Censorship in science: a new paper and analysis

November 25, 2023 • 12:00 pm

Well, a paper criticizing the “woke” aspects of science has finally appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, though peer-reviewed critiques of scientific censorship or ideological pressure have appeared in the Journal of Controversial Ideas (a push for judging science on merit rather than ideology), and in the Skeptical Inquirer (an explication of how evolutionary biology is being distorted by ideology). I was an author of both of those papers (the second was reviewed, but not by a group of scientists in the field), but I’m not on the present one (I wish I were!).

The article below, which just came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious journal, has a panoply of authors, many of whom you will recognize. It was certainly peer-reviewed, and its topic is the censorship of scientific papers, defined as “actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality.” It presents the problem, shows who the censors are, gives examples of censorship and studies of the problem as a whole, analyzes the motives of censors, explains why censorship is bad for both science and society, and suggests some fixes that might reduce censorship.

Click below to see the paper, and then below that to see an article about the paper, written by two of its authors, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. If you want just a quick take, read the Chronicle article, but the PNAS one is accessible to the nonscientific reader.

The two main conclusions of the PNAS paper are these:

a. Censorship of papers is increasing rapidly, and often takes the form of “soft” censorship, which is censorship based on social opprobrium, rather than outright banning by authorities (“hard censorship”)

b. The censors are usually fellow scientists, and usually act not out of malicious motives, but out of “prosocial ones”; that is, they try to keep stuff out of the literature because they think it’s harmful for society.

The diagram below, from the paper, is really a summary of its points—except for fixes of the problem.

As I said, most censorship is soft; as the paper notes:

Contemporary scientific censorship is typically the soft variety, which can be difficult to distinguish from legitimate scientific rejection. Science advances through robust criticism and rejection of ideas that have been scrutinized and contradicted by evidence. Papers rejected for failing to meet conventional standards have not been censored. However, many criteria that influence scientific decision-making, including novelty, interest, “fit”, and even quality are often ambiguous and subjective, which enables scholars to exaggerate flaws or make unreasonable demands to justify rejection of unpalatable findings.

And it’s also prosocial: meant to prevent the “harm” that we so often see claimed to occur when one’s own ideology is violated:

But censorship can be prosocially motivated. Censorious scholars often worry that research may be appropriated by malevolent actors to support harmful policies and attitudes. Both scholars and laypersons report that some scholarship is too dangerous to pursue, and much contemporary scientific censorship aims to protect vulnerable groups. Perceived harmfulness of information increases censoriousness among the public, harm concerns are a central focus of content moderation on social media , and the more people overestimate harmful reactions to science, the more they support scientific censorship. People are especially censorious when they view others as susceptible to potentially harmful information In some contemporary Western societies, many people object to information that portrays historically disadvantaged groups unfavorably and academia is increasingly concerned about historically disadvantaged groups Harm concerns may even cause perceptions of errors where none exist.

Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM .

Now the data adduced in the paper largely involve not censorship of papers, but censorship of academics, expecially that compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). These cases are not censorship in the strict sense used by the authors (scientific papers), but are still attempts to keep academics’ ideas in all areas from reaching the public. The caption for the three plots given below (the paper has three more) is “Characteristics of higher education scholars targeted for their pedagogy and/or critical inquiry between 2000 and June, 2023 (n = 486) and characteristics of their targeters.”

The figures beow are FIRE’s data on not just science, but all form of scholarship:

First, the rise in censorship; the figures for this year are incomplete, and there was a drop between 2021 and 2022. But look at the increase since 2000:

Below: which disciplines are targeted (blue means the targeted scholar was attacked by someone from his/her left, and red denotes attacks from his/her right. Overall, and as I’ve noted often, most attacks came from the left. Note too that the humanities experience more targeting incidents than does science.

Finally, the topics targeted for censorship. As you might expect, race and gender are the top two, though institutional policy is a close third. As race and gender are closely connected with claims of oppression, it’s not surprising that prosocially-motivated attacks on scholarship involve trying to prevent harm to minorities.

The diagrem below, taking into account all attempts at censorship, show that most come from the left of the attacker (blue) compared to the right. (Gray is either unknown or “neither”). This again is no surprise; the right is not only less often represented in colleges, but is also less likely to engage in prosocially motivated censorship::

The PNAS article is copiously documented (there are 130 references), and I like it. But there are two problems that I think slightly reduce its effectiveness. The first is that the article lacks tangible examples of how odious this kind of censorship can be. Examples really hit home, especially when you see how hypocritical and sneaky authors and journals can be, even when acting prosocially. In fact, only one case is described in both the paper and the Chronicle article below, but it’s a doozy, well known among many of us. This was an article which was retracted not because it had scientific problems, but because its conclusions violated what gender ideologues want to see. It also led to a shameful call for censorship in general of articles that might be “harmful”.

The Chronicle summary (click to read):

Both the paper and the Chronicle article have nearly word-for-word identical descriptions of the incident (this, by the way, is self-plagiarism), but the Chronicle piece has links, so I’ll excerpt that one:

Moral motives have long influenced scientific decision-making. What’s new is that journals are now explicitly endorsing moral concerns as legitimate reasons to suppress science. Following the publication (and retraction) of an article reporting that the mentees of male mentors, on average, had more scholarly success than did the mentees of female mentors, Nature Communications released an editorial promising increased attention to potential harms. A subsequent Nature editorial stated that authors, reviewers, and editors must consider the potentially harmful implications of research, and a Nature Human Behaviour editorial declared the publication might reject or retract articles that have the potential to undermine the dignity of particular groups of people. In effect, editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities, or those of their most sensitive readers.

The paper, found at the first link (and now retracted) found that in mentor/mentee relationships in science, the quality of the mentor had a positive effect on the career of the mentee, BUT, thethe paper also reported this:

We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors. While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career. These findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.

That is, same-sex mentorship of women seemed to be less helpful for their careers than being mentored by a male. Now this is, of course, ideologically unacceptable, and, though as far as I know the data were sound, it raised a ruckus. As the Nature Communications editors noted when retracting the paper:

They retracted the paper simply because of criticisms that the results weren’t ideologically comfortable, and before the criticisms were considered. Also, have a look at the two editorials, especially the Nature Human Behavior one which became the subject to considerable pushback, including this tweet by Steve Pinker (an author of the present PNAS manuscript); see also my post about the fracas, which contains another long tweet by Michael Shermer.

Journalists & psychologists take note: Nature Human Behavior is no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed. I won't referee, publish, or cite (how do we know articles have been vetted for truth rather than political correctness)? https://t.co/3qXFGizt6h pic.twitter.com/G5BgB2hpqD

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 26, 2022

At any rate, I’d like to have seen more examples of censored papers that would drive home the repugnance of censorship and the urgency of fixing it. One that came immediately to mind was James Damore’s firing at Google for suggesting that inequities in representation may be due to preferences rather than bias. Anna Krylov, one of the authors of the PNAS paper, tells me she’s writing a blog post for the Heterodox STEM site that will give several more examples of censorship, and I’ll highlight them when her piece appears.

Finally, what are the harms of censorship and how can we fix them? I won’t go into detail about this (the paper does more), except to say that the harms are obvious: censorship keeps the truth hidden, and the truth not only will out, but may be valuable. While it is possible that some solid science should be suppressed if it offends certain groups or leads to “harm”, I can’t think of any scientific result that really should be censored because of its implications. Readers may want to suggest some below.

