First, let me jot some thoughts about Ingrid’s peer-review post that also relate to Henry’s. Then, mongooses. [click to continue…]
From the monthly archives:
June 2011
Via the “ICCI blog”:http://www.cognitionandculture.net/ICCI-blog/the-dark-side-of-evolutionary-psychology.html, some sixty-odd evolutionary psychologists have published a collective letter, disassociating themselves from Satoshi Kanazawa.
bq. We have previously pursued the usual scientific channels open to us to counteract what in our view is Kanazawa’s poor quality science by reviewing and rejecting his papers from scientific journals, and by publishing critiques of his papers in the scientific literature. This has not stopped him from continuing to produce poor quality science and promoting it directly to the public. We have therefore taken the unusual step of making this statement to counteract the damage we believe he is doing to the perception of our discipline in the media and among the public. … Many of these critiques completely undermine the work: the statistician Andrew Gelman, for example, has re-analysed the data Kanazawa used in 2007 to suggest that “Beautiful people have more daughters” and has demonstrated that Kanazawa’s conclusions are simply not supported by the data. Despite this, Kanazawa has not withdrawn the critiqued paper nor published a correction. … The peer review process is not perfect and appears to have failed when dealing with Kanazawa’s poor quality work.Those of us who have reviewed his papers have had experiences where we have rejected papers of his for certain journals on scientific grounds, only to see the papers appear virtually unaltered in print in other journals, despite the detailed critiques of the papers given to Kanazawa by the reviewers and editors of the journals that rejected his papers.
I’ve no doubt that Kanazawa’s work is bad by the commonly accepted standards of evolutionary psychology. But as the ICCI blog politely suggests, there is a broader problem with the field that the collective letter doesn’t address as directly as it should. Evolutionary psychology has benefited from media attention, but also been distorted by it – there are significant incentives to produce ‘shocking’ and ‘contrarian’ findings. I saw this first hand a few years ago when I got involved in an email discussion with the co-editor of an evolutionary psychology journal which had published one of Kanazawa’s more egregious stinkers. When I pushed the person in question on how obviously bad the piece was, the response was that:
bq. I happen to think it is a great thought provoking document, and one of the few in the last ten years that have actually gotten people to talk about issues. … I would rather have an article that causes people to think and talk and yes, argue and criticize than to publish an article that is one more facet of the same old thing.
There’s something to be said for stirring it up every once in a while. But there’s also something to be said for trying to get things right. Typically, academic journals are supposed to emphasize the latter rather than the former. It’s beyond dispute that Kanazawa can produce “thought provoking”1 articles that get people to “argue and criticize.”2 But the peer review process is supposed to do a bit more than to verify that your ideas are daring and controversial. That at least one journal editor (and surely more than one, given Kanazawa’s publication record) in the field don’t seem to understand this suggests that there is a problem.
1 If “thoughts” can be taken to encompass internal queries-to-self along the lines of ‘how the fuck did this ever get published?’
2 The joint letter mentions some 24 critiques of his papers by 59 social and natural scientists. If Satoshi Kanazawa did not exist, theorists and methodologists would have to invent him as a cautionary example.
Update: I should probably link manually to Cosma’s webpost responding to this since, you know, that whole Trackback thing doesn’t work so well anymore. I should also say that while I am no very great fan of Stephen Pinker’s work, the title of this post should not be read in any way as implying that it’s on a level with Kanazawa’s ( I just don’t think of halfway decent puns often enough that I can easily junk them).
We’ve talked about US incarceration rates on CT before. Peter Moskos approaches it with an interesting twist in his new book In Defense of Flogging. I have not read the book, but I did read his piece in the WSJ’s Ideas Market and you should, too. It does a very nice job of summarizing some of what is fundamentally wrong with the US prison system. Here’s a brief quote, but as we like to say, go read the whole thing:
In much of America, prisons have become nothing more than a massive government-run—one might even say “socialist”—job program. To oversimplify, but just a bit, we pay poor unemployed rural whites to guard poor unemployed urban blacks. Prison guards and private prisons advocate for more and more prisoners, literally profiting from human bondage. Such a peculiar institution should be unconscionable.
