hooser
1yr ago
I am fascinated by your idea of what actions make a scientist. If an experiment I am conducting needs some beakers washed, does it make me less of a scientist if I have a freshman undergrad wash them--so long as I check that it's done properly? If the experiment that I designed needs some chemicals mixed in particular proportions and sequence, does it make me less of a scientist if a senior undergrad does it--so long as I check that it's done properly? If I design three experiments to test a theory, does it make me less of a scientist three first-year graduate students carries each experiment out--so long as I check that they are done properly? If there are multiple competing theories in my field and I have good ideas about how I can test them but to design the experiments in detail I would need to have a thorough and detailed knowledge of several disparate sub-fields and possibly fields in adjacent disciplines, and also I would need to raise substantial funds to finance such experiments, does it make me less of a scientist if I recruit a team of grad students and post-docs, each specializing in some particular sub-field and tasked with designing and carrying out experiments there, while I use my broader expertise and established credentials to convince whoever I can to finance these projects?
Are you less of a programmer because you don't program in Assembly? Or because you import modules? Are you less of a software engineer if you spend your time with the client determining their needs, then oversee the development of architectural design, APIs for relevant modules with appropriate testing system, and then hand off the actual code writing to a team of programmers?
hooser
1yr ago
Plus, for the record, if we could engineer 'brain dead' animals that could carry out all the activities necessary to grow to full size for slaughter but were incapable of feeling any pain or pleasure, I would find this a perfectly acceptable solution as well. I don't want animals to suffer.
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. In effect, it would mean that the animal has leprosy. Humans who have leprosy (aka Hansen's disease) need to actively and consciously monitor themselves for any physical damage, because it's their inability to feel pain that leads small wounds to fester. (And they get wounds easier in the first place because the pain feedback isn't there.)
So a baby calf with something like leprosy will quickly hurt itself and get festering wounds.
That means that for this enterprise to be at all viable, you'd need to keep that calf isolated and in clean environment, and still check it over like every day for sores or cuts. That's a lot of work, and therefore not economically worth it.
hooser
1yr ago
My personal observation is that almost everyone I still see wearing a mask in public transport or while shopping is a senior citizen or a middle-aged person that seems obviously sickly.
I wonder how many of those people are like my husband, who wears a mask to stave off the chance of smelling perfumes and cleaning fragrances. He gets bad sinus headaches that last for days from artificial fragrances and he is very happy that now he has a normalized excuse for wearing a mask in public.
hooser
1yr ago
Oh, I agree with your premise! Where we disagree is on whether the casting already accomplished this goal. Luke MacFarlane is a hottie and played the role of conflicted boyfriend especially well. Billy Eichner is no Timothée Chalamet, but rom-coms frequently have the girl main protagonist not be conventionally beautiful. Which was important to the plot.
If I were in charge of marketing this movie... it would probably tank harder, because I don't know the first thing about marketing. But Monday-night arm-chair quarterbacking is as American as Apple Pie, so:
I would market it hard to young heterosexual women, with lots of hints to suggest that they can use this movie as a potential litmus test on whether their date is willing to signal openness to leftie liberal ideals regarding sexuality. Since the movie's ultimate morality lesson is about monogamous commitment, the date's response to that would also be useful.
hooser
1yr ago
Yes, the father figure would be less likely in such an arrangement. On the plus side, it increases the odds of an uncle figure.
hooser
1yr ago
Perhaps in reality the ultimate causes of this dissonance are that modern-day sexual mores are completely stupid, so deeply incoherent that acceptance of any one of them will necessarily lead to cognitive dissonance when contrasted against some other
That observation is a very useful starting place. When I find myself in a similar confusion, I try to switch my perspective to a more traditional view by imagining it involving my kin. Like: "What would I want to do to the guy who did this to my 18-year-old daughter?"
If a guy uploaded to pornhub a realistic sleazy deep-fake porn with my daughter's image and distributed the link within my community, I'd be contemplating the percussion sound of a baseball bat striking his kneecap.
Now that I have an anchor to my reaction, I can explore its possible reasons.
