October 2013 – Page 9

The Sorry State Of Science?

The Economist complains that modern scientists are doing “too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity”:

Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think.

Various factors contribute to the problem. Statistical mistakes are widespread. The peer reviewers who evaluate papers before journals commit to publishing them are much worse at spotting mistakes than they or others appreciate. Professional pressure, competition and ambition push scientists to publish more quickly than would be wise. A career structure which lays great stress on publishing copious papers exacerbates all these problems. “There is no cost to getting things wrong,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who has taken an interest in his discipline’s persistent errors. “The cost is not getting them published.”

In a separate piece, the magazine suggests some steps for the scientific community to reclaim legitimacy:

A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones. Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are. (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.

Jerry Coyne reacts:

The main lesson of these pieces is that we shouldn’t trust a scientific result unless it’s been independently replicated—preferably more than once. That’s something we should already know, but what we don’t know is how many findings—and the articles deal largely with biomedical research—haven’t been replicable, how many others haven’t even been subject to replication, and how shoddy the reviewing process is, so that even a published result may be dubious.

As I read these pieces, I did so captiously, really wanting to find some flaws with their conclusions. I don’t like to think that there are so many problems with my profession. But the authors have done their homework and present a pretty convincing case that science, especially given the fierce competition to get jobs and succeed in them, is not doing a bang-up job. That doesn’t mean it is completely flawed, for if that were true we’d make no advances at all, and we do know that many discoveries in recent years (dinosaurs evolving into birds, the Higgs boson, black matter, DNA sequences, and so on) seem solid.

Relatedly, Michael White investigates the motivations of cheating scientists:

The trouble happens when good ideas turn out to be wrong. Based on a compelling idea, a scientist may have invested months or years of work, given presentations to colleagues or even the public, and published promising results in a high-profile journal. But further experiments don’t turn out as expected, and it becomes clear that the cherished idea that was too good not to be true now needs to be abandoned. At this point, as physicist Bob Park described it in Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud, scientists reach a fork in the road. “In one direction lies the admission that they may have been mistaken. … In the other direction is denial. … Few if any scientists are so clever or so lucky that they will not come to such a fork in their career.”

Infrared Ghosts, Ctd

Robert T. Gonzalez is unnerved by a detail in Matthew Power’s essay on the psychology of drone warfare:

Killing from afar could contribute in a significant way to what Air Force psychologists refer to in a 2011 mental health survey of 600 combat drone operators as “existential conflict.” Over 40 percent of drone crews surveyed reported moderate to high stress. One in five reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. A later study, Power writes, found that “drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, PTSD, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as traditional combat aircrews.” So how best to ease the consciences of America’s Drone Warriors? Powers mentions one solution in a parenthetical, emphasized below:

These effects [PTSD, alcohol abuse, suicidal ideation] appeared to spike at the exact time of Bryant’s deployment, during the surge in Iraq. (Chillingly, to mitigate these effects, researchers have proposed creating a Siri-like user interface, a virtual copilot that anthropomorphizes the drone and lets crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.)

It is painfully ironic, given the ineffectiveness of physical distance at easing soldiers’ consciences, that researchers would propose the psychological equivalent as a mitigating measure – even (perhaps especially) if it proves to be an effective therapeutic technique. It is a testament to our species’ capacity for humanity, after all, that in withdrawing our bodies from the grisly realities of war we seem to have left our psyches behind.

(Photo: Air Interdiction Agent Jack Thurston from U.S. Office of Air and Marine (OAM) pilots an unmanned Predator aircraft from a flight operations center near the Mexican border at Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona on March 7, 2013. By John Moore/Getty Images.)

Can American Conservatism Be Saved?

The best part of Wilfred McClay’s new essay on what Michael Oakeshott could contribute to today’s American Republicanism is a gem from George Santayana, perhaps the most under-rated conservative writer I know. In thinking of America, Santayana was struck by the vastness of its wildernesses, its gigantic mountain ranges and deserts, its inherent difference from the genteel English conservatism of what Tolkien called the Shire.

But he didn’t draw from this any sense of American exceptionalism, in which this country’s sheer might could empower it to run the world, or to unleash the animal spirits of capitalism. He saw something else in those mountains:

A Californian whom I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different from what they are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert…

It is the yoke of this genteel tradition itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy, namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their life.

