Biased objective metrics

As you know, Dear Reader, one of the things that annoys me the most is being put in the position of having to actually defend Glam, no matter how tangentially. So I’m irritated.

Today’s annoyance is related to the perennial discussion of using metrics such as the Journal Impact Factor of journals in which a professorial candidate’s papers are published as a way to prioritize them for a job search. You can add h-index and citations of the candidate’s papers on an individual basis on this heap if you like.

The Savvy Scientist in these discussions is very sure that since these measures, ostensibly objective, are in fact subject to “bias”, this renders them risible as useful decision criteria.

We then typically downshift to someone yelling about how the only one true way to evaluate a scientist is to READ HER PAPERS and make your decisions accordingly. About “merit”. About who is better and who is worse as a scientist. About who should make the short list. About who should be offered employment.

The Savvy Scientist may even demonstrate that they are a Savvy Woke Scientist by yelling about how the clear biases in objective metrics of scientific ability and accomplishment work to the disfavor of non-majoritarians. To hinder the advancement of diversity goals by under-counting the qualities of URM, women, those of less famous training pedigree, etc.

So obviously all decisions should be made by a handful of people on a hiring committee reading papers deeply and meaningfully offering their informed view on merit. Because the only possible reason that academic science uses those silly, risibly useless, so called objective measures is because everyone is too lazy to do the hard work.

What gets lost in all of this is any thinking about WHY we have reason to use objective measures in the first place.

Nobody, in their Savvy Scientist ranting, seems to every consider this. They fail to consider the incredibly biased subjectivity of a handful of profs reading papers and deciding if they are good, impactful, important, creative, etc, etc.

Even before we get to the vagaries of scientific interests, there are hugely unjustified interpersonal biases in evaluating work products. We know this from the studies where legal briefs were de/misidentified. We can infer this from various resume-call back studies. We can infer this from citation homophily studies. Have you not every heard fellow scientists say stuff like “well, I just don’t trust the work from that lab”? or “nobody can replicate their work”? I sure have. From people that should know better. And whenever I challenge them as to why….let us just say the reasons are not objective. And don’t even get me started about the “replication crisis” and how it applies to such statements.

Then, even absent any sort of interpersonal bias, we get to the vast array of scientific biases that are dressed up as objective merit evaluations but really just boil down to “I say this is good because it is what I am interested in”. or “because they do things like I do”>

Citations metrics are an attempt to crowd source that quality evaluation so as to minimize the input of any particular bias.

That, for the slower members of the group, is a VERY GOOD THING!

The proper response to an objective measure that is subject to (known) biases is not to throw the baby out onto the midden heap of completely subjective “merit” evaluation.

The proper response is to account for the (known) biases.

You can lead a horse to water but…

Scientists are complete idiots on the business of science.

Once upon a time I asked Science Twitter to opine on whether they had ever met anyone smarter than they are. They, being mostly not sociopathic narcissists, said they had.

Have you ever had the impression that someone you interact(ed) with regularly is smarter than you are? Not just more expert or informed in a particular domain. Smarter.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

So far, so good. They are also quite willing to admit the obvious,

Have you ever had the impression that someone you interact(ed) with regularly is not as smart as you are? Not just less expert or informed in your particular domain. Not on the other political side. Dumber.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

except for those weenie few per cent that are left after we discount the spoiler/joker rate. These are undoubtedly the duplicitous folks that claim never to think anyone else is an idiot.

I threw in a distractor for the parents in the crowd….

If you have children who have been in group school-like environments for at least three years have you ever noticed your child is smarter or not as smart as other children?

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

..but seriously, for many in my audience, this is going to be the situation where they are most able to rub elbows with something like the full distribution in their country. Public elementary school. Of course, many will already be on a very select track due to their choice of geographic location.

Next, we moved on to some science logic. Totes different and unrelated issue.

In your science, a measurement of central tendency is invalid if there is any variation across your sample of subjects or cells or what not.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

Here we see the joker rate of 3.4% on full display. Most Science Twitter types know this is nonsense. We LIVE for trying to assess the central tendency within a sample that expresses some portion of the variability that exists in the presumed population we are trying to study. Mean plus or minus error bar. bam.