The modern US culture is (broadly) a culture of dignity, where "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is an aspirational ideal. If I aspire to this ideal for myself and my hypothetical 18-year-old daughter, then the sleazy deep-fake porn is "words" that I and my daughter ought not allow to hurt us. We would then treat the incident as we would one where someone created a fake Linked-In account for my daughter, or a controversial blog post written in my daughter's name, or if someone hacked my daughter's Twitter account and posted some unsavory tweets in her name.
In a culture of dignity, I would assume that my daughter's dignity cannot truly be compromised by something she didn't do (in this case: make a sleazy porn video). I would understand the need to correct the record--have pornhub take down the video, issue a clarification within our community --and I would regard that task as an annoyance.
However, underneath that culture-of-dignity veneer lurk centuries of cultures of honor. It doesn't take much for me to get into that mindset. By creating the deepfake porn and distributing it among my community, the guy compromised my daughter's honor--altered for the worse her reputation among my community--and by extension he compromised my honor. Swift baseball-to-the-kneecap plus spreading the word about the retribution is pure restorative justice.
(But what if the guy didn't distribute the deepfake? Like, what if I found it by browsing his laptop? The threat of distribution is there. So my gut response is to get immediately angry and see that he erases the video and promises never to do that again. Presumably, if I am browsing the guy's laptop, the guy is part of my community and I will have social levers to ensure compliance.)
The question is then: what culture does my community have?
If it's Blue Tribe PMC: my daughter's reputation will rise by spreading word about (a) her stoic response to someone's attempt at reducing her dignity, (b) our levelheaded pursuit of legal means of redress, and even (c) our high-brow discussions on why our culture regards sex as shameful in the first place.
If it's Red Tribe Appalachia: out comes the baseball bat.
hooser
1yr ago
Nice effort-post! And thanks for doing the hard work of examining qualitative evidence.
Your main point is: (A) there's been a lot of female empowerment in Saudi Arabia over the past half-a-century, and (B) that's what explains the coincidental drop in fertility rates.
I agree that evidence indicates a substantial rise of female empowerment. To back up your qualitative evidence: Gender Inequality Index has a sharp drop in 2013, going from higher than Iran to on-par with Russia. "This index covers three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and economic status." For comparison, I have included other countries: USA is lower than Russia but higher than Japan, which in turn is higher than South Korea, which by 2015 is on par with Sweden.
I looked at other measurements in Our World In Data, but many of those measurements don't take into account that almost 40% of people in Saudi Arabia are migrant workers, most of whom are men.
However, I am far from convinced that female empowerment is the main cause of the drop in fertility rates.
There is a strong correlation between fertility rate and child mortality rate, and this is likely causal. If you want to eventually have three adult children and each baby is likely to reach adulthood, then you only need to have three babies; but if half of babies die before adulthood, then you better plan to have six babies.
In Saudi Arabia, child mortality starts dropping in the 60's and 70's, and fertility rate start dropping in the 80's. That's the kind of generational delay I would expect: people get used to the fact that kids aren't dying like flies, and adjust accordingly.
The correlation between female empowerment and fertility rate could have the opposite causal explanation: as it became less necessary for women to have lots of babies in order for a few of them to survive to adulthood, the society can empower women to marry later, get more education, and participate more in the labor force.
hooser
1yr ago
I wish the nascent yet-to-prove-it's-viable cultivated meat industry the best of luck, because I am excited about the possibilities of what might happen if they manage to pull it off.
Imagine: celebrity steaks that are actual meat from celebrities! Want a bite of Ryan Gosling? Now you can!
Ever wanted to try panda meat but have obvious ethical and legal barriers? Now you can!
Or: Ever wonder what an alicorn would taste like? Our food artists have combined muscle cells from a horse, an eagle, and a rhinoceros.
hooser
1yr ago
Perspective from the relevant location is much appreciated. I hope you will post follow-ups.
hooser
1yr ago
That's a reasonable guess, but doesn't apply to me. My experience renting in California is during the time that I had a reasonably-paid and very steady full-time employment. When I rented from corporate landlords at "luxury" apartment complex, I didn't get my deposit back two-out-of-three times. When I rented from individual landlords, I didn't get my deposit back one-out-of-two times. At each of those locations, I cleaned the apartment after all my stuff was moved out, prior to handing back the key during the inspection.
