jonah Lehrer, however, decided he didn’t need to use them.

This does have a taste of Leona Helmsleyesque “rules are for the little people” to it. And, I think it’s important to note that Lehrer gave the outward appearance of following the rules. He did not stand up and say, “I think these rules are unnecessary to good journalistic practice, and here’s why…” Rather, he quietly excused himself from following them.

But now, Lehrer tells us, he recognizes the importance of the rules.

That’s well and good. However, the rules he’s pointing to — taping and transcribing interviews, fact-checking claims and footnoting sources — seem designed to prevent unwitting mistakes. They could head off misremembering what interviewees said, miscommunicating whose words or insights animate part of a story, getting the facts wrong accidentally. It’s less clear that these rules can head off willful lies and efforts to mislead — which is to say, the kind of misdeeds that got Lehrer into trouble.

Moreover, that he now accepts these rules after being caught lying does not indicate that Jonah Lehrer is now especially sage about journalism. It’s remedial work.

Let’s move on from his endorsement (finally) of standards of journalistic practice to the constellation of cognitive biases and weaknesses of will that Jonah Lehrer seems to be trying to saddle with the responsibility for his lies.

Recognizing cognitive biases is a good thing. It is useful to the extent that it helps us to avoid getting fooled by them. You’ll recall that, knowledge-builders, whether scientists or journalists, are supposed to do their best to avoid being fooled.

But, what Lehrer did is hard to cast in terms of ignoring strong cognitive biases. He made stuff up. He fabricated quotes. He presented other authors’ writing as his own. When confronted about his falsifications, he lied. Did his cognitive biases do all this?

What Jonah Lehrer seems to be sidestepping in his “meh culpa” is the fact that, when he had to make choices about whether to work with the actual facts or instead to make stuff up, about whether to write his own pieces (or at least to properly cite the material from others that he used) or to plagiarize, about whether to be honest about what he’d done when confronted or to lie some more, he decided to be dishonest.

If we’re to believe this was a choice his cognitive biases made for him, then his seem much more powerful (and dangerous) than the garden-variety cognitive biases most grown-up humans have.

It seems to me more plausible that Lehrer’s problem was a weakness of will. It’s not that he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong — he wasn’t fooled by his brain into believing it was OK, or else he wouldn’t have tried to conceal it. Instead, despite recognizing the wrongness of his deeds, he couldn’t muster the effort not to do them.

If Jonah Lehrer cannot recognize this — that it frequently requires conscious effort to do the right thing — it’s hard to believe he’ll be committed to putting that effort into doing the right (journalistic) thing going forward. Verily, given the trust he’s burned with his journalistic colleagues, he can expect that proving himself to be reformed will require extra effort.

But maybe what Lehrer is claiming is something different. Maybe he’s denying that he understood the right thing to do and then opted not to do it because it seemed like too much work. Maybe he’s claiming instead that he just couldn’t resist the temptation (whether of rule-breaking for its own sake or of rule-breaking as the most efficient route to secure the prestige he craved). In other words, maybe he’s saying he was literally powerless, that he could not help committing those misdeeds.

If that’s Lehrer’s claim — and if, in addition, he’s claiming that the piece of his cognitive apparatus that was so vulnerable to temptation that it seized control to make him do wrong is as integral to who Jonah Lehrer is as his cognitive biases are — the whole rehabilitation thing may be a non-starter. If this is how Lehrer understands why he did wrong, he seems to be identifying himself as a wrongdoer with a high probability of reoffending.

If he can parlay that into more five-figure speaker fees, maybe that will be a decent living for Jonah Lehrer, but it will be a big problem for the community of journalists and for the public that trusts journalists as generally reliable sources of information.

Weakness is part of Lehrer, as it is for all of us, but it is not a part he is acknowledging he could control or counteract by concerted effort, or by asking for help from others.

It’s part of him, but not in a way that makes him inclined to actually take responsibility or to acknowledge that he could have done otherwise under the circumstances.

If he couldn’t have done otherwise — and if he might not be able to when faced with similar temptation in the future — then Jonah Lehrer has no business in journalism. Until he can recognize his own agency, and the responsibility that attaches to it, the most he has to offer is one more cautionary tale.
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*Fact check: I have absolutely no idea how many other bloggers took five years of Latin. My evidence-free guess is that it’s not just me.

The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles. Rather than clue people in to problems with research design or interpretation, this alignment with stereotype further confirms the study. Variation gets erased: in bad evolutionary psychology, there are only straight people, and everyone wants the same things in life. …

No one should ever love their idea so much that it becomes detached from reality.

It’s a lovely post about the challenges of good scientific methodology when studying human behavior (and why it matters to more than just scientists), so you should read the whole thing.

Kate’s post also puts me in mind of some broader issues about which scientists should remind themselves from time to time to keep themselves honest. I’m putting some of those on the table here.

Let’s start with a quotable quote from Richard Feynman:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Scientists are trying to build reliable knowledge about the world from information that they know is necessarily incomplete. There are many ways to interpret the collections of empirical data we have on hand — indeed, many contradictory ways to interpret them. This means that lots of the possible interpretations will be wrong.

You don’t want to draw the wrong conclusion from the available data, not if you can possibly avoid it. Feynman’s “first principle” is noting that we need to be on guard against letting ourselves be fooled by wrong conclusions — and on guard against the peculiar ways that we are more vulnerable to being fooled.

This means we have to talk about our attachment to intuitions. All scientists have intuitions. They surely help in motivating questions to ask about the world and strategies for finding good answers to them. But intuitions, no matter how strong, are not the same as empirical evidence.

Making things more challenging, our strong intuitions can shape what we take to be the empirical evidence. They can play a role in which results we set aside because they “couldn’t be right,” in which features of a system we pay attention to and which we ignore, in which questions we bother to ask in the first place. If we don’t notice the operation of our intuitions, and the way they impact our view of the empirical evidence, we’re making it easier to get fooled. Indeed, if our intuitions are very strong, we’re essentially fooling ourselves.

As if this weren’t enough, we humans (and, by extension, human scientists) are not always great at recognizing when we are in the grips of our intuitions. It can feel like we’re examining a phenomenon to answer a question and that we’re refraining from making any assumptions to guide our enquiry, but chances are it’s not a feeling we should trust.

This is not to say that our intuitions are guaranteed safe haven from our noticing them. We can become aware of them and try to neutralize the extent to which they, rather than the empirical evidence, are driving the scientific story — but to do this, we tend to need help from people who have conflicting intuitions about the same bit of the world. This is a good methodological reason to take account of the assumptions and intuitions of others, especially when they conflict with our own.

What happens if there are intuitions about which we all agree — assumptions we are making (and may well be unaware that we’re making, because they seem so bleeding obvious) with which no one disagrees? I don’t know that there are any such universal human intuitions. It seems unlikely to me, but I can’t rule out the possibility. How would they bode for our efforts at scientific knowledge-building?

First, we would probably want to recognize that the universality of an intuition still wouldn’t make it into independent empirical evidence. Even if it had been the case, prior to Galileo, or Copernicus, or Aristarchus of Samos, that every human took it as utterly obvious that Earth is stationary, we recognize that this intuition could still be wrong. As it happened, it was an intuition that was questioned, though not without serious resistance.

Developing a capacity to question the obvious, and also to recognize and articulate what it is we’re taking to be obvious in order that we might question it, seems like a crucial skill for scientists to cultivate.

But, as I think comes out quite clearly in Kate’s post, there are some intuitions we have that, even once we’ve recognized them, may be extremely difficult to subject to empirical test. This doesn’t mean that the questions connected in our heads to these intuitions are outside the realm of scientific inquiry, but it would be foolish not to notice that it’s likely to be extremely difficult to find good scientific answers to these questions. We need to be wary of the way our intuitions try to stack the evidential deck. We need to acknowledge that the very fact of our having strong intuitions doesn’t count as empirical evidence in favor of them. We need to come to grips with the possibility that our intuitions could be wrong — perhaps to the extent that we recognize that empirical results that seem to support our intuitions require extra scrutiny, just to be sure.

To do any less is to ask to be fooled, and that’s the outcome scientific knowledge-building is trying to avoid.