Second, scientific censorship could harm the public’s trust in the field and the trust of the scientific literature by scientists. As the PNAS paper notes,

Censorship may be particularly likely to erode trust in science in contemporary society because scientists now have other means (besides academic journals) to publicize their findings and claims of censorship. If the public routinely finds quality scholarship on blogs, social media, and online magazines by scientists who claim to have been censored, a redistribution of authority from established scientific outlets to newer, popular ones seems likely. Given the many modes of dissemination and public availability of data, proscribing certain research areas for credentialed scientists may give extremists a monopoly over sensitive research. Scientific censorship may also reduce trust in the scientific literature among scientists, exacerbating hostility and polarization. If particular groups of scholars feel censored by their discipline, they may leave altogether, creating a scientific monoculture that stifles progress.

So what’s to be done? The PNAS article gives a whole laundry list of fixes, nearly all of which are good. They include making reviews of papers, both accepted and rejected, public; third-party audits of scientific journals to measure the quality of their editorial practice, independence of sociopolitical pressures, and so on; and making serious calls for retractions of papers available publicly available to concerned scholars. This is all under the rubric of transparency, and names could be anonymous.

The only “fix” that sounds hard to implement is testing the proposition that some science creates more harm than good. The authors suggest that there might be some way to measure this, but I’m not convinced:

Scholars should empirically test the costs and benefits of censorship against the costs and benefits of alternatives. They could compare the consequences of retracting an inflammatory paper to 1) publishing commentaries and replies, 2) publishing opinion pieces about the possible applications and implications of the findings, or 3) simply allowing it to remain published and letting science carry on. Which approach inspires more and better research? Which approach is more likely to undermine the reputation of science? Which approach minimizes harm and maximizes benefits? Given ongoing controversies surrounding retraction norms, an adversarial collaboration (including both proponents and opponents of harm-based retractions) might be the most productive and persuasive approach to these research questions.

Frankly, I don’t think this is feasible; such controlled tests can’t be done! When Luana Maroja and I wrote our paper on the ideological erosion of science, we discussed whether any solid scientific result should be censored because of its possible harms. After much discussion, we agreed on “no.”

Readers may dissent, and dissent is welcome in the comments. But the point of this post is that censorship is pervasive in science, in general it’s harmful since, on the grounds of preserving a favored ideology, it prevents the dissemination of truth, and that scientists should stop it. That, of course, would mean keeping the tentacles of the ideological octopus off of science, but that doesn’t seem to be in the offing. I hope that the new PNAS paper will help keep those suckers out of our field.

The journal Science discusses positionality statements

November 16, 2023 • 9:15 am

Science magazine (you can call it a “journal” if you wish) recently published a surprisingly objective article on “positionality statements,” statements about the author’s background, race, gender, and views that are often included these days along with scientific papers. (Science is usually woke and often doesn’t present both sides of an issue.)

Positionality statements are often quite detailed, intended to give readers an idea of where the author is coming from, even though that’s supposed to be irrelevant in judging science. Another reason quoted in the article is that writing such statements somehow makes the author aware of his or her biases or unconscious reasons for doing the work, or to reflect on what future work they should do given their background. To my mind, that’s weird, as authors should already know that, and there’s no reason to make public your thoughts on these issues.

I’ve written about positionality statements before. Below are three examples I gave, and you’ll also want to read Sally Satel’s article at Persuasion, “Focus on the research, not the researcher.” There Satel suggests that positionality statements may actually be inimical to science as they may condition editors to accept papers out of sympathy, may themselves be biased, and of course violate the dictum that you judge science by, to quote a famoous man, the content of the paper, not the color of the author’s skin. However, Satel says that in one restricted area such statements may be justified:

. . . . positionality statements do make more sense in some narrow contexts. According to Jukka Savolainen, a Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University, positionality statements probably originated in ethnographic research. When we spoke, he told me that “it makes sense to be concerned about the characteristics of individual scholars doing field work when they are the only instrument of data collection and interpretation.” That is, when a researcher is working alone in a foreign culture, it may be worth illuminating possible sources of inadvertent bias.

But of course such statements are widespread in many fields beyond anthropology. None of the three statements I give below are from such papers:

So, here we go (the posts will lead you to the original papers):

From this post:

I (first author) was raised as a Muslim immigrant-origin girl in a small Iowa town and constantly aware that my family was “different.” Having been an educator in PK-12 contexts, my goal in studying developmental psychology was to make the process easier for other youth who, like myself, were intersectionally minoritized and privileged because of religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or other identities or experiences. I was unprepared for the microaggressions embedded in developmental scholarship rooted in non-inclusive modes of knowledge production that resisted the nuances of the diverse individuals and groups I sought to better understand. . . . I seek to place myself in relationships and contexts to learn and engage in a co-conspiring, co-liberatory inquiry stance.

From another post, a statement about several authors:

Ash T. Zemenick is a nonbinary trans person who grew up with an economically and academically supportive household to which they attribute many of their opportunities. They are now the manager of the University of California Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, in Truckee, California, and are a cofounder and lead director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States. Shaun Turney is a white heterosexual transgender Canadian man who was supported in both his transition and his education by his university-educated parents. He is currently on paternity leave from his work as a non–tenure-track course lecturer in biology. Alex J. Webster is a cis white queer woman who grew up in an economically stable household and is now raising a child in a nontraditional queer family structure. She is a research professor in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Biology, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is a director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States. Sarah C. Jones is a disabled (ADHD) cis white queer woman who grew up in a supportive and economically stable household with two university-educated parents. She is a director of Project Biodiversify, and serves as the education manager for Budburst, a project of the Chicago Botanic Garden, in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Marjorie G. Weber is a cis white woman who grew up in an economically stable household. She is an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Plant Biology Department and Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, in East Lansing, Michigan, and is a cofounder and director of Project Biodiversify, in the United States.

And one given by Sally Satel in her article below:

Consider the positionality statement by the authors of “Low-income Black mothers parenting adolescents in the mass incarceration era: The long reach of criminalization,” which appeared in the American Sociological Review in in 2019:

“Both authors are middle-to upper-middle-class white women—one is a mother, the other is not. A commitment to antiracist, intersectional, and feminist principles guides our research efforts, and we conducted this work with an awareness of the politics, dangers, and limitations of affluent white academics writing about the lives of low-income Black Americans.”

So what we see above is both self-flagellation and virtue signaling, but does it help you assess the science? Not to my mind. The papers are already of a woke tenor, and to learn that the authors are themselves engaged in confessional identitarianism doesn’t help you judge them better. All you can say is, “Yes, the authors are minoritized or aware of their status as outsiders,” but does that help you judge the results? Nope. Maybe it helps the authors to examine their own viewpoints, as the Science article below avers, but they can do that on their own time. It needn’t be splashed all over a paper. As Sally noted:

Currently, only one journal I could find—the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering—requires positionality statements. Others, like the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “encourage” but don’t require them.

Click on the screenshot below to access the Science article, which you can also find archived here:

Here are the “pros” as quoted in the article,:

“It’s an invitation to think more broadly about what your role as a researcher is in the work that you’re trying to understand,” says Alejandra Núñez-de la Mora, a biological anthropologist at the University of Veracruz. She published a 2021 paper in the American Journal of Human Biology arguing that reflecting on one’s positionality can pay off in future work, helping researchers address inequities such as “parachute research,” unchecked power dynamics, and gaps in inclusivity. If you’re an astronomer, for example, think about where your telescope is, she says. “Are you part of that community? Is that telescope put there with knowledge of the people who call that place their land?”

