Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.
I don’t know about you people, but I’m very excited about a possibility of more just and equitable human-ice interactions.
Just so you don’t think this is limited to glaciers, one of the paper’s authors says:
The root of this paradigm comes from the era of Victorian Imperialism in which manly vigor and scientific discovery provided the dominant way of both understanding and dominating foreign spaces
Clearly, this outdated “scientific discovery” thing has to go.
Here’s more about the NSF grant. It doesn’t sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this “research”.
[EDITED to add, in explanation:] It’s a five-year grant, with two-and-a-bit years still to run. The NSF page describing it lists three papers, none of which is this one and none of which sounds like it’s very much like this one. The NSF page also lists a number of topics, none of which has much to do with “feminist glaciology”. So this looks like it’s very much a sideshow.
The grant went to Mark Carey (notice how he’s the lead author for all the publications arising out of this grant) to study “ways in which science, nature, and society intersect”. The paper in question easily falls under this umbrella.
The grant also mentions “employment and training of undergraduate students in specific research projects” (that undergrad is Jaclyn Rushing, one of the paper authors) and “mentoring of a postdoctoral fellow” (who is Alessandro Antonello, another author of that paper).
By the way, another interesting feature of this NSF grant:
(2) development of an “Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program” science and society curriculum to teach undergraduates alongside prison inmates in the unique penitentiary environment;
Advancing science, I see.
P.S. Oh, and the U of Oregon press release just outright says: “The National Science Foundation supported the research as part of a five-year grant to Carey for his studies on glacier-societal interactions.” QED.
The paper in question easily falls under this umbrella
Oh yes, I’m not denying that. But, e.g., the discussion under that tweet you linked to includes someone confidently claiming that every cent of that $460k went to “this research”, which is surely completely false unless by “this research” is meant “a much broader project of which this paper is a small and peripheral part”.
QED.
Again, I think you have misunderstood what I was saying; my apologies for being unclear. I was not, at all, saying that the work done on the paper was not in any way supported by that NSF grant. I was saying only what I actually said: It doesn’t sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this “research”.
The $460k is for the whole of this CAREER thing. Not for this peripheral paper on “feminist glaciology.”
(I have no idea whether any of the other work of the CAREER project is more valuable. And there might be a useful idea or two buried in the “feminist glaciology”. So the above is in no way a comment on whether the NSF’s money is being well spent overall.)
So some comments to a tweet are written by idiots. News at 11.
And someone who I presume is not an idiot wrote here “that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000”. Which is, y’know, not true unless you take “this research” in an outrageously broad sense.
I suspect that in practice [...]
Me too. Which, again, does not mean that the NSF spent $460k on feminist glaciology research.
Which is, y’know, not true unless you take “this research” in an outrageously broad sense.
But I do. Given this paper which many people suspected to be Sokal-style satire (it’s not), I very much doubt the quality of research put out by the recipient of the grant, Mark Carey.
does not mean that the NSF spent $460k on feminist glaciology research
Why did the NSF spend any money on feminist glaciology research?
I very much doubt the quality of research put out by the recipient of the grant, Mark Carey.
My guess is that this particular bit of “research” was largely done by one of the other named authors, but they have some rule that the more senior person’s name goes on everything. Carey’s list of publications doesn’t look particularly bullshitty. (Note that he’s a historian rather than a scientist; these do not purport to be science publications.)
Why did the NSF spend any money on feminist glaciology research?
Because it gives out grants for broad general projects, and the proposal for funding for this broad general project didn’t say anything about feminist glaciology, and it would not be a good use of anyone’s time for the NSF to vet every single thing done by any academic it funds. (That’s my guess, anyway.)
Carey’s list of publications doesn’t look particularly bullshitty.
I looked at a random paper called “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species” and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.
Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:
to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an “endangered glacier” narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.
So again, it’s not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.
So it’s still the same thing. When talking about “glaciology”, I expect something like “here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt”, but instead the guy produces something like “here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists”. The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.
Technically, “collecting stuff people said about something” could be called science, but then it’s not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting “stuff people said about glaciers”, I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.
It’s not about glaciers persay, but it very much is about ‘glaciers in popular culture’. You could call what he does scholarship as opposed to science, but either way it’s something related to glaciers, that people might be interested in.
