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Lumifer comments on Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016 - Less Wrong
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So, science.
Let me offer a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal: Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. And here is the abstract:
I don't know about you people, but I'm very excited about a possibility of more just and equitable human-ice interactions.
Oh, and that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000.
Just so you don't think this is limited to glaciers, one of the paper's authors says:
Clearly, this outdated "scientific discovery" thing has to go.
Here's more about the NSF grant. It doesn't sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this "research".
[EDITED to add, in explanation:] It's a five-year grant, with two-and-a-bit years still to run. The NSF page describing it lists three papers, none of which is this one and none of which sounds like it's very much like this one. The NSF page also lists a number of topics, none of which has much to do with "feminist glaciology". So this looks like it's very much a sideshow.
The grant went to Mark Carey (notice how he's the lead author for all the publications arising out of this grant) to study "ways in which science, nature, and society intersect". The paper in question easily falls under this umbrella.
The grant also mentions "employment and training of undergraduate students in specific research projects" (that undergrad is Jaclyn Rushing, one of the paper authors) and "mentoring of a postdoctoral fellow" (who is Alessandro Antonello, another author of that paper).
By the way, another interesting feature of this NSF grant:
Advancing science, I see.
P.S. Oh, and the U of Oregon press release just outright says: "The National Science Foundation supported the research as part of a five-year grant to Carey for his studies on glacier-societal interactions." QED.
Oh yes, I'm not denying that. But, e.g., the discussion under that tweet you linked to includes someone confidently claiming that every cent of that $460k went to "this research", which is surely completely false unless by "this research" is meant "a much broader project of which this paper is a small and peripheral part".
Again, I think you have misunderstood what I was saying; my apologies for being unclear. I was not, at all, saying that the work done on the paper was not in any way supported by that NSF grant. I was saying only what I actually said: It doesn't sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this "research".
The $460k is for the whole of this CAREER thing. Not for this peripheral paper on "feminist glaciology."
(I have no idea whether any of the other work of the CAREER project is more valuable. And there might be a useful idea or two buried in the "feminist glaciology". So the above is in no way a comment on whether the NSF's money is being well spent overall.)
LOL. So some comments to a tweet are written by idiots. News at 11.
Notice that the tweet itself says only that the NSF funded this paper. This looks to be correct.
I suspect that in practice the NSF grant basically just paid a part of Mark Carey's salary and provided some money to pay his collaborators.
And someone who I presume is not an idiot wrote here "that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000". Which is, y'know, not true unless you take "this research" in an outrageously broad sense.
Me too. Which, again, does not mean that the NSF spent $460k on feminist glaciology research.
But I do. Given this paper which many people suspected to be Sokal-style satire (it's not), I very much doubt the quality of research put out by the recipient of the grant, Mark Carey.
Why did the NSF spend any money on feminist glaciology research?
My guess is that this particular bit of "research" was largely done by one of the other named authors, but they have some rule that the more senior person's name goes on everything. Carey's list of publications doesn't look particularly bullshitty. (Note that he's a historian rather than a scientist; these do not purport to be science publications.)
Because it gives out grants for broad general projects, and the proposal for funding for this broad general project didn't say anything about feminist glaciology, and it would not be a good use of anyone's time for the NSF to vet every single thing done by any academic it funds. (That's my guess, anyway.)
I looked at a random paper called "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species" and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.
Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:
So again, it's not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.
So it's still the same thing. When talking about "glaciology", I expect something like "here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt", but instead the guy produces something like "here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists". The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.
Technically, "collecting stuff people said about something" could be called science, but then it's not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting "stuff people said about glaciers", I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.
It's not about glaciers persay, but it very much is about 'glaciers in popular culture'. You could call what he does scholarship as opposed to science, but either way it's something related to glaciers, that people might be interested in.
He is a historian, studying history of science. That subject is exactly about studying what people (scientists) are saying.
"Collecting stuff people said about something" is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that's why "prehistory" refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.
(To ask whether history is "science" is kind of like asking whether medicine is "chemistry". History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn't mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)
Ouch!
