A Chunk of (Climate) Change

An old saying in investigative journalism is "follow the money."  According to a recent article in the New York Times, that's just what the environmental organization Greenpeace did when it began to look into the funding of publications written by one Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon.  Soon is a researcher associated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and has attracted a lot of publicity for his outspoken comments on global warming, which he appears to doubt is due to man-made causes.  He has made the rounds of conservative talk shows to express his doubts, and that is probably why Greenpeace decided to investigate him.  While Soon has made no secret of the fact that some of his funding came from energy industries and interests, documents obtained by means of the Freedom of Information Act showed that Soon was producing papers to order for specific funders, referring to the papers as  "deliverables."  He received over $400,000 from a prominent electric utility and $230,000 from the Koch Charitable Foundation.  The New York Times reports that the Smithsonian Institution is mounting its own investigation into Soon's dealings, and its acting director admits that the Institute may need to clean up its ethical act with regard to disclosure of funding sources. 

As Newton taught us, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, at least in physics.  The opposite reaction inspired by the Soon affair has come from the U. S. Congress, which has now showered universities and energy companies with letters demanding information about funding sources for scientists who have criticized the establishment view of climate change.  This has prompted Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, to criticize what he calls "fishing expeditions" by Congress, because of the chilling effect it has on academic freedom.

I heard Prof. Dessler speak about a year ago at Texas A&M on the topic of the history of climate-change science.  In general, he is in sympathy with the Greenpeace view that corporate interests are trying to sow discord in the climate-change area, in much the same way that tobacco interests sowed doubt about the link between smoking and cancer in the 1960s.  But he is objective enough to realize that when Congress sends your university a letter asking for documents concerning your own research funding, it doesn't help you sleep better at night, and it doesn't make it any easier to follow the data wherever it leads.

If everybody would recognize the wisdom of a couple of well-established principles, things like the Soon investigation and the congressional reaction to it might be avoided.

The first principle is, always acknowledge your funding sources in sufficient detail.  I haven't read any of Dr. Soon's papers and I don't know how or whether he acknowledged the specific ties between dollars and articles, assuming these ties existed (and while the investigation is still ongoing, it looks like they did).  As far as I'm concerned, the only time an academic should take money for publishing a specific piece of writing with a specific point of view, is when the funding source itself publishes the piece, as in book publishing.  (Full disclosure:  I am currently waiting for Wiley to publish a textbook I've written, and while I don't expect to get rich from it, I will get royalties if they sell any copies.)  Any time someone comes to you and offers you money to "place" specific publications in other venues not controlled by the funder, especially if readers of the publications will think that what you write is objective and not influenced by outside agencies, you should see bright flashing red conflict-of-interest lights and think about it a long, long time.

Now, I myself have taken money from agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the expectation that I would do work and publish papers as a result.  What's the difference?  Sometimes it's not easy to tell.  Everybody expects that scientists and engineers who take research money from NSF will publish papers about their research.  And nobody I know looks at the acknowledgment section and says, "Ah-hah!  The NSF paid for this.  No wonder it's X, Y, or Z."  This is because the NSF has, overall, done a reasonably good job of letting scientists themselves judge what is good research and what isn't, and whether it should be funded or published. 

The problem that comes up with climate-change research is that it has become a political hot-button issue.  Billions of dollars of corporate revenue are at stake if unfriendly climate-change-related legislation comes to pass, and so corporations that feel threatened are eager to see ostensibly objective research published that favors the views which allow them to keep making more money.  This is rational behavior on the part of the corporations, but the danger to objective science research is clear. 

And that brings me to my second point:  the fiction of truly 100% "objective" science.  Guess what:  there ain't no such animal.  Every scientist has biases, prejudices, and hunches that prevent him or her from being the perfect, suspended-in-the-air, dispassionate, Mr.-Spock-like viewer of objective truth.  In the choice of research topics, in the selection of funding agencies, and in the way research is performed and presented, scientists betray their biases—and yes, even their political convictions—all the time, often while fooling themselves into thinking they are being perfectly objective. 

When the subject of study is not of widespread public interest and influence—say, nematodes—it's fairly easy for the small group of folks who just can't know enough about nematodes to get together and pursue the truth about nematodes, and sometimes come pretty close to ideal objectivity.  But when the subject has vast and time-extended implications for every resident of the planet, as climate change does, everybody wants to get in their two cents, or two hundred thousand dollars, as the case may be.  And while I won't go so far as to say that everyone has their price, if a researcher's salary depends 100% on raising external funding, it's hard to resist the blandishments of a corporation or political group that wants a quid pro quo in the form of research with a predetermined outcome.

While the jury is still out, that's apparently what happened to Dr. Song.  His case can serve as a warning to every funded researcher not only to disclose one's funding in enough detail, but to ask whether one has betrayed the ideal of objectivity for cash. Congress can think about restraining itself from scaring academics and making it even harder to do objective science in the academy.  And everybody can realize that scientists are human beings for whom the ideal of absolute objectivity is just that—an ideal that is rarely, if ever, realized in practice.