Cultivating a space where commentators can vigorously disagree with a writer–whether on a blog, Twitter, G+, or Facebook, *and* remain committed to being in a real dialogue is pretty challenging. It’s fantastic when these exchanges work and become constructive in that space. On the other hand, there are times when it goes off the rails despite your efforts. What drives the difference? How can you identify someone who is commenting simply to cause trouble versus a commenter there to engage in and add value to a genuine debate? What influence does this capacity for *anyone* to engage with one another via the great leveler that is social media have on social media itself and the tenor and direction of scientific communication?

Getting ready for this session was near the top of my mind when I read a perspective piece by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele in the January 4, 2013 issue of Science. [1] In the article, Brossard and Scheufele raise concerns about the effects of moving the communication of science information to the public from dead-tree newspapers and magazines into online, interactive spaces.

Here’s the paragraph that struck me as especially relevant to the issues Emily and I had been discussing for our session at ScienceOnline 2013:

A recent conference presented an examination of the effects of these unintended influences of Web 2.0 environments empirically by manipulating only the tone of the comments (civil or uncivil) that followed an online science news story in a national survey experiment. All participants were exposed to the same, balanced news item (covering nanotechnology as an emerging technology) and to a set of comments following the story that were consistent in terms of content but differed in tone. Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story. Exposure to uncivil comments (which included name calling and other non-content-specific expressions of incivility) polarized the views among proponents and opponents of the technology with respect to its potential risks. In other words, just the tone of the comments following balanced science stories in Web 2.0 environments can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself. (41)

There’s lots to talk about here.

Does this research finding mean that, when you’re trying to communicate scientific information online, enabling comments is a bad idea?

Lots of us are betting that it’s not. Rather, we’re optimistic that people will be more engaged with the information when they have a chance to engage in a conversation about it (e.g., by asking questions and getting answers).

However, the research finding described in the Science piece suggests that there may be better and worse ways of managing commenting on your posts if your goal is to help your readers understand a particular piece of science.

This might involve having a comment policy that puts some things clearly out-of-bounds, like name-calling or other kinds of incivility, and then consistently enforcing this policy.

It should be noted — and has been — that some kinds of incivility wear the trappings of polite language, which means that it’s not enough to set up automatic screens that weed out comments containing particular specified naughty words. Effective promotion of civility rather than incivility might well involve having the author of the online piece and/or designated moderators as active participants in the ongoing conversation, calling out bad commenter behavior as well as misinformation, answering questions to make sure the audience really understands the information being presented, and being attentive to how the unfolding discussion is likely to be welcoming — or forbidding — to the audience one is hoping to reach.

There are a bunch of details that are not clear from this brief paragraph in the perspective piece. Were the readers whose opinions were swayed by the tone of the comments reacting to a conversation that had already happened or were they watching as it happened? (My guess is the former, since the latter would be hard to orchestrate and coordinate with a survey.) Were they looking at a series of comments that dropped them in the middle of a conversation that might plausibly continue, or were they looking at a conversation that had reached its conclusion? Did the manipulated reader comments include any comments that appeared to be from the author of the science article, or were the research subjects responding to a conversation from which the author appeared to be absent? Potentially, these details could make a difference to the results — a conversation could impact someone reading it differently depending on whether it seems to be gearing up or winding down, just as participation from the author could carry a different kind of weigh than the views of random people on the internet. I’m hopeful that future research in this area will explore just what kind of difference they might make.

I’m also guessing that the experimental subjects reading the science article and the manipulated comments that followed could not themselves participate in the discussion by posting a comment. I wonder how much being stuck on the sidelines rather than involved in the dialogue affected their views. We should remember, though, that most indicators suggest that readers of online articles — even on blogs — who actually post comments are much smaller in number than the readers who “lurk” without commenting. This means that commenters are generally a very small percentage of the readers one is trying to reach, and perhaps not very representative of those readers overall.

At this point, the take-home seems to be that social scientists haven’t discovered all the factors that matter in how an audience for online science is going to receive and respond to what’s being offered — which means that those of us delivering science-y content online should assume we haven’t discovered all those factors, either. It might be useful, though, if we are reflective about our interactions with our audiences and if we keep track of the circumstances around communicative efforts that seem to work and those that seem to fail. Cataloguing these anecdote could surely provide fodder for some systematic empirical study, and I’m guessing it could help us think through strategies for really listening to the audiences we hope are listening to us.

* * * * *
As might be expected, Bora has a great deal to say about the implications of this particular piece of research and about commenting, comment moderation, and Web 2.0 conversations more generally. Grab a mug of coffee, settle in, and read it.

——
[1] Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, “Science, New Media, and the Public.” Science 4 January 2013:Vol. 339, pp. 40-41.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1160364

For some reason, a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable fear of chemistry. I’m not just talking about fear of chemistry instruction, but full-on fear of chemicals in their world. Because what people think they know about chemicals is that they go boom, or they’re artificial, or they’re drugs which are maybe useful but maybe just making big pharma CEOs rich, and maybe they’re addictive and subject to abuse. Or, they are seeping into our water, our air, our food, our bodies and maybe poisoning us.

At the extreme, it strikes me that chemophobia is really just a fear of recognizing that our world is made of chemicals. I can assure you, it is!

Your computer is made of chemicals, but so are paper and ink. Snails are made of chemicals, as are plants (which carry out chemical reactions right under our noses. Also carrying out chemical reactions right under our noses are yeasts, without which many of our potables would be less potent. Indeed, our kitchens and pantries, from which we draw our ingredients and prepare our meals, are full of many impressively reactive chemicals.

And here, it actually strikes me that we might be able to ratchet down the levels of chemophobia if people find ways to return to de novo syntheses of more of what they eat — which is to say, to making their food from scratch.

For the last several months, our kitchen has been a hotbed of homemade bread. Partly this is because we had a stretch of a couple years where our only functional oven was a toaster over, which means when we got a working full-sized oven again, we became very enthusiastic about using it.

As it turns out, when you’re baking two or three loaves of bread every week, you start looking at things like different kinds of flour on the market and figuring out how things like gluten content affect your dough — how dense of a bread it will make, how much “spring” it has in the oven, and so forth.

(Gluten is a chemical.)

Maybe you dabble with the occasional batch of biscuits of muffins or quick-bread that uses a leavening agent other than yeast — otherwise known as a chemical leavener.

(Chemical leaveners are chemicals.)

And, you might even start to pick up a feel for which chemical leaveners depend on there being an acidic ingredient (like vinegar or buttermilk) in your batter and which will do the job without an acidic ingredient in the batter.

(Those ingredients, whether acidic or not, are made of chemicals. Even the water.)

Indeed, many who find their inner baker will start playing around with recipes that call for more exotic ingredients like lecithin or ascorbic acid or caramel color (each one: a chemical).

It’s to the point that I have joked, while perusing the pages of “baking enhancers” in the fancy baking supply catalogs, “People start baking their own bread so they can avoid all the chemicals in the commercially baked bread, but then they get really good at baking and start improving their homemade bread with all these chemicals!”

And yes, there’s a bit of a disconnect in baking to avoid chemicals in your food and then discovering that there are certain chemicals that will make that food better. But, I’m hopeful that the process leads to a connection, wherein people who are getting back in touch with making one of the oldest kinds of foods we have can also make peace with the recognition that wholesome foods (and the people who eat them) are made of chemicals.

It’s something to chew on, anyway.

I was interviewed last week about #overlyhonestmethods for the Public Radio International program Living On Earth, and the length of my commentary was more or less Twitter-scaled. This means some of the nuance (at least in my head), about questions like whether I thought the tweets were an overshare that could make science look bad, didn’t quite make it to the radio. Also, in response to the Living On Earth segment, one of the people with whom I regularly discuss the philosophy of science in the three-dimensional world, shared some concerns about this hashtag in the hopes I’d say a bit more:

I am concerned about the brevity of the comments which may influence what one expresses.  Second there is an ego component; some may try to outdo others’ funny stories, and may stretch things in order to gain a competitive advantage.

So, I’m going to say a bit more.

Should we worry that #overlyhonestmethods tweets share information that will make scientific practice look bad to (certain segments of) the public?

I don’t think so. I suppose this may depend on what exactly the public expects of scientists.