It reminds me of a scene in The Twelve Chairs where Ostap Bender, a con man, pretends to be a chess grand master and gives a lecture about chess, for money, despite actually being quite a bad chess player:
“Comrades!” he said in a marvelous voice. “Comrades and brothers in chess, the subject of my lecture today will be the same thing I spoke about—and, I have to admit, not without success—in Nizhny Novgorod a week ago. The subject of my lecture is an idea for a fruitful opening move. What exactly is an opening move, comrades, and what exactly, comrades, is an idea? An opening move, comrades, is ‘Quasi una fantasia.’ And what exactly does ‘idea’ mean, comrades? An idea, comrades, is human thought clothed in the logical form of chess. (...)”
The idea is: pretend to be an expert on X despite not being an expert on X. After saying a few introductory words about X, move to a meta level where you already have an experience in bullshitting. Many people will not notice the trick, because they will automatically assume that you moved to the meta level because you are such an expert on X that everything object-level is already beneath your status and now you are using your vast wisdom to generalize. While in fact you are merely talking high-status sounding platitudes.
Ostap pretends to be an expert on chess, then he switches the topic to an idea of chess, and then he presumably makes the whole lecture about ideas in general. The feminist glaciology researchers pretend to be experts on glaciology, then they switch the topic to patriarchal oppression in glaciology, and then they write an article about patriarchal oppression in general, sprinkled with some glaciology trivia.
To illustrate what I mean, I will now give you an outline of an article about feminist zymurgy that you could write in an afternoon. I actually don’t know what “zymurgy” means, I just noticed it twenty years ago as the last word in my English dictionary and it somehow stuck in my memory; all I remember is that it is some kind of science. Doesn’t matter; I can still write an article about feminist zymurgy! Here is the outline:
Zymurgy as a science is very important for our society. For example (use google or wikipedia to find some examples of practical application of zymurgy). But despite all its successes, the field suffers from a few serious problems, such as gender bias.
Scientific literature about zymurgy usually mentions (use google or wikipedia to find ten most important male researches in zymurgy) as the most important names in zymurgy. Most people won’t even notice that all these scientists are male. This is how widespread is the idea that zymurgy is mostly a male field. However, there are also many important female scientists in zymurgy, such as (use google or wikipedia to find five or ten most important female researches in zymurgy). These important female contributors are often not known enough. For example (use google or wikipedia to find some trivia about the life of these female scientists, even if the trivia is completely unrelated to zymurgy).
Women are not the only minority ignored by the white imperialistic Western science. Indigenous people are similarly erased from the official science, despite providing alternative points of view. For example (use google or wikipedia to find some native beliefs related to the field of zymurgy, however absurd). By not giving these alternative points of view the same respect as to the white patriachal science, our democracy is endangered. Further research is needed.
If there is some wannabe Sokal reading this comment, feel free to use this template, and please tell me the results.
Technically, “collecting stuff people said about something” could be called science
“Collecting stuff people said about something” is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that’s why “prehistory” refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.
(To ask whether history is “science” is kind of like asking whether medicine is “chemistry”. History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn’t mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)
Ouch! [...] You don’t think he self-identifies as a scientist?
Here’s his university home page. Associate Professor of History; “Mark Carey specializes in environmental history and the history of science”, etc. I don’t see anything suggesting that he thinks he is a scientist.
he is one of the IPCC authors
The IPCC’s reports make some attempt to assess the impact of (any given degree of) climate change. It seems perfectly reasonable for someone who’s spent much of his career looking at things like “the global history of human-glacier interactions” to be involved in that.
That webpage says: “He is working in particular on detection and attribution of climate change impacts”, and the IPCC publications listed are: “A new social contract for the IPCC”; “Detection and attribution of observed impacts”; “Polar regions”. The first two of those are explicitly about the effects of climate change on human societies; I bet his contribution to the third is too. … Ah, yes, both of those two are parts of something called “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”.
So: no, indeed, I don’t think he self-identifies as a scientist, and I don’t see any reason why he should.
That’s my guess. Maybe he’d want to hedge it a bit. I certainly wouldn’t expect an outright “yes”.
Given how clear I thought I already was, I’m wondering whether you have a gotcha in mind and are about to present me with an interview where he calls himself a scientist, or something. I will be happy to recant to whatever extent the evidence justifies doing so.
Nope, no gotchas. It’s just that I feel very certain that he would call himself a scientist and perceive himself that way. It’s strange to me that you think otherwise. Clearly one of us is mistaken :-)
At least one of us. (He might hold some intermediate view of himself that would surprise us both.)