In your science a correlation between two things only exists if plotting the individual points forms a line.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

Oh, they are getting warmed up now. A little worrisom on the joker rate but maybe people were just fired up to click the first option? Anyway, CLEARLY, a correlation can exist without ever point being perfectly predictive of the central tendency of the relationship between two variables. And CLEARLY the fact that there is some variability in one measure does not mean it does not tell us, on average, about the other measure if those two things are correlated. And as good scientists who are able to understand the idea of central tendency and error, we do not throw out a correlation if it does not form an invariant line. Or at least most of us do not.

Now, what about the simplest of experimental designs? The two factor, two level quad box that appears in the first chapter of any Experimental Design text book?

In your science, if more than one factor contributes independently to a measurement it means the measure is invalid.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

Well OF COURSE good scientists understand that there can be not just random variation in a measure, there can be non-random variation. I.e., an influence of another factor! And this may be a constant but is most often a variable influence. Which, gasp, may INTERACT with the first factor in some way….often a variable way. So of course these good scientists, many who deal with this very simple reality of the natural world on a daily basis, report that they are well aware of such things and would never toss a measure just because it was influenced in an identifiable way by more than factor. Geez, don’t insult our intelligence here.

Okay, so we finally got to the water drinking part.

Standardized tests like the GRE and SAT measure how smart people are.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) February 23, 2021

Good god, scientists let all of their training go right straight out of the window when it comes to the business of being a professional scientist.

Raging at the descriptive as if it is prescriptive

A quick google search turns up this definition of prescriptive: “relating to the imposition or enforcement of a rule or method.” Another one brings up this definition, and refinement, for descriptive: “describing or classifying in an objective and nonjudgmental way….. describing accents, forms, structures, and usage without making value judgments.“

We have tread this duality a time or two on this blog. Back in the salad days of science blogging, it led to many a blog war.

In our typical fights, I or PP would offer comments describing the state of the grant-funded, academic biomedical science career as we see it. This would usually be in the course of offering what we saw as some of the best strategies and approaches for the individual who is operating within this professional sphere. Right now, as is, as it is found. Etc. For them to succeed.

Inevitably, despite all evidence, someone would come along and get all red about such comments as if we were prescribing, instead of describing, whatever specific or general reality we were describing.

Pick your issue. I don’t like writing a million grants to get the barest hope of winning one. I think this is a stupid way for the NIH to behave and a huge waste of time and taxpayer resources. So when I tell jr and not so jr faculty to submit a ton of grants this is not an endorsement of the NIH system as I see it. It is advice to help the individual to succeed despite the problems with the system. I tee off on Glam all the time….but would never tell a new PI not to seek JIF points wherever possible. There are many things I say about how NIH grant review should go, that might seem to contrast with my actual reviewer behavior for anyone who has been on study section with YHN. (For those who are wondering, this has mostly to do with my overarching belief that NIH grant review should be fair. Even if one objects to some of the structural aspects of review, one should not blow it all up at the expense of the applications that are in front of a given reviewer.) The fact that I bang on about first and senior authorship strategy for respective career stages doesn’t mean that I believe that chronic middle-author contributions shouldn’t be better recognized.

I can walk and chew gum.

Twitter has erupted in the past few days. There are many who are very angered by a piece published in Nature Communications by AlShebli et al which can be summarized by this sentence in the Abstract “We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors.” This was recently followed, in grand old rump sniffing (demi)Glam Mag tradition by an article by Sterling et al. in PNAS. The key Abstract sentence for this one was “we find women earn less than men, net of human capital factors like engineering degree and grade point average, and that the influence of gender on starting salaries is associated with self-efficacy“. In context, “self-efficacy” means “self-confidence“.

For the most part, these articles are descriptive. The authors of the first analyze citation metrics, i.e. “We analyze 215 million scientists and 222 million papers taken from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) dataset⁴², which contains detailed records of scientific publications and their citation network”. The authors of the second conducted a survey investigation: “To assess individual beliefs about one’s technical ability we measure ESE, a five-item validated measure on a five-point scale (0 = “not confident” to 4 = “extremely confident,” alpha = 0.87; SI Appendix, section S1). Participants were asked, “How confident are you in your ability to do each of the following at this time?”:”

Quite naturally, the problem comes in where the descriptive is blurred with the prescriptive. First, because it can appear as if any suggestion of optimized behavior within the constraints of the reality that is being described, is in fact a defense of that reality. Intentional or unintentional. Second, because prescribing a course of action that accords with the reality that is being described, almost inevitably contributes to perpetuation of the system that is being described. Each of thse articles is a mixed bag, of course. A key sentence or two can be all the evidence that is needed to launch a thousand outraged tweets. I once famously described the NSF (in contrast to the NIH) as being a grant funding system designed for amateur scientists. You can imagine how many people failed to note the “designed for” and accused me of calling what I saw as the victims of this old fashioned, un-updated approach “amateurs”. It did not go well then.

