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Weiye Loh

Do Fights Over Climate Communication Reflect the End of 'Scientism'? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • climate (mis)communication. Two sessions explored a focal point of this blog, the interface of climate science and policy, and the roles of scientists and the media in fostering productive discourse. Both discussions homed in on an uncomfortable reality — the erosion of a longstanding presumption that scientific information, if communicated more effectively, will end up framing policy choices.
  • First I sat in on a symposium on the  future of climate communication in a world where traditional science journalism is a shrinking wedge of a growing pie of communication options. The discussion didn’t really provide many answers, but did reveal the persistent frustrations of some scientists with the way the media cover their field.
  • Sparks flew between Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist long focused on hurricanes and warming, and Seth Borenstein, who covers climate and other science for the Associated Press. Borenstein spoke highly of a Boston Globe dual profile of Emanuel and his colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  Richard Lindzen. To Emanuel, the piece was a great example of what he described as “he said, he said” coverage of science. Borenstein replied that this particular piece was not centered on the science, but on the men — in the context of their relationship, research and worldviews. (It’s worth noting that Emanuel, whom I’ve been interviewing on hurricanes and climate since 1988, describes himself as  a conservative and, mainly, Republican voter.)
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  • Keith Kloor, blogging on the session  at Collide-a-Scape, included a sobering assessment of the scientist-journalist tensions over global warming from Tom Rosensteil, a panelist and long-time journalist who now heads up Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism: If you’re waiting for the press to persuade the public, you’re going to lose. The press doesn’t see that as its job.
  • scientists have  a great opportunity, and responsibility, to tell their own story more directly, as some are doing occasionally through Dot Earth “ Post Cards” and The Times’ Scientist at Work blog.
  • Naomi Oreskes, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of “Merchants of Doubt“: Of Mavericks and Mules Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Realclimate.org: Between Sound Bites and the Scientific Paper: Communicating in the Hinterland Thomas Lessl, a scholar at the University of Georgia focused on the cultural history of science: Reforming Scientific Communication About Anthropogenic Climate Change
  • I focused on two words in the title of the session — diversity and denial. The diversity of lines of inquiry in climate science has a two-pronged impact. It helps build a robust overall picture of a growing human influence on a complex system. But for many of the most important  pixel points in that picture, there is robust, durable and un-manufactured debate. That debate can then be exploited by naysayers eager to cast doubt on the enterprise, when in fact — as I’ve written here before — it’s simply the (sometimes ugly) way that science progresses.
  • My denial, I said, lay in my longstanding presumption, like that of many scientists and journalists, that better communication of information will tend to change people’s perceptions, priorities and behavior. This attitude, in my view, crested for climate scientists in the wake of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
  • In his talk, Thomas Lessl said much of this attitude is rooted in what he and some other social science scholars call “scientism,” the idea — rooted in the 19th century — that scientific inquiry is a “distinctive mode of inquiry that promises to bring clarity to all human endeavors.” [5:45 p.m. | Updated Chris Mooney sent an e-mail noting how the discussion below resonates with "Do Scientists Understand the Public," a report he wrote last year for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and explored here.]
  • Scientism, though it is good at promoting the recognition that scientific knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, also promotes communication behavior that is bad for the scientific ethos. By this I mean that it turns such communication into combat. By presuming that scientific understanding is the only criterion that matters, scientism inclines public actors to treat resistant audiences as an enemy: If the public doesn’t get the science, shame on the public. If the public rejects a scientific claim, it is either because they don’t get it or because they operate upon some sinister motive.
  • Scientific knowledge cannot take the place of prudence in public affairs.
  • Prudence, according to Robert Harriman, “is the mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action. Contingent events cannot be known with certainty, and actions are intelligible only with regard to some idea of what is good.”
  • Scientism tends to suppose a one-size-fits-all notion of truth telling. But in the public sphere, people don’t think that way. They bring to the table a variety of truth standards: moral judgment, common-sense judgment, a variety of metaphysical perspectives, and ideological frameworks. The scientists who communicate about climate change may regard these standards as wrong-headed or at best irrelevant, but scientists don’t get to decide this in a democratic debate. When scientists become public actors, they have stepped outside of science, and they are obliged to honor the rules of communication and thought that govern the rest of the world. This might be different, if climate change was just about determining the causes of climate change, but it never is. Getting from the acceptance of ACC to acceptance of the kinds of emissions-reducing policies that are being advocated takes us from one domain of knowing into another.
  • One might object by saying that the formation of public policy depends upon first establishing the scientific bases of ACC, and that the first question can be considered independently of the second. Of course that is right, but that is an abstract academic distinction that does not hold in public debates. In public debates a different set of norms and assumptions apply: motive is not to be casually set aside as a nonfactor. Just because scientists customarily bracket off scientific topics from their policy implications does not mean that lay people do this—or even that they should be compelled to do so. When scientists talk about one thing, they seem to imply the other. But which is the motive force? Are they advocating for ACC because they subscribe to a political worldview that supports legal curtailments upon free enterprise? Or do they support such a political worldview because they are convinced of ACC? The fact that they speak as scientists may mean to other scientists that they reason from evidence alone. But the public does not necessarily share this assumption. If scientists don’t respect this fact about their audiences, they are bound to get in trouble. [Read the rest.]
Weiye Loh

When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Most people think of the term in the context of production of goods and services: more efficient means more valuable output is wrung from a given bundle of real resources (which is good) or that fewer real resources are burned up to produce a given output (which is also good).
  • In economics, efficiency is also used to evaluate alternative distributions of an available set of goods and services among members of society. In this context, I distinguished in last week’s post between changes in public policies (reallocations of economic welfare) that make some people feel better off and none feel worse off and those that make some people feel better off but others feel worse off.
  • consider whether economists should ever become advocates for a revaluation of China’s currency, the renminbi — or, alternatively, for imposing higher tariffs on Chinese imports. Such a policy would tend to improve the lot of shareholders and employees of manufacturers competing with Chinese imports. Yet it would make American consumers of Chinese goods worse off. If the renminbi were significantly and artificially undervalued against the United States dollar, relative to a free-market exchange rate without government intervention, that would be tantamount to China running a giant, perennial sale on Chinese goods sold to the United States. If you’re an American consumer, what’s not to like about that? So why are so many economists advocating an end to this sale?
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  • Strict constructionists argue that their analyses should confine themselves strictly to positive (that is, descriptive) analysis: identify who wins and who loses from a public policy, and how much, but leave judgments about the social merits of the policy to politicians.
  • a researcher’s political ideology or vested interest in a particular theory can still enter even ostensibly descriptive analysis by the data set chosen for the research; the mathematical transformations of raw data and the exclusion of so-called outlier data; the specific form of the mathematical equations posited for estimation; the estimation method used; the number of retrials in estimation to get what strikes the researcher as “plausible” results, and the manner in which final research findings are presented. This is so even among natural scientists discussing global warming. As the late medical journalist Victor Cohn once quoted a scientist, “I would not have seen it if I did not believe it.”
  • anyone who sincerely believes that seemingly scientific, positive research in the sciences — especially the social sciences — is invariably free of the researcher’s own predilections is a Panglossian optimist.
  • majority of economists have been unhappy for more than a century with the limits that the strict constructionist school would place upon their professional purview. They routinely do enter the forum in which public policy is debated
  • The problem with welfare analysis is not so much that ethical dimensions typically enter into it, but that economists pretend that is not so. They do so by justifying their normative dicta with appeal to the seemly scientific but actually value-laden concept of efficiency.
  • economics is not a science that only describes, measures, explains and predicts human interests, values and policies — it also evaluates, promotes, endorses or rejects them. The predicament of economics and all other social sciences consists in their failure to acknowledge honestly their value orientation in their pathetic and inauthentic pretension to emulate the natural sciences they presume to be value free.
  • By the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, a public policy is judged to enhance economic efficiency and overall social welfare — and therefore is to be recommended by economists to decision-makers — if those who gain from the policy could potentially bribe those who lose from it into accepting it and still be better off (Kaldor), or those who lose from it were unable to bribe the gainers into forgoing the policy (Hicks). That the bribe was not paid merely underscores the point.
  • In applications, the Kaldor-Hicks criterion and the efficiency criterion amount to the same thing. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $5, social gains increase by $5, so the policy is a good one. When Jack gains $10 and Jill loses $15, there is a deadweight loss of $5, so the policy is bad. Evidently, on the Kaldor-Hicks criterion one need not know who Jack and Jill are, nor anything about their economic circumstances. Furthermore, a truly stunning implication of the criterion is that if a public policy takes $X away from one citizen and gives it to another, and nothing else changes, then such a policy is welfare neutral. Would any non-economist buy that proposition?
  • Virtually all modern textbooks in economics base their treatment of efficiency on Kaldor-Hicks, usually without acknowledging the ethical dimensions of the concept. I use these texts in my economics courses as, I suppose, do most my colleagues around the world. But I explicitly alert my students to the ethical pitfalls in normative welfare economics, with commentaries such as “How Economists Bastardized Benthamite Utilitarianism” and “The Welfare Economics of Health Insurance,” or with assignments that force students to think about this issue. My advice to students and readers is: When you hear us economists wax eloquent on the virtue of greater efficiency — beware!
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    When Value Judgments Masquerade as Science
Weiye Loh