Here is an article he wrote. Some brief quotations, which seem to me like things he wouldn’t have written if he numbered himself among the scientists:
there is great diversity in terminology and underlying assumptions about what climate is and how scholars analyze it, [...] about environmental historians’ responsibility to engage the general public and policymakers, about whether historians use or criticize contemporary natural sciences, and about our capacity and willingness to collaborate with scientists, engineers, and other disciplines even beyond the academy.
(“Our capacity and willingness to collaborate with scientists”.)
This is why we need more environmental historians thinking about present-day climate change—and why collaboration among historians, scientists, and modelers is essential, and doable.
(Not, e.g., “why we need more people like me who are both scientists and historians”, but collaboration between these groups. The general thrust of the paper is that scientists need to listen to environmental historians, who have useful and distinctive things to contribute.)
I can’t find anything Carey’s written, or anything written about Carey, that suggests to me that he would call himself a scientist.[1] Why do you think he would? (Is it, e.g., just out of a sense that science is high-status and therefore people doing anything with any connection to science will tend to call themselves scientists?)
[1] … Except for a passing mention of “social scientists” in the paper I linked above, which may indicate that he reckons historians “social scientists”. If he defines “scientists” so broadly as to include historians generally then meh, maybe he would call himself a scientist, but he would probably also willingly agree that he isn’t what-most-people-call-scientists. My guess is still that he would answer “no” to “are you a scientist?”, though as I say he might want to hedge.
This is a silly discussion, but, briefly, try to look at the situation from the inside point of view. Carey is a professor at a university, he gets grants from NSF, he publishes books and papers in peer-reviewed journals. A “scientist” is a high-status label and refusing to call himself a scientist would banish him to the bottom of the totem pole in his social circles.
You probably think of science as “hard sciences”. But there are also soft sciences, aka social sciences and I believe historians, sociologists, etc. would not take kindly to being told that what they do is not science. Their internal perspective is that they engage in science, not in diddling with pot shards in their navels.
(Is there something about my style of posting that encourages people on LW to bulverize me so much?)
Anyway, you could simply have answered yes to my question “Is it, e.g., just out of a sense that science is high-status and therefore people doing anything with any connection to science will tend to call themselves scientists?”.
I’d try actually asking Carey, but right at the moment I think it would be tactless. (The story of the feminist glaciology paper is doing the rounds and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s deluged by people asking “do you consider yourself a scientist?” with hostile intent.)
Here’s an interview with Carey. His initial description of himself is as a “historian of science and environmental historian”, but later on he does refer to “social scientists like myself”.
So, you were right and I was wrong (in, at least, a way I predicted I might be): he does, at least in some contexts, call himself a scientist.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?” I think is important and deserving of careful consideration, and the application of that question to the area of glaceology no more narrow than something like “the categorial semantics of the pi-calculus”. De-biasing knowledge in psychology is a recurrent theme in LessWrong, and gender is possibly a bias that is hampering scientific discovery.
It is doubly unfortunate that the theme is treated as if it were literary critique or politology, instead of experimental psychology: on one side, narrative instead of experimental exploration gets us no closer to the truth, on the other side it exposes the whole field to ridicule, thereby pushing away positive contribution.
Am I steel-manning too much? There were no such things as “feminist study” when I attended university, and even now it’s not so widespread here in Italy, so I don’t know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
I agree that we should pay more attention to biases, including gender biases.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that people who talk loudest about these topics are even worse than average; that their strategy is more or less “reversed stupidity plus strong political mindkilling”. They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side. (They seem unable to understand the difference between “a white cis het man said ‘2+2=4’” and “‘2+2=4’ is an evil white cis het fact”.)
They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side.
No. The would go after Kuhn and the majority of people who investigated scientifically what scientists do and say that there isn’t one method that can be called the scientific method. The standard HPS belief is that scientists in different fields use different methods.
They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side
The scientific method is a tool of fascist oppression!
You think I’m joking? Let me quote you from a presumably peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare:
the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific
arena.
Right, but criticising the movement isn’t the same thing as criticising the scientific method.
For example, doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
To be fair, I haven’t checked out the source, and I’m unlikely to, on mobile. The quote doesn’t establish what you want to say, but maybe the source does, and I should have considered that in my first reply.
doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
The writer is interested in power structures and fighting the fascists:
Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of “truth” from empirical reality and evidence. Demanding evidence to support your claims is an act of oppression and intolerance.
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of “truth” from empirical reality and evidence.