Sources:  I referred to the New York Times articles "Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Researcher," appeared at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

on Feb. 21, 2015, and "Lawmakers Seek Information on Funding for Climate Change Critics" on Feb. 25 at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/science/lawmakers-seek-information-on-funding-for-climate-change-critics.html.  After this blog was written, I was saddened to read of the passing of the original Mr. Spock of Star Trek fame, Leonard Nimoy, at the age of 83. 

Women in Engineering—Will GoldieBlox Help?

Of the millions of engineers worldwide, only about 14% are women.  To some, this statistic is prima facie proof that women are unjustly prevented from joining what is generally regarded as a desirable and socially beneficial profession.  To others, it merely shows that the difference between men and women extends to aptitudes and career choices.  But to Stanford mechanical-engineering graduate Debbie Sterling, that statistic represents a challenge she is tackling with her company, GoldieBlox.

The firm's mission statement, prominently displayed on their website below a pie chart showing the infamous 14% number, says that its goal is to "get girls building."  GoldieBlox's line of construction toys are designed to appeal especially to girls, and come with storybooks about female engineering role models.  These kits include "GoldieBlox and the Dunk Tank," "GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine," and a GoldieBlox zipline action figure—the character herself as a doll with long blonde tresses, dressed in a tee shirt and overalls and definitely not possessed of a Barbie-doll-like figure.  Although I have not bought toys for young children for many years and my judgment on such matters is therefore suspect, the kits look a little on the pricey side to me.  You can lay out as much as a couple hundred bucks for the Solid Gold(ie) Package, which includes nearly every item in their catalog.  But hey—if it can really turn your little Mabel or Doris into an engineer, it's worth it, isn't it?

GoldieBlox has been around for only a couple of years (Sterling founded it in 2012 with help from Kickstarter), and so it is too soon to tell whether the firm, and other similar girl-oriented science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) products now available, will push that 14% number higher.  But GoldieBlox, as a privately funded self-supporting free-enterprise company, is a welcome addition to the sometimes heavy-handed efforts of the federal government to do the same thing.  While I have not received funding from the U. S. National Science Foundation for many years, I have kept up with its various programs and policies enough to know that the paucity of women in engineering and other STEM fields is of great concern to that agency.  According to one source, NSF will spend over $800 million in fiscal year 2014 on education and human resources, and it is safe to say that a good fraction of that will go toward programs aimed at increasing the participation of women in STEM fields at all levels.

Rarely does any discussion of this topic stray into the fundamentals of the ethical concerns involved, so I will try to do a little of that here.  One argument in favor of increasing the number of women in engineering is purely utilitarian.  It has two premises and a conclusion.  Premise One is "Women and men are equally capable of being engineers."  Premise Two is "Only 14% of engineers are women."  The conclusion is "A lot of women who could be engineers are not becoming engineers."  At this point, the pleas from industry that they cannot find enough good engineers are brought in to justify spending tax money on special programs designed to encourage women to enter STEM fields.

This argument has the advantage that it relies on statistics.  Premise Two is an undeniable statistical fact, and as for Premise One, you can find psychological and educational studies that support the contention that women as a group have the brainpower needed to do most engineering jobs.  But to get from the conclusion of this syllogism, which is factual, to a call to action—"we should get more women into engineering"—requires that we either ignore all the other possible things that the potential-engineer women could do with their lives, or perform a complex global optimization problem involving the entire working population.  So this argument doesn't take you as far as it seems to promise at first, at least without a lot of public-policy help smuggled in at the last minute.

Another argument, which in my view is much stronger, is based on the generally accepted notion that irrational prohibitions and thoughtless misallocation of opportunities and role models are wrong.  To give a personal example of the first, my wife was the daughter of a highway engineer.  When she was in high school in the 1960s, she wanted to take a drafting class, because she had seen the kind of drawings that her father did at work and she thought that might be a good thing to learn.  She was told that "girls don't take drafting," and ended up in a home economics class.  While the feminist movement of the 1970s had has many far-reaching effects, not all of which were positive, I think it is a good thing that such arbitrary sex-related employment exclusions are largely a thing of the past. 

The lack of opportunities and role models for women is a similar problem, although these fall more into the category of sins of omission than commission.  As GoldieBlox founder Sterling learned when she was a girl, construction toys were made and marketed for boys, not girls.  Now that her company is around, that is no longer the case, although time will tell whether enough enlightened parents will buy GoldieBlox kits for their daughters to make a difference. 

Programs that connect up girls with working women engineers can make a tremendous positive difference here.  Just meeting a woman who was able to make it through engineering school and get an engineering job can be a great encouragement to a young woman who finds attending mostly-male engineering classes intimidating.  The NSF money that is spent on those sorts of encouraging activities addresses these sorts of passive injustices.  While statistics proving their effectiveness may be hard to come by, you can talk to women who are now engineers to whom such things made their careers possible.

By and large, engineering is a profession that contributes to human flourishing.  As mothers, women have historically done most of the work in contributing to the flourishing of the class of humans called children, and so it is no great stretch for women to contribute also in the more indirect way of an engineering career. I wish GoldieBlox well, and hope that in future years I may end up teaching some women who can fondly recall the time they discovered GoldieBlox and the Dunk Tank, and their lives were forever changed.

