{"id":484056,"date":"2010-03-29T08:38:25","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T12:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/climateprogress.org\/?p=22023"},"modified":"2010-03-29T08:38:25","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T12:38:25","slug":"how-scientists-think-%e2%80%94-and-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/484056","title":{"rendered":"How scientists think \u2014 and fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s guest blogger is the best science writer in the country named Easterbrook.\u00a0 Steve is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto.\u00a0 He wrote a much admired comment on RealClimate, which offers a rare look into the scientific mindset.<\/p>\n

<\/span>In the interest of bridging the two cultures, I asked if I could reprint it, and Steve expanded it to add context and links.\u00a0 It has been posted on his blog with the title, “Academics always fight over the peer-review process<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate<\/a> about the Guardian\u2019s investigation<\/a> of the CRU emails fiasco. The Guardian has, until recently, had an outstandingly good record on it\u2019s climate change reporting. It commissioned Fred Pearce to do a detailed investigation into the emails, and he published his results in a 12-part series. While some parts of it are excellent, other parts<\/a> demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of how science works, especially the sections dealing with the peer-review process. These were just hopelessly wrong, as demonstrated by Ben Santer\u2019s rebuttal<\/a> of the specific allegations. In parallel, George Monbiot, who I normally respect as one of the few journalists who really understands the science, has been arguing for Phil Jones to resign<\/a> as head of the CRU at East Anglia, on the basis that his handling of the FOI requests was unprofessional. Monbiot has repeated this more recently, as can be seen in this BBC clip<\/a>, where he is hopelessly ineffective in combating Delingpole\u2019s nonsense, because he\u2019s unwilling to defend the CRU scientists adequately.<\/em><\/p>\n

The problem with both Pearce\u2019s investigation, and Monbiot\u2019s criticisms of Prof Jones is that neither has any idea of what academic research looks like from the inside, nor how scientists normally talk to one another. The following is my attempt to explain this context, and in particular why scientists talking freely among themselves might seem to rude or worse. Enough people liked my comment at RC that I decided to edit it a little and post it here (the original has already been reposted at ClimateSight<\/a> and Prof Mandia\u2019s blog<\/a>). I should add one disclaimer: I don\u2019t mean to suggest here that scientists are not nice people \u2013 the climate scientists I\u2019ve gotten to know over the past few years are some of the nicest people you could ever ask to meet. It\u2019s just that scientists are extremely passionate about the integrity of their work, and don\u2019t take kindly to people pissing them around. Okay, now read on\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Once we\u2019ve gotten past the quote-mining and distortion<\/a>, the worst that can be said about the CRU emails is that the scientists sometimes come across as rude or dismissive, and say things in the emails that really aren\u2019t very nice. However, the personal email messages\u00a0between senior academics in any field are frequently not very nice. We tend to be very blunt about what appears to us as ignorance, and intolerant of anything that wastes our time<\/a>, or distracts us from our work. And when we think (rightly or wrongly) that the peer review process has let another crap paper through, we certainly don\u2019t hold back in expressing our opinions to one another. Which is of course completely different to how we behave when we meet one another. Most scientists distinguish clearly between the intellectual cut and thrust (in which we\u2019re sometimes very rude about one another\u2019s ideas) and our social interactions (in which we all get together over a beer and bitch about the downsides of academic life). Occasionally, there\u2019s someone who is unable to separate the two, and takes the intellectual jabs personally, but such people are rare enough in most scientific fields that the rest of us know exactly who they are, and try to avoid them at conferences.<\/p>\n

Part of this is due to the nature of academic research. Most career academics have large egos and very thick skins.\u00a0I think the tenure process and the peer review process filter out those who don\u2019t. We\u2019re all jostling to get our work published and recognised, often by pointing out how flawed everyone else\u2019s work is. But we also\u00a0care deeply about intellectual rigor, and preserving the integrity of the published body of knowledge. And we also know that many key career milestones are dependent on being respected (and preferably liked) by others in the field, such as the more senior people who might get asked to write recommendation letters for tenure and promotion and honors, or the scientists with competing theories who will get asked to peer review our papers.<\/p>\n

Which means in public (e.g. in conference talks and published papers) our criticisms of others are usually carefully coded to appear polite and respectful. For example, a published paper might talk about making \u201can improvement on the methodology of Bloggs et al\u201d. Meanwhile, in private, when talking to our colleagues, we\u2019re more likely to say that Bloggs\u2019 work is complete rubbish, and should never have been published in the first place, and anyway everyone knows Bloggs didn\u2019t do any of the work himself, and the only decent bits are due to his poor, underpaid postdoc<\/a>, who never gets any credit for her efforts. (Yes, academics like to gossip about one another just as regular people do).\u00a0This kind of blunt rudeness is common in private emails, especially when we\u2019re discussing other scientists behind their backs with likeminded colleagues. Don\u2019t be fooled by the more measured politeness in public: when we think an idea is wrong, we\u2019ll tear it to shreds.<\/p>\n