That’s not true. The ‘regimes of truth’ used by judges at court don’t decouple truth from empirical reality and evidence. At the same time it’s not the same ‘regime of truth’ used in EBM. They argue against monoculture and that there’s one standard of truth that everybody in science has to follow.
That not only means that the existing questions might get biased answers but also that important questions don’t get scientific investigation because they are not interesting in the EBM paradigm. That’s classic Kuhn. Scientific paradigms not only determine answers but also questions and old questions often get forgotten with new paradigms.
They bring the question: How should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that,
genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the
equation?
Under classic EBM that’s not a question about which you can write a scientific paper.
Yes, I think that’s about correct—there should be.
In high-energy physics there seems to be a 5-sigma standard. Does that mean that climate scientists shouldn’t say they found strong evidence for global warming when climate scientists don’t have 5-sigma’s? No. It’s quite alright for the climate scientists to use different standards.
Bioinformatics isn’t part of medical statistics because the bioinformatics community uses different standards of evidence. It least that’s how my statistics professor explained why a distinct bioinformatics community developed.
When we look at 23andMe we see the conflicts of those standards. Risk profiles developed by 23andMe are reasonable from a bioinformatics perspective. At the same time they don’t fulfill the values of the medical statistics community.
Science doesn’t profit from forcing the same standards on everyone. That doesn’t mean that the FDA can’t have a uniform standards for approving drugs but the scientific community as a whole benefits from plurality.
Whether a question is “interesting” has nothing to do with single or multiple standards of truth.
That might be true, but is besides the point. Their claim doesn’t focus on standards of truth but on regimes of truth, with they equate with Kuhn’s term paradigm.
The fact that Kuhnian paradigm change comes with a change of the questions that interest scientists, seems to be well-established to me. Do you think that’s wrong?
That’s not a question for science. It’s a question for a psychotherapist, lay or professional.
How does that make the question non-scientific? Do you consider psychotherapy a non-scientific field?
Saying that the question isn’t scientific also opens up the area for lunatics. There are pro-life Christians who’s insistance on doing everything to keep people alive results in old people getting effectively tortured. Our society would profit if we had good scientists who would work on the topic of how to provide old people a dignified way to die.
In high-energy physics there seems to be a 5-sigma standard. Does that mean that climate scientists shouldn’t say they found strong evidence for global warming when climate scientists don’t have 5-sigma’s?
You are still confused.
In the context of this thread the standard that we are talking about is the standard of the objective reality. Things are measured and evaluated by how well they match the reality. This is the standard—common to physicists and (hopefully, though I have my doubts) climate scientists.
different standards of evidence
Still confused.
Here you are not even talking about standards of evidence (which determine what kind of evidence would you find acceptable). You are talking about standards of proof where “proof” is defined as “enough to convince us to accept the following as true”. That can certainly be different in different fields. Even from the theoretical-optimal point of view, it should vary depending on how much you stand to gain if the hypothesis turns out to be actually true and how much you stand to lose otherwise.
The standard of proof for physicists is five sigmas, usually.
But those are not the standards about which we are talking in this thread.
Do you consider psychotherapy a non-scientific field?
Yes. At best it’s at a proto-science stage, trying to gather evidence. I don’t think it had much success in systematising it yet.
Our society would profit if we had good scientists who would work on the topic of how to provide old people a dignified way to die.
No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it would be very harmful for the society to decide that there is a single, objective, “scientific” dignified way to die.
Things are measured and evaluated by how well they match the reality.
No, you are confused because you try to build up a strawman.
The criticism of EBM made in the article isn’t that the authors want that truth isn’t evaluated by how well something matches reality. It’s that the particular way of checking how well something matches reality used by EBM claims a monopoly and that this monopoly is bad.
In practice the authors consider it facism that the FDA forbids 23andMe for giving patient data interpretation. 23andMe doesn’t provide evidence for their product that’s high in the Cochrane hierachy and that’s why the FDA blocks them.
In addition they also argue that focusing on objective measurements isn’t enough. It’s easy to find subjective measurements that are generally believed to be of importance: Statements of conflicts of interest. If a paper declares a conflict of interest that’s not about the objective facts the paper investigates but about a subjective feature of the investigator. Having knowledge about that subjective feature helps the reader to know how well the paper matches up with reality.
It’s a complete strawman to assume that requiring papers to report conflicts of interest and having the readers take them into account somehow moves the reader away from reality.