The people doing science are human. They are likely to be working with all kinds of constraints — how close their equipment is to the limits of its capabilities (and to making scary noises), how frequently lab personnel can actually make it into the lab to tend to cell cultures, how precisely (or not) pumping rates can be controlled, how promptly (or not) the folks receiving packages can get perishable deliveries to the researchers. (Notice that at least some of these limitations are connected to limited budgets for research … which maybe means that if the public finds them unacceptable, they should lobby their Congresscritters for increased research funding.) There are also constraints that come from the limits of the human animal: with a finite attention span, without a built in chronometer or calibrated eyeballs, and with a need for sleep and possibly even recreation every so often (despite what some might have you think).

Maybe I’m wrong, but my guess is that it’s a good thing to have a public that is aware of these limitations imposed by the available equipment, reagents, and non-robot workforce.

Actually, I’m willing to bet that some of these limitations, and an awareness of them, are also really handy in scientific knowledge-building. They are departures from ideality that may help scientists nail down which variables in the system really matter in producing and controlling the phenomenon being studied. Reproducibility might be easy for a robot that can do every step of the experiment precisely every single time, but we really learn what’s going on when we drift from that. Does it matter if I use reagents from a different supplier? Can I leave the cultures to incubate a day longer? Can I successfully run the reaction in a lab that’s 10 ^oC warmer or 10 ^oC colder? Working out the tolerances helps turn an experimental protocol from a magic trick into a system where we have some robust understanding of what variables matter and of how they’re hooked to each other.

Does the 140 character limit mean #overlyhonestmethods tweets leave out important information, or that scientists will only use the hashtag to be candid about some of their methods while leaving others unexplored?

The need for brevity surely means that methods for which candor requires a great deal of context and/or explanation won’t be as well-represented as methods where one can be candid and pithy simultaneously. These tweeted glimpses into how the science gets done are more likely to be one-liners than shaggy-dog stories.

However, it’s hard to imagine that folks who really wanted to share wouldn’t use a series of tweets if they wanted to play along, or maybe even write a blog post about it and use the hashtag to tweet a link to that post.

What if #overlyhonestmethods becomes a game of one-upmanship and puffery, in which researchers sacrifice honesty for laughs?

Maybe there’s some of this happening, and if the point of the hashtag is for researchers to entertain each other, maybe that’s not a problem. However, in the case that other members of one’s scientific community were actually looking to those tweets to fill in some of the important details of methodology that are elided in the terse “Materials and Methods” section of a published research paper, I hope the tweeters would, when queried, provide clear and candid information on how they actually conducted their experiments. Correcting or retracting a tweet should be less of an ego blow than correcting or retracting a published paper, I hope (and indeed, as hard as it might be to correct or retract published claims, good scientists do it when they need to).

The whole #overlyhonestmethods hashtag raises the perennial question of why it is so much is elided in published “Materials and Methods” sections. Blame is usually put on limitations of space in the journals, but it’s also reasonable to acknowledge that sometimes details-that-turn-out-to-be-important are left out because the researchers don’t fully recognize their importance. Other times, researchers may have empirical grounds for thinking these details are important, but they don’t yet have a satisfying story to tell about why they should be.

By the way, I think it would be an excellent thing if, for research that is already published, #overlyhonestmethods included the relevant DOI. These tweets would be supplementary information researchers could really use.

What researchers use #overlyhonestmethods to disclose ethically problematic methods?

Given that Twitter is a social medium, I expect other scientists in the community watching the hashtag would challenge those methods or chime in to explain just what makes them ethically problematic. They might also suggest less ethically problematic ways to achieve the same research goals.

The researchers on Twitter could, in other words, use the social medium to exert social pressure in order to make sure other members of their scientific community understand and live up to the norms of that community.

That outcome would strike me as a very good one.

* * * * *

In addition to the ever expanding collection of tweets about methods, #overlyhonestmethods also has links to some thoughtful, smart, and funny commentary on the hashtag and the conversations around it. Check it out!

Among other things, this suggests a willingness to put the scientific knowledge to use once it’s built.** If we learn some relevant details about the workings of the world, taking those into account as we figure out how best to achieve our goals or solve our problems seems like a reasonable thing to do — especially if we’ve made a financial investment in discovering those relevant details.

And yet, some of the “strings” attached to federally funded research suggest that the legislators involved in approving funding for research are less than enthusiastic to see our best scientific knowledge put to use in crafting policy — or, that they would prefer that the relevant scientific knowledge not be built or communicated at all.

A case in point, which has been very much on my mind for the last month, is the way language in appropriations bills has restricted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funds for research related to firearms.

The University of Chicago Crime Lab organized a joint letter (PDF) to the gun violence task force being headed by Vice President Joe Biden, signed by 108 researchers and scholars, which is very clear in laying out the impediments that have been put on research about the effects of guns. They identify the crucial language, which is still present in subsection c of section 503 and 218 of FY2013 Appropriations Act governing NIH and CDC funding:

None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.

As the letter from the Crime Lab rightly notes,

Federal scientific funds should not be used to advance ideological agendas on any topic. Yet that legislative language has the effect of discouraging the funding of well-crafted scientific studies.

What is the level of this discouragement? The letter presents a table comparing major NIH research awards connected to a handful of conditions between 1973 and 2012, noting the number of reported cases of these conditions in the U.S. during this time period alongside the number of grants to study the condition. There were 212 NIH research awards to study cholera and 400 reported U.S. cases of cholera. There were 56 NIH research awards to study diphtheria and 1337 reported U.S. cases of diphtheria. There were 129 NIH research awards to study polio and 266 reported U.S. cases of polio. There were 89 NIH research awards to study rabies and 65 reported U.S. cases of rabies. But, for more than 4 million reported firearm injuries in the U.S. during this time period, there were exactly 3 NIH research awards to study firearm injuries.

One possibility here is that, from 1973 to 2012, there were very few researchers interested enough in firearm injuries to propose well-crafted scientific studies of them. I suspect that that the 108 signatories of the letter linked above would disagree with that explanation for this disparity in research funding.

Another possibility is that legislators want to prevent the relevant scientific knowledge from being built. The fact that they have imposed restrictions on the collection and sharing of data by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (in particular, data tracing illegal sales and purchases of firearms) strongly supports the hypothesis that, at least when it comes to firearms, legislators would rather be able to make policy unencumbered by pesky facts about how the relevant pieces of the world actually work.

What this suggests to me is that these legislators either don’t understand that knowing more about how the world works can help you achieve desired outcomes in that world, or that they don’t want to achieve the outcome of reducing firearm injury or death.

Perhaps these legislators don’t want researchers to build reliable knowledge about the causes of firearm injury because they fear it will get in the way of their achieving some other goal that is more important to them than reducing firearm injury or death.

Perhaps they fear that careful scientific research will turn up facts which themselves seem to “to advocate or promote gun control” — at least to the extent that they show that the most effective way to reduce firearm injury and death would be to implement controls that the legislators view as politically unpalatable.

If nothing else, I find that a legislator’s aversion to scientific evidence is a useful piece of information about him or her to me, as a voter.
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*If federal funding for research did function like a subsidy, meant to keep the researchers employed and out of trouble, you’d expect to see a much higher level of support for philosophical research. History suggests that philosophers in the public square with nothing else to keep them busy end up asking people lots of annoying questions, undermining the authority of institutions, corrupting the youth, and so forth.

**One of the challenges in getting the public on board to fund scientific research is that they can be quite skeptical that “basic research” will have any useful application beyond satisfying researchers’ curiosity.

In this segment of the interview, we talk about foodies as picky eaters whose preferences get respect and about how pickiness looks from the parenting side of the transaction. Also, we notice that culinary school might involve encounters with a classic Star Trek monster.

Janet D. Stemwedel: It does seem like there are certain ways to be picky that people will not only accept but actually look at as praiseworthy. “Oh, you’ve decided to give up this really delightful food that everyone else would wallow in!” I’ll come clean: part of the reason I’m vegetarian is that I have never cared for meat. Once I moved out of my parents’ house and not eating meat became an option, I stopped eating the stuff without any kind of impressive exercise of will. And, in restaurants that are big on fake meat, I’ll end up pulling it out of my soup. The waitrons will tell me, “Oh, don’t worry, you can eat that! It’s not meat!” And I’ll say, “I can eat it, but I don’t like it, so I won’t be eating it.”

Stephanie V. W. Lucianovich: You don’t need a meat substitute if the point is that you don’t like meat.

JS: Although veggie bacon rocks.

