Science

Via Randolph Fritz, a “very interesting article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/may/20/drug-companies-ghost-writing-journalism about how extensive the pharmaceuticals ghostwriting industry is:

bq. The planning companies are paid to implement high-impact publication strategies for specific drugs. They target the most influential academics to act as authors, draft the articles, and ensure that these include clearly-defined branding messages and appear in the most prestigious journals. … There are now at least 250 different companies engaged in the business of planning clinical publications for the pharmaceutical industry … Current Medical Directions, a medical communications company based in New York, promises to create “scientific content in support of our clients’ messages”. … n a flow-chart drawn up by Eric Crown, publications manager at Merck (the company that sold the controversial painkiller Vioxx), the determination of authorship appears as the fourth stage of the article preparation procedure. That is, only after company employees have presented clinical study data, discussed the findings, finalised “tactical plans” and identified where the article should be published. … “We’ve never done ghostwriting, per se, as I’d define it”, says John Romankiewicz, president of Scientific Therapeutics Information, the New Jersey firm that helped Merck promote Vioxx with a series of positive articles in medical journals. “We may have written a paper, but the people we work with have to have some input and approve it.”

I used to think that political scientists were lucky, in that no-one cared enough about what we had to say to try to suborn our reputations via dubious endorsements. And then I read about the “Gadaffi and political science scandal …”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/04/the-monitor-group-gadaffi-pr

Here is a very old joke. A soldier is captured during a long-running war and thrown into the most stereotypical prison cell imaginable. Inside the cell is another solider. He has an enormous, disgusting-smelling beard and has clearly been there a long time. The young solider immediately sets about trying to escape. He is resourceful and possessed of great willpower. He bribes a guard with his emergency supply of cash. The guard gets him into a supply truck and he makes it to the prison garage, but is found during a routine vehicle search while exiting the compound. He is returned to his cell. His mangy companion says nothing about his departure or return. Undeterred, the young soldier works on the bars of the cell for weeks, filing them down with a shim made from a toothbrush. The whole time the old soldier looks on, silently. The young soldier finally breaks the bars, slips out the window and makes it to the outer wall, where he is spotted and recaptured. He is thrown back in the cell. He glowers at his grizzled companion, who still remains silent. Calming himself and mastering his despair, he tries yet again, this time digging a tunnel with the narrow end of a broken plastic coffee spoon. After about two years of work he succeeds in escaping under the wall and making it to the nearest town, only to be captured again at the train station. He is delivered, once again, back to his cell and its taciturn occupant. At the end of his wits, the young soldier finally confronts the old soldier, shouting, “Couldn’t you at least offer to help me with this?! I mean, I’ve come up with all these great plans—you could have joined me in executing them! What’s wrong with you?” The old soldier looks at him and says, “Oh I tried all these methods years ago—bribery, the bars, a tunnel, and a few others besides—none of them work.” The young soldier looks at him, incredulous, and screams “Well if you knew they didn’t work, WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU TELL ME BEFORE I TRIED THEM, YOU BASTARD?!” The old soldier scratches his filthy beard and says, “Hey, who publishes negative results?“

Because of the day that’s in it, here’s a simple Aperture Science Keynote Theme. The theme requires you have Univers installed. For maximum effectiveness, the use of this theme is best accompanied by a well-prepared text, a clear speaking voice, and—for fielding questions—a functional Aperture Science military android. I’ll probably use the theme in class tomorrow (though the turret is still being shipped to me). Here are some samples:
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Thanks, Cosma, for posting the Haldane and Russell pieces. Let me now offer an elegant proof of Henry’s thesis – “The ancestry of modern SF lies as much in the 19th century ‘condition of England’ novel as it does in more obvious ancestors like Frankenstein” – with reference to the G.K. Chesterton novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which Haldane mocks for its bad prophecy. (Haldane himself confidently predicts that, in the future, people will sensibly acknowledge the tonic, healthful effects of tobacco. Glass houses, stones.) Anyway, the neat thing about Napoleon is that it is imagines, from the point of view of 1904, what the world will look like, 80 years hence. Will 1984 be some sort of utopia, or some sort of dystopia, one asks?

Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and thither, crying, “What can it be? What can it be? What will London be like a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses upside down—more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands—make feet flexible, don’t you know? Moon … motor-cars … no heads….” And so they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the twentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is now.

We arrive at the limit case of sf. We tend to assume science fiction is about portraying technological change – or potential technological differences from how things are now. But, logically, one of the possibilities is that things could be pretty much the same. Of course, this is rather silly because it turns every work of fiction into science fiction (because every work of fiction either imagines things to be different from how they are, scientifically, or more or less the same.) Which induces us to pluck the string of motive. What makes something sf is either its foregrounding of technological difference/change or its impulse to indulge the sociological imagination, more generally. Getting back to Chesterton, his world of 1984 is more changed than “almost exactly like what it is now” would suggest:

Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it was in those enviable days when I was still alive.

The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal—such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, “All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature’s revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction in favour of tails.”

And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished almost to a point. The people combined could have swept the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing. England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one. Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.

In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet. That vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any man doing anything but the thing he had done the day before.

Then: everything erupts in glorious medievalism!

Now, let’s run through it again. Logically, it should be allowable for any imaginative treatment of the future of science, or the possibilities of science (up to and including fairly flagrant impossibilities) to count as sf. But that means, potentially: things stay the same. But that’s a silly sort of sf. So we expand our definition to include works of sociological imagination, as it were. But now it’s a bit tail-wags-the-dog. The fact that Chesterton’s novel, framed as it is, is plainly sf, goes to show that sf is a subset of a broader set of works of sociologically imaginative fiction. In much sf, the machinery functions not as a fictional end but a means of getting the sociological ball rolling. Instead of deus ex machina, to end the thing, you have populus ex machina, to get it started. On the other hand, there are problems with doing it this way. But that’s why we have comment boxes.

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/10/a-night-at-the-oxford-union/

bq. The viscount is an interesting character. He once worked in the policy unit at Number Ten under Lady Thatcher and is now deputy leader of the anti-European UK Independence Party. More recently he has become famous as a vociferous climate-change sceptic and for fighting a Quixotic campaign to gain entrance into the House of Lords. I was seated opposite him at the pre-debate dinner, and initially I found his conversation rather unsettling: a blizzard of statistics and anecdotes on everything from climate to Europe, all delivered with supreme confidence and a slight gleam in the eye. I began to think that Viscount Monckton might be a formidable opponent during the debate. Then he told me that he has discovered a new drug that is a complete cure for two-thirds of known diseases – and that he expects it to go into clinical trials soon. I asked him whether his miracle cure was chiefly effective against viruses or bacterial diseases? “Both”, he said, “and prions”. At this point I felt a little more relaxed about the forthcoming debate.

Philosophy TV hosts a conversation between Ned Hall and L.A. Paul on the counterfactual analysis of causation. It is, of course, must-see TV on any plausible account of necessity.

In the interests of full disclosure, something, something, something. I’ll think of it in a minute.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the “European Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference in Bochum, Germany”:http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/espp2010/index.html . The highlight for me was attending a talk by “Michael Tomasello”:http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig on pre-linguistic communication. Getting home, I ordered a copy of Tomasello’s “Why We Cooperate”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262013592/junius-20 in which he argues, on the basis of detailed empirical work with young children and other primates, that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds. Many of the details of Tomasello’s work are controversial (the book is essentially his Tanner Lectures and contains replies by Silk, Dweck, Skyrms and Spelke) and I lack the competence to begin to adjudicate some of the disputes. But this much is, I think, clear: that work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t – quelle surprise! – support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy.
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“XKCD’s Cartoon”:http://xkcd.com/765/ is pretty funny today, but is worded in a way that _seriously_ understates homeopathy’s order of suck.

!http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dilution.png!