Apart from the the IPCC report does contain subjective expert credence as a standard for whether certain statements have something to do with reality. It’s not just that the particle-physics community has a higher bar for discoveries.
In fact, I think it would be very harmful for the society to decide that there is a single, objective, “scientific” dignified way to die.
The whole point of this discussion that to be able to have good scientific view on the topic, medicine would need to move away from focusing on trying to provide a single objective answer.
I don’t know. I bothered because he thought you might see that your characterization of the views of other people as not thinking that truth should be about reality is a strawman. I don’t know why you believed that you could convince me that the evil outgroup holds that view. Especially without really doing anything besides saying: “Look those morons don’t believe in reality”.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?”
The problem is that the article doesn’t just focus on that question. It also frequently makes deontological claims about how natives knowledge should be more respected. Including knowledge that supposes that glaciers don’t like certain smells.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?”
Not quite—your question belongs to the field of sociology of science, more or less, and this is a paper in an Earth sciences journal. The authors don’t ask questions about gender bias, they specifically propose a “feminist glaciology framework”, in part because they unconditionally assume that this bias exists and severely impacts the study of glaciers.
gets us no closer to the truth
I see no evidence whatsoever that this paper has any interest in what you or I might consider “truth” of the scientific kind.
I don’t know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
So, science.
Let me offer a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal: Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. And here is the abstract:
I don’t know about you people, but I’m very excited about a possibility of more just and equitable human-ice interactions.
Oh, and that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000.
Just so you don’t think this is limited to glaciers, one of the paper’s authors says:
Clearly, this outdated “scientific discovery” thing has to go.
Here’s more about the NSF grant. It doesn’t sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this “research”.
[EDITED to add, in explanation:] It’s a five-year grant, with two-and-a-bit years still to run. The NSF page describing it lists three papers, none of which is this one and none of which sounds like it’s very much like this one. The NSF page also lists a number of topics, none of which has much to do with “feminist glaciology”. So this looks like it’s very much a sideshow.
The grant went to Mark Carey (notice how he’s the lead author for all the publications arising out of this grant) to study “ways in which science, nature, and society intersect”. The paper in question easily falls under this umbrella.
The grant also mentions “employment and training of undergraduate students in specific research projects” (that undergrad is Jaclyn Rushing, one of the paper authors) and “mentoring of a postdoctoral fellow” (who is Alessandro Antonello, another author of that paper).
By the way, another interesting feature of this NSF grant:
Advancing science, I see.
P.S. Oh, and the U of Oregon press release just outright says: “The National Science Foundation supported the research as part of a five-year grant to Carey for his studies on glacier-societal interactions.” QED.
Oh yes, I’m not denying that. But, e.g., the discussion under that tweet you linked to includes someone confidently claiming that every cent of that $460k went to “this research”, which is surely completely false unless by “this research” is meant “a much broader project of which this paper is a small and peripheral part”.
Again, I think you have misunderstood what I was saying; my apologies for being unclear. I was not, at all, saying that the work done on the paper was not in any way supported by that NSF grant. I was saying only what I actually said: It doesn’t sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this “research”.
The $460k is for the whole of this CAREER thing. Not for this peripheral paper on “feminist glaciology.”
(I have no idea whether any of the other work of the CAREER project is more valuable. And there might be a useful idea or two buried in the “feminist glaciology”. So the above is in no way a comment on whether the NSF’s money is being well spent overall.)
LOL. So some comments to a tweet are written by idiots. News at 11.
Notice that the tweet itself says only that the NSF funded this paper. This looks to be correct.
I suspect that in practice the NSF grant basically just paid a part of Mark Carey’s salary and provided some money to pay his collaborators.
And someone who I presume is not an idiot wrote here “that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000”. Which is, y’know, not true unless you take “this research” in an outrageously broad sense.
Me too. Which, again, does not mean that the NSF spent $460k on feminist glaciology research.
But I do. Given this paper which many people suspected to be Sokal-style satire (it’s not), I very much doubt the quality of research put out by the recipient of the grant, Mark Carey.
Why did the NSF spend any money on feminist glaciology research?
My guess is that this particular bit of “research” was largely done by one of the other named authors, but they have some rule that the more senior person’s name goes on everything. Carey’s list of publications doesn’t look particularly bullshitty. (Note that he’s a historian rather than a scientist; these do not purport to be science publications.)
