The Futile Cycle

In the mix of the whole “Scienceblogs is white!!” non-event, Razib at Gene Expression had some questions to ask about the underrepresentation of Asians in blogging, even though Asians tend to be over-represented in science research. He speculates that maybe Asian American cultures tend not to cultivate literary talents as much.

I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate some more. I think Asian Americans tend to emphasize mathematical and technical fields because of social and migratory selection.

Namely, the over-representation of Asians in certain fields has to do with the immigrant language barrier. It’s hard to get a job if you don’t speak English well; part of being successful in the humanities is being able to communicate, as that’s largely what one does in those fields: communicate and analyze other people’s communications. On the other hand, technical fields, especially highly mathematical fields, tend to translate better across language barriers because mathematics is universal these days. Those immigrants who are able to obtain green cards or visas are those who have valuable skills that can translate immediately to results, and those skills tend to be technical.

You’d think that it would still be hard to survive any academic job without a good command of English, but immigrants can be amazingly resourceful, and academia can be surprisingly forgiving of bad speaking ability (let’s face it, professors are often not model speakers, even the native English speakers). I know that my dad had an insane amount of trouble learning english, but his mathematical ability was top-notch. He survived his thesis defense by writing down his entire presentation beforehand and memorizing it, word-for-word.

So what I’m saying is that the American barriers and limitations to immigration create an artificial, societal selection such that only those immigrants with technical abilities are able to pass through the immigration filter with any amount of ease.

This model, of course, makes some predictions. As English language teaching abroad increases, more immigrants and more minorities with backgrounds from those countries should start to appear in the humanities. In addition, this kind of filter effect should happen even with non-Asian ethnic groups, as long as there is some sort of language barrier. I’m curious as to how many British scholars, for example, populate the humanities compared to, say, German speakers (I’m trying to pick countries that have roughly the same overall economic status, and similar “white”-ness and cultural backgrounds). More Africans and Hispanics should populate the sciences compared to other disciplines, too.

The main problem with generalizing this model to other immigrant and minority groups is that there are fewer scholars that are, say, black, or Hispanic in academia, compared to Asians. There might be too much noise to definitively affirm or rule out this “filter effect” in such groups. There might be enough immigration, however, from Britain and Europe to do some sort of preliminary analysis.

Via Pharmalot, apparently Pfizer is going to court to try to force the NEJM to release its confidential reviews of articles on Celebrex and Bextra, two of Pfizer’s products that have been targeted for lawsuits on their side effects.

Now, I’m not saying either way whether Pfizer is guilty of misinformation and such on Celebrex and Bextra, but this subpoena is just wrong. The scientific peer-review process has traditionally depended on confidentially to ensure candid and honest statements about the quality of research without fear of repercussions or retribution. It’s not perfect, but it’s sure a hell of a lot better than going without a peer-review system, and trying to break the confidential review system is like trying to force journalists to open up their sources. It stops the flow of good journalism, and it stops the flow of proper science.

Pfizer isn’t doing itself or the rest of the drug industry any favors, either. For whatever reason, people hate drug companies even more than they hate other companies (except maybe Big Tobacco), perhaps because they think that drug companies are evil machines sucking money out of sick and desperate people. That’s not true, and there are many noble people, including doctors and scientists, working hard out there in the drug industry to find the latest drugs to help people, but these kinds of antics from the top are just awful. I don’t envy the researchers at Pfizer, as they don’t deserve society’s scorn for all of this.

Yesterday I watched online the Republican debate, which happened at the Reagan Library, and I heard Mike Huckabee and John McCain both mention leaving Iraq “with honor.” Apparently, Dick Cheney has used that term, too.

Now, I’m not going to comment on the US operations in Iraq, but seriously, what politician in their right mind would invoke Nixon’s statements on Vietnam in order to describe the policy of staying in Iraq? “Leave with honor” sounds very much like Nixon’s “Peace with honor.” It would seem to me like political suicide to utter those words; but perhaps Vietnam is fading from the memories of the public?