By now I give at least even odds that I won't get my deposit back when I move.
hooser
1yr ago
Looks like you have already substantially analyzed the pros and cons of moving. One additional possible cost of moving (depending where you're at): the deposit.
In California, my experience is that renters can kiss their deposit goodbye. The standard renting procedure is to pay upfront first month's rent, last month's rent, a deposit for the keys (a couple hundred dollars), and an additional deposit in the amount of monthly rent in case you leave the place trashed once you move. My experience with renting is that there is a high chance that the landlord will by default not return that deposit, even though I always clean up the place before moving out. The times I have asked for itemized list of what that deposit went towards fixing (which they are required to provide upon request), the list included carpet cleaning, repainting, and other stuff that is about sprucing up the place after normal wear-and-tear.
Once, that list included carpet cleaning for an apartment with no carpets. I did get that portion back, but only after making a credible threat to sue.
In other parts of the US, however, I got my deposit back without such problems. So I recommend considering the norms regarding deposits where you're at, and if the norms are for those deposits to go to upkeep for normal wear-and-tear, then adding both your deposit for your current place and your deposit for the other place as part of the moving costs.
hooser
1yr ago
Seems like a part of a general trend within the US Armed Forces.
Two days ago the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force have jointly published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Since it's behind paywall, I will quote the entire thing and boldface the part that stands out to me as relevant to this conversation:
An all-volunteer military has defended the U.S. for nearly 50 years. America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians stand shoulder to shoulder with allies and partners to defeat tyranny, prevent war and defend the freedom that allows democracy and prosperity to thrive.
As the U.S. refocuses on rising challenges from China and Russia, the armed forces are confronting a generational recruiting shortfall. As global threats loom, our respective services face a shrinking pool of qualified and willing applicants. Military communities are increasingly isolated. A strong U.S. job market in which there are nearly two open positions for every person seeking work increases the difficulty of attracting recruits. But the nation needs defending, even when the job market is historically strong.
As the civilian leaders of the Army, Navy and Air Force, we join to ask every young American to consider serving in the U.S. military. If you seek a life of purpose and passion, if you hope to invest your talents in a cause bigger than yourself, if you want to belong to a community of people who also choose to serve, you can find that connection and more in the armed forces.
This is an exciting time to serve. Since the end of the draft gave way to the all-volunteer military in 1973, new technologies have emerged that shape how we engage with those who seek to do us harm. Today more than ever, the armed forces need data scientists, coders and engineers as much as we need pilots, submariners and infantry. If you join, you’ll get the chance to change lives, use technology and develop skills that the private sector can’t match. You’ll serve in every part of the world, protecting freedom and responding to crises with the skills to make a difference. Our goal is to recruit and build a force that looks like America, and so we are working to strengthen and support diversity, equity and inclusion for all who serve. Whether you serve three years or 20 years, there are ample opportunities for tailored professional and personal development. You’ll do work that matters.
We know that there are misperceptions about the military that might keep people from joining. We are providing unparalleled training and educational opportunities for our service members and investing billions of dollars in housing and quality of life, while also changing policies that are more in step with what this generation has come to expect from the best institutions. We are finding new ways to help young Americans meet our necessarily high standards.
To do all these things, we are counting on policy makers, schools, religious institutions, and families to reinforce the importance of service and the opportunities it provides. Members of Congress, we ask for your support as we work on solutions to the recruiting challenge. We ask civic leaders and educators to open your communities to active-duty military and veterans, especially in places where we haven’t adequately invested in the past. To parents and families, we ask that you give us the opportunity to share all that we’re doing to make the military even more of a place for the next generation to grow and thrive, including our unprecedented commitment to making the military a place where all who serve can be free from harassment, discrimination or abuse.
To our veterans, we ask that you tell your stories of service to the greatest nation in the world. Most of all, we ask young Americans to join us—and to write your own stories of service to our nation.
