C.Titus Brown tweeted about this article with the following description -
We will leave it to you to judge other points mentioned in the article, but to us, the trouble goes far beyond closed publication, winner-take-all prizes and gender ratio. The following quote seemed most suitable -
“Scientists love to think that they are totally objective,” when in fact they’re often not, Bennett says. “I think it’s very important to
look at these questions.”
Let us mention one striking observation we made based on interacting with hundreds of US ‘scientists’ over the last six years. So far, we came across exactly one professional scientist, who could properly explain the banking and financial crisis to us. That says a lot about a group of people, who claim to earn their living by thinking.
Also check -
Full Cycle of Science in Protestant World
This is exactly the sort of patronising post that turn people off your blog.
Thank you. We try to make honest observations rather than flattering others. I followed about ten or more good financial blogs since 2006 and almost all of them described the evolving financial crisis very well. Not a single one of them was written by an academic scientist. During the same time, I also talked to many of my collaborators in science about those issues and they all dismissed my observations as ‘conspiracy theories’ EVEN AFTER the collapse of many big banks in 2008 !! What happened to all supposed thinkers in academia? More recently, I parsed through the balance sheet of Cold Spring Harbor Lab and showed where time bombs are hidden. I have not heard any comment from anyone on that either.
Not being able to understand the banking and financial crisis, or even worse, claiming that they do not matter, has many ramifications.
(i) It puts the person (member of academia) and his students way behind the curve in their attempts to grasp significance of rapid changes in the social system. Why is grant money disappearing? How is it connected to bank bailout?
(ii) It makes them vulnerable to manipulations by the bankers and media.
(iii) Worst of all, it will eventually bring down many parts of university system due to cascading defaults and other issues. Did you realize how close Harvard was from losing most of its endowment fund in 2008?
I understand that economics is something this blog regularly comments on. And I also recognize the impact of banking and financial crisis has on academia/industries. But it also seems, at least to me, that it is a very complicated issue that I am sure many professional scientists/students just don’t have the time or resources to study and comment on.
Are you pushing for STEM scientists to get involved in other fields like economics or politics while still maintaining their own professional responsibilities? It’s not that easy.
The dismissive attitudes you’ve encountered in your professional circle is probably not deserved; however, it really seems like it’s more a case where you are disappointed that people in your field aren’t also interest in what you are interested in.
I appreciate that you are trying to push scientists to get more involved in these issues. Maybe you should write a comprehensive blog entry on why you think scientists need to be more involved. I’ll gladly read that over the small snippets of snarkiness sprinkled over various blog entries.
Damian: that was well-put.
This blog is the only place that publicly covers certain technical areas of bioinformatics.
While I tolerate non-bioinformatics posts, this site would be more appealing to researchers (who seek focused content) if anything unrelated to bioinformatics were moved to another section, e.g. the existing homolog.us/Social/.
Absolutely. It is important for scientists to challenge economic orthodoxies and hold economic commentaries with the same scientific standards as they would do for science articles, because economics gains its respectability by being called a science and using the language of science. When you judge economics using scientific objectivity, you will find that economics as presented in mainstream literature is fraud. There is nothing complex about it, and the arguments are intentionally made complex to keep others out and give the field a veneer of respectability. Here is the opinion of a Harvard maths student, who took a deeper look and came to the same conclusion as mine -
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/economics-debunked-chapter-two-for-sixth-graders.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/the-very-important-and-of-course-blacklisted-bis-paper-about-the-crisis.html
What you call snarkiness is well-reasoned opinion based on experience over many years. I tried for many years to discuss economics with professional scientists, but conversations often ended with -
a) ‘Economics is a complex subject and I do not know much to judge validity of your arguments.’
b) ‘If you and Paul Krugman disagree, I would listen to Krugman, because he a Nobel Laureate.’
(a) is fine, but (a) combined with (b) is not science. Most professional scientists I came across in USA are low-quality scientists (judged by this standard) even though they are highly placed, well funded and have solved a technical problem or two in their life. Science in USA has become very hierarchical and people consider authority more important than scientific process of logical argument.
Thanks Rayan for your thoughtful comment. I am trying to keep almost all banking and finance-related commentaries and open-access related commentaries out of here. Only three kinds of articles turn out to be borderline case -
1. Legal aspects of open source code and open publishing (could be important for bioinformaticians putting their code online),
2. Questions from students on whether to do study bioinformatics, do PhD, etc.
3. Science-related article from one of our favorite journals (Science, Nature) and forwarded by Titus Brown among all !!
What you call snarkiness is well-reasoned opinion based on experience over many years.
Perhaps I should read your other blog entries on these topics to get a better understand of where you are coming from. But you have to admit, it’s hard to take your opinions at face value when it’s haphazardly inserted into dubiously related topics.
Science in USA has become very hierarchical and people consider authority more important than scientific process of logical argument.
I agree with you, except that I think that’s science everywhere in the world. Academia seems to be becoming a kind of a ‘priesthood’. Again, I think it’s a valid and interesting topic. But perhaps a dedicated blog post will be a better forum of discussion.
Or maybe a book
I usually have a field day discussing finance-related topics among scientists, because scientists tend to justify their work as ‘good’ and ‘moral’, but when some core assumptions are challenged, the best argument they can muster is ‘go away, I do not want to hear you’ or ‘I will ban you from my forum’. Here is a good example. The other day, svpow blog posted a commentary titled ‘Is it immoral to hide your research behind a paywall?‘. Given that the question was posed in terms of morality, it was natural for me to ask, whether it was more moral to publish in closed journal or more moral to publish open in a journal, whose CEO was senior employee in one of the worst subprime banks in California (or USA) before joining the journal. Matt, who runs the blog, first called me conspiracy theorist and then threatened to ban me. On further prodding, he acknowledged that there was no ‘conspiracy theory’ in my comment, but came up with a different canard – “PLoS is a non-profit organization. Personally I don’t care if the CEO is barbequing kittens over flaming piles of rare zoological monographs and wiping his mouth with the US Constitution; he’s not funelling any taxpayer money to corporate shareholders”. In our understanding, most people care about who runs an organization, and ‘non-profit’ is merely a legal description of an entity, not ‘moral’ description.
[...] Shaking Up Science? [...]
[...] Shaking Up Science? [...]