To that I’d say, “okay, fine: keep it to yourself and, if you need to say it, publish it elsewhere”. This isn’t anywhere near Satel’s exception above, as your positionality doesn’t affect your astronomical results.

Another:

Positionality statements also benefit readers, supporters say, peeling back the curtain on researchers’ decisions that would otherwise remain invisible—from what questions they pursue to how they interpret their data. “It’s not just that we want to know about people’s socially constructed identities. That’s not the point,” says Julie Martin, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, which has required positionality statements since July 2020. “The point is how do those and your worldview affect the decisions you make in the research?”

Again, this has nothing to do with the published research itself, which reflects what’s done after the author has winnowed down the questions. And really, is the author the person to judge this question? Doesn’t a therapist need to help with this? At any rate, let those authors ponder it on their own, for this is a subjective reflection on behavior, not science.

Please, sir, can I have one more?:

As for [Genevieve] Wojcik, she says reflecting on her positionality has helped her realize her identity is inextricably linked with her work, enriching it and shaping the directions it takes—including, for example, her work to design genetics studies to be more inclusive of multiracial individuals. “I’ve sort of come into the notion that who I am can actually make my work better and lead me to question things that hadn’t been questioned before.”

Here’s Wojcik’s positionality statement:

Genevieve L. Wojcik (she/her): I am unsure as to how I identify, as my experience as a biracial individual in the USA has largely been defined by what I am not, instead of what I am. My mother immigrated here from Taiwan and my father’s parents from France and Poland. My research interests in genetic epidemiology for diverse, and specifically admixed, populations have been partially motivated by my background to ensure that discoveries will also benefit my loved ones, whether family or friends, with increased urgency for my multiracial children.

This is again a statement about motivation that, while perhaps Wojcik was insufficiently reflective to know this stuff before she wrote it out, has no bearing on the paper.

And the cons:

But others question the statements’ value. “I find it amazing that [publishing positionality statements] is becoming so widespread without any evidence that it actually achieves what it sets out to achieve,” says Patricia Nayna Schwerdtle, who studies global public health at Heidelberg University and coauthored a February critique of the practice in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Indeed. And it might even be counterproductive, as Satel notes above. One of the worst effects of this tsunami of wokeness is that it encourages one to judge science by immutable characteristics of people or their irrelevant views on politics or ideology. Below you can see a study in progress that’s designed to find out whether positionality statement achieve what they’re designed to do, which is almost invariably to increase the diversity of scientists or encourage new ideas. But that study seems to have serious problems.

From my friend Anna, quoting a paper on which there were many coauthors, including me:

But some researchers think airing this information in the literature violates a central tenet of science: that a researcher’s work should be judged independently of who they are. Spotlighting a scientist’s identity represents a “bizarre turn back to [the] Dark Ages,” says Anna Krylov, a chemist at the University of Southern California who wrote an April critique alongside 28 co-authors in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. “It was not a good time when people were treated by their attributes and not by their achievements, not by their merit,” Krylov adds.

Some of the many authors of our paper have discussed positionality statements via email, and I have to say that there was no sentiment in favor of them. But what do you expect from a group of authors making the case that science should be judged by its merit alone? Some of us amused ourselves by confecting positionality statements that we would have appended to our own JCI paper. Here’s mine:

“Jerry A. Coyne is a lugubrious old white Jewish male, descended from Ashkenazi ancestors, who doesn’t think this paper has a chance of being published.”

Positionality statements encourage readers to judge papers not by their merit alone, but by characteristics that distort your judgements about the merit of the research, and that merit is really the way science should be judged. Even if your astronomical results come from using a telescope that indigenous people claim sits on their land, this affects the scienfitic results not one whit. Issues like politics, indigenous rights, and so on, can be argued out in other places, but shouldn’t pollute the scientific literature, since they’re ideological and political questions.

Another “con”:

Another concern is that positionality statements serve only as virtue signaling and gloss over deeper issues, such as the reproducibility crisis in science. They seem like a “last ditch effort before you publish your paper,” Nayna Schwerdtle says. Instead, researchers should strengthen upstream solutions, such as open science and participatory research, she argues.

Well, the reproducibility crisis is not something that needs addressing in a given paper, since whether or not a paper’s results are reproducible depends on other papers yet to be published, or on a literature review.

One of the biggest arguments against positionality statements is that there’s no evidence that they accomplish anything save for the authors’ statement that it made them reflect their motivations, something I largely doubt. Here’s what the new article says:

At least one team of researchers is studying whether these statements have their intended effect. Rose Oronje, a researcher at the African Institute for Development Policy, and her colleagues at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine are evaluating the results of publishing reflexivity statements—a similar practice that encourages researchers engaged in global collaborations to consider how their work acknowledges the communities involved.

The team is reviewing published statements in global health journals and interviewing authors and journal editors to gauge whether this measure at the time of publication has the power to shift researchers’ mindsets and lead to more equitable practices. Publication guidelines can provide powerful incentives for scientists to effect systemic change, Oronje says. “When you start there, it becomes very easy for us to want to do it, because we want to publish.”

Now tell me, given that this involves self-report about whether one’s mindset shifts in result to woke and subjective statements, whether there can be any result other than “yes, these statements work!”? Given the history of research that goes against what “progressives” want, like the retraction of a Nature Communications paper showing that female-female mentorships may actually hurt women’s scientific careers, I’m not optimistic. And how can you judge whether positionality statements create more equitable practices given that the Zeitgeist itself is pushing “more equitable practices”. There’s a correlation/causation issue here that will be almost impossible to resolve. How do you separate the temporally increasing trend towards practices that progressives consider “equitable” from the effect of positionality statements? I don’t see how.

In the end, science should be judged by merit alone, not by race, gender, politics, ancestry, sexuality, or family history of the scientist. In a few cases, which fall under the Satel Exception, as when you’re doing work that could be thought exploitative, as in anthropology or collecting organisms in other countries, it may be useful (and sometimes required) to show how you complied with required or recommended practices. And maybe—just maybe—you can mention inadvertent biases or problems with the research. But those are very restricted, much less subjective, and often aren’t even positionality statements!

Positionality statements are likely to be biased and self-serving. I have to say that if they’re of any value to me in science, it’s that when I see them I tend to avoid reading the paper. If you want to indulge in narcissism or self-flagellation, leave it out of your paper, and do it on your own time!

But kudos to Science for publishing a pretty objective article on this issue.

A new and tendentious “scientific” field: Critical Ecology

May 6, 2022 • 12:30 pm

A reader sent me this announcement of a talk given at Cornell University by a scientist from the California Academy of Science. I reproduce the announcement in full, complete with italicization and bolding, though I’ve removed Zoom links and email addresses. (I can’t find the talk online, though she does have a short talk on “Ecology as a Locus for Social Change.) I won’t belabor it at length, as I find its content simply flabbergasting, but I want to point out five things:

It is “critical ecology” in that it infuses real science (ecology) with “critical theory”, itself containing a big dollop of postmodernism.
It is written in the obscurantist style of postmodernism fused with modern wokeist strains (e.g., use of preferred pronouns)
It is tendentious: there is no way that this style of science can be objective. Its aim, as suggested below, is simply to confirm preconceptions of the writer and to push her ideology into ecology. Note especially this sentence: “Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice.” This is social engineering, not science.
This is also an example of the invasion of wokeism into science, as instantiated by Steve Pinker’s recent statement on climate change in the journal Science. But at least the Science stuff, however wrongheaded, was explicitly about policy. Here we have what purports to be a form of science that involves hypothesis testing, but the answers must only come out in a preferred direction.
Note the criticism of “objectivity,” as in this sentence: “critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is ‘objective’, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities.” Note that “objective” is in scare quotes, and is opposed to the lived experience of those in racialized communities. It is this redefinition of “objectivity” as “the master’s (e.g. white supremacist’s) tools” that poses the biggest danger of science. Science then merely becomes a matter of one’s preferred opinion or “lived experience”: things not checkable by scientific methods.