The National Library of Ireland is on Flickr, contributing public domain photos to the Commons. If anyone is looking for an image for the cover of their new book on trolley problems – and is too shy to ask to use mine – this might be the ticket.
Part One: Reasons why this response took eight months to write
1. Cat was in lap; couldn’t reach keyboard.
2. “Just Dial My Number” by Jeremy Jay incessantly running through head.
3. Is that the smell of cookies? I love cookies.
4. Procrastination: attempts to facebook-friend people who are better-know or better-looking than I am. Finally, just plain better than I am. Rebuffed, depressed.
5. Unable to decide how large a box of chocolates to send Maria Farrell.
6. Eating many sample boxes of chocolates; concluding none was good enough to have sent; stomach ache, nausea, self-loathing.
7. Suspecting my response might entail me actually reading Sunnyside.
8. Peep Show, Seasons I-VI, which was such a bargain on amazon.co.uk, only playable on Region 2.  Depression.
9. Figuring out hulu; watching of Peep Show through Season VII. Intense identification of self with all male characters (including Superhans). Stomach ache, nausea, self-loathing.
12. The internet turns out to have pornography on it. How long has this been going on?
13. Stalemated in determining whether receding hairline should or should not be accompanied by extended sideburns.
14. Building up courage. Brainstorm: sidestep article entirely by writing it in Italian!
15. Attempt to learn Italian confounded by there being so many different words for things. In Italian, “dog,” for instance, is an entirely different word than “dog.” Abject weeping. Io sonno cane.
16. Finding comfortable chair.
17. Fussing with 150-watt bulb.
17. Arguing with pillow.
18. Dabbing finger, attempt to wipe remainder mark from bottom of Sunnyside.
19. Reading Sunnyside. Oh, Jesus. WTF?
My daughters got interested in the Ramayana because we’ve been to Bali and seen some shadow puppets and golden deer dancing. (For the foreseeable future, the golden deer crown I helped Zoe make, for this thing she did at school, is going to be my signal achievement in the ‘damned fiddly art projects you help the kids with for school’ category.) We also watched Sita Sings The Blues, which they thought was great. They insisted on fast-forwarding through the ‘boring’ bits about Nina and her long-distance relationship, but they loved the bits in which the unreliable shadow puppet narrators offer inarticulate commentary and mis-assembled chat about Hindu religion, Indian literary history, so forth. The girls asked me to fill in the blanks.
I know my Greek mythology. (Norse? Of course!) Hindu religion and Sanskrit literature? Fortunately, I found a couple beautiful books suitable for kids of all ages, by animator/artist Sanjay Patel. The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow
You can see numerous page scans from the books here and here. Lovely pictures. [click to continue…]
The academic journal Theoria published recently a roundtable on philosophy publishing. For those of us who have been active as paper submitters, referees, and (associate or guest) editors, it doesn’t contain spectacular new insights – though I found it nevertheless interesting. Yet importantly, this kind of ‘behind the scene’ information is essential for graduate students who aspire an academic job, or postdocs who want and need to strengthen their position: it gives information on how academic journals really work, what counts and what is relevant etc. For many graduate students and junior scholars it is hard to get this information if one isn’t lucky to be mentored by a senior scholar who has the relevant experiences and knowledge, and is willing to share them.
All the editors who took part in the roundtable observe that it is increasingly difficult to find referees. This confirms my experience as an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics, and also reflects the crazy number of requests I get to review papers from all sorts of journals, and also on papers where I strongly doubt I have special expertise. So I’ve been wondering for a long time: is this system sustainable? Is there a way to reward referees, or another way to create positive incentives for refereeing (whether material or immaterial)? Or is there no need to ‘fix the system’?