Knowledge Revolution

I attended the Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit this last weekend in Mountain View, and it was really fascinating and inspiring.  It was my first mentor summit, representing the Biodiversity Informatics Group of the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, MA with my colleague Dima Mozzherin, and it was also my first ‘unconference’.  For those that haven’t been to an unconference, it is basically a meeting where the talks are not scheduled in advanced, but are instead determined by the attendees themselves.  The entire conference schedule is determined in one frenzied hour during the opening session, and it works remarkably well (at least for a meeting that had less than 300 people… a multi-thousand person conference might not work as well).  The mechanism for setting the schedule was decidedly low-tech: sharpies, sticky notes and dot stickers to vote for a session, along with a big board showing available rooms, so sessions can be load balanced.  To me this demonstrates the great thing about engineers: use the best tech for the job, even if it is paper and pen.  Anyway, the end result is a list of sessions that by definition attendees are interested in, all nicely balanced between rooms.

The quality of the meeting was really outstanding – it was like attending a top-notch IT conference, with a variety of expertise represented, ranging from software engineers, to software managers, and experts on IP and licensing.  The variety of sessions was equally wide and allowed us to explore a series of topics, including open-source social networking software, IPR issues, advanced trolling (!), and sessions on the Google Summer of Code program itself.  Some talks were obviously prepared in advanced, and some were more discussion like.  In each case, folks used the excellent Etherpad software to take real-time collaborative notes (often using a site called TypeWith.me that runs the open source code), which are all available on the conference wiki.

I held a session called “Liberate Your Data!” where we talked about ideas and strategies for bringing together data collected in diverse projects and formats into a single location (basically the goal of the Encyclopedia of Life).  We discussed strategies including creating plug-ins for Excel, using semantic markup technologies and the challenges of creating tools that work across domains, when the data ontologies and formats often vary widely between disciplines.

The meeting was held on the Google campus, which was quite nice.  I really like the idea of thinking of a workplace as a ‘campus’ instead of an office complex, since this promotes the notion of learning as well as doing.  Google fed us the whole weekend, and the food was pretty damn tasty.

One of the things I noted was that, like many IT and software get togethers, it was fairly male dominated.  I am not sure how to improve this situation.  The same imbalance also exists in various science fields, such as physics, while is quite equally balanced in others, such as biology.  It would be interesting to study what the root causes are.

Another thing I noted is the fact that engineers sometimes tend to be focused on elegant engineering or technical solutions to problems, while end-users are almost always focused on their experience with a system.  Most users don’t care if the code running their cell phone or computer is open source or closed source, they just want it to work all of the time and be easy to use.  For me, the iPhone is the prime example.  Not only is the OS not open-source, you can’t even (easily) install any application you want without it being approved by a single company.  It’s a very closed platform, and yet it is extremely popular (even many folks at the conference had one).  And the reason of course is that it is a great user experience.  I think it is important for any software developer to think about their end user and the user experience in general if the goal is to have a project that is widely used.

Anyway, the summit was not only a great way to meet new people, but was also a great way to learn about other open source projects, and Google should be commended for investing in programs such as this.  I’m looking forward to future years already.

Bertrand Russel, British philosopher, once said “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”  This quote neatly summarizes a cognitive bias known as the “Dunning-Kruger effect“.  The effect, as described by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999, is one in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”.  In other words, they are too dumb to realize they are dumb.  Fortunately, there is a way out of the worst results of this effect, and it involves promoting scientific literacy in schools and in the media.

I am currently working on education and outreach efforts for the NASA Astrobiology Institute.  In these efforts, we seek to better inform the public as to how their tax dollars invested in NASA are used.  Not only do we need to train future scientists and engineers for NASA, we also need to train the public to understand, appreciate and fund their work.  We also need to produce members of society for whom scientific literacy and methodology is the expected norm.  We need to remove the oft-perceived barrier between scientists and the public, and produce better results in large public policy debates.