Sunita Narain: Indian scientists: missing in action - 0 views

  • Since then there has been dead silence among the powerful scientific leaders of the country, with one exception. Kiran Karnik, a former employee of ISRO and board member of Deva
  • when the scientists who understand the issue are not prepared to engage with the public, there can be little informed discussion. The cynical public, which sees scams tumble out each day, believes easily that everybody is a crook. But, as I said, the country’s top scientists have withdrawn further into their comfort holes, their opinion frozen in contempt that Indian society is scientifically illiterate. I can assure you in the future there will be even less conversation between scientists and all of us in the public sphere.
  • This is not good. Science is about everyday policy. It needs to be understood and for this it needs to be discussed and deliberated openly and strenuously. But how will this happen if one side — the one with information, knowledge and power — will not engage in public discourse?
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  • I suspect Indian scientists have retired hurt to the pavilion. They were exposed to some nasty public scrutiny on a deal made by a premier science research establishment, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), with Devas, a private company, on the allocation of spectrum. The public verdict was that the arrangement was a scandal; public resources had been given away for a song. The government, already scam-bruised, hastily scrapped the contract.
  • Take the issue of genetically-modified (GM) crops. For long this matter has been decided inside closed-door committee rooms, where scientists are comforted by the fact that their decisions will not be challenged. Their defence is “sound science” and “superior knowledge”. It is interesting that the same scientists will accept data produced by private companies pushing the product. Issues of conflict of interest will be brushed aside as integrity cannot be questioned behind closed doors. Silence is the best insurance. This is what happened inside a stuffy committee room, where scientists sat to give permission to Mahyco-Monsanto to grow genetically-modified brinjal.
  • This case involved a vegetable we all eat. This was a matter of science we had the right to know about and to decide upon. The issue made headlines. The reaction of the scientific fraternity was predictable and obnoxious. They resented the questions. They did not want a public debate.
  • As the controversy raged and more people got involved, the scientists ran for cover. They wanted none of this messy street fight. They were meant to advise prime ministers and the likes, not to answer simple questions of people. Finally, when environment minister Jairam Ramesh took the decision on the side of the ordinary vegetable eater, unconvinced by the validity of the scientific data to justify no-harm, scientists were missing in their public reactions. Instead, they whispered about lack of “sound science” in the decision inside committees.
  • The matter did not end there. The minister commissioned an inter-academy inquiry — six top scientific institutions looked into GM crops and Bt-brinjal — expecting a rigorous examination of the technical issues and data gaps. The report released by this committee was shoddy to say the least. It contained no references or attributions and not a single citation. It made sweeping statements and lifted passages from a government newsletter and even from global biotech industry. The report was thrashed. Scientists again withdrew into offended silence.
  • The final report of this apex-science group is marginally better in that it includes citations but it reeks of scientific arrogance cloaked in jargon. The committee did not find it fit to review the matter, which had reached public scrutiny. The report is only a cover for their established opinion about the ‘truth’ of Bt-brinjal. Science for them is certainly not a matter of enquiry, critique or even dissent.
  • the world has changed. No longer is this report meant only for top political and policy leaders, who would be overwhelmed by the weight of the matter, the language and the expert knowledge of the writer. The report will be subjected to public scrutiny. Its lack of rigour will be deliberated, its unquestioned assertion challenged.
  • This is the difference between the manufactured comfortable world of science behind closed doors and the noisy messy world outside. It is clear to me that Indian scientists need confidence to creatively engage in public concerns. The task to build scientific literacy will not happen without their engagement and their tolerance for dissent. The role of science in Indian democracy is being revisited with a new intensity. The only problem is that the key players are missing in action.
Weiye Loh

Office of Science & Technology - Democracy's Open Secret - 0 views

  • there is a deeper issue here that spans political parties across nations:  a lack of recognition among policy makers of their dependence on experts in making wise decisions.  Experts do not, of course, determine how policy decisions ought to be made but they do add considerable value to wise decision making.
  • The deeper issue at work here is an open secret in the practice of democracy, and that is the fact that our elected leaders are chosen from among us, the people.  As such, politicians tend to reflect the views of the general public on many subjects - not just those subjects governed solely by political passions, but also those that are traditionally the province of experts.  Elected officials are not just a lot like us, they are us.
  • For example, perhaps foreshadowing contemporary US politics, in 1996 a freshman member of the US Congress proposed eliminating the US government's National Weather Service , declaring that the agency was not needed because "I get my weather from The Weather Channel."  Of course the weather informaton found on The Weather Channel comes from a sophisticated scientific and technological infrastructure built by the federal government over many decades which supports a wide range of economic activity, from agriculture to airlines, as well as from the private sector weather services.
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  • European politicians have their own blind spots at the interface of science and policy.  For instance, several years ago former German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel claimed rather implausibly that: "You can build 100 coal-fired power plants and don't have to have higher CO2 emissions."  His explanation was that Germany participates in emissions trading and this would necessarily limit carbon dioxide no matter how much was produced. Obviously, emissions trading cannot make the impossible possible.
  • We should expect policy makers to face difficulties when it comes to governance when it involves considerations of science, technology, and innovation for the simple reason that they are just like everyone else -- mostly ignorant about mostly everything.
  • in 2010, the US NSF reported that 28% of Americans and 34% of Europeans believed that the sun goes around the earth.  Similarly, 30% of Americans and 41% of Europeans believe that radioactivity results only from human activities.  It should not be so surprising when we learn that policy makers may share such perspectives.
  • A popular view is that more education about science and technology will lead to better decisions.  While education is, of course, important to a healthy democracy, it will never result in a populace (or their representatives) with expertise in everything.  
  • Achieving such heroic levels of expertise is not realistic for anyone.  Instead, we must rely on specialized experts to inform decision making. Just as you and I often need to consult with experts when dealing with our health, home repairs, finances, and other tasks, so too do policy makers need to tap into expertise in order to make good decisions.
  • it should be far less worrisome that the public or policy makers do not understand this or that information that experts may know well.  What should be of more concern is that policy makers appear to lack an understanding of how they can tap into expertise to inform decision making.  This situation is akin to flying blind. Specialized expertise typically does not compel particular decisions, but it does help to make decisions more informed.  This distinction lies behind Winston Churchill's oft-cited advice that science should be "on tap, but not on top." Effective governance does not depend upon philosopher kings in governments or in the populace, but rather on the use of effective mechanisms for bringing expertise into the political process.
  • It is the responsibility - even the special expertise - of policy makers to know how to use the instruments of government to bring experts into the process of governance. The troubling aspect of the statements and actions by the Gummers, Gabriels, and Bachmanns of the political world lies not in their lack of knowledge about science, but in their lack of knowledge about government.
Weiye Loh

Is 'More Efficient' Always Better? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Efficiency is the seemingly value-free standard economists use when they make the case for particular policies — say, free trade, more liberal immigration policies, cap-and-trade policies on environmental pollution, the all-volunteer army or congestion tolls. The concept of efficiency is used to justify a reliance on free-market principles, rather than the government, to organize the health care sector, or to make recommendations on taxation, government spending and monetary policy. All of these public policies have one thing in common: They create winners and losers among members of society.
  • can it be said that a more efficient resource allocation is better than a less efficient one, given the changes in the distribution of welfare among members of society that these allocations imply?
  • Suppose a restructuring of the economy has the effect of increasing the growth of average gross domestic product per capita, but that the benefits of that growth accrue disproportionately disproportionately to a minority of citizens, while others are worse off as a result, as appears to have been the case in the United States in the last several decades. Can economists judge this to be a good thing?
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  • Indeed, how useful is efficiency as a normative guide to public policy? Can economists legitimately base their advocacy of particular policies on that criterion? That advocacy, especially when supported by mathematical notation and complex graphs, may look like economic science. But when greater efficiency is accompanied by a redistribution of economic privilege in society, subjective ethical dimensions inevitably get baked into the economist’s recommendations.
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    Is 'More Efficient' Always Better?
Weiye Loh

When Science Trumps Policy: The Triumph of Insite « British Columbia « Canada... - 0 views

  • As skeptics we obviously want to see science based medicine and effective methods to improve public health. What this means is that, we skeptics, want to see medicine like vaccines promoted instead of homeopathy; but, we also want to see science based policy as well. What Insite has proven is that the harm reduction policy is working, in fact, working better than the “war on drugs” policy that the Conservative government has been supporting. Since the evidence is pointing to harm reduction being a more effective method of controlling the harmful effects of drug addiction in society, it should follow that harm reduction as a policy gain the support of our government and health care providers.
  • what was really distressing was that the Harper Government wasn’t just arguing against the evidence (saying for instance that it was either wrong or misguided) but actually arguing in spite of the evidence. What they were saying was that, yes, harm reduction appears to be working…but that’s irrelevant because that isn’t the policy we want to use.
Weiye Loh

Want people to get on board with a shift to clean energy? Shield them from economic ins... - 0 views

