| Wednesday, August
17, 2005 Off to Seattle tomorrow for the Writers of the
Future thing.
I was reading the editorial in the latest Scientific American, and
apparently I need to write, yet again, my essay on Voodoo Sciences and the
difference between citizen, novelist, advocate, and scientist. Sigh.
Apparently the honorable editors at Scientific American have never learned.
Neither has Dawkins, but that's another story.
===================
Subject: Re: This will make you proud
http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/THISWILLMAKEYOUPROUD.HTML
Copy and Paste. It will make you proud!!!
"GOD BLESS AMERICA"
Anne
=============
Subject: windows worm
Dear Jerry:
I know people probably are very grateful for your
Windows worm/virus/ malware warnings but I'm really getting to the point,
when I see a headline like today's on CNN Online "WORM HITS WINDOWS 2000",
of asking that the implicit footnote (that is: "Macs unaffected") be made
explicit. Maybe OS X will get cracked some day and I'll be laughing out of
the other side of my mouth, but really: if you want a secure, reliable,
attractive OS get (and use) an Apple!
All the best,
Tim Loeb
For now, at least. It is not inevitable. Linux has been hit (not as hard
as Microsoft, but hit). Apple will not be safe forever. Alas.
====================
=====================
Science, Scientific American,
Voodoo, Stem Cells, and the Public
Scientific American came today. I do not usually read the magazine except
when a particular article interests me. I have the same habit regarding
Atlantic magazine. Enough articles in each are worth reading that I will
continue to subscribe, but the editorial philosophy is so predictable as to
have no information content, and/or it is infuriatingly wrong, and I don't
need extra strains on my blood pressure.
But once I a while I will read the front matter in Scientific American,
and I did today. The editorial, and "The Skeptic" column were as I expected:
nothing awful, but predictable given the subject matter, preaching to their
audience that the flaws in evolutionary theory do not prove the existence of
God or the fundamental unsoundness of evolutionary theory (although which
evolutionary theory is glossed over, just as people who thought Steven Jay
Gould's views on evolution dead wrong would still use his arguments against
theological intervention). None of that is very interesting, at least to me.
There is also the usual insistence that science must lead in public
policy, and scientists must be the leaders, and it is meet, right, and their
bounden duty to be so. Of course sometimes they are only citizens and they
must then admit that, but, etc. etc. What there isn't is any glimmering that
scientists and advocates have different jobs, and operate by different
rules, and when scientists become advocates they cease to be scientists, and
have no more credibility than any other advocate. I wrote all this thirty
years ago in my C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture "The Voodoo Sciences"; but
apparently the lesson isn't being learned very well. It is simply this:
novelists need only be plausible, and a novelist is no more expert than
anyone else (although he may be more persuasive than some others). Advocates
need only present evidence -- the information and data favorable to
their case; they can rely on the opposition to produce the counter
arguments. Scientists, though, must deal with data, and that includes all of
it, most particularly including the evidence and data unfavorable to their
theory, and if their theory does not account for known facts and data it is
the job of the scientist to call attention to this, not to gloss it over.
That's the nature of science. "My theory accounts for almost all the
data. Alas, here are these inconvenient data points it cannot predict or
explain, but no one else's theory does as well as mine with the major part
of the data."
Of course that isn't what the "scientists" who are all out for Kyoto and
other policies that implement "regulatory" science say. They put on their
white coats and stand in their laboratories surrounded by students and
expensive equipment and computers (mostly paid for by tax money) and
shamelessly speak as if they were scientists -- but they act like any lawyer
presenting only his side of the case. And there are very few exceptions to
this in major scientific debates.
Now let's talk about Stem Cells and California. A real estate agent and
land speculator grown wealthy invested $2 million of his own money to get
control of about $3 billion to be spent on Stem Cell Research. So far,
according to Scientific American, the Institute he is to head that will dole
out this public money isn't structured, but Real Soon Now.
