Science Visions

Lauren Ross is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at University of California, Irvine, where she has been since 2017.  Lauren is a philosopher of science focusing on causation and explanation, especially in biology, neuroscience, and medicine.

Lauren completed her dissertation at University of Pittsburgh in History and Philosophy of Science with Jim Woodward and Ken Schaffner.  Along the way she earned an MA in bioethics, also from Pittsburgh.  After graduating, she spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary where she was a co-investigator on the grant ‘From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics’.  

Lauren’s pathway into philosophy was an unusual one.  Before her PhD, she completed an MD, originally intending to go into medicine.  After deciding to make the change, she was able to draw on her in-depth knowledge of medicine in subsequent philosophical work.

She has published in journals like Philosophy of Science, Biology & Philosophy, and Synthese, and spoken widely both nationally and internationally on her work.  Lauren has also served the discipline by co-organizing several workshops.

PSA2018 Poster Forum:  Submission deadline July 1, 2018 

Do you have a pedagogical experiment that you want to share with your colleagues? A public outreach project that was a success? A grant project that you want to advertise? Or research that you would like feedback on? The PSA poster forum is a venue for all of the above! 

The inaugural PSA poster session was held in 2016 in Atlanta. If you missed it, there were about 80 posters set up in a ballroom along with appetizers and beverages. The evening featured both a lively exchange of ideas around the posters and an opportunity to socialize with colleagues. (And, yes, there will be food and beverages again this year!) I presented a poster on a teaching-related initiative and found it a rewarding experience. The presentation format of informal discussion with small groups or individuals allowed for in depth conversations with those who were most interested, which yielded high quality feedback. The forum also provided an opportunity to communicate a few key points to a wide audience. There are sample posters from PSA2016 posted here. Evelyn Brister’s blog posts “Citations, Gender, and Epistemic Uptake” below present material from her poster at that session.

If you are new to the poster format, the PSA poster forum has a web page with comprehensive instructions and tips on organizational principles, aesthetic design, and presentation.

If you would like to submit an abstract to the PSA 2018 poster forum, the instructions are posted here. The final deadline for submissions is July 1, 2018, but the committee will be reviewing submissions on an ongoing basis. Note that the PSA policy regarding multiple submissions to PSA2018 and presenting no more than once on the main program does not apply to poster abstracts. A presenting author on a contributed paper or participating in a symposium may also submit one poster abstract on a substantially different topic.

I would be happy to answer general questions about poster submissions (Doreen Fraser at [email protected]). (To maintain anonymity in the review process, questions about specific submissions should be sent to [email protected], which will be monitored by someone not involved in the review process.) I look forward to seeing many of you at the poster forum in Seattle!

Like many of you did, I showed up last Saturday at my local 2018 Women’s March Rally. I had a bad cold last week, so I didn’t have the energy to make a sign, but I made sure to wear my “Thelma and Louise Finishing School Graduate” shirt, and I met up with some faculty friends who had brought “A Woman’s Place is in the Revolution” signs. We listened to speeches and took pictures of signs that affirmed the #MeToo movement and called out our federal government’s attacks on women, as well as our state government’s restrictive abortion laws. My favorite signs are always the reproductive-justice ones, from the straightforward “Governor out of my uterus” and the pleading “When will my body have as many rights as a gun?” to the uniquely southern “Don’t Tread On Me” flag with a uterus replacing the snake on the yellow background.

During rallies like these, I often see undergraduates I have taught or am teaching. I never hesitate to return a wave or have a conversation with my students when I’m on the street as a feminist rather than as a professor, and I think it is overall a good thing to let my students see me participate in political life in these ways. And yet, I would never wear my Thelma and Louise shirt into the classroom, and not just because I still dress up to teach.

For the past three semesters, starting in the semester that witnessed the 2016 presidential election, I taught a class in health care ethics. I’m not a health care ethicist—or any sort of ethicist—in my research, but I’ve come to cherish the class and its discussions of important, real-life issues with an earnest and motivated group of students. These students, primarily science majors who have signed up for an elective in philosophy, are not exactly a representative sample of our state’s population, but there is a spread of religious and political views in the classroom. So one of my biggest pedagogical challenges over the past three semesters has been to figure out how to present, or how to hide, my own views in class discussions of topics like the government’s role in health insurance, the opioid crisis, and, of course, abortion and reproductive rights.

It should go without saying that I do the thing we all do of telling students that it’s not important that they agree with me but that they provide reasons for their own beliefs. I repeat that maxim early and often, and I’ve even come to believe it. But if you tell a student you’re pro-choice before asking them to write an essay about whether it’s alright for a woman to seek an abortion, even after telling them they don’t need to agree with you, you set them up to try to game you out rather than wrestling with their own views. So I’ve gotten better and better at presenting multiple sides of issues where I believe one side is clearly in the right, and I’ve even had students guess wrong once or twice about where I’d land (I let them “Ask Me Anything” on the last day of class). My students seem to like this setup and often mention in course reviews that they felt comfortable exploring their views and disagreeing with their classmates in my classroom, and I take this as very favorable feedback.

Like I said before, I’m not an ethicist. And in the wake of the rally I found myself wondering if I’m doing this wrong. I teach them “Feminism 101,” that people who are women are people, and I tell them that is something I believe strongly. I get them to tease out the implications of that maxim in law and medicine. But I don’t tell them I’m pro-choice. And I don’t tell them that they should be, too. I don’t tell them to join me at rallies to support Planned Parenthood. I don’t tell them to make their six calls. Is it ethical to withhold my positions on issues that concern feminists in the classroom? As a feminist, should it be part of my pedagogy to explain to my students how my feminism informs my personal ethics and politics, or to advocate for feminist action?

I genuinely find the tenets of the pro-life movement abhorrent and the arguments ill-founded. The more I learn about the historical origins of the movement the more troubled I am by those, too. In my advanced classes on philosophy of science and analytic philosophy, I don’t hesitate to point out that most canonical histories of western philosophy are piles of dead white men, and I make efforts to develop inclusive syllabi and lesson plans. My research is informed by feminist approaches to science. I mentor female philosophy majors and graduate students. I’m one of the chairs of the Philosophy of Science Association Women’s Caucus, for crying out loud! I donate to Planned Parenthood and show up at Women’s Marches, and I sometimes I lay awake at night wondering whether my feminism is sufficiently intersectional to avoid being bullshit.

So, as a strident and agonizing feminist, is it ethical for me to share more of my feminism in the classroom? At this particular political and cultural moment, is it morally incumbent upon me to(o)?

I don’t know, but it is feeling more and more pressing to figure it out every time our governor signs a new bill to try to shut down the last abortion provider in Kentucky. And as I wrestle with my own approaches, I’d love to hear how other Caucus members are confronting their feminism in the classroom these days.