  • The reality is that a bold new energy and climate change policy would inevitably result in dislocations in certain industries and upset long-established ways of life in many regions; in addition, it would lead to higher prices for basic commodities such as gas, home heating oil, and food. In societies where there are strong social safety nets -- universal healthcare, universal preschool, strong support for new parents, significant investments in public transportation, and sustained support for higher education -- the changes wrought by a paradigm shift in energy will tend not to result in hugely destabilizing effects across whole towns and communities. In fact, with good planning and investments in critical infrastructure, strong environmental policies can result in overall improvements in the quality of life for nearly everyone. Throughout much of the developed world, citizens are willing to pay prices for gasoline that would lead to riots in American streets, because they know that the government revenue raised by high gas taxes is used for programs that directly benefit them. In other words, ten-dollar-a-gallon gas isn’t such a big deal when everyone has great healthcare, great public transportation, and free high-quality schooling.
  • Americans are so battered and anxious right now. Median wages are flat, unemployment is high, politics is paralyzed. Middle-class families are one health problem away from ruin, and when they fall, there's no net. That kind of insecurity, as much as anything, explains the American reticence to launch bold new social programs.
  • Michael Levi points to a fantastic piece by Nassim Taleb and Mark Blyth wherein they approach a similar subject from a seemingly contrary angle, arguing that government efforts to suppress social and economic volatility can backfire. Without the experience of adjusting to small shocks as they come, we won't be prepared when the big shocks arrive:
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  • Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to "Black Swans" -- that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.
  • If a society provides a basic measure of health and economic security for its citizens, its citizens will be more tolerant of a little volatility/risk/ambition in its social and economic policy.
  • This gets at why I think its extremely difficult to reconcile modern-day conservatism and serious efforts to address climate change (and future resource shortages, and other various other sources of long-term risk). The U.S. conservative politic program is devoted to increasing economic and social insecurity for average people and decreasing it for wealthy business owners. That is roughly the opposite of the approach you'd want to take if you want to increase society's resilience to the dangers approaching.
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    First there's this extremely smart piece from economist Jason Scorse. It makes an argument that I wish had gotten much more attention during the fight over the climate bill, to wit: "people are much more willing to support environmental policies that come with large risks and disruptions to their way of life when other policies are in place to shield them from excessive risk and instability."
Weiye Loh

Why do we care where we publish? - 0 views

  • being both a working scientist and a science writer gives me a unique perspective on science, scientific publications, and the significance of scientific work. The final disclosure should be that I have never published in any of the top rank physics journals or in Science, Nature, or PNAS. I don't believe I have an axe to grind about that, but I am also sure that you can ascribe some of my opinions to PNAS envy.
  • If you asked most scientists what their goals were, the answer would boil down to the generation of new knowledge. But, at some point, science and scientists have to interact with money and administrators, which has significant consequences for science. For instance, when trying to employ someone to do a job, you try to objectively decide if the skills set of the prospective employee matches that required to do the job. In science, the same question has to be asked—instead of being asked once per job interview, however, this question gets asked all the time.
  • Because science requires funding, and no one gets a lifetime dollop-o-cash to explore their favorite corner of the universe. So, the question gets broken down to "how competent is the scientist?" "Is the question they want to answer interesting?" "Do they have the resources to do what they say they will?" We will ignore the last question and focus on the first two.
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  • How can we assess the competence of a scientist? Past performance is, realistically, the only way to judge future performance. Past performance can only be assessed by looking at their publications. Were they in a similar area? Are they considered significant? Are they numerous? Curiously, though, the second question is also answered by looking at publications—if a topic is considered significant, then there will be lots of publications in that area, and those publications will be of more general interest, and so end up in higher ranking journals.
  • So we end up in the situation that the editors of major journals are in the position to influence the direction of scientific funding, meaning that there is a huge incentive for everyone to make damn sure that their work ends up in Science or Nature. But why are Science, Nature, and PNAS considered the place to put significant work? Why isn't a new optical phenomena, published in Optics Express, as important as a new optical phenomena published in Science?
  • The big three try to be general; they will, in principle, publish reports from any discipline, and they anticipate readership from a range of disciplines. This explicit generality means that the scientific results must not only be of general interest, but also highly significant. The remaining journals become more specialized, covering perhaps only physics, or optics, or even just optical networking. However, they all claim to only publish work that is highly original in nature.
  • Are standards really so different? Naturally, the more specialized a journal is, the fewer people it appeals to. However, the major difference in determining originality is one of degree and referee. A more specialized journal has more detailed articles, so the differences between experiments stand out more obviously, while appealing to general interest changes the emphasis of the article away from details toward broad conclusions.
  • as the audience becomes broader, more technical details get left by the wayside. Note that none of the gene sequences published in Science have the actual experimental and analysis details. What ends up published is really a broad-brush description of the work, with the important details either languishing as supplemental information, or even published elsewhere, in a more suitable journal. Yet, the high profile paper will get all the citations, while the more detailed—the unkind would say accurate—description of the work gets no attention.
  • And that is how journals are ranked. Count the number of citations for each journal per volume, run it through a magic number generator, and the impact factor jumps out (make your checks out to ISI Thomson please). That leaves us with the following formula: grants require high impact publications, high impact publications need citations, and that means putting research in a journal that gets lots of citations. Grants follow the concepts that appear to be currently significant, and that's decided by work that is published in high impact journals.
  • This system would be fine if it did not ignore the fact that performing science and reporting scientific results are two very different skills, and not everyone has both in equal quantity. The difference between a Nature-worthy finding and a not-Nature-worthy finding is often in the quality of the writing. How skillfully can I relate this bit of research back to general or topical interests? It really is this simple. Over the years, I have seen quite a few physics papers with exaggerated claims of significance (or even results) make it into top flight journals, and the only differences I can see between those works and similar works published elsewhere is that the presentation and level of detail are different.
  • articles from the big three are much easier to cover on Nobel Intent than articles from, say Physical Review D. Nevertheless, when we do cover them, sometimes the researchers suddenly realize that they could have gotten a lot more mileage out of their work. It changes their approach to reporting their results, which I see as evidence that writing skill counts for as much as scientific quality.
  • If that observation is generally true, then it raises questions about the whole process of evaluating a researcher's competence and a field's significance, because good writers corrupt the process by publishing less significant work in journals that only publish significant findings. In fact, I think it goes further than that, because Science, Nature, and PNAS actively promote themselves as scientific compasses. Want to find the most interesting and significant research? Read PNAS.
  • The publishers do this by extensively publicizing science that appears in their own journals. Their news sections primarily summarize work published in the same issue of the same magazine. This lets them create a double-whammy of scientific significance—not only was the work published in Nature, they also summarized it in their News and Views section.
  • Furthermore, the top three work very hard at getting other journalists to cover their articles. This is easy to see by simply looking at Nobel Intent's coverage. Most of the work we discuss comes from Science and Nature. Is this because we only read those two publications? No, but they tell us ahead of time what is interesting in their upcoming issue. They even provide short summaries of many papers that practically guide people through writing the story, meaning reporter Jim at the local daily doesn't need a science degree to cover the science beat.
  • Very few of the other journals do this. I don't get early access to the Physical Review series, even though I love reporting from them. In fact, until this year, they didn't even highlight interesting papers for their own readers. This makes it incredibly hard for a science reporter to cover science outside of the major journals. The knock-on effect is that Applied Physics Letters never appears in the news, which means you can't evaluate recent news coverage to figure out what's of general interest, leaving you with... well, the big three journals again, which mostly report on themselves. On the other hand, if a particular scientific topic does start to receive some press attention, it is much more likely that similar work will suddenly be acceptable in the big three journals.
  • That said, I should point out that judging the significance of scientific work is a process fraught with difficulty. Why do you think it takes around 10 years from the publication of first results through to obtaining a Nobel Prize? Because it can take that long for the implications of the results to sink in—or, more commonly, sink without trace.
  • I don't think that we can reasonably expect journal editors and peer reviewers to accurately assess the significance (general or otherwise) of a new piece of research. There are, of course, exceptions: the first genome sequences, the first observation that the rate of the expansion of the universe is changing. But the point is that these are exceptions, and most work's significance is far more ambiguous, and even goes unrecognized (or over-celebrated) by scientists in the field.
  • The conclusion is that the top three journals are significantly gamed by scientists who are trying to get ahead in their careers—citations always lag a few years behind, so a PNAS paper with less than ten citations can look good for quite a few years, even compared to an Optics Letters with 50 citations. The top three journals overtly encourage this, because it is to their advantage if everyone agrees that they are the source of the most interesting science. Consequently, scientists who are more honest in self-assessing their work, or who simply aren't word-smiths, end up losing out.
  • scientific competence should not be judged by how many citations the author's work has received or where it was published. Instead, we should consider using a mathematical graph analysis to look at the networks of publications and citations, which should help us judge how central to a field a particular researcher is. This would have the positive influence of a publication mattering less than who thought it was important.
  • Science and Nature should either eliminate their News and Views section, or implement a policy of not reporting on their own articles. This would open up one of the major sources of "science news for scientists" to stories originating in other journals.
Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: The problem of replicability in science - 0 views

