Month: October 2013

The latest social work failure – child abused to death – being debated everywhere, is just another symptom of the underlying problem of scientific objectivity getting into too many places where it shouldn’t.

• “Politician” claims social worker seeing dog mess in room where child is kept (after long history of other visits and issues) should simply have the right to remove the child on the evidence of their own senses.
• “Professional” responds that only police can force entry and removal and only after court proceeding and only after sufficient “evidence” has been gathered and “due process” has been followed, etc.

Precisely the point. In appropriate cases the evidence of the social worker’s own nose should suffice as due process.

The reason why this is not accepted by the professional institutions, is the counter case. To indemnify against accidentally over-zealous action causing damage where there was none – the usual rights and responsibilities challenge. (The old Cleveland child-abuse scandal, for example.)

What’s missing ? The idea of wisdom. The idea that the individual social worker can (be able, be trusted to) make such a decision. Instead, the idea that evidence and justification is something scientific, to be “tested” by formal process. Well, beyond science it’s not scientific, nor even wholly objective. But sadly, the values of science are privileged, allowed to take precedence over values of humanity, in a social context, everywhere beyond the domain of science in fact.

Social workers need to be entrusted with wisdom and common sense. (So recruitment and training and work assignment, and management, assessment and sanctioning, etc, all need to be based on this. Human values and experience of humanity being at least (if not more in domains like social work) as valuable as formal “qualifications” and knowledge of application of formal procedures.

The reason we have the problems we have is because we don’t trust our social workers, or can’t trust them except through formal – objective, scientific – procedure. Another case of the measures devaluing the work, and tending the work towards lower value, the complete opposite of what is required. The balance of human rights and responsibilities is a value judgement, a human value judgement involving the humanities NOT science alone.

Science is immensely valuable in its domain, but destroys (human) value in domains where its use is misguided.

Interestingly, just seconds after the previous post on the disservice done to science by the conflation of science and technology, Lisa Jardine also tweeted a link to this Sue Nelson piece on “BBC lads’ science” in the Telegraph. And, only hours after Jim AlKhalili had tweeted to “boast” (tongue in cheek) about acquisition of  his iPhone5 – the “latest boys’ toy”. Man, what a tangled web.

[Hold – still trying to find 5 minutes also to comment on this “Round III” response by Pinker to Wieseltier on the interminable science vs the humanities debate in New Republic, tweeted by Tiff Jenkins.]

Where to start? Scientists, science journalists and science media-folk, do science a disservice, when they promote science wrongly. And, in doing so, that is also a disservice to the society they aim to serve. So what could possibly be wrong about the way science is promoted?

Promote science as an enterprise of wonder in its own right, and as as a route to understanding the wonders and workings of the world. Go for it, surely the core aim of science.

Promote science as the source of understanding, discovery and development of enabling technologies that underlie the sustainable advancement of human society in the cosmos. We’d be mad no to. Remember, a flint hand tool, whose development depended on recognising cleavage planes in otherwise continuous naturally occurring hard material, was new technology once, as all technology is.

By promotion, I’m talking about informing and educating society about the above, to attract interest and resources – individuals to join the enterprise, and funds to support their work and their organisations, both commercial and institutional. All valid, laudable and indeed essential to the enterprise and to society itself.

But let’s not confuse promotion with education, and let’s not confuse education about science with science education. Sure each contributes to the other in a self-reinforcing virtuous-circle. Education that actually achieves understanding in the topic, also promotes effort towards achieving more of the same. Some aspects of education are part of that valid promotion. But education that inspires interest without actually achieving understanding, nevertheless also achieves the promotion objectives, so it is important to recognise that science education is more than science promotion.

The success of celebrity scientists – and celebrity honorary-science-supporting comics – in TV and Radio does a great deal to blur that distinction. If this played only into the virtuous-circle of promoting science (and technology) it would be OK, but through ever more ubiquitous public and social media debates on the biggest science-related issues of our times, the blurring of debate about and understanding of science issues is far more dangerous to the future of humanity.

The “lads’ science” of Sue Nelson’s piece reflects part of this. The very fact that “boys toys” technology and engineering media like Top Gear can be rolled into the same breath as the more explicitly “science” light-weight media of the likes of O’Briain, Fry, Ince and Cox is part of the conflation of science with its technological products.

Personally (as a bloke) I can take or leave “boys’ toys”, and the fact that these are obsessions of laddish males reflects well on the fairer sex IMHO – vive la differance (*). But science should not taint itself with such crass commercialism. Science – even when promoting itself publicly, commercially – needs to maintain blue-water between its gender-neutral self and the technology / life-style marketing of boys’ toys.

Maintaining boundaries – between science and technology in this case – is not just about agreeing to disagree about the distinction – that’s only ever a temporary cease-fire.  In fact it never needs to be about “warring” at all. Boundaries reflect evolving definitions of the domains either side, where fences make good neighbours. The science / technology boundary is problematic enough itself, as described by the Sue Nelson piece, but a mere trifle compared to the wider science vs humanities debacle dangerously rail-roading wisdom out of the world at large.

[More on the science / humanities distinction – and the ongoing Pinker / Wieseltier dialogue – later.]

[(*) More on the positive value of real gender differences – not in science, but where they matter – in this dissertation.]

Lisa Jardine tweeted a link to this piece by Alice Bell, on BP funding of the International Centre for Advanced materials with the comment “More please.”

In so far as the emphasised conclusion is not to simply object to, or place demands on, industrial funding of “science”, but that the public debate should aim to  ask questions, I’d wholeheartedly agree.

But it raises two issues for me, about the questions that need to be asked.

One is that science itself should also remember that it’s main job is to ask questions.

Technology or applied science, unlike science itself, concerned with applications of sufficient potential value to attract industrial funding. Still research, still risk money, but quite different to science research. One may have ethical doubts as to “strings attached” to research funding for science itself, though clearly it does happen successfully, and clearly the funding and activity of the technology also supports the activities of science too, but it’s important to notice the distinction.

Science’s job is to ask the questions of knowledge quite independent of their potential for technology applications.

Secondly, the piece, like the research centre and its funding, concerns science & technology, but conveniently uses the topic “science”. Blurred for easy reading and digestion, and of course, blurring to ease the spin-off funding into science itself. But this is part of a trend of privileging the position of science in society, treating science as the catch-all, the superset of all things, to which science relates – which is most things one way or another. Science is science, and applied science or technology is both science and its application. Application of science is neither science nor a subset of science. Application involves many more human values than are found in your science.

Constantly blurring this important distinction – science over-reaching its remit – is one source of the interminable science vs dogma wars, where many supporters of science do science a disservice, by ignoring values between the dogmatic extremes.