The High Quality Research Act and American Science

Yesterday, President Obama spoke at the National Academy of Sciences to mark its 150th anniversary. Alongside the usual issues, Obama took time to defend "the integrity of our scientific process" and "our rigorous peer review system." 

Why? Because they're under attack—from within the halls of Congress. 

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is preparing legislation that would disrupt peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF). A draft of the bill—which is called the "High Quality Research Act" (HQRA)—leaked onto the web this week. It includes a new set of criteria for NSF projects:

There are all sorts of reasons these developments should be of interest to readers of this blog—not least, the fact that the NSF funds the history of science through its Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program. Below, I'll fill out a few of the details of what's happened, and suggest some ways HQRA (and its discontents) link up with issues of concern to science studies more generally. 

While Smith was apparently the least of three evils when he was appointed chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, his views on climate change and other issues set him apart from the vast majority of practicing scientists like those Obama addressed yesterday. 

Of course, this hasn't stopped him from joining Tom Coburn and others in an effort to redirect the NSF's extensive merit review system toward a set of goals defined by Congress. Late last week, Smith took the effort to a new level, though, when he wrote the Acting Director of the NSF about five projects whose "intellectual merit" (an NSF metric) he doubted. Here they are: 

As the Committee's ranking Democrat pointed out in response, Smith's decision to question the scientific merits of specific grantees is unprecedented. "By making this request," she added, "you are sending a chilling message to the entire scientific community that peer review may always be trumped by political review." While peer review isn't perfect, she concluded, it's the best we've got. 

Over the next few days, everyone—politicians and lobbyists, scientists and their societies, scholars and citizens—will no doubt be weighing in on what all of this means. Let me just highlight a few things that I think speak directly to some of the issues explored by science studies in general and this blog in particular. 

It's worth noting that the five studies singled out by Smith all fall under the NSF's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Why does this matter? For one, it seems unlikely that Smith would have ventured such a salvo at "harder" sciences like math and physics (John McCain's 2008 beef with bears not withstanding). 

For another, we're not far from the so-called "Science Wars" of the 1990s. Then, as now, the politics of knowledge were close to the surface—and the headlines. Though Sokal's famous "hoax" was perpetrated on behalf of peer review, its afterlife in the media juxtaposed "scientific" and "social" ways of knowing in a way that rendered (and renders) some "social scientists" anxious. 

Another theme of interest to scholars of science studies is the notion of "peer review" itself. Interest goes back at least as far as Robert Merton's notion of "organized skepticism," one of the four scientific norms he introduced in "The Normative Structure of Science" in 1942. Merton extended that analysis in 1971, in a famous co-authored piece on "Patterns of Evaluation in Science." 

More recently, STS scholars like Sheila Jasanoff have built on Merton by attending to the career of peer review in the realms of law and policy—or, more recently, in the contentious political climate around the issue of global warming. Jasanoff and others trace this evolution to the expanding circle of stakeholders as science and technology extend their reach. 

Mario Biagioli provides an alternative perspective on peer review—including a useful overview of both its history and the literature attending on it. For Biagioli, the relevant questions are less those of stakeholders and politics with a capital-P (though they are relevant), and more the philosophical issues connected with questions of authorship and intellectual property. 

In either case, science studies has had a great deal to say about peer review, and will no doubt have more to say in the weeks and months ahead. What interests me is how, in response to Smith's bill, the links between this thing called "the scientific process" and this thing called "peer review"—both contingent, even problematic concepts—tend to be shored up, not least by those (and here I'll just take myself as a data point) who have participated in historicizing and even criticizing those same concepts in other contexts. 

Amidst calls for open access (including an ambivalent "trial" by Nature in 2006) and what seem like some pretty crucial questions about the merits and possibilities of the "scientific process" as it's currently practiced (op. cit.), the intrusion of capital-P politics still tends to reinforce old binaries and shore up otherwise unstable categories in the interest of protecting what we've got. 

So, when Obama says "fields like psychology and anthropology and economics and political science" are all "sciences because scholars develop and test hypotheses and subject them to peer review," or when he says "we’ve got to make sure that we are supporting the idea that they’re not subject to politics, that they’re not skewed by an agenda," my interest is piqued. 

Do we really believe that's what defines a science? Either way, do we really think whatever science is isn't "subject to politics" or "skewed by an agenda"? Or do we mean it at particular times, with respect to particular politics and agendas, when particular hypotheses are under attack? 

I'm not sure, but wouldn't it be fun to see a colleague—a scholar of peer review, say—called up to testify on its history and its relative importance for "the scientific process" as a result of all this?

