I went with a friend to the Renaissance portrait show at the Met the other day. Since we were there early in the morning, the crowds arrived only as we were leaving, so we were able to stroll through the whole thing, making shameless eye contact with the subjects and speculating whether each must have been pleased or not with their likenesses.

The show is enormous and contains a number of studies in chalk, terra cotta, and drypoint alongside the final paintings or marble busts. Unsurprisingly, the studies, even the prints, are all a lot more lively than the final works. The final works, for which the artists were presumably paid, contain a spectrum of corrective orthodontics (there were a lot of merciless underbites), softened double chins, gently backlit bugeyes and bulbous noses. They have a flatness and formality that is undoubtedly due to the nature of the commission (paint someone powerful so they’ll like it and not ruin your career), but was also endearingly familiar to me in a way that reminded me how I am often pleased with my own accidental sketches but loathe the things I try to make good enough to keep. (I was going to say that making something intended not to be seen is uncomplicated. But it’s just its own rare kind of complicated.)

There were clouds of flour, long-haired unicorns (horns both up and down), pollen and fertility symbols everywhere, half open doors, birds and hands that lapped their frames, distant mountain rages and seascapes in perfect focus behind eyebrowless beauties and stern merchants; one serene maiden wore her family’s crest, enormous stylized testicles, embroidered on her marble sleeves.

I thought about art and making things and getting paid or not to make things and how art once had a practical use in seizing and maintaining power and wealth, in stabilizing a society, and how an art market separate from commerce hasn’t necessarily been all good for art in general, but that the future of commercial art isn’t looking any better. I think we’ve all sensed this inevitable future in which making new things is almost valueless even while we maintained an unjustified faith that things would work out somehow because we simply couldn’t bear to picture this version of the future.

At the end of the show was a brown wall on which was aggressively printed the name of the company supplying the paint for the walls of the exhibition.

My review of the show is as follows: Lovely, lovely! and what an impressive lot of tall hats and turbans! (I am have been reading about orientalism in fashion and my simultaneous disapproval and painful covetousness of the droopily gilded Edwardian era clothing, leaves me turban-aware.) The Botticellis notwithstanding, the Memling portraits were my favorites, and we stopped for a moment on the way out to visit Tommaso Portinari and His Wife, who reside in eternal piety, his genuine, hers something less, outside the show in the main collection. (I like Mrs. Portinari. She looks like she’s trying not to giggle for fear of hurting her husband’s feelings.) For a good twenty minutes after we left, the features of everyone around me seemed luminous and sharp, and the jowels and baseball hats and whiskers and bald spots and double chins all seemed beautifully and intentionally made; and because this is New York in December and everyone is clad in voluminous dark puffer coats, the faces seemed to spring forward against the dense black of other centuries.

A male barber shaves all and only those men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?

What’s wrong with using data? Nothing, but how do we know we’re using the right data?  In real life data needs to be seen as a flat, artificially boundried piece of a much larger, messier, multidimensional story. It’s a photograph that usually depicts the most easily captured and quantified piece of the story. Often enough, the most easily captured and quantified data is not be the most meaningful or useful.

It’s easy to get sidetracked. In this case, it turns out the barber in question is eight years old, and I know for a fact he’s got a pituitary problem that means he’ll never disconcert us with any sort of secondary sexual characteristics, so there we have it—problem solved.

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Some-one or two asked me why I don’t write about my kid these days and after some thought I concluded that it’s because I’m doing a pretty lousy job as a mother and feel ashamed. I am finally starting to understand the raging market for Bad Mother literature. It’s a lot easier to field critiques from nosy strangers than to endure the knowledge that you broke your child’s heart.

Confessing publicly is even nicer. Because, between the two of us, I am the only one who can write, I would tell a emotionally nuanced, apparently even-handed story, thrumming with just enough guilt and extenuating circumstances to make all the other mothers generously absolve me with it’s-no-big-deals and do all the hard work of rationalization on my behalf. Unfortunately the pre-rational person injured does not agree that it’s no big deal. Which leads me to cheerfully conclude: 1) It’s impossible to help another person with their pain and 2) we will all die alone. Then I stare into space for a while and think about how pregnancy must be the only time it’s A) possible to really protect someone you love and B) not be truly alone. At which point I wind up with that thought that it’s terribly sad and a great relief not to have any more children.

