So, who doesn’t love it when life imitates art? Apparently, some fishermen near Córdoba, Argentina caught this fish:
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| Image via Geekologie. |
Perhaps coincidentally, the fish was caught near the city’s nuclear reactor.
Sadly, a brief survey of Córdoba’s Wikipedia page reveal’s no mention of a baseball team, glacier, gorge, or iconic lemon tree.
Spanish-language story here.
So, I had not realized until I got a twitter-prompt from Kiona Strickland that so much time had passed since I put out my call for opinions on what one would need to successfully do academic research outside the confines of traditional academia.
The call was put out in the context of my own goal of incorporating as a non-profit called the Ronin Institute to pursue my own scholarship.
A remarkable number of people shared extensive and thoughtful comments. I hope to respond directly to each of you quite soon as well.
Responses came from people who are already functioning outside of academia, people who are thinking about doing so, and people who are successful and reasonably happy professors at this or that institution.
There were a huge number of specific things that came up in the responses, but they seemed to cluster around the following five things:
1) Money
2) Library access
3) Colleagues
4) Legitimacy
5) Infrastructure
It occurs to me that each of these needs points to the fundamental role of universities are resource aggregators. By that I mean that they facilitate what in economic terms would be called “economy of scale” (or in voodoo complexity science terms “emergence”). I’ll take each one of these in turn.
1) Money. This is of course, the biggest thing that many scholars are worried about, especially these days. You’ve found something that you love. You’ve gained enormous expertise in it. Quite possibly, there is some particular thing (maybe a behavior in some species, or a period of history of some specific location) on which you have become the most knowledgable person in the world. It seems like you ought to be a way to turn that into a paycheck, right?
Fundamentally, we all have to work within the constraints set by how much funding there is out there to support scholarship in a particular area. You can total up the budgets of then NSF, private foundations, and so on, and it provides a sort of upper bound on what can be supported. In many fields, there is the perennial problem of over-production of PhDs, which is constantly putting pressure on this upper bound, but that’s a post for another day.
Within those constraints, an independent scholar has to deal with two things. First, the money available for their research may not be enough to live on. Second, their grant support may fluctuate over time. In most fields, universities help with the first by creating ways to subsidize your scholarship through teaching or other activities. If you are, for instance, a clinical researcher in a university hospital, you may have an arrangement where the less grant money you have, the more time you spend treating patients.
Universities help to address the inevitable fluctuations in grant support by effectively averaging financial support across individuals and over time. I may have a grant shortfall this year, but they keep paying my salary (at least nine months of it). Presumably, this is, on average, compensated by the overhead they take in when I do have grant support, from the classes I teach, and from donors who are impressed by the prestige of my department.
It is not obvious to me that the Ronin Institute will be able to do much of anything on this front, unless I win the lottery. However, I believe that it could serve as a hub for communication among independent scholars, many of whom might have more creative ideas to share.
2) Library access. Access to scientific journals and books is an absolute necessity for any real scholarship. Here, the resource aggregation is perhaps most obvious. A university will typically have institutional subscriptions to a huge number of academic journals, and affiliation with the university gives you access to those journals. University libraries also usually have huge number of “books,” which are sort of like the web, but printed out on paper.
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| Legend has it that in an era before the invention of the blog, people used to buy, sell, borrow, and occasionally read books. Image via Wikipedia. |
This, again, is something that would be difficult for the Ronin Institute to replace. Fortunately, there are work-arounds available to many independent scholars. For books, many universities have mechanisms to make their collections open to the public. You’ll want to contact the school(s) closest to you to find out.
For most scholars, the most important thing, though will be electronic access to the journal articles, preferably via some mechanism that works while you’re at home in your pajamas. The trick is to acquire some sort of (non-paying) affiliation with a university. You might be able to use your alumni status do this with your alma mater, or you might be able to arrange some sort of adjunct or visiting position with a university close to you.
3) Colleagues. The most valuable resource that universities aggregate is people. At a university, you can be surrounded by people who care about things as obscure as the things you care about. You get continually exposed to new ideas both in formal settings like seminars and in informal ones like waiting in line for a latte. Some of these colleagues may then become collaborators.
It is easy, I think, for an independent scholar to recede into isolation. Your research can suffer from a general lack of intellectual stimulation. It can become sloppy if you are not being challenged by smart people who have expertise that overlaps with and complements your own. And, of course, some of the most interesting projects are those that integrate knowledge, expertise, and ideas from different areas. Those projects will absolutely require strong communication or collaboration among multiple people with different backgrounds.