The I’ve diluted the semen 30x’ bit is technically right, but it suggests to the average reader that there is 1/30 as much semen as in the original sample. In fact, as John Sladek says in his wonderful survey of pseudo-science, _The New Apocrypha_, the average amount of the original substance that yer average homeopathic medicine has is much, _much_ smaller. So much smaller that it’s hard to envisage.

bq. … the smaller a dose is, the more powerful its effects. Homeopathic drugs have been diluted to one decillionth of a grain … the homeopathic apothecary takes a pint of the pure drug, mixes it in ten pints of water, throws away nine pints and mixes the remainder in ten pints of water; then he repeats the process sixty times … Martin Gardner compares it to ‘letting a drop of medicine fall in the Pacific, mixing thoroughly, then taking a spoonful. But a decillionth is a far, far smaller dose than this. Try to imagine a globe of water the size of our solar system. Then imagine that every star in the galaxy, and in every other visible galaxy, is surrounded by a similar globe of water. All the water is combined, and into it we drop one 1,000 millionth of a drop of water, mix thoroughly and take as directed … if the purest imaginable water is used in a real homeopathic drug, it must still contain far more natural amounts of even the rarest elements on earth, than it can possibly contain of the medicine.

I’ll leave it to those with more time, arithmetical ingenuity, and basic medical knowledge than me to calculate the likelihood that even a single spermatazoon lurks in the stick-figure’s sample. But I’m pretty sure that the odds ain’t great.

Update: As ‘belle le triste” notes in comments:

bq. But the principle of homeopathy operates by the so-called “law of similars”: what you’re diluting isn’t what will cure the problem, it’s what would (in non-diluted doses) cause the problem. Thus a homeopathic application of macro-diluted sperm would be being deployed to _prevent_ pregnancy, not to cause it.

XKCD is unquestionably guilty of _bad homeopathy._ Can somebody please revoke his license?

Sometimes an _ad hominem_ attack just seems right. Such is the case with George Monbiot’s latest piece on Matt Ridley, the Dawkinsite pop-science author. I’ve been aware of Ridley in his journalistic capacity for years, but I had no idea that he also had a parallel career in banking. Monbiot on Ridley’s _The Rational Optimist_ :

bq. In the book, Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy”, which stifles free enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing out big corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he insists, and not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for everybody. What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock, he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select committee, for a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was able to pursue this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of regulation” by the state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out. But it’s not just Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite to mention it.

Definitely worth a short post at CT, then, to make this connection more widely known.

Morning and Afternoon Tea are the twin social hubs of Australian academia, so it’s only natural that a disturbing tearoom phenomenon would be noticed, investigated and subsequently published in the British Medical Journal: The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute.

Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom. Design Longitudinal cohort study. Setting Research institute employing about 140 people. Subjects 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months. Main outcome measures Incidence of teaspoon loss per 100 teaspoon years and teaspoon half life.

Results 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The half life of the teaspoons was 81 days. The half life of teaspoons in communal tearooms (42 days) was significantly shorter than for those in rooms associated with particular research groups (77 days). The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons’ value. The incidence of teaspoon loss over the period of observation was 360.62 per 100 teaspoon years. At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a practical institute-wide population of 70 teaspoons.

Conclusions The loss of workplace teaspoons was rapid, showing that their availability, and hence office culture in general, is constantly threatened.

Follow the link and scroll down for the long correspondence that followed. Notable contributions include “Teabags and forks are confounding factors“, “Communism and Biros“, “Global Implications, Impending Catastrophe“, and “Could teaspoons be the larvae of some unrecognised adult?”

MIT researchers have shown that people’s moral judgments change when the functioning of a certain part of the brain is suppressed using magnetic stimulation. Here’s the abstract:

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor’s mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions). Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment (experiment 1, offline stimulation) and during moral judgment (experiment 2, online stimulation). In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the actor’s mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms (e.g., actors who intended but failed to do harm): Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms.

So basically, they have identified a part of the brain that is important in attributing mental states to others. And the moral judgments of normal adults depend on attributing mental states – intentions, specifically – to others. When they suppress the functioning of this part of the brain, moral judgments alter.