The first set of authors’ suggestions are being interpreted as saying that nobody should train with female PIs because it will be terrible for their careers, broadly writ. The war against the second set of authors is just getting fully engaged, but I suspect it will fall mostly along the lines of the descriptive being conflated with the prescriptive, i.e., that it is okay to screw over the less-overconfident person.

You will see these issues being argued and conflated and parsed in the Twitter storm. As you are well aware, Dear Reader, I believe such imprecise and loaded and miscommunicated and angry discussion is the key to working through all of the issues. People do some of their best work when they are mad as all get out.

but…….

We’ve been through these arguments before. Frequently, in my recollection. And I would say that the most angry disputes come around because of people who are not so good at distinguishing the prescriptive from the descriptive. And who are very, very keen to first kill the messenger.

What would credential-less academic science look like?

There was a thread on the Twitters today complaining about graduate students being called trainees.

https://twitter.com/thoughtsofaphd/status/1262697954688880640

The conversation went in all of the usual directions.

Because, of course, the “hot take” is correct. We have increased the number of post-graduate trainees in doctoral granting programs so as to obtain cut-rate labor to service our biomedical science research laboratory work. Yes. Absolutely.

To service the work that our federal government is asking us to do, and paying us to do, via the NIH, NSF and a few other major grant-making entities.

Grants to not-for-profit Universities and Research Institutes are, of course, a way for the US federal government to try to get cut-rate labor to service its goals. By leveraging the power of calling middle management “Professors” to justify underpaying us for the job we are doing. (“Underpaying” is a concept I have on good authority from practically every academic I’ve spoken with about their satisfaction with their compensation.)

Getting back to the pre-doctoral exploit, however, their is this notion of a valuable credential being dangled as the additional compensation. The award of the PhD (and the presumed training that comes with it) is supposed to make up for any perceived deficiencies in month to month paychecks. And it does have value. This credential is necessary for many subsequent job categories that are perceived as being desired. Or at least more desired than the jobs that are available, or the compensation that is available, for those without this particular credential.

My question for today is, would things be better in academic science if, instead of the credential model we operated on the peformance based, resume building model?

Everyone enters this pipeline as a fresh faced bachelor’s degree recipient and gets paid as a real employee on technician wages. Just like our current tech class. From there on, advance to the first supervisory step (like the current postdoc stage) depends merely on performance, opportunity and drive. If you just put in your time, you stay a tech. And move up on that trajectory. If you take an interest in the broader science issues and do more than just put in your hours under direction of the higher-ups, more like what we expect out of current graduate students, well, at some point you are competitive for the entry level manager position. And you get some techs to direct.

Then again, if you want to move up to the next level, junior faculty-ish we can say, you have to produce. You have to produce and show you can “run a team and act in all ways like a PI save name” and….boom. You get to be PI.

From there, if you take the extra time to also teach classes, since we’re going to have the adjunctification of traditional teaching duties rolled into this re-alignment of course, maybe you eventually earn the title of Professor. If we still have that.

At every stage, the key is that you are more or less expected to be able to make a career at that stage if that is what fits you. Techs can remain techs. Job longevity. Steady raises. Benefits. Low level managers…ditto.

Look you still have to perform. Every workplace has turnover for competence and for fit. But then again I see checkout folks at my local Costco that I’ve seen there for well over two decades. Same job, presumably with incremental raises. No need to constantly run upward merely to stay in your job.

And I assume there are those who I saw two decades ago who have moved up in managerial tracks either within Costco or in some other retail business.

What would it look like if we de-credentialed academic science?

It isn’t the trolley problem, it’s the air supply trope of space station sci-fi

The first (I think) season of The Expanse space drama teevee show had a small sideline of something that I think I recall enough from similar fiction to be a trope. The show has the class element built into it, especially in that first season. There are rich people on the space station and poor people. The masses struggle to survive, live dirtily and envy the people living above them who they have to knuckle under to.