Because it gives out grants for broad general projects, and the proposal for funding for this broad general project didn’t say anything about feminist glaciology, and it would not be a good use of anyone’s time for the NSF to vet every single thing done by any academic it funds. (That’s my guess, anyway.)
I looked at a random paper called “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species” and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.
Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:
So again, it’s not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.
So it’s still the same thing. When talking about “glaciology”, I expect something like “here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt”, but instead the guy produces something like “here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists”. The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.
Technically, “collecting stuff people said about something” could be called science, but then it’s not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting “stuff people said about glaciers”, I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.
It’s not about glaciers persay, but it very much is about ‘glaciers in popular culture’. You could call what he does scholarship as opposed to science, but either way it’s something related to glaciers, that people might be interested in.
It reminds me of a scene in The Twelve Chairs where Ostap Bender, a con man, pretends to be a chess grand master and gives a lecture about chess, for money, despite actually being quite a bad chess player:
The idea is: pretend to be an expert on X despite not being an expert on X. After saying a few introductory words about X, move to a meta level where you already have an experience in bullshitting. Many people will not notice the trick, because they will automatically assume that you moved to the meta level because you are such an expert on X that everything object-level is already beneath your status and now you are using your vast wisdom to generalize. While in fact you are merely talking high-status sounding platitudes.
Ostap pretends to be an expert on chess, then he switches the topic to an idea of chess, and then he presumably makes the whole lecture about ideas in general. The feminist glaciology researchers pretend to be experts on glaciology, then they switch the topic to patriarchal oppression in glaciology, and then they write an article about patriarchal oppression in general, sprinkled with some glaciology trivia.
To illustrate what I mean, I will now give you an outline of an article about feminist zymurgy that you could write in an afternoon. I actually don’t know what “zymurgy” means, I just noticed it twenty years ago as the last word in my English dictionary and it somehow stuck in my memory; all I remember is that it is some kind of science. Doesn’t matter; I can still write an article about feminist zymurgy! Here is the outline:
If there is some wannabe Sokal reading this comment, feel free to use this template, and please tell me the results.
Now look it up and find out whether your example is less or more appropriate than you thought. ;-)
“Collecting stuff people said about something” is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that’s why “prehistory” refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.
(To ask whether history is “science” is kind of like asking whether medicine is “chemistry”. History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn’t mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)
He is a historian, studying history of science. That subject is exactly about studying what people (scientists) are saying.
Ouch!
I think you’re wrong about that. You don’t think he self-identifies as a scientist? Among other things, he is one of the IPCC authors… :-/
Here’s his university home page. Associate Professor of History; “Mark Carey specializes in environmental history and the history of science”, etc. I don’t see anything suggesting that he thinks he is a scientist.
The IPCC’s reports make some attempt to assess the impact of (any given degree of) climate change. It seems perfectly reasonable for someone who’s spent much of his career looking at things like “the global history of human-glacier interactions” to be involved in that.
That webpage says: “He is working in particular on detection and attribution of climate change impacts”, and the IPCC publications listed are: “A new social contract for the IPCC”; “Detection and attribution of observed impacts”; “Polar regions”. The first two of those are explicitly about the effects of climate change on human societies; I bet his contribution to the third is too. … Ah, yes, both of those two are parts of something called “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”.
So: no, indeed, I don’t think he self-identifies as a scientist, and I don’t see any reason why he should.
Just to be sure, you think that if you ask him “Are you a scientist?” he will say “No”—right?
That’s my guess. Maybe he’d want to hedge it a bit. I certainly wouldn’t expect an outright “yes”.
Given how clear I thought I already was, I’m wondering whether you have a gotcha in mind and are about to present me with an interview where he calls himself a scientist, or something. I will be happy to recant to whatever extent the evidence justifies doing so.
Nope, no gotchas. It’s just that I feel very certain that he would call himself a scientist and perceive himself that way. It’s strange to me that you think otherwise. Clearly one of us is mistaken :-)
At least one of us. (He might hold some intermediate view of himself that would surprise us both.)
Here is an article he wrote. Some brief quotations, which seem to me like things he wouldn’t have written if he numbered himself among the scientists:
(“Our capacity and willingness to collaborate with scientists”.)
(Not, e.g., “why we need more people like me who are both scientists and historians”, but collaboration between these groups. The general thrust of the paper is that scientists need to listen to environmental historians, who have useful and distinctive things to contribute.)
I can’t find anything Carey’s written, or anything written about Carey, that suggests to me that he would call himself a scientist.[1] Why do you think he would? (Is it, e.g., just out of a sense that science is high-status and therefore people doing anything with any connection to science will tend to call themselves scientists?)