SL: Really? Bacon, man …

JS: It’s the holy grail, taste-wise, right?

SL: There’s a thought it could be more psychological than biological.

JS: Salt and fat.

SL: And a high concentration of nutrients that you’d need to survive in the wilderness. But also, there’s the happy memory of smelling it cooking on a weekend morning, not something the scientists discount. These are learned experiences.

JS: But a favorite food can become a food you can’t deal with if you eat it right before your stomach flu.

SL: Right. It just takes one time. Except for with my husband. He had eaten a pastrami sandwich earlier in the day, then drank a lot and threw up. And his reaction was, “Oh yeah, that was a good pastrami sandwich.” As it was coming up, this is what was going through his head!

JS: Not a very picky eater.

SL: He’s such a freak! He just doesn’t get turned off to foods easily. Although he does have his bugaboos, like bologna (maybe because he didn’t grow up with it) and cheese with apples. But anyway, the aspect of choice …

JS: Like being able to say, “I can’t eat that because the dietary laws of my religion forbid it,” which generally gets some level of respect.

SL: But then there are the foodies! And that seems to be a socially sanctioned way to be a picky eater. “Oh, I would never eat that!”

JS: “I would never drink that wine! That year was horrible!”

SL: Exactly! Or, “I don’t eat Wonder Bread because it’s full of preservatives!” Foodies can certainly be moralistic, in their own way, about what they will and will not eat. But it’s annoying when they’re like that.

JS: Because their picky preferences are better than yours.

SL: It’s obnoxious.

JS: Are there some foods you don’t regret being picky about?

SL: Well, there are some foods I still don’t eat, and I’m fine with that. Bananas and raisins are right up there, and I wrote a piece for the Washington Post detailing the reasons why I’m OK not liking bananas. They’re trying to kill me in various ways — they’ve got radiation in them –

JS: We can’t grow them locally.

SL: Due to their lack of genetic diversity, they’re going to doe out anyway, so it’s probably better that I never liked them. They used to come with tarantulas in them, back in the day.

JS: That’s extra protein!

SL: So, I could list a bunch of foods that I still don’t like but without regret. Braised meats? I just don’t like them. People go on and on about how great they are, but to me it’s a big mass of everything-tastes-the-same with none of it highly flavored enough for me. WIth stews I have the same kind of issue. I think I don’t regret not liking these kinds of food now because I recognize how far I’ve come. I like so many more things than I used to, and I can get by without it impacting my health or my social life. And, when faced with them at somebody’s house, I will eat something that has bananas or whatever in it. I’ve learned how to deal with it. But I won’t choose to have it myself at home.

JS: You won’t seek it out.

SL: But I am bringing some of these foods into my home, because I don’t want to prejudice my son against them. He likes bananas, sometimes, but often they’ll end up wasted. He’ll go through a phase where he wants them, and then another where he doesn’t want them. His interest level is at the point where I can buy two bananas at a time. I have had friends ask me, “Are you going to not feed him raisins?” Of course I’m going to give him raisins. I can touch the things!

JS: “Are you going to raise the child picky?”

SL: Right! So far, the kid likes okra, so I think we’re OK. But everything on the list I give in the book of foods I still don’t like, I have absolutely no problem not liking them, because it just doesn’t impact my life. There are just a few things out there I wish I liked more, because it would vary our diet more. For example, I don’t love green beans. I toss them with pesto sometimes, but I have just not found a way to make them where I love them. I don’t love peas either, except when Evvia does them in the summertime — huge English peas that come cold dressed with feta and scallions and dill (which I normally don’t like) and olive oil and lemon, and they’re only here for like three weeks. And they’re the best damn peas — that’s the only way I want them. The things I kind of wish I liked that I don’t, I’ve tried, and I’ll try them again, but it doesn’t really bug me.

JS: I wonder how much my regrets for the things I feel like I should be able to like but don’t are connected to the fact that I was not an especially picky eater as a kid (except for not liking meat). I kind of feel like I should like asparagus, but I don’t. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten it that I can’t even remember whether I can smell the funny asparagus metabolite in my pee.

SL: I didn’t like asparagus, and then I wanted to like it and found a recipe that worked, roasting it and dressing it with a vinaigrette and goat cheese. But then we ate a lot of it, and it was really good, and after a while I was noticing that I only ate the tips, not the woody, stringy bits.

JS: And that it still tasted like asparagus.

SL: Yeah. In the end, I tried it.

JS: For me, olives are another challenging food. I’m the only one in my household who doesn’t like them at all. So we may order a pizza with olives to share, but I’m going to pick all the olives off of mine and give them to whoever is nicest to me.

SL: How do you feel about the pizza once you’ve picked them off? Can you actually eat the pizza then?

JS: If I’m hungry enough, I can. I guess it depends. The black olive penetration on pizza is not as extreme as biting into a whole olive.

SL: No. I think the kind of olives they use for pizza are …

JS: Sort of defanged?

SL: Yeah. They’re just not as bitter as the whole olives you find.

JS: Are there foods you’ve grown to like where you still feel some residual pickiness? It sounds like asparagus may be one.

SL: Sweet potatoes and squash are two others I’m still on the fence about. I have to be very careful about how I make them. Lentils — maybe legumes more generally — are foods I don’t love unconditionally. They have to be prepared a certain way. Broccoli, too! I will only eat broccoli made according to the recipe I give in the book or, failing that, roasted but without the vinaigrette. Just because I like a food does not mean I fully accept every rendition of it. Speaking from a cook’s perspective, you just can’t disrespect vegetables. I will not eat broccoli steamed, I just don’t think it’s fair.

JS: Fair enough.

SL: I’m still pretty picky about how I like even the foods that I like.

JS: OK, death is not an option: a dish with a flavor you’re picky about and a good texture, or a dish with a texture you’re picky about and a good flavor?

SL: That’s so hard.

JS: You really want death on the table?

SL: It depends … How bad is the flavor? How good is the flavor?

JS: So, if the good is good enough, you might be able to deal with the challenging part?

SL: I think texture really gets me more. For example, I don’t have a problem with the flavor of flan or panna cotta. Very good flavors. Mango I’ve had, and the flavor is good, but it’s so gelatinous and slimy.

JS: To your palate, it’s wrong.

SL: Yeah. It just gets the gag reflex going for me more. But thinking about it now, I probably wouldn’t do bad flavor/good texture.

JS: So flavor might have a slight edge?

SL: Yeah. I’m thinking about stew: for me, bad all around. Everything is mushy and everything is one flavor, and it’s just very un-fun for me. But then there’s something like bananas, where my problem probably started as a texture issue, but because I disliked the texture so much, I started to associate the smell and the flavor with that texture, and now I don’t like anything banana flavored. I don’t like banana bread. I’ll eat it, but I don’t like it.

JS: And banana flavored cocktails would be right out.

SL: Auugh! Anything that’s a banana flavored cocktail is usually creamy too, and I have a problem with creamy cocktails. I used to be able to do the creamy cocktail in my youth, but now I think there’s something very wrong with them. Unless it’s got coffee.

JS: Did pickiness make culinary school harder?

SL: Yeah, it probably did. I noticed I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to eat certain things. If you’re picky, you do have to really steel yourself to touch certain things that you might not want to touch, like fish. In general, I don’t like handling raw chicken, although I love to eat cooked chicken. I don’t mind handling red meats at all. There’s more blood to it — chicken, by comparison, is more pale and dead looking. So yeah, being picky probably made culinary school more challenging, but I was so into food by that point that it overrode some of it. I knew I would have to eat stuff like veal, stuff that would be difficult for me, and that it would be embarrassing if I didn’t, because the chefs told us we would have to taste everything. I was totally scared about that. But, the fact that it was probably harder for me than it was for someone who was an unabashed lover of all foods probably made it more of a moral victory. Just like becoming a foodie in the face of pickiness, I knew I had to work harder at it. I wasn’t born that way, I had to earn my stripes by getting over a lot of hurdles.

JS: It was a bigger deal because you overcame more adversity to get there.

SL: I think it meant more to me personally.

JS: Did you find that some of the stuff you learned in culinary school gave you more tools to deal with your own pickiness?

SL: Oh, yeah, because it just taught me better methods of cooking things that maybe I didn’t yet know. And, it really made me fearless about adding salt. Roberta Dowling was the director of the school, and nothing was ever salty enough for her. I started calling her the salt-vampire. There was a character on –

JS: Star Trek! I know that one!