The entire announcement is indented.

Critical ecology provides a framework for integrating social critiques of imperialism, enslavement, and modern racial capitalism into the quantitative analysis of human oppression as a process organizing the biophysical drivers of global environmental change.

—————————————————————-

The Research Fellows group at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability will host Dr. Suzanne Pierre of the Critical Ecology Lab for a visiting lecture at 4:00 pm on May 5th in Weill Hall 226. We hope you will attend; feel free to forward this invitation to colleagues.

Guest Lecture by Dr. Suzanne Pierre, California Academy of Sciences

Location: Weill Hall 226

Date: May 5

Time: 4:00-5:00 pm

[JAC: Zoom and email address redacted]

Critical Ecology: Testing Hypotheses in Service of Liberation

Dr. Suzanne Pierre (she; Cornell Ecology and Evolutionary Biology ’18), will introduce critical ecology as an emerging approach to global environmental change research. Pierre’s work in critical ecology provides a framework for integrating social critiques of imperialism, enslavement, and modern racial capitalism into the quantitative analysis of human oppression as a process organizing the biophysical drivers of global environmental change. Pierre’s goal is to couple theory from decolonial studies, Black feminist studies, and other schools of liberatory thought to inform testable ecological hypotheses. Her work aims to document patterns in relationships between societal oppression/extraction and resultant ecosystem perturbations, currently focusing on her expertise in soil microbial ecology and forest biogeochemistry.

As Audre Lorde said, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. In keeping with this wisdom, critical ecology also provides a space to address the tension present in defining what is “objective”, a practice that has neglected the phenomena experienced by racialized communities. Through the practice of theory and basic research, Pierre aims to offer systemically oppressed populations a praxis for redress beyond environmental justice. Pierre will also introduce her nonprofit research organization, the Critical Ecology Lab, as a locus for reflexive critique, methods development, and liberation work by interdisciplinary scientists and students.

Dr. Suzanne Pierre is the founder and lead investigator of the Critical Ecology Lab, where transdisciplinary scholars seek to reframe the objectives and methods of academic research in support of equity and decolonial futures. The Critical Ecology Lab is a space to investigate and explain how the natural world, from soils to atmosphere, has been shaped by racial and cultural supremacy, natural resource exploitation, and social exclusion. Before building the CEL community, Dr. Pierre completed her doctoral research in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at Cornell University. Her experience within traditional academic structures encouraged her to act for greater inclusiveness in academic research spaces, so she co-founded and organized the first Diversity Preview Weekend. The impact of Dr. Pierre’s research and organizing is felt across Cornell today, and we are honored to host her as she continues to lead through intellectual contributions and direct action.

I’ll leave it to readers to tender comments.

New Zealand’s Royal Society exculpates two members accused of criticizing indigenous “ways of knowing” as coequal with science

March 13, 2022 • 12:45 pm

I’ve written many times about this big kerfuffle in New Zealand. It involves the government adhering to a misguided interpretation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, in which the British colonists negotiated a truce with chiefs of some (but not all) Māori groups. That treaty guarantees the Māori full rights as British citizens and has other stipulations about land.

The recent trouble started when both the New Zealand government and educational authorities at all levels of schooling decided not only to teach Mātauranga Māori, (henceforth “MM”) or “Māori ways of knowing”, not just in school, which is fine, but in science classes , and as coequal with modern science. This is an untenable position both educationally and politically, for it would not only water down science education, but also degrade the already-declining educational standing of New Zealand among comparable countries.

Most important, it would confuse students as to what science really is, for MM encompasses not just “traditional knowledge”, like how to trap eels, but also a farrago of myth, unverifiable legend, superstition, morality, and theology, which include many bizarre supernatural statements. Imagine that being given equal treatment in science classes! The Māori, for example, have their own creation myths analogous to but different from those of the Bible. Are these to be given equal time in biology class?

Further, the “way of knowing” of MM is practical knowledge (yes, that’s still knowledge), but wouldn’t expose the students to the way modern scientists practice their trade.

Nobody questions whether Māori history and MM should be taught in schools. They are, after all, part of the nation’s history and sociology. But not in science class as a form of science!

A group of professors, perhaps unaware of the conflagration they’d start, made a public statement against teaching MM as science:

As I wrote earlier:

Seven professors at the University of Auckland signed a letter in the weekly magazine The Listener that criticized the governments’ and universities’ plans to teach the indigenous Māori “way of knowing,” mātauranga Māori, as equivalent to modern science, though the Māori “way of knowing” includes elements of the supernatural, myths, some practical knowledge, and so on. You can see the Listener letter here or here, and I’ll quote briefly from it:

A recent report from a Government NCEA working group on proposed changes to the Māori school curriculum aims “to esure parity for with the other bodies of knowledge credentialed by NCEA (particularly Western/Pakeha epistemologies)”. It includes the following description as part of a new course: “It promotes discussion and analysis of the ways in which science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views (among which, its use as a a rationale for colonisation of Māori and the suppression of Māori knowledge); and the notion that science is a Western European invention and itself evidence of European dominance over Māori and other indigenous peoples.”

. . . Indigenous knowledge is critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy. However, in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself.

To accept it as the equivalent of science is to patronise and fail indigenous populations; better to ensure that everyone participates in the world’s scientific enterprises. Indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.

As I wrote, the letter brought down heaps of opprobrium upon the seven signers (one has since died), both from the University of Auckland and from the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ), the country’s most prestigious body of science. From my post cited above:

The Royal Society itself issued a statement criticizing the professors, [JAC: that letter has vanished and been replaced by a more conciliatory one; the original version criticized the professors for mischaracterizing science and harming indigenous people] and has launched an investigation of the two remaining signatories in the Academy, Robert Nola and Garth Cooper (Cooper is at least a quarter Māori). Nola and Cooper could be booted out of the RSNZ for simply exercising free speech, which apparently is not “free” in New Zealand if it casts doubt on the truth of Māori mythology. Here’s part of the RSNZ’s statement [JAC: this was the origjnal statement, now retracted and replaced. Bolding below is mine]:

Royal Society Te Apārangi supports, fosters and recognises research within many knowledge systems.

The Society is deeply proud of the rich variety of outstanding work being undertaken across Aotearoa at present. In the past year alone, this includes Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd’s literary scholarship (winner of the 2020 Rutherford Medal), the work of Te Pūnaha Matatini on COVID-19 modelling by 2020 Te Puiaki Pūtaiao Matua a Te Pirimia Prime Minister’s Science Prize Winner (led by Professor Shaun Hendy), and the knowledge sharing of Matariki by Professor Rangi Matamua.

The Society supports all New Zealanders to explore, discover and share knowledge.

The recent suggestion by a group of University of Auckland academics that mātauranga Māori is not a valid truth is utterly rejected by Royal Society Te Apārangi. The Society strongly upholds the value of mātauranga Māori and rejects the narrow and outmoded definition of science outlined in The Listener – Letter to the Editor.

It deeply regrets the harm such a misguided view can cause.