  • The problem of replicability in science from xkcdby Massimo Pigliucci
  • In recent months much has been written about the apparent fact that a surprising, indeed disturbing, number of scientific findings cannot be replicated, or when replicated the effect size turns out to be much smaller than previously thought.
  • Arguably, the recent streak of articles on this topic began with one penned by David Freedman in The Atlantic, and provocatively entitled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.” In it, the major character was John Ioannidis, the author of some influential meta-studies about the low degree of replicability and high number of technical flaws in a significant portion of published papers in the biomedical literature.
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  • As Freedman put it in The Atlantic: “80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.” Ioannidis himself was quoted uttering some sobering words for the medical community (and the public at large): “Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor. I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”
  • Julia and I actually addressed this topic during a Rationally Speaking podcast, featuring as guest our friend Steve Novella, of Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe and Science-Based Medicine fame. But while Steve did quibble with the tone of the Atlantic article, he agreed that Ioannidis’ results are well known and accepted by the medical research community. Steve did point out that it should not be surprising that results get better and better as one moves toward more stringent protocols like large randomized trials, but it seems to me that one should be surprised (actually, appalled) by the fact that even there the percentage of flawed studies is high — not to mention the fact that most studies are in fact neither large nor properly randomized.
  • The second big recent blow to public perception of the reliability of scientific results is an article published in The New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, entitled “The truth wears off.” Lehrer also mentions Ioannidis, but the bulk of his essay is about findings in psychiatry, psychology and evolutionary biology (and even in research on the paranormal!).
  • In these disciplines there are now several documented cases of results that were initially spectacularly positive — for instance the effects of second generation antipsychotic drugs, or the hypothesized relationship between a male’s body symmetry and the quality of his genes — that turned out to be increasingly difficult to replicate over time, with the original effect sizes being cut down dramatically, or even disappearing altogether.
  • As Lehrer concludes at the end of his article: “Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling.”
  • None of this should actually be particularly surprising to any practicing scientist. If you have spent a significant time of your life in labs and reading the technical literature, you will appreciate the difficulties posed by empirical research, not to mention a number of issues such as the fact that few scientists ever actually bother to replicate someone else’s results, for the simple reason that there is no Nobel (or even funded grant, or tenured position) waiting for the guy who arrived second.
  • n the midst of this I was directed by a tweet by my colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson (who has also appeared on the RS podcast, though in a different context) to a recent ABC News article penned by John Allen Paulos, which meant to explain the decline effect in science.
  • Paulos’ article is indeed concise and on the mark (though several of the explanations he proposes were already brought up in both the Atlantic and New Yorker essays), but it doesn’t really make things much better.
  • Paulos suggests that one explanation for the decline effect is the well known statistical phenomenon of the regression toward the mean. This phenomenon is responsible, among other things, for a fair number of superstitions: you’ve probably heard of some athletes’ and other celebrities’ fear of being featured on the cover of a magazine after a particularly impressive series of accomplishments, because this brings “bad luck,” meaning that the following year one will not be able to repeat the performance at the same level. This is actually true, not because of magical reasons, but simply as a result of the regression to the mean: extraordinary performances are the result of a large number of factors that have to line up just right for the spectacular result to be achieved. The statistical chances of such an alignment to repeat itself are low, so inevitably next year’s performance will likely be below par. Paulos correctly argues that this also explains some of the decline effect of scientific results: the first discovery might have been the result of a number of factors that are unlikely to repeat themselves in exactly the same way, thus reducing the effect size when the study is replicated.
  • nother major determinant of the unreliability of scientific results mentioned by Paulos is the well know problem of publication bias: crudely put, science journals (particularly the high-profile ones, like Nature and Science) are interested only in positive, spectacular, “sexy” results. Which creates a powerful filter against negative, or marginally significant results. What you see in science journals, in other words, isn’t a statistically representative sample of scientific results, but a highly biased one, in favor of positive outcomes. No wonder that when people try to repeat the feat they often come up empty handed.
  • A third cause for the problem, not mentioned by Paulos but addressed in the New Yorker article, is the selective reporting of results by scientists themselves. This is essentially the same phenomenon as the publication bias, except that this time it is scientists themselves, not editors and reviewers, who don’t bother to submit for publication results that are either negative or not strongly conclusive. Again, the outcome is that what we see in the literature isn’t all the science that we ought to see. And it’s no good to argue that it is the “best” science, because the quality of scientific research is measured by the appropriateness of the experimental protocols (including the use of large samples) and of the data analyses — not by whether the results happen to confirm the scientist’s favorite theory.
  • The conclusion of all this is not, of course, that we should throw the baby (science) out with the bath water (bad or unreliable results). But scientists should also be under no illusion that these are rare anomalies that do not affect scientific research at large. Too much emphasis is being put on the “publish or perish” culture of modern academia, with the result that graduate students are explicitly instructed to go for the SPU’s — Smallest Publishable Units — when they have to decide how much of their work to submit to a journal. That way they maximize the number of their publications, which maximizes the chances of landing a postdoc position, and then a tenure track one, and then of getting grants funded, and finally of getting tenure. The result is that, according to statistics published by Nature, it turns out that about ⅓ of published studies is never cited (not to mention replicated!).
  • “Scientists these days tend to keep up the polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist’s field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist’s, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants. ... We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will ‘add another brick to the temple of science.’ Most such bricks lie around the brickyard.”
    • Weiye Loh
       
      Written by John Platt in a "Science" article published in 1964
  • Most damning of all, however, is the potential effect that all of this may have on science’s already dubious reputation with the general public (think evolution-creation, vaccine-autism, or climate change)
  • “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than non-scientists who falsely claim they can heal. If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”
  • Joseph T. Lapp said... But is any of this new for science? Perhaps science has operated this way all along, full of fits and starts, mostly duds. How do we know that this isn't the optimal way for science to operate?My issues are with the understanding of science that high school graduates have, and with the reporting of science.
    • Weiye Loh
       
      It's the media at fault again.
  • What seems to have emerged in recent decades is a change in the institutional setting that got science advancing spectacularly since the establishment of the Royal Society. Flaws in the system such as corporate funded research, pal-review instead of peer-review, publication bias, science entangled with policy advocacy, and suchlike, may be distorting the environment, making it less suitable for the production of good science, especially in some fields.
  • Remedies should exist, but they should evolve rather than being imposed on a reluctant sociological-economic science establishment driven by powerful motives such as professional advance or funding. After all, who or what would have the authority to impose those rules, other than the scientific establishment itself?
Weiye Loh

Before Assange there was Jayakumar: Context, realpolitik, and the public inte... - 0 views

  • Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman’s remarks in the Wall Street Journal Asia piece, “Leaked cable spooks some U.S. sources” dated 3 Dec 2010. The paragraph in question went like this: “Others laid blame not on working U.S. diplomats, but on Wikileaks. Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had “deep concerns about the damaging action of Wikileaks.” It added, ‘it is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence.’” (emphasis my own)
  • on 25 Jan 2003, the then Singapore Minister of Foreign Affairs and current Senior Minister without portfolio, Professor S Jayakumar, in an unprecedented move, unilaterally released all diplomatic and official correspondence relating to confidential discussions on water negotiations between Singapore and Malaysia from the year 2000. In a parliamentary speech that would have had Julian Assange smiling from ear to ear, Jayakumar said, “We therefore have no choice but to set the record straight by releasing these documents for people to judge for themselves the truth of the matter.” The parliamentary reason for the unprecedented release of information was the misrepresentations made by Malaysia over the price of water, amongst others.
  • The then Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir’s response to Singapore’s pre-Wikileak wikileak was equally quote-worthy, “I don’t feel nice. You write a letter to your girlfriend. And your girlfriend circulates it to all her boyfriends. I don’t think I’ll get involved with that girl.”
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  • Mahathir did not leave it at that. He foreshadowed the Wikileak-chastised countries of today saying what William, the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US and Iran today, amongst others, must agree with, “It’s very difficult now for us to write letters at all because we might as well negotiate through the media.”
  • I proceeded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs homepage to search for the full press release. As I anticipated, there was a caveat. This is the press release in full: In response to media queries on the WikiLeaks release of confidential and secret-graded US diplomatic correspondence, the MFA Spokesman expressed deep concerns about the damaging action of WikiLeaks. It is critical to protect the confidentiality of diplomatic and official correspondence, which is why Singapore has the Officials Secrets Act. In particular, the selective release of documents, especially when taken out of context, will only serve to sow confusion and fail to provide a complete picture of the important issues that were being discussed amongst leaders in the strictest of confidentiality.
  • The sentence in red seems to posit that the selective release of documents can be legitimised if released documents are not taken out of context. If this interpretation is true, then one can account for the political decision to release confidential correspondence covering the Singapore and Malaysia water talks referred to above. In parallel, one can imagine Assange or his supporters arguing that lies of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the advent of abject two-faced politics today to be sufficient grounds to justify the actions of Wikileaks. As for the arguments about confidentiality and official correspondence, the events in parliament in 2003 tell us no one should underestimate the ability of nation-states to do an Assange if it befits their purpose – be it directly, as Jayakumar did, or indirectly, through the media or some other medium of influence.
  • Timothy Garton Ash put out the dilemma perfectly when he said, “There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.”
  • the advent of technology will only further blur the lines between these two public interests, if it has not already. Quite apart from technology, the absence of transparent and accountable institutions may also serve to guarantee the prospect of more of such embarrassing leaks in future.
  • In August 2009, there was considerable interest in Singapore about the circumstances behind the departure of Chip Goodyear, former CEO of the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton, from the national sovereign wealth fund, Temasek Holdings. Before that, all the public knew was – in the name of leadership renewal – Chip Goodyear had been carefully chosen and apparently hand-picked to replace Ho Ching as CEO of Temasek Holdings. In response to Chip’s untimely departure, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam was quoted, “People do want to know, there is curiosity, it is a matter of public interest. That is not sufficient reason to disclose information. It is not sufficient that there be curiosity and interest that you want to disclose information.”
  • Overly secretive and furtive politicians operating in a parliamentary democracy are unlikely to inspire confidence among an educated citizenry either, only serving to paradoxically fuel public cynicism and conspiracy theories.
  • I believe that government officials and politicians who perform their jobs honourably have nothing to fear from Wikileaks. I would admit that there is an inherent naivety and idealism in this position. But if the lesson from the Wikileaks episode portends a higher standard of ethical conduct, encourages transparency and accountability – all of which promote good governance, realpolitik notwithstanding – then it is perhaps a lesson all politicians and government officials should pay keen attention to.
  • Post-script: “These disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do….If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.” –Simon Jenkins, Guardian
Weiye Loh

