Book by Steven Pinker: “Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help you understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? These are the goals of Rationality, Steven Pinker’s follow-up to Enlightenment Now. In the 21st century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are an irrational species — cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and discovered the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains that we think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning our best thinkers have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book—until now. Rationality also explores its opposite: how the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology by individuals can add up to crippling irrationality in a society. Collective rationality depends on norms that are explicitly designed to promote objectivity and truth. Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire, and empower….(More)”.
Who takes part in Citizen Science projects & why?
CS Track: “Citizen Science in Europe, as elsewhere, continues to manifest itself in a variety of different ways. While attracting interest across multiple sectors of society, its definition remains unclear. The first CS Track White Paper on Themes, objectives and participants of citizen science activities has just been published and, along with the initial results of the first large scale survey into participation in citizen science, provides an important overview of who participates in citizen science projects and what motivates them. This short report focuses on one aspect that emerges in this white paper.
Citizen Science Participants – who are they?
Participants and who they are, have a significant impact on the objectives and outcomes of citizen science projects. However, existing information on the demographics of participants in citizen science projects is very limited and most studies have focused on a single project or programme. Furthermore, certain groups, like young people, are underrepresented in the available data.
What our research team has gathered from the literature and the initial results of the CS Track large-scale survey is the following:
- Well-educated, affluent participants outnumber less affluent participants,
- More men than women take part in many of the programmes that have been analysed.
- Citizen scientists seem to be white, middle-aged, scientifically literate or generally interested in science or scientific topics.
- Scientists, academics, teachers, science students and people who have a passion for the outdoors are among the groups of people most likely to take part in citizen science.
- In agricultural, biological and environmental science-based programmes, participants are often scientists themselves, science teachers or students, conservation group members, backpackers or hikers or other outdoor enthusiasts – in other words people who care about nature.
- Community and youth citizen science projects are underrepresented in the available data….(More)“.
Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science
Paper by Rink Hoekstra and Simine Vazire: “The replication crisis in the social, behavioural, and life sciences has spurred a reform movement aimed at increasing the credibility of scientific studies. Many of these credibility-enhancing reforms focus, appropriately, on specific research and publication practices. A less often mentioned aspect of credibility is the need for intellectual humility, or being transparent about and owning the limitations of our work. Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research…
A recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour laments the fact that academia prefers clear and polished stories over honest but less clear-cut ones, with “research projects [presented] as conclusive narratives that leave no room for ambiguity or for conflicting or inconclusive results” (p. 1). Although honesty and clarity are not mutually exclusive, the pressure resulting from this probably impacts the quality and validity of our scientific work. Most journals still seem to favor clear stories, despite an arguably larger risk of these having validity issues. This presents a real dilemma for authors – especially those who do not have the luxury of a tenured position – who would like to put intellectual humility front and center: In order to increase the odds of getting a publication, they are encouraged to present their stories as better than they actually are. Being more honest or humble likely has a negative effect on their CVs. In the following, we’ll present a constructive solution for this apparent stalemate, which reverses the reward structure in such a way that authors are encouraged to write papers that “tell it like it is”….(More)”.
Process Science: The Interdisciplinary Study of Continuous Change
Paper by Jan vom Brocke et al: “The only constant in our world is change. Why is there not a field of science that explicitly studies continuous change? We propose the establishment of process science, a field that studies processes: coherent series of changes, both man-made and naturally occurring, that unfold over time and occur at various levels. Process science is concerned with understanding and influencing change. It entails discovering and understanding processes as well as designing interventions to shape them into desired directions. Process science is based on four key principles; it (1) puts processes at the center of attention, (2) investigates processes scientifically, (3) embraces perspectives of multiple disciplines, and (4) aims to create impact by actively shaping the unfolding of processes. The ubiquitous availability of digital trace data, combined with advanced data analytics capabilities, offer new and unprecedented opportunities to study processes through multiple data sources, which makes process science very timely….(More)”.
