Let's talk about my science

Let's talk about our lab's science. We're wrapping up experiments for the summer. Long, tiring experiments that have gone pretty well I think. I'm just finishing up the last part of the data collection which may form the preliminary data for a grant proposal.
(Good thing I have that spousal green card. Shit that's up for renewal this year. Didn't the DOJ just come out with a thing about federal protection for LBGT persons? I need to check up on that. Better get that re application started)
... Sorry got side tracked. As I was saying preliminary data for a grant
(Wait, what are NIH paylines now? And isn't the federal budget going to be slashed?)
... Which is good because scientifically I'm feeling ready to spread my wings as I've mentioned before. I have a couple of papers in review, two more about to be submitted and will probably get at least one more out to review by fall. One of the ones in review is entirely my side project, and the one I aim to submit is my own devising even if it's out of my PIs project. So I'm ready to start looking for paths out of the postdoc.
(In the context of a university sector in financial crisis and a flooded job market).
Of course, it's a bit tricky because the husband got into a pre med masters program locally
(So that's six years of education. What is tuition these days? How much do residents make? I wonder what medicine as a profession will look like in six years).
So I need to stay local for a bit longer
(All the local universities are in crisis because of a massively reduced state subsidy, a new funding formula, tuition caps, and debts accrued from unsustainable growth policies).
But I would like to remain professionally competitive enough to have the possibility of being back home in the UK with my family one day.
(I wonder where the UK will be in six years? OH GOD NO DO NOT THINK ABOUT THAT)
But yeah, I would really like to talk about my science.

On not falling over

Once, when I was on a skiing holiday with a friend, we got to talking about our week so far. I said that I was glad I hadn't fallen over yet. My friend responded "If you haven't fallen over, it means you're not trying hard enough". I was surprised by this. I'd just done the hardest run in the resort that day. To my mind, not falling over meant, simply, that I was good at skiing.
I have a feeling similar to this every time people discuss grades at school and university, and, more specifically, the importance of failure as a learning tool. I don't doubt that recovering from failure shows determination (though when we praise those who overcome failure, we should be careful of survivor bias). And I don't doubt that evaluating someone solely based on grades, without looking at grade progression, background, research experience and so on is foolish. But the description of straight A students, therefore of me, that tends to accompany these debates, sticks in my craw somewhat. Because, like my friend's assessment of my skiing ability, the fact that I'm good at what I do is taken as prima facie evidence that it's all effortless and, somehow, a scam.
Being a straight A student is not effortless. It takes work. In my case, it took discipline, a lot of it. Furthermore, the idea that just because the grades don't show a progression, there is no wrestling with concepts, ideas, no struggles, is erroneous. Those things happen. It's just that, for some reason, with the straight A student, the breakthrough happens before the test, so there is never any evidence of it. The illusion of effortlessness is just that: the straight A student is the swan, gliding gracefully across the mirror like lake, legs paddling furiously underneath.
The other idea that attaches to straight A students, which characterizes me even less, is that somehow, we do not learn the material, we merely learn to take tests. I won't deny that good grades can act as a motivator (and, more tellingly, that bad grades act as a discouragement). But the relationship is more subtle. For me in particular, the good grades worked in combination with my genuine interest in the subjects to create a virtuous circle, one where the external rewards of effort combined with the internal drive of interest to make working for school fun. Yes, fun. As much as exams stressed me, there were times when being given 3 hours to write essays on topics I loved (looking at you general paper from part II zoology) was actually almost a pleasure. 
There are limitations to being a straight A student. Most obviously with me, the fact that I started out good and became excellent in most academic subjects meant that it took me a long time to learn how to deal with those things I wasn't good at from the start (sports comes to mind, but also the violin).  But that doesn't mean that I wasn't good at the things I was good at. It just means that I didn't devote much energy to things I wasn't good at. Then again, many not straight A students do this too (we all do, in fact). The other issue is that straight A students have trouble differentiating adequate performance from actually bad performance. It also took me a long time to recognise that, when hard work yields a reward (a good grade), it is easier to do then when it doesn't. I have immense respect for the C and B students of this world who work their arses off consistently, despite never seeing a consistent A.
As for the question of failure, I have mixed feelings on this. I never failed academically by any measure. Perhaps my first true failure was failing to secure employment straight after my PhD. I overcame that failure, but I'm not sure what I learnt from it. That I was tenacious? I think I learnt that from teaching myself linear algebra in grad school just as much. And besides, my failure would have been impossible to overcome without the successes that came before it. When we focus on failure, we deny people the joy of success that comes from practiced skill.
When we overly lionise the educational importance of failure, and fail to recognise the effort that goes into sustained success, we undermine a lot of hard work. And when we suggest that all straight A students are intellectual frauds, we deny them the joy of their achievement, and the value of their work. These messages reach straight A students early: I think I was nine or ten when my teachers first started telling me to expect to start failing at some point, some as a warning, others, somewhat more gleefully. No one likes a tall poppy. I can understand teachers not focusing on straight A students. I have more trouble with teachers undermining them. It happens more often than you might think.
It is possible to critique the narrowness of our systems of evaluation, and the flaws inherent in our educational systems, without casting aspersions on the efforts and joys of those individuals who do well in them. There is pleasure in racing down skillfully from mountaintop to village, carving into the snow with practiced ease knowing that this, you are good at.