Resources are finite (unlike a Star Trek type of show, or even Star Wars) and of course the control of these resources is used to further oppress the masses and bend them to the will of the elite.

Well, one of those resources in this particular show is oxygen.

A pretty big deal, of course, when the only known place with an excess of this element that is essential to life is back on Earth. Now, perhaps in some space drama situations the supply of air IS like the trolley problem. A very direct sort of “If I get the oxygen, you die and vice versa” does pop up but usually this is within the trope of self-sacrifice. Like Jack and Rose and that damn door in the Titanic blockbuster.

But the better situation is the one in The Expanse where the rich people could just sort of lean out the oxygen for the poor people. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure how that sort of thing is pulled off in a space station but whatever. Go with it. The show sets it up as a class control issue I seem to recall, but it could very well be one of limited resources. On the space station, what happens if oxygen becomes a truly limited resource? Are the powerful going to keep themselves in normal operation even if they have to starve the powerless to do it?

Have you ever lived at altitude for a few days? The mile high in Denver sucks badly enough. When you first get there, you are…weak. You aren’t dying or anything. You can live and do stuff. You just suck at it. You can’t walk briskly up a staircase like you could at sea level. You can’t even think all that well, frankly. And if you have a condition that further compromises your oxygen uptake? Yikes. Could be very painful and nauseating.

Or maybe you went to Denver on the plane and then drove straight up to the mountains and had to operate at two miles up. Say, at a Keystone meeting or a Winter Brain, right peeps? At this point, shit is getting real. And many otherwise healthy folks are feeling really, really bad.

They don’t die though. For the most part. Unless there are exacerbating health conditions. If you sent some people to Keystone Colorado to live for awhile, so that you and your buddies could have the same amount of oxygen you are used to at sea level, it’s not like you are pulling the lever on the trolley track switch to make it run over someone else. They aren’t going to die.

You are just, well, making it suck for them.

Getting back to the space station drama, we reach another nasty little consideration. What if, just suppose, what IF, the rich people were knowingly overpopulating the space station so they’d have plenty of workers competing for scraps. Then nobody would be comfortable enough to come after the rich, they spend all their time just surviving. And the middle class is kept in a precarious enough situation that they don’t want to rock the boat lest their subsistance, semi-comfortable amount of oxygen might be scaled back. I mean that happens right? It happened just last month and I’m sure it was all a mistake and the Governor of the whole place wasn’t really trying to rein in the feisty Professors…

Whoops.

Did I give away the game?

Damn.

On the obsessive hobbies of scientists

This is an extension to some thoughts I posted on Twitter awhile ago.

There is a certain species of “amazing scientist who is revolutionizing everything” biographical puff piece that strikes an interesting chord about academics. These are details that come up in seminar introductions, blog posts, media profiles, institutional profiles, award nominations and obituaries.

I am referring specifically to the part where they talk about hobbies, interests and activities that are not directly related to work*.

I surmise the hobby is discussed in these types of pieces to humanize the nerd or to amaze you that their non-science time is just as obsessive and elite as their science**. Possibly both of these apply simultaneously. Typical realms of discussion are obsessive sports participation (very commonly running long distance events or triathlon competition), foodie obsession (he cooks lavish meals for his lab), wine snobbery or the arts. With respect to the arts, you most commonly hear about how the scientist being lionized plays a musical instrument in a band. Presumably this ties into our societal obsession with rock n rollers and their supposed rebel natures. We know Francis Collins plays the guitar in a band. We know Nora Volkow likes to run. I can’t remember hearing about any community minded hobbies of any of the other IC directors.

You don’t hear about how the awesome scientist pulls his (it’s usually a him) weight at home in these types of settings. Obsessive plumbing leak fixer! Soccer dad! Makes meals for his family on the regular!

You don’t hear about community stuff either. Many scientists participate in local groups for improving the schools or city governance or their faith community. Many spend their time volunteering in the classroom.

And it isn’t just the puff pieces that draw this distinction between the externally-focused activities and the obsessively internally-focused ones. Academic science actually punishes people for anything they do that isn’t self-oriented.

If one is highly accomplished in science it is okay to have hobbies as long as they are obsessively self-involved ones like running marathons. It is obvious that any sort of external activity or hobby is only okay if the science work is considered to be of the highest rank. If one is considering a middle of the road scientist then clearly they should be spending more time at work and less time training for a marathon!