There is a Whitmanesque celebration of America here – but in the service of emphasizing the limits of human activity, the insignificance of so much that rivets us day by day, and the more fruitful option of mere enjoyment of these wildernesses, a giving over to them. And this uniquely American sense of the promising yonder and awe-inspiring West will – and should – shape an indigenous conservatism. Why such an emphasis on contingent space and place? Because conservatism in its best sense is about the constant situating of the individual within a cultural and historical context. Indeed, the very idea of the individual, an Oakeshottian would insist, is a contingent and unlikely achievement of the modern European and American mind, forged first by Augustine from the moral kindling of Christianity, and elaborated ever since. Individualism can never therefore be an ideology. “I built that” is an excrescent simplification, a form of contempt for tradition and society.

McClay asks the obvious yet overlooked question in our politics today: what is it that American conservatives want to conserve? It’s a great question. I am sympathetic, for example, to some conservatives’ dismay at the decline of unifying cultural events like Christmas or Easter. I am sympathetic to conservative resistance to changes in, say, marriage law, or the cultural impact of mass Latino immigration. There is real loss for many here as well as real gain for many more in the future. But the key to a more productively conservative defense of tradition is, it seems to me, a civility in making the case and an alertness to the occasional, contingent need for genuine reform, as social problems emerge in a changing society.

Today’s Republicanism is, in contrast, absolutist, ideological, fundamentalist and angry. It has ceased to be a voice among others in a genuine conversation about our country and become a rigid, absolutist ideology fueled by the worst aspects of the right – from racism to Randian indifference to the many others who made – and make – our lives possible. A lot of the time, it is quite simply philistine. Here’s what McClay gleans from Oakeshott’s writing that could help the cause of conservative reform:

First, the idea of conversation as the model for civilized life.

Second, the need to create and preserve appropriate scale in our communities, for the sake of fostering just such conversation.

Third, the profound human need for release from the burden of purposefulness, which is perhaps another way of expressing the enduring need for transcendence, an avenue that Rationalism tends to foreclose to us.

And fourth, the irreplaceable mission of liberal learning.

To translate: civility in public discourse, maximal federalism and subsidiarity, a sense of transcendence to overcome the delusions of materialism and individualism, and a relentless defense of universities as the core places where our society learns to breathe and grow in the light of knowledge and understanding.

Is this an agenda? Not in any sense of the word. And that is the point. There is no fixed set of policies that an Oakeshottian conservative will embrace. It will all depend on the time and the place and the problem. He will question change and reform as a constant necessity – which is what makes him (and me) allergic to the bromides of progressivism. But he will also try and judge when reform is necessary to preserve the coherence of a society. So, for example, I favor immigration reform, legalized cannabis and gay marriage because they are contingent and creative responses to emergent social facts: the existence of millions of undocumented immigrants, widespread illegal use of cannabis, and the arrival of a self-conscious minority denied the dignity of equal citizenship. There are Oakeshottian conservative critiques of all three reforms, as well. The issue, in the end, is one of prudential judgment about all these questions, a skill and virtue that can never be reduced to an ideology or “ism”.

Understanding the limits of one’s own understanding makes a political conversation natural. It’s what I’ve tried to foster here on the Dish and failed to live by during the more emotional period after 9/11. It’s not just a blogging formula. It’s a way of thinking. And until we revive that manner of thinking, American conservatism will remain defined by its ugliest and dumbest protagonists.

Recent Dish on Oakeshott here. My own book on Oakeshott’s thought (my doctoral dissertation) can be bought here. My more accessible book, The Conservative Soul, deeply influenced by Oakeshott’s thought can be bought here.

Mental Health Break

Roughly my understanding of basketball:

A Dating Site For Every Subculture, Ctd

A reader writes:

While I did meet my wife of 16 years online, it wasn’t via a dating site (I don’t know if any existed then). It wasn’t even on the Internet. Or rather, it was, but not the way people think of it today. It was on one of the old USENET newsgroups, where a large number of quirky and interesting people hung out and discussed … pretty much everything. It was a strange but useful situation in which most people were looking for a relationship, but unlike dating site hookups we weren’t “stuck” with trying to make something happen with one person in semi-contrived “dates”.

My future wife and I argued passionately but congenially. We liked one another but there was no romantic spark (at least on my end). But that group often had get-togethers. People would fly across the country to hang out for a weekend, and on one of those trips we met in person. There was a click, but we didn’t act on it until another get-together months later. Serendipity? I think so.

