EVERYONE'S A WHINGER!!!!

We love a good moan, don’t we? In fact, Mola mola’s First Law^TM states that any two scientists, within 10 minutes of meeting in a social situation, will have discussed a minimum of two of the following three topics: 1. The tyrany of Impact Factors
2. The injustices of the funding system
3. The iniquities of peer review

Well, on the issue of peer review at least the UK government feels your pain. A new Commons Select Committee

…invites evidence on the operation and effectiveness of the peer review process used to examine and validate scientific results and papers prior to publication. The Committee welcomes submissions on all aspect of the process and among the issues it is likely to examine are the following:

• the strengths and weaknesses of peer review as a quality control mechanism for scientists, publishers and the public;
• measures to strengthen peer review;
• the value and use of peer reviewed science on advancing and testing scientific knowledge;
• the value and use of peer reviewed science in informing public debate;
• the extent to which peer review varies between scientific disciplines and between countries across the world;
• the processes by which reviewers with the requisite skills and knowledge are identified, in particular as the volume of multi-disciplinary research increases;
• the impact of IT and greater use of online resources on the peer review process; and
• possible alternatives to peer review.

The Committee welcomes submissions from scientists whose material has been peer reviewed, those who commission peer reviews and those who carry out peer review.

(Incidentally, in no way should this be seen as an attempt by certain right wing forces, frustrated by the failure of inquiry after inquiry to find any wrong-doing at a certain East Anglian institution, to undermine instead the very machinery of science. Oh no, that would be a terribly cynical interpretation.)

Now, there’s a lot that can be said on this, and various tweaks that I would like to see to the system as it currently stands. But I’m posting this now because I worry that the enquiry will be dominated by strident voices with, shall we say, eccentric ‘solutions’ to problems that I’m yet to be convinced really exists. I don’t think the peer review system is in crisis (there, I’ve said it!), whether for assessing grant proposals or reviewing manuscripts. Rather, I think it works pretty well in its primary role (good stuff tends to get through (eventually…), poor stuff gets weeded out).

I feel strongly that this moderate view needs to be heard by the enquiry. I intend to submit something, and will post my submission here. You should have a go too.

The Commentator's Fallacy, or The Sports Fan's Lament

The foibles of sports commentators are especially obvious to me during the annual 6 Nations rugby tournament, one of those all too rare confluences of a sport that interests me appearing on a TV channel to which I have access. There is one particular logical fallacy that is voiced time and again, to the extent that it has slowly dawned on me that, rather than just bemoaning the poor luck of their team, people actually believe it. The scenario is as follows: In the 3rd minute of the crunch game between, say, England and Wales, the Welsh kicker misses an easy 3 point penalty. At the end of the 80 minute game, Wales have lost by 2 points (a far fetched scenario, I know, for the Welsh to have got so close). Post-match, pundits will say something along the lines of, “If only Jones had kicked that early penalty, Wales would have won by a point”.

More generally, the total value of the missed kicks / disallowed goals / dropped catches / etc. will be added on to a team’s score, and the ‘result’ changed accordingly in the commentators’ minds.

I had always assumed that this argument was more subtle, along the lines of, “If we’d got those early points, the whole tenor of the game would perhaps have changed.” But I’m increasingly, incredulously aware that a large number of people actually seem to hold by the “add missed opportunities to final score, voila” school of post-match assessment.

Essentially, this sees all events within a match as simply additive and strictly linear, rather than interacting in multiply complex ways (see, there is a sciency bit!) So, in the rugby example, the restart following a missed penalty kick takes place in an entirely different part of the pitch than the restart after a successful kick – everything that follows is on a new, unique course as a result. Of course, this is hardly an insightful observation. But it is an example of the corruption of the word ‘analysis’ that occurs in a sporting context (‘statistics’ is another that suffers…)

That said, if you add 7 points for Mark Cueto’s disallowed try (assuming, of course, that St Jonny would have converted it), the 2007 World Cup Final becomes a whole new ballgame…

Two cheers for Sir Paul

Earlier this week, the BBC flagship science programme Horizon screened Science Under Attack. This was billed as an examination by Sir Paul Nurse – Nobel laureate and new president of the Royal Society – of why science appears to be under attack, “from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.” In reality, it was much more focused on the first of these, using stunning visuals from NASA, and some telling analogies to reaffirm the reality of man-made climate change. He really only touched on the other issues to learn what climate scientists could learn from these ‘controversies’.

One thing I learnt is that if science is under attack, I want Paul Nurse as the linchpin of my defence. He quietly cut down to size people who were badly in need of it (Tip: if you are a jobbing Daily Telegraph journalist, do not pick a fight over science with the Nobel laureate President of the Royal Society), without hitting the pit-bull mode of some other defenders of science. He dealt with the HIV-AIDS issue with compassion but firmness, was gently dismissive of octogenarian contrarian Fred Singer, and did a thorough debunking of the media hyperbole over climategate.

Why only two cheers then?

Well, I just felt the programme rather fizzled out in the usual platitudes about what ‘we’ (scientists now, not the general viewer) need to do to restore public trust: concentrate on doing excellent science, stay out of politics, but communicate what we do well.

OK. But how, exactly? I would argue for instance that it is now impossible to have an apolitical stance on climate change. The very act of studying climate change – in particular if your work adds to the overwhelming consensus view – will be seen as a political stance by the credulous (or ‘sceptics’, as they like to style themselves). Climate scientists have been communicating their science extremely effectively, probably more so than almost any other group of scientists, for many years. Yet trust is broken, and I don’t think that simply piling up more evidence will restore it.

More generally, it’s a fallacy anyway to say that scientists are not already engaged in communicating their work. Tim Radford’s piece in Nature this week nicely tackles the ‘canard’ that scientists are not good communicators. (Although he does repeat the idea that “the language, form and conventions of the published scientific paper could almost have been devised to conceal information”, which I think is only partly true these days: sure, technical publications assume technical knowledge, but it’s certainly my impression that scientific writing is far less opaque than it used to be, with the widespread replacement of the old stereotypical convoluted passive-tense clauses (‘an experiment was conducted…’) with clearer, much more active prose (’here’s what we did…’)).

Radford concludes that “…alas, people… listen selectively, even to the best communicators”, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. The so-called (and much derided) ‘deficit model’ of science communication states that, if we can just get sufficient information out there, the public will finally understand. But if people passionately believe something different, or don’t trust where the information is coming from, then this is bound to fail.

I don’t have an answer, but was hoping Sir Paul might have.