Look, I get that we like to know more about people’s life outside of their work. Pursuit of the personal detail fuels industries valued in the billions of dollars when it comes to famous movie stars, musicians, politicians and professional athletes. There is no reason that people in science wouldn’t also have an interest in the non-work activities of the more famous members of our professions.

But still. The relative selectivity in what we choose to lionize versus criticize about our science peers seems meaningful to me. It has an effect on all of us, including (most importantly) our trainees. Personally, I do not want people in science thinking (no matter how implicitly) that obsessive, self-involved hobbies are associated with the most revered scientists and that community type, external benefit activities are the hallmark of the scientific nobody.

Perhaps we could think twice about those seminar speaker intros we give and the nature of the puff pieces we write or contribute background to.

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*Calm yourselves debate champeens. This set of observations is about which hobbies we choose to laud in a professional context and which ones we do not. It doesn’t mean you are horrible for running every day. Exercise is healthy and good for you. We should all do more of it.

**And I should also note that this doesn’t have to devolve into “I only have time for work” snark, no matter the reality. I’m not criticizing hobbies and activities at all. I think that is great if you have things that make you happy. Again, this is about the type of such non-science hobbies that we find reason to congratulate or merely to note in a professionally-oriented biographical piece.

Plea bargains are unsatisfying to the victims of their type of crime

Inder Verma has resigned his position at the Salk Institute before a formal conclusion was reached in their internal investigation. One can only imagine they were moving toward a finding of guilt and he was tipped to resign.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/leading-salk-scientist-resigns-after-allegations-harassment

MeToo STEM

There is a new blog at MeTooSTEM.wordpress.com that seeks to give voice to people in STEM disciplines and fields of work that have experienced sexual harassment.

Such as Jen:

The men in the lab would read the Victoria’s Secret catalog at lunch in the break room. I could only wear baggy sweatshirts and turtlenecks to lab because when I leaned over my bench, the men would try to look down my shirt. Then came the targeted verbal harassment of the most crude nature

or Sam:

I’ve been the victim of retaliation by my university and a member of the faculty who was ‘that guy’ – the ‘harmless’ one who ‘loved women’. The one who sexually harassed trainees and colleagues.

or Anne:

a scientist at a company I wanted to work for expressed interest in my research at a conference. … When I got to the restaurant, he was 100% drunk and not interested in talking about anything substantive but instead asked personal questions, making me so uncomfortable I couldn’t network with his colleagues. I left after only a few minutes, humiliated and angry that he misled about his intentions and that I missed the chance to network with people actually interested in my work

Go Read.

On reviewing scientific work from known sexual harassers, retaliators, bigots and generalized jerks of science

On a recent post, DNAMan asks:

If you were reviewing an NIH proposal from a PI who was a known (or widely rumored) sexual harasser, would you take that into account? How?

My immediate answer was:

I don’t know about “widely rumored”. But if I was convinced someone was a sexual harasser this would render me unable to fairly judge the application. So I would recuse myself and tell the SRO why I was doing so. As one is expected to do for any conflicts that one recognizes about the proposal.

I’m promoting this to a new post because this also came up in the Twitter discussion of Lander’s toast of Jim Watson. Apparently this is not obvious to everyone.

One is supposed to refuse to review grant proposals, and manuscripts submitted for publication, if one feels that one has a conflict of interest that renders the review biased. This is very clear. Formal guidelines tend to concentrate on personal financial benefits (i.e. standing to gain from a company in which one has ownership or other financial interest), institutional benefits (i.e., you cannot review NIH grants submitted from your University since the University is, after all, the applicant and you are an agent of that University) and mentoring / collaborating interests (typically expressed as co-publication or mentoring formally in past three years). Nevertheless there is a clear expectation, spelled out in some cases, that you should refuse to take a review assignment if you feel that you cannot be unbiased.

This is beyond any formal guidelines. A general ethical principle.

There is a LOT of grey area.

As I frequently relate, in my early years when a famous Editor asked me to review a manuscript from one of my tighter science homies and I pointed out this relationship I was told “If I had to use that standard as the Editor I would never get anything reviewed. Just do it. I know you are friends.“.

I may also have mentioned that when first on study section I queried an SRO about doing reviews for PIs who were scientifically sort of close to my work. I was told a similar thing about how reviews would never get done if vaguely working in the same areas and maybe one day competing on some topic were the standard for COI recusal.