An unrelated aside: A lot of bi, gay, and poly people were on the group in those days, and being around them (even in a mostly virtual fashion) finished off my wavering discomfort with, and disapproval of, gay folks.

Another reader:

Yes, I finally [tinypass_offer text=”subscribed”]. Over the years the Dish has gotten me through elections, made me angry, kept me sane. What assuaged my guilt and held me back, honestly, was the tone of your responses to readers’ concerns about the two in-your-face/not-after-the-jump photos of genitalia. You may have the luxury of being out from under The Man’s tyranny at your workplace, but not all of us are.

But what broke down my resistance to subscribing was the post from the single farmer reading the Dish on his tractor. Whether or not you can add a dating section to your amazing site (God, that would be awesome), it fiercely hit me how much I value the diversity, not only of the posts, but of your amazing readers, and how much in their diversity they look like me. Where else do atheists willingly suffer and thoughtfully respond to posts about Catholicism; where else do Catholics so thoughtfully try to balance reason, doctrine, the reality of the contemporary world, and the imperative of mercy and justice? Where else do people explain, present arguments, and attempt logically to convince, rather than shout, slander, and throw tantrums when faced with reasonable questions? I am already a part of this strange group that values rational debate (and puppies); now I am a contributing part.

And I’m also single, in Portland, Oregon. I realized long ago I am incompatible with nearly everyone.

I can see the different merits in opposing positions; I can see gray; I can see that conservatism, and the robust continuity of a polity and a people can sometimes best be served by “progressive” decisions that take note of the reality of the times. And I do find that contemporary reality is rather often something of which we should indeed take heed! All that puts me in a minority – yet on your site I am in the majority. Like your farmer, I work with my hands – in my case as a chef. Like your farmer, my blue-collar metier doesn’t preclude curiosity or stain my neck indelibly red. I work for a nonprofit; I donate my time to other charities; I’m Catholic and finally excited about my Church as a whole (I always saw much good at the local level, thankfully). I imagine a new Franciscan Era in which we all learn how to be more merciful, tolerant, rational, and just, in our dealings with others and in our governance.

I’m 4’10”, slender, bench 200 pounds, adore Rilke and Ottoman court music, studied Japanese and philosophy, and like to read the news in English, Spanish, and French when I have the time (because I forgot any and all Japanese). Also, because I’m a cook, I have the most lamentable diet imaginable when away from work (I take it on faith that Reese’s constitutes a complete protein and that the citric acid in Haribo counts as a fruit). I like training dogs, I like petting cats, I’m on Reddit, I take MOOCs, I’m suddenly near-sighted, and I’m addicted to lipstick. My primary adjunct spirituality is that of looking at Cute Cat Photos on the Internet.

Let’s see what you can find me!

Update from a reader:

No seriously. Help us out, here. I met one Dishhead in person when he overheard my conversation, at a Gotye concert I had been dragged to and hated every second of. He was so handsome and funny in a corduroy blazer and was amazed when I quickly estimated that I probably had 8-10 comments published. And then there was the adorable casual invocation of the girlfriend who just didn’t get why he spent so much time on the Dish every day. But before that little revelation we already had so much in common and so many things to talk about!

Dished Connection?

The Roots Of Disaster Relief

David Wachsmuth sizes up the success of Sandy relief on the anniversary of the superstorm:

New Jersey alone has 565 municipalities representing a population only slightly larger than the single municipality of New York City. This fragmentation can be a real problem in the face of a major disaster like Hurricane Sandy. Storms don’t respect jurisdictional boundaries, after all, and they likewise challenge us to coordinate disaster response on a regional scale. Unfortunately, there was little successful inter-jurisdictional coordination in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. … In New York and New Jersey, the most agile, adaptive disaster response generally didn’t come from local and state governments, but from grassroots response networks like Occupy Sandy. One important thing that differentiated Occupy Sandy from governments is that it wasn’t constrained by jurisdictional boundaries. As such, it could simply devote its resources where need was greatest. If governments are unable to work effectively across jurisdictions, they should partner with informal actors who can.