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| Being an independent scholar has the potential to be a lonely existence, even if you do have a balloon. |
Then, of course, there’s the purely social / emotional component. For most of us, being a truly independent researcher would be a terribly lonely and unsatisfying existence. I think we all need someplace where we can go and say something like, “I’m so sick of working on this grant proposal,” or, “You won’t believe what Reviewer 3 wants me to change,” where people will get it.
In principle, this is an area where the Ronin Institute could make a contribution. It could serve as an online hub where independent scholars can share their ideas and experiences, maybe even find collaborators. What do you think? If there were a reasonable online community of Ronin, would you participate? Do you imagine that it would help?
4) Legitimacy. This, to be honest, was one of my primary motivations. If you submit a grant proposal or paper from your home address, the reviewers are probably not going to take you seriously. It’s a shame, but the fact is that most reviewers are going to be traditional academics themselves, and may be instinctively distrustful of alternative careers.
This, again, is a place where the Ronin Institute might be able to contribute something. I am leaning towards creating a mechanism through which independent scholars could acquire some sort of affiliation with the Ronin Institute. This would come with an e-mail address and the ability to cite the Ronin Institue as an institutional address. My instinct is that if you have a way of publishing under a university address (e.g., as an adjunct professor or visiting scholar), that will benefit you more, but who knows. I’m still weighing the pros and cons on this one, and am trying to think about just how open the affiliation would be. In any event, it would probably be somewhat restrictive at the beginning, as I would want to limit the numbers for logistical considerations, at least to start.
5) Infrastructure. The last thing that universities provide is all the other people and stuff that you could never have on your own. This includes grant administrators, accountants, clerical support, IRBs, etc. It also includes equipment. In the experimental sciences, it might be expensive lab equipment, which only makes economic sense when it is shared among three labs, each of which has fifteen or twenty grad students, postdocs, and technicians working there. Even if your work is primarily theoretical or computational
This is an area where the Ronin Institute could, in principle, contribute. It is conceivable that, in the future, independent scholars could run grants through the Ronin Institute, and the overhead from those grants could support one or more people who could administer the grants. Similarly, maybe it could pool money to pay for shared software licenses.
This is not anything that is going to happen anytime soon, however. If a sufficient (and sufficiently active) community grows here, though, it is something that we might consider a few years down the road.
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| The Hall of Doom would have been difficult for any one supervillain to afford on his or her own. |
In the meantime, we might be able to compile a list of resources, ways to access those science-y things that you need occasionally, but could not possibly hope to own.
Next Time:
As you might expect, many of the responses also focused on all the things that don’t work for them in traditional academia. That will be the next update.
So, here’s something that’s a little bit awesome. At least it’s awesome if you’re the type of Evolutionary Biologist who likes to poke fun at Evolutionary Psychology. Which is to say, if you’re an Evolutionary Biologist.
If you go to John Tooby’s webpage, and click on the link labeled “Advanced Theory and Method in Evolutionary Psychology,” you get this:
Hat tip to someone whose name I won’t post here, lest it should negatively impact his and/or her job prospects.
So, I’m not sure exactly how I wound up covering this story here. Somehow I have this vague memory of posting a link. Then there was a green fog, and some comments, and tiny dogs riding tricycles, and Katie Holmes struggling to escape from her Katie-Holmes-shaped prison cell, except she had giant fangs, and next thing you know, here we are.
Anyway, a few days ago I mentioned that Gilbert Harman had reposted his mini-paper in which he lays out the case that Marc Hauser had taken many of the ideas in his book Moral Minds from a young researcher named John Mikhail, and that Hauser had not given Mikhail adequate credit for those ideas. Harman argues that Hauser’s qualifies as plagiarism, not of Mikhail’s words, but of his ideas.
A commenter noted that Hauser has responded to the allegations, and Harman provided a link to Hauser’s response, which he has posted on his webpage. You can view the response here. Briefly, Hauser argues 1) that many of the ideas in the book, which Harman claims were copied wholesale from Mikhail, were, in fact, indebted to a number of non-Mikhail sources, many of which predate Mikhail’s work (e.g., Chomsky), 2) that the scope and thrust of Moral Minds is quite different from Mikhail’s, and 3) that Harman seems to be lobbying for a standard of citation that is not at all standard in the field (or any field), and would result in books being completely overwhelmed with citations.