So speaking of awkward silences, I have been wondering whether the theoretical existence of black swans matters all that much. If I’m surrounded by white swans as far as the eye can see, it seems like a rational (if not logical) decision to bracket the assumption that swans are white, and proceed with my cosmically important swan studies. If my other option is to abandon further swan studies, go to bed and turn my face to the wall until it’s possible to deduce or not the existence of statistically significant set of swans in every possible color, I choose the logically false, but rationally defensible assumption that all swans are white. Meanwhile, I continue to get up in the morning.

The original example of the black swan was used by Hume to demonstrate what’s wrong with inductive reasoning (plenty!). Popper took it further and used it declare that induction simply can’t be a part of scientific methodology. That’s why falsification is the basis of the modern scientific method, i.e. a hypothesis can only be tested and falsified, but not proven. In terms of philosophy, it’s more complicated than that, but in terms of the popular and practical meaning of science—not so much. It’s all pretty logical and defensible in the context of say, theoretical physics or maybe even macroeconomics (is it?), but the holes become obvious when you stand it up against the life sciences. Mervyn Susser, in his excellent and melodramatically titled 1989 essay “Epidemiology Today: A Thought Tormented World,” gives the example of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood.

William Harvey may well have arrived at his hypothesis that the blood circulates by a large leap of the imagination (so Walter Pagel has argued), a leap that would thereby exemplify Popper’s requirement for hypothesis formation. But a reading of de Motu Cordis shows that Harvey’s hypothesis was both preceded and followed by an extensive process of induction. Imagination need not act to the exclusion of inductive reason. By whatever process Harvey reached his hypothesis, he then subjected it to what can be described as hypotheticodeductive tests, being so far again in conformity with Popper. However, he neither refuted his hypothesis nor aimed to do so, but verified it.

So, the ruling out of induction in the biomedical sciences is either a polite consensual bullshit or medicine doesn’t get to be a science. But if medicine doesn’t really get to be science, how much less epidemiology with all it’s wooly sociopolitical context? But no, epidemiology is mostly practiced as though it were abstract science and as though there is no sociopolitical context at all and as though epidemiologists certainly aren’t making any value-based judgments. None of which is true, obviously.

Susser describes this as a conflict between the logical and the rational, and so it is.

I started thinking about all this when I began to do design research on citizen scientists (the beloved users of the beloved thing I am making these days.⁰¹ ) I found that one of their greatest common characteristics is an ill-defined concern that they and their loved ones may be insufficiently protected by science (really epidemiology). It comes down to Susser’s conflict between the logical and the rational. By definition, epidemiology, because it is practiced as though it were a strictly logical Science,⁰² must favor falsely negative associations over falsely positive associations.

It’s only when you apply this protective logic to situations involving the health and quality of life of real, individual humans, that it appears truly grotesque. Its application to something like a potential environmental contaminant involves shocking decisions about value. As a scientist, do you prioritize human health by favoring favor false associations, or the status quo, by favoring negative associations? Real human lives might be lost or destroyed long before there is sufficient evidence to approach the problem deductively or satisfy scientific standards of proof.⁰³ That’s the definition of a value decision. Yet epidemiology is Science and is therefore logical, and so has to deny that value or sociopolitical context enters into it. If you counter the logical with the rational, you are Unscientific.

This is why intelligent, rational people are intuitively skeptical when Studies Prove X Is Completely Safe for Everyone Everywhere. They know you have to be a little bit crazy to be able to reconcile the conflict between the logical and the rational.⁰⁴

If Science denies that scientists must make decisions about value and excludes the inductive reasoning that that motivates so many productive lay researchers (and honestly should motivate biomedical researchers more), maybe it’s time to redefine science.

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And another thing!

Thing A: I was talking to Mitsu about how everyone’s big concern is that lay researchers can’t be trusted not to make up crank theories and allow their personal bias to blind them to the falsifications popping up everywhere in their data. That’s a problem of course, but it’s not unique to individuals. The bias toward the status quo is just as powerful as any personal crank theory, and in the context of orthodoxy, it’s plugged into wide ranging systems of power. The most useful question is the validity of the science, not to whom the science belongs.

Thing B: All of the above is not even taking into account what happens when you try to make sense of really big data without induction. You have to take to your bed. It can’t be done.

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Guys? Guys? Where is everyone?