Ted Bunn’s Blog

Remember when Larry Summers (then President of Harvard) stirred up a lot of anger by suggesting that the gender gap in science was due to innate differences in ability between men and women?  I was mad about his comments for reasons that had nothing to do with sexism or (to use a phrase that has long ago transitioned to meaninglessness) political correctness; what bothered me was his crime against empiricism.

Summers’s claim was an empirical one, that is, one that’s amenable to testing via data.  Not surprisingly, lots of people have looked at it over the years and tried to bring data to bear to answer it.  Summers was speculating with pristine ignorance of this, which is just plain irresponsible.  Speculating in the absence of data is a bit like sexual fantasizing: it’s fun, and everyone does it, but you really shouldn’t talk about it in public.* This is especially true if you’re a high-profile figure speaking in a public forum about a controversial subject.

Anyway, that’s all ancient history now.  Why bring it up?  Because I just saw some results from a new study that bears on this question.  It turns out that the level of unconscious stereotyping about gender and science in a country is a good predictor of the gender gap in students’ scientific performance in that country.  That’s not what Summers’s hypothesis would predict.  Thanks to Sean Carroll for drawing my attention to this.

* Joke stolen from John Baez, who used it in a completely different context, if memory serves.

A number of scientists I know refuse to deal with journals published by the publisher Reed Elsevier, for a couple of different reasons.  First, they’re ridiculously expensive, and Elsevier sometimes adopts pricing schemes where libraries have to purchase large bundles of journals rather than just the ones they want.  As John Baez put it a while ago,

There is really no reason for us to donate our work [i.e. authorship and refereeing] to profit-making corporations who sell it back to us at exorbitant prices!

The second reason some academics were boycotting Elsevier is that the company had a sideline sponsoring international arms fairs, a business which many people find repugnant.  That’s no longer a reason to shun the company, though: they’re out of that line of work.

All of the above is at least a couple of years old.  But here’s a new reason not to like the company: for about five years, they published at least six fake journals.  These were made to look like peer-reviewed scientific journals, but they weren’t.  At least one was owned and operated by Merck, and published only articles promoting Merck’s interests.  Not surprisingly, librarians and others don’t like this.

Oh, and by the way, the company also ran New Scientist, which used to be a good pop-science magazine, into the ground.  Less important than some other considerations, but still annoying.

Should there be an organized boycott over something like this fake-journal scandal?  I don’t really know.  But I do know that I have a choice when donating my labor to journals, and I’m fully entitled to take this sort of practice into account when making that choice.  Other things being equal, I’m certainly going to steer clear of this company.  If there were an occasion in which publishing in an Elsevier journal was far better than any other option for some reason, I’d have to decide how to weigh the various factors.  Fortunately, for me that pretty much never arises: the main journals it makes sense for me to publish in are published by professional societies.  They’re reasonably priced (compared to other scientific journals) and as far as I know are free from this sort of corruption.

At long last, the Planck Surveyor is getting ready for launch.  Andrew Jaffe gives details and a bunch of links.

I like the BBC podcast More or Less, which analyzes news stories from a quantitative perspective.  It tries to teach the skill that one might call “data literacy,” that is, the ability to examine statements about data and statistics critically and logically.  I’ve unsuccessfully argued in the past that data literacy should be an explicit goal of our education system.  Until we reach that goal, we could do a lot worse than make this podcast required listening.

The most recent installment (most recent installment) began with an interview with David MacKay, the author of a book that quantitatively compares different approaches to reducing carbon emissions. Afterwards, Rebecca Willis of the Sustainable Development Commission offers a rebuttal of sorts:

David McKay’s position on nuclear power, I think, exposes what for me is one of the weaknesses of his book. His approach is to boil it all down to a giant equation … It’s not about giant equations. It’s not about which mix of electricity generation we need.  It’s essentially about how we can lead happy lives, while using less than a quarter of the carbon that we do at the moment.

This sort of talk infuriates me.  The last sentence is certainly true, but the way to get there is to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and yes, that means equations.  People who want to achieve Willis’s goal should be embracing the mindset of people like MacKay who are trying to figure these things out.

I haven’t read MacKay’s book, and I have no idea whether his calculations are right or not.  But Willis doesn’t say anything (in the above quote or elsewhere in the inverview) suggesting that the calculations are wrong — it seems to be the whole idea of calculations that bothers her.

I don’t mean to pick on Willis, but it seems to me that this attitude is common among environmentalists.  I think the problem is that, if you view bad environmental behavior as a personal moral failing, then thinking about it in merely quantitative terms seems inadequate.

The same thing comes up in discussions about the purchase of carbon offsets.  Is it OK for me to fly on a plane, if I purchase offsets to account for the associated CO2?  It seems to me that the answer to this is technical: If carbon offsets actually work (that is, if they result in the promised amount of CO2 being removed from the atmosphere, when it otherwise wouldn’t have been), then the answer is clearly yes.  Of course, it’s hard to answer that technical question!  But it seems to me that many people object to offsets, not on the grounds that they don’t work, but on the grounds that even framing the question in this way is wrong: If you view carbon emission as a sin, then offsets are morally unsavory “indulgences” you can buy to atone for the sin.  I think that this Manichaean mindset is unhelpful: what’s good in this case is what works, and calculation is the way we figure out what works.

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Have I mentioned that I love British newspapers?