It is worth remembering that Harman himself has stated that his original allegations (which you can read here) were meant to be “a draft of a case for the prosecution and not a final verdict on this topic.” So I think that even Harman would not want any of us jumping to any conclusions without reading and considering Hauser’s response.
What I would love is to hear from someone out there who is familiar with the work in question, but is not connected to Hauser, Mikhail, or Harman. Does any such person exist out there?
So, welcome back to Sunday Linkasaurolophus.
Remember, it’s like the Winter Linkolympics, but on just one ski.
1. Philosopher of Biology, blogger, and awesome-name-winner John Wilkins is looking for help to bridge a financial lacuna. If you’re in a position to loan or donate, please do. He’s one of the good guys.
2. Who says high schools aren’t preparing kids to function in our society? One consequence of the decade-long War on Terror™ (a wholly owned subsidiary of Haliburton) is the proliferation of secret courts, which are able to pass down judgments with absolutely no public scrutiny or oversight. Well, the kids are getting in education in twenty-first century American Justice at Alice High School in Texas, where a student was kicked off the cheerleading squad and suspended. The student claims that he is being punished for a same-sex kiss that was caught on one of the school’s surveillance cameras. The school says,
The Alice I.S.D. has recently reviewed the recent removal of a student from the Alice High School Cheerleading Squad. After reviewing the Alice I.S.D. Student Code of Conduct and the Cheer Program Handbook, the removal will stay in effect. The student’s parents are in agreement with the district’s decision. The student code of conduct and cheer handbook are designed to improve conduct and encourage students to adhere to their responsibilities as members of the school community. The student and parents are clearly aware that the student was not removed from the squad for kissing another student at school. While the student is free to discuss certain aspects of his discipline in the media, the District cannot discuss the specifics of this incident and must respect the privacy rights of the students involved in this matter.
Except, that the student’s family is not in agreement, and still claims it is about the kiss. But, you know, privacy concerns, so I guess we’ll just have to trust them. Via Jezebel.
3. Did you know that Oral Roberts has a gay grandson? Me either. He sounds awesome. He’ll be giving a series of public lectures starting today. Read about it here. And no, it appears he is no longer invited to family functions.
4. Global warming is real. Now most people who are not ideologically committed to global warming NOT being true already knew that. So what’s the news here? Well, a group of researchers called Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature has done a careful reanalysis of the major temperature records, and has concluded that, yes, things are getting warmer. The results are important in part because the group is not made up of existing members of the climate-science community, and in fact approached the question with a degree of skepticism. In a rational world, that would satisfy climate deniers. Oh well. Via The Economist.
5. And finally, if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and a whole crowd of folks singing at Columbus Circle in support of the Occupy movement. Via Boing Boing.
So, a few weeks ago, I linked to a short piece written by Princeton Philosophy Professor Gilbert Harman in which Harman made the case that Marc Hauser’s book Moral Minds plagiarized the ideas of a young researcher named John Mikhail.
Then, suddenly, the Harman piece disappeared. Harman commented that he had not meant for the piece to go public. He had posted it to his website in order to get comments from a small circle of colleagues. When it received wider attention, Harman pulled it down so that he could give his ideas some more thought before publicizing his accusations.
Well, an expanded version of the piece is now back up. You can read it here. I haven’t diffed the files, but it looks like the original piece is still there, with some additional discussion at the end.
Connoisseurs of academic scandal, enjoy.
Hat tip to Laila Waggoner.
Edit: Post title had Marc Harman instead of Marc Hauser. Der . . .
So, a few weeks ago I posted about three-year postdoc opportunities at the Santa Fe Institute. This is a reminder, since applications are due on November 1. Go to the original post for a complete explanation of why you should be applying for one of these positions.
Here’s the short version: it’s three years of complete freedom to pursue whatever research you want in an intellectually stimulating transdisciplinary environment with a bunch of cool colleagues.
Read more about the fellowship and access the online application here.
So, if you’re an Evolutionary Biologist, you’re already familiar with the dust-up prompted by a Nature paper published in 2010 by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson. If not, I wrote about the paper, and the response from the community, here and here.
Briefly, the article attacked one class of approaches to modeling the evolution of traits affecting social interaction: models based on kin selection and inclusive fitness. The authors made strong claims about the effectiveness of such models, claiming that they were useless or even wrong for thinking about eusociality (e.g., in species of bees and ants). The paper prompted a number of written responses, in blogs and in letters to Nature, one co-authored by 137 prominent biologists, refuting many of the claims of the paper.
