Book Review: "Are We All Scientific Experts Now?"
Highly recommended. Brief book with a very high level argument relying a lot on his experience but I think it has some deep insights into how science is done, our shifting conception of how it is done, and the way it is communicated.
Three big ideas are covered in this book. First, a three wave conception of how science has been conceived since the mid-20th century:
(1) idealistic deference to science focusing selectively on fairy tale versions of its history and overly focusing on the heroic successes,
(2) cynical deconstruction of science as nothing special and decloaking of experts by adopting a symmetry of explanations regarding what is true and what is false, making science just another storytelling activity and focusing selectively on failures and controversies and social and political influences on science, and
(3) a more realistic wave that accepts the messy processes of doing scientific work and the requirements for doing it well along with the ethos that makes sincere inquiry into nature legitimately special. This is where we need to be now in his view, and I agree strongly with him.
The second wave Collins associates with the problem of "default expertise," the idea that since it is nothing special we can all directly understand scientific ideas and primary sources, learn from them, and make competent and useful evaluations of them, without any specialist knowledge or skills. He ultimately finds the concept untenable and a notion drawn from significantly overreaching the real insights that were drawn from the second wave that revolted against the privileged scientific priesthood.
Second big idea, a model of different kinds of expertise and its relationship to tacit knowledge, recognizing especially the difference between things we pick up ourselves and things we pick up by interacting deeply and systematically with other people.
Third big idea, distance lends enchantment. The farther we get from being researchers directly discussing their work with each other in a field day to day, the more the conversation changes and becomes more idealized regarding how it might be applied and the farther we get from actually understanding it.
My summary from the review:
"We are all ubiquitous experts but we are not all scientific experts in the sense that not only are we not all domain specialists in the fields we want to think about but we don't even widely share the ethos of inquiry that is common to scientists. Even specialist scientists vary in how highly they value aspects of that ethos.
The conclusion is that it is vital to both protect the scientific ethos and have a more realistic understanding of the kinds of expertise and the messy processes that make it work and cloud our communications about it when we go to make decisions from scientific work.
This kind of nuanced, important thinking about science and expertise is a wonderful gift from Collins that I truly hope we don't squander."
Full review on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R29W32NZEDCBIA/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Showing posts with label sociology of science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sociology of science. Show all posts
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Saturday, September 11, 2010
A classic battle of politicized science: Kamin vs. Eysenck
My review of the 1981 book: Intelligence: The Battle for the Mind by Hans Eysenck and Leon Kamin can be found on Amazon here.
I found this old book a fascinating look at the politics of intelligence at its most extreme prior the publication of The Bell Curve. In spite of all the friction generated by The Bell Curve that left a misleading impression in the minds of many people, there was actually a general consensus over most of the technical claims regarding intelligence and intelligence testing.
By the time The Bell Curve was written, the definition of intelligence in psychometric terms was well established as were the moderate correlations with academic success and some kinds of occupational success, and the heritability numbers for IQ from several twins studies. It was also pretty well accepted that there were group differences in scores as well as individual differences.
However, the implications of all of these things was more in question than ever because in contrast to some of the basic assumptions in The Bell Curve, heritability was known be highly variable from population to population, IQ was a reasonably good predictor of an important but narrow range of abilities mainly related to literacy and certain kinds of reasoning, and more was unknown than known about the reasons and implications of the group differences.
In the Kamin vs. Eysenck book, we see Eysenck focusing on things that for the most part are not at controvesial at all, and not taking an extreme hereditarian view. His politics are subtle, you can still read echoes of the earlier hereditarian view in his chapters. He talks about people's "capacity" and emphasizes how environment is important in developing intelligence, but implies that people still reach limits determined by heredity in some sense.
Kamin on the other hand reveals his own politics far less subtly by accusing nearly every individual differences researcher of some kind of bias or racism and by looking for anomalies and assuming fraud throughout the entire range of psychometric testing research.
A very instructive account in the dynamics of how scientists interact (or not!) around controversial research programs depending on the way they express their own biases.
See the full review here.
I found this old book a fascinating look at the politics of intelligence at its most extreme prior the publication of The Bell Curve. In spite of all the friction generated by The Bell Curve that left a misleading impression in the minds of many people, there was actually a general consensus over most of the technical claims regarding intelligence and intelligence testing.
By the time The Bell Curve was written, the definition of intelligence in psychometric terms was well established as were the moderate correlations with academic success and some kinds of occupational success, and the heritability numbers for IQ from several twins studies. It was also pretty well accepted that there were group differences in scores as well as individual differences.
However, the implications of all of these things was more in question than ever because in contrast to some of the basic assumptions in The Bell Curve, heritability was known be highly variable from population to population, IQ was a reasonably good predictor of an important but narrow range of abilities mainly related to literacy and certain kinds of reasoning, and more was unknown than known about the reasons and implications of the group differences.
In the Kamin vs. Eysenck book, we see Eysenck focusing on things that for the most part are not at controvesial at all, and not taking an extreme hereditarian view. His politics are subtle, you can still read echoes of the earlier hereditarian view in his chapters. He talks about people's "capacity" and emphasizes how environment is important in developing intelligence, but implies that people still reach limits determined by heredity in some sense.
Kamin on the other hand reveals his own politics far less subtly by accusing nearly every individual differences researcher of some kind of bias or racism and by looking for anomalies and assuming fraud throughout the entire range of psychometric testing research.
A very instructive account in the dynamics of how scientists interact (or not!) around controversial research programs depending on the way they express their own biases.
See the full review here.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?
Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?
In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.
My comments:
1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.
2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.
So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.
Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.
Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.
Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.
In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.
My comments:
1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.
2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.
So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.
Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.
Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.
Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.
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