Over at CoyoteBlog, I’ve made a few comments on this blog post in response to a quip that the author was skeptical about global warming. I’d like to repost my arguments here, since I think it’s a general reflection of my thoughts on science:

I think that trusting scientists on their views in their fields of expertise is generally a good idea, and if the IPCC says that global warming is starting to accelerate, I’m inclined to accept it; it’s really the only intelligent thing to do. Policy and normative notions, one can debate, even if you aren’t an expert, but for facts and other positive notions, I’ll stick to the experts, and they seem to say that global warming is real.

If everyone trusted the experts more, the world would be a better place. None of the pseudo-science homeopathy/complementary medicine nonsense, none of the liberalized ignorance of basic economic facts, and none of the nonsense of evolution denial.

Here, someone replied to me:

Your response would make sense if you didn’t take into account the idea that scientists get way more money to do research about catastrophic global warming versus natural equilibrium.

In addition, I don’t agree with the “trusting experts” argument because I have yet to see an approach to global warming based on the emerging field of complex adaptive systems. As one who studies this field, am I not an “expert”, shouldn’t you trust me? Because I’ve found that complex systems move towards different equilibriums, not tipping points. By classifying the global climate as a complex adaptive system, I have to disagree with the current so-called “experts” who claim there is a tipping point.

Personally, I think this whole argument of “trusting experts” is flawed because one is only an expert until somebody with a new theory comes along that is better. Let’s not forget the “experts” told us that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and they had the majority consensus. It used to be mind boggling to think otherwise.

“Trusting experts” is probably one of those things which will lead to the loss of individual liberty and further reinforces the point of this blog article

Thus, I replied,

Well, notice that I used the plural here. The views of an individual scientist are, for better or worse, his/her own views. The scientific consensus, on the other hand, represents the views of a large swath of scientists, and the competition between scientists for funding and publication generally means that, on the whole, the “most correct” interpretation tends to win. I don’t know how much I can trust an individual scientist’s views, but if a vast majority of scientists support a view, then I’ll stick with that one. I’m not addressing here the whole “tipping point” phrasing or alarmism that the particular journalist used in the above blog post. I’m talking about general skepticism about global warming. Unless I have specific, methodological problems with the general field’s reasoning, and have experience in in that field, I’d say that I will always accept the field’s scientific consensus on a subject.

There’s a word for people who, with absolutely no expertise, think that they have the answers in the face of tons of experts: crackpot. Lay people (i.e. non-scientists) who go against scientific consensus are the same as people who think that they can prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity wrong, or who think they’ve proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in two short sentences. They’re not brilliant critics; they’re raving madmen. Just because Rob is an expert in complex adaptive systems doesn’t mean he’s an expert in climate science. That’s like saying a mathematician is an expert in cryptography; yes, cryptography uses mathematics, but unless that mathematician has a focus on cryptography, they won’t know all the algorithms, all the details, all the issues involved. If a mathematician were to persist in making sweeping non-consensus claims about cryptography without reading about cryptography, he or she’d be a crackpot, regardless of how smart they are.

So if Rob is going to make some claim about climate science because he’s in a field he thinks is related, he’d better have much better reasons than “adaptive systems converge upon fixed points”, cause climate phase trajectories lie in a large-dimensional manifold, and in such situations, fixed points often abound; in addition, we don’t know the rate of convergence to the various fixed points, and presumably the ever-changing flux of the sun, geothermal activity, and rotation of the earth would prevent such steady-state convergence. Perhaps anthropogenic climate change is driven by the evolution of fixed points in certain directions; perhaps our introduction of greenhouse gases has led to some sort of bifurcation, and that’s leading to the increase in temperatures. Hey look, I can make vague generalities about climate science as a complex system, too! Do you believe me? I would hope you go to the experts instead.

Sure, some “experts” in the past have claimed that the Earth was in the center of the universe, perhaps, but they were not scientists; they didn’t follow the scientific method, they used state-mandated religious views to arrive at their conclusions; religion obviously is not a source of facts, and isn’t a way to find scientific truths.