The paper comes with a weighty appendix, which contains a lot of calculations. Those calculations are not problematic. Rather, it is the main text (the only part most people will read) that triggered the vocal response. The main text made a bunch of unsupported (and wrong) claims, knocking down a straw-man caricature of kin-selection models. It was this straw-man caricature that people found so offensive, along with the failure to cite a huge body of literature (which would have undermined that straw man).
The disconnect between the careful, meticulous appendix and the swaggering, irresponsible main text led most readers to assume that we were looking at a frankenpaper, the imperfectly integrated product of multiple authors. In this sort of circumstance, the impulse is to partition blame among the authors.
My sense was that most people held Tarnita, a postdoc with Nowak at the time, blameless, a talented junior scientist in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The blame, in most people’s eyes, fell primarily on Nowak, for a complex set of reasons that I tried to untangle here. In particular, Nowak has a reputation for not being generous in attribution of credit to other scientists.
Wilson was not blamed. He is, after all, a living legend among evolutionary biologists. If anything, the discussion about Wilson was along the lines of, “Why is Wilson keeping such bad company?” Some people even speculated that he was perhaps being taken advantage of, that he had been roped into putting his name on the paper.
It now appears that I, along with all the other rumor-mongering evolutionary biologists, owe Nowak an apology.
Over the past year, Wilson has been on the warpath, giving various interviews in which he reiterates the major arguments presented in the paper. The most recent just appeared here in the Atlantic. This article, I think, makes it clear that Wilson was the ideological driving force behind all of the misrepresentation in the original Nature article. It also seems to indicate that the disingenuous argument will be expanded to book length in Wilson’s forthcoming The Social Conquest of Earth.
The richest part of the Atlantic article comes in Wilson’s trashing of Stephen Jay Gould. Trashing Gould is, of course, a popular pastime among evolutionary biologists.
“I believe Gould was a charlatan,” [Wilson] told me. “I believe that he was … seeking reputation and credibility as a scientist and writer, and he did it consistently by distorting what other scientists were saying and devising arguments based upon that distortion.”
This is a valid enough criticism of Gould. It is also a dead-on description of what was wrong with the Nowak et al. paper. I suspect that the irony is lost on Wilson.
Nowak, M., Tarnita, C., & Wilson, E. (2010). The evolution of eusociality Nature, 466 (7310), 1057-1062 DOI: 10.1038/nature09205
So, a few items for the Linkasaurolophus this week.
Remember, it’s like Linkaroni, but 100% gluten free.
Let’s start with the good news. If you haven’t seen it, this is a beautiful articulation of what the whole Occupy Wall Street, 99% thing is all about. It was written as an open letter to “the 53% guy,” a critic of the protests, on Daily Kos. If you’ve got relatives who think that the protests are just a bunch of lazy whiners who want someone to blame for their lot in life, send them this. Here’s an excerpt:
So, if you think being a liberal means that I don’t value hard work or a strong work ethic, you’re wrong. I think everyone appreciates the industry and dedication a person like you displays. I’m sure you’re a great employee, and if you have entrepreneurial ambitions, I’m sure these qualities will serve you there too. I’ll wish you the best of luck, even though a guy like you will probably need luck less than most.
I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something.
Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?
Hat tip to Jon Woodward on that one.
Next up, New York is currently all out of the Plan B (“morning after”) contraceptive. This was covered by the Health Editor at an online magazine called XO Jane. You can read the column here, but I really don’t recommend it, as it is excruciatingly self absorbed, written in a style you might expect from someone so famous, or so rich, that they are accustomed to having to put no effort into their conversations, because everyone laughs at all of their jokes no matter what.
But, more importantly, it contains statements about birth control that are just factually wrong. It has been tackled by scicurous, who details some of the problems, and end with this piece of advice:
Far be it from me to tell XO Jane how to handle their hiring, but I do think it’s generally wise to have a heath editor who’s taken a health course. And who can read. But perhaps I’m too picky.
Finally, there’s an update on the faster-than-light neutron thing. A paper has appeared on the Physics ArXiv that claims that the Italian physicists who wrote the original paper failed to account for certain relativistic effects, and that when those effects are taken into account, the correction of 64 nanoseconds is just enough to bring the neutrino speeds back under the speed limit.
The paper, by Ronald van Elburg, can be found here.