Open data, democracy and public sector reform - 0 views

  •  
    Governments are increasingly making their data available online in standard formats and under licenses that permit the free re-use of data. The justifications advanced for this include claims regarding the economic potential of open government data (OGD), the potential for OGD to promote transparency and accountability of government and the role of OGD in supporting the reform and reshaping of public services. This paper takes a pragmatic mixed-methods approach to exploring uses of data from the UK national open government data portal, data.gov.uk, and identifies how the emerging practices of OGD use are developing. It sets out five 'processes' of data use, and describes a series of embedded cases of education OGD use, and use of public-spending OGD. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data it presents an outline account of the motivations driving different individuals to engage with open government data, and it identifies a range of connections between open government data use of processes of civic change. It argues that a "data for developers" narrative that assumes OGD use will primarily be mediated by technology developers is misplaced, and that whilst innovation-based routes to OGD-driven public sector reform are evident, the relationship between OGD and democracy is less clear. As strategic research it highlights a number of emerging policy issues for developing OGD provision and use, and makes a contribution towards theoretical understandings of OGD use in practice.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Wanted: Less Spin, More Informed Debate - 0 views

  • , the rejection of proposals that suggest starting with a low carbon price is thus a pretty good guarantee against any carbon pricing at all.  It is rather remarkable to see advocates for climate action arguing against a policy that recommends implementing a carbon price, simply because it does not start high enough for their tastes.  For some, idealism trumps pragmatism, even if it means no action at all.
  • Ward writes: . . . climate change is the result of a number of market failures, the largest of which arises from the fact that the prices of products and services involving emissions of greenhouse gases do not reflect the true costs of the damage caused through impacts on the climate. . . All serious economic analyses of how to tackle climate change identify the need to correct this market failure through a carbon price, which can be implemented, for instance, through cap and trade schemes or carbon taxes. . . A carbon price can be usefully supplemented by improvements in innovation policies, but it needs to be at the core of action on climate change, as this paper by Carolyn Fischer and Richard Newell points out.
  • First, the criticism is off target. A low and rising carbon price is in fact a central element to the policy recommendations advanced by the Hartwell Group in Climate Pragmatism, the Hartwell Paper, and as well, in my book The Climate Fix.  In Climate Pragmatism, we approvingly cite Japan's low-but-rising fossil fuels tax and discuss a range of possible fees or taxes on fossil fuels, implemented, not to penalize energy use or price fossil fuels out of the market, but rather to ensure that as we benefit from today’s energy resources we are setting aside the funds necessary to accelerate energy innovation and secure the nation’s energy future.
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  • Here is another debating lesson -- before engaging in public not only should one read the materials that they are critiquing, they should also read the materials that they cite in support of their own arguments. This is not the first time that Bob Ward has put out misleading information related to my work.  Ever since we debated in public at the Royal Institution, Bob has adopted guerrilla tactics, lobbing nonsense into the public arena and then hiding when challenged to support or defend his views.  As readers here know, I am all for open and respectful debate over these important topics.  Why is that instead, all we get is poorly informed misdirection and spin? Despite the attempts at spin, I'd welcome Bob's informed engagement on this topic. Perhaps he might start by explaining which of the 10 statements that I put up on the mathematics and logic underlying climate pragmatism is incorrect.
  • In comments to another blog, I've identified Bob as a PR flack. I see no reason to change that assessment. In fact, his actions only confirm it. Where does he fit into a scientific debate?
  • Thanks for the comment, but I'll take the other side ;-)First, this is a policy debate that involves various scientific, economic, political analyses coupled with various values commitments including monied interests -- and as such, PR guys are as welcome as anyone else.That said, the problem here is not that Ward is a PR guy, but that he is trying to make his case via spin and misrepresentation. That gets noticed pretty quickly by anyone paying attention and is easily shot down.
Weiye Loh

When Insurers Put Profits Before People - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Late in 2007
  • A 17-year-old girl named Nataline Sarkisyan was in desperate need of a transplant after receiving aggressive treatment that cured her recurrent leukemia but caused her liver to fail. Without a new organ, she would die in a matter of a days; with one, she had a 65 percent chance of surviving. Her doctors placed her on the liver transplant waiting list.
  • She was critically ill, as close to death as one could possibly be while technically still alive, and her fate was inextricably linked to another’s. Somewhere, someone with a compatible organ had to die in time for Nataline to live.
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  • But even when the perfect liver became available a few days after she was put on the list, doctors could not operate. What made Nataline different from most transplant patients, and what eventually brought her case to the attention of much of the country, was that her survival did not depend on the availability of an organ or her clinicians or even the quality of care she received. It rested on her health insurance company.
  • Cigna had denied the initial request to cover the costs of the liver transplant. And the insurer persisted in its refusal, claiming that the treatment was “experimental” and unproven, and despite numerous pleas from Nataline’s physicians to the contrary.
  • But as relatives and friends organized campaigns to draw public attention to Nataline’s plight, the insurance conglomerate found itself embroiled in a public relations nightmare, one that could jeopardize its very existence. The company reversed its decision. But the change came too late. Nataline died just a few hours after Cigna authorized the transplant.
  • Mr. Potter was the head of corporate communications at two major insurers, first at Humana and then at Cigna. Now Mr. Potter has written a fascinating book that details the methods he and his colleagues used to manipulate public opinion
  • Mr. Potter goes on to describe the myth-making he did, interspersing descriptions of front groups, paid spies and jiggered studies with a deft retelling of the convoluted (and usually eye-glazing) history of health care insurance policies.
  • We learn that executives at Cigna worried that Nataline’s situation would only add fire to the growing public discontent with a health care system anchored by private insurance. As the case drew more national attention, the threat of a legislative overhaul that would ban for-profit insurers became real, and Mr. Potter found himself working on the biggest P.R. campaign of his career.
  • Cigna hired a large international law firm and a P.R. firm already well known to them from previous work aimed at discrediting Michael Moore and his film “Sicko.” Together with Cigna, these outside firms waged a campaign that would eventually include the aggressive placement of articles with friendly “third party” reporters, editors and producers who would “disabuse the media, politicians and the public of the notion that Nataline would have gotten the transplant if she had lived in Canada or France or England or any other developed country.” A “spy” was dispatched to Nataline’s funeral; and when the Sarkisyan family filed a lawsuit against the insurer, a team of lawyers was assigned to keep track of actions and comments by the family’s lawyer.
  • In the end, however, Nataline’s death proved to be the final straw for Mr. Potter. “It became clearer to me than ever that I was part of an industry that would do whatever it took to perpetuate its extraordinarily profitable existence,” he writes. “I had sold my soul.” He left corporate public relations for good less than six months after her death.
  • “I don’t mean to imply that all people who work for health insurance companies are greedier or more evil than other Americans,” he writes. “In fact, many of them feel — and justifiably so — that they are helping millions of people get they care they need.” The real problem, he says, lies in the fact that the United States “has entrusted one of the most important societal functions, providing health care, to private health insurance companies.” Therefore, the top executives of these companies become beholden not to the patients they have pledged to cover, but to the shareholders who hold them responsible for the bottom line.
Weiye Loh

Cut secrecy down to a minimum - 0 views

  • This is not an anarchist call for the ransacking of government files, in the manner of Julian Assange. WikiLeaks has raised the issue of whether the unauthorised and anarchic acquisition and leaking of government records is legally or ethically defensible. I don't wish to embark on that debate. I believe it is a distraction from a much more important debate about how to enhance the quality of political and public deliberation while drastically reducing secrecy.
  • If public policy is sound, it must be possible for the grounds of such policy to be made public without caveat and to withstand public scrutiny. We should not be left guessing, as we too commonly are; and deploring the evasions of politicians and their minions.
Weiye Loh

