Category Archives: Thoughts about science

American education

From a beautiful article in this week’s Time magazine from Fareed Zakaria, one of Time‘s many great journalists (italics mine):

time cover.png

“I went through the Asian educational system, which is now so admired. It gave me an impressive base of knowledge and taught me how to study hard and fast. But when I got to the U.S. for college, I found that it had not trained me that well to think. American education at its best teaches you how to solve problems, truly understand the material, question authority, think for yourself and be creative. It teaches you to learn what you love and to love learning. These are incredibly important values, and they are why the U.S. has been able to maintain an edge in creative industries and innovation in general.

Many of my students are hungry for American education at its best and work hard on my attempts to offer it. This is indeed so the point of it all. I agonize about whether I am pushing them hard enough at this. And how to reach the other students, for their own good and for everyone else’s. Zakaria’s article appears in an issue of Time which is asking where the American dream went.

Certainty

We had science writer Faye Flam from the Philadelphia Inquirer in class today. She does investigative science journalism and writes a column on evolution and an extremely stimulating blog. Faye said so explicitly many things which I feel the need to dance around.  Fabulous.
Since we had a professional blogger in the room, I asked the class what they’ve found hardest about the blogging they’ve had to do for this course. Rachel said she hated the uncertainty in things: when she is researching a blog post, she just wants certainty. Faye laughed. Tough.
I think no interesting problem in science has certainty. It’s a failure of K-12 education that students expect otherwise. If we had certainty about things, there wouldn’t be scientific problems. 

holy-bible.jpg

But this desire for certainty reminded me of a post on Faye’s blog.  A reader argued that certainty is precisely what is good about creation stories, and more generally about religion.  You can really get certainty.  
My late mother-in-law always said she felt sorry for me. She got the answer to everything on Sunday. I was stuck with trying to make sense of it all myself.

The Full Monty

Monty2.jpg

Today I gave the class the Monty Hall problem.  I like it because most people choose the wrong solution and it is extremely hard to explain the right solution without mathematics (ie the toolkit of science). The verbal explanations are somehow so unsatisfactory. Try this nonsense for example, which is technically correct Hollywood gibberish [mind you, Kevin Spacey does define professor cool].

The reaction of one of my PhD students when I told her what I was going to do: 

Oh my God, you’re not going to Monty Hall them! 

Do you have any idea the emotion that will generate? Paul Erdos didn’t get this problem and was vitriolically angry about it until it finally clicked. My husband and I nearly got divorced over it (he didn’t mention that Monty knows what’s behind the doors and will always choose to reveal a goat, then he refused to believe that those conditions mattered). You’re in a country where people may be armed… ARE YOU COMPLETELY INSANE????? 

which, when I explained I escaped alive, was followed by:

.…but were they genuinely not worked up about it? It made me blindingly angry, and when I brought this up once at a party as an amusing story, the point being how funny it was that this maths problem produced such passion, two people at the party almost came to blows about it. These were neighbours, not maths geeks. Also really annoyed husband’s brother, husband’s best friend…..  so what the hell is wrong with your Penn State students? Are they dead?

Well no, but I could not decide what the students made of it. Is it just too weird to wrap your head around a pointless problem that is (by the professor’s own admission) very hard to wrap your head around?  Next class I’ll discuss why it is so hard for people to wrap their head around it.  Shame no one understands that either.  At least there are some hypotheses.

The failed objective

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for einsteinwiki.jpgI dumped one of the course objectives from last year. 

Norm Freed, the now retired Dean who assigned me this course, rightly argued that a course objective should be to explain to non-scientists why science so impassions scientists.
That it does impassion is clear.  But why?  I have no explanation that will work on an 18 yr-old non-scientist.
Answers on a post card.

How lousy is non-science?

Perhaps the most important implication of the gross inefficiencies of medical science actually lies beyond science.  If just 2% of medical ideas generate positive benefits, and as many generate harm as help, think what the hit rate must be in fields of human inquiry where experimentation and hard inference are impossible.