[1] … Except for a passing mention of “social scientists” in the paper I linked above, which may indicate that he reckons historians “social scientists”. If he defines “scientists” so broadly as to include historians generally then meh, maybe he would call himself a scientist, but he would probably also willingly agree that he isn’t what-most-people-call-scientists. My guess is still that he would answer “no” to “are you a scientist?”, though as I say he might want to hedge.
This is a silly discussion, but, briefly, try to look at the situation from the inside point of view. Carey is a professor at a university, he gets grants from NSF, he publishes books and papers in peer-reviewed journals. A “scientist” is a high-status label and refusing to call himself a scientist would banish him to the bottom of the totem pole in his social circles.
You probably think of science as “hard sciences”. But there are also soft sciences, aka social sciences and I believe historians, sociologists, etc. would not take kindly to being told that what they do is not science. Their internal perspective is that they engage in science, not in diddling with pot shards in their navels.
Look at yourself :-) and avoid the typical mind fallacy.
(Is there something about my style of posting that encourages people on LW to bulverize me so much?)
Anyway, you could simply have answered yes to my question “Is it, e.g., just out of a sense that science is high-status and therefore people doing anything with any connection to science will tend to call themselves scientists?”.
I’d try actually asking Carey, but right at the moment I think it would be tactless. (The story of the feminist glaciology paper is doing the rounds and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s deluged by people asking “do you consider yourself a scientist?” with hostile intent.)
Here’s an interview with Carey. His initial description of himself is as a “historian of science and environmental historian”, but later on he does refer to “social scientists like myself”.
So, you were right and I was wrong (in, at least, a way I predicted I might be): he does, at least in some contexts, call himself a scientist.
The underlying question “is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?” I think is important and deserving of careful consideration, and the application of that question to the area of glaceology no more narrow than something like “the categorial semantics of the pi-calculus”.
De-biasing knowledge in psychology is a recurrent theme in LessWrong, and gender is possibly a bias that is hampering scientific discovery.
It is doubly unfortunate that the theme is treated as if it were literary critique or politology, instead of experimental psychology: on one side, narrative instead of experimental exploration gets us no closer to the truth, on the other side it exposes the whole field to ridicule, thereby pushing away positive contribution.
Am I steel-manning too much? There were no such things as “feminist study” when I attended university, and even now it’s not so widespread here in Italy, so I don’t know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
I agree that we should pay more attention to biases, including gender biases.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that people who talk loudest about these topics are even worse than average; that their strategy is more or less “reversed stupidity plus strong political mindkilling”. They usually don’t care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side. (They seem unable to understand the difference between “a white cis het man said ‘2+2=4’” and “‘2+2=4’ is an evil white cis het fact”.)
No. The would go after Kuhn and the majority of people who investigated scientifically what scientists do and say that there isn’t one method that can be called
the scientific method. The standard HPS belief is that scientists in different fields use different methods.The scientific method is a tool of fascist oppression!
You think I’m joking? Let me quote you from a presumably peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare:
(source)
“The evidence-based movement in the health sciences” is not the scientific method. It’s a movement.
It’s a movement to use the scientific method.
Right, but criticising the movement isn’t the same thing as criticising the scientific method.
For example, doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
To be fair, I haven’t checked out the source, and I’m unlikely to, on mobile. The quote doesn’t establish what you want to say, but maybe the source does, and I should have considered that in my first reply.
The writer is interested in power structures and fighting the fascists:
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of “truth” from empirical reality and evidence. Demanding evidence to support your claims is an act of oppression and intolerance.
That’s not true. The ‘regimes of truth’ used by judges at court don’t decouple truth from empirical reality and evidence. At the same time it’s not the same ‘regime of truth’ used in EBM. They argue against monoculture and that there’s one standard of truth that everybody in science has to follow.
That not only means that the existing questions might get biased answers but also that important questions don’t get scientific investigation because they are not interesting in the EBM paradigm. That’s classic Kuhn. Scientific paradigms not only determine answers but also questions and old questions often get forgotten with new paradigms.
They bring the question:
How should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?Under classic EBM that’s not a question about which you can write a scientific paper.
Yes, I think that’s about correct—there should be.
Whether a question is “interesting” has nothing to do with single or multiple standards of truth.
That’s not a question for science. It’s a question for a psychotherapist, lay or professional.