Harm indeed. Far more harmful to the country and its youth to teach mythology and legend as science! The RSNZ apparently has no idea what science really is.

But the teaching of MM as science is almost a foregone conclusion for, as the Wokest of Western countries, New Zealanders worship the Treaty as almost the Bible for guiding national behavior, and nearly everything Māori has become sacred and immune to criticism. The many supporters of the “Satanic Seven,” as I called them, were forced to keep quiet, for public support of their stand could do severe professional damage to academics, as it has already. Self-censoring about MM is pervasive in New Zealand, as I’ve learned from many private emails.

This post brings an end to the Royal Society issue, though not to the MM skirmish itself. In short, 5 complaints were made to the RS about Nola and Cooper as signers of the Listener letter (Corballis was also a member, but complaints against him were dropped when he died.) The Royal Society of New Zealand, to its shame, decided to investigate two of the complaints and produced a confidential report.

In the meantime, the kerfuffle came to world attention. It was reported in the Daily Fail, and Richard Dawkins wrote a letter to the Listener supporting the views of the Satanic seven. I even heard that the Royal Society of London wrote a reproving letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand, though I can’t verify this. All this put the Royal Society of New Zealand in a bad light.

The two complaints against Cooper and Nola investigated by the RSNZ accused them of violating these principles of the RSNZ by writing their letter to the Listener:

. . . Members are obliged:

To behave with honesty, integrity, and professionalism when undertaking their activities;
To only claim competence commensurate with their expertise, knowledge and skills, and ensure their practices are consistent with relevant national, Māori [1] and international standards and codes of practice in their discipline or field;
To undertake their activities diligently and carefully;
To support the public interest by making the results and findings of their activities available as soon as it is appropriate to do so, by presenting those results and findings in an honest, straightforward and unbiased manner, and by being prepared to contribute their knowledge or skills to avert or lessen public crises [2] when it is appropriate to do so;
In undertaking their activities, to endeavour, where practicable, to partner with those communities and mana whenua for whom there are reasonably foreseeable direct impacts, and to meet any obligations arising from the Treaty of Waitangi;
To safeguard the health, safety, wellbeing, rights and interests of people involved in or affected during the conduct of their activities. . . .

9.) To demonstrate and encourage ethical behaviour and high professional standards amongst their colleagues;

It’s absolutely ridiculous to launch a three-month investigation of two honored members of the RSNZ on these bases. They were simply stating their opinion publicly.

I believe there were lots of complaints from other people arguing that, because the Satanic Seven weren’t experts in MM, they had no right to express an opinion about its compatibility with science. That’s palpable nonsense. You don’t have to do much investigation of the nature of MM to see that while, like all indigenous forms of “knowing”, it gives fascinating insights into belief systems not based on empirical science, it’s simply not commensurate with science as it’s practiced today.

Finally, last week the RSNZ came up with its decision: the two members of the Society who signed the letter were fully exculpated. The “confidential” summary of the investigation is below, but I got permission to publish it. That’s no longer necessary since much of it is now public.

But that didn’t stop the RSNZ from pulling a slimy move to get in one last lick against its two miscreant members. The RSNZ issued two statements, the second leaving out out a single sentence from the first. Here’s the original version, but in the final version, now published online, the sentence I put in bold has been omitted:

Royal Society Te Apārangi

Statement in relation to complaints about a letter to the New Zealand Listener

The Society received complaints against Fellows of the Society who were among seven authors of a letter to the New Zealand Listener ‘In defence of science’ _in July 2021. The complaints particularly referred to the vulnerability of Māori and early career researchers.

The Society convened an Initial Investigation Panel (Panel) to consider the complaints as set out under the Society’s complaint procedures. The Society is obliged to follow the Complaints Procedures it has adopted when it receives a complaint about a member of the Society.

The overall role of the Panel was to decide whether the complaints should proceed to a Complaints Determination Committee. The role of the Panel was not to consider the merits of the views expressed in the New Zealand Listener letter.

The Panel considered there was no evidence that the Fellows acted with any intent of dishonesty or lack of integrity.

The Panel concluded that the complaints should not proceed to a Complaints Determination Committee. The Panel referred to clause 6.4(i) of the Complaint Procedures: the complaint is not amenable to resolution by a Complaint Determination Committee, including by reason of its demanding the open-ended evaluation of contentious expert opinion or of contested scientific evidence amongst researchers and scholars.”

In coming to its conclusion, the Panel noted that during the process of their investigation both the complainants and the respondents referred to a considerable number of matters that were outside the Panel’s scope, including the merits of or otherwise of the broader issues raised in the letter or elsewhere. In the Panel’s view, the matters raised are of substance and merit further constructive discussion and respectful dialogue.

The Complaints Procedures provide that such a decision by the Panel is final and cannot be appealed.

The Society notes that it has been inappropriate to publicly comment about the complaints while the matter was before the Initial Investigation Panel.

This summary is being published on the basis that it may be beneficial to other scientists, technologists, or humanities scholars, as set out in the Complaints Procedures.

Now why would they omit that sentence, which simply implies that the two accused Fellows behaved with honesty and integrity? In truth, it’s even slimier than that: it said “there was no evidence that the Fellows acted with any intent of dishonesty or lack of integrity.” It’s not a verdict of “not guilty”, but the Scottish verdict of “not proven.” But now even that sentence, which is mildly praiseworthy, is gone.

As I said, the controversy over the hegemony of MM in science continues, and if I know anything about New Zealand educational politics, MM will worm its way into science class. All the new RSNZ statement does is exculpate two scientists unfairly accused of misbehavior and harm for saying that MM, while worthy of being taught, is not coequal with modern science.

The Royal Society of New Zealand has acted despicably during this whole episode, abrogating the free speech of its members. If anything undergirds science, it’s the concept of saying what you think; and criticizing an indigenous “way of knowing” as “not compatible with modern science” is certainly within the purview of acceptable speech.

Except in New Zealand.

***********

The only public reporting I’ve seen on this so far has been in the Kiwi magazine Stuff, in the article below (click on screenshot):

What’s new is this:

The Royal Society’s chief executive Paul Atkins earlier said the organisation was taking the controversy seriously.

“We are acutely aware of the potential for significant damage to be inflicted in multiple directions, not least to relationships and our ability to have a balanced and informed dialogue about important questions for the future of our country,” he said in a statement.

Have a look at that statement and its mandatory genuflecting towards MM. Finally, the University of Auckland promised last year to hold an impending symposium about the compatibility of MM with science, with both sides being defended. It didn’t happen:

The University of Auckland had intended to hold a Māturanga Māori and science symposium in the first three months of the year, but this has been delayed, a spokeswoman confirmed.

And I predict it won’t happen. Unless the University of Auckland stacks the deck with MM sympathizers—and it’s entirely capable of doing this—such a debate, though potentially enlightening, would be perceived as racist, and would be too inflammatory.

Sabine Hossenfelder on the most epic fights between scientists

February 14, 2022 • 11:00 am

Here’s a 16-minute video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder that was forwarded to me by reader Steve, who added this

Sabine leads with the contretemps between E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. I found the whole video edifying, with my admiration for Thomas Edison taken down several notches.

Indeed! You will never look at Edison the same way again, especially if you go on the Internet and look for the video of the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant, promoted by Edison.

The six fights:

1.) Richard Dawkins’s scathing review of E. O. Wilson’s 2012 book, The Social Conquest of Earth, which pushed a group-selectionist origin of human behavior. (I too reviewed that book for TLS and will send a copy on request).