A messy machine

This week in journal club, we revisited a classic paper of evolutionary biology, Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin's famous/infamous The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme, a paper that, among other things, has made amateur architectural history something of a cottage industry among evolutionary biologists. "Spandrels", as it is often known, is almost impossible to discuss as a scientific paper among biologists of a certain age.* It is a cultural artefact, a signifier of its times. Any discussion of "Spandrels" immediately becomes a historiography, an attempt to, on the one hand, understand it in its context that is no longer around us, and, on the other, detect its influence on the different world in which we now live. "Spandrels" is, depending on who you talk to, either the hallmark of a small but significant paradigm shift in evolutionary biology, or the beginning of an unhelpful tangent that has needlessly distracted evolutionary biologists for decades.
But taken on its own terms, "Spandrels" is a bizarre thing. Certainly, it is a kind of paper we would be unused to seeing today. It is a straight up, unapologetic, highly (and variably effectively) rhetorical polemic. As its name implies, it is a critique, not of data, but of ways of thinking. "Spandrels" is all argument, no new data.**
What I think is most interesting about "spandrels" in that regard is the insight it gives us into the messy machine that is science. Specifically, it challenges simplistic notions about what science is.
In her speech accepting the nomination for  presidential candidate for the Democratic party, Hillary Clinton said at one point "I believe in Science". The reaction among scientists (on social media, because that's how I gauge reactions among scientists) was divided into two camps. One we shall call camp relief (as "Thank you, thank you, an existential dread has been slightly lifted from my shoulders"). The other we shall call camp epistemological frustration, best exemplified by this facebook response. Specifically point 2 "Rather, science is a philosophical approach to understanding one's world - one which is rooted in doubt, skepticism and formal testing methods". To which I would add only one thing:
"science, among other things, is a philosophical approach to understanding one's world - one which is rooted in doubt, skepticism and formal testing methods"
Because science is also a social activity, undertaken by people (Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin) supported by institutions (Harvard University, the Royal Society of Great Britain). And these are very much things we can believe (in the sense of have faith) in. Science is values, such as assumptions of good faith (sorely tested of late) and "nullius in verba". Science is also norms of ethics and even of esthetics. Some will argue that these things are ancillary to science's epistemological foundation. Which I think is nonsense. Unless you want to subscribe to some Walden-esque neo-Rousseauian vision where science is limited to ascertaining the depth of ponds we can measure by our own, the social and institutional structures of science, and the Trust which underpins them, are as crucial to science as any theory of knowledge. For without them, no aggregate, collaborative, progressive, growing science is possible.
Science is a messy machine, and like all messy machines we are tempted to make it seem simple, But when we say "science is self correcting", it is like when we say "markets find solutions", or "the eventual overthrow of the Bourgeoisie is an inevitable consequence of capitalism". It makes complex, non linear, messy human processes seem cleaner than they are. And in the process, it obscures all the awful things that humans do when they feel they actions are not being judged.
Because the attitude that limits science to an abstracted epistemological process, the attitude that obscures the social structures that allow science to work, even when it is for the best of reasons, is cousins to the attitude that tells people of color, and women, and disabled folk, and gay folk, and people from developing countries, that the barriers they face are not part of science.
Only an inclusive definition of science, that includes as parts of science the epistemology as well as the institutions, and ultimately, the people DOING the science, can argue that the structural inequalities of science are scientific problem. And to solve those structural inequalities, we must believe they are a problem, and we must believe we can fix them.

*I've noticed with some amusement, being at the tail end of that generation, that younger biologists are completely nonplussed by the paper's tone and cultural importance.
** In that respect, it is very similar, and knowing Gould I suspect this is no coincidence, to Simpson's slim Magnum Opus Tempo and Mode in Evolution

