Sci-fi in aid of Science
I was a pretty big fan of science fiction in my younger days, and still read some from time to time. I think Frank Herbert’s Dune is a great novel (the sequels not so much), enjoyed reading works by Heinlein, Le Guin and Asimov..
One of the genre’s leading lights back then was Arthur C Clarke, who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (in 1982) [not true, see below] on which the film was based. I was not a Clarke fan, don’t remember that I read any of his stuff. However, he made an interesting contribution to the culture beyond his books themselves, when he formulated three ‘laws’ regarding technology that have come to be known as Clarke’s Laws. He didn’t proclaim these all at once, and in any case it is the third law that is most cited, which so far as I can determine first appeared in a letter he wrote to Science in 1968. [If anyone has better info on the third law’s original appearance and antecedents I’d love to hear it.]
Clarke’s Third Law is: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
That strikes me – and many others, apparently – as a perceptive statement. Think of how someone living in 1682 anywhere in the world would regard television or radio.
As with any perceptive and oft-repeated assertion, this prompted others to lay down similar edicts, such as Grey’s Law: “Any sufficiently egregious incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
[I cannot trace Grey’s law back to anyone named Grey – if you can, let me know.]
Note that there is a difference, as Clarke’s law speaks to how something will be perceived, whereas Grey’s points at the consequences of incompetence vs malice. If you are denied a mortgage by a bank despite your stellar credit rating, the impact on you of that decision does not depend on whether it is attributable to the credit officer’s incompetence or dislike of you.
On to Science, then, and what I will call Gelman’s Law (although Gelman himself does not refer to it that way).
Most non-academics I know view academics and their research with a somewhat rosy glow. If someone with letters after their name writes something, and particularly if they write it in an academic journal, they believe it.
It does nothing to increase my popularity with my friends to repeatedly tell them: it ain’t so. There is a lot of crappy (a technical academic term, I will elaborate in future posts) research being done, and a lot of crappy research being published, even in peer-reviewed journals. What is worse is that as far as I can tell, the credible research is almost never the stuff that gets written up in the media. Some version of Gresham’s Law [‘bad money drives out good money’] seems to be at work here.
A blog that I read regularly is titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science (gripping title, eh?), written by Andrew Gelman, a Political Science and Stats prof at Columbia U. I recommend it to you, but warn that you better have your geek hard-hat on for many of the posts.
Although I often disagree with Gelman, he generally writes well and I have learned tons from his blog. One of the things that has endeared it to me is his ongoing campaign against academic fraud and incompetent research.
He has formulated a Law of his own, which he modestly attributes to Clarke, but which I will here dub Gelman’s Third Law:
“Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.”
I think this law combines the insights of Clarke’s and Grey’s. The consequences of believing the results from crappy research do not differ from the consequences of believing the results from fraudulent research, as with Grey. However, it is also true that there is no reason to see the two things as different. If you are so incompetent at research as to produce crap, then you should be seen as a fraud, as with Clarke.
I will be writing about crappy/fraudulent research often here, in hopes of convincing readers that they should be very skeptical the next time they read those deadly words: “Studies show…”
I will close this by referring you, for your reading pleasure, to a post by Gelman titled:
It’s a long post, but non-geeky, and quite illuminating. (Aside: I interviewed for an academic position at U of Nevada in Reno a hundred years ago. They put me up in a casino during my visit. Didn’t gamble, didn’t get a job offer.) You can read more about this intrepid and highly paid Dean here. His story is really making the (academic) rounds these days.
You’re welcome, and stay tuned. I got a million of ‘em….
p.s. Discovered this since I wrote the above, but before posting. One of many reasons this stuff matters, from Nevada Today
University receives largest individual gift in its history to create the George W. Gillemot Aerospace Engineering Department
The $36 million gift is the largest individual cash gift the University has received in its 149-year history
Anyone care to bet on whether this Dean gets canned?
Corrigendum: An alert reader has pointed out that Clarke’s novel was not written in 1982 – indeed, the film came out in 1968. In fact the 2001 film was based largely on one of Clarke’s short stories from 1951: The Sentinel. Clarke did write a novel called 2010: Odyssey Two, in 1982, and a not-so-successful movie was based on that, in 1984.