Now, in climate science, all our conventions are being broken. Private email exchanges are being made public. People who have no scientific training and\/or no prior exposure to the scientific culture are attempting to engage in a discourse with scientists, and neither side understands the other. People misquoting scientists, and trying to trip them up with loaded questions. And, occasionally, resorting to death threatst. Outside of the scientific community, most people just don\u2019t understand how science works, and so don\u2019t know how to make sense of what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

And scientists don\u2019t really know how to engage with\u00a0these strange outsiders. Scientists normally only interact with other scientists. We live rather sheltered lives; they don\u2019t call it the ivory tower for nothing. When scientists are attacked for political reasons, we mistake it for an intellectual discussion over brandy in the senior common room. Scientists have no training for political battles, and so our responses often look rude or dismissive to outsiders. Which in turn gets interpreted as unprofessional behaviour by those who don\u2019t understand how scientists talk. And unlike commercial organisations and politicians, universities don\u2019t engage professional PR firms to make us look good, and we academics would be horrified if they did: horrified at the expense, and horrified by the idea that our research might need to be communicated on anything other than its scientific merits.<\/p>\n

Journalists like Monbiot, despite all his brilliant work in keeping up with the science and trying to explain it to the masses, just haven\u2019t ever experienced academic culture from the inside. Hence his call, which he keeps repeating, for Phil Jones to resign, on the basis that Phil reacted unprofessionally to FOI requests. But if you keep provoking a scientist with nonsense, you\u2019ll get a hostile response. Any fool knows you don\u2019t get data from a scientist by using FOI requests, you do it by stroking their ego a little, or by engaging them with a compelling research idea that you need the data to pursue. And in the rare cases where this doesn\u2019t work, you do some extra work yourself to reconstruct the data you need using other sources, or you test your hypothesis using a different approach (because it\u2019s the research result we care about, not any particular dataset). So to a scientist, anyone stupid enough to try to get scientific data through repeated FOI requests quite clearly deserves our utter contempt. Jones was merely expressing (in private) a sentiment that most scientists would share \u2013 and extreme frustration with people who clearly don\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n

The same misunderstandings occur when outsiders look at how we talk about the peer-review process. Outsiders tend to think that all published papers are somehow equal in merit, and that peer-review is a magical process that only lets the truth through (hint: we refer to it more often as a crap-shoot). Scientists know that some papers are accepted because they are brilliant, are others are accepted because its hard to tell whether they are any good, and publication might provoke other scientists to do the necessary followup work. We know some published papers are worth reading, and some should be ignored.\u00a0So, we\u2019re natural skeptics \u2013 we\u00a0tend to think that most new published results are likely to be wrong, and we tend to accept them only once they\u2019ve been repeatedly tested and refined.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re used to having our own papers rejected from time to time, and we learn how to deal with it \u2013 quite clearly the reviewers were stupid, and we\u2019ll show them by getting it published elsewhere (remember, big ego, thick skin). We\u2019re also used to seeing the occasional crap paper get accepted (even into our most prized journals), and again we understand that the reviewers were stupid, and the journal editors incompetent, and we waste no time in expressing that. And if there\u2019s a particularly egregious example, everyone in the community will know about it, everyone will agree it\u2019s bad, and some of us will start complaining loudly about the idiot editor who let it through. Yet at the same time, we\u2019re all reviewers, and some of us are editors, so it\u2019s understood that the people we\u2019re calling stupid and incompetent are our colleagues. And a big part of calling them stupid or incompetent is to get them to be more rigorous next time round, and it works because no honest scientist wants to be seen as lacking rigor. What looks to the outsider like a bunch of scientists trying to subvert some gold standard of scientific truth is really just scientists trying to goad one another into doing a better job in what we all know is a messy, noisy process.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that scientists will always tend to be rude to ignorant and lazy people, because we expect to see in one another a driving desire to master complex ideas and to work damn hard at it. Unfortunately the outside world (and many journalists) interpret that rudeness as unprofessional conduct. And because they don\u2019t see it every day (like we do!) they\u2019re horrified.<\/p>\n

Some people have suggested that scientists need to wise up, and learn how to present themselves better on the public stage. Indeed, the Guardian published an editorial<\/a> calling for the emergence of new leaders from the scientific community who can explain the science. This is naive and irresponsible. It completely ignores the nature of the current wave of attacks on scientists, and what motivates them. No scientist can be an effective communicator in a world where those with vested interests will do everything they can to destroy his or her reputation. The scientific community doesn\u2019t have the resources to defend itself in this situation, and quite frankly it shouldn\u2019t have to.\u00a0What we really need is for newspaper editors, politicians, and business leaders to start acting responsibly, make the effort to understand what the science is saying, make the effort to understand what really driving these swiftboat-style attacks on scientists, and then shift the discourse from endless dissection of scientists\u2019 emails onto useful, substantive discussions of the policy choices we\u2019re faced with.<\/p>\n

– Steve Easterbrook<\/p>\n

Related Post:<\/p>\n