2.) Wilson’s riposte that Dawkins was a “journalist.” Ouch!

3.) Leibniz vs. Newton’s debate about who first developed differential calculus. Newton got discovery precedence, but was slow to publish, so both men’s work appeared about the same time. A fight ensued, with Newton beefing to the Royal Society about credit. Newton won that fight, but there were a lot of bad feelings and mutual criticism. Leibniz also cheated by changing the dates of some of his manuscripts to try establishing precedence

4.) Thomas Edison vs. Nikola Tesla over whether electric current should be delivered as direct (DC_ or alternating (AC). Edison, an advocate of DC, electrocuted animals (including Topsy the elephant, one of the most heinous acts imaginable) to show that AC was dangerous.

5.) The paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope versus Othniel Marsh, a conflict described in Wikipedia as “The Bone Wars”:

The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, was a period of intense and ruthlessly competitive fossil hunting and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to outdo the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and the destruction of bones. Each scientist also sought to ruin his rival’s reputation and cut off his funding, using attacks in scientific publications.

6.) Fred Hoyle versus the world! Willy Fowler, Hoyle’s collaborator, got a Nobel Prize (with Chandrasekhar) in 1983. Both Hoyle and Fowler collaborated on how nuclear reactions work in stars. Why was Hoyle overlooked? Hossenfelder gives several possible explanations.

Hossenfelder’s lesson is that “competition is a good thing, but is best enjoyed in small doses”. I’m not sure I agree, as the more competition there is in science, the faster we get to the truth. Yes, it’s unpleasant to see big guns acting petty, but in the end science is the beneficiary.

Hossenfelder also mentions that the conflicts show that scientists are human, but we already know that. There aren’t really lessons here beyond those in the history of science, but there’s a lot of intriguing history in this short video

American scientists are mostly Democrats, with almost no Republicans. Is this lack of diversity a problem?

December 10, 2020 • 9:45 am

A letter to the editor appeared in the latest issue of Nature, decrying the political uniformity of scientists (click on screenshot below to access though I’ve put up the whole thing). And the link to the Nature poll described in the letter’s first line is here, but the survey was not of Americans but of Nature readers from throughout the world.

However, there’s no doubt that, among American scientists, Democrats still greatly outnumber Republicans. The latest data I can find are in a 2009 Pew poll showing that not only are American scientists mostly liberal, but that there’s a huge disparity between the politics of scientists and of the American public in general. I suspect that, given what’s happened under Trump, this disparity has only increased. The data in 2009:

Most [American] scientists identify as Democrats (55%), while 32% identify as independents and just 6% say they are Republicans. When the leanings of independents are considered, fully 81% identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 12% who either identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. Among the public, there are far fewer self-described Democrats (35%) and far more Republicans (23%). Overall, 52% of the public identifies as Democratic or leans Democratic, while 35% identifies as Republican or leans Republican.

This disparity exercised Andrew Meso, a British computational neuroscientist (he’s also black), who wrote this letter:

Now Dr. Meso is mistaken that the Nature poll was of “US scientists”, but it doesn’t matter, for the “misalignment” he describes is still true. As an academic, I have long been aware of this, for the disparity exists not just in science, but in academia as a whole.

Meso’s implicit argument that we need to increase political diversity doesn’t carry near as much weight as an argument for greater gender and ethnic diversity, for there’s not a good argument that Republicans were oppressed in the past, nor that there is discrimination against Republican students being accepted to grad school or being hired as professors—at least in science. I’ve been on many hiring and student-acceptance committees, and not once have I ever heard of a candidate being touted or dissed because of their politics. Indeed, we never even know their politics! (This may not hold for faculty in areas like economics or sociology.) And I’ve never heard of a scientist being denied promotion or tenure on the grounds of their politics.

So it’s hard to make an argument that the dearth of Republicans in American science is due to bias or discrimination. Nor does the ideological slant seem likely to affect science: as I read somewhere (but can’t lay my hands on the reference), scientists’ politics don’t affect the nature or quality of their research.

Why the disparity between scientists and the public, then, if it’s not bigotry? Well, perhaps it’s preference.

For reasons we can speculate about, perhaps those with a conservative bent are less likely to go into science, or remain in science if they start studying this. Perhaps those with a liberal bent are more attracted to the empirical method and the techniques of science. I have no idea if this is right, but feel free to speculate. But I’ll make one point: if people think that the differential representation is due to preference rather than bias, and it’s a preference based on political affiliation (which may be correlated with other traits), why are we so eager to assume that other differential representations, like those involving gender or ethnicity, are based solely on bias and bigotry rather than preference? As we know, this kind of representation is automatically assumed to be based on prejudice, but I’ve always said that we can’t assume that without the needed research.

Finally, is Meso right in raising the alarm that the Democratic “elitism” of American scientists could turn other Americans—many of whom are Republican—against science or against going into science? (He conflates “judging science” with “going into science” in his final paragraph.) If he were right, this in itself would be a form of preference, but could also involve bigotry if conservatives sense that scientists don’t like their politics. And yes, Republicans are more anti-science than Democrats, though the difference has been exaggerated, but not to the extent that would explain the differential representation in science. To me, it seems more likely that the disparity is based on a preference connected to political affiliation, but that’s just a guess.

Finally, Meso’s conclusion—that liberalism in scientists turns others against science and against going into science, presumes that the public actually knows how liberal scientists are. But they don’t seem to, at least according to that Pew report:

Most Americans do not see scientists as a group as particularly liberal or conservative. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) say they think of scientists as “neither in particular”; 20% see them as politically liberal and 9% say they are politically conservative.

If there’s no evidence in science of bias against Republican scientists or students, then there is no need to engage in affirmative action to bring them on board—unless they somehow bring a scientific point of view absent among more liberal scientists. But I can’t see one. (It’s not that evident amongst ethnic or gender groups, either.) But the reason I’m in favor of affirmative action is not so much to bring a diversity of ideas as to act as a form of reparations for those who were denied equal opportunity. And the reparations view, while holding for women and people of color, doesn’t seem to hold for conservatives.

But my dislike of affirmative action for Republicans in science doesn’t hold for college students, for I think ideological and political diversity is an innate good among undergraduates, as it stimulates discussion and exposes students to other ways of thinking. So while I can’t support a case for “affirmative action” for more Republicans in science, I can do so for college students. As for professors outside of science, I’m not so sure. It’s useful for students to be exposed to various political views, or lines of thought, from their professors as well. I can’t see hiring professors because they’re Republicans, but I can see making an effort to incorporate conservative points of view into academic departments. Since we scientists are supposed to keep our politics out of the classroom, though, we don’t need to make this effort.

Should scientific journals strive for “diversity” of reviewers and authors?

November 17, 2020 • 12:00 pm

The New York Times recently had a piece by their new and woke science reporter, Katherine J. Wu, which is basically an indictment of science journals for not keeping track of the “diversity” of authors and reviewers of the papers they publish or reject. The implicit message is that science journals are racist, discriminating against papers by minoritized authors.

Click on the screenshot to read the article:

Wu’s implicit assumption is twofold. First, that a paucity of diversity—which of course means ethnic diversity, but minus Asians since they are surely overrepresented among authors—reflects racism on the part of scientific journals and reviewers. There is no consideration of whether a lack of diversity may represent simply a paucity of minority authors and reviewers. That itself may reflect racism, past or present, that narrows the opportunities of would-be scientists, but the article implies that it’s racism acting on Ph.D. authors trying to submit papers.