So we are, for the most part, left up to our own devices and ethics about when we identify a bias in ourselves and refuse to do peer review because of this conflict.

I have occasionally refused to review an NIH grant because the PI was simply too good of a friend. I can’t recall being asked to review a grant proposal from anyone I dislike personally or professionally enough to trigger my personal threshold.

I am convinced, however, that I would recuse myself from the review of proposals or manuscripts from any person that I know to be a sexual harasser, a retaliator and/or a bigot against women, underrepresented groups generally, LGBTQ, and the like.

There is a flavor of apologist for Jim Watson (et rascalia) that wants to pursue a “slippery slope” argument. Just Asking the Questions. You know the type. One or two of these popped up on twitter over the weekend but I’m too lazy to go back and find the thread.

The JAQ-off response is along the lines of “What about people who have politics you don’t like? Would you recuse yourself from a Trump voter?”.

The answer is no.

Now sure, the topic of implicit or unconscious bias came up and it is problematic for sure. We cannot recuse ourselves when we do not recognize our bias. But I would argue that this does not in any way suggest that we shouldn’t recuse ourselves when we DO recognize our biases. There is a severity factor here. I may have implicit bias against someone in my field that I know to be a Republican. Or I may not. And when there is a clear and explicit bias, we should recuse.

I do not believe that people who have proven themselves to be sexual harassers or bigots on the scale of Jim Watson deserve NIH grant funding. I do not believe their science is going to be so much superior to all of the other applicants that it needs to be funded. And so if the NIH disagrees with me, by letting them participate in peer review, clearly I cannot do an unbiased job of what NIH is asking me to do.

The manuscript review issue is a bit different. It is not zero-sum and I never review that way, even for the supposedly most-selective journals that ask me to review. There is no particular reason to spread scoring, so to speak, as it would be done for grant application review. But I think it boils down to essentially the same thing. The Editor has decided that the paper should go out for review and it is likely that I will be more critical than otherwise.

So….can anyone see any huge problems here? Peer review of grants and manuscripts is opt-in. Nobody is really obliged to participate at all. And we are expected to manage the most obvious of biases by recusal.

Eric Lander apologizes for toasting Jim Watson

Dr. Eric Lander, of the BROAD Institute, recently gave a toast honoring Jim Watson at the close of the Biology of Genomes meeting. See below Twitter thread from Jonathan Eisen for an archived video copy of the toast. (Picture via: Sarah Tishkoff tweet)

Lander has now apologized for doing so in a tweet:

Last week I agreed to toast James Watson for the Human Genome Project on his 90th birthday. My brief comment about his being “flawed” did not go nearly far enough. His views are abhorrent: racist, sexist, anti-semitic. I was wrong to toast. I apologize.

— Eric Lander (@eric_lander) May 14, 2018

The text reads:

Last week I agreed to toast James Watson for the Human Genome Project on his 90th birthday. My brief comment about his being “flawed” did not go nearly far enough. His views are abhorrent: racist, sexist, anti-semitic. I was wrong to toast. I apologize.

I applaud Dr. Lander for this apology.

This comes after a bit of a Twitter storm. If you wonder why some people see value in using social media to advance progressive ideas*, this is one example.

Some key threads from

Jonathan Eisen

Well – for those who missed out on one of the most repulsive events in the recent history of genomics – here is an Instagram post of a video of Eric Lander toasting the racist, sexist, antisemitic Jim Watson https://t.co/vOPQKfmLLh 1/n

— Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) May 13, 2018

Angus Johnson

James Watson is a repellent, noxious bigot. He's a proponent of so-called race science, and he's also just a crank and an asshole.

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) May 13, 2018

Michael Eisen

Since not everyone is aware of how awful a human Jim Watson is, and therefore doesn't appreciate how utterly revolting it is that Eric Lander, for entirely self-serving reasons, chose to celebrate him, read this account of his 2000 talk at @UCBerkeley https://t.co/VOdMWfz0O9

— Michael Eisen #912238 (@mbeisen) May 13, 2018

One of the most amazing things in all of the twitter discussion over the weekend is that there are still people who want to try to claim that Watson’s decades of abhorrent ranting about people he disdains, tied in many cases to the scientific topics he is discussing and in others to the people he thinks should be allowed or disallowed to participate in science, have nothing to do with public accolades “for his scientific accomplishments”.