The military can and must do more to recruit and retain America’s finest, but we need America behind us. We must ask ourselves how we can help ensure that there is a new generation able and inspired to carry on the nation’s proud, selfless and distinguished legacy of service. You can write your own story of service to the country.
Ms. Wormuth, Mr. Kendall and Mr. Del Toro are, respectively, secretary of the Army, Air Force and Navy.
hooser
1yr ago
Try: "I find your phasing... problematic." (Followed by a dignified silence.)
Seriously, though, if your purpose is to improve your own communication skills--and that's a laudable purpose to have--I recommend seriously adapting Socratic method. Ask questions, and genuinely listen to their responses. If they talk about broad ideas, come up with realistic concrete scenarios, preferably based on your own life or someone you know. If the terminology gets in the way of communication, suggest "tabooing" a particular word and see if it improves communication of ideas.
By the way, I recommend reading Plato's dialogues. The character of Socrates is great at walking the narrow path between a devil's advocate and a troll, and it falls to other characters to voice "common-sense" ideas.
hooser
1yr ago
Thanks for the empathy!
This is also a great example of the limits of sympathy [1]. My reaction to the event was closer to "oh well, that's the subway for ya". I dealt with it, and shrugged it off. Whereas another woman experiencing the same event may end up traumatized and vowing never to ride public transit again. There is no way to know what effect an identical event would have on two people without them telling of it.
(Though one can use a probability distribution based on statistics... I just realized how geeky that sounds, but I stand by it.)
[1] I keep having to remind myself which is which:
Sympathy (which comes from the Greek sym, meaning "together," and pathos, referring to feelings or emotion) is used when one person shares the feelings of another; an example is when one experiences sadness when someone close is experiencing grief or loss. Empathy is also related to pathos. It differs from sympathy in carrying an implication of greater emotional distance. With empathy, you can imagine or understand how someone might feel, without necessarily having those feelings yourself.
hooser
1yr ago
I agree with your assessment of what makes one a programmer. Programming is a specific technical skill, and what makes one a programmer is being good at--and doing--that technical skill.
A software engineer, on the other hand--or better yet, a software architect--need not necessarily do any programming. They can offload the tasks that require that specific technical skill to programmers.
I suspect that this is at the root of the contention between your perspective and mine. Do you regard doing science as a set of technical skills? Or do you regard doing science as making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world?
And once I phrase it like that, I find that the specific issue of our contention--under what conditions you/we call the people who progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world "scientists"--stops mattering so much.
The current system (in US) where one can progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world on a fundamental level is done mostly in university-based labs. These labs rely on funding to continue to make their progress. Funding depends on maintaining a solid and clearly-legible track record of previous progress (which in our system involves high-quality publications in peer-reviewed journals that are well-regarded in the field). Funding also depends on seeking out and getting those grants, and then making sure to satisfy their conditions so the lab can get more of such grants in the future.
So if I run a bio-chem lab (the Hooser Lab at Stanbridge) and my goal is to progress what we know about what causes aging and what may halt the process in mammals, then my main job is to make sure that my lab can actually make useful progress in my goal. I need to break down what my lab needs to do, what resources it needs to do that, and how I can get those resources. Then I get those resources, and oversee the process. And as much as I enjoyed writing scripts to analyze data when I was a postdoc at Whatihear Lab at Oxbridge, maybe my time would be better spent on reviewing drafts for publications (because I have the breadth of knowledge to connect that esoteric result to broader field, or to suggest in the discussion multiple probable interesting consequences), and speaking with grant-giving foundations (because I have built my reputation as a serious scientist and they will take me seriously), while a postdoc in my lab oversees the data analysis.
hooser
1yr ago
UCLA Williams Institute released a report examining the number of trans-identified people over the past five years. It buried the lede in its June 2022 report: in the same five-year period while trans-ID increased 100% among youth, trans-ID among adults 25 and over dropped 21%.
This might reflect a change of what transgenderism means, in Blue Tribe circles at least.