The Science of Structure and the Apologetics of Agency

What do Jonah Lehrer and Sheryl Sandberg have in common?

I think it's productive to see their separate moments in the sun through a shared lens. The way they've been received recently tells us something interesting about the way ideas of structure and agency play out in the popular press, and specifically how science fits into that picture.

Sources: http://www.thenextbigdesign.com/2011/12/brief-post-on-jonah-lehrer.html
and http://www.newyorker.com/images/2011/07/11/p233/110711_r21057_p233.jpg

In Lehrer's plagiarism and Sandberg's "Leaning In," critics have fixated on the relative emphasis the two give to structure and agency. Where Lehrer didn't take enough responsibility for his own agency, Sandberg made too much of hers (or any woman's), at the cost of structural inequalities. Below, I explore how (and why) the two account for structure and agency the way they do, with special emphasis on the role of science in their accounts.

Let's start with Lehrer.

Once the boy wonder of popular science, Lehrer's world fell apart late last summer amidst allegations (and confessions) that he had both plagiarized (his own work and others') and, at various points, outright fabricated. In a four-part series (links here), I used the episode to explore structural features of "the house that Gladwell built" and the place of popular science. 

Source: http://images.nymag.com/news/features/lehrer121029_560.jpg

Lehrer's recent apology did something similar—much to the displeasure of his critics. Many felt Lehrer avoided admitting fault by pivoting away from his misdeeds to tell a story about the way the rules we're forced to follow structure the actions we take. It's not that Lehrer denied wrongdoing; it's just that an apology is about your agency, not about what made (or let) you do it.

Critics called it a "meh culpa" and a "Mea Sorta Culpa." They were outraged that he thought he could "humblebrag his way back into journalism." The fact that he was paid $20,000 for his time certainly fueled the flames. But what was really at issue, displayed on the wall of live tweets behind him as he spoke, was the fact that he was using science to explain away his agency.

Live tweet by the man who first outed Lehrer
(Source: https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/301394809782943745)

Lehrer says he needs new "standard operating procedures." In effect, he says that his faults are here to stay—all he can do is contain them, with "a new list of rules, a stricter set of standard operating procedures." Needless to say, this recourse to rules rankled journalists who see their trade as the pursuit of truth, not a flight from error. 

As Jennifer Scheussler put it for the New York Times: "before too long Mr. Lehrer was surrendering to the higher power of scientific research [and] the kind of scientific terms—“confirmation bias,” “anchoring”—he helped popularize." In the end, it was more structure than agency, more science than apology—which no one wanted.

Things are different—opposite, even—with the reception of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. Sandberg's book, currently the #1 New York Times bestseller, has been persistently (some say unfairly) contrasted with another hugely popular piece on gender and the workplace: Anne Marie Slaughter's much-read essay in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."

Slaughter's article, which sparked a healthy debate over the summer, was actually framed partly around Sandberg's take on similar issues, as expressed in a series of lectures (Lean In wasn't out) like the one above. While applauding many of Sandberg's points, Slaughter takes strong issue with her charge that the lack of female leaders can be explained by an "ambition gap."

It's a critique Slaughter sharpened in her recent review of Lean In for the New York Times Book Review. Though Sandberg recognizes both women's agency and the structures that constrain it, "she chooses to concentrate only on the 'internal obstacles,' the ways in which women hold themselves back. This," Slaughter adds, "is unfortunate." Yes, women should lean in; but so should "business."

Many, including Slaughter, have faulted Sandberg for generalizing from a privileged position within the corporate world. That is, it's too easy for a woman who seems to have it all (or as close to it as one can get) to emphasize individual agency as the driving force of inequality. Structure, suggests Slaughter, slips through the cracks of Sandberg's self-help feminism.

Which brings me back to structure vs. agency. Where Lehrer emphasized structures, Sandberg touts agency. And, while both draw extensively on scientific studies, these seem to align much more strongly with the structural side of things. Maybe this is obvious, but it's helped me clarify some of the issues I was teasing out of Lehrer's fall last autumn.

For Lehrer, science suggests that his pre-conscious biases require structural constraints. On this view, agency eludes articulation—in fact, it's hardly there at all. Sandberg, by contrast, uses science (and statistics) to flesh those structural constraints out in full—and then argues for agency as a way to push through them.

Either way, the scientific world "out there" is a structural one. As far as agency goes, it either vanishes entirely (in the case of Lehrer) or exists somewhere outside the studies, a sort of deus ex machina—in Sandberg's view—to fight back against the structures that constrain it. When all is TED and done, it's up to us (ironically, perhaps) to decide which it is.