The IPCC (a coalition of most climate scientists) thinks that currently, mankind’s contribute to the environment has caused a significant change in the climate, leading to a significant change in the world’s temperature compared to the past. The main objections to this that I’ve seen come from 1) people with no expertise, and 2) a few (very few) climate scientists. The people with no expertise include members of the press, politicians, random scientists from other fields, and so on. I don’t think they have valid points to make unless they really read the literature first. That the vast majority of climate scientists agree with the IPCCs statements nullifies my second concern.

And an expert in climate science is still an expert in climate science once new theories come about. Did physicists stop becoming physicists with the quantum mechanics revolution? No, they instead all became expert quantum physicists. Did they leave the theory up to the public to decide? No, they evaluated it themselves, because people intimately familiar with the experimental details and the underlying facts and methodologies are the best ones to evaluate new theories and evidence. Let the scientists in the field determine what theory is sound and what isn’t; I don’t think the uninformed public should.

Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino apparently thinks that in-store health clinics (such as MinuteClinic) are unethical because they (gasp) make money off of sick people!

Wait, so what about pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, health insurance companies, doctors, nurses, ambulance workers, hospital staffers, and scientists who do research on clinical diseases (among others)? Maybe they shouldn’t be making money either! That would really encourage them to succeed in helping others!

And farmers shouldn’t be driven by profits, because they’re making money off of hungry people! And homebuilders shouldn’t be driven by profits, because they’re making money off of people looking for shelter!

To think that Boston would have a mayor so economically and morally illiterate.

A great post from Marginal Revolution, where Tyler Cowen talks about how soldiers in the military seem to be eating quite well, on average. Of course, that’s not what he’s really talking about, but check out the post for a great analogy on why military systems aren’t necessarily generalizable to the public.

There’s been a lot of media hullaballoo about the whole creation of human stem cells from skin cells, which is really just a confirmation of the research from last year on mice.

For some reason, some people, like this Washington Post editorialist, seems to think that this research side-steps the whole embryonic stem cell morality debate, that it “vindicates” George Bush’s decision to fight embryonic stem cell research.

It doesn’t.

The stem cell research from mice showed that these “created” stem cells can grow to become a whole embryo and organism. Let’s assume for a moment that in this respect, human biology is similar to mouse biology (it’s not far-fetched). If the newly created stem cell can grow to be a new person, doesn’t that mean it has a “soul”? So, then is it bad to do research on such a cell?

If, theoretically, this technology is perfect and can actually transform a skin cell to a good stem cell, then that stem cell would be no different from an embryonic stem cell, and all the same morality rules apply here (regardless of whether you are for or against it). This isn’t some sort of magic morality bullet. No ethical dilemmas are resolved here. You can’t support this sort of research and be against embryonic stem cell research, because this is embryonic stem cell research.

I don’t normally delve into ethics that much, because I don’t think most people share my eclectic set of reasonings, but when I saw the comments on this Crooked Timber post on the economics of the death penalty, I decided I’ve got to say something. I am not an economist, but I am a scientist, and science is as science does, so I’m going to comment on this from the point of view of a scientist.

One thing I saw quite often was people saying, “Economists always assume that people are rational, but that’s obviously not realistic!”

This is misleading! Economists define “rational” differently from the normal word, just like how every other field has its own jargon (”text” in literary studies, for example, doesn’t mean “written words”, but any human-produced work that can be analyzed; “energy” in physics doesn’t mean the same thing that normal people mean, but rather the capacity to accelerate a mass (or counteract an opposing force) over a distance).

In any case, when economists say “rational”, they mean someone who has some sort of internal set of goals and attains them. A “rational” person responds to incentives in ways that maximize how much they get what they want. So, if a person wants to not die, they’ll avoid things that might kill them. The goals can change over time (an old man has different goals from a toddler), and from person to person (Bill Gates obviously has different goals from Brittany Spears, which led to their different decisions in life). Economists tend to muddy the jargon more and talk about “utility”, but that has nothing to do with money, in general. “Utility” is just “how much the person has reached their personal goals.” So, in a sense, a person’s ultimate goal is to get what they want, which is kind of logically redundant.

This hypothesis is pretty good! People want things, and they do things to get them. Simple! They want to be happy, or maybe they’re hugely emo and want to be sad. Maybe they’re masochists and want to feel pain. Maybe they’re ultra-patriots and so want to die for their country. Maybe they want fame, or maybe they want money. These are all perfectly rational reasons; the key is just finding out the underlying “want.” Everyone is motivated by something; it’s hard to think of someone who isn’t. And people respond to incentives based on their wants.

