Author: Ophelia Benson

Update: Thursday evening: that part could well just be Kwokkian fabulation. In other words, bullshit. Sheril isn’t entirely clear about it, but I think that’s what she’s saying. If I learn more, I’ll say more.

Oh gee, I was just a little premature with that. I was unaware that Kwok had claimed that Sheril Kirshenbaum herself had fed him an article about me (the recent Observer article). So it’s not just a matter of passively failing to remove comments including one that calls me a bitch, it’s a matter of actively helping the notoriously (and widely-banned) obsessive and vituperative and out of control John Kwok. They turn out to be bottom-feeders. I’m a little stunned…

A small and trivial sub-point, that is nevertheless interesting because of what it seems to reveal about agendas and motivations and…scruples, or the lack of them. Chris Mooney yesterday told his readers he had deleted a comment and asked commenters to keep it substantive – ‘no personal attacks.’ Since then the notorious John Kwok has continued a stream of posts directed at me, which are as personal as anyone could wish for, including calling me a bitch. There they sit, unremoved, while Kwok adds more and more. Ho hum.

More on Unscientific America

1) There is an unpleasant tone of scolding and blame throughout. I’ve given some examples in previous posts, and there are many more.

For every scientist who shuns or misunderstands the broad public, there’s another who deeply wants to find better ways to connect…[p. 11] [no reference given for that ‘statistic’]

All too often we find scientists saying things to their peers and colleagues, or even to the press, that sound something like this: “I can’t believe the public is so stupid that it believes X” or “I can’t believe people are so ignorant that they’ll accept Y.” At this point the scientist ceases to be a friendly instructor and becomes a condescending detractor and belittler. [p 17]

2) There is way too much loose journalistic over-generalization; too much talk of ‘scientists’ or (repeated ad nauseam) ‘the scientific community’ as if all scientists think and act as a bloc; too much confident assertion about causes and consequences and solutions.

3) The generalizations sometimes degenerate into what looks like mere vendetta, in particular when CM and SK single out PZ Myers for a scolding not once but twice: the first time for having a popular blog and for the aforementioned cracker affair, the second for having a popular blog [pp 96-7, 109-11, 114].

4) There is a pervasive lack of support for the large, general claims. Causes and connections are simply asserted rather than argued or backed up with evidence.

5) The book and its argument are fundamentally political rather than epistemological, and they are political in a very particular way. There is much talk throughout of the need to ‘bridge divides,’ and this, in my view, creates a basic distortion of the thinking. If the overarching goal is to bridge divides (as they at least once say it is), then differences must be papered over or ignored – and that is simply not compatible with free inquiry.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum write and think (here, at least) more like political operatives or advertisers or people in the PR business than anything else. They are intent on consensus and community-creating, and that makes their approach seem more like manipulation and pandering than like frank and open discussion.

[I]t is undeniable that the troubling disconnect between the scientific community and society stems partly fom the nature of scientific training today, and from scientific culture generally. In some ways science has become self-isolating. [p 11]

And so on. Yes, but that is the nature of the discipline. It simply doesn’t make sense to expect ‘the scientific community’ and society to blend seamlessly together, and it makes even less sense to expect science to be anything other than ‘self-isolating’ in the sense of being what it is as opposed to something else.

There is a kind of pseudo-populist, anti-‘elitist’ tone throughout that is grating and that, more seriously, pulls the whole book in the direction of disdain for epistemic values. This is perhaps the most serious flaw in the book. There are scattered disclaimers about this – professed admiration for Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life, for instance, while at the same time enacting some of the anti-intellectual tropes that Hofstadter wrote about. But in spite of the disclaimers, there is a lot of blaming and scolding of ‘scientists’ as a bloc and a lot of pressure to be more ‘friendly’ and accessible.

[I]n a world dominated by the twenty-four hour news cycle…scientists will have to find ways of presenting science issues in such a way that politicians will instantly recognize their media communicability. Scientists will have to accept that their advice is being judged not on its substantive content – at least not at first – but explicitly on the utility of its packaging.

In context, if you concentrate, they seem to be saying that some scientists will have to do that kind of work – but their habit of overgeneralization and bloc-thinking prevents them from making that clear enough, and after awhile they seem to be simply telling all scientists to stop being such sticklers for content.

More later.

I said (somewhere, at some point) that I would write about Unscientific America as a whole, by way of following up on chapter 8. Here we go.

It starts with an account of some sort of populist revolt over – the demotion of Pluto. Yes, really.

People were aghast…On some fundamental level their sense of fair play had been violated, their love of the underdog provoked…Even many scientists were upset. ‘I’m embarrassed for astronomy,’ remarked Alan Stern, the chief scientist on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond…[H]ow could this planetary crack-up happen in the first place? Didn’t the scientists involved foresee such a public outcry? Did they simply not care? [pp 2-3]

Bastards! Miserable heartless bastards! No, they didn’t care – the elitist swine. ‘The furor over Pluto,’ CM and SK solemnly inform us, ‘is just one particularly colorful example of the rift today between the world of science and the rest of society.’ Is it? Really? I would say no, I would say it’s just some random Thing that’s part of the great pageant of 21st century life and one that it’s risky to draw large conclusions from. Or maybe not so much risky as absurd.

And that’s a sample of one major problem with the book overall: it’s packed to the rafters with large claims for which the authors offer no evidence or argument. There are a great many assertions that just dangle there, unsupported.

Scientists know what advances are under way and debate them regularly at their conferences, but they’re talking far too much among themselves and far too little to everybody else. [p 10]

Are they? Too much for what? Too little for what? How do we know? How are the excess and the deficit measured? Who decides?

I don’t know, because the authors don’t say, and that kind of thing is all too typical. There’s the dreaded war between ‘the New Atheist movement’ and many religious believers:

The zealots on both sides generate unending polarization, squeeze out the middle ground, and leave all too many Americans convinced that science poses a threat to their values and the upbringing of their children. [p 7]

Do they? How do we know? How do the authors know? I can’t tell you, because they don’t tell us; they just make an announcement, and then move on. They truly seem not to realize that their claims are not self-evident – which seems surprising, since Mooney is a journalist and has done excellent work complete with evidence backing it up.

More later.