The result has been covered by the Physics ArXiv blog, and at Bad Astronomy. Both writers caution that, while the results seem convincing, we need to wait for the response from the Italian team, and generally let the process play out before concluding that the result has definitively been debunked.
If van Elburg is right, though, it is worth noting that, rather than being a refutation of Einstein’s theory, the neutrino experiment looks more like a dramatic confirmation of it.
Recall that last week, the Wall Street Journal published a moronic editorial as part of their ongoing commitment to propagating lies about climate science. The pinnacle fo moronicity in the moronic editorial was the following moronic claim:
The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Do you think that, in light of van Elburg’s calculation, the Journal will now publish a retraction, saying that, well, maybe we should be recognizing the broad consensus among climate scientists?
Yeah, me neither.
So, welcome back to the Genetical Book Review! This episode? The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronon. Ronson is the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, which the movie was based on.
Also, his name is what my name would be if I were from Iceland.
The Psychopath Test traces Ronson’s exploration of psychopathy: what a psychopath is, how you identify one, the effect they have on society, and society’s efforts to contain them. The book is written engagingly, and makes for a quick read, even if you’re as slow a reader as I am. Ronson mixes historical and medical information with interviews of both psychopaths and the doctors who have sought to define and/or treat them. Some of the accounts, you can imagine, touch on some fairly gruesome events, but the light manner of the writing should make the material palatable even for those with weaker stomachs for that sort of thing.
One of the most interesting things about the book is the fact that the material is presented chronologically — not in the order that things happened, but in the order that Ronson learned about and understood them (ostensibly, at least). The effect is a really interesting one, which fits well with what seems to be one of the books goals. By the end of the book, Ronson has deconstructed the whole notion of sanity/insanity, as well as the motives of doctors, pharmaceutical companies, police, the entertainment industry, and journalists, including himself.
He achieves the effect by writing in a sort of semi-gonzo, close first person, chronicling his own reactions and beliefs along the journey. First, he learns x, and so he believes X. Then, in the next chapter, he learns y, and starts to doubt his belief in X. And so on throughout the book. The result is a message that is fragmented, but also nuanced and faceted. This mixture of sometimes contradictory conclusions actually seems quite fitting, given the complexity of the phenomenon, and our limited understanding of it.
Even out of that complexity though, there are two big take-home messages that rise above the others.
First is the fact that psychopathy is not really a well-defined, discrete thing. There is a continuum not only of severity, but of type. Two people could both score high on the eponymous psychopath test (constructed by Bob Hare, who features prominently in the book), but actually exhibit quite different suites of behavior.
This, of course, is not news to anyone who has spent time studying psychiatric disorders (or any other sort of complex disease). Labeling is a necessary part of science and of medicine, as it is what allows us to communicate with each other in an efficient way. However, we need to keep reminding ourselves that these labels refer to abstractions, and that the thing we care about is typically a lot more complicated, and a lots less well understood, than a monolithic label implies.
Which is to say, while it might not be news, it is always good to be reminded of it.
Second is the idea that there are a lot of aspects of society that have a vested interest in reducing people to their maddest edges, as Ronson puts it. Reality television and daytime talk shows seek out people who have something going on that is crazy enough to be entertaining, and then edit out all the boring (read “sane”) bits. Journalists do likewise, seeking out the extreme behaviors and personalities that will make for good quotations and compelling stories. Pharmaceutical companies benefit monetarily from the application of clinical labels to any behavior that lies outside the norm.
And so forth.
There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.
The other thing that struck me was the chapter on the DSM, the big book that defines all mental illnesses. I think I had always assumed that there was some sort of rigorous, evidence-based process by which disorders were included or excluded. It seems that, well, not so much. It seems more like it is a veneer of codification laid on top of a bunch of idiosyncratic opinions, passed through a filter of special interests. Sigh.
Basically, if you work in the field, you may already be familiar with many of the stories, and may already have internalized many of the punchlines. But, for most people, The Psychopath Test provides an entertaining, informative, and often troubling look at medicalization and exploitation of mental health in our society.
Ronson, Jon. The Psychopath Test. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011.
Hare, R. D. (1980). A research scale for the assessment of psychopathy in criminal populations Personality and Individual Differences, 1 (2), 111-120 : 10.1016/0191-8869(80)90028-8
Buy it now!!
What’s that? You say you want to buy this book? And you want to support Lost in Transcription at the same time? Well, for you, sir and/or madam, I present these links.
Buy The Psychopath Test now through:
