dancing in context

A few days ago, I noted that simply recognizing context as a factor in the dance of science wasn't very satisfying, because that "gives no flavour for how context interacts with the cycle elements" (observation, experiment, theorizing, and classification).

John Wilkins was nice enough to respond, first by pointing out that he's in the middle of a series (oops!) and second, that

... It is an empirical matter in each case what that context is. There are no generalisations that I think are unexceptional about this. Sometimes a science will run more or less independently of its culture, and at other times a science will be beholden to its cultural context independently of the internal issues of the science. [...] To think there is a general, universal and consistent cultural context for science is, I believe, a holdover of Comtean positivist thinking. You want to know what the relevant context was for the Hubble telescope, or for the discovery of aspirin? Go look. My schematic here merely indicates the general relations of external and internal movements in the science.

Yup. Good stuff, and I look forward to reading what comes next in the series.

Although context is frustratingly idiosyncratic, I think there are some areas at the fringes where it is possible to make definite claims about its relationship to scientific practice. But first, I want to say why I think context is such a hard problem.

It isn't clear what context is. I mean, it's a distinction between something and its surroundings, but what does that mean? What kind of distinction does "context" rely on? It isn't strictly foreground/background (that seems to imply salient/not-salient, and that's clearly not right). It's more like inside/outside. That seems to depend on solving the "demarcation problem:" what is science, and what isn't? Some activities count as scientific, others do not (I suppose measuring counts, but napping does not). Some interests are scientific, others are not (perhaps understanding counts but getting tenure does not). Things get fuzzy fast, and I'm not entirely certain a sharp line is desirable.

Still, even without a satisfactory notion of what context is, we can pick out cases of context affecting science. For example, legal restrictions make certain experiments impossible.*

I expect I'll have more to say about context at a later date, but that's enough noodling for today.

* For a sense of "possible" that is sensitive to legal matters. Typically, we would say illegal activities are "impermissible," not impossible, but I prefer to discuss "regulative possibility." This allows for an analysis that makes use of overlapping realms of possibility -- physical, technological, economic, ethical, and regulative to name a few.

the dance of scientific practice

This is a fascinating picture of science. I like it as an emendation to the Baconian/Popperian cycles (described in the original article), but I do not like the final version, in which this cycle is simply plopped into a circle called "context." This gives no flavour for how context interacts with the cycle elements.

Then again, no one has yet done a good job of that, so I should not criticize.

More from the original:

There are twelve possible pathways for methodological influence of one task type to lead to results in another, plus the four pathways of self-correction and revision. It seems quite feasible to think that observation might be influenced by theoretical assumptions and expectations, or that we might develop classifications on the basis of our experience and the classification systems, neural and analytic, we apply to such data.

reinventing the bookstore

The New Sleekness on reinventing the bookstore. First, buy out a major chain (B&N is on the block). Then, get rid of all the mass market paperbacks and leave just the hardcovers on the shelves, hire staff who know about books, and sell print-on-demand and e-versions of all the hardback books in the store. That leaves lots of extra room left over for:

1) Expand the café to include actual meals from a relatively gourmet kitchen with table service (featuring produce from a rooftop or back-of-house organic garden, where possible).
2) Create a lounge area for leisurely reading
3) Create a cloistered co-working space for freelancers
4) Expand the children’s area (with short-term day care)
5) Hire a badass events coordinator for each store to bring in local artists, musicians and theatre troupes for performances, as well as authors, for nighttime events
6) Apply for a liquor license for those nighttime events

Seems like a reasonable start, but I imagine the success of 1-6 depends highly on the location of the original bookstore.

I want this house.

This one.

radiation scare

When a cancer patient is treated with radiation in a radiotherapy clinic, the tumour dies after absorbing a dose of more than 40 sieverts. During the treatment, healthy tissue and organs near the tumour get an incidental dose of some 20 sieverts, which is 20,000 times the recommended annual limit and at least five times the dose that proved fatal at Chernobyl.

 How can tissue survive this friendly fire? A radiation dose is the same in principle, whether received in a hospital or elsewhere. But the critical point is that the therapeutic dose is spread over four to six weeks, giving cells time to repair the damage. Each day the healthy cells receive about 1 sievert, and just manage to repair themselves. The tumour cells receive a higher dose, and just fail to do so.