SL: For every dish she tasted, she’d say, “Needs more salt,” even if we added all the salt the recipe called for. She tried to get us to recognize that the recipe was just a guideline. And salt really does do a lot for food. People who are not so confident in the kitchen get infuriated by “salt to taste,” but it really is all about your personal taste. What’s going on inside your mouth is so different from what may be going on in someone else’s, which means only you can determine whether it’s enough salt.

JS: Does pickiness look different when you’re on the parental side of the transaction.

SL: Yes. It’s so frustrating! It’s so, “Oh my God, don’t be like me!” I know my mom was like, “Whatever. You guys were picky. I wasn’t worried about it.” The doctor was like, “Give ‘em vitamins.” I do think that writing the book, especially the chapter on children, relaxed me. On the other hand, I feel the same way a lot of other picky eaters who are parents feel: I’m just a little bit more conditioned to understand what they’re going through and not push it. But I have to be careful, because sometimes you can still fall into “No, no, no! I know you think you don’t like it now, but really, just try it and you’ll like it.” I have to remember that it’s him and what tastes good to him and what he wants to do. Later on in life, if he changes his mind about whatever it is he doesn’t like this week, great. This week he told me he didn’t like grilled cheese. My response was, “You’re no son of mine! How does a person not like grilled cheese? It was always there for me.”

JS: I think the right answer to, “I don’t like grilled cheese, Mom,” is “More for me!”

SL: Exactly! But yeah, it’s a very different perspective on pickiness. But again, I’m probably more conditioned to be understanding about it than a non-picky parent who gets a picky child might be. They just don’t even know what it’s like.

JS: It’s an interesting thing as they get older. Until this school year, I was the school lunch packer of the house for both of my kids, and I’d get the complaints along the lines of, “Why do you pack us stuff we don’t like?” Of course, I’d say, “OK, tell me what you would like,” but then within a few months they’d be sick of that. This year, I’m still packing my older kid’s linch, since she has to get out the door early to catch a bus, but my 11-year-old has been making her own lunches, and I catch her making these sandwiches that two years ago she would have claimed she didn’t like any components of them at all. The other day, she made a sandwich on home-baked whole wheat bread with a honey-mustard marinate she dug out of the back of the fridge, and smoked gouda, and arugula. I said, “I didn’t know you liked those things.” She said, “Me neither, but they were here, and I tried them, and they were good.” Another day, she made a sandwich with some homemade lime curd, and the parent in the vicinity said, “What about some more protein on that?” so she put some peanut butter on that sandwich and later reported that it tasted kind of Thai.

SL: Of course it did!

JS: I’ll take their word for what they like (or don’t like) this week, but that’s not going to stop me from eating other stuff in front of them, and if it smells or looks good enough to them and they say, “Can I try some of that?” maybe I’ll be nice and I’ll share.

SL: That’s the way to do it, no pressure but you keep offering the stuff, exposing them to it but not getting hurt feelings if they don’t like it.

JS: And ultimately, who cares if the kid ends up liking it? If it’s less hassle for me, one less fight? I have enough fights. I don’t need more fights.

SL: You don’t really need the bragging rights, either. “Oh, my kid is so rarefied!” Who cares?

In this segment of the interview, we ponder the kind of power picky eaters find in the scientific research on pickiness, the different ways people get judgmental about what someone else is eating, and the curious fact that scientists who research picky eating seem not to be picky eaters themselves. Also, we cast aspersions on lima beans and kale.

Janet D. Stemwedel: Are there some aspects of pickiness that you’d like to see the scientists research that they don’t seem to be researching yet?

Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic: There was the question of whether there are sex differences in pickiness, which it seems like maybe they’re looking into more now. Also, and this is because of where I am right now, I’d really like to see them look into the impact of having early examples of well-prepared food, because I have a hunch this might be pretty important. I’m pretty sure there’s no silver bullet, whether you’re breast-fed or formula-fed or whatever. It can make parents feel really bad when they get a long list of things to do to help your kid not be picky, and they do everything on the list, and the kid still ends up picky. But I’d like to see more of the research suggesting that it’s not just early exposure to food but early exposure to good food. I’m also intrigued by the research suggesting that pickiness is not a choice but rather a part of your biology. Lots of my friends who are gay have likened it to coming out of the closet and accepting that who you are is not a choice. I’d like to see more pickiness research here, but maybe it’s not so much about the science as the sociology of finding acceptance as a picky eater. Also, I’m not sure the extent to which scientists are taking the cultural aspects into account when they study pickiness — you figure they must. I am sick of people throwing the French back at me, saying, there’s this book written by the mother who raised her kids in France, and her kids were not picky, so, generally, kids in France are not picky. And I’m thinking, you know, I’m willing to bet that there are picky kids in France, but they just don’t talk about it. Scientifically speaking, there’s a high probability that there are picky eaters there.

JS: Right, and their parents probably just have access to enough good wine to not be as bothered by it.

SL: Or maybe their stance is just generally not to be bothered by it. Jacques Pepin said to me, “We just didn’t talk about it.” His daughter liked some things and disliked others, and he said, “You know, when she decided she liked Brussels sprouts, we didn’t get down on the floor to praise God; we just didn’t talk about it either way.” It doesn’t become a thing in the family. Parents today are so educated about food and nutrition, but it can have bad effects as well as good effects.

JS: We have the knowledge, but we don’t always know what to do with it.

SL: I’m hoping that scientists will be able to take all that they’re learning about the different facets of pickiness and put that knowledge together to develop ways to help people. People have asked me whether hypnosis works. I don’t know, and the scientists I asked didn’t know either. But there are people looking for help, and I hope that what the scientists are learning can make that help more accessible.

JS: Something occurred to me as I was reading what you wrote about the various aspects of why people like or don’t like certain flavors or different textures. I know someone who studies drugs of abuse. During the period of time just after my tenure dossier when in, I detoxed from caffeine, but I kept drinking decaffeinated coffee, because I love the taste of coffee. But, this researcher told me, “No, you don’t. You think you do, but the research we have shows that coffee is objectively aversive.” So you look at the animal studies and the research on how humans get in there and get themselves to like coffee, and all the indications are that we’re biologically predisposed not to like it.

SL: We’re not supposed to like it.

JS: But we can get this neurochemical payoff if we can get past that aversion. And I’m thinking, why on earth aren’t leafy greens doing that for us? How awesome would that be?

SL: They don’t get us high. They don’t give us the stimulant boost of caffeine. I think what your researcher friend is saying is that the benefit of caffeine is enough that it’s worth it to learn how to handle the bitterness to get the alertness. I started out with really sweet coffee drinks, with General Foods International coffees, then moved on to Starbucks drinks. I can finally drink black coffee. (I usually put milk in it, but that’s more for my stomach.) I can actually appreciate good coffees, like the ones from Hawaii. But, it’s because I worked at it — just like I worked at liking some of the foods I’ve disliked. I wanted to like it because the payoff was good. With greens, the only payoff is that they’re good for you. I reached a certain age where that was a payoff I wanted. I wanted to like Brussels sprouts because the idea of actually healthful foods became appealing to me. But there are plenty of people I know who are picky eaters who couldn’t care less about that.

JS: So, if there were more reasons apparent within our lifestyle to like leafy greens and their nutritional payoff, we’d work harder when we were in junior high and high school and college to like them? Maybe as hard as we do to become coffee drinkers?

SL: Sure! I’m trying very hard to like kale.

JS: Me too! I feel bad that I don’t like it.

SL: I know, right?

JS: I feel like I should — like a good vegetarian should like kale.

SL: Well, everyone’s trying to like it, and I’ve found some ways of liking it. But, what’s the payoff for kale? Obviously, it’s very good for you, and it’s supposed to have some specific benefits like being really good for your complexion, and cleaning out your liver. Have another glass of wine? OK, if you eat your kale. But again, “good for you” is a weird kind of payoff.

JS: It’s a payoff you have to wait for.

SL: And one you’re not necessarily always going to see. I’ve been told that eating lots of salmon also has health benefits, but I just don’t like salmon enough to eat enough of it to see those benefits.

