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gjm comments on Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
It reminds me of a scene in The Twelve Chairs where Ostap Bender, a con man, pretends to be a chess grand master and gives a lecture about chess, for money, despite actually being quite a bad chess player:
The idea is: pretend to be an expert on X despite not being an expert on X. After saying a few introductory words about X, move to a meta level where you already have an experience in bullshitting. Many people will not notice the trick, because they will automatically assume that you moved to the meta level because you are such an expert on X that everything object-level is already beneath your status and now you are using your vast wisdom to generalize. While in fact you are merely talking high-status sounding platitudes.
Ostap pretends to be an expert on chess, then he switches the topic to an idea of chess, and then he presumably makes the whole lecture about ideas in general. The feminist glaciology researchers pretend to be experts on glaciology, then they switch the topic to patriarchal oppression in glaciology, and then they write an article about patriarchal oppression in general, sprinkled with some glaciology trivia.
To illustrate what I mean, I will now give you an outline of an article about feminist zymurgy that you could write in an afternoon. I actually don't know what "zymurgy" means, I just noticed it twenty years ago as the last word in my English dictionary and it somehow stuck in my memory; all I remember is that it is some kind of science. Doesn't matter; I can still write an article about feminist zymurgy! Here is the outline:
If there is some wannabe Sokal reading this comment, feel free to use this template, and please tell me the results.
Now look it up and find out whether your example is less or more appropriate than you thought. ;-)
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.
Just to be sure, you think that if you ask him "Are you a scientist?" he will say "No" -- right?
That's my guess. Maybe he'd want to hedge it a bit. I certainly wouldn't expect an outright "yes".
Given how clear I thought I already was, I'm wondering whether you have a gotcha in mind and are about to present me with an interview where he calls himself a scientist, or something. I will be happy to recant to whatever extent the evidence justifies doing so.
Nope, no gotchas. It's just that I feel very certain that he would call himself a scientist and perceive himself that way. It's strange to me that you think otherwise. Clearly one of us is mistaken :-)