Sources:  I learned about GoldieBlox and its founder, Debbie Sterling, from an article by Nicole Villalpando that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman print edition on Dec. 5, 2014.  (Full access to the online article requires a subscription.)  I also referred to the American Association of Universities website at http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=14335 for statistics on the NSF budget, and the GoldieBlox website www.goldieblox.com. 

The Limits of Diversity

This month's Scientific American devotes twenty pages to articles on diversity in science—the shameful lack thereof, and what can be done about it. One piece is a kind of confessional by a Lockheed Martin engineer who quickly moved into management and found that as she chose staff from widely varying backgrounds, the quality of her group's work increased.  Other articles cite social-science studies that show diverse organizations are not only more socially just; they do better science and engineering too.  The reader of these paeans to diversity could not be blamed for taking away the impression that diversity is like goodness:  you simply can't have too much of it.  Is that true?  Or are there limits to diversity?

What does diversity mean?  It has both an objective aspect, and a subjective or political aspect.  In the strict sense of diversity meaning merely "difference," one can objectively measure diversity in genetic makeup, diversity in hair color, or diversity in virtually any other measurable characteristic that a group of things or people has.  This scientific aspect allows statisticians to crank out reams of charts showing the degree of gender diversity in the number of Ph. D.'s granted, ethnic diversity in hiring practices, and so on.  So in this scientific sense, diversity is a quantifiable, measurable thing.

But when we ask what kinds of diversity are significant in the sense addressed by the Scientific American authors, the list narrows to political and cultural hot-button matters:  gender, race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on.  Scientists and engineers must deal with these matters not as mythical objective professionals, but as human beings.  And in so doing, the issue becomes an ethical, political, and even philosophical one.

The idea of virtue is not a scientific concept, but it is one of the best ways to describe a certain class of characteristics involving choice, as Aristotle says.  I think Aristotle would class diversity as a type of virtue because a diverse organization is better with regard to social justice than a non-diverse one, and (as the social scientists have shown), diverse scientific organizations do science and engineering better than non-diverse ones.  Making something intrinsically good and also better at what it does are the two main aspects of a virtue (again, according to Aristotle), and diversity qualifies on both counts.

The next question is this:  can you have too much diversity?  Most virtues represent a mean or rough average between the two extremes of excess and deficiency.  Assembling a competent technical organization with a mind to diversity represents a compromise between extremes.  In the decades before diversity in its modern sense was recognized as an organizational goal, those in charge (usually white males) picked the best people they could while following the cultural norms of their time.  These norms generally (but not always) excluded women and minorities, and tended to perpetuate the demographic makeup of the organization, while making it extremely hard or impossible for non-whites and non-males to enter.  This was bad. 

However, you can imagine an opposite extreme.  The perfectly diverse organization would have diversity statistics identical to those of the largest applicable sample group:  the state, the nation, or even the world.  William F. Buckley is supposed to have said he'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the entire faculty of Harvard University, and in this proposal, at least, he was favoring the opposite extreme of diversity I am talking about.  But if diversity is the only criterion of selection, the specialized competencies that a research or engineering organization needs will be absent, except by chance, and it will fail to achieve its objective, unless its only objective is to show that it is acceptably diverse.

The U. S. National Science Foundation has in recent years spent a substantial portion of its resources encouraging diversity in various ways.  To the extent that these efforts have righted previous injustices committed either consciously or through unconscious bias against certain groups, they are to be applauded.  But there is nothing scientific about the choices of which measures of diversity to work on. 

In a secular democracy, these choices are made politically.  And making politics your ultimate authority can land you in unpleasant places, as scientists in Russia and Germany have found.  A crackpot biologist named Lysenko got his hands on the political levers of control in the old USSR in the 1920s. Lysenko thought acquired characteristics could be inherited, and for the next forty years, any Soviet biologist who disagreed with Lysenko about evolution was liable to disappear into the Siberian work camps.  And the Nazi party in Germany took delight in calling Einstein's theory of relativity "Jewish physics."  Such blatant overruling of science by politics can always happen if those in charge value political goals more than the integrity of science.

I am personally about as un-diverse as you can get: an old white male conservative Christian Texan.  An organization composed of people like me would score close to zero on any diversity index you care to name.  I view the diversity project as an attempt, however flawed, to show the type of love that wills the good of the beloved to people who would otherwise be kept from flourishing to the best of their abilities.  There is nothing wrong with this type of love.  It is the type of love Jesus Christ exhorted his followers to show to each other.  But implementing diversity in a way that helps those who need that type of help without inflicting harm or the loss of opportunity on others is an inherently complex task.  The only way to do it perfectly would be to have perfect insight into the problem of social justice, and only God has that.  Any human attempt at diversity represents a compromise between using resources to increase diversity, versus using resources to address the task at hand.  And those promoting diversity should remember that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Sources: The October 2014 issue of Scientific American includes Stephanie C. Hill's article "In pursuit of the best ideas:  How I learned the value of diversity," on pp. 48-49.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Lysenkoism and "Deutsche physik" ("German physics").