Times Higher Education - Unconventional thinkers or recklessly dangerous minds? - 0 views

  • The origin of Aids denialism lies with one man. Peter Duesberg has spent the whole of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley. In the 1970s he performed groundbreaking work that helped show how mutated genes cause cancer, an insight that earned him a well-deserved international reputation.
  • in the early 1980s, something changed. Duesberg attempted to refute his own theories, claiming that it was not mutated genes but rather environmental toxins that are cancer's true cause. He dismissed the studies of other researchers who had furthered his original work. Then, in 1987, he published a paper that extended his new train of thought to Aids.
  • Initially many scientists were open to Duesberg's ideas. But as evidence linking HIV to Aids mounted - crucially the observation that ARVs brought Aids sufferers who were on the brink of death back to life - the vast majority concluded that the debate was over. Nonetheless, Duesberg persisted with his arguments, and in doing so attracted a cabal of supporters
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  • In 1999, denialism secured its highest-profile advocate: Thabo Mbeki, who was then president of South Africa. Having studied denialist literature, Mbeki decided that the consensus on Aids sounded too much like a "biblical absolute truth" that couldn't be questioned. The following year he set up a panel of advisers, nearly half of whom were Aids denialists, including Duesberg. The resultant health policies cut funding for clinics distributing ARVs, withheld donor medication and blocked international aid grants. Meanwhile, Mbeki's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, promoted the use of alternative Aids remedies, such as beetroot and garlic.
  • In 2007, Nicoli Nattrass, an economist and director of the Aids and Society Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, estimated that, between 1999 and 2007, Mbeki's Aids denialist policies led to more than 340,000 premature deaths. Later, scientists Max Essex, Pride Chigwedere and other colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health arrived at a similar figure.
  • "I don't think it's hyperbole to say the (Mbeki regime's) Aids policies do not fall short of a crime against humanity," says Kalichman. "The science behind these medications was irrefutable, and yet they chose to buy into pseudoscience and withhold life-prolonging, if not life-saving, medications from the population. I just don't think there's any question that it should be looked into and investigated."
  • In fairness, there was a reason to have faint doubts about HIV treatment in the early days of Mbeki's rule.
  • some individual cases had raised questions about their reliability on mass rollout. In 2002, for example, Sarah Hlalele, a South African HIV patient and activist from a settlement background, died from "lactic acidosis", a side-effect of her drugs combination. Today doctors know enough about mixing ARVs not to make the same mistake, but at the time her death terrified the medical community.
  • any trial would be futile because of the uncertainties over ARVs that existed during Mbeki's tenure and the fact that others in Mbeki's government went along with his views (although they have since renounced them). "Mbeki was wrong, but propositions we had established then weren't as incontestably established as they are now ... So I think these calls (for genocide charges or criminal trials) are misguided, and I think they're a sideshow, and I don't support them."
  • Regardless of the culpability of politicians, the question remains whether scientists themselves should be allowed to promote views that go wildly against the mainstream consensus. The history of science is littered with offbeat ideas that were ridiculed by the scientific communities of the time. Most of these ideas missed the textbooks and went straight into the waste-paper basket, but a few - continental drift, the germ basis of disease or the Earth's orbit around the Sun, for instance - ultimately proved to be worth more than the paper they were written on. In science, many would argue, freedom of expression is too important to throw away.
  • Such an issue is engulfing the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses. Last year the journal, which is not peer reviewed, published a paper by Duesberg and others claiming that the South African Aids death-toll estimates were inflated, while reiterating the argument that there is "no proof that HIV causes Aids". That prompted several Aids scientists to complain to Elsevier, which responded by retracting the paper and asking the journal's editor, Bruce Charlton, to implement a system of peer review. Having refused to change the editorial policy, Charlton faces the sack
  • There are people who would like the journal to keep its current format and continue accepting controversial papers, but for Aids scientists, Duesberg's paper was a step too far. Although it was deleted from both the journal's website and the Medline database, its existence elsewhere on the internet drove Chigwedere and Essex to publish a peer-reviewed rebuttal earlier this year in AIDS and Behavior, lest any readers be "hoodwinked" into thinking there was genuine debate about the causes of Aids.
  • Duesberg believes he is being "censored", although he has found other outlets. In 1991, he helped form "The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/Aids Hypothesis" - now called Rethinking Aids, or simply The Group - to publicise denialist information. Backed by his Berkeley credentials, he regularly promotes his views in media articles and films. Meanwhile, his closest collaborator, David Rasnick, tells "anyone who asks" that "HIV drugs do more harm than good".
  • "Is academic freedom such a precious concept that scientists can hide behind it while betraying the public so blatantly?" asked John Moore, an Aids scientist at Cornell University, on a South African health news website last year. Moore suggested that universities could put in place a "post-tenure review" system to ensure that their researchers act within accepted bounds of scientific practice. "When the facts are so solidly against views that kill people, there must be a price to pay," he added.
  • Now it seems Duesberg may have to pay that price since it emerged last month that his withdrawn paper has led to an investigation at Berkeley for misconduct. Yet for many in the field, chasing fellow scientists comes second to dealing with the Aids pandemic.
  •  
    6 May 2010 Aids denialism is estimated to have killed many thousands. Jon Cartwright asks if scientists should be held accountable, while overleaf Bruce Charlton defends his decision to publish the work of an Aids sceptic, which sparked a row that has led to his being sacked and his journal abandoning its raison d'etre: presenting controversial ideas for scientific debate
Weiye Loh

Arianna Huffington: The Media Gets It Wrong on WikiLeaks: It's About Broken Trust, Not ... - 0 views

  • Too much of the coverage has been meta -- focusing on questions about whether the leaks were justified, while too little has dealt with the details of what has actually been revealed and what those revelations say about the wisdom of our ongoing effort in Afghanistan. There's a reason why the administration is so upset about these leaks.
  • True, there hasn't been one smoking-gun, bombshell revelation -- but that's certainly not to say the cables haven't been revealing. What there has been instead is more of the consistent drip, drip, drip of damning details we keep getting about the war.
  • It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops -- and made a speech about how we are "succeeding" and "making important progress" and bound to "prevail."
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  • The WikiLeaks cables present quite a different picture. What emerges is one reality (the real one) colliding with another (the official one). We see smart, good-faith diplomats and foreign service personnel trying to make the truth on the ground match up to the one the administration has proclaimed to the public. The cables show the widening disconnect. It's like a foreign policy Ponzi scheme -- this one fueled not by the public's money, but the public's acquiescence.
  • The second aspect of the story -- the one that was the focus of the symposium -- is the changing relationship to government that technology has made possible.
  • Back in the year 2007, B.W. (Before WikiLeaks), Barack Obama waxed lyrical about government and the internet: "We have to use technology to open up our democracy. It's no coincidence that one of the most secretive administrations in our history has favored special interest and pursued policy that could not stand up to the sunlight."
  • Not long after the election, in announcing his "Transparency and Open Government" policy, the president proclaimed: "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset." Cut to a few years later. Now that he's defending a reality that doesn't match up to, well, reality, he's suddenly not so keen on the people having a chance to access this "national asset."
  • Even more wikironic are the statements by his Secretary of State who, less than a year ago, was lecturing other nations about the value of an unfettered and free internet. Given her description of the WikiLeaks as "an attack on America's foreign policy interests" that have put in danger "innocent people," her comments take on a whole different light. Some highlights: In authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable... technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights... As in the dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers who use these tools. Now "making government accountable" is, as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put it, a "reckless and dangerous action."
  • ay Rosen, one of the participants in the symposium, wrote a brilliant essay entitled "From Judith Miller to Julian Assange." He writes: For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002. That was when the New York Times published Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's breathless, spoon-fed -- and ultimately inaccurate -- account of Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb.
  • Miller's after-the-facts-proved-wrong response, as quoted in a Michael Massing piece in the New York Review of Books, was: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." In other words, her job is to tell citizens what their government is saying, not, as Obama called for in his transparency initiative, what their government is doing.
  • As Jay Rosen put it: Today it is recognized at the Times and in the journalism world that Judy Miller was a bad actor who did a lot of damage and had to go. But it has never been recognized that secrecy was itself a bad actor in the events that led to the collapse, that it did a lot of damage, and parts of it might have to go. Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th.
  • And in the WikiLeaks case, much of media has again found itself on the wrong side of secrecy -- and so much of the reporting about WikiLeaks has served to obscure, to conflate, to mislead. For instance, how many stories have you heard or read about all the cables being "dumped" in "indiscriminate" ways with no attempt to "vet" and "redact" the stories first. In truth, only just over 1,200 of the 250,000 cables have been released, and WikiLeaks is now publishing only those cables vetted and redacted by their media partners, which includes the New York Times here and the Guardian in England.
  • The establishment media may be part of the media, but they're also part of the establishment. And they're circling the wagons. One method they're using, as Andrew Rasiej put it after the symposium, is to conflate the secrecy that governments use to operate and the secrecy that is used to hide the truth and allow governments to mislead us.
  • Nobody, including WikiLeaks, is promoting the idea that government should exist in total transparency,
  • Assange himself would not disagree. "Secrecy is important for many things," he told Time's Richard Stengel. "We keep secret the identity of our sources, as an example, take great pains to do it." At the same time, however, secrecy "shouldn't be used to cover up abuses."
  • Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders' intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down. Government officials who now attack WikiLeaks don't fear national endangerment, they fear personal embarrassment. And while scores of conservatives have long promised to undermine or challenge the current monstrosity in Washington, D.C., it is now an organization not recognizably conservative that best undermines the political establishment and challenges its very foundations.
  • It is not, as Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian, the job of the media to protect the powerful from embarrassment. As I said at the symposium, its job is to play the role of the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes -- brave enough to point out what nobody else is willing to say.
  • When the press trades truth for access, it is WikiLeaks that acts like the little boy. "Power," wrote Jenkins, "loathes truth revealed. When the public interest is undermined by the lies and paranoia of power, it is disclosure that takes sanity by the scruff of its neck and sets it back on its feet."
  • A final aspect of the story is Julian Assange himself. Is he a visionary? Is he an anarchist? Is he a jerk? This is fun speculation, but why does it have an impact on the value of the WikiLeaks revelations?
Weiye Loh