JS: Heh. That reminds me of the stories I heard from our pediatrician that you’ve probably heard from yours, that if you feed your baby too much strained carrot, the baby might turn orange and you shouldn’t be alarmed. And of course, I was determined to sit down and feed my child enough carrots that weekend to see if I could make that happen.

SL: I’ve never seen that happen. Does it really happen?

JS: Apparently with some kids it does. I tried with mine and could not achieve the effect.

[At this point we got a little sidetracked as I offered Stephanie some of my Gigantes (baked organic Gigante beans with tomatoes, leeks, and herbed feta). I had ordered them with some trepidation because someone on Yelp had described this as a lima bean dish, and I ... am not a fan of lima beans. The beans turned out to be a broad bean that bore no resemblance to the smaller, starchy lima beans of my youthful recollection.]

SL: I’ve never actually seen those lima beans fresh, just in bags in the frozen section.

JS: And assuming they still taste like we remember them, who would get them?

SL: Well, my husband is the kind of person who will eat anything, so he might. But you can also take limas and puree them with lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil and make a white bean spread. If I had to eat limas, that’s what I’d do with them. Maybe add a little mint. But I wouldn’t just eat them out of the bag, not even with butter.

JS: They’re not right.

SL: No.

JS: With so many different kinds of beans, why would you eat that one?

SL: There’s a reason why Alexander, of the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, had lima beans as his hated food. But, there are scientists at Monell working on flavors and acceptance of food — trying, among other things, to work out ways to make the drug cocktails less yucky for pediatric AIDS patients. They’re working on “bitter blockers” for that. (Maybe that could help with lima beans, too.) Anyway, getting Americans to eat more healthy foods …

JS: There’s probably some pill we could take for that, right?

SL: Hey, I thought we could do that with vitamins. Then I heard Michael Pollan saying, basically vitamins are pointless. (I still take them.) It’s tricky, because lots of people eat primarily for pleasure, not for health. I’m not sure why we have to see the two as being in opposition to each other; I enjoy food so much now that I find pleasure in eating foods that are good for me. But there are also plenty of people who just see food as fuel, and don’t find it any more interesting or worthy of discussion than that.

JS: At that point, why not just stock up on the nutrition bars and never do dishes again?

SL: When Anderson Cooper came out as a picky eater on his talk show, he said, “I would rather just drink my meals. I would rather have a shake.” His reaction to food was at the level where he wasn’t interested in anything more than that, at all. He’d rather go for convenience.

JS: That seems OK to me. That’s not how I am, or how the people I live with (and cook for) are, which means I can’t just blend it for meals, but that’s how it goes.

SL: For people who are like that, and know that they’re like that, if drinking meals is what works for them, that’s great. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be that way, but then again, I say that not really knowing what it’s like to be them instead of me.

JS: Do you think that interest in the causes of pickiness is driven by the amount of judgment people attach to picky eaters?

SL: Certainly, that’s my interest in it. I don’t think that’s necessarily why the scientific community is interested in it — I mean, I don’t think it bothers them very much, except in terms of understanding the psychological effects that are connected to pickiness. But yes, let’s talk about how food is the subject of judgment in general — especially among people in the Bay Area, among foodies.

JS: “Are you really going to eat that?! Do you know where that’s from?”

SL: Right, or “I won’t eat anything that wasn’t grown or raised within a 90 mile radius.” We have so many levels at which we judge what someone else is eating. My personal motivation for writing this book was to shed light on this topic because of the judgment that I saw picky eaters experience. For a while, I wouldn’t even admit my past as a picky eater. I had become a foodie and I was out here reinventing myself, but I kept my mouth shut about things I didn’t like until other people around me were admitting that they went through a picky stage of their own. Whenever I’ve written about pickiness online, the comments end up having a lot of people sharing their own stories. It seems like everyone can relate to it: “This is what I don’t like, and here’s why …” or, “I never thought I’d find anyone else who didn’t like this food for the same reason I don’t like it.” I’ve found that people can bond just as much over hating foods as they do over liking them. Let’s face it, food is often about community, so discussions of things we hate and things we love can be equally interesting to people. Even if you have the Pollyannas who say, “Who really wants to talk about something as unpleasant as what we don’t like?” guess what? We all dislike things.

JS: How many of the scientists who do research on the different aspects that contribute to pickiness outed themselves as picky eaters to you? Or do you think the scientists who study this stuff seem to be less picky than the rest of us?

SL: None of them really admitted to me that they were picky eaters. And I would ask them point blank if they were. One of the scientists working on the Duke study, Nancy Zucker, told me, “No. I ate everything as a kid, and I still do.” And, she told me her mom did some really weird things with food because her job was to sample products. The other scientist I spoke to on the Duke study admitted to not really liking tomatoes, but that was the extent of her pickiness. I got the sense from Dr. Dani Reed at Monell that she loves food and loves to cook. There were some foods, like organ meats, that she hadn’t quite accepted but that her friends were trying to get her to like. But, not a whole lot of people in this scientific community admitted to me that they were picky. I’m now thinking through everyone I interviewed, and I don’t recall any of them expressing food issues.

JS: I wonder if that’s at all connected with the research — whether doing research in this area is a way to make yourself less picky, or whether people who are picky are not especially drawn to this area of research.

SL: A lot of them would admit to having family members or friends who were picky. So then you wonder if they might have been drawn to the research because of this need to understand someone in their life.

JS: Maybe in the same way that losing a family member to leukemia could draw you to a career in oncology, having a family member who ruined family dinners by not eating what was on the plate draws you to this?

SL: Quite possibly. By and large, the scientists I spoke to about pickiness were so non-judgmental, probably because they’ve been studying it in various forms for various reasons. The rest of us are just now talking more about it and starting to notice the research that’s been amassed (on children, or breast feeding, or “inter-uterine feeding” and what they’re “tasting” in the womb). Since Monell is the center for research on taste and smell, they are used to journalists asking them about picky eaters. They’re also used to being misquoted and having the journalists’ accounts of the science come out wrong. (For example, they hate the word “supertaster,” which the media loves.) I got the impression that they were very non-judmental about pickiness, but none of them really described themselves as picky to me — and I asked.

JS: Maybe the picky eaters who are scientists go into some other field.

SL: Maybe. Maybe they don’t want to be involved with the food anymore.

JS: “Get it away from me! Get it away from me!”

SL: Seriously! “I lived it; I don’t need to study it!”

JS: Do you think having a scientific story to tell about pickiness makes it easier for picky eaters to push back against the societal judgment?

SL: Oh yeah. Lots of interviewers I’ve spoken to have wanted to tout this book as the science of picky eating — and let’s face it, it’s not all about the science — but people want to latch onto the scientific story because, for the lay person, when science hands down a judgment, you kind of just accept it. This is how I felt — you can’t argue with science. Science is saying, this is why I am who I am. Having scientific facts about pickiness gives you the back-up of a big-brained community, we can explain at least part of why you’re the way you are, and it’s OK. When parents can be given scientific explanations for why their kids are the way they are –

JS: And that the kid’s not just messing with you.

SL: Right! And that it’s not your fault. It’s not that you did something wrong to your kid that made your kid a picky eater. We’re really talking about two communities of picky eating, the parents of kids who are picky, and the adults who are picky eaters, and both those communities are looking for science because it’s as solid a thing as they can find to help them get through it.

JS: But here, we loop back to what you were saying earlier, as you were discussing how there’s potentially a genetic basis for pickiness, and how this kind of finding is almost analogous to finding a biological basis for sexual orientation. In both cases, you could draw the conclusion that it isn’t a choice but who you are.

SL: Exactly.

JS: But when I hear that, I’m always thinking to myself, but what if it were a choice? Why would that make us any more ready to say it’s a bad thing? Why should a biological basis be required for us to accept it? Do you think picky eaters need to have some scientific justification, or should society just be more accepting of people’s individual likes and dislike around food?

SL: Well, a psychologist would say, the first thing a picky eaters needs to do is accept that that’s who she is. Whatever the reason, whether their biology or their life history, this is who they are. The next thing is how does this impact you, and do you want to change it? If it’s something you want to change, you can then deal with it in steps. Why do we need to know that it’s not a choice? Because you get judged more for your choices. Let’s face it, you also get judged for who you are, but you get judged far more if you make what is assumed to be a choice to dislike certain foods. Then it’s like, “Why would you make that choice?” But there might also be a bully-population thing going on. There seem to be more people who like food of various kinds than who dislike them; why are they the ones who get to be right?