I work in a small liberal arts college with almost all students in the 18-24 age range. Twenty years ago, if we had any transgender students or employees, they either were closeted or completely passed. In 2008-2015, we got a few students who were openly trans and really worked on presenting themselves as their chosen gender. I don't know if they had surgeries, but at least testosterone / estrogen intake was involved.
After that, we got more and more students who would say they are trans, but I am sure that no pills or surgeries were involved. In fact, if they didn't tell me they are trans I would not have known it, because most of them don't do anything outside of the (liberal arts college) norm of their obvious biological gender. (Guy with long hair wearing a skirt? Whatevs. Gal with short hair wearing... wait, is there even something a gal can't wear and still read female?)
By now, being trans just means that you say you are trans, both socially and in Williams Institute report:
The BRFSS module asks, “Do you consider yourself to be transgender?” with response options,
“Yes; No; Don’t know/not sure” or respondents could refuse to answer. If a respondent expresses
confusion, then interviewers provide definitions of transgender and/or gender nonconforming. If
respondents affirmatively answer the question, they are then asked if they consider themselves to
be male-to-female; female-to-male; or gender nonconforming. The YRBS module asks, “Some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex at birth does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender?” with response options, “No; Yes, I am transgender; Not sure if I am transgender, Don’t know what the question is asking.”
Which means that for most people who self-identified as "trans" in the past, "de-transitioning" just means "not saying you are trans anymore".
So here's my theory to explain the drop in trans-identifying adults: in 2016 when college-attending or very-online normies caught wind of this new and exciting idea--that saying you are transgender marks you edgy and cool but you don't need to do anything more expensive than claim it--there was a spike of 25-35-year-olds self-identifying as "trans"-something. Now, when the idea is old and "trans" has lost its coolness-signaling edge, that spike isn't there, and some of the people who added to the spike in 2016 no longer say they're trans.
hooser
1yr ago
Brasilian president Jair Bolsonaro pledges to respect the Constitution after the election loss. I am posting this here as an example of where culture war gets actually rather civilized. The race between Bosonaro and Lula was tight, and the former could have made serious trouble re. transition of power. Since that link is pay-walled and I have yet to figure out how to get archive.org to take a snapshot of what I am seeing, I will reproduce the parts that I find interesting.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday vowed to respect the constitution after he lost the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ending a tense silence of 45 hours in which he had refused to acknowledge the results even as his allies urged him to do so.
Mr. Bolsonaro didn’t comment on his loss in Sunday’s runoff vote in a press conference in Brasília, the capital. His chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, flanking Mr. Bolsonaro in the briefing, told reporters that the president had authorized him to begin the transition process that would end with Mr. da Silva’s inauguration on Jan. 1.
“I will continue complying with the orders of the constitution—it’s an honor to be the leader of millions of Brazilians who, like myself, believe in economic freedom, religious freedom, free speech, honesty and the green and yellow colors of our national flag,” said Mr. Bolsonaro, speaking to reporters from his official residence.
Mr. Bolsonaro thanked the more than 58 million people who voted for him Sunday, saying that protests by truckers across the country Tuesday in support of his government were the result of “indignation and feelings of injustice over the electoral process.”
Mr. Bolsonaro has spent much of the past few years raising allegations of fraud in Brazil’s electronic-voting system and warned that this year’s election could be stolen from him, without presenting evidence.
[something something stocks, because it's Wall Street Journal]
The 67-year-old former army captain came close to winning, but ultimately lost Sunday’s runoff election to Mr. da Silva, a leftist former president, in the closest presidential race in Brazil’s history. In the final tally, Mr. da Silva, a 77-year-old former trade-union leader who served two terms as president ending in 2010, garnered 50.9% of the vote, 2.1 million more votes than Mr. Bolsonaro, who got 49.1%, according to the country’s electoral court.
Though Mr. Bolsonaro had pledged shortly before the Oct. 2 first round of voting that he would only accept the outcome if the vote was clean, prominent allies had quickly recognized the result after electoral authorities counted the more than 120 million ballots Sunday.