(Top photo: The Monmouth Beach pavilion is surrounded by debris caused by Superstorm Sandy on November 8, 2012 in Monmouth, New Jersey. Sandy made landfall on October 29, 2012 near Brigantine, New Jersey and cost the country an estimated $65 billion. By Allison Joyce/Getty Images. Bottom photo: The Monmouth Beach pavilion is shown on October 22, 2013. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Red States’ Gift To Blue States

As Republican Governor John Kasich bravely goes rogue in Ohio, Don Taylor runs the numbers on the Medicaid expansion:

By choosing not to expand Medicaid, the poorer, mostly politically “red” states are redistributing money toward the richer, mostly politically “blue” ones (there are exceptions; red Kentucky is both expanding Medicaid and has one of the best functioning State exchanges). Further, those States that are expanding Medicaid have also tended to set up state-based insurance exchanges, which are currently operating much better than the federal one, meaning that income based subsidies associated with the purchase of private health insurance may flow less freely to poorer states, at least in the short term. And there is a court case that could stop the flow of such subsidies to states not operating their own exchange all together. I have not tried to estimate the magnitude of these sources of redistribution from poor to rich states under different scenarios because things are so fluid, but the Medicaid numbers outlined are potentially just the start.

The bottom line is that if the current State Medicaid expansion decisions persist, the unintended story of the ACA will turn out to be the redistribution of money from poorer States, to richer ones, an outcome imposed by the poorer states, upon themselves.

Drum thinks the red states are going to have to come around eventually:

No matter how, um, passionate the tea partiers are about Obamacare, at some point it’s going to be clear that it’s here to stay. Maybe that’s a year from now, maybe it’s two. And when that finally happens, the scorched-earth opposition is going to deflate and all those red states are going to start taking another look at all the money they’ve given up. It may take a while, but I suspect that within a few years virtually every state will finally decide that there’s not much point in continuing to hold out. One by one, they’ll all belly up to the bar and sign up.

Reihan reluctantly agrees:

Rejecting the Medicaid expansion may well be the right policy, as Avik Roy and Grace-Marie Turner have argued. A number of states, including Arkansas and Wisconsin, have sought to use the insurance exchanges as an alternative to the Medicaid expansion, and the case for doing so seems fairly strong.

But the political cost of rejecting the Medicaid expansion will prove very high, for advocates will, as [Michael Greve anticipates], argue that rejection represents a senseless “loss” of federal dollars. Given that taxpayers in states that reject the expansion won’t get back the federal taxes they pay to finance the expansion, states will forgo a tangible (if flawed) benefit in exchange for the intangible satisfaction of possibly helping to unravel a deeply problematic law. This might seem like a decent trade while the future of Obamacare is in doubt. It won’t seem quite as attractive if the law proves durable.

Trende sizes up the politics of the court case Taylor mentions:

Here’s where the proponents of the suit may be too clever by half. It’s assumed that, if the courts block the subsidies for people on the federal exchange, Republicans will dig in, the government will have to declare hardship exemptions from the mandate for those who can’t afford insurance without subsidies, and that the framework will collapse.

But a different approach is at least as plausible: This is an election year, and Democrats will likely mount a full-bore assault on state legislators, governors, and congressmen in states without exchanges. The arguments would almost write themselves: Why won’t you let people in our state have the same benefits that people get in New York? Why won’t you set up a marketplace where our citizens could get insurance for one-tenth the price? I’m not sure such a campaign would be as unsuccessful as a lot of Republicans imagine.

“Bankruptcy Sisters”

Liz Carter considers why 2 Broke Girls – a sitcom about young Brooklynites who dream of opening a cupcake shop – has become a surprise hit in China:

Perhaps Chinese viewers prefer 2 Broke Girls because they can empathize with the characters, who work hard for low pay. In 2012, the average Chinese took home a little less than $4,000 of income, according to official figures. One fan commented on Weibo, China’s Twitter, that she wanted to be like Max and Caroline. “Although they are poor,” she wrote, “They work hard together to achieve a shared dream.”

While wages are much higher in China’s urban areas, the country’s income gap and the rising cost of living have many worried that hard work will not translate into success, or even security. For these people, 2 Broke Girls represents the dream of a meritocracy. One Weibo user wrote that she felt 2 Broke Girls was about girls “at the lowest tiers of society” pursuing their dreams “with bravery and determination.”

Millions of Chinese, especially university students and recent graduates facing a tough job market, admire the protagonists’ optimism and positive attitude in the face of adversity. … “I don’t just watch 2 Broke Girls for fun,” one viewer explained on Weibo. “I am studying the spirit with which they pursue their dream. At the end of every episode, when they count how much they’ve saved, I feel an indescribable positive energy.”

Previous Dish on the sitcom here.