I think you're wrong about that. You don't think he self-identifies as a scientist? Among other things, he is one of the IPCC authors... :-/
Here's his university home page. Associate Professor of History; "Mark Carey specializes in environmental history and the history of science", etc. I don't see anything suggesting that he thinks he is a scientist.
The IPCC's reports make some attempt to assess the impact of (any given degree of) climate change. It seems perfectly reasonable for someone who's spent much of his career looking at things like "the global history of human-glacier interactions" to be involved in that.
That webpage says: "He is working in particular on detection and attribution of climate change impacts", and the IPCC publications listed are: "A new social contract for the IPCC"; "Detection and attribution of observed impacts"; "Polar regions". The first two of those are explicitly about the effects of climate change on human societies; I bet his contribution to the third is too. ... Ah, yes, both of those two are parts of something called "Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability".
So: no, indeed, I don't think he self-identifies as a scientist, and I don't see any reason why he should.
The underlying question "is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?" I think is important and deserving of careful consideration, and the application of that question to the area of glaceology no more narrow than something like "the categorial semantics of the pi-calculus".
De-biasing knowledge in psychology is a recurrent theme in LessWrong, and gender is possibly a bias that is hampering scientific discovery.
It is doubly unfortunate that the theme is treated as if it were literary critique or politology, instead of experimental psychology: on one side, narrative instead of experimental exploration gets us no closer to the truth, on the other side it exposes the whole field to ridicule, thereby pushing away positive contribution.
Am I steel-manning too much? There were no such things as "feminist study" when I attended university, and even now it's not so widespread here in Italy, so I don't know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
The problem is that the article doesn't just focus on that question. It also frequently makes deontological claims about how natives knowledge should be more respected. Including knowledge that supposes that glaciers don't like certain smells.
I agree that we should pay more attention to biases, including gender biases.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that people who talk loudest about these topics are even worse than average; that their strategy is more or less "reversed stupidity plus strong political mindkilling". They usually don't care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side. (They seem unable to understand the difference between "a white cis het man said '2+2=4'" and "'2+2=4' is an evil white cis het fact".)
The scientific method is a tool of fascist oppression!
You think I'm joking? Let me quote you from a presumably peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare:
(source)
"The evidence-based movement in the health sciences" is not the scientific method. It's a movement.
It's a movement to use the scientific method.
Right, but criticising the movement isn't the same thing as criticising the scientific method.
For example, doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
To be fair, I haven't checked out the source, and I'm unlikely to, on mobile. The quote doesn't establish what you want to say, but maybe the source does, and I should have considered that in my first reply.
The writer is interested in power structures and fighting the fascists:
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of "truth" from empirical reality and evidence. Demanding evidence to support your claims is an act of oppression and intolerance.
That's not true. The ‘regimes of truth’ used by judges at court don't decouple truth from empirical reality and evidence. At the same time it's not the same ‘regime of truth’ used in EBM. They argue against monoculture and that there's one standard of truth that everybody in science has to follow.
That not only means that the existing questions might get biased answers but also that important questions don't get scientific investigation because they are not interesting in the EBM paradigm. That's classic Kuhn. Scientific paradigms not only determine answers but also questions and old questions often get forgotten with new paradigms.
They bring the question: `How should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?`
Under classic EBM that's not a question about which you can write a scientific paper.
Yes, I think that's about correct -- there should be.
Whether a question is "interesting" has nothing to do with single or multiple standards of truth.
That's not a question for science. It's a question for a psychotherapist, lay or professional.
Correct and I like it this way. Not everything has to be science.
No. The would go after Kuhn and the majority of people who investigated scientifically what scientists do and say that there isn't one method that can be called
the scientific method. The standard HPS belief is that scientists in different fields use different methods.Not quite -- your question belongs to the field of sociology of science, more or less, and this is a paper in an Earth sciences journal. The authors don't ask questions about gender bias, they specifically propose a "feminist glaciology framework", in part because they unconditionally assume that this bias exists and severely impacts the study of glaciers.
I see no evidence whatsoever that this paper has any interest in what you or I might consider "truth" of the scientific kind.
It depends on who you ask :-/