An apology, and understanding

I was an ass on twitter last night. PIs and postdocs were shouting about the overtime threshold change, and I jumped in, riled up and angry and not paying enough attention to what was being said, so sure I was of what I was saying. I apologize.
I was made to realize (by someone with great patience) that much of the PI ambivalence to this announcement boils down to it adding yet another financial burden on labs whose margin of operation is already so thin as to be invisible. And so, once again, all our great science problems come back to the question of funding.
PI are, everywhere, trying to square an impossible circle, that keeps getting more complicated. And as much as we may think we understand, we postdocs are not squaring that circle. That burden is the PIs.
I still think this rule change is a rare victory for American workers' rights, after decades of seeing them eroded. I still think that the segue through the discussion of a postdoc's worth this weekend was unecessary, beside the point, and vicious. I still think that in the aggregate, this reform will be for the best. The key word there is aggregate.
But I am also reminded that any new law put forward without adequate funding may quickly become little more than window dressing. And that when it comes to its impact on workers paid by the public dollar, that may be what this law becomes.
In the immediate term, if the reform goes through as intended, I suspect HR memos will be sent, and PIs will watch their postdocs comings and goings a little closer. Maybe fewer marathon experiments will be scheduled back to back. Maybe fewer hours will be worked. Maybe this will actually be good for the long hours culture in academia (though I hear the overtime exempt PIs laugh darkly at this).
But what this ugky episode reminds us most, is that no matter how you cut, no matter what you reform, there isn't enough money for all the people in science right now. And until that's addressed, all reforms like these will have similar responses I fear.

Human assets

I have a lot a of friends who are academics, but I think that, on balance, most of my friends are not. I like this. It allows me to escape from the navel gazing that permeates many academic discussions. It allows me to put the problems of junior scientists in perspective, to learn that they are, in the words of Elrond to Gimli, "only part of the troubles of the world". This does not mean that I don't think that junior academics have problems, far from it. It merely reminds me that our problems are similar to those in other careers, and (more often than not) have similar root causes.
My brother recently got a new job. He works in strategic marketing, that is, the data driven part of marketing, not the shiny ads bit. He aggregates and crunches data concerning the products his company sells, and makes recommendation on where the company should be targeting its existing products, and where it should be focusing new product development.
For the past several years, he's worked for a major multinational whose entire product line exists in a mature market, that is a market where almost all possible consumers already buy either the company's product or a rival's similar one. In a mature market, growth is marginal, innovation is incremental, and strategy primarily trench warfare. My brother hated it. It played to none of his strengths, and the company had no interest in branching out into new markets. Thankfully, he recently switched to a company that is positioned in a non market leader position in a dynamic, changing market. A company that hired him precisely because he is excellent at 6,000 ft, broad picture of things strategy recommendations backed by a thorough understanding of the data.
A comment from my brother's exit interview with company number one struck me when talking about this. His soon to be ex-boss said to him "you've been under used and poorly used". To me, that seemed an explicit recognition that his talents were ill suited to the company yes, but also that the company had failed to find a way to make use of what it recognised as potential assets. What a waste. While we can probably justify this from an actuarial perspective, one cannot help but feel that, well, it is a sub-optimal way to deal with resources, and a pretty shitty way to deal with people.
This problem, "under used and poorly used" is surely one that affects academia. And there is no such thing as a mature market in academia. We should always be able to make use of the assets people bring to our labs. We can always develop our products into new markets. Heck, in the current funding environment, spinning out new products is all we do. What is more, academia, I think, has the potential to forge a different way of managing human assets because, historically, mentorship is built into the very structure of the profession. I know that it often, in this day and age, doesn't seem that way, and I know that many people fail to live up to that ideal.  But the American research university is based on the XIXth century German research university model. And mentorship, the nurturing and guiding of talented young scientists, was and remains a key ingredient in that vision.
That norm of mentoring is an important one, and one that can inject humanity and compassion in what can often be difficult times (especially for ECRs). But, I think that today, we need to reconsider what constitutes good mentoring. It is, I think, no longer merely about developing the student or postdoc as a scientist. It is about being honest with them about the job market and expectations. It is about guiding them, or pointing them towards others who may guide them, if they decide to transition out of academia. It is about using your status to advocate on their behalf. It is about supporting them when they advocate for themselves. If mentorship as a value in science as a social endeavor is to remain meaningful, then it requires that mentors engage at least somewhat with the reality of what their trainees face. A discussion about what mentorship means in this context is long overdue.
There has been much talk on the internet lately of the ubiquity and unavoidability of cost benefit analysis in life, particularly as they relate to the difficult choices of young scientists, and the older scientists who sometimes support them. My brother's situation at his old company may have been the result of such a cost benefit analysis: developing him as asset would have been too expensive to be worth it. In the midst of such discussions, it is worth remembering that cost benefit analysis is not the only decision making framework which exists. In fact, it has often been explicitly rejected in determining how we should interact with other people. Kant's categorical imperative (always treat another human as an end in itself, not as the means to an end), for example, argues that utilitarian analysis of human interactions is unethical. The 'golden rule' (treat others as you would they would treat you) similarly cannot be reduced to cost benefit analysis. In the tension between cost benefit analysis of human assets, and the necessary human interactions of work, lies the difficult path of academic mentorship.

