Year: 2013

Interesting BBC R4 Point of View this morning by Lisa Jardine.

[Fuller text in BBC Magazine article.]

Based on the telling by her father (Jacob Bronowski) of the Leo Szillard story of the flash of inspiration that led him to patent the neutron chain reaction idea as a source of energy in the name of UK Admiralty, and the subsequent UK and US development and use of first nuclear bombs.

Szillard (and Einstein and Bronowski and many others in science) raised many ethical objections to the use of such weapons as their reality became more certain. (Aside – Many previous references in this blog to the Einstein letter and to Durrenmatt’s play “Die Physiker“. Szillard is topical again thanks to recent work by Graham Farmelo, whose previous work on Paul Dirac has also been covered here.)

But Lisa’s point was really this. Being told that story was valuable lesson in ethics associated with science, even though the complex chain of events and reasoning quoted by, and told of, Szillard, as any one of the many individuals involved, was objectively suspect and in need of selective interpretation as history – a convenient narrative with an agenda. But none-the-less valuable to her (and to me).

The point I add to this is that a major – and dangerous –  part of the problem is science conflating itself with many other domains associated with science, from basic philosophies of science and knowledge, to the technological exploitations of understanding scientific possibilities by the rest of humanity, of which science is a part but not the whole.

Science is not technology and the distinction matters – in the Szillard story, the subject was “patenting” the use of idea for its technological exploitation, not the idea itself. Furthermore – science is not humanity’s sole privileged access to knowledge, the distinction between the subset we call science and the whole of “rational” knowledge applicable to human decision-making, also matters. These distinctions matter because the ethics (and politics and economics) of best choices for humanity cannot be reduced to science alone. Not even (say) Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The use of science to solve the problems of and increase valuable possibilities for human society, both requires technology and involves value judgements – human value judgements in domains where science has no privileged view. Science is privileged in value-neutral domains, but not in domains where human values matter.

Science good; Scientism bad.

The latest social work failure – child abused to death – being debated everywhere, is just another symptom of the underlying problem of scientific objectivity getting into too many places where it shouldn’t.

• “Politician” claims social worker seeing dog mess in room where child is kept (after long history of other visits and issues) should simply have the right to remove the child on the evidence of their own senses.
• “Professional” responds that only police can force entry and removal and only after court proceeding and only after sufficient “evidence” has been gathered and “due process” has been followed, etc.

Precisely the point. In appropriate cases the evidence of the social worker’s own nose should suffice as due process.

The reason why this is not accepted by the professional institutions, is the counter case. To indemnify against accidentally over-zealous action causing damage where there was none – the usual rights and responsibilities challenge. (The old Cleveland child-abuse scandal, for example.)

What’s missing ? The idea of wisdom. The idea that the individual social worker can (be able, be trusted to) make such a decision. Instead, the idea that evidence and justification is something scientific, to be “tested” by formal process. Well, beyond science it’s not scientific, nor even wholly objective. But sadly, the values of science are privileged, allowed to take precedence over values of humanity, in a social context, everywhere beyond the domain of science in fact.

Social workers need to be entrusted with wisdom and common sense. (So recruitment and training and work assignment, and management, assessment and sanctioning, etc, all need to be based on this. Human values and experience of humanity being at least (if not more in domains like social work) as valuable as formal “qualifications” and knowledge of application of formal procedures.

The reason we have the problems we have is because we don’t trust our social workers, or can’t trust them except through formal – objective, scientific – procedure. Another case of the measures devaluing the work, and tending the work towards lower value, the complete opposite of what is required. The balance of human rights and responsibilities is a value judgement, a human value judgement involving the humanities NOT science alone.

Science is immensely valuable in its domain, but destroys (human) value in domains where its use is misguided.

Interestingly, just seconds after the previous post on the disservice done to science by the conflation of science and technology, Lisa Jardine also tweeted a link to this Sue Nelson piece on “BBC lads’ science” in the Telegraph. And, only hours after Jim AlKhalili had tweeted to “boast” (tongue in cheek) about acquisition of  his iPhone5 – the “latest boys’ toy”. Man, what a tangled web.

[Hold – still trying to find 5 minutes also to comment on this “Round III” response by Pinker to Wieseltier on the interminable science vs the humanities debate in New Republic, tweeted by Tiff Jenkins.]

Where to start? Scientists, science journalists and science media-folk, do science a disservice, when they promote science wrongly. And, in doing so, that is also a disservice to the society they aim to serve. So what could possibly be wrong about the way science is promoted?

Promote science as an enterprise of wonder in its own right, and as as a route to understanding the wonders and workings of the world. Go for it, surely the core aim of science.

Promote science as the source of understanding, discovery and development of enabling technologies that underlie the sustainable advancement of human society in the cosmos. We’d be mad no to. Remember, a flint hand tool, whose development depended on recognising cleavage planes in otherwise continuous naturally occurring hard material, was new technology once, as all technology is.

By promotion, I’m talking about informing and educating society about the above, to attract interest and resources – individuals to join the enterprise, and funds to support their work and their organisations, both commercial and institutional. All valid, laudable and indeed essential to the enterprise and to society itself.

But let’s not confuse promotion with education, and let’s not confuse education about science with science education. Sure each contributes to the other in a self-reinforcing virtuous-circle. Education that actually achieves understanding in the topic, also promotes effort towards achieving more of the same. Some aspects of education are part of that valid promotion. But education that inspires interest without actually achieving understanding, nevertheless also achieves the promotion objectives, so it is important to recognise that science education is more than science promotion.