[someone possibly well-known in Brasil calls for Bolsonaro to concede]
Mr. Bolsonaro’s short speech came as Mr. Garcia and other politicians called on him to acknowledge the outcome to help tame protests by truckers across the country who blocked major highways in a show of support for the president. Brazil’s traffic police said it was investigating cases in which its own officers had sided with the truckers.
As of midday Tuesday, truckers had erected more than 200 blockades across Brazil, the federal traffic police said, including at São Paulo’s international airport, where flights were canceled after the main access road was blocked. The authorities said they had cleared hundreds of others.
I am in US. There is one thing I expect my president to do: step down. So kudos to Brazil.
hooser
1yr ago
And training the AI on the actual person's breasts isn't required for the result to be highly similar to what they actually look like topless, at least for some women, considering at least some people's breasts are visually similar to other people's breasts. Thus a person who has not already consented to having topless photos of themselves present anywhere on the internet can have topless images of them created to what is indeed a very high degree of verisimilitude to their actual naked form, using i.e. pornstar's breasts as training data.
Porn stars not only self-select based on their agility in smoothly changing positions in front of cameras--incidentally, a skill shared with politicians--but also for how good they look naked. If an AI image generator is trained on naked bodies of porn starts, its AI-completed naked version of me will look amazingly better than I actually do.
Women's breasts, in particular, come in a variety of shapes, and they are frequently not symmetric. Older women's breasts tend to be flat--think more like those pictures in the old National Geographic depicting women in some far-away hunter-gatherer tribe. The nipples and areolae come in various shapes and sizes, and change with temperature. Some have inverted nipples. Practically all of this variability is hidden by the kinds of clothes women wear, especially if they are into padded bras.
The distribution of body fat also varies significantly for overweight women, and this is also mostly hidden or distorted by clothes.
hooser
1yr ago
the worst offender being a piece that was literally just a square canvas planted black. That's it.
Yes, but which square canvas painted black was it?
It may be one of Robert Motherwell's Iberia series, painted during the Spanish civil war. Though the most famous variants have a dash of non-black paint somewhere, some don't. Motherwell's Iberia canvasses have thick black paint and look almost like a map relief.
It may be one of Ad Reinhardt's paintings. He did a lot of them. Reinhardt's canvasses tend to have very subtle patterns and shades, though the whole point of some of the canvasses is to not have any patterns whatsoever. That would be consistent with the philosophy of art-as-art he was exploring:
There is nothing there. What you see is not what you see. What you see is nothing. Nothing but shapes, lines, colors. What you see is whats in your mind. What you see is something somebody told you to look for. Look out for anything you see! Watch it! Watch out! Take care! Don’t leap before you look out.
But if you are really lucky, it was the original Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. The Black Square is one of the most influential works of modern art, ground zero for exploration of what modern artists and modern art audience mean by art. [Intentionally so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)): "It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins."
If it was the Black Square, then there is an additional [bonus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)) for the Culture War angle:
In 2015, while viewing the Black Square with a microscope, art historians at the Tretyakov Gallery discovered a message underneath its black paint. It was believed to read as "Battle of negroes in a dark cave." The reference was linked to an 1897 comic by French writer Alphonse Allais with the caption: "Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit" or "Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night." The researchers at the State Tretyakov Gallery speculated that Malevich was responding to the joke within Allais' popular work.
hooser
1yr ago
Congratulations on getting the NIH grant!
You are right to point out that a significant portion of gatekeepers in US Academia are very much into the DEI/woke ideology. I would guess that in some fields, they are the majority of gatekeepers. In other fields, they may yet be a minority. Since most fields in US are liberal/left, and DEI/woke ideology evolved specifically to spread in or dominate such spaces, I would expect to encounter such gatekeepers in pretty much any academic field. I would also expect to encounter gatekeepers who retain classical liberal ideals that are at odds with discriminatory aspects of the former.
Getting a specific job, getting a specific grant, those have always been a crap shoot and involved guessing the priorities of whoever comprised the hiring / grant committee. It also is, deliberately, a status game. We would like to think that academic status is about merit, but it's still status, and thus susceptible to status-affecting politics. DEI/woke has been quite effective in that game, in the milieu of liberal/left spaces. So I would expect their representation within the academic gatekeepers to increase.