The second assumption is that more ethnic diversity in journals means better science. Well, that’s true in the sense that the more people who get the opportunities to become scientists, the higher the average quality of the science that is published. But I’m not at all convinced that members of any group, be they groups involving genders, religions, incomes, or ethnicity, have a special “point of view” based on their group identity that makes them do science differently. Science is science, and I don’t feel that Hispanics, say, have a different “way of knowing.” (There may be one exception here, that I’ve mentioned before: I think women scientists are responsible for shifting the focus in sexual selection from male traits alone to female preferences as well. But many men were also involved in this shift). In the end, the best science comes from giving everybody equal opportunities, not practicing remediation based on race at the publication level.

But the question is whether journals should be publishing more papers by members of minority groups. That is, is there a bias against, say, black or Hispanic authors that needs to be rectified by that form of “affirmative action” on the publication level—taking steps to accept more papers by minority authors?

It’s my opinion that the answer is “no”. This presumes that a paucity of papers by such authors is prima facie evidence for bias, when it may reflect only a paucity of minority-group members in the field, or of minority scientists submitting papers, or submitting fewer papers,—rather than reviewers deliberately discriminating against papers by minority authors.

It may be worth investigating this issue, but I consider it hardly worthwhile for two reasons. First, figuring out whether a paucity of papers from minority group members is due to racism at the reviewing level is very hard to do, though not impossible (see below). More important, it’s certainly true that the disparity between the proportion of minority-group members in the population and the number of papers published by members of that group is due largely not to racism but to an underrepresentation of Blacks and Hispanics in science. Figuring out why that disparity exists is the best way to achieve more proportionality in science, if that is your goal. And that’s really where our efforts should be going.

Here are the data given in the NYT piece from two scientific organizations showing disparities between population proportions and publication/reviewer proportions. The article makes the point that most journals, though, do not keep records of the ethnicity of authors and reviewers. (To clarify for non-scientists, when scientists submit papers to a journal, those papers are sent to several reviewers—usually two or three—who are experts in the area of research. Based on the reviewers’ assessment of the paper, the editor then decides whether or not to publish it. If the decision is “yes,” there is often some revision of the paper required, either in the discussion or the scientific analysis.)

I’m going to discuss authors here, not reviewers, because it is the quality of authors‘ work that, by and large, constructs the quality of the journal. How do we know if a journal is discriminating against minority authors? You can’t simply use a difference between the proportion of people in the field, or the proportion of people submitting papers on the one hand, and the proportion of papers published on the other, as a criterion for bias. That’s because members of different groups may submit papers less often, or of lesser quality, and that this would lead to differential representation that would not reflect racism. Bias must be proven, not assumed.

There are two ways to solve this problem. The first is the equivalent of doing “blind” auditions for orchestras—auditions in which those seeking an orchestral chair perform behind a curtain. That “blind” system removes all bias against sex or race. To do this with a paper, you simply remove the names of the authors, their institution, and the acknowledgments from the manuscript, so the reviewers don’t know who wrote the paper. (There are, of course, ways to guess, like if an author cites herself repeatedly, but in many cases this will indeed lead to quality appraisal ignorant of the author’s race or gender.)

I hit upon that system in the late 1970s when I was a postdoc, full of piss and vinegar and concerned that papers were getting preferentially published not because of race, but because of reputation. My idea was that famous people had an easier time publishing their papers than small fish (like me!). I wrote letters—real letters—to the editors of about 30 journals in my field, proposing that manuscripts be reviewed blind this way. I got only one response, and that was from an editor who said that he preferred knowing the authors, because famous authors were more likely to submit better papers! That may be true on average, but it’s not the best way to ensure the quality of papers in a journal! In fact, famous authors may get by more easily with shoddier work because of their reputations.

At any rate, some journals have now wisely decided to adopt the blind-author technique, and more power to them! It seems to me a step in the right direction to eliminate animus not just against groups of people, but against your scientific “enemies” or in favor of your scientific “friends”. (Believe me, this kind of bias is rife in science.) While you can get around this system by guessing, I think it does help ensure objective reviewing and thus higher-quality papers. (I should add that the NYT music critic opposed blind auditions because he said that while it increased the proportion of women in orchestras, it didn’t eliminate racial inequities; his view was clearly that equity trumped orchestral quality.)

The other way would be to do an experiment submitting identical sets of manuscripts with fake names that give clues to the gender or ethnicity of the authors. If manuscripts with women or minority authors are rejected more often than the same manuscripts with “white” or “male” names, that surely indicates bias. This was what was done in a laborious study of grant reviewing, using made-up “black”, “white”, “male” and “female” names on identical proposals. The study showed no evidence of racial or gender bias in grant evaluation. Needless to say, you don’t hear much about this study, even though it was a good one, as the results went against people’s certainty that there must be sex and gender bias in reviewing.

That experiment could be done with paper reviewing too, and really must be done before you can start making implicit accusations of bias. But I favor the blind-reviewing technique. You don’t have to do any experiments to see if that one makes things more equitable because, by eliminating a source of bias from the outset, it almost has to. It is my feeling that a “fake name” study wouldn’t show evidence of bias in pubication, but that’s my feeling alone. Better just to practice blind reviewing rather than speculate or do experiments.

In the end, my feeling is that affirmative action should not be applied to reviewing papers by people who already have doctorates, and, while I believe in affirmative action, I think it has to stop at some point in the hierarchy. My point comes after faculty hired hiring. I think it’s okay and useful to take race and gender into account when hiring junior faculty, as well as in college and grad-school admissions, but that’s where it stops. Ethnicity and gender should not be a consideration in getting tenure, full professorships, or in getting papers published—areas where merit alone should be the only criterion. Again, this is my view, and others may disagree.

Some of those who disagree think the whole system of a scientific meritocracy is flawed—that there isn’t even a scientific meritocracy. The NYT article says that:

Publishing papers in top-tier journals is crucial scholastic currency. But the process is deeply insular, often hinging on personal connections between journal editors and the researchers from whom they solicit and receive manuscripts.

“Science is publicized as a meritocracy: a larger, data-driven enterprise in which the best work and the best people float to the top,” Dr. Extavour said. In truth, she added, universal, objective standards are lacking, and “the access that authors have to editors is variable.”

To democratize this process, editors and reviewers need to level the playing field, in part by reflecting the diversity that journals claim they seek, Dr. Kamath said. “People think this is a cosmetic or surface issue,” she said. “But in reality, the very nature of your scholarship would change if you took diversity, equity and inclusion seriously.”

This whole section is to imply that there is little correlation between the merit of a paper and the chance of its being published. I think that’s a foolish conclusion, with the caaveats that Wu gives meant to imply a weak correlation at best. This is not my experience in reviewing papers or assessing published papers. Yes, sometimes a terrible paper gets published in a good journal, and a great paper gets rejected by a good journal, but there is surely a correlation between the quality of a paper and the chance that a. it will get published, and b. that it will get published in a prestigious journal.

No, to democratize the process, just do blind reviewing. That will go a ways toward eliminating bias. But even in the absence of that procedure, journals would be hard pressed to construct a system that would give preferential publication to papers by ethnic minorities. Regardless of what Katherine Wu thinks, science largely is a meritocracy, at least when it comes to publication, and I don’t think it would be good for science as a whole to bump papers up or down based on the race of their authors.

NIH gets into the game of requiring job candidates to show track records of promoting diversity

February 2, 2020 • 10:30 am

At the end of last year, I pointed out that the University of California system was implementing a new procedure for hiring faculty. It involved candidates submitting “diversity statements” that recounted their knowledge about diversity, their past efforts to increase diversity in their institutions, and their plans for promoting diversity if they were hired.