Instead, most of the problems with economics come from economists trying to get from looking at individuals to groups of individuals, because it’s very hard to analyze even one person; more than one is almost impossible to do in any detail. (Studying just one individual in really great detail is called a “biography”, and economists generally want to study how most people work in general). Often, for the sake of simplicity, economists assume that individuals are more or less similar, or that they vary only along very specific characteristics. This is obviously not true, but the assumptions can be useful and good enough for the particular thing they’re studying. The assumptions can break down, but it’s not because economists assumed that people were “rational”; it’s because a particular economist assumes that individuals are motivated by the same things.

So, saying “people aren’t rational” isn’t a good criticism of economics. People are pretty rational. It’s the other assumptions on top, the “useful approximations”, that make the theories sometimes a little shaky.

A new psychology paper is out in Intelligence claiming that differences in academic achievement by siblings of opposite sex are due to differences in variance of ability. I don’t know about the merits or demerits of the paper (I only skimmed the abstract and some of the rest of it), but the topic reminds me of remarks two years ago by a certain university president…

Via Medpundit, an article in Scientific American arguing against race-based medicine. I spoke about this on an aside in a post a few days ago, but now I feel like I have to respond to the Scientific American article. Note that I’m not defending BiDil here, but the concept of race-based medicine in general.

I don’t think the trend for race or ethnicity targeted drugs is a bad thing, overall, because first, we wouldn’t have a shortage of new drugs for everyone, since drug companies would only try for subpopulation-targeted drugs in a case where the drug has failed in a larger population. They want profits; they’re not going to limit the scope of any drug to a subpopulation — race-based or genetics-based or whatever — unless they had no choice; just look at how much they try to expand the indications of already approved drugs. And research produces so many drugs that fail clinical trials anyway that it might as well behoove industry to try drugs on sub-populations, since they’ve brought the drugs so far through the clinical process. So nothing to worry about on the economic side of things.

Secondly, taking race into account is better than not doing so, I think. It is simply wrong and counter-productive to claim that people can’t be grouped into ethnicity based on genetic polymorphisms. There are strong sub-population differences on polymorphisms of drug metabolizing enzymes, so what is toxic to one group may not be to the other. And saying that only 10 drugs or so have evidence to back up race-based indications doesn’t mean that we won’t see more in the future, now that more biological understanding is coming out about such things. But until personal genome sequencing and profiling becomes a lot less expensive and a lot faster than it is now, ethnicity, or even race, is a better substitute than nothing. After all, humans have, on a population scale, very homogeneous genetics, and the variation from continent to continent is pretty clear, with minor exceptions, so ethnicity is a valid and easily detectable, though crude, genetic marker. (Ironically, “black”, which is what BiDil was approved for, is probably the crudest and most meaningless sub-population indicator, since Africa has the most diverse genetic variation in the world.)

I do, however, hope that the FDA does not go lax with its requirements of efficacy. After all, race-targeted or not, the drug still has to work. I don’t believe that a head-to-head of one race versus another would be strictly necessary before approval of a drug, since that brings in ethical issues (testing a drug in populations where researchers expect the drug to fail). Anyway, if a drug really is effective in a larger population, post-approval clinical trials would be a lot easier to test, as they would already have gone through the three previous trials for efficacy and toxicity, and so it would be advantageous to allow the drug company to seek approval based on a limited subset first.

Basically, I see race-based or ethnicity-based medicine as part of the whole “personalized medicine” endeavor. Even though it’s crude, it’s still the first step, and it’s what we have to work with right now. We have drugs targeted based on age and sex already, and biologists very well know that age from birth is just a surrogate for “real” aging, and sex is just a surrogate for “real” hormonal levels, developmental history, and so on. Until we have better biological markers, age, sex, and even race and ethnicity, are good starting points for tailoring medicine to each person. We already do it, so why not with pharmaceuticals, too?

UPDATE: A nice New York Times article on natural selection on human subpopulations.