Monday, March 23, 2015

Where's the Truth? The Challenge of Scientific 'Controversies'

I wrote a little over a month ago about the use of the term "research" in public arguments over science. I argued at the time, and still maintain, that people often claim to have done "research" when what they really mean is that they have (very selectively) read other people's research. This is related, I think, to the erosion of respect for expertise, but that's a subject for another day.

At the time, a fairly robust Facebook discussion broke out among my friends about whether there isn't another reasonable form of the word "research" - what we might call "library research". Isn't it fair, some argued, for a layperson who is not expert in a given field to say that they are "researching" some issue by digging into the literature and reading what the experts have written? I will concede this point - though I would prefer the term "library research" to distinguish this from the sort of research that generates new knowledge, I think it's fair for non-experts to talk about "researching" a topic in the sense of informing themselves about the current state of what is known.

Of course, many of those who try to stir up "controversy" on scientific subjects (vaccines, climate change, etc.) aren't really doing this kind of "research" either. There's a difference between reading The Literature on a subject to try to find out what the experts think about something, and selectively reading that same research to bolster a predetermined conclusion that you've already arrived at (vaccines cause autism, climate change isn't real, the earth is 6000 years old - take your pick). Those people still aren't engaged in research, even of the "library research" variety, any more than a small child putting on his father's tie makes him an employed professional with a job. It's just window dressing, and usually pretty ill-fitting at that.

But in the midst of that Facebook conversation, one of my friends raised a very good question: if you are a non-expert faced with a controversial subject, how do you go about trying to research that topic to figure out, as best you can, what the truth is? This is actually harder than it might seem, in part because experts often don't do a very good job of communicating with the public and in part because those who are trying to create "controversy" as a way of arguing for extremely unorthodox (often demonstrably false) ideas like to muddy the water as much as they can. In the midst of that kind of free-for-all, what's a reasonable non-expert person to do?

There are a few fairly easy rules of thumb that will take you a little ways down the road. Just as the corollary to Godwin's Law states that whoever mentions Nazis first in an argument automatically loses, the adoption of any argument predicated on a vast conspiracy of silence on the part of thousands of otherwise-autonomous (if not competitive) individuals is a guaranteed loser. Efforts, therefore, to dismiss "climate science" as a cooked-up conspiracy fail on their face since such a theory would require the complicit cooperation of thousands of individual scientists around the world who all know better but have been convinced to lie to the rest of us. Ditto for arguments that the CDC  and NIH are somehow engaged in a conspiracy of silence - anybody who watches government agencies for any length of time knows that most of them leak like sieves and can't be trusted to keep much of anything secret. So if one side of a "debate" is relying on this kind of argument, it's safe to say they're probably wrong.

Beyond that, however, the waters get pretty muddy. Many folks involved in these controversies make claims to certain kinds of authority, while denying the authority claims of the other side. Take, for example, the work of Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has given a number of public talks recently claiming that modern chemical agriculture, and Monsanto's RoundUp product in particular, are going to make 1/2 of all American children develop Autism by the year 2025. This has been widely reported in a number of fringe science websites, often with headlines line this:
MIT States That Half of All Children May Be Autistic By 2025 Due to Monsanto
On the face of it, this is absurd. "MIT" states no such thing - in fact, the university itself does not endorse the work of any of its researchers. Moreover, Dr. Seneff is a highly controversial figure at best - an electrical engineer and expert in computational algorithms for understanding human language who has wandered into matters of public health, biochemistry, and epidemiology that are pretty far afield from her established expertise. Beyond presentations and talks, much of the work she has published in this area has been in the journal Entropy, itself a highly controversial publication whose parent organization, MDPI, has been accused of shady scientific practices. All of this gets into the realm of claim and counter-claim which can be VERY difficult for non-experts to sort through.

Folks that like to cite impressive institutions (MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins) on behalf of their claims are often quick to dismiss other equally-impressive institutions when scientists disagree with the argument they're trying to advance. This is another good indication that you may be dealing with a questionable argument - a persistent habit of attacking people rather than ideas (similar to the reliance on conspiracy theory, above). It's legitimate to question someone's credentials, because that's germane to whether they are a reliable source of information. Questioning motives, on the other hand, is generally out of bounds. Inconsistency doesn't look good either; note this article's introduction of its purported expert as a "Johns Hopkins University graduate" even though nearly every other graduate of that same institution engaged in research in the field of vaccines disagrees with him.