Roberta is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, Davis, where she has been since 2006.  Previously, she held an appointment at California State University, East Bay.  Her PhD is from University of Minnesota, where she wrote her dissertation on chance in evolution, working with Kenneth Waters and John Beatty.

Roberta works primarily in the history and philosophy of biology, in philosophy of science more generally, and in environmental and medical ethics.   She is best known for her contributions to evolutionary theorizing, especially work on the concept of drift, causation, mechanisms, and on probability/determinism in evolution.  Most recently, she has focused on the work of conservationist and wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold, also writing on GMOs and on race and evolution.

Roberta co-edited the volume Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics, which was published by Springer in 2013.  In 2015, she co-edited the special issue Genomics and the Philosophy of Race for Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.  She has published widely in history and philosophy of science.  Her work has received eight small grants from UC Davis since 2007.

Roberta’s service to the discipline has been Herculean.  She is an editor of the journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology and on the editorial boards of Philosophy of Science, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences.  She has served on the governing board (and the program committee and the nominating committee) of the Philosophy of Science Association, and as the co-chair of the PSA Women’s Caucus, as well as serving in multiple capacities for ISHPSSB, the APA, and AAAS.

This past August, after running my annual marathon, I ran into a pickle.  Marathons are a relatively new thing for me. Even more recent is my interest in Cross Fit. Now here is the thing: I have never liked to do anything without doing it well. So, after running my marathon in July, I looked at what it would take to seriously train over the year to increase my performance on the next one -- I got hung up on a particular time with two zeros at the end. I also looked at what it would take to devote myself more seriously to Cross Fit. Unsurprisingly, training plans turned out to be largely incompatible. What were I to do? I figured I would ask the best expert I had handy: my coach.

Dan answered with a question of his own (always a nice trick): "What are your goals?".  That question gave me pause. Indeed, what are my goals, and why is it important to figure that out? Thinking about it, an obvious truth struck me: I will never be a competitive athlete: I will never "win" a marathon, nor will I ever go to the Cross Fit games. For plenty of reasons I don't need to specify here, that ship has sailed a long time ago.

If it is not competing then, what are my goals? I run marathons and I do Cross Fit because I enjoy both. I enjoy the challenge, I enjoy the mastery, I enjoy the achievement. But besides that? Why have these two specific activities become my hobbies of choice among all the other ones I could enjoy devoting my time to? Why not practicing yoga, writing fiction, drawing, or dancing? These also involve challenge, mastery, and achievement. A short conversation with myself revealed that I do Cross Fit because I want to grow old without injuries. I want to be able to hike the mountains, to play with my grand-children, to be independent and mobile, as long as possible. Cross Fit workouts give me a mixture of physical challenges associated with strength, balance, coordination, and mobility that I haven't found anywhere else.  What about marathons? Why the heck am I doing this to myself, again and again? Long-distance running provides me with a unique form of serenity and peace. I am not good at shutting off my buzzing head while sitting. Long runs only make room for silence.  

So my goals are on one hand to keep generally healthy, strong, and mobile, and on the other hand to secure some mental relief. On the basis of that answer, the coach could provide some advice: keep your long runs stress-free: don't put a lot of thought in them, just go run as long as you need to get what you want from them. Then come to the gym the rest of the time: you will grow old strong and mobile, and we will improve your overall fitness. Then he followed with some anecdotal evidence suggesting that a regular Cross Fit training would increase my marathon performance without me thinking about it too much.

The last piece is nice and comforting, but it is not the important part. The important part is that I cannot just throw myself full speed into something, and do it as seriously and as intensely as possible just because "I have never liked to do anything without doing it well". Don't get me wrong: I truly hate it. But "doing something well" does not necessarily mean doing them at maximum intensity. What it means depends, again, on your goals.  

Satisfied with my new exercise routine, I realize now that my coach's advice applies way beyond training schedules.  As many, if not all, of us, I constantly struggle with balancing my time between various endeavors, including research, teaching, student mentoring, public service, self-care, and family. I enjoy all of these activities. So, I could possibly spend an indefinite amount of time on each of them, "just because" I have never liked to do anything without doing it well, "just because" I enjoy the challenge and mastery associated with them. Could it be that I could solve some, or all of my troubles, by answering the simple question: "what are my goals?" for each of these activities? There are some obvious answers here: I will never be the new rising star in my research field (at 42, I can safely say that that ship too has sailed), I care deeply about making a difference in people's lives, I don't really care about fame or money, and self-care is just a necessary condition for everything else. Now I am not sure yet how all of this translates into the overall question of how to balance my time between all those things I enjoy doing. But I am committed to work on figuring it out as soon as possible, while diligently going through my WODs, and my long runs.

Soazig Le Bihan

At our first pit stop, we take an in-depth look at some highly successful accounts: Katrina Falkenberg at @EES_Update, Beth Hannon at @TheBJPS, Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger (@yoginho), who ran @KLI_Austria until June 1st, 2017, and Christopher Eliot at @PTPBio.

tl;dr My Five Main Takeaways:

Make the institute handle a go-to hub for specific types of content. (Re)tweet wisely but widely. Less noise, more signal. #academictwitter

Co-construct an Academic Twitter ecosystem. Collaborate by (re)tweeting and tagging posts from other #philsci accounts. #academictwitter

Create a living portrait of your institutional activities. Don’t just post a photo+talk title. Inject a human perspective #academictwitter

Actively control how your event is tweeted. Set up ground rules, a hashtag, and create “sound-bite” quotes for retweets #academictwitter

Twitter is great for networking, not that great for debates. Take the discussion outside after initial contact #academictwitter

Fun things to try:

1.     Designate “conference correspondents” to live tweet from the ground. The rest can live vicariously through them #academictwitter #ideas

We will cover conference tweeting in our next post.

2.     Rotate your handle between institute members. Showcase their work and perspectives.  #academictwitter #ideas

3.     Run “journal clubs” around your events. Summarize what you’re reading. Explain why. #academictwitter #ideas #teachingmoment

4.     Use tools such as Tweetdeck and Buffer to manage what you see and how you tweet. #academictwitter #tips #makeitworkforyou

5.     Check out #ScholarSunday each Sunday for scholars to follow. Contribute your own. #academictwitter #philsci #histsci

THE INTERVIEW

@EES_Update is the official handle of the brand new Extended Evolutionary Synthesis grant project (http://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/), an impressive consortium of 51 researchers across 22 projects, including philosophy of biology. They (very smartly) hired Katrina as the dedicated communications officer to run one of the mightiest interdisciplinary institute handles I’ve seen. I had to ask how she does it!

@BJPS, the official handle of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (https://academic.oup.com/bjps/) caught my attention with their highly successful conference campaign at ISHPSSB 2017. They just finished another conference campaign from EPSA. It was intriguing to see a journal account reach out beyond their published content to engage broadly with its disciplines. Now I want to know: who, what, when, where, how?

