Symptoms Of The Universe
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. ~ Neil Peart
When atheists ape creationists: Fallacies and anti-feminism
Given that I’ve used the f-word in the title above, I’m obliged to open with the following…
Trigger warning. If you find that you are unable to respond to criticism of sexism without randomly arranging terms such as SJW, white knight, cuck, kill yourself, bitch, whore, rape, professional victims, PC gone mad, First Amendment, feminazi, and/or fuck (and other assorted expletives) into grammatically dubious and arbitrarily capitalised boilerplate then you may find the following post both intellectually and emotionally challenging. A strong and potentially damaging kneejerk response or, indeed, extreme overreaction may result.
(I kicked off a previous post with an identical warning and was rather amused by the aggrieved responses I received from some over-sensitive souls.)
This month’s Physics World is a special issue on the challenges for diversity in the physics community. It features a number of timely and compellingly-argued articles that I thoroughly recommend (albeit belatedly. I meant to write this post a couple of weeks ago but the day job, including four days’ worth of 1st year lab report marking and preparation for an upcoming trip to Ethiopia (more of this in future posts), necessarily took priority). Matin Durani writes candidly about the effects of hidden bias, while Margaret Harris’ piece on the role of microagressions in normalising sexism and other biases, A Thousand Tiny Cuts, is one of the best articles on the topic I’ve read. Louise Mayor, Features Editor for Physics World (and an alumna of the Nanoscience Group here in Nottingham), highlights the depressing bigotry faced by the LGBT group at CERN – their posters have been ripped down and defaced (see photos below, taken from the Physics World article).
That Leviticus 20:13 was tacked onto one of the posters (photo in the top right hand corner above) is hardly a big surprise: it’s the traditional, tiresomely predictable ‘riposte’ from those who use religion to bolster their bigotry. But then they’re spoilt for choice when it comes to Leviticus, given that it’s jam-packed to the brim of the most hateful, spiteful, and ludicrous bile. There’s Leviticus 21:16-23, targeted at those with disabilities (“For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed“). Or how about Leviticus 20:9: “Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.Because they have cursed their father or mother, their blood will be on their own head“? (The Book of Leviticus puts the most rabid of death penalty enthusiasts to shame — they look positively liberal in their views by comparison). And, of course, there’s the seminal sexism that is Leviticus 20:3 — “set the value of a male between the ages of twenty and sixty at fifty shekels of silver, according to the sanctuary shekel; for a female, set her value at thirty shekels“. (Oh, and tattoos are also verboten).
As I’ve explained at length in a couple of previous posts, I have no time at all for the excuses that are made for the innate immorality of many aspects of religious mythology, of all hues. (Moreover, I make no excuses for using the term innate in this context. As Sam Harris argues, there are many aspects of a humanist moral code that are (or should be) universal. Barbarity is barbarity, regardless of cultural and religious mores). Before I’m accused of picking an easy target with Leviticus (“No real Christian really takes Leviticus seriously — it’s the New Testament that’s important”), let’s note three things: (i) there are many Christians who indeed claim to take all of the Bible literally; (ii) moderate Christians regularly turn a blind eye to the blatant bigotry that is at the core of their faith in the 21st century; and (iii) (I apologise for repeating myself from a previous post but…) religion has too often been responsible for impeding, not accelerating, the development of women’s rights, LGBT rights, and human rights in general.
Claims that Christianity somehow, for example, drove the abolition of slavery ring hollow, as this article forcefully points out: “most churches refused to take part when offered a leading role by abolitionists. As historian John R. McKivigan explains in his book The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches 1830-1865, “All but a few small denominations balked at a commitment to uncompromised abolitionist principles and programs. As a result, civil war and government ended slavery in 1865.”
And what then continued to set back the cause of women in Ireland for decades? The Catholic Church. (Moreover, despite plummeting numbers of those who identify as religious in the Republic of Ireland, the Catholic Church still has a stranglehold on education in the country, with over 90% of all state schools being run by the Church.)
All in all, you might say that I’m not a big fan of religion.
Phil Mason is currently a research scientist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague. A brief overview of his academic career to date is here. Mason’s research interests are not a million miles away from mine, in that we’re both interested in intermolecular and interparticle interactions. I’m, however, a scanning probe microscopist and irregular synchrotron user who probes atoms and molecules in real space (with occasional forays to reciprocal space) on solid surfaces, while Mason is more focussed on interactions in aqueous solutions and their analysis via (neutron) scattering techniques. (The latter means that we both would seem to share an appreciation of the power and elegance of Fourier transforms…).
Mason, in his Thunderf00t guise, has a parallel, and very successful, online career via the YouTube videos he makes. His “Why Do People Laugh At Creationists?” series has been extremely popular, with the first video (of 44 to date) having now attracted over 2 million views. The Thunderf00t channel itself has over half a million subscribers. In addition to his derision of creationism, Mason has posted videos on a variety of intriguing science topics including, in particular, a discussion of just why potassium explodes in water. In an admirable “cross-linking” of public engagement with academic research (a topic in which I have quite some interest), Mason’s potassium-in-water video eventually led to a fascinating paper in Nature Chemistry invoking a novel Coulomb explosion mechanism for the phenomenon.
But since 2012, and apparently seeded by a bitter dispute with Freethought Blogs and PZ Myers that year, Mason has devoted a huge amount of time and effort to attacking feminism. Repeatedly. Childishly. Spitefully*. And his vitriol has been underpinned throughout by precisely the type of argumentative fallacies for which he’s criticised creationists in the past.
The second most-viewed video for the Thunderf00t YouTube channel has got the fantastically hyperbolic title of “Why ‘feminism’ poisons everything“. (The Daily Mail — that bastion of rational, scientific, and accurate discourse — would be proud to lead with a title like that…). “Why ‘feminism’ poisons everything” has attracted over 1.5 million views since it was uploaded towards the end of 2013. (I’ll return to this video below because Mason makes some astoundingly weak and remarkably unscientific arguments on the topic of sexual dimorphism, which he has repeated regularly in other fora.)
(Coincidentally, if, like me, you prefer to read rather than flick on the ‘Tube, you can find a transcript of the “Why ‘feminism’ poisons everything” diatribe here).
The RationalWiki page for Thunderf00t puts it, with characteristic bluntness, like this:
Mason epitomizes the “STEMlord” atheist: a self-congratulatory, “right-thinking” individual who is a complete fuckwad in every other department.
I was invited back to the MSS in June last year and decided, after a chat with DPR, that a timely topic for conversation would be the Tim Hunt furore. (Rest easy, I’m not about to re-open that particular debate here. If you’re really interested, browse this blog for a number of posts which include links to many other articles/posts on the Hunt debacle and tens of thousands of words of associated comments). Mason, as Thunderf00t, also appeared on that particular episode of the MSS. I think Dr. Mason would agree that he and I did not exactly see eye to eye on the issue of diversity in science and the extent to which conscious or unconscious environmental biases, and not innate intellectual differences influence the gender balance in disciplines such as physics (and other sciences).
During the MSS discussion, Mason repeated the sexual dimorphism argument from his “Why ‘feminism’ poisons everything” video. There are many aspects of Mason’s anti-feminist tirades I could choose to dissect, including his appalling victim-blaming ‘analysis’ of rape a few years back, but many others have comprehensively rebutted those, particular, um, ‘arguments’. (I’ll note in passing that Mason of course denies that he has ever victim-blamed. However, see this forensic take-down of his “TEACH THEM NOT TO RAPE!” video (capitals not mine). TL;DR — Mason’s denials simply don’t ring true.)
I want to focus on the sexual dimorphism angle, however, because it highlights how Mason — despite being an accomplished scientist — can show a remarkable and complete disregard for scientific evidence (and the scientific method) when it comes to his YouTube appearances. Indeed, I’d go further; his reliance on an argument based on sexual dimorphism has all the hallmarks of an article of faith. In this, he’s behaving precisely like the creationists he so disparages.
Mason’s argument runs like this (and I quote):
“You see, we are part of a sexually dimorphic species, that is, males and females tend to have different physical characteristics. Look, the reason that we divide the Olympics up by sex, is not because we are inherently sexist. It’s because men and women tend to have different traits. On average, in the upper body strength, it’s almost fifty-percent difference. Ugh, come on. Tell me again how this is really a myth.”
On that MSS episode last year, Mason again used the performance of men and women at the Olympics to attempt to explain away the gender imbalance in physics. ( As the Institute of Physics puts it, “For more than 25 years, only around 20% of students progressing on to A-level physics have been girls, despite about equal success between the genders in GCSE physics and science.“).
Let that sink in for a moment… A scientist who has spent a great deal of his life debunking logical fallacies has used the performance of males vs females at the Olympics to justify the gender imbalance in physics at A-level and at universities.
Christ on a bike.
Where’s the evidence to support this ‘hypothesis’? Where are the data which systematically and credibly show that women are either (a) less intellectually equipped for, or (b) less ‘innately’ (there’s that word again) interested in physics than men (or other STEM subjects)? Where are the peer-reviewed and credible analyses that control for the effects of environment (especially conscious and unconscious biases in that environment) and show that there’s a distinct gender-specific aspect associated with ability in STEM subjects?
Without compelling evidence (which, to the very best of my knowledge, he has yet to provide (see below)), Mason’s sexual dimorphism argument, such as it is, is nothing more than an appeal to the fallacy of personal incredulity: “Look, men and women are physically different. I simply cannot believe that this doesn’t also influence their intellectual abilities or their preference for STEM vs non-STEM subjects or their ability to secure positions at the top of a company hierarchy. We’re just wired differently”.
Although you’d never know this from any of Dr. Mason’s contributions to YouTube, debates continue to rage about whether or not the concept of a “male” vs a “female” brain is valid. Two recent studies [1,2] both attracted a great deal of attention but came to polar opposite conclusions. The first of those papers was critiqued at length at PubPeer; for one thing, well-known artefacts related to magnetic resonance scanning were apparently not taken into consideration. The more recent paper [2] finds no evidence for a “male” vs a “female” brain. One nonetheless still has to question the extent to which environmental factors can ever fully be taken into account in any of these studies.
I’m a physicist. Our research group positions individual atoms on chunks of silicon and other inorganic samples in ultrahigh vacuum (at a pressure comparable to that found on the surface of the moon) and at 5 degrees above absolute zero. We have a huge degree of control over the environment surrounding our samples. And yet we, and other groups in our research field, still struggle immensely with the robust interpretation of data.
Disentangling/deconvolving environmental influences when it comes to the analysis and interpretation of measurements purporting to show gender differences therefore strikes me as a damn-near-impossible task. How can one ever reliably establish a credible control sample free of all environmental influence?
A series of studies and meta-analyses [see Ref. 3 for a lengthy review] have found that gender differences are minimal across a wide range of attributes. We can quibble about the statistical “power” of the research (and I will admit to being rather surprised, to put it mildly, at the extent to which many studies on gender differences/similarities are statistically underpowered) but the key thing is that sexual dimorphism effects are often at the limits of detection. Moreover, I will reiterate — just how do we robustly differentiate between biological and sociocultural effects? How do we deconvolve these aspects?
If I couch this in the language of the physical scientist, what it means is that the “sexual dimporphism” signal-to-noise ratio is very small and very easily swamped by external interference. In physics, and if I can be excused the rather strained analogy, coupling to the very large number of degrees of freedom of the environment plays an essential role in many systems. The same is true, in spades, for any socio-cultural system. Before Mason wheels out his sexual dimorphism hypothesis yet again, it’d be helpful (and rather more scientific) if he could at least cite the literature which highlights, repeatedly, the key importance of environment. He could start with the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. I’ll quote, at length, from p. 267:
“There are intellectual areas in which females, on average, excel and males, on average, excel. Psychological, social, and biological factors explain these differences. However, it does not seem that biology is limiting intelligence in any way because biology alone cannot explain the vast improvement of female performance on certain measures such as the increasing numbers of females scoring at the highest end of the SAT math test (Blackburn, 2004).
Data showing differences between men and women in intelligence do not support the notion of a smarter sex, nor do they imply that the differences are immutable.” [Emphasis mine].
It’s about time I brought this lengthy post to an end. Before I do, I’ve got to stress that I’m of course not the first to point out the vacuity of Mason’s “sexual dimorphism” schtick. As noted on that Rational Wiki page to which I referred above, a few months following the MSS episode on which Mason and I debated, Thunderf00t was again raising the dimorphism flag under a video posted by the social scientist Kristi Winters. Although it’s often a good idea to avoid reading/commenting below the line, it’s worth visiting that video (and reading the RationalWiki commentary) to see the extent to which Mason indulged in a series of argumentative fallacies, and then ducked out of providing the evidence for his claims that Winters requested.
I contacted Mason before I started writing this post to let him know that I was planning to upload a piece which was critical of his views on feminism. To his credit, he responded positively, and sent me a link to this article as a demonstration of what he sees as the adverse effects of feminism on science. For a change, Mason and I agree — that paper is junk. It does a big disservice to both science and feminism. I’ve made similar comments about the work of Karen Barad previously, which attempts to couch quantum mechanics in the context of feminist and queer ‘theory’. There’s a substantial “emperor’s new clothes” character to work of that type, usually written in an impenetrable style to disguise the lack of substance.
But physics and physical chemistry is not immune to having nonsense papers being published. Worse, when it came to the Bogdanov affair (as a particularly telling example), opinion was divided as to whether their papers were a hoax or real science! Similarly, this paper (and its bargain-basement photoshopping of data) was published in Nano Letters, which, as Mason will know, is not at the bottom of the hierarchy of prestige journals…
So we STEM folk shouldn’t get too far up on our high horse; there have been a variety of embarrassing papers published in our field. And just as we don’t damn an entire field of chemistry or physics when fraudulent, or simply sloppy, work is published, we can’t in turn dismiss all of social science on the basis of a few cringeworthy papers. To do so would represent yet another piece of sloppy, fallacious thinking.
In my daughter’s Year 7 classroom the following words are pinned up on the wall:
No, Dr. Mason. Feminism does not poison everything.
* I should stress that, as discussed in this post, I do not agree at all with the attempt that was made to have Mason fired from his research post (on the basis of the anti-feminism tirades he posts online and the associated social media ‘dynamics’). Mason should be debated, not censored.
**I’ve not met Mason in person — I’ve spoken with him online via the MSS and exchanged a couple of e-mails.
One of those spleen-venting conferences was a fascinating and important event held in Prague back in December, organized by Filip Vostal and Mark Carrigan: “Power, Acceleration, and Metrics in Academic Life”. My presentation, The Power, Perils and Pitfalls of Peer Review in Public – please excuse thePartridgian overkill on the alliteration – largely focused on the question of post-publication peer review (PPPR) via online channels such as PubPeer. I’ve written at length, however, on PPPR previously (here,here, and here) so I’m not going to rehearse and rehash those arguments. I instead want to explain just why I levelled the accusation of hypocrisy and why I am far from confident that we’ll see a meaningful revolution in academic publishing any time soon.
Let’s start with a few ‘axioms’/principles that, while perhaps not being entirely self-evident in each case, could at least be said to represent some sort of consensus among academics:
The business model of the traditional academic publishing industry is deeply flawed. While some might argue that George Monbiot – or at least the sub-editor who provided the title for his article on the subject a few years back (“Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”) – perhaps overstated the problem just a little, it is clear that the profit margins and working practices for many publishers are beyond the pale. (A major contribution to those profit margins is, of course, the indirect and substantial public subsidy, via editing and reviewing, too often provided gratis by the academic community).
A journal’s impact factor (JIF) is clearly not a good indicator of the quality of a paper published in that journal. The JIF has been skewered many, many times with some of the more memorable and important critiques coming from Stephen Curry, Dorothy Bishop, David Colquhoun, Jenny Rohn, and, most recently, this illuminating post from Stuart Cantrill. Yet its very strong influence tenaciously persists and pervades academia. I regularly receive CVs from potential postdocs where they ‘helpfully’ highlight the JIF for each of the papers in their list of publications. Indeed, some go so far as to rank their publications on the basis of the JIF.
Given that the majority of research is publicly funded, it is important to ensure that open access publication becomes the norm. This one is arguably rather more contentious and there are clear differences in the appreciation of open access (OA) publishing between disciplines, with the arts and humanities arguably being rather less welcoming of OA than the sciences. Nonetheless, the key importance of OA has laudably been recognized by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and all researchers funded by any of the seven UK research councils are mandated to make their papers available via either a green or gold OA route (with the gold OA route, seen by many as a sop to the publishing industry, often being prohibitively expensive).
With these three “axioms” in place, it now seems rather straight-forward to make a decision as to the journal(s) our research group should choose as the appropriate forum for our work. We should put aside any consideration of impact factor and aim to select those journals which eschew the traditional for-(large)-profit publishing model and provide cost-effective open access publication, right?
Indeed, we’re particularly fortunate because there’s an exemplar of open access publishing in our research area: The Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology. Not only are papers in the Beilstein J. Nanotech free to the reader (and easy to locate and download online), but publishing there is free: no exorbitant gold OA costs nor, indeed, any type of charge to the author(s) for publication. (The Beilstein Foundation has very deep pockets and laudably shoulders all of the costs).
But take a look at our list of publications — although we indeed publish in the Beilstein J. Nanotech., the number of our papers appearing there can be counted on the fingers of (less than) one hand. So, while I espouse the three principles listed above, I hypocritically don’t practice what I preach. What’s my excuse?
In academia, journal brand is everything. I have sat in many committees, read many CVs, and participated in many discussions where candidates for a postdoctoral position, a fellowship, or other roles at various rungs of the academic career ladder have been compared. And very often, the committee members will say something along the lines of “Well, Candidate X has got much better publications than Candidate Y”…without ever having read the papers of either candidate. The judgment of quality is lazily “outsourced” to the brand-name of the journal. If it’s in a Nature journal, it’s obviously of higher quality than something published in one of those, ahem, “lesser” journals.
If, as principal investigator, I were to advise the PhD students and postdocs in the group here at Nottingham that, in line with the three principles above, they should publish all of their work in the Beilstein J. Nanotech., it would be career suicide for them. To hammer this point home, here’s the advice from one referee of a paper we recently submitted:
“I recommend re-submission of the manuscript to the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology, where works of similar quality can be found. The work is definitively well below the standards of [Journal Name].”
There is very clearly a well-established hierarchy here. Journal ‘branding’, and, worse, journal impact factor, remain exceptionally important in (falsely) establishing the perceived quality of a piece of research, despite many efforts to counter this perception, including, most notably, DORA. My hypocritical approach to publishing research stems directly from this perception. I know that if I want the researchers in my group to stand a chance of competing with their peers, we have to target “those” journals. The same is true for all the other PIs out there. While we all complain bitterly about the impact factor monkey on our back, we’re locked into the addiction to journal brand.
And it’s very difficult to see how to break the cycle…
Do team-players let your university down?
A key reason I write blog posts is that it’s generally a wonderful form of catharsis. Digitising my irritations usually helps me to get some sort of perspective on things — when I close the laptop at the end of converting my thoughts to pixels I generally feel just that little bit better. But that’s not going to be the case for this post. I guarantee that even after I’ve finished hammering away at the keyboard I’m still going to be seething.
Say the words “Project Transform” to almost any member of staff at the University of Nottingham and I guarantee you’ll hear a litany of complaints. Transform represents an overhaul – a “re-imagining”, if you will — of practically all aspects of our university. With any type of major change like Transform there of course will inevitably be gripes and complaints; we all tend to resist upheavals. Moreover, some aspects of Project Transform are, to be fair, long overdue. But Transform has been handled – and continues to be handled – in an exceptionally heavy-handed and frustrating manner (at best). Staff who are “within scope” of the Transform process — particularly, and especially, administrative, professional, and managerial (APM) staff – have in many cases been treated shabbily by the University. The levels of uncertainty related to their future role(s) within the University of Nottingham (UoN) have been especially problematic.
Many of my personal bugbears with Transform over the last year or so relate to our school’s undergraduate admissions processes. (I’m an admissions tutor). In the School of Physics and Astronomy we have an exceptionally well-organised and rather successful admissions process. This, you’ll not be surprised to hear, has got nothing to do with me; the smooth-running of our UG admissions is due almost entirely to our talented and dedicated admissions secretary and her APM colleagues. (The contributions of APM and technical staff to the higher education sector do not get enough recognition — they are the lifeblood of any university. To be fair to Nottingham, the University put quite some effort into raising the profile of technicians a couple of years back. See “HE’s Unsung Heroes“). Informal and formal feedback from applicants to our courses (and their parents) highlights time and again the key importance of dedicated, School-based staff.
Yet the University demands ever-greater centralisation of admissions. This is a core “mantra” of Project Transform: centralise to maximise efficiency. But an entirely centralised admissions process makes no sense for very many schools/departments. Applicants want to get to know the academics and the staff in the school to which they’re applying. (And, again, we know this from the very clear feedback we get from applicants.) The argument that centralising admissions will somehow “improve the student experience” seems to me to be a complete non-starter. (Did I mention that we have an extremely efficient process already? If it ain’t broke…)
I could bang on about Transform for quite some time — its effects on staff morale could be the subject of a lengthy (and daily) series of posts — but that would be a little too Nottingham-centric. My real aim in writing this post is to flag up an aspect of the ethos of the Transform process which is common to very many universities and is deeply corrosive: the “be a team-player” mentality.