Allison goes on to advocate a change to radiation safety recommendations. Current international recommendations are "1 millisievert per year above the natural background level of about 2.5 millisieverts per year." The author suggests more granularity in the timespan portion of the limit, and a much higher overall limit: "I suggest the upper limit might be reset at a lifetime total of 5 sieverts, at no more than 0.1 sievert per month. That would be a fraction of a radiotherapy dose, spread over a lifetime." 

Full story here.

Another entrant in the "Werner Hertzog reads..." meme

Madeline

Is anthropology generalizing from self?

Anthropology is biased toward the WEIRD -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (and in particular, to undergraduates at the University of Chicago). The paper is "The weirdest people in the world?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2010), 33: 61-83 Cambridge University Press. Find it here. 

The abstract:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

The method:

We have organized our presen- tation into a series of telescoping contrasts showing, at each level of contrast, how WEIRD people measure up relative to the available reference populations. Our first contrast compares people from modern industrialized societies with those from small-scale societies. Our second telescoping stage contrasts people from Western societies with those from non-Western industrialized societies. Next, we contrast Americans with people from other Western societies. Finally, we contrast university- educated Americans with non – university-educated Amer- icans, or university students with non-student adults, depending on the available data. At each level we discuss behavioral and psychological phenomena for which there are available comparative data, and we assess how WEIRD people compare with other samples.

The findings: 

1. Comparative projects involving visual illusions, social motivations (fairness), folkbiological cogni- tion, and spatial cognition all show industrialized popu- lations as outliers. (p. 69)

2. Although robust patterns have emerged among people from industrialized societies, Westerners emerge as unusual – frequent global outliers – on several key dimensions [including cooperation, anti-social punishment, self-concept, holistic-versus-analytic thinking, and moral reasoning]. (p.72)

3. American participants are exceptional even within the unusual popu- lation of Westerners [for example, in their individualism and attitude toward death]. (p. 76)

4. There are differences among typical subjects and the rest of the American popu- lation in unexpected domains. In some of these domains (e.g., individualism, moral reasoning, worldview defense in response to death thoughts, and perceptions of choice), the data from American undergraduates rep- resent even more dramatic departures from the patterns identified in non-Western samples. Further, contempor- ary American college students appear further removed along some of these dimensions than did their predeces- sors a few decades earlier. Typical subjects may be outliers within an outlier population. (p. 78)

And the conclusion:

The empirical foundation of the behavioral sciences comes principally from experiments with American undergraduates. The patterns we have identified in the available (albeit limited) data indicate that this sub-subpopulation is highly unusual along many important psychological and behavioral dimensions. It is not merely that researchers frequently make generalizations from a narrow subpopu- lation. The concern is that this particular subpopulation is highly unrepresentative of the species. (p. 62) 

The responses:

The array of responses to this target article is telling. One suggests looking for genetic similarities to explain the WEIRD results, another suggests using the internet to increase sample diversity in the "convenience sample". Several papers amplify the worry in various ways, one by extending it to allied fields like neuroscience (i.e., WEIRD people have WEIRD brains), another by linking WEIRD-based findings to normative expectations "such as might be held by international criminal tribunals in “cognitively distant” war-torn areas" (p. 98), and still another suggesting that institutionalized chimpanzees badly misrepresent wild chimpanzee populations. A contrarian suggests that WEIRD people may be the best representatives of human nature, another says the problem isn't so much the WEIRD subjects as the WEIRD researchers. A few responses seem only tenuously linked to the target article: one discusses development as a mediator between evolution and culture, another decries the use of artificial situations in behavioural research. The last response is by a philosopher, who observes that most philosophers are WEIRD men, which means philosophers' intuitions may be quite different from everyone else's.

See also here for some nice commentary by Greg Downey, especially on the descriptor "WEIRD".

From the perspective of my admittedly non-academic Brazilian colleague, the truly outstanding characteristics of the US students were characteristics like their body types, the diminishing of gender markers, and the evidence of extraordinary peer-group conformity in bearing, expression and personal presentation. His observations are hardly scientific, but they suggest that focusing on ‘Western-ness’, education, economic system, wealth, and political system certainly doesn’t exhaust the parameters of difference and it might not even highlight the most salient, although it does correspond to patterns of the Big Variables in Western scholarship about difference (when I was in grad school, it was the Holy Trinity: gender, class and ethnicity).

WEIRD people are fat and sedentary, and the difference may begin in childhood, with the development of basic motor skills.