While I favor a form of affirmative action to increase diversity in hiring, I objected to the diversity-statement procedure because it not only demands adherence to a specific ideology (candidates’ diversity statements were scored on a point system, with higher points given to those whose statements matched the philosophy of the evaluators), but also gives the diversity statement priority over all other qualifications: if a candidate’s diversity score didn’t meet or exceed the cutoff threshold of 11 points, the application was discarded without further review.

This procedure is unfair because of its use of an ideological test, because it doesn’t count other “outreach” activities that are valuable but don’t promote diversity (e.g., giving talks to high school children, writing popular articles on science), and because it bars minority candidates who haven’t engaged in diversity-promoting activities before they apply for jobs.

Imagine, for example, an African-American scholar who has spent her time with her nose to the grindstone, accumulating an admirable academic and teaching record without having had the time or the will to promote diversity. As valuable as she would be to a department—and believe me, universities are desperately looking for good minority candidates—she wouldn’t have a chance of being hired under this “threshold” process. (Such scholars exist, for I know of some.) I find this process ludicrous and counterproductive, as I find the use of all mandatory diversity statements.

Now, however, according to this report in Science magazine, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is giving a ton of money to 12 universities for “cluster hires” (groups of people hired at once to beef up programs)—and that hiring process, even if not designed to increase diversity, will require every candidate not just to submit a diversity statement, but to show a “track record” of working to promote diversity. (“Diversity”, as always, means racial and gender diversity, not any kind of intellectual, class, geographic, or economic diversity.)

Click on the screenshot to read the news item:

The article reports that the NIH is appropriating $241 million to create a program called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST). This will provide roughly $20 million to each of a dozen schools, each aliquot supporting a “cluster hire” of ten new faculty members. Cluster hires have been used to increase diversity, but also for non-diversity initiatives, like “[accelerating] their capacity to do research in an emerging area, such as computational biology or nanofabrication.”

And the NIH initiative, despite having both diversity goals and “emerging area” goals, is requiring every candidate to prove that they have already promoted diversity. Note that this statement is required because restricting hires to individuals from underrepresented groups is illegal for the NIH. Here’s the crucial statement from the article (my emphasis):

Not all of the 120 new hires would need to belong to groups now underrepresented in academic medicine, which include women, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, and those with disabilities, says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief diversity officer. In fact, she told the Council of Councils at its 24 January meeting, any such restriction would be illegal and also run counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent. But Valantine says every person hired must have a track record of working to change a culture that too often makes scientists from underrepresented groups feel unwelcome on campus and isolated in the laboratory.

This is pretty explicit in imposing a diversity-promoting test on the cluster hires. Every person hired must have a track record. That again leaves out minority candidates who have been doing things other than “changing the culture”. (And it presumes that there is a culture that makes underrepresented scientists feel unwelcome, something for which there is no evidence save anecdotal statements.) Without that record, black or white, male or female, you don’t stand a chance of getting hired under the NIH program. And that in itself is “counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent.”

Fortunately, there are organizations, like that run by Chad Topaz of Williams College, that will, for a donation, help candidates write a diversity statement. All you need is to hand over $100 or more to Topaz’s organization, and they’ll help you look like a great promoter of diversity. (I can only imagine how this works.)

Well, regardless of whether such bigotry exists (this is nearly always the default explanation for underrepresentation of some groups), there’s independent evidence of how valuable minority candidates already are in academia. As the article notes:

New faculty hires don’t come cheap. At Emory, a standard startup package for a new professor in the natural sciences or engineering exceeds $1 million, Freeman says. And Valantine says startup costs for a basic scientist with a wet lab at a medical school could run as high as $3 million. Minority scientists usually command a premium salary because they are in such high demand, Freeman notes. [JAC: Carla Freeman is Emory’s senior associate dean of the faculty.]

Yes, it’s true that minority faculty are in high demand: Chicago is always trying to hire them, but the pool of candidates is small. The failure to land such candidates surely doesn’t reflect bigotry on the part of departments, but, in my view, a paucity of candidates because of poorer educational opportunities available for minorities, including worse schools.

Factors like those make a mockery of the notion of “equal opportunity.” And yes, this lack of opportunity goes way back to bigotry that, in the case of African-Americans, started with slavery. It must be rectified, but one has to diagnose how to fix it—and the fix may not involve assuming that hiring committees are racist or sexist. My own view is that it’s going to require a lot of effort and money to equalize opportunity for all Americans from the outset of their lives, and we all know how hard that is. But it’s something we must do.

As I said, I favor affirmative action in such hires if one wants to increase diversity. But that affirmative action should have nothing to do with “diversity statements” or a track record of changing a culture that may not even exist. You just weight the underrepresented but desired characteristics during the hiring process.

The implicit assumption that bigotry accounts for the whole of minority underrepresentation in academia is probably unjustified. First, as the Science article notes, cluster hiring may be the wrong tool:

The scientific literature on cluster hiring is very thin. Freeman and administrators at a handful of other institutions provide anecdotal evidence of its value in fostering diversity, but there are no rigorous studies of how it compares to other approaches. Steven Brint, a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside, is looking at its impact on interdisciplinary collaborations, the most common goal for institutions that have tried it. And his preliminary findings on research productivity suggest cluster hiring may actually impede efforts to foster diversity.

“Overall, output increases for all researchers,” Blint says. “But the benefits are not evenly distributed. When we analyze the results by race and gender, our results suggest that senior scientists tend to benefit more from such hirings.” Not surprisingly, he adds, those senior scientists tend to be white men.

And this statement in the Science piece implicitly assumes that bias is the cause:

FIRST is the latest in a series of programs NIH has launched since 2014 following a 2011 study that showed black scientists are less likely to receive an NIH award than their white or Asian counterparts. NIH has set itself the goal of eliminating that disparity, and Valantine hopes FIRST will take an important step in that direction by using an unorthodox approach to recruiting academic researchers.

But a study published last year, which was highly anticipated, found—and, I’m sad to say, to some people’s disappointment—that there wasn’t any evidence for either race or gender bias in a detailed study of “mock evaluation” of NIH proposals. (The study isn’t perfect, but if it had shown such bias, nobody would discuss its weaknesses!) And the Science article doesn’t even mention this followup!(Click on screenshot):

But the 2011 study cited above also showed that the funding gap remained after controlling for investigators’ “educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics”. After removing these factors, African-Americans still were 10% less likely to get an NIH award than whites. Does this prove bigotry in the process? Not necessarily, because the study below was also published last year:

It shows that a substantial amount of the NIH award disparity was due not to bigotry, but to choice of topics: black scientists were more prone to apply for funding in fields less likely to receive funding: fields involving “research at the community and population level, as opposed to more fundamental and mechanistic investigations”. It’s thus a fallacy to assume, at the outset, that a disparity in outcomes automatically reflects bigotry rather than other factors like preference.

But regardless of that, for the funding-rate disparity isn’t the main subject of this post, we still need to study racial and sex disparities, and, if they reflect factors that narrow opportunities, we need to fix those things. Since any fixes will take decades, I favor affirmative action in hiring as well as in accepting students. But I adamantly reject the use of mandatory diversity statements as a tool for promoting academic diversity. It’s the wrong fix. And now not only the University of California uses it, but at least ten other universities are poised to join in—at the behest of the federal government, of which the NIH is part.

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