01. I always tend to feel affectionate toward the users of the products I work on, but these people especially affect me.
02. To be fair, that’s a generalization. There are many critiques of it exactly from within.
03. I have been looking at case studies involving environmental pollutants in the 80s and 90s and how they were uncovered by somebody’s mom performing inductive research (e.g. Love Canal) and why standard epidemiological science missed the same thing for a crinimally long time. In fact, criminal is the right word becuase the lay researchers involved had to resort to legal and political action to get anything done.
04. People usually express it as a concern for the individual or the outlier who might be missed in a big study. It’s rational to value human life.

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.

~

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.

~

Guys? Guys? Where is everyone?

01. Isn’t it fascinating how things loop back through history, both culturally and scientifically? We couldn’t have had feminism if we’d gone on being obsessed with how men are animals and women weak, but now we are finding that despite what we’d had to tell ourselves in our efforts for parity between the sexes, we’re very different from one another—and our physical fragilities are often distinctly defined by sex. And we couldn’t listen to all those cranks in the early part of the twentieth century who were talking, as it turns out, with some insight about the “devitalization of the soil” and what that would do to our agricultural system and to us, because they were also spouting about racial fitness and who should and shouldn’t get to breed based on the knobbiness of their cranium. There are these little eddies of pseudoscience where truth gets trapped like hair in the shower drain, but almost no one has the stomach to stick their arm down and poke around.
02. Again, the blops of truth floating in a murky mess of something else—those people who say that the harm already done is so egregious that simply treating the child with ordinary, consistent kindness is not enough are probably right. I weep like a sponge every time I hear that This American Life episode on unconditional love.

My website got devoured by spambots, but the timing was great because as it happened, I didn’t have anything nice to say, and so was overflowing with nothing. When the train of thought gets going too relentlessly in one direction, it usually just derails in a twisted wreckage of half finished sentences and eye rolling and nothing gets written down. For example, the other day I was reading ancient Bowlby on attachment theory (A beautiful triumph of observation, studded with a variety of little sexist nuggets that tie it securely to its era.01 ) because sometimes I need confirmation that I have not broken my child, as he still regularly sobs when I leave the room for thirty seconds or a work day. (I know, I know—but these things aren’t rational. “The goal of the child is to remain near the caregiver” was reassuring.) Somehow from there I moved on to reading about the peculiarly American phenomena of attachment therapy, wherein attachment theory is used to justify some truly terrible things done to the most powerless people. Attachment therapy purports to be a way of curing the secondary injury done to babies and little children when previous neglect or abuse leaves them without the emotional/neurological(?) equipment to form a meaningful, trusting bond with their caregiver. It is inherently coercive, and is associated with physical and mental violence against children. Wikipedia, last I checked, notes the American-ness of attachment therapy and relates it to American wealth allowing international adoptions from countries where children may have had poor care in early childhood. Attachment therapy manages to place the onus on the affected child to change to accommodate the adults, rather than the other way around, which a really basic reading of the research on attachment would indicate.02 It occurred to me that that’s the part so specifically American. We have an awful national capacity for feeling victimized by the powerless. At first glance, attachment therapy seems so bizarre that one assumes it must be some odd cultural anomaly, but look again and it’s not. It’s an almost inevitable boiling up of our national outrage toward the helpless. Who could possibly be more helpless than children injured by adults? There’s a deep and horrible cynicism in the idea that we need to constantly defend ourselves from being manipulated by the truly powerless; that we need to demonstrate to the helpless the depths of their subjection.  We need them to know that we will break them permanently should they make any attempt to use any small resources of volition they might scrounge together. Because, god forbid we, the ones with the power, ever “feel manipulated.”

And since that pretty much covers the way we feel about everything from newborns to school teachers, garbage collection, and foreign policy, that’s about where the train derails and I need to go lie down. However, instead I ordered The Road to Evergreen (the comments thread in that link is worth reading), in which Rachael Stryker looks at the wreckage of the colliding cultural assumptions surrounding attachment therapy.