Telling stories about the real world

Science is very good, on the whole, at what it does: establishing predictable facts about the natural world. It's probably fair to say that modern science, in so far as there is such a thing, is better at this than pretty much any other system that humans have ever devised. As scientists, we are often tempted to take other areas of human knowledge gathering to task for not behaving enough like science in their attitude to establishing facts about the world. We berate and bemoan the lack or misuse of evidence. We pour (sometimes deserved) scorn on the apparent flimsiness of other enterprises. In two very interesting posts, drugmonkey discusses why journalism and law can be so unappealing to the scientifically trained. I don't disagree with everything he says, and I think that certainly parts of both could stand to be held to more scientific standards of evidence.
And yet, I am always a little cautious about yelling "be more scientific" at people. Scientists as a whole have a bad a case of epistemological "PC gaming master race" syndrome (if I ever make a nerdier analogy, shoot me).  We are convinced of the innate superiority of our means of knowing what we know. This view is hubris. On the one hand, as has been shown time and again by historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, it is remarkably difficult to pin down, at any time in history, a single definition of what constitutes the scientific method. What's more, efforts to do so have often lead to awkward situations, such as Karl Popper's continuous flip flopping over whether evolution by natural selection could be considered scientific. (One of the many reasons I dislike Karl Popper). On the other, there are entire areas of enquiry in which applying the many commonly accepted facets of the "scientific method" (hypothesis testing by experiment, replication) is difficult, impossible, or wrong headed. And no, I'm not talking about your position on omnipotent beings awkwardly obsessed with judging humans. I'm talking about the two things that are (not coincidentally) crucial in both journalism and courts of law: the reconstruction of historical events and  the determination of people's internal states.
Wait, I here you cry, are you claiming history is not a science? Well, no. What I am claiming (and the philosopher Anton Schopenhauer got there first) is that one cannot apply an experimental framework to individual point event in the past, and furthermore that the range of applicability of hypothetico-deductive methods is much more limited. And when attempting to ascertain the truth behind a single event, in the past, never to be repeated (such as a current event, or a crime), what are we left with? Testimony, correlation, hearsay. Also known as a case. Also known as a story. Neither Baconian empiricism, nor hypothetico-deductivism, nor Popperian faslificationism, will help us here. At best, they will allow us to evaluate some (though by no means all) the evidence. In essence, the repeatable experiment is a tool for erasing the singular nature of point events (and it is much more difficult to do then often presented).
This exact problem is one that plagues my original discipline of paleontology. Paleontology is, in many ways, history writ large. Except it is not writ, more sort of left lying around. Many of the events we would like to understand are unobservable, their consequence inferred from disparate sources of evidence observed in the here and now. And the paleontological literature is rife with people grappling with the problem of just how scientific this endeavor is. And they run the gamut, from people twisting Popper's theory into an unrecognizable pretzel to accommodate paleontological historicity, to people consigning vast tracts of what is normally considered part of paleo to the dustbin of unscientific speculation. Neither approach is satisfying, and both end up running into absurdity and intellectual sterility. Paleontology is largely historical, as such the best we can do is marshal evidence for competing narratives, and go with the most plausible. Some of that evidence will fit with more prescriptive definitions of the scientific method, most (and I count most cases of fossil discovery in this category) will not.
As for the reconstruction of the internal states of a person at a given time and place, science isn't even close to figuring that one out. Yet we, as humans, are always in the business of trying to figure out what's going on in another person's head. And, in the West at least, it is literature that has grappled most directly with this problem, through what one could describe as thought experiments, but that we usually call novels. As the philosopher Mary Midgley once wrote:

"That is why literature is such an important part of our lives - why the notion that it is less important than science is so mistaken, Shakespeare and Tolstoy help us to understand the self-destructive psychology of despotism. Flaubert and Racine illuminate the self-destructive side of love. What we need to grasp in such cases is not the simple fact that people are acting against their interests. We know that; it stands out a mile. We need to understand, beyond this, what kind of gratification they are getting in acting this way."

Ironically, two of the authors who most thoroughly embraces this task of literature, Emile Zola and Marcel Proust, both believed that their novels were eminently empirical and yes, scientific.
Abandoning the notion that a one-size-fits-all epistemological framework derived from the physical sciences can be applied across all areas of possible human knowledge is not the same as saying "anything goes". Rather, it is a requirement that we be more rigorous, more critical, more demanding of the evidence and narratives presented to us given the constraints of what it is we are trying to understand and know. Indeed, the uncritical acceptance of a superficially science-y framework can be as dangerous for critical thought as any narrative-based understanding of the world (this is what Richard Feynman described as cargo cult science). We should have more that one tool in our epistemological kit. The world of things that are knowable is complex enough to need them.


PS: While researching this post, I found this delightful Schopenhauer quote we can probably all agree on:
"Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly."