Seth’s blog

Varangy wonders what I think about this editorial by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired. Anderson says “faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.” Anderson confuses statistical models (which are summaries of the data) with scientific ones (which are descriptions of the mechanism that produced the data). As far as the content goes, I’m completely unconvinced. Anderson gives no examples of this approach to science being replaced by something else.

For me, the larger lesson of the editorial is how different science is from engineering. Wired is mainly about engineering. I’m pretty sure Anderson has some grasp of the subject. Yet this editorial, which reads like something a humanities professor would write, shows that his understanding doesn’t extend to science. It reminds me why I didn’t want to be a doctor. (Which is like being an engineer.) It seemed to me that a doctor’s world is too constrained: You deal with similar problems over and over. I wanted more uncertainty, a bigger canvas. That larger canvas came along when I tried to figure out why I was waking up too early. Rather than being like engineering (applying what we already know), this was true science: I had no idea what the answer was. There was a very wide range of possibilities. Science and engineering are two ends of a dimension of problem-solving. The more you have an idea what the answer will be, the more it is like engineering. The wider the range of possible answers, the more it is like science. Making a living requires a steady income: much more compatible with engineering than science. I like to think my self-experimentation has a kind of wild flavor which is the flavor of “raw” science, whereas the science most people are familiar with is “pasteurized” science — science tamed, made more certain, more ritualistic, so as to make it more compatible with making a living. Sequencing genes, for example, is pasteurized science. Taking an MRI of the brain while subjects do this or that task is pasteurized science. Pasteurized science is full of rituals and overstatements (e.g., “correlation does not equal causation”, “the plural of anecdote is not data”) that reduce unpleasant uncertainty, just as pasteurization does. Pasteurized science is more confusable with engineering.

There’s one way in which Anderson is right about the effects of more data. It has nothing to do with the difference between petrabytes and gigabytes (which is what Anderson emphasizes), but it is something that having a lot more data enables: Making pictures. When you can make a picture with your data, it becomes a lot easier to see interesting patterns in it.

Andrew Gelman’s take.

More. Derek James, a graduate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, agrees with me.

I learned a new verb today: to other, meaning to treat someone else as “other,” as different. The person I learned it from had used it once before. She had learned it from a graduate student. Sample usage: “They were othering him and I didn’t like it.” I like to other because there’s room for a milder term than demonize.

Definition of othering, which isn’t in Merriam-Webster’s Online.

In response to my post Can You Change Something if You Don’t Love It? Patri Friedman wrote:

This seems like a good argument for social freedom and harm reduction rather than criminalization, for things like prostitution, gambling, and drugs. If they are illegal, we tend to demonize them, and the people who do them are people willing to do illegal things, who tend to be sleazier. You get a feedback cycle of sleaziness. And then when there are problems (drugs that are bad for you, STDS among sex workers), they are hard to fix.

If instead you acknowledge that these things are going to happen anyway, make them legal and regulated, when problems come up it will be much easier to find smart, competent people who respect drug users, prostitutes, and Johns, and can provide good suggestions for fixing the problems.

Besides being a great point all by itself, it is eerily similar to something Eduoard Servan-Schrieber told me at lunch when he was a grad student at Berkeley. He’d been a sailor in the French navy when he was about 21. Every day, everyone on the ship had lunch together, the officers at the same table as the privates. This was great, said Eduaord, because when a problem came up it was easy to speak with the officers about it. You weren’t scared of them, they weren’t mistrustful of you.

I’ve repeated this story many times. I think there is something basic and biological that makes us trust and work well with people we see regularly and makes us mistrust and work poorly with those we don’t see regularly. When you are in the same company or organization with people you don’t see regularly, great problems can arise, especially if you have power over them or they have power over you.

More. Elisabeth Pisani — the source of the post to which Friedman responded — wrote me, “I agree 100% with Patri, not just on principle but with the weight of the evidence of 15 years experience.”

1. At Writers With Drinks I met a woman who is writing a memoir. Since I had actually published a book, she wondered if I had any advice about finding a publisher. I said don’t get your hopes up. Practically no one makes anything resembling a living from writing books. (I meant books like memoirs — what a friend calls real books.) It’s a hobby. I asked her if she’d heard this before. No, she said. She said she’s around people who are “positive” whereas I was “realistic.”

2. My friend Phil Price is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A few years ago he wrote a chapter (”"Assessing uncertainties in the relationship between inhaled particle concentrations, internal deposition, and health effects”) for a handbook-like compendium. It was a big mistake, he said. There were three problems: 1. It was much harder to write than he expected. 2. The quality of the final product was lower than he expected. 3. The audience was tiny. Maybe 11 people would end up reading what he’d written.

A long post by Ben Casnocha tells how to give advice. The subject fascinates me because I’ve noticed what a strong tendency I have to give advice when told of this or that problem — yet I also realize that advice giving is usually obnoxious. I think this is why Ben’s post is long: It’s a difficult problem, like an addiction: The bad consequences are hard to avoid. Why do I have this tendency? No obvious reason. It certainly isn’t learned or copied or sustained by reward. Why is it obnoxious? Again, there’s no obvious reason. Giving advice has good and bad aspects: trying to be helpful (good) and acting superior and ignorant (bad). Why the bad seems to predominate I have no idea.

This is one reason I think Jane Jacobs’s you can only change what you love is usually true: because in your communication with someone you love (or at least respect) there will be enough positive in the whole message to overcome the negative of the advice itself — so that the advice doesn’t push the person away. (Another reason I think she’s right is that to give good advice you usually need to know a lot about the person you are advising.)