I am a fan of the frequent and engaging talk summaries that used to come from the KLI Klosterneuburg (http://kli.ac.at) @KLIAustria. They were orchestrated and composed by Yogi, the director of the KLI at the time. I am thrilled that he generously shared his Twitter wisdom. Parts of my interview with him will also show up in future posts (about conference tweeting and tweeting as an individual).

I asked Chris to share the guiding principles behind the official handle of Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology @PTPBio, a newly relaunched journal that is unique and remarkable as the first free, open-access, and researcher-run journal in the field.

Today we reveal the human behind the handles! Who’s lurking behind EES_update and BJPS? A dedicated officer? A bot? A poor, tired grad student?

Katrina (EES): EES_Update is the communication platform for the extended evolutionary synthesis research program. It consists of a website, blog, twitter account and facebook page. These outlets work together to promote our research and that of others, as well as advertise related conferences, job vacancies and other pertinent social media accounts. Importantly, we use our twitter and facebook activities to direct people to our blog and website where the real ‘meat’ is hosted. As the communications and outreach officer for the research program I am the one doing all the posting and uploading but I work very closely with the program’s 51 researchers across a wide variety of inter-related topics.

Beth (BJPS): The twitter account is 100% organic, free range, and bot-free! It’s usually run by Steven French (Co-Chief Editor) and Beth Hannon (Assistant Editor); the Facebook account is run by Beth Hannon. We’ve been experimenting with giving the twitter account over to other academics at conferences we can’t make ourselves, so that they can live tweet the talks in our place. Recently, we’ve had Charles Pence tweeting from the ISH conference in Rio. He did such an excellent job, we’ll definitely be repeating the experiment!

KLI: The @KLIAustria account was organized and run by Yogi Jaeger up until June 1st this year. Two examples of Yogi’s work: KLI colloquium with James DiFrisco & KLI colloquium with Jannie Hofmeyr

Chris (PTPBio): Since our relaunch as Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology earlier this year, I've been running the new Twitter account that came online with it, @PTPBio.

What content do you (re)tweet for your institution? Most importantly, WHY tweet at all?

Katrina (EES): Our goal is for EES Update to be a ‘hub’ for science communication in evolutionary biology, reaching a large audience with varied types of information across diverse topic areas. We hope that this might expose researchers in one field to current research in another to stimulate new ideas and research avenues. This simply wouldn’t be feasible for an individual researcher to maintain alongside their traditional academic responsibilities.

@EES_update follows hundreds of twitter handles including empirical and theoretical biologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians of biology, societies and journals. I look through the twitter feed regularly but as it’s too vast to read everything, I created a couple of lists to make sure I don’t miss anything from our researchers or other researchers who frequently tweet about topics relevant to our audience. I also look at key hashtags and have a handful of google alerts but I find that reading the general and customized feeds are the most useful.

Beth (BJPS): I think one of the motivations behind taking to social media was that we’re a tricky journal for publishers to market. It’s not just philosophers of science that engage with our content, but scientists too. That said, it’s not always easy to make our material obvious to scientists through conventional means. And there are plenty of philosophers beyond the sub-discipline of philosophy of science who might not have realised that our articles are relevant to their work, too. But social media respects no disciplinary boundaries! So it’s a great way of trying to ensure that our authors get read by all the people who might be interested in their work, not just the usual suspects. And while our first priority is to our own authors, it does the broader philsci community no harm to be given greater exposure.

Of course, tweeting about the Journal’s content is only a fraction of what we do. But I don’t think we see ourselves as curators of everything phisci! We just tweet and re-tweet the things that we find interesting or funny, and think others will too (though YMMV!). Because Steven’s interests run towards physics and my own towards biology, we hopefully cover a wide enough range of philsci topics. We try to give particular attention to early career and otherwise less visible people and their work (as we also do via the spotlight series on our blog, Auxiliary Hypotheses). What we don’t re-tweet are advertisements for postgrad courses and similar.

Yogi: My experience with Twitter has been very good and very valuable, both running my personal Twitter feed and that of the KLI over the past two years. The KLI feed increased from about a dozen to several hundred followers over just a few months. It's a great way of presenting yourself or your institute to a wide but interested audience and to keep up-to-date with relevant literature and news beyond the boundaries your own field. It is absolutely essential nowadays for academic institutes to have a well-designed and informative social media presence. Twitter remains the platform preferred by most scientists. Tweets are much more effective for reaching your audience than websites, which people usually only visit when they want to apply for a fellowship/job, find information on a researcher at the institute, or get some other specific piece of information. Moreover, tweets give a more dynamic picture of the academic life and activities at an institute, and allow alumni to remain connected and updated without much effort on their side.

Chris (PTPBio): We mostly tweet content that's closely related to what we do. My assumption is that people choosing to follow us mostly want to hear about our content. That includes announcing our papers as soon as they're published and highlighting developments at the journal. When we retweet, it's usually still content related to the journal in some way. We pass on tweets and blog posts about our articles. And, for example, because a distinguishing feature of our journal is that it's fully open access, we recently shared a study showing that open access articles are cited significantly more often than paywalled articles are. So, our Twitter engagement is focused on supporting our product.

Has Tweeting been beneficial for your handle? What good does it bring?

Beth (BJPS): There’s a definite correlation between a paper’s downloads and citations on the one hand, and its promotion via social media on the other. Undoubtedly, this has to do with reaching those non-traditional audiences. And with the growth of AltMetrics, this is only going to become more important. On the whole, we’ve found social media to be a fantastic means to bring attention to philosophy of any sort. I also run a public philosophy organisation (The Forum, based in the LSE), and using only social media our audience numbers have increased from something in the dozens to the hundreds. Social media both uncovers and cultivates a real appetite for philosophy.

People have mentioned that they found out about a particular conference, new research, or recently published paper (one of ours or some other journal’s) via our social media channels, which is nice. And so far, the feedback we’ve received has been positive! For ourselves, I think we enjoy the chance to ‘chat’, even a little, with our colleagues and friends who we might otherwise only see at the occasional conference, or whom we may never otherwise have come across.

Chris (PTPBio): Making sure the articles we publish are discoverable — that readers interested in their topics will find them — is one of our highest priorities. And I think Twitter is one of the best ways to release information about our articles into the wild. In that environment, it finds its way to interested readers we would never know to reach out to directly. When a biologist shares a tweet about one of our articles with coworkers, for instance, the article reaches a new audience. And in our analytics, we can see those visits to the articles on our site coming in from Twitter.

