I can has cheezcake?
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I was so like, dude, you are no funsies.
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Surely this story was just intended to relaunch Bill Cosby’s career.
(Someone out there must know what I’m referring to.)
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Well, “scientific racism”/“race realism”/“race science” ain’t true:
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Well, it is a kind of race science. In that it’s a race to the bottom.
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Well this is disappointing:
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Indeed. Every once in a while something like this crops up to destroy our faith in the idea of the dispassionate scientist, only interested in the search for truth.
OTOH, now I have heard of the Luwians, which I hadn’t before. Only a couple of weeks ago, I first learned about the Late Bronze Age collapse, an astonishing 50-year period in which the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean were mostly destroyed.
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Perhaps this is why alot of what I read about the Luwians didn’t make sense.
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On the other hand, my intuition is that if you were to compare numbers, the percentage of scientists who did wrong is far lower than most occupations. It’s so rare that when it happens it gets a lot of coverage. But that’s just my (biased) opinion.
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But is it getting coverage because it’s rare, or is it getting coverage because it rarely gets called out?
I’ve mentioned it before, but my favourite example is Donna Haraway’s essay on the history of our understanding of primate social hierarchies, where the discovery of alpha females had to wait until there were enough women anthropologists in the field to notice – because the men’s previous assumptions on the “naturalness” of patriarchies prevented them from even bothering to look.
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The former, IMO. But I don’t know how it varies by field, and by country. Certainly we’ve become aware of more ethics violations in biology recently, for example, but I think it’s still a tiny proportion of the whole. And is neglecting part of science due to bias as bad as deliberately falsifying results?
I know this is not the same thing, but science does tend to self-correction, over the long haul, as more results come in. So effects of individual wrong-doing tend to right themselves, as your example shows. It takes a while sometimes, but the mere existence of embarrassing self-correction tends to enforce some self-restraint in those who might consider faking results, etc.
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I agree, but it’s also very hard to detect, since only someone well-versed in the same field is likely to notice, and the (usually correct) assumption is that scientists behave honourably.
The issue of blinkered assumptions is not the same as that of deliberate cheating or falsification, though.
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This is why it’s unfortunate that the top journals tend to shy away from articles that repeat experiments.
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It’s easier to commit fraud when the new discovery fits people’s preconceived assumptions, and when… the basic honesty of all involved is one of those assumptions.
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It is if the consequences cause harm. Medical research and kinesiology come to mind. Women weren’t allowed to run marathons because it was assumed if they tried to do the same as the men their uteri would rip apart.
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Was this purely due to patriarchy? Or due to an incorrect assumption about human biomechanics?
I’ll give you a personal example. When I was diagnosed with IBD in 1963 or thereabouts, it was thought to be due to psychological factors (the way stomach ulcers were back then). I grew up absorbing the idea that it was all my fault. Then in the seventies, it was recognized to be an immune system disease. By then it was too late; it caused a lot of problems that I’ve found difficult to deal with. But I can’t really blame the doctors for that; it was the best hypothesis they had at the time. I can blame them for other things, but not that.
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Haraway said patriarchy, and has some fun plotting anthropologist PhD trees the way anthropologists plot primate family trees. The essay is in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women if you’re interested. The book also includes The Cyborg Manifesto. It has an essay or two on the psychology of the immune system as well, which I have found useful in understanding my own health issues. It’s not about “fault” (ugh), but more about how the mental affects the physical and vice versa. This is the book that made me realise I tend to feel sad a day or two before a cold comes on, and that if I take preventative measures at that point I can avoid or at least shorten the cold.
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