~

And speaking of childs, an update on mine. Aurelito-Roly is three and a half now, long-legged, and eats more than I do. He told me a joke the other morning that went like this: “This is a bird sauce joke. Bird, bird, bird! (Pause.) That’s not a bird, it’s a sauce!” Pretty sure he’s a genius and will be our ticket to wealth and fame. Speaking of which, we have started to look at schools (If we manage to send him to a good public preschool next year, we will be rich—rich, I tell you! Babysitting is expensive—expensive, I tell you!) and world, I want to apologize, at least temporarily, for sighing and going limp when you started talking about finding a school for your child, because I am right with you, talking a hundred miles and hour and clutching my forehead. I don’t give a damn about eventual ivy league schools, but I hate the idea of sending someone I love off to something he detests or is bored by every day, all day. We are about twenty minutes away from a couple of really wonderful progressive public schools in East Harlem, bursting with violins and drums and cooking and ceramics and dancing and guinea pigs and ice skating in Central Park; and we are pinning an awful lot of our hopes on the lottery admission process for one of those. Unfortunately everyone else we know is too.

~

And I just thought of one other thing—remember that story about James Fallon’s work? He found, using PET scans, that serial killers all had in common a pattern of low activity in the orbital cortex, but that that pattern alone was not enough to predict sociopathic behaviour.

The end.

01. I worked on a project involving the NYC school system years ago and went around interviewing teachers and administrators all over the city as a part of my research. It flattened me. There was so much idiocy, so much pointless complexity, shame, and paranoia, that I walked away with less comprehension of the individuals I was researching that I had to begin with. Who were these people who could tolerate such frustration and lack of autonomy every day of their lives? A few of my interviewees were, of course, just too dumb to notice. But how could anyone as creative and intelligent as some of the people I met manage to take any satisfaction in what they were doing in a structure apparently designed to systematically humiliate and demotivate them? I still don't know, but I'm pretty sure the key to fixing American education is to make teaching a rewarding career for inventive, smart people. (Notice how I just fixed American education?)

I am collaborating with my neighbor-friend to write a thing (we aren’t sure what it is yet) and we are working on dialogue in which two characters talk about why they each choose to work within different, but equally impossible systems—health care and public school. It’s been really hard for me because the idea of choosing to work within a sprawling system like either of those sounds crushing to me01, but the characters know with certainty (as does my writing partner, who used to be a public school teacher and now works in health care) that for the real, individual students and patients involved, their presence makes things go unequivocally better. And that’s enough of a reason. If it weren’t, they are good at it (they say like a chorus of Flannery O’Conners), and that together that makes it more than enough.

I suppose that’s the caketaker. I am not so good at it. I can’t take my eyes off the crazy-redundant-looping-mesmerizing systems. And I am, it not good, at least better at thinking about how to skip or short-circuit pieces of those, than I am at anything that requires I ignore them. Viz: I get all tangled up in the morality of either decision—work to staunch the blood flow from real, existing people and risk enabling a broken, sometimes bad system to continue to function, or work to fix the system and risk watching real, existing people topple over from blood loss.

I read an article a while ago about differences in the cultural context of drinking and drunkenness and it discusses how it turns out drinking doesn’t exactly break down our inhibitions so much as cut us off from any concern that’s not immediately in front of us. And I think to do the triage work, the work that real live people deserve, the work I admire and am horrified by, I would have to stay pretty drunk, pretty much all the time.

~

Yeah, yeah, and while I’m at it: Hey famous hipster writer, I call bullshit on your practice of regularly admitting to something really ugly and then refusing to take any responsibility for it by saying everyone feels that way and if they don’t, they aren’t being honest. No, not all of us are the same kind of asshole you are. Some of us have a rich array of other, different failings and if you were more curious about the inner lives of other people, you might productively notice them.