Now to the how-to part. How does one set up a Twitter environment for an event? I asked Katrina to walk us through what she did for the first EES workshop:

Katrina (EES): In May this year, we held our first EES event, a small workshop at the KLI, entitled, “Cause and Process in Evolution”. We used the acronym of the conference name plus the year for the hashtag: #CAPIE2017. Our rationale was that it was short so more characters could be used for the tweet itself and could be derived from the conference name if people forgot it. Live tweeting from participants was encouraged but images of slides with sensitive content were to receive permission from the presenter before posting. It’s very important that conference tweeting respects the sensitivity of unpublished findings so it doesn’t discourage the sharing of works in progress. As the person behind the @EES_update handle, I tweeted during all the talks and reciprocally retweeted other participants to maximize the content and reach of the tweets going out.

What is a good tweet? A good tweeting strategy? Dos and Don’ts?

Yogi: There are a number of researchers who I follow that are excellent at picking out and posting interesting new work. Useful tweets briefly summarize topic and impact of a piece of work, and then link to it (and to potential secondary articles in science news media). A good tweet also includes handles of authors or other colleagues who are directly involved or affected by a paper. This gets the relevant people notified and often starts a discussion, especially if the results presented are controversial. I have had very good discussions, e.g. about the use and misuse of the "genetic program" metaphor (see below) that started with tweets on specific papers. Twitter, with its 140 character limit, does pose severe constraints on what you can explain. Sometimes, discussions need to move to email, Skype, or live conversations to provide appropriate context. Sometimes, there is value in brevity though, since it forces discussion participants to concisely state their most relevant points and arguments.

That being said…less noise, more signal, please! Anti-examples are institutes that only tweet seminar announcements (usually available through websites or mailing lists anyway). Using hashtags effectively is extremely important to increase the abysmal signal-to-noise ratio that keeps many people away from Twitter. There is an awful lot of meaninglessness out there, like the alien in Kurt Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" that only broadcasts "I am here, I am here, I am here..."

Katrina (EES): We make a point to balance our highly field-specific tweets with more general tweets. For example, on the specific side, we tweet about recently published papers which advance a particular field. On the other hand, we try to reach a wide interdisciplinary audience by, for example, tweeting about our recent blog posts and those of others, which are accessible to a non-specialist audience. It is extremely helpful, especially at the beginning, to interact with other people or institutions with similar goals. You can retweet each other’s content and together reach a wider audience. We are always looking to collaborate – the more comprehensive our content, the better.

Beth (BJPS): We don’t have much in the way of a strategy—mostly what we do has emerged in the doing of it. We’ve certainly never sat down to discuss what we’re doing. We do try to tweet at different times of the day—despite our parochial name, our authors and readers span the globe! Twitter is so ephemeral, a tweet disappears into the void within a few hours and we’d completely miss those in other time zones if we didn’t tweet across the day.

In terms of dos and don’ts... Don’t be a jerk? Remember that nothing good comes from arguing on twitter? Do engage only as much as you want or can, given the many other tasks on your plate. Do be yourself (except where that conflicts with being a jerk….). Don’t fight it: embrace the videos of cats and dogs.

Chris (PTPBio): If I can find a way to display in just a few words what's exciting about a new article, that tweet will find its way beyond our core audience to other people it will excite. Philosophy doesn't lend itself to the brevity Twitter forces on us. But it can be healthy for the message to be forced to try!

Some accounts share a wide variety of content. They serve as portals to lots of interesting, vaguely-related stuff. There are virtues to that. It's sociable. It's inclusive. But as a reader, I mostly prefer to subscribe to accounts that have a high signal-to-noise ratio relative to my interests. I happen to like the more peripheral content @TheBJPS and @hoposjournal tweet, for example. But there are a lot of academics on Twitter I don't follow anymore because their academic topic is maybe 20% of what they tweet. I would love to hear about it, but I don't happen to care enough about their other interests to spend so much time scrolling. Reading Twitter uses up time and attention. So, I try to keep our journal account pretty focused and hope that some readers value that and don't miss the other stuff.

Who would you recommend following?

Beth (BJPS): In the years we’ve been using twitter, the increase in twitter accounts for bigger projects has been noticeable. Some very active and informative accounts include @EES_update, @p_realism (run by our ex-Co-Chief Editor Michela Massimi), and @EpistInnocence. There are other non-bot journal accounts popping up too; @hoposjournal is particular active and interesting. And bot accounts aren’t all bad! @PhilSciArchive and @SocPhilSciPract are particularly good for keeping track of new papers, conferences, jobs, and so on. Besides these group accounts, there are lots of individual philosophers and scientists that give great twitter; there’s probably too many to mention and we’d end up leaving someone important out anyway!

Katrina (EES): The EES research program is by nature interdisciplinary and our twitter followers and followed handles reflect this. We highly recommend following a range of individuals, institutions/consortia and journals for a range of content and perspectives.

Yogi: I am reluctant to provide specific tags here, since who you want to follow will depend a lot on what kind of information you are interested in. There is no way around exploring and then selecting those feeds that are useful to you! I tend to follow A LOT of feeds, and then aggregate those I really like and use regularly into an "essential" (private) Twitter list. I've also created several other topical lists. Many tools also allow you to create dynamic lists that follow hashtags. I used TweetDeck on my laptop to do this. It is a powerful tool to manage and display feeds sorted by such lists and hashtags (although it does suffer from some annoying bugs and missing features, unfortunately).

Chris (PTPBio): There's not a right way to use Twitter. I read about people making Twitter friends (“tweeps”) who become valued real-world friends, for example. Others enjoy seeing a wide-ranging snapshot of everything that's going on right now. But I spot new Twitter users who follow a dozen news outlets and a dozen major non-profits that each tweet several times an hour plus a handful of celebrities and politicians, and I can't imagine wanting that. Unlike all that, there is content on Twitter you can't get elsewhere. As a philosopher of science, being able to hear what papers and ideas biologists all over the world are most excited about discussing with each other has irreplaceable value for me. I can't hang out at the coffee machines in all the science departments. But I can see what they're eagerly sharing and discussing. So I look for accounts like that, in my specific areas of interest.

Thinking about using Twitter for your organization, institute, or event?

Interested in networking and following conferences on Twitter?

Looking for a community of dissertation-writers with support, resources, tips, and mentorship?

Read on for interviews with institutions, grants, and philosophers of science on Twitter!

You may have heard of Twitter, a social media platform in 140 characters. It is the place of political meltdowns, a troll-infested swampland where dank memes go to die. But have you heard of the little paradise within, untouched by the hordes—Academic Twitter?

Academic Twitter is a large multi-disciplinary community of (mostly) scientists, chattering academic life, policy, practices, results, writing tips, jokes… and more.

Here, scientists of all stripes and seniority…

exchange research info and opportunities

follow conferences and network with the profession

provide and seek support

push for #openscience #citizenscience #sciart (science and art) #scicomm (science communication) and science policies

organize Twitter Conferences (yes, that’s a thing!)

take turns with rotating accounts to talk about what they do and how they do it

smirk (and quietly cry) at the Lego Grad Student, Shit Academics Say, PHD Comics…

…140 characters at a time.