Rethinking the gene » Scienceline - 0 views

  • Currently, the public views genes primarily as self-contained packets of information that come from parents and are distinct from the environment. “The popular notion of the gene is an attractive idea—it’s so magical,” said Mark Blumberg, a developmental biologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. But it ignores the growing scientific understanding of how genes and local environments interplay, he said.
  • With the rise of molecular biology in the 1930s and genomics (the study of entire genomes) in the 1970s, scientists have developed a much more dynamic and complex picture of this interplay. The simplistic notion of the gene has been replaced with gene-environment interactions and developmental influences—nature and nurture as completely intertwined.
  • But the public hasn’t quite kept up. There remains a “huge chasm” between the way scientists understand genetics and the way the public understands it, said David Shenk, an author who has written extensively on genetics and intelligence.
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  • the public still thinks of genes as blueprints, providing precise instructions for each individual.
  • “The elegant simplicity of the idea is so powerful,” said Shenk. Unfortunately, it is also false. The blueprint metaphor is fundamentally deceptive, he said, and “leads people to believe that any difference they see can be tied back to specific genes.”
  • Instead, Shenk advocates the metaphor of a giant mixing board, in which genes are a multitude of knobs and switches that get turned on and off depending on various factors in their environment. Interaction is key, though it goes against how most people see genetics: the classic, but inaccurate, dichotomies of nature versus nurture, innate versus acquired and genes versus environment.
  • Belief in those dichotomies is hard to eliminate because people tend to understand genetics through the two separate “tracks” of genes and the environment, according to speech communication expert Celeste Condit from the University of Georgia in Athens. Condit suggests that, whenever possible, explanations of genetics—by scientists, authors, journalists, or doctors—should draw connections between the two tracks, effectively merging them into one. “We need to link up the gene and environment tracks,” she said, “so that [people] can’t think of one without thinking of the other.”
  • Part of what makes these concepts so difficult lies in the language of genetics itself. A recent study by Condit in the September issue of Clinical Genetics found that when people hear the word genetics, they primarily think of heredity, or the quality of being heritable (passed from one generation to the next). Unfortunately, the terms heredity and heritable are often confused with heritability, which has a very different meaning.
  • heritability has single-handedly muddled the discourse of genetics to such a degree that even experts can’t keep it straight, argues historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in her recent book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture. Keller describes how heritability (in the technical literature) refers to how much of the variation in a trait is due to genetic explanation. But the term has seeped out into the general public and is, understandably, taken to mean heritable, or ability to be inherited. These concepts are fundamentally different, but often hard to grasp.
  • For example, let’s say that in a population with people of different heights, 60 percent of the variation in height is attributable to genes (as opposed to nutrition). The heritability of height is 60 percent. This does not mean, however, that 60 percent of an individual’s height comes from her genes, and 40 percent from what she ate growing up. Heritability refers to causes of variations (between people), not to causes of traits themselves (in each particular individual). The conflation of crucially different terms like traits and variations has wreaked havoc on the public understanding of genetics.
  • The stakes are high. Condit emphasizes how important a solid understanding of genetics is for making health decisions. Whether people see diabetes or lung cancer as determined by family history or responsive to changes in behavior depends greatly on how they understand genetics. Policy decisions about education, childcare, or the workplace are all informed by a proper understanding of the dynamic interplay of genes and the environment, and this means looking beyond the Mendelian lens of heredity. According to Shenk, everyone in the business of communicating these issues “needs to bend over backwards to help people understand.”
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Innovation in Drug Development: An Inverse Moore's Law? - 0 views

  • Today's FT has this interesting graph and an accompanying story, showing a sort of inverse Moore's Law of drug development.  Over almost 60 years the number of new drugs developed per unit of investment has declined in a fairly constant manner, and some drug companies are now slashing their R&D budgets.
  • why this trend has occurred.  The FT points to a combination of low-hanging fruit that has been plucked and increasing costs of drug development. To some observers, that reflects the end of the mid to late 20th century golden era for drug discovery, when first-generation medicines such as antibiotics and beta-blockers to treat high blood pressure transformed healthcare. At the same time, regulatory demands to prove safety and efficacy have grown firmer. The result is larger and more costly clinical trials, and high failure rates for experimental drugs.
  • Others point to flawed innovation policies in industry and governments: “The markets treat drug companies as though research and development spending destroys value,” says Jack Scannell, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “People have stopped distinguishing the good from the bad. All those which performed well returned cash to shareholders. Unless the industry can articulate what the problem is, I don’t expect that to change.”
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  • Mr [Andrew] Baum [of Morgan Stanley] argues that the solution for drug companies is to share the risks of research with others. That means reducing in-house investment in research, and instead partnering and licensing experimental medicines from smaller companies after some of the early failures have been eliminated.
  • Chas Bountra of Oxford university calls for a more radical partnership combining industry and academic research. “What we are trying to do is just too difficult,” he says. “No one organisation can do it, so we have to pool resources and expertise.” He suggests removing intellectual property rights until a drug is in mid-stage testing in humans, which would make academics more willing to co-operate because they could publish their results freely. The sharing of data would enable companies to avoid duplicating work.
  • The challenge is for academia and biotech companies to fill the research gap. Mr Ratcliffe argues that after a lull in 2009 and 2010, private capital is returning to the sector – as demonstrated by a particular buzz at JPMorgan’s new year biotech conference in California.
  • Patrick Vallance, senior vice-president for discovery at GSK, is cautious about deferring patents until so late, arguing that drug companies need to be able to protect their intellectual property in order to fund expensive late-stage development. But he too is experimenting with ways to co-operate more closely with academics over longer periods. He is also championing the “externalisation” of the company’s pipeline, with biotech and university partners accounting for half the total. GSK has earmarked £50m to support fledgling British companies, many “wrapped around” the group’s sites. One such example is Convergence, a spin-out from a GSK lab researching pain relief.
  • Big pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to find ways to overcome the loss of tens of billions of dollars in revenue as patents on top-selling drugs run out. Many sound similar notes about encouraging entrepreneurialism in their ranks, making smart deals and capitalizing on emerging-market growth, But their actual plans are often quite different—and each carries significant risks. Novartis AG, for instance, is so convinced that diversification is the best course that the company has a considerable business selling low-priced generics. Meantime, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. has decided to concentrate on innovative medicines, shedding so many nonpharmaceutical units that it' has become midsize. GlaxoSmithKline PLC is still investing in research, but like Pfizer it has narrowed the range of disease areas in which it's seeking new treatments. Underlying the divergence is a deep-seated philosophical dispute over the merits of the heavy investment that companies must make to discover new drugs. By most estimates, bringing a new molecule to market costs drug makers more than $1 billion. Industry officials have been engaged in a vigorous debate over whether the investment is worth it, or whether they should leave it to others whose work they can acquire or license after a demonstration of strong potential.
  • To what extent can approached to innovation influence the trend line in the graph above?  I don't think that anyone really knows the answer.  The different approaches being taken by Merck and Pfizer, for instance, represent a real world policy experiment: The contrast between Merck and Pfizer reflects the very different personal approaches of their CEOs. An accountant by training, Mr. Read has held various business positions during a three-decade career at Pfizer. The 57-year-old cited torcetrapib, a cholesterol medicine that the company spent more than $800 million developing but then pulled due to safety concerns, as an example of the kind of wasteful spending Pfizer would avoid. "We're going to have metrics," Mr. Read said. He wants Pfizer to stop "always investing on hope rather than strong signals and the quality of the science, the quality of the medicine." Mr. Frazier, 56, a Harvard-educated lawyer who joined Merck in 1994 from private practice, said the company was sticking by its own troubled heart drug, vorapaxar. Mr. Frazier said he wanted to see all of the data from the trials before rushing to judgment. "We believe in the innovation approach," he said.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Analysis of the Nisbet Report -- Part II, Political Views of S... - 0 views