JS: Good question!

SL: And then there are discussions about evolution, where maybe not liking a particular food could be viewed as a weakness (because in an environment where that’s what there was to eat, you’d be out of luck). Sometimes it seems like our culture treats the not-picky eaters as fitter (evolutionarily) than the picky eaters. Of course, those who like and eat everything indiscriminately are more likely to eat something who kills them, so maybe the picky eaters will be the ultimate survivors. But definitely, the scientific story does feel like it helps fend off some of the societal criticism. Vegetarians and vegans already have some cover for their eating preferences. They have reasons they can give about ethics or environmental impacts. The scientific information can give picky eaters reasons to push back with that stronger than just individual preferences. For some reason, “I just don’t like it” isn’t treated like a good reason not to eat something.

In this segment of the interview, we discuss some of what scientists think they know about pickiness and why it matters. We also dip our tasting spoons into the steaming cauldron of early upbringing and cultural influences on the foods we like or don’t like, and chew on the idea that a kid’s pickiness can be developmentally appropriate.

Janet D. Stemwedel: The first question I have is about the expectations you had when you set out on this project, researching the book, about what you were going to learn about the science — whether you started out thinking science probably had a nice, neat explanation for why people are picky eaters, of whether you started out with the assumption that it was going to be a big old complicated thing?

Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic: I did not think science had the big answer, honestly. I thought science could answer the supertaster question for me personally, but that was the only answer I expected to get. In the meantime, I knew that I could ask scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists questions along with that. But I knew from what I was aware of already, the articles out there — I mean, they’re usually pop-culture articles, and they don’t always tell the science correctly or fully — I knew that science had some answers. I knew that there were so many avenues that could be explored, I really didn’t expect there to be a full answer. What I found, though, were more possibilities, like “this could be a possible reason — being a supertaster could be a reason, but it’s not the only reason.” Being exposed via breast milk — which I was not; I was a formula-fed baby — is maybe linked to being less picky, so maybe being formula-fed contributed to my pickiness. You’re never going to get an answer with 100% agreement behind it, because it’s still evolving. And science, as evidenced by Duke doing this study, for the adults at least, they don’t know what’s causing it, they just know that there are a lot of contributing factors. And, when they’re looking to treat it, it’s more like, “Well, let’s get really in-depth into what the possibilities might be that contribute to it, and let’s try to fix them” on sometimes just the psychological level.

JS: It’s an interesting kind of thing that something that goes along with studying a phenomenon like being a picky eater is the scientists saying, “And we’re going to fix it!” Like it’s something that needs to be fixed rather than just part of normal human variation. Why problematize it?

SL: Well, Dr. Nancy Zucker at Duke said what they worry about — less in my case, personally; more other people’s cases — they’re finding, if you’re a child, your development could be affected if you have what they call severe food refusal. They left the adults alone for a while, but now they’re discovering that maybe adults’ health and social lives are severely impaired by this problem, because they’re not eating the things maybe they’re supposed to be eating that can extend their lives or make them healthier, or if they don’t want to go out to dinner with friends and family, if they don’t want to be around friends, that’s a problem. So, that’s why they want to “fix” it, or at least help.

JS: So, it’s not necessarily, “We will find the picky eaters. They will all be cured. It will be a happy utopia.”

SL: I think the picky eaters have to want the help to be “cured”. While I got over it, I don’t believe that there’s going to be a cure. It’s very individualized. You really have to want to get over it, and to be fair to picky eaters who have it worse than I do, I don’t mean to say that all picky eaters want to live that way. But you have to have a very strong impetus to push you to do it. It’s a really scary thing. A lot of picky eaters will tell you it’s not a won’t, it’s a can’t. They can’t get over it.

JS: You interacted with lots of scientists who study many different aspects of pickiness in lots of different ways. You discovered that it’s complicated. Is your sense that the scientists feel like they may be getting near a place where things start seeming less complicated, where things start falling into place? Or was your sense, talking to them, that every corner they turned, they found a new way that it’s more complicated?

SL: I think the second. I think that as they gather information, especially about the adult picky eaters — because the adults are more forthcoming about what they don’t like and why or what they remember; you don’t necessarily reason with kids when you’re trying to treat them, you just treat them — so I think that they’re finding more nuances. It’s not just about the individual foods at all. It’s the reasons, if they can figure them out. So I think, when I spoke to scientists about my own personal experience and how I feel like I got past it, for some of them that was new information. To hear about my reactions to foods, or how I went to culinary school, some of it was like, “Oh, that makes sense. You learned how to cook and that demystified the food. That makes sense, on a psychological level, that that could have helped you.” But I think it’s still such a mystery because many people struggle with how to explain a dislike. You have to be pretty introspective to do it, and you may just be unable to explain it. “I don’t know why I don’t like it; I just don’t like it. I don’t know if it’s the texture or the flavor or what.” Some people haven’t thought very hard about it. They just know they don’t like it. I’m not sure it’s that complicated of a thing, except that humans are so complicated, and pickiness is more of an internal than an external issue. That makes it pretty complex.

JS: So scientists aren’t even expecting that it’s going to end up shaking out to be like three main ways to be picky.

SL: You know, I don’t know, because when I asked Dr. Zucker, who was heading up the Duke study, what they hoped to achieve, she was very careful to say that they were in the beginning stages of just assessing information with this online survey. I will say, they were surprised at the response. I’m remembering she said in a radio interview we were both part of that she expected around 3,000 people to fill out this form, and they got like 30,000. So I think the breadth of that response, what they’re learning about how many people out there might classify themselves as picky, as having food issues — and again, they were just amassing the information, they hadn’t yet begun to process it. Maybe they’ve started that now. Because I will say, also in that same interview, I always asked the question, is there a difference between men and women. That could have been something, potentially, I talked about in the book. Although I didn’t write about it, I personally found that of the people I’ve met who are former picky eaters, who have gotten past it, more are women than men. Men I’ve met who are picky eaters seem to just be OK with their state. They deal with it and they don’t really need to change it. We could go into philosophical reasons about women being social, or feeling judged, to explain why they might be more likely to try to get past it. But anyway, when I asked if there’s a difference between men and women, [I found out] there are studies with kids found that males may be more likely to reject a new idea than females. But Dr. Zucker did say in this one interview that they are starting to find out that there might be a difference between the sexes in pickiness itself. I wanted to talk to her about it more, but I couldn’t on the radio. Anyway, some interesting correlations are emerging.

JS: But then untangling what’s going on with those, whether it’s genes or environment, figuring out if there’s a cultural component to it …

SL: Whether there’s a cultural component is something I’ve been asked about a lot in interviews. It was something I did not feel equipped to cover, because it was just so big. I could have taken on the history of picky eating — it was something my editor wanted me to do — but I wasn’t even sure how to begin tracking the history of it. On the cultural side of it, you get a lot of people saying, “Well, in India babies eat spicy foods.” Yeah, they do; that’s what’s there, what they’re used to. That’s their normal. But I also had someone tell me about being an American in North Korea, working (yes, it can be done). They went out to lunch with their Korean counterparts, and the menu had a western side and a Korean side. The western side was all pastas, pizzas, whatever, and the Koreans at the lunch thought that was absolutely disgusting food. So, it’s all about what you’re used to. It’s not that Americans are predisposed to be picky because we live in this huge country of largesse. People in different countries are going to have different reactions to different kinds of food. What might be gross to someone who’s never had Japanese food before almost certainly has an American counterpart that someone in Japan would find gross. It’s a huge topic that I couldn’t even begin to get into.

JS: It makes you wonder. I would not describe my own upbringing as full of lots of different styles of food, or of foods from lots of different cultural traditions. My parents were from the midwest. I was growing up basically in the ’70s and ’80s, and that was not necessarily a time of astounding creativity among home chefs.

SL: Not just in the midwest, it wasn’t anywhere. I’m from Minnesota, and I grew up the same time you did. It was a lot of frozen vegetables for me. Badly prepared.

JS: With the hell boiled right out of them.

SL: Right! So there was no way they were going to end up being anything good. Now, I could blame Minnesota for our lack of access to better food, but I’ve talked to a friend of mine who grew up in California –

JS: And it was the same thing?

SL: Yes. She said, “We just didn’t have the same access that we do today.”