Strolling scrolling through, I was struck by its richness, rigor, and humanity. On a good day, dissertators are hugged, conferences are broadcast, a case study is found, life priorities are doubted, an octopus pic goes viral, and finally (!) someone hears back from customer service.

This tickled my curiosity.

Mayhaps…, philosophers of science can use Twitter to tap in, or dare I say meddle with, a robust scientific community operating in real time?

Perhaps…, the diverse needs of our students and faculties could benefit from Twitter’s wide-ranging support and resources? (e.g. #PHDchat #PhDlife for dissertators, #ECRchat for early career researchers, #Acwri for academic writers, and #shutupandwrite for academics to join writing sessions in the comfort of their own homes)

Maybe…, our journals, institutes, international societies could better serve its global members and audience through Twitter? (e.g. tweeting from conferences, hosting Twitter conferences such as the highly successful #braintc, #WSTC3, #BTCon17)?

Could we dare dream…, that philosophers limited by finances, physical and mental health, language, or nationality, etc., can break barriers with the help of Twitter, even if just a little bit?

To investigate, I sought out Tweeters in philosophy of science/biology and begged interdisciplinary grant and institute accounts to share their wisdom. Part introduction, part rumination, I propose to take you on a road trip through Academic Twitter in three parts.

Part I: What does it take to manage a successful institutional account, especially interdisciplinary onesl? I interview handles including @TheBJPS, the official account of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and @EES_update, the communication platform for the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis project, an interdisciplinary program spanning 51 researchers in 22 projects, including philosophy of biology!

Part II: What is conference twittering, and how can I do it better? I share conversations with my favorite conference Tweeters, Johannes Jaeger @yoginho (who tweeted for @KLIAustria), Charles Pence @pencechp (who live tweeted from ISHPSSB 2017 for @TheBJPS), and more. We take a look at the art of succinctly summarizing philosophy talks in one paragraph (2-3 tweets).

Part III: What good can come out of Twitter? Jewels from fellow #philsci Tweeters, some addicted (you know who you are), some casual. I chat with Tweeters Rani Lill Anjum @ranilillanjum, KatherineLiu @KatherineELiu, Ehud Lamm @ehud, Jun Otsuka @junotk_jp, Roberta Millstein @Cepaea, and others about interdisciplinarity, dos & don’ts, professional networking, academic support, and stories of good things that happen on Twitter.

If you’ve got this far, the Twitter notations might not have deterred you, but the #s and @s, information explosion, and existential angst of Twitter does make for a bedazzling, bewildering, and bewitching experience. Don’t worry, I’ll be your dutiful tour guide. Regardless of your relationship with social media, there’s always something to take away.

So! Warm up your thumbs and open your apps. Let’s kick off this end-of-summer ride!

The hashtag? #AcademicTwitter!

--Lynn Chiu, University of Bordeaux/CNRS

I.  Then and Now

 When I was in graduate school in a philosophy department, talking about the cognitive capabilities of animals meant risking being suspected of being unphilosophical -- unscientific, even!  It depended upon the context and company, of course.  An indication of the depth of the rift that existed in my department was the exchange that occurred when, at my mock interview, one faculty member asked me a question involving animal belief and another faculty member advised me (in an authoritative tone) that if an interviewer ever asks about animal cognition, rather than try to answer it, my response should be to change the topic immediately!

But I soon learned there were philosophers working on the topic, and quite seriously, too.  Many were women in philosophy of science.  Not too long after that exchange, I got to hear Kristin Andrews speak on something involving dolphins and mirror recognition.  Her papers exhibit all the rigor of the most careful work in analytic philosophy, while venturing into the muddy territory of experimental research on animal cognitive abilities.   [A good example is her recent "Chimpanzee Mind Reading: Don't Stop Believing" in Philosophy Compass. ] I say muddy territory metaphorically, in that the research questions and methods in animal cognition were often not as precise as was needed to answer the philosophical question she had formulated.  But it's possible it fits literally, too, as she sometimes actually works with animals herself, making her own observations firsthand.   Soon I ran across others:  Colin Allen co-edited The Cognitive Animal.'   Sandy Mitchell argued that anthropomorphism was "not necessarily nonscientific" in an anthology devoted to the topic, Thinking With Animals, edited by the historian of science Lorraine Daston. Frans de Waal showed up in philosophy venues more and more, and was invited to give the Tanner Lectures in 2003, and gave one with the subtitle "Continuity with the Other Primates." And, Kristin Andrews  went on to make a career out of her interest in the topic, publishing Do Apes Read Minds?  which put forth a novel account of how to think about attributing beliefs to apes.  Far from being rejected as not philosophical by the profession, the Canadian Philosophical Association awarded it the 2013 Biennial Book prize.  She has since published The Animal Mind: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition, which some are using as a textbook.  A sign of the acceptance of animal mind in philosophy is the mammoth Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Animal Minds, which just appeared on the scene a few months ago, which she co-edited.  

That odd exchange at the mock interview took place over fifteen years ago.  Things feel very different now.  Philosophy of science on animal cognition gets funded now, too.  Philosophers are becoming ever more adventurous about the kind of projects they are proposing.

II. "How close to us?" -- two senses

 Much of the work -- at least the early work -- on animal cognition was occasioned by questions involving comparisons of the cognitive abilities of humans (often human children) and animals.  This is asking how close animals are to us in the sense of comparing their abilities with ours.  Here mirror self-recognition and counting are two iconic examples.  Animal cognitive abilities are sometimes even labeled using developmental milestones originally designed for human children.   

People who work with animals, though, are aware not just of animal cognitive development, but of the significance of the quality of the bond between animals and whom they learn from and interact with, whether those others are animals or humans.  Pets -- or companion animals, as they're usually called in academic settings -- are of course a special case of the animal-human bond (as opposed to animals raised in herds for their wool, say), but why should studying them in their role as pets be any less scientific?  It should be okay to ask "How close are they?" in this sense, too.  

It's not unscientific to study animals in their natural habitat, and a dogs' natural habitat often is co-habitation with someone of the human species.  The canine-human bond is certainly not thought to be unnatural, in fact, some find it to be one of the most amazing things natural selection has wrought.  Some dogs seem able to detect more about their human's emotional and cognitive state than humanly possible.  That's worthy of study in and of itself.  But, then how is the canine-human bond involved in training them?  