“We judge people not just for what they do, but what they’re thinking at the time of their action, what they’re intending,” [Liane] Young says. But, she says, a brief magnetic pulse was able to change that.
…
[The resulting judgments are] the sort of moral judgment you often see in kids who are 3 or 4 years old, Young says.

Interesting. The researchers themselves seem to be fairly careful in stating their results, but Joshua Greene – psychology professor at Harvard, Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton – swings for the fences (although note that this is mostly a reporter’s paraphrase):

The fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait, says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. But that view isn’t accurate, he says.
…
[According to Greene,] The scientists are trying to take concepts such as morality, which philosophers once attributed to the human soul, and “break it down in mechanical terms.”

If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, Green says, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.

But of course the scientists are not adjusting morality with a magnet, they’re affecting people’s moral judgments. I don’t think anyone ever doubted that manipulating the brain in various ways can lead people to alter their judgments – moral and otherwise. This is obvious to anyone who has observed the results of alcohol, for example, or – much more indirectly – framing effects.

The experiment really doesn’t have much to say one way or the other about souls, meta-ethics, or the justification of any ground-level moral judgments. (Actually, it might suggest that you shouldn’t rely on your interpersonal judgments when the neural activity in your right temporoparietal junction is being disrupted by transcranial magnetic stimulation, or perhaps just when you’ve volunteered as a subject in an MIT lab.) Rather, it highlights the importance of attribution of intention in the moral judgment of normal adults, shows how localized in the brain this function is, and demonstrates how easily it can be suppressed in isolation from other functions. A plausible next step:

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a brain expert at University College London, said the findings were insightful.
“The study suggests that this region – the RTPJ – is necessary for moral reasoning.
“What is interesting is that this is a region that is very late developing – into adolescence and beyond right into the 20s.
“The next step would be to look at how or whether moral development changes through childhood into adulthood.”

Cosmic Variance‘s Sean Carroll doing a very good job indeed on The Colbert Report. That shit is hard. Along the way he makes deft use of a Dara O’Briain line (“Of course science doesn’t know everything — if science knew everything, it would stop”) that I believe I introduced him to, so therefore I take full credit for all the laughs he got and expect to receive a check for any royalties accruing from Colbert-related sales.

A bit of mindless surfing had me looking at the execrable Instapundit for the first time in ages … but there was actually something interesting there: a link to Sally Mann, talking about memory, uncertainty and the collodion process. Those 19th-century photographers who managed to produce near-flawless images using the process were really something.

I’m still working on the follow-up to my Descartes post, to which comments have been good and useful. I’ll plug the gap with a passage from the Dan Garber book I mentioned before, Descartes Embodied (good book.) I’ve never read much Francis Bacon (I don’t teach him); and in particular I haven’t read New Atlantis, which I know is his science fiction utopia (you’d think I would have gotten around to reading such a thing). Garber summarizes the organizational structure for the House of Saloman, which is apparently New Atlantis’ League of Extraordinarily Scientific Gentlemen. The job titles are pretty much turned all the way up to Awesome.

At the bottom of the organization are those who form the tables of natural history, a total of twenty-four investigators. Twelve “Merchants of Light” “sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations … [and] bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts.” Three “Depredators” collect experiments from books three “Mystery-men” collect experiments from mechanical arts and liberal sciences, and three “Pioneers or Miners” try new experiments of their own devising. They are joined by three “Compilers,” who arrange these observations and experiments into proper tables. Twelve workers are employed at the next stage of the enterprise. Three “dowry-men or Benefactors” examine the initial tables compiled by the Compilers and draw out both technological applications and the first theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from the tables, presumably what Bacon calls the first vintage in the Novum organum. Three “Lamps” as he calls them, then draw new experiments out of the work of the Compilers and Benefactors, which experiments are them performed by three “Inoculators.” And finally, “we have three that raise the form discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature.”

I think someone really ought to write an SF thriller in which the science heroes of New Atlantis have to race against time to compile the proper Baconian tables that will allow them to understand and technologically defeat the invading Martians. Or something.

Perhaps Adam Roberts will consent to show up in comments and tell us whether New Atlantis is actually as fun to read as it sounds.