The success of celebrity scientists – and celebrity honorary-science-supporting comics – in TV and Radio does a great deal to blur that distinction. If this played only into the virtuous-circle of promoting science (and technology) it would be OK, but through ever more ubiquitous public and social media debates on the biggest science-related issues of our times, the blurring of debate about and understanding of science issues is far more dangerous to the future of humanity.

The “lads’ science” of Sue Nelson’s piece reflects part of this. The very fact that “boys toys” technology and engineering media like Top Gear can be rolled into the same breath as the more explicitly “science” light-weight media of the likes of O’Briain, Fry, Ince and Cox is part of the conflation of science with its technological products.

Personally (as a bloke) I can take or leave “boys’ toys”, and the fact that these are obsessions of laddish males reflects well on the fairer sex IMHO – vive la differance (*). But science should not taint itself with such crass commercialism. Science – even when promoting itself publicly, commercially – needs to maintain blue-water between its gender-neutral self and the technology / life-style marketing of boys’ toys.

Maintaining boundaries – between science and technology in this case – is not just about agreeing to disagree about the distinction – that’s only ever a temporary cease-fire.  In fact it never needs to be about “warring” at all. Boundaries reflect evolving definitions of the domains either side, where fences make good neighbours. The science / technology boundary is problematic enough itself, as described by the Sue Nelson piece, but a mere trifle compared to the wider science vs humanities debacle dangerously rail-roading wisdom out of the world at large.

[More on the science / humanities distinction – and the ongoing Pinker / Wieseltier dialogue – later.]

[(*) More on the positive value of real gender differences – not in science, but where they matter – in this dissertation.]

Lisa Jardine tweeted a link to this piece by Alice Bell, on BP funding of the International Centre for Advanced materials with the comment “More please.”

In so far as the emphasised conclusion is not to simply object to, or place demands on, industrial funding of “science”, but that the public debate should aim to  ask questions, I’d wholeheartedly agree.

But it raises two issues for me, about the questions that need to be asked.

One is that science itself should also remember that it’s main job is to ask questions.

Technology or applied science, unlike science itself, concerned with applications of sufficient potential value to attract industrial funding. Still research, still risk money, but quite different to science research. One may have ethical doubts as to “strings attached” to research funding for science itself, though clearly it does happen successfully, and clearly the funding and activity of the technology also supports the activities of science too, but it’s important to notice the distinction.

Science’s job is to ask the questions of knowledge quite independent of their potential for technology applications.

Secondly, the piece, like the research centre and its funding, concerns science & technology, but conveniently uses the topic “science”. Blurred for easy reading and digestion, and of course, blurring to ease the spin-off funding into science itself. But this is part of a trend of privileging the position of science in society, treating science as the catch-all, the superset of all things, to which science relates – which is most things one way or another. Science is science, and applied science or technology is both science and its application. Application of science is neither science nor a subset of science. Application involves many more human values than are found in your science.

Constantly blurring this important distinction – science over-reaching its remit – is one source of the interminable science vs dogma wars, where many supporters of science do science a disservice, by ignoring values between the dogmatic extremes.

Interesting piece tweeted by Medium Picks.

Not fully digested. But my view of unmoderated comment threads on every news story or campaigning web page going is that these are always skewed by the cynical who believe that taking the hard line on any topic is the way to get noticed and failing that sarcastic ridicule will do instead. They wouldn’t think of themselves as trolls by any technical definition, but that’s what they are, driving intelligent and balanced debate – faster than greased lightning – off the very pages where they would be most valuable. It quickly ends up as polarised lowest common denominator stuff, a race to the bottom.

There’s more in this piece, but I agree with this gist:

A single format will no longer serve
for the multiple contexts
where comments once made sense.

Serious web media need to think about how to marshal different comment environments for different motives, and as I said many times, ensure any moderated threads associated with their specific pages adopt a level of “respect” that involves reading, understanding and constructive synthesis before disagreeing, criticising and worse under cover of rhetorical games. Or, ultimately treat all reactions as correspondence – letters to the editor – to be subject to the site’s own editorial policy. It might not be so bad, but the success of celebrity comics – and celebrity scientists who wish they were – on twitter and facebook and comment-is-free seems to reinforce the idea that everyone thinks it’s their job to be cruelly witty on ever topic, whereas that’s a job for the professionals. As I always say, we can’t all be court jester at the same time, we’d get nothing worthwhile done.

(Quite different for any media channel where fun and provocation are designed for public reaction and amusement or “gossip” and “hits” – good luck to them – but any channel with serious communication objectives needs to consider the “comment crisis”. Building engagement is more than  a numbers game – quality matters.)

Two other significant points in there – Popular Science being one of the on-line journals seeing the need for proper moderation, and the idea of an independent moderation service to apply your policy, ie doing it right is worth significant effort – Polygon Guideline Enforcers – your rules of engagement as I’ve called them before.

I expressed hope for DiCanio when he was appointed at Sunderland, and repeated my admiration for his passion and honesty when he was sacked. He’s someone whose ethos I’ve always liked, since he was a player in his West Ham days.

Reason to post today is reading this piece from Frank Keogh. He’s dead right. DiCanio’s approach worked at Swindon and the reason it didn’t work at Sunderland is that highly paid premiership players don’t take kindly to their bubble being burst by being asked to turn up with personal passion for the club, so they troop into their paymaster’s office to object. In the premiership – with only a few exceptions – it’s just not about that any more. Better luck next time Paolo, that bubble needs bursting, if this football supporter is ever going to value the premiership over the championship.