III.  Philosophers as Explorers

This brings us to an unusual project by philosopher of science Carla Fehr that is an investigation into an intriguing meld of canine cognition, the canine-human bond, scientific consensus, and scientific method.  Her investigation, though not devoid of all sorts of fun pet ownership aspects,  means to find answers to some serious questions, and will be chronicled at a blog devoted to the project, called ontheroadwithmilo.com   I am reminded of travel narratives of eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers like Humboldt, Wallace and Darwin, though the territory explored with be different; something more like an exploration of an unprobed landscape in science studies than a land Europeans have yet to study and map. Here are some excerpts from the site:

"This project is a chance to look more closely at the social, political, and scientific research on the dogs who share our lives, and to do so from the perspective of my relationship with Milo the AwesomeDog.  https://ontheroadwithmilo.com/about/

"My goal.

I want to learn about dog-human relationships from expert handlers and trainers, from scientists working on this topic, and from my own relationship with Milo. I’ll explore the connections among these different kinds of knowledge to help answer a bunch of questions. [see blog for these questions]"

"The journey.

Milo and I will visit Canadian veterinary schools, and talk to veterinary and other scientists doing research on dogs. I’ll take Milo to obedience trials across the country, compete with him, and talk with people who have practical expertise training and handling dogs. I want to know these scientists’ and practical experts’ thoughts about how we generate and use knowledge about dog minds and relationships." 

By now there are a number of posts up.  Several concern a critique of the literature on the effectiveness of clicker training.  I think this is a fascinating project, with an unusual and insightful conclusion about how the scientific method is used in invoking evidence for dog training methods. Here's a post on that:  https://ontheroadwithmilo.com/2017/06/07/my-method-is-scientific-3-the-trouble-with-clicker-training/

Some knowledge comes from observation in naturalistic settings, such as this one about Milo watching action films -- or is it about Milo's reactions to the philosopher in the room viewing an action film?  Good question, right?  Right. https://ontheroadwithmilo.com/2017/06/06/on-watching-action-movies-with-sensitive-dogs/

And, I realized, the two posts are related.  The one about observing Milo in his natural habitat of his human's living room provides background knowledge that's valuable in investigating the question about scientific method.  The human-animal bond is part of the picture that is being investigated, which enriches the picture and helps open up new possibilities to consider regarding what is going on.  The question "How close are they?"  in the sense of bonds with humans is not unrelated to investigating "How close are they?"  in the sense of comparisons with humans.  

The actual journey is about to start, if it hasn't already.  

Those journeys by Humboldt and Wallace and Darwin provided a lot of material to British and European scientists in the nineteenth century, and well beyond.  Who knows what will result from this journey?  You can sign up to get notices of new posts to the blog at ontheroadwithmilo.com

--Susan Sterrett, Wichita State University

In late April I led a forum about science reporting at the DeLTA Center in Iowa, which is comprised mainly of psychologists (DeLTA is an acronym for Development and Learning from Theory to Application). The immediate topic of discussion was a recent article I'd written on what journalists should do to cover unreliable science. The epistemic background of my practical recommendations was that science news should be conceptualized as the result of collaboration. This assimilates science news to the interscientific collaborations theorized about by philosophers of science and social epistemologists. Science news has usually (if implicitly) been viewed in terms of an individualistic epistemology: scientists do their epistemic jobs, and reporting is a matter of providing reliable testimony. The idea of reporting as passive transmission (whatever the beat) has been criticized for a number of reasons by sociologists and others in media studies. Epistemic failures within science, however, make vivid the prior question of who should provide the justification for science news in the first place. On my view, it's up to both scientists and journalists, since each group can undermine the reliability of science news independently.

While many epistemic issues arise in science journalism, I'd like to touch here on a basic question regarding collaboration that isn't usually noted. It is something that, in addition to widening their theorizing about collaboration to include science-humanities collaborations, philosophers of science might think also about. Many philosophers of science have a good idea (often from the inside) of what scientists do, and hence what they can contribute to justification, collaboration, and the like. In contrast, for almost anyone except journalists themselves and those who study journalism, the process that yields a news story is largely a mystery. We may pay attention only when and to the extent that there are notable failures of the process, especially oversimplification or distortion of research results. This came out at the DeLTA forum when a leading psychologist recounted his dismal interactions with a prominent science journalist. The latter, when pressed on the simplification issue, retorted "My job is to sell newspapers!" So how's that collaboration idea supposed to work?

My response was, "He's simplifying his job for you." No, he's not just selling newspapers. But yes, he serves the public interest, and he does not have the luxury of pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake. And this makes a difference to what he does.

Science and objective journalism share two epistemically critical features: first, they aim at truth (or accuracy), and second, they demand empirical support for truth claims. But science journalism is never just a question of how to present science to people for whom "ice floe" and "symmetry" are technical terms. It is also about determining that this bit of science is relevant (and to whom), and – importantly for the process of producing it – about how to make that bit appear relevant to a public that needs to be persuaded of its relevance. That the public is ever more distracted only makes this job harder. The goals of truth and relevance are not necessarily at odds, but it is part of what the reporter does to balance these things (among others). Strict truth will rarely win out; there's just not enough time or space for it, and there are non-epistemic goals to consider.

However, this conflict has also come to characterize science. Even if few scientists may seriously describe what they do as "selling research", in fact this is what many are worried about (a.k.a. "winning grants"). This is the same conflict of interest between pursuing truth and responding to market pressure that journalists have faced since forever. Doing the right epistemic thing is constrained in practice by what must be done to satisfy competing non-epistemic interests and pressures. The received view of science news artificially divides it into an epistemic component for which scientists are responsible, and a sales component for which journalists are responsible. On the collaborative view, both sides need to work together to produce as epistemically reliable a product as possible within their respective (but often similar) non-epistemic constraints.

If anyone happens to be around CERN next week:

Marie Curie, women and science, then and now

Globe of Science and Innovation - CERN

Thursday 29 June 2017 8:30 pm

With the participation of l’Echo du Reculet from Thoiry.

Conference in French with simultaneous interpretation Registration mandatory here

Hélène Langevin-Joliot, Emeritus Research Director in Fundamental Nuclear Physics at the CNRS in Orsay, France, daughter of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie (Nobel laureates for Chemistry in 1935) and granddaughter of Pierre Curie (Nobel laureate for Physics in 1903) and Marie Curie (Nobel laureate for Physics in 1903 and for Chemistry in 1911).

Langevin-Joliot will present her life in science, her extraordinary family history and the role of women in science more generally. Langevin-Joliot has given her all to her career as a passionate and committed nuclear physicist while always defending those causes close to her heart, such as campaigning against the deployment of nuclear technology for military purposes, championing access to scientific careers for women and inspiring as many people as possible to take an interest in science.