Think economics.  Whole chunks of politics.  And law.  Policy makers must be really groping in the dark.

More humility.

Another of Dean Larson’s pearls came after he had told the students that when they were born, we thought the stuff in the universe was star dust.  Today, we think that less than 5% of the the universe is star dust; what constitutes the remaining 95+% is mysterious (the physicists, who can get away with such things, call it ‘Dark’).

 DarkMatterPie.jpg

The lesson the Dean drew:  “Humility in the face of persistent great unknowns is the true philosophy that modern physics has to offer”  — Joseph Silk, Cosmologist.
So while biologists were decoding genomes and building new life forms, the astronomers and cosmologists were discovering ignorance on a vast scale. Physicists have been ahead of the curve so far, so there is probably a lesson in this for those of us with more earthly concerns.

The Dean on the Cosmos

Dean Larson gave the class a crash course in astronomical and cosmological thought last week.  Two hours on the whole lot.  Two startling moments:

spiral-galaxy.jpg

1.  His conclusion to the question, How big is the universe?:  “Darned big”.

2.  In front of a huge Hubble telescope shot of a distant galaxy, and having explained it likely contained 100 billion stars, the Dean wanders up an aisle, stops mid sentence, and says “I think that is just awesome”.
Memo to self.  Inject more wonder into the course.  And make Darned Big an option in a multiple choice test.

Humility

After I talked about the inefficiencies of science at my lab meeting, one of my PhD students drew my attention to an extremely thought provoking article in The Atlantic.  I think for SiOW next year I will do more in this area.  I didn’t even get into the lessons of bad or absence science in medicine for the life decisions of individual SiOW graduates.  There are so many hooks here.  Not least, the way I can use this to teach the human frailty of science, the problems of public perception, and why faith healers flourish.
I also love the quotes at the end of the article.  Especially:  
“The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing”.
and
“Science is a noble endeavor, but its also a low-yield endeavor.”  Amen.

How lousy is science?

Who’d have thought that medical science can be used to examine how good scientists are?
Large double-blind randomized control trial (RCTs) are about as good as it gets for figuring out whether some new medical treatment actually works.  In RCTs, patients are randomly allocated to either placebo treatments or the experimental treatment, and if it is all done well (blinded, large scale, properly randomized), an answer emerges which is a great deal more reliable than can be had any other way.  But at the heart of RCTs is a paradox.  Only treatments which scientists think will work are tested in these expensive trials.  So what patient in their right mind wants to be in the control arm?  Everyone should want to get the new treatment – the scientific bet is on the new treatment. Indeed, if medical science is any good, the very trials needed to test large-scale efficacy and safety are unethical!

cancer-drug-companies.jpgFortunately, it turns out that medical science is actually not that good.  Analysis of 50 years of U.S. cancer RCTs have shown that that most of the time, the new experimental treatments do nothing at all, but that when they do, they are as likely to harm as help. Consequently, the trials are – magically – ethical (whew).  On average, you are as well off getting the placebo as you are getting the fancy experimental treatment.
That’s good news for medical science in one sense, but appalling news in another.  It means that despite all our knowledge of biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, all the test-tube experiments, all the animal studies, all the small-scale patient trials, all the theory and experience in the world, when it comes to identifying treatments that will work, we’re no better than a coin toss.  Importantly, only around 20% of the trails are breakthroughs. There is 80% waste (or harm) in the process, and that is excluding all the ideas that never survived to get to RCT stage — say ten times as many again? 
Weeks after I taught this to the class, I still find it staggering.  I think my science has a better hit rate than  2% — but then, there is no way to quantify success and failure in my business.  In perhaps the one area of science where success rates can be quantitified, it turns out we are staggeringly poor at discovery.
Of course, all that waste has nonetheless powered enormous improvements in cancer outcomes.   And it has certainly been way more successful at cancer treatment than centuries of exploration by other approaches to knowing (think religion, witch doctors, homeopathy, philosophy, and non-evidence based medicine).  But still. It just shows how much we really are groping in the dark.