Spy vs Spy, Ctd

How credible is it that Obama was unaware that the NSA was tapping the phones of 35 world leaders? I don’t know. But the evidence is mounting that it is not credible. Ed Morrissey, for one, doesn’t buy it:

[W]ho exactly would be the customer of this data, once collected? Here’s a hint: It’s not going to be the undersecretary of agricultural development at the USDA. The only reason to surveil Angela Merkel is to provide real-time intelligence to the highest level of government about the intentions of the German Chancellor. Furthermore, that intelligence would have to be specified as to its source for the policymaker to validate it for its consideration. If that policymaker is not Barack Obama, then perhaps we should be asking who exactly is making decisions at the top level of government.

The idea that Obama didn’t know about this program is absurd on its face. That doesn’t mean it started with Obama, and it’s almost assured that it didn’t. However, more than four years after taking office, Obama can’t seriously think that anyone will believe that he just found out about this NSA effort from the funny papers.

Jack Goldsmith is also highly skeptical:

I have a hard time believing that the President in his many hundreds of intelligence briefings – scores of which surely involved intelligence about allied leaders in run-ups to various diplomatic and political meetings – did not know that some of the information was gleaned through collection against the leaders themselves. (I am not saying that the White House is lying about what the President knew – only that its statement about the President’s ignorance is extraordinary, and that I suspect that someone in the White House knew.)

A new LA Times story backs him up:

The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.

Ambers thinks is possible that Obama wasn’t told about the NSA’s activities:

If no one at NSA ever presumed that the flap potential from an operation like this was huge enough to notify the new president, then those who accuse the NSA of buying into its own hubris are in good standing. The NSA has not thought strategically about the geopolitical and real-world ramifications of the enormous post-9/11 expansion of its power and capabilities, and the agency is going through hell right now because one of its own employees, for whatever reason, decided to call its bluff. …

Bugging the phones of foreign leaders is not illegal, and there may have been a time when the risk of doing it was worth the reward to the policy-makers who ordered it. But the NSA, for whatever reason, never reassessed this risk calculation, perhaps assuming that the secret would never get out, and so there really wasn’t any need to tinker with a communications channel that might be important in the future.

And then it leaked.

And now, President Obama, the policy-maker, is screwed.

Shafer expects the story to blow over:

It may be that Merkel’s public carpet-calling of Obama is just for domestic show, as she tries to figure out what the country’s next government will look like. Or maybe in a weak moment, she said something in a text message that she forgot could be monitored. Who among us hasn’t? And if we haven’t, it’s only a matter of time before we do. But as scandals go, this seems like a Snapchat moment: it’s designed to disappear.

The Gains Of The Godless

Herb Silverman, founder of the Secular Coalition for America, steps back to appreciate the recent progress of nonbelievers:

Some groups are primarily interested in lectures and book clubs, some in socializing, some in good works, some in protesting, some in political action, and some in all of the above. There are also many virtual atheist groups, who enjoy discussions even though they never meet. … However, the movement has become larger than formal organizations alone, perhaps because of the increasing number of “nones,” those who don’t identify with any religion. According to a recent Pew Survey, this demographic has risen to 20 percent, and even higher among millennials.

Emily Suzanne Clark surveys the historical advance of atheism in the public square:

The first [landmark] moment was the revolutionary deism of the late eighteenth century and into the early American republic. Thomas Paine and later tributes to Paine were more of a diffuse threat to Protestant hegemony than an organized force but these later tributes testify to the lingering influence of Paine.

In the earlier colonial era, there was both a legal and a social privileging of belief, namely Christian belief. One need only think of Paine’s influence and how his lack of “proper” belief and his association with the French Revolution cost him his reputation. The bridge between this first period in public atheism to the next could be easily seen in the visual culture tributes and memorializations to Paine, specifically in Watson Heston’s cartoons in the Truth Seeker. One particular cartoon contrasted Paine as the defender of liberty and a tyrannical John Wesley; while one stood for American patriotism, the other was a symbol of corrupt power.

The second moment was the liberal secularism of the late nineteenth century. This group imagined themselves vis-à-vis the idea of America as a Christian nation. The National Liberal League and the American Secular Union advocated for a secular republic in which religious freedom applied to the irreligious as well as the religious. These groups vocalized a number of demands including the taxation of churches, the end of religious chaplains in public spaces, the removal of the bible from public schools, and the repeal of Sabbatarian laws.