Controlled falling

I just had the good fortune to take a modern dance class at Washington University with David Marchant. The class was a wonderful mix of an introduction to a variety of modern dance techniques and their history, along with dance improvisation, and doing David’s always inspired choreography. The central focus of the class, however, has been presence. David asked us to reflect on the first day on the following question: what makes a dancer great? It’s not, we decided, simply mastery of a technique, strength, or flexibility.  Great modern dancers make their own technique, break the “rules” of dance, and try out novel approaches to movement.  Great dancing is about something more ineffable: presence. We’ve discussed presence all semester, and tried out different ways of defining it, or pinning down what gives a dancer presence. One central idea is attention, but not the energetic, adrenalin-fueled hyper-attentiveness one associates with running a race or giving a public address for the first time. The sort of attention associated with presence has more of a calm, focused character.  

What is the nature of attention associated with presence? Attention to what? Dancers with presence are attentive to their environment (including other dancers), their body, and the flow of the dance, all at the same time. Achieving that is difficult. Why? It seems like this sort of focused attention is something we all have, but (David argued) we often lose when we are trained as dancers, because our focus shifts to technique, or mastering specific skills. Learning these skills causes us to focus on looking lean, and long, or mastering certain steps or particular ways of holding our body. This takes our attention away from simply being present in, and feeling the joy of motion of the dance.  Attentive presence is what we might have felt dancing as children, or as untrained dancers. So, we had to relearn this kind of attention. We’ve worked quite a bit on what may seem an odd task: being present in one’s body – noticing how our body feels as it moves, being attentive to choices we make in movement, even very small, simple moves. We’ve used various techniques to cultivate a kind of relaxed, focused attention. We’ve focused on attending to particular parts of the body that tend to tense up as we dance – the neck, the back, and the shoulders – as well as habits of motion that we fall into – pulling up straight, puffing our chest out or pulling back the shoulders, tightening our core. It can be quite difficult to unlearn these habits, especially after decades of ballet training.  We’ve also focused on looking around us and noticing our environment: trying to see motion at the periphery of our vision, and exploring aspects of our immediate environment – the texture of the floor, the motion of the ceiling or walls as we spin, noticing all the particular objects in our environment. I have spent a lot of time simply seeing, or trying to see anew: the color of paint on the walls, the trees outside, and the fading light of evening. We’ve worked on feeling what it is like to move through space, and trying to notice and respond to how those around us move. Someone with presence is fully engaged with both the dance and with the environment.

I’ve noticed that as I practice, this focused attention, I achieve a kind of joy. Presence is joyful. That’s why, I think, it’ is a pleasure to watch. We want to see presence in a dancer, because we know how that feels: the feeling of presence is what it feels like to be a child deep in play or spending time with a good friend, or for some of us, being outdoors: a kind of deep excitement, a quiet and serene joy.

What matters, David argued, to a dancer’s presence, is the ability to own the choreography – to make it one’s own – to fully occupy the dance.  Dancers with presence seem to not be preoccupied with failure, or getting each step right. To have presence is to lead, not to follow, or look like what someone else thinks one ought to look, to do what someone else thinks you ought to do. Of course, dancers need to learn and perform choreography, but a great choreographer is one who can cultivate this presence in the artists. 

This is linked, I think, to something David repeated throughout the semester that struck me: Balance is controlled falling.  He urged us to think about this as we dance.  Letting go of holding oneself in a certain way, or getting right each and every step, and yet not letting go of self-awareness, is harder than one might think.  Modern dancers (or at least those in David’s tradition) try to cultivate an ease of motion with balance, control and dynamism.  Modern dance looks deceptively easy, exactly because it looks so much like “natural” motion. But it involves a combination of control, and (sometimes quite literally) falling.

I think more of us - philosophers, and perhaps women philosophers in particular - need to practice this kind of controlled falling. Or, I do. Falling is associated with harm, risk, fear, and failure. I think many of us seek out safety – in everyday decisions in our philosophical work, professional lives and families. This can make us feel less afraid, but there is a cost. If we’re unwilling to take the risks that controlled falling involves, we won’t rise to our potential. Taking risks - and failing - and yet owning this failure, and moving on with grace, is part of becoming fully mature.

I’ve been working on a book project for several years, and I’ve had a hard time finishing. This is in part because the book is very ambitious and wide-ranging. But, it’s also because I’m afraid: afraid of failure. I worry that the book has poor or bad arguments, that my ideas are not original, poorly executed, or inadequately defended, or that I lack sufficient knowledge of what I’m writing about. Apart from delaying the book’s getting finished, this has also meant that I’ve been afraid to take risks in my work, to say what I really think. I say the safer thing, the less surprising thing, and in a way, this makes the book’s ideas more shallow and uninteresting. 

I need to do is more controlled falling in my own work, which means: - Pursue my arguments to their conclusions, rather than pull up or stop short because I’m afraid of where my ideas lead. - Stop following others’ ideas and arguments, and let my own ideas shape the work’s organization and argument. - Be willing to own my work, even when I misstep. 

Alison Peterman is the James P. Wilmot Distinguished Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester.  Her research is primarily in early modern philosophy and history of philosophy of science, focusing especially on Spinoza, but also on Newton, Descartes, and, most recently, Cavendish.  Her pet frog, Franklin, is named after Rosalind Franklin.  

While earning her PhD in Philosophy at Northwestern University, Alison simultaneously earned a Master’s in Physics.  Since finishing her graduate work in 2012, she has been at Rochester, beginning her distinguished professorship in 2015.

Alison has published her work in top journals including Synthese and Philosopher’s Imprint.  In addition to publishing in philosophy, she was a researcher on the CMS experiment when the Higgs boson was discovered.  She was selected as a Young Researcher to attend the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Physics in 2012.

Alison has organized several workshops including, for the last several years, the Upstate New York Workshop in Early Modern Philosophy through the Mellon Foundation.

A note from the editors at humansandnature: 

Dr. Roberta Millstein just published 

an essay

 about morality and evolution on the Center for Humans and Nature website:

http://www.humansandnature.org/how-the-struggle-for-existence-became-an-environmental-ethic-for-our-lifetime 

Interesting article from Cailin O’Connor and Justin Bruner on modeling discrimination in academia.

Reposted from Cailin O’Connor’s article on the Huffington Post:

As an undergrad at Harvard with (relatively) few resources, I used to make my pizza money as a guinea pig in psych studies. One nippy November morning, a graduate student ushered me into a small room where I was instructed to stare at an ‘X’ and perform some menial task. Unbeknownst to me, words were simultaneously flashing on the screen, so quickly that I couldn’t consciously register them. When the program finished, I called the graduate student back in. She asked me to do one more supposedly unrelated thing: take a math test.

“I’m terrible at math.” I smiled sheepishly as I picked up the pen.

At the end of the test, as I wrote down my math SAT score, I remember thinking to myself something like, “Why did I just say that?”

This study is now one of hundreds investigating the effects of stereotyping on performance. One of the most fascinating findings from this literature is the phenomenon of stereotype threat. This happens when members of a group perform according to stereotypes about them. Under stereotype threat, African Americans do worse on the GRE, women play poorer chess, and European Americans are worse at sports.