In the end, if you REALLY want to know what the state of knowledge is on a given subject, you first have to become conversant in the basics of the scientific method and you have to be willing to wade through an awful lot of material, some of which may be deliberately obfuscatory or misleading. That's a tall order for most folks, but if it matters to you to be right then that's what you have to do. This is one reason why scientific literacy is so important - more people need the tools to do this right. But equally important, people need the mental discipline to not "reason backwards", picking the answer they want based on their social tribe and then cherry-picking evidence to support it. That's probably the hardest barrier of all, and it's what separates actual scientists from wannabes with agendas.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015












Monday, March 9, 2015

You Can't Infer Motives From Behavior

I occasionally comment on memes and other internet oddities that catch my eye. Usually these are political and/or tribal in nature and strike me as saying something the maker or distributor didn't intend to say. So it was that the following came across by FB feed this past weekend:

Now, this is a pretty typical piece of ideological tribalism. In fact, all it really is is a quote from one of Thomas Sowell's columns - which I'm sure are readily available elsewhere on the internet for his devoted readers - gussied up with some pictures of Democrats. As memes go, it's pretty unremarkable, although it does provide a FB- and twitter-ready way to spread around a sound byte that others might not see if they don't go track down Mr. Sowell's work and read it in its entirety.

What struck me about this otherwise ordinary bit of internet flotsam was the claim that it makes up front: the author claims to know what the real motives of a vaguely-defined group of people are, separate from what they themselves say about their motives. Leaving aside the question of whether a large group ("liberals") can all have the same set of motives, this claim violates one of the first rules I learned in graduate school: you can't infer motives from behavior.

The problem of motive has vexed political and social scientists for generations. All of us make inferences of motive all the time. We believe that the person who cut us off in traffic is a jerk who likes to push other people out of the way. We claim that the other political party has a hidden agenda not revealed in their public explanations of their policy preferences. We argue that Iran is building nuclear weapons so that it can annihilate Israel. And so on up and down the line.

The problem in every one of these cases is that there is always another explanation. The car in traffic may be driven by a desperate mother rushing her toddler to the ER. The folks writing that political party platform may genuinely believe that their policy prescriptions will lead to better outcomes for the welfare of the country. And Iran might be pursuing weapons capabilities for deterrence purposes in an effort not to change the status quo but to maintain it against what it perceives are aggressive outside forces.

The answers to the motives question obviously matter. As Robert Jervis pointed out more than a generation ago in Perception and Misperception in International Politics, there is no "safe bet" - misinterpreting aggressive motives as defensive ones is just as bad as seeing a defensive actor where there is in reality an aggressive one. There is no "play it safe" - all miscalculations can lead to ruin.

Unfortunately, the only thing we can see - the other actors' behavior - doesn't tell us what their motives are, because different motivations can lead to the same behaviors. Moreover, as Jervis and many others have pointed out, we tend to be very selective about which behaviors we see and how we interpret them. We tend to ascribe the motives to the other side that we want to. Our judgments are filled with wishful thinking.

This is actually what Mr. Sowell is engaged in. He would very much like what he says to be true, because it strengthens his own group identity and sense of superiority. It also makes him a great deal of money to say these kinds of things, which is motive enough for many kinds of behavior. This is not to say that he doesn't believe what he says - he may very well be sincere. But it does cast doubt on whether his claim should be taken seriously.

Indeed, nearly all claims about "the motives of the enemy" should be taken with a bag or two of salt. Sussing out motivations is a difficult and time-consuming task undertaken only with extensive data and rigorous analysis as removed as possible from wishful thinking and other biases - a task that requires extensive training and practice. And even then, practitioners of this art are sometimes wrong. Until we invent the machine that reads minds (and maybe even not then), this is the best we can get.

So what's the average layman to do? Political science can't teach people to make better judgments about motive, not unless people are prepared to undertake both a lot of study and a significant amount of personal introspection to control their own biases. But there is a much shorter punchline that everyone can reach quickly. If you care about actually being right about politics, ignore any and every statement that starts with "the real motives of X are..." Stop and consider the full range of possible motives, not just the ones that confirm your biases. It's a small step, and not an easy one. But if you care about the toxicity of political discourse, it's a necessary step for all of us.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Guns on Campus: An Administrator's View











Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Trustee-Assisted Suicide: The Death of Sweet Briar College

Sweet Briar College Will Shut Down