Robert Klein, the real estate developer who sparked the California Stem
Cell Research and Cures Initiative wants to set things up "to shield
decision making from the bureaucracy of state government and allow the
agency to operate like an entrepreneurial startup." Now that scares me
already. I've seen entrepreneurs running startups and burning capital. Told
that a Saturn is a great car, they think their public image requires a BMW,
and that the company needs an expensive headquarters in a high cost city
rather than more modest quarters in a lower cost region. There are a few
exceptions to this, but not enough to give me a warm feeling about spending
public money in outfits that operate like an entrepreneurial startup.
He believes, he says, that he has a mandate from the public to improve
the research funding model. Given that I doubt one in ten Californians have
the faintest idea of how NIH operates, or how NSF operates (and how those
differ from each other, and from mixed grant and operations agencies like
NASA), I do not think he has a mandate to improve the grant structure. I
think he has a mandate from the public to cure Alzheimer's, diabetes, and
Parkinson's disease. That's sure what the campaign seemed to be promising.
Give us the public money and we'll get the job done, with stem cells.
Of course the University of California, and NIH, and a bunch of other
outfits have their own ideas of how that money ought to be dispensed. To
begin with, the salaries of the research people shouldn't be set by the
public or legislature. They ought to be set by "peers", just as tax
supported universities ought to be "self governing" meaning that salaries
and promotions should be set by tenured faculty acting in committees and on
the faculty senate. None of this public participation: the public did its
part by paying taxes. Now kindly get out of the way and let us do what we
know how to do. Oh, and it will cost you more next year, and why were you so
stingy this year?
Gordon Keller of the Mount Sinai Medical Research Center argues with
state financing anyway. Exactly what he wants isn't entirely clear, but he
says of state efforts, well, many states support unrestricted stem cell
research but six states, while supporting research in embryonic stem cells,
have banned funding cloning research. "How," Dr. Klein asks, "can it be
moral to do research with one type of funds, but not with the other?"
And of course everyone is concerned that the public has too much power in
spending this money. Sometimes parents attack research results they don't
like (as in autism research) and even have the nerve to fund studies to test
their own treatment theories. Heresy. "The public drives not just what
disease areas get attention but what the research strategies are," says
Mildred K. Cho, associate director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical
Ethics.
The public just doesn't understand. It's the public's job to pay for all
this. It's the task of our new masters to set up their own self-governing
orders and institutions, and the Fellows of their New Order will determine
who gets the money, and what it will go for, and don't you forget it. And
don't you go raising money to test alternative theories either! That's
unethical.
One thing is certain. We measure institutional effectiveness by how much
of the money they raise goes into the actual work of the institution. The
Salvation Army is up there around 85 to 90%, and few would say that the 10%
or so spent on administration and fund raising is spent frivolously and with
abandon. The California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative mandated
that $3 billion be spent on stem cell research. It will cost $6 billion to
get that much money together. Even if they spend 100% of it on research --
rather unlikely -- they will be down to 50% by the usual standards. One
suspects that the board and staff of the Institute will be paid
"competitive" salaries, meaning the kind of money that University of
California administrators get.
Or competitive with Federal executive pay:
"Executive salaries are currently set at predetermined rates on a
six-step salary schedule. Under federal law, salaries for the SES are capped
at the third-highest pay level on the Executive Schedule, which sets
salaries for members of Congress and executive branch political appointees.
This year, the third-highest level is $142,500, and according to Office of
Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James, about 60 percent of the SES
is paid at the current cap. The Senior Executives Association, the
professional association for the 7,000 members of the SES, has lobbied
Congress and the administration for several years to raise the cap.
"There are some civil service issues that sharply divide people," said
Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., who introduced the House version of the SES bill.
"Pay compression is certainly not one of them. It is remarkable to think
that more than 60 percent of the senior executives earn the same salary,
simply because Congress has not been willing to lift the pay cap." Davis is
chairwoman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service and
Agency Organization.
"The pending legislation would abolish the six steps and change the pay
range to a salary band that starts at $102,000 and is capped at $154,700.
Political appointees could set executives' salaries at any amount within
that range. "
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0403/041403t1.htm
Well, we will see. But if Klein thinks he has a mandate to change the
way research projects are managed, he's wrong: his mandate is to cure
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which is what the public thought it was
voting for when it handed over $3billion and authorized spending $6
billion to get it.
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