Amazingly, it has been shown that even seemingly inconsequential stimuli can lead to stereotype threat. Researchers found that female students who checked the gender box before taking their AP calculus exam, as students usually do, did worse than students who checked the box after. This little box may be responsible for keeping nearly 5,000 female students a year from starting college with advanced calculus credit.

In my case, I had been subconsciously primed with words related to femininity (like pink, lipstick, and doll). Some subjects in the study were primed with neutral words instead. In studies like these, as in the calculus one, women who see feminine words subsequently do worse on the math test than those who don’t. Researchers have even found that women taking math tests under stereotype threat show activity in regions of the brain associated with the processing of negative social information – we get anxious.

It was a few years later, my senior year, that Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, made the famous comments that led to his resignation. At a conference talk he suggested that differences in innate aptitude could help explain the gender gap in fields like mathematics and science. His idea was that even slight innate differences could mean that women would rarely end up in the top echelons of mathematical ability, the ‘tails’ of the bell curve. As a student I wasn’t particularly upset by his words. It seemed to me that Summers was probably right – most of the math majors at college were boys, most mathematicians were men.

Ten years have passed, and I’m now a professor doing mathematical work in philosophy of science – a field that is only about 15 percent female. During this time, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to think about why Summers’ comments were so problematic. At the time he made them, Larry Summers was the most prominent member of arguably the most prominent academic community in the world. From this position, he chose to feed the very stereotypes that keep women from performing well in technical areas. (Stereotypes that make young women say things like, “I’m terrible at math.”) Even if he was right, he ought to have kept his mouth shut.

But thinking Summers’ comments were problematic from a practical standpoint doesn’t answer the question. Is it true? Are women innately worse at math?

A lot of researchers have tried to definitively answer this question, generating huge amounts of controversy in the meantime. The problem is that when it comes to women and men’s performance in math, there are no control groups. Cultural stereotypes about gender and mathematical ability are pervasive and it’s extremely difficult to separate performance gaps based on these stereotypes from performance gaps based on 'innate’ talent.

A new analysis gives reason to think that evidence for innate differences in mathematical ability has been strongly overstated. Years of studies have documented gaps in the very top levels of mathematical performance. (These were the studies that fueled Larry’s comments.) However, these measured differences have fluctuated widely over time, across countries, and across cultural groups. During the last 30 years, the gaps in these scores have dropped dramatically in the U.S. In some nations (like Indonesia and Iceland), women outperform men in the tip-top of mathematical performance. And while white American males tend to outperform white females, studies have found that the trend is reversed for Asian-Americans.

Notably, one widely documented study on stereotype threat found that when Asian-American women were reminded of their Asian identities their math performance improved, while reminders of their femininity had the opposite effect.

A few years ago, I joined the philosophy faculty at a university as it was about to embark on becoming a model "innovation campus."   I've since learned this is a national trend and that there are by now plans for dozens of innovation campuses.  The New York Times recently featured a long article on the trend[1], explaining the history of the ideas behind it: common spaces such as hallways shared between different disciplines so as to enable "creative collisions" and open spaces for collaboration fitted out with equipment that enables people to work together on the construction of physical things.  

Likewise, in planning the March for Science this month, pride of place was given to "discovery and innovation" in its statements celebrating the role of science in society.   Caroline Weinberg, National Co-Chair, March for Science's statement began  “Scientific discovery and innovation are a critical part of our nation and our future . . ." [2]  

But there's been something of a backlash against giving innovation all the credit for whatever good has come from scientific endeavors.   A key article titled "Hail the Maintainers" appeared in Aeon last year[3], which suggested that a lot of the credit is rightfully due to 'maintenance.'  In it, authors Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel chronicled changing attitudes to the term innovation, even as efforts to curtail its use seem to have failed. They noted that recent crises have forced us to recognize the important role of 'infrastructure' -- a "most unglamorous  term" -- and, with it, the important role of the technological labor of "those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist, that were 'innovated' long ago."  

Now, this really appeals to me.  Truth be known, if I'm at a movie where the action takes place in an isolated manicured landscape in a gleaming residence, I'm going to be asking where the people who polish the floors and tend the gardens are, and when they get their work done.  Why did we never hear a vacuum cleaner or a leaf blower the whole length of the film?  Storylines often provide an explanation of how some remarkable location was discovered, or how impressive structures were designed and constructed, and by whom -- but not how they're kept up.  This has amused one of my friends to no end, leading him to remark, after a film, "Well, I know you think it would have been a much better film if it had devoted more time to showing cleaning activities, but . . ."  I do think there's a point there, and perhaps a feminist one, about devaluing the important technological labor that has often been associated with women's work.  

Yet, I don't think that innovation and maintenance should be associated with two different phases of infrastructure.  The Maintainers, a movement of sorts which by now has hosted two conferences and has a blog ( themaintainers.org ), is certainly right to point out the importance of the technological work of keeping things running, but there is also the technological work of critically evaluating whether the way things are running is a good idea.  I can think of several examples where such critical evaluation is needed, rather than uncritically going forward with repairing and maintaining the infrastructures to do what they were originally designed to do. Innovation and disruption of infrastructures 'innovated' long ago might well be called for sometimes.  I can think of several examples.

I'll give one here:  the electrical grid.  Many consider it a public good as well as a socio-technological marvel, and calls for massive investment to upgrade and maintain it have been widely supported, due in part to concerns it has or may soon become vulnerable.  Yet, in reality, there is a growing realization that the grid concept -- the original infrastructure of generating and distributing electricity over very large geographical regions as it is demanded by consumers - may not be the best arrangement for people to have access to electricity.   The construction of microgrids and improved technologies for energy storage have constituted a simmering threat of "disruption" to this most staid of infrastructures.[4]  Then there are questions of environmental justice:  the burden of pollution (including noise pollution) from the construction and operation of large electrical power generation equipment tends to be borne by those with little political power to control where the activities associated with electrical power production take place.  

Public policy decisions about investing in the maintenance of the grid are an occasion to raise the question of when an infrastructure inappropriately becomes its own end.  That is, at what point do we stop assuming that we need to maintain the grid (and other infrastructures such as the existing highway system, and existing water and sewage systems) on the basis that the public good is served by such large infrastructures?  At what point do we start asking all over again, from scratch, what it is that people and other living things need and (even given that there is some existing infrastructure already), what better ways there might be for them to have it?   This is an important question that needs to find its way into these discussions on innovation and "the maintainers" too.  

S G Sterrett   April 2017

[1]   https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/education/edlife/innovation-campus-entrepreneurship-engineering-arts.html?_r=0

[2] https://www.marchforscience.com/press/2017/4/10/march-for-science-organizers-detail-plans-for-global-events-including-flagship-march-in-the-nations-capital  

[3] https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more