Additional Reading:
Snowflakes Falling

We’ve finally found out, thanks to Nature News, that the paltry academic salary on which poor Jim Watson has been forced to rely is $375,000 per year as “chancellor emeritus” at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The current NIH salary limitation is $181,500, this is the maximum amount that can be charged to Federal grants. I’m here to tell you, most of us funded by NIH grants do not make anything like this as an annual salary.

 

Arrogant jerkwad creates meaningless kerfluffle, News at Eleven

Notorious arrogant bastard* and Nobel laureate, James Watson shoots off again, this time descending into race/intelligence minefield [Pharyngula, Zuska, denialism blog]. Consequently gets talk cancelled. The ass kick by Greg Laden here and here, pre-empts my need to get into the intelligence literature. Blogosphere and MSM goes nuts for a news cycle or two.

Famed Scientist Apologizes for Quoted Racial Remarks

James Watson: What I’ve Learned

Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified….
Francis Crick said we should pay poor people not to have children. I think now we’re in a terrible situation where we should pay the rich people to have children. If there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don’t have children. These are self-obvious facts.
If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn’t have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday.

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*Call it constantly angry performative social justice warrioring if you like. Whatever it takes. Just get er done.

Today’s ponder

Academic science does everything it can to exploit the shit out of jr scientists / profs and somehow I am the problem for pointing it out.

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) December 19, 2016

Today’s version of this was me pointing out that if you are on a “9 month appointment” of Salary X but every workplace expectation is that you will be doing University related work for 12 months, that in fact Salary X is your base 12-mo salary. The “9 month” thing is a dodge the Universities pull to turn your job into a contingency plan like selling cars.

If you sell a grant idea, you get to bonus your Salary X to the tune of those three extra summer months.

I’m sure there are a lot of fancy accounting reasons Universities pull this. There is certainly a whiff of distasteful “sing for your supper” in the underlying expectation that such Profs must acquire extramural funding to pay for themselves that I’m sure is being whisked aside with this dodge.

What I don’t understand is why so many of the victims of such schemes are so amped to defend them and call me terrible for pointing this out.

Look, if there is genuinely a situation where your Professor career is a-okay from start to finish if you only work 9 months out of the year than sure. I buy it. This person’s 9-month salary is plausibly a 9-month salary. I’m going to raise an eyebrow if they don’t cut off your card key access and VPN over the summer but….okay, fine.

But, the second you have a situation where you are expected to work those extra three months on University related business in order to retain your job or to advance normally (see: tenure) then this is a base salary for a 12-month job.

Hope

I recently attended a scientific meeting with which I’ve had an uncomfortable relationship for years. When I first heard about the topic domain and focus of this meeting as a trainee I was amazed. “This is just the right home for me and my interests in science”, I thought. And, scientifically this was, and still is, the case.

I should love this meeting and this academic society.

This has not been the case, very likely because of the demographics of the society (guess) in addition to a few other….lets call them unusual academic society tics.

This year was a distinct improvement. It isn’t here yet but I can see a youth wave about to crash into the shore. This swell of younger scientists (stretching from postdoc to nearly-tenured) looks more like modern science to me. Demographically, and on many dimensions.

This gives me hope for the future of this academic meeting.

Creeping infantilization of scientists

I recently attended a scientific meeting during which it was made clear that their prize for young investigators had an age cutoff of 50 or younger.

Now the award was not literally titled “for Young Investigators” as so many are, but the context was clear. A guy who looks phenotypically like a solidly mid-career, even approaching-senior, was described as a “rising star” by the award presenter.

This is ridiculous.

It is more of this creeping infantilization of generations of scientists by the preceding one (Boomers) or two (preWar) generations. The generations who were Full Professors by age 40.

This is all of a part with grant reviews that wring hands over the “risk” of handing an R01 over to a 30 year old. Or a 38 year old.

I think we need to resist this.

Hold the line at 40 years of age on early-career or young-investigator awards. If your society is such that it only starts the awards at mid-career, make this clear. Call them “established stars” instead of “rising stars”.

Really, it’s normal

It’s okay. It’s perfectly natural and healthy. Everyone does it, you know. I mean, it’s not like anyone brags about it but they do it. Regularly. So go ahead and don’t feel ashamed.

Thought of the Day

If the information firehose and intellectual go-juice of a Society for Neuroscience week leaves you mentally exhausted, you don’t actually work those 60 hours a week you claim to work.