JS: Huh!

SL: She’s a former picky eater turned foodie and food writer, and she said it wasn’t until she went to college that she was opened up to more food. Maybe it is all about what your parents are bringing home. My husband grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and his mom always loved to cook, so she sought out the best recipes and there was more of that emphasis for him; even if they didn’t always have access to non-frozen vegetables, there was an attempt. I grew up on Chinese food and Vietnamese food, because we had a lot of it around, and I loved it, but I didn’t grow up around stuff I love now, like Ethiopian food or Afghan food. In this day and age, even in the midwest, there are more corner grocery stores that are going to have the ingredients, there are more restaurants, there’s more of an emphasis on the food culture than when you and I were growing up.

JS: Maybe that will have an impact on our kids. But, then again …

SL: It’s one thing that might help.

JS: Yeah. I have a kid who, as a two-year-old, cried inconsolably when, after her third helping of garlic broccoli, we ran out (and couldn’t get more, since it was Sunday, and the Thai restaurant down the street that we had gotten it from was closed). We said, “Child, you are not supposed to like broccoli this much!” And before that, when she was a baby, of course, every time my head was turned at the playground, she’d eat a handful of sand, I think just on principle. So, not what I would have called a super-picky child. But now, for her, there’s like a 15 minute window in which she’ll count a banana as ripe.

SL: I don’t blame her!

JS: And beyond that, she says, “It makes me gag.”

SL: Bananas are pernicious!

JS: It’s hard to know how much of this has to do with this is where her palate is right now (and it’s a moving target), and how much of it is, here’s a way to stick it to the parent.

SL: Speaking personally, I was the middle child, so I was always trying to be good. I was not ever trying to piss off my parents or run counter to them. And even my older sister, who was more the rebel, rebelled in other ways. I will say she became a vegetarian for a while, maybe to make a point — she was a teenager — but I also believe it was to avoid certain foods that neither of us liked. Speaking as a kid who grew up picky, I never consciously thought of my pickiness as a way to thwart my parents. I hated fighting with them about it.

JS: Yeah, I’m not even sure this would be a conscious thing. Once they’re thirteen, they don’t even know all the ways they’re trying to fight authority.

SL: Sometimes they’re disagreeing just to disagree.

JS: I think it’s part of demonstrating that you’re an autonomous human being; you have to reject every good idea that comes out of your mother’s mouth.

SL: Which is exactly what they’re doing around eighteen months. This is why it’s normal to see picky eaters at toddler age. It’s developmentally appropriate — they should be picky eaters. It’s the first time they can take control and say “No” and “You can’t put this in my mouth because I can now feed myself.” So yes, I learned that they’re little teenagers when they’re toddlers, with the same kinds of hormonal fluctuations going on.

JS: Well, it’s totally fun to get to do that twice with each child. Development kind of sucks.

SL: Yeah.

During a pause in my grading, my eldest child (age 13) related this conversation to me, which I am sharing with her permission.*

On a recent drive to a trumpet lesson, my father and I were speculating the social role of Santa Claus as compared to his elves. We managed to come up with two different possible theories that took account of the many different factors that were present in Santa’s supposed habits.

My dad’s theory was that Santa was a zombie. Not one of those brain-munching decomposing corpses that constitute the modern definition of zombies, but a zombie in the voodoo sense. Basically, a flesh puppet; a person under mind control that was being used to perform a task. He came to the conclusion that the elves brought Santa back every year to play a leadership role. According to my dad, resurrecting Santa was all the elves could do autonomously.

You can read more about how to make an old-school zombie in this excellent post from the archives of Cocktail Party Physics. Kids, be sure to get a parent’s permission first!

My theory was a bit more complex, and seemed more feasible to me. I hypothesized that Santa and his elves were like an ant or bee colony, with Santa as the “queen” and the elves as the workers. I proposed that milk and cookies were like the royal jelly. If an elf was given milk and/or cookies, it would metamorphose into another Santa and would challenge the existing Santa’s dominance. What would follow would be an intense and potentially disastrous Santa-on-Santa battle.

So my kids haven’t exactly outgrown speculating about Santa, but that speculation seems to have gone in an interesting direction. One wonders how many scientific careers can be traced back to childhood conversations where a grown-up was willing to spin theories with a kid.

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*Not only did she give her permission for me to share it, but she typed it up herself.

Say there’s an area of scientific research that is at a relatively early stage of its development. People working in this area of research see what they are doing as strongly connected to other, better established scientific fields, whether in terms of methodological approaches to answering questions, or the existing collections of empirical evidence on which they draw, or what have you.

There is general agreement within this community about the broad type of question that might be answered by this area of research and the sorts of data that may be useful in evaluating hypotheses. But there is also a good bit of disagreement among practitioners of this emerging field about which questions will be the most interesting (or tractable) ones to pursue, about how far one may reasonably extend the conclusions from particular bits of research, and even about methodological issues (such as what one’s null hypothesis should be).

Let me pause to note that I don’t think the state of affairs I’m describing would be out of the ordinary for a newish scientific field trying to get its footing. You have a community of practitioners trying to work out a reasonable set of strategies to answer questions about a bundle of phenomena that haven’t really been tackled by other scientific fields that are chugging merrily along. Not only do you not have the answers yet to the questions you’re asking about those phenomena, but you’re also engaged in building, testing, and refining the tools you’ll be using to try to answer those questions. You may share a commitment with others in the community that there will be a useful set of scientific tools (conceptual and methodological) to help you get a handle on those phenomena, but getting there may involve a good bit of disagreement about what tools are best suited for the task. And, there’s a possibility that in the end, there might not be any such tools that give you answers to the questions you’re asking.

Imagine yourself to be a member of this newish area of scientific research.*

What kind of obligation do you have to engage with other practitioners of this newish area of scientific research whose work you feel is not good? (What kind of “not good” are we talking about here? Possibly you perceive them to be drawing unwarranted conclusions from their studies, or using shoddy methodology, or ignoring empirical evidence that seems to contradict their claims. There’s no need to assume that they are being intentionally dishonest.) Do you have an obligation to take to the scientific literature to critique the shortcomings in their work? Do you have an obligation to communicate these critiques privately (e.g., in email correspondence)? Or is it ethically permissible not to engage with what you consider the bad examples of work in your emerging scientific field, instead keeping your head down and producing your own good examples of how to make progress in your emerging scientific field?

Do you think your obligations here are different than they might be if you were working in a well-established scientific field? (In a well-established scientific field, one might argue, the standards for good work and bad work are clearer; does this mean it takes less individual work to identify and rebut the bad work?)

Now consider the situation when your emerging scientific field is one that focuses on questions that capture the imagination not just of scientists trying to get this new field up and running, but also of the general public — to the extent that science writers and journalists are watching the output of your emerging scientific field for interesting results to communicate to the public. How does the fact that the public is paying some attention to your newish area of scientific research bear on what kind of obligation you have to engage with the practitioners in your field whose work you feel is not good?

(Is it fair that a scientist’s obligations within his or her scientific field might shift depending on whether the public cares at all about the details of the knowledge being built by that scientific field? Is this the kind of thing that might drive scientists into more esoteric fields of research?)

Finally, consider the situation when your emerging field of science has captured the public imagination, and when the science writers and journalists seem to be getting most of their information about what your field is up to and what knowledge you have built from the folks in your field whose work you feel is not good. Does this place more of an obligation upon you to engage with the practitioners doing not-good work? Does it obligate you to engage with the science writers and journalists to rebut the bad work and/or explain what is required for good scientific work in your newish field? If you suspect that science writers and journalists are acting, in this case, to amplify misunderstandings or to hype tempting results that lack proper evidential support, do you have an obligation to communicate directly to the public about the misunderstandings and/or about what proper evidential support looks like?

A question I think can be asked at every stage of this thought experiment: Does the community of practitioners of your emerging scientific field have a collective responsibility to engage with the not-so-good work, even if any given individual practitioner does not? And, if the answer to this question is “yes”, how can the community of practitioners live up to that obligation if no individual practitioner is willing to step up and do it?

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* For fun, you can also consider these questions from the point of view of a member of the general public: What kinds of obligations do you want the scientists in this emerging field to recognize? After all, as a member of the public, your interests might diverge in interesting ways from those of a scientist in this emerging field.