  • One part of Matthew Nisbet's recent report that has received very little attention is its comparative analysis of ideological and partisan perspectives of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Nisbet shows that AAAS members are extremely partisan and ideological.  The word "extremely" is mine, and what do I mean by it?  Look at the figure above:  AAAS members are more partisan than MSNBC viewers and even Tea Party members.  AAAS members are more ideological than evangelical churchgoers but less so than Fox News viewers.  In both cases AAAS members are very different than the public as a whole.
  • Dan Sarewitz has discussed the problems with the ideological and partisan likemindedness of our scientific community, which has been exploited and reenforced in political debates: During the Bush administration, Democrats discovered that they could score political points by accusing Bush of being anti-science. In the process, they seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational. Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals. How would a more politically diverse scientific community improve this situation? First, it could foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science. Second, it would cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge. This could help keep difficult problems like climate change from getting prematurely straitjacketed by ideology. A more politically diverse scientific community would, overall, support a healthier relationship between science and politics.
  • It should come as no surprise that the increasing politicization of science has come to make science more political rather than politics more scientific.  At the same time, the more partisan and/or and ideological that you are, the more welcome and comfortable that you will find the politicization of science, as it reenforces your preconceptions.
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  • It also fits perfectly into a political strategy that holds that arguments about science can help to resolve political debates.  Climate change is only the most visible of this tendency, where the empirical evidence shows that efforts to wage climate politics through climate science have had the greatest effect in magnifying the partisan divide.  Some are blinded by these dynamics -- for instance Chris Mooney excuses the extreme partisanship/ideology of AAAS members by blaming  . . . George W. Bush.
  • Anyone concerned with political decision making in a society that contains a diversity of partisan and ideological perspectives should be concerned that, in one sector at least, the experts that we rely on have views that are far different than the broader society.  One response to this would be to wage a political battle to try to convert the broader society to the values of the experts, perhaps through the idea that improving science communication or education a great value transformation will occur.
  • My sense is that this strategy is not just doomed to fail, but will have some serious blowback effects on the scientific community itself.  More likely from my view is that such efforts to transform society through science will instead lead to the partisan debates across society taking firmer root within our expert communities. This is a topic that deserves more discussion and debate.  Dan Sarewitz concludes provocatively that, "A democratic society needs Republican scientists."
  • It is important to recognize that hyper-partisans like Joe Romm and Chris Mooney will continue to seek to poison the wells of discussion within the scientific community (which is left-leaning, so this is a discuss that needs to occur at least to start within the left) through constant appeals to partisanship and ideology.  Improving the role of science and scientists in our political debates will require an ability to rise above such efforts to associate the scientific community with only a subset of partisan and ideological perspectives.  But science and expertise belongs to all of us, and should make society better as a whole.
  • anecdote is not the singular of data.
  • One benefit of the politicizing of science is that it caused smart people outside the field to look closely at what was going on behind the curtain. That has been harmful to the short run reputation of science, but helpful to the long run competence of science.
  • I think that the Nisbet report missed the point entirely.This is a better summary of the problem the AGW promotion industry is facing:http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/136/climate-fatigue-leaves-global-warming-in-the-cold#commentHere is a nice part:"The public's concern about global warming as a pressing problem is in marked decline not least because of the growing realisation that governments and the international community are ignoring the advice of climate campaigners. Instead, most policy makers around the world refuse to accept any decisions that are likely to harm national interests and economic competitiveness.They are assisted in this policy of benign neglect by a public that has largely become habituated to false alarms and is happy to ignore other claims of environmental catastrophe that are today widely disregarded or seen as scare tactics."Nisbet's intricate mechanisms resolutely avoid facing this reality, and in doing so is left with little meaning.
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Breakthrough Europe: Towards a Social Theory of Climate Change - 0 views

  • Lever-Tracy confronted sociologists head on about their worrisome silence on the issue. Why have sociologists failed to address the greatest and most overwhelming challenge facing modern society? Why have the figureheads of the discipline, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, so far refused to apply their seminal notions of structuration and the risk society to the issue?
  • Earlier, we re-published an important contribution by Ulrich Beck, the world-renowned German sociologist and a Breakthrough Senior Fellow. More recently, Current Sociology published a powerful response by Reiner Grundmann of Aston University and Nico Stehr of Zeppelin University.
  • sociologists should not rush into the discursive arena without asking some critical questions in advance, questions such as: What exactly could sociology contribute to the debate? And, is there something we urgently need that is not addressed by other disciplines or by political proposals?
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  • he authors disagree with Lever-Tracy's observation that the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists is driven by a widespread suspicion of naturalistic explanations, teleological arguments and environmental determinism.
  • While conceding that Lever-Tracy's observation may be partially true, the authors argue that more important processes are at play, including cautiousness on the part of sociologists to step into a heavily politicized debate; methodological differences with the natural sciences; and sensitivity about locating climate change in the longue durée.
  • Secondly, while Lever-Tracy argues that "natural and social change are now in lockstep with each other, operating on the same scales," and that therefore a multidisciplinary approach is needed, Grundmann and Stehr suggest that the true challenge is interdisciplinarity, as opposed to multidisciplinarity.
  • Thirdly, and this possibly the most striking observation of the article, Grundmann and Stehr challenge Lever-Tracy's argument that natural scientists have successfully made the case for anthropogenic climate change, and that therefore social scientists should cease to endlessly question this scientific consensus on the basis of a skeptical postmodern 'deconstructionism'.
  • As opposed to both Lever-Tracy's positivist view and the radical postmodern deconstructionist view, Grundmann and Stehr take the social constructivist view, which argues that that every idea is socially constructed and therefore the product of human interpretation and communication. This raises the 'intractable' specters of discourse and framing, to which we will return in a second.
  • Finally, Lever-Tracy holds that climate change needs to be posited "firmly at the heart of the discipline." Grundmann and Stehr, however, emphasize that "if this is going to [be] more than wishful thinking, we need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise."
  • The importance of framing climate change in a way that allows it to resonate with the concerns of the average citizen is an issue that the Breakthrough Institute has long emphasized. Especially the apocalyptic politics of fear that is often associated with climate change tends to have a counterproductive effect on public opinion. Realizing this, Grundmann and Stehr make an important warning to sociologists: "the inherent alarmism in many social science contributions on climate change merely repeats the central message provided by mainstream media." In other words, it fails to provide the kind of distantiated observation needed to approach the issue with at least a mild degree of objectivity or impartiality.
  • While this tension is symptomatic of many social scientific attempts to get involved, we propose to study these very underlying assumptions. For example, we should ask: Does the dramatization of events lead to effective political responses? Do we need a politics of fear? Is scientific consensus instrumental for sound policies? And more generally, what are the relations between a changing technological infrastructure, social shifts and belief systems? What contribution can bottom-up initiatives have in fighting climate change? What roles are there for markets, hierarchies and voluntary action? How was it possible that the 'fight against climate change' rose from a marginal discourse to a hegemonic one (from heresy to dogma)? And will the discourse remain hegemonic or will too much pub¬lic debate about climate change lead to 'climate change fatigue'?
  • In this respect, Grundmann and Stehr make another crucial observation: "the severity of a problem does not mean that we as sociologists should forget about our analytical apparatus." Bringing the analytical apparatus of sociology back in, the hunting season for positivist approaches to knowledge and nature is opened. Grundmann and Stehr consequently criticize not only Lever-Tracy's unspoken adherence to a positivist nature-society duality, taking instead a more dialectical Marxian approach to the relationship between man and his environment, but they also criticize her idea that incremental increases in our scientific knowledge of climate change and its impacts will automatically coalesce into successful and meaningful policy responses.
  • Political decisions about climate change are made on the basis of scientific research and a host of other (economic, political, cultural) considerations. Regarding the scientific dimension, it is a common perception (one that Lever-Tracy seems to share) that the more knowledge we have, the better the political response will be. This is the assumption of the linear model of policy-making that has been dominant in the past but debunked time and again (Godin, 2006). What we increasingly realize is that knowl¬edge creation leads to an excess of information and 'objectivity' (Sarewitz, 2000). Even the consensual mechanisms of the IPCC lead to an increase in options because knowledge about climate change increases.
  • Instead, Grundmann and Stehr propose to look carefully at how we frame climate change socially and whether the hegemonic climate discourse is actually contributing to successful political action or hampering it. Defending this social constructivist approach from the unfounded allegation that it would play into the hands of the climate skeptics, the authors note that defining climate change as a social construction ... is not to diminish its importance, relevance, or reality. It simply means that sociologists study the process whereby something (like anthropogenic climate change) is transformed from a conjecture into an accepted fact. With regard to policy, we observe a near exclusive focus on carbon dioxide emissions. This framing has proven counter productive, as the Hartwell paper and other sources demonstrate (see Eastin et al., 2010; Prins et al., 2010). Reducing carbon emissions in the short term is among the most difficult tasks. More progress could be made by a re-framing of the issue, not as an issue of human sinfulness, but of human dignity. [emphasis added]
  • These observations allow the authors to come full circle, arriving right back at their first observation about the real reasons why sociologists have so far kept silent on climate change. Somehow, "there seems to be the curious conviction that lest you want to be accused of helping the fossil fuel lobbies and the climate skeptics, you better keep quiet."
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    Towards a Social Theory of Climate Change
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