Correct and I like it this way. Not everything has to be science.
In high-energy physics there seems to be a 5-sigma standard. Does that mean that climate scientists shouldn’t say they found strong evidence for global warming when climate scientists don’t have 5-sigma’s? No. It’s quite alright for the climate scientists to use different standards.
Bioinformatics isn’t part of medical statistics because the bioinformatics community uses different standards of evidence. It least that’s how my statistics professor explained why a distinct bioinformatics community developed.
When we look at 23andMe we see the conflicts of those standards. Risk profiles developed by 23andMe are reasonable from a bioinformatics perspective. At the same time they don’t fulfill the values of the medical statistics community.
Science doesn’t profit from forcing the same standards on everyone. That doesn’t mean that the FDA can’t have a uniform standards for approving drugs but the scientific community as a whole benefits from plurality.
That might be true, but is besides the point. Their claim doesn’t focus on standards of truth but on regimes of truth, with they equate with Kuhn’s term paradigm.
The fact that Kuhnian paradigm change comes with a change of the questions that interest scientists, seems to be well-established to me. Do you think that’s wrong?
How does that make the question non-scientific? Do you consider psychotherapy a non-scientific field?
Saying that the question isn’t scientific also opens up the area for lunatics. There are pro-life Christians who’s insistance on doing everything to keep people alive results in old people getting effectively tortured. Our society would profit if we had good scientists who would work on the topic of how to provide old people a dignified way to die.
You are still confused.
In the context of this thread the standard that we are talking about is the standard of the objective reality. Things are measured and evaluated by how well they match the reality. This is the standard—common to physicists and (hopefully, though I have my doubts) climate scientists.
Still confused.
Here you are not even talking about standards of evidence (which determine what kind of evidence would you find acceptable). You are talking about standards of proof where “proof” is defined as “enough to convince us to accept the following as true”. That can certainly be different in different fields. Even from the theoretical-optimal point of view, it should vary depending on how much you stand to gain if the hypothesis turns out to be actually true and how much you stand to lose otherwise.
The standard of proof for physicists is five sigmas, usually.
But those are not the standards about which we are talking in this thread.
Yes. At best it’s at a proto-science stage, trying to gather evidence. I don’t think it had much success in systematising it yet.
No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it would be very harmful for the society to decide that there is a single, objective, “scientific” dignified way to die.
No, you are confused because you try to build up a strawman.
The criticism of EBM made in the article isn’t that the authors want that truth isn’t evaluated by how well something matches reality. It’s that the particular way of checking how well something matches reality used by EBM claims a monopoly and that this monopoly is bad.
In practice the authors consider it facism that the FDA forbids 23andMe for giving patient data interpretation. 23andMe doesn’t provide evidence for their product that’s high in the Cochrane hierachy and that’s why the FDA blocks them.
In addition they also argue that focusing on objective measurements isn’t enough. It’s easy to find subjective measurements that are generally believed to be of importance: Statements of conflicts of interest. If a paper declares a conflict of interest that’s not about the objective facts the paper investigates but about a subjective feature of the investigator. Having knowledge about that subjective feature helps the reader to know how well the paper matches up with reality.
It’s a complete strawman to assume that requiring papers to report conflicts of interest and having the readers take them into account somehow moves the reader away from reality.
Apart from the the IPCC report does contain subjective expert credence as a standard for whether certain statements have something to do with reality. It’s not just that the particle-physics community has a higher bar for discoveries.
The whole point of this discussion that to be able to have good scientific view on the topic, medicine would need to move away from focusing on trying to provide a single objective answer.
Why did I even bother.
Tap.
I don’t know. I bothered because he thought you might see that your characterization of the views of other people as not thinking that truth should be about reality is a strawman. I don’t know why you believed that you could convince me that the evil outgroup holds that view. Especially without really doing anything besides saying: “Look those morons don’t believe in reality”.
The problem is that the article doesn’t just focus on that question. It also frequently makes deontological claims about how natives knowledge should be more respected. Including knowledge that supposes that glaciers don’t like certain smells.
Not quite—your question belongs to the field of sociology of science, more or less, and this is a paper in an Earth sciences journal. The authors don’t ask questions about gender bias, they specifically propose a “feminist glaciology framework”, in part because they unconditionally assume that this bias exists and severely impacts the study of glaciers.
I see no evidence whatsoever that this paper has any interest in what you or I might consider “truth” of the scientific kind.
It depends on who you ask :-/