To anyone who is personally worried about this trend, I recommend considering life outside of academia.
hooser
1yr ago
I think you're right about that this is where we disagree. If we take doing science as "making progress on our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world", well that applies to the electron microscope salesmen, academic departmental secretaries, directors of corporate research orgs, plumbers who install chilled water systems in labs, the maintainers of python and r, and any number of other people who contribute in some small way to the broad economic activity of advancing science.
Excellent point! My follow-up question is therefore: what actual utility is there in distinguishing some of the jobs (professions? tasks?) that progress our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world as "scientist"?
I do think that this utility exists and is important. It reminds me of Feynman's description of cargo cult science:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
In an organization whose purpose is to progress in our ability to predict and manipulate the physical world--and which has a solid track record of effectively making this progress--who are the people that are essential to the enterprise, and who are in necessary supporting roles?
If the latter: do they require transferable set of skills that are not particular to this specific enterprise? The plumber who installs the chilled water system is such; so is the CPA in HR; so is the janitor. The lab manager (like, in a chem lab) would need to have specialized knowledge to do her job, but it's still transferable set of skills (solid Bachelor's level knowledge of chemistry plus great organizational skills). These people do useful work that enable the enterprise, but they are not essential.
It's useful to reserve the term "scientist" for the former--those who are essential to the enterprise--to keep the telos of their profession foremost in mind. It's useful, because the scientist's telos is frequently in direct contradiction with goals people have (e.g., getting that publication after you put in so much effort into that experiment, if only those couple of observation points weren't undermining your hypothesis). Let me quote Feynman once more:
But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. [...] It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.
From an op-ed at Harvard Crimson (via Marginal Revolution):
[snip]
I enjoyed reading the article, and as someone not at all affiliated with Harvard I am happy to argue against some of the ideas the author expressed.
Firstly, a quibble about facts:
Yes, the sticker-prize tuition at Harvard has grown, as it has at other private colleges. But the question ought to be: do students actually pay more? According to College Scorecard, students [1] pay on average just under $14,000 per year--for everything, including living expenses. I don't have comparable data for 1986, but that's lower than the median for 4-year US colleges (which is around $19,500).
One may argue that all US colleges have bloated administration and thus increased cost, and I am sympathetic to that argument. But at least let's acknowledge that, regarding actual cost of attendance, Harvard seems to be doing better when compared not just to its peers but the set of all accredited US 4-year institutions.
Now, for the challenge that the author kindly provides:
I don't know any actual specifics, but I am willing to bet (a modest amount) that at some point in the past decade there were student protests at Harvard regarding the choice of art on display. Probably the protests involved non-white students, or people speaking on behalf of non-white students, and their main objection was something like: people of color don't feel welcome at this institution because all the prominently-displayed portraits are of white people. Likely some professors were part of the protesters.
Whatever your opinions are as to the validity of the protesters' claim that the choice of art affects non-white students, the protests themselves would be disruptive and/or stimulating to the educational experience. The president's response to create the task-force on the issue has calmed the protests (taking away the disruptive aspect ) while taking seriously the vocal minority's concerns. For those who found the protests stimulating to the educational experience (which includes acquisition and polish of social norms, and not merely subject matter studied in one's classes), the president's response models how one goes about addressing strongly-expressed concerns over some issue of institutional inertia.
It's still reasonable to ask: was the process that the president cost-effective in achieving its objectives? I would love to see someone try to analyze that! In my experience, service on such committees isn't directly compensated, though it does suck up substantial time. Like, did those six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators have better things to do? They were either on that committee because they were deeply interested in the issue (the students and faculty), or because they were the nine administrators. Did those administrators have languishing tasks which would have actually been more important to address than calming down vocal protesters current and future? Will that new administrative post be filled by an already-existing Harvard employee, or are they actually hiring a brand-new administrator?
Inquiring minds kinda want to know.
[1] At least, students who filled out FAFSA and received any federal financial aid.
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