Very often, criticism from rank-and-file academics of university processes/decisions is met with an argument from their line managers/senior colleagues which runs something along these lines: “We need to be careful that we’re seen to be team-players. Otherwise we could get labelled as trouble-makers and we’ll be marginalised and have no influence”. This is an infuriating and self-defeating position to adopt. Academics who care about their students, their colleagues, their school/department/institute — and, ultimately, the university itself — complain because they are team-players. The team is struggling; it needs to hear some home truths. The academic that is truly a team-player will point out those home truths to those who are leading the team.
Time and again when large companies fail, a primary reason for the failure turns out to be the unwillingness of many in the organisation to countenance bad news. This post by Lawrence Serewicz at his Thoughts on Management blog makes the point exceptionally well:
The desire to hear good news, especially in collective meetings, is understandable. No one likes to hear bad news no matter how important it may be. The larger the meeting the less it will be an appropriate place to discuss bad news because it can be seen as criticism. If the bad news becomes a criticism, then in a large group setting it can become like a re-education camp where underperforming units are held to account or to blame. Such an approach will be unintended, but it can easily become the default setting when people set out to discuss bad news. The challenge is to find the right place, the right amount of people, to discuss bad news.
A team-player is someone who recognises that there are problems and goes out of their way to communicate those problems — to be the bearer of bad news. Almost invariably, however, “a team-player” is now interpreted in the university context as someone who doesn’t “whine”, who accentuates/exaggerates the positive (and sweeps the negative under the carpet), and who is willing to compromise to the point where valid and pressing concerns are not raised.
Author Philip MoriartyPosted on March 9, 2016 Categories Uncategorized3 Comments on Do team-players let your university down?
“I Can See Her Again”
I’m well aware that I’m skirting dangerously close to Mary Ann Bighead (of Private Eye fame) territory with this short post, but I am immensely proud of my daughter, Saoirse, for having her poem published in a book of poetry last week. The book in question, “Poetry Emotions“, is a collection of poetry written by children from schools across the Midlands. Here’s Saoirse’s poem.
I click “play” on the movie in my head.
And I can see her again.
Her soft black hair glistening in the sunlight,
as she leaps and bounds over the fields.
Skipping, jumping.
It’s as if she’s an angel,
Staring down at me with immense concentration.
And it’s as if she just floated away leaving only a shadow in the sky.
A tear trickles down my cheek.
I feel like it was all my doing,
I can remember how it used to be.
Playing in the fields and meadows, singing and laughing.
I can remember her sweet voice.
She looks at me and I look at her.
Our gaze is locked in time.
I see her again and I remember, my best friend…
Saoirse Carroll-Moriarty (9)
Middleton Primary & Nursery School, Wollaton, Nottingham
Author Philip MoriartyPosted on March 4, 2016 Categories poetryTags poetry; "Poetry Emotions"; primary schools; poem1 Comment on “I Can See Her Again”
Blatt is back: “open debate cornerstone of scientiﬁc process”
The debate about anonymity in post-publication peer review rumbles on. Leonid Schneider is doing a great job of documenting and analysing the (often very heated) views of both sides. Here’s his latest post…
For Better Science
Michael Blatt, Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Plant Physiology, is back into the arena, fighting against the anonymity in post-publication peer review (PPPR). I have been in regular email exchange with Blatt, as indicated in my earlier blog post about the advantages of signed PPPR.
Now the British scientist has published another editorial in his journal, titled: “When Is Science ‘Ultimately Unreliable’?”, where he addresses the arguments usually brought up in support of anonymity in PPPR. In his earlier editorial in October 2015, named “Vigilante Science”, Blatt has exposed himself to plenty of criticism, including from my side, and it seems most of it happened due to a misunderstanding.
Because for Blatt (and also for myself), it is important to separate between whistleblowing of potential misconduct on the one hand and “scientiﬁc critique” on the other hand…
Author Philip MoriartyPosted on March 2, 2016 Categories Uncategorized
There are deep and fascinating links between heavy metal and quantum physics.
No, really.
There are.