New report confirms positive momentum for EU open science
Press release: “The Commission released the results and datasets of a study monitoring the open access mandate in Horizon 2020. With a steadily increase over the years and an average success rate of 83% open access to scientific publications, the European Commission is at the forefront of research and innovation funders concluded the consortium formed by the analysis company PPMI (Lithuania), research and innovation centre Athena (Greece) and Maastricht University (the Netherlands).
The Commission sought advice on a process and reliable metrics through which to monitor all aspects of the open access requirements in Horizon 2020, and inform how to best do it for Horizon Europe – which has a more stringent and comprehensive set of rights and obligations for Open Science.
The key findings of the study indicate that the early European Commission’s leadership in the Open Science policy has paid off. The Excellent Science pillar in Horizon 2020 has led the success story, with an open access rate of 86%. Of the leaders within this pillar are the European Research Council (ERC) and the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme, with open access rates of over 88%.
Other interesting facts:
- In terms of article processing charges (APCs), the study estimated the average cost in Horizon 2020 of publishing an open access article to be around EUR 2,200. APCs for articles published in ‘hybrid’ journals (a cost that will no longer be eligible under Horizon Europe), have a higher average cost of EUR 2,600.
- Compliance in terms of depositing open access publications in a repository (even when publishing open access through a journal) is relatively high (81.9%), indicating that the current policy of depositing is well understood and implemented by researchers.
- Regarding licences, 49% of Horizon 2020 publications were published using Creative Commons (CC) licences, which permit reuse (with various levels of restrictions) while 33% use publisher-specific licences that place restrictions on text and data mining (TDM).
- Institutional repositories have responded in a satisfactory manner to the challenge of providing FAIR access to their publications, amending internal processes and metadata to incorporate necessary changes: 95% of deposited publications include in their metadata some type of persistent identifier (PID).
- Datasets in repositories present a low compliance level as only approximately 39% of Horizon 2020 deposited datasets are findable, (i.e., the metadata includes a PID and URL to the data file), and only around 32% of deposited datasets are accessible (i.e., the data file can be fetched using a URL link in the metadata). Horizon Europe will hopefully allow to achieve better results.
- The study also identified gaps in the existing Horizon 2020 open access monitoring data, which pose further difficulties in assessing compliance. Self-reporting by beneficiaries also highlighted a number of issues…(More)”
No revolution: COVID-19 boosted open access, but preprints are only a fraction of pandemic papers
Article by Jeffrey Brainard: “In January 2020, as COVID-19 spread insidiously, research funders and journal publishers recognized their old ways wouldn’t do. They needed to hit the gas pedal to meet the desperate need for information that could help slow the disease.
One major funder, the Wellcome Trust, issued a call for changing business as usual. Authors should put up COVID-19 manuscripts as preprints, it urged, because those are publicly posted shortly after they’re written, before being peer reviewed. Scientists should share their data widely. And publishers should make journal articles open access, or free to read immediately when published.
Dozens of the world’s leading funders, publishers, and scientific societies (including AAAS, publisher of Science) signed Wellcome’s statement. Critics of the tradition-bound world of scientific publishing saw a rare opportunity to tackle long-standing complaints—for example, that journals place many papers behind paywalls and take months to complete peer review. They hoped the pandemic could help birth a new publishing system.
But nearly 2 years later, hopes for a wholesale revolution are fading. Preprints by medical researchers surged, but they remain a small fraction of the literature on COVID-19. Much of that literature is available for free, but access to the underlying data is spotty. COVID-19 journal articles were reviewed faster than previous papers, but not dramatically so, and some ask whether that gain in speed came at the expense of quality. “The overall system demonstrated what could be possible,” says Judy Luther, president of Informed Strategies, a publishing consulting firm.
One thing is clear. The pandemic prompted an avalanche of new papers: more than 530,000, released either by journals or as preprints, according to the Dimensions bibliometric database. That fed the largest 1-year increase in all scholarly articles, and the largest annual total ever. That response is “bonkers,” says Vincent Larivière of the University of Montreal, who studies scholarly publishing. “Everyone had to have their COVID moment and write something.”…(More)”.
Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researchers
Paper by Baobao Zhang, Markus Anderljung, Lauren Kahn, Naomi Dreksler, Michael C. Horowitz, and Allan Dafoe: “Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers play an important role in the ethics and governance of AI, including through their work, advocacy, and choice of employment. Nevertheless, this influential group’s attitudes are not well understood, undermining our ability to discern consensuses or disagreements between AI/ML researchers. To examine these researchers’ views, we conducted a survey of those who published in two top AI/ML conferences (N = 524). We compare these results with those from a 2016 survey of AI/ML researchers (Grace et al., 2018) and a 2018 survey of the US public (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). We find that AI/ML researchers place high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest; moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook….(More)”.
Citizen science—discovering (new) solutions to wicked problems
Paper by Ian R. Hodgkinson, Sahar Mousavi & Paul Hughes: “The article explores the role citizen science can play in discovering new solutions to pressing wicked problems. Using illustrations of citizen science projects to show how and where citizens have been fundamental in creating solutions and driving change, the article calls for wider recognition and use of citizen science in public administration and management research. For wider utilization of citizens’ active co-participation in research design, delivery and dissemination, the article presents a set of citizen science pathways….(More)”.
The U.S. Is Getting a Crash Course in Scientific Uncertainty
Apoorva Mandavilli at the New York Times: “When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months — and there’s no end in sight.
Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans don’t need to wear masks. Wait, they do.
At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain. In just the past week, federal health officials said they would begin offering booster shots to all Americans in the coming months. Days earlier, those officials had assured the public that the vaccines were holding strong against the Delta variant of the virus, and that boosters would not be necessary.
As early as Monday, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to formally approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has already been given to scores of millions of Americans. Some holdouts found it suspicious that the vaccine was not formally approved yet somehow widely dispensed. For them, “emergency authorization” has never seemed quite enough.
Americans are living with science as it unfolds in real time. The process has always been fluid, unpredictable. But rarely has it moved at this speed, leaving citizens to confront research findings as soon as they land at the front door, a stream of deliveries that no one ordered and no one wants.
Is a visit to my ailing parent too dangerous? Do the benefits of in-person schooling outweigh the possibility of physical harm to my child? Will our family gathering turn into a superspreader event?
Living with a capricious enemy has been unsettling even for researchers, public health officials and journalists who are used to the mutable nature of science. They, too, have frequently agonized over the best way to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
But to frustrated Americans unfamiliar with the circuitous and often contentious path to scientific discovery, public health officials have seemed at times to be moving the goal posts and flip-flopping, or misleading, even lying to, the country.
Most of the time, scientists are “edging forward in a very incremental way,” said Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of two popular websites, bioRxiv and medRxiv, where scientists post new research.
“There are blind alleys that people go down, and a lot of the time you kind of don’t know what you don’t know.”
Biology and medicine are particularly demanding fields. Ideas are evaluated for years, sometimes decades, before they are accepted….(More)”.
Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future
Book (Second Edition) edited by Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore: “Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. In order to influence the development of technology for the better, we must first understand how technology and society are inextricably bound together. These writings—by thinkers ranging from Bruno Latour to Francis Fukuyama—help us do just that, examining how people shape technology and how technology shapes people. This second edition updates the original significantly, offering twenty-one new essays along with fifteen from the first edition.
The book first presents visions of the future that range from technological utopias to cautionary tales and then introduces several major STS theories. It examines human and social values and how they are embedded in technological choices and explores the interesting and subtle complexities of the technology-society relationship. Remedying a gap in earlier theorizing in the field, many of the texts illustrate how race and gender are intertwined with technology. Finally, the book offers a set of readings that focus on the sociotechnical challenges we face today, treating topics that include cybersecurity, geoengineering, and the myth of neutral technology…(More)”.