These policy debates, such as health care reform, financial regulation, and climate change policy, are often dominated by emotion, opinion, and biased lobbying by groups with short-term economic issues in mind.  Facts, however, do not have political agendas.  There is only set of facts, and those are backed by evidence and devoid of emotion.  The scientific process of discovery is based on finding and refining these facts, even when they contradict our own beliefs, preconceptions, or previous scientific findings.

If our goals include the long term custody of the world, then we need to move public discussions towards evidence-based fact as much as possible.  We need the public to understand, appreciate, and demand that policy decisions in diverse areas like health delivery, energy production, and more be made on the basis of evidence.  Science literacy and reducing the gap between scientists and the public is one mechanism for achieving this goal.

As an example of preconceptions, the unusually heavy snowstorms in the eastern US this past winter demonstrated the lack of understanding of basic scientific principles within the general media, a significant fraction of the general public, as well as many elected officials.  There were numerous discussion of how the snowfall was evidence that “global warming” was not occurring.  Similarly, heat waves in the summer sometimes produce the opposite reactions from the media, overshadowing more compelling evidence for climate change. This creates a confusing message that undermines confidence in carefully researched insights.  Absent from many of these discussions is the fact that local events (either in time or geography) are highly variable.  Our understanding must see these short term events in the context of the general trends as it is the study of the long term trends that increase knowledge of the system. While the eastern US was receiving cold weather in January and February, a simple calculation shows that it represents about 0.1% of the surface of the Earth and is not a representative indicator of the Earth’s climate.  Such care is rarely evident in the popular media, and this indicates the severity of the problem of scientific illiteracy.

Another common misconception is that when a previously publicized scientific result is updated, changed or overturned, this indicates scientists have been wrong before, and therefore shouldn’t be trusted at all.  What this view fails to appreciate is one of the cornerstones of scientific advancement – every result is subject to change based on new evidence, new understanding, and new experimental results.  What the public sees as a case of scientists being wrong or changing their minds is often normal advancement in a profession which is highly critical of itself and subjects any claims to scrutiny.  If only politicians would subject themselves to the same self-critical reviews as scientists, the world might be a much better place.

There will certainly be debates and issues for which emotion, faith and other inherently unquantifiable areas are important.  But for most policy issues and most professions, fact, evidence, and logic are a much more productive way to solve problems.  Now we need to take message to our schools and to the media so that we get better results from the next generation of leaders than we are getting from the current generation.

Have you ever watched the news or heard a story on the radio where a newscaster discussed an issue related to science and said something like “I believe” or “I think” or just stating opinions as truth?  For example, “I believe global warming is a hoax” or “The weather has actually been hotter this summer than normal”.  Has this frustrated you as much as it frustrates me?  It seems that some in the media have no problem blurring the line between opinion and evidence based reporting, and don’t seem to understand that especially when it comes to items that are measurable, there is little place for opinion.

For example, take the statement: “I think the weather has actually been hotter this summer than normal.”  You hear folks say this all the time, but it’s actually pretty easy to collect data, compare to previous summers and then do that over a number of years to determine the validity of such a statement.  Do newscasters do this before speaking publicly or authoritatively on the news?  I doubt it – yet their words are repeated and quoted by others, lending them false credibility.  Scientists on the other hand, are very cautions when making statements because they tend to base what the say about such matters on items that can be supported with evidence.  In fact, they will often hedge their statements with “probably” and “likely” since it is always hard to be 100% sure, but this hedging is often missed by the general public who take such statements to much more uncertainty than actually exists.  Global climate change is the classic example  of this and is exploited by opponents of action to their advantage.  Since these opponents often use tactics such as repetition and marketing instead of evidence, it’s difficult to counteract.

So how you battle this sort of reporting?  I believe the first step is improved communication between the science community and the general public, so that people understand how science works, what the process of discovery is, and how it is communicated within the science community.  This understanding will hopefully lead to the public doing a better job of holding the rest of the media to account, and maybe to cut down on the amount of opining and increase the amount of actual reporting.