Category Archives: Alt-ac

Philosophy and Science Policy: A Report from the Field I

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I’m actually going to give a series of reports from the field, including a chapter in a book on Field Philosophy that I’m revising now in light of editor/reviewer comments. In the chapter, I discuss our Comparative Assessment of Peer Review project. For a brief account of Field Philosophy, see the preprint of a manuscript I co-authored with Diana Hicks. That’s also being revised now.

Today, however, I will be focusing on more pressing current events having to do with Plan S. So, I will give a talk at the NJIT Department of Humanities Fall Colloquium Series to try to let my colleagues know what I’ve been up to recently. Here are the slides.

As a philosopher, my approach is not simply to offer an objective ‘report’. Instead, I will be offering an argument.

If we want to encourage academic flourishing, then we need new ways of evaluating academic research. We want to encourage academic flourishing. Therefore, we need new ways of evaluating academic research.

Of course, the argument also refers to my own activities. I want my department to understand and value my forays into the field of science policy. But that will mean revaluing the way I am currently evaluated (which is along fairly standard lines).

Camp Engineering Education AfterNext

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This looks like fun!

Thoughts from the Public Philosophy Network 2018 Conference

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First, I’ve been away from my own blog for far too long. My apologies. Second, no more ‘Press This’?! Ugh. So, here is a LINK to the full program of PPN 2018.

Most of these thoughts were generated during the workshop run by Paul Thompson on day 1 on ‘Evaluating Public Philosophy as Academic Scholarship’. This issue is important for everyone who would like to see public philosophy succeed; but it is vitally important for those of us on the tenure track, since not being able to evaluate public philosophy as academic scholarship often means that it is reduced to a ‘service’ activity. Service, of course, is seen as even less important than teaching, which is often seen as less important than research. This hierarchy may be altered at small liberal arts colleges or others that put special emphasis on teaching. Generally speaking, though, one’s research rules in tenure decisions. I’ve never heard, or even heard of, any advice along the lines of ‘Do more teaching and publish less’ or ‘make sure you get on more committees or peer review more journal manuscripts’. Whereas ‘Just publish more’ is something I hear frequently.

So, it’s vitally important to be able to evaluate public philosophy as academic scholarship.

I want to add that, although many of these ideas were not my own and came from group discussion, I am solely responsible for the way I put them here. I may mess up, but no one else should be blamed for my mistakes. What follows isn’t quite the ‘Survival Guide’ that Michael O’Rourke suggested developing. Instead, it is a list of things I (and perhaps others) would like to see coming from PPN. (This may change what PPN is, of course. Can a network that meets once in while provide these things?)

We need:

  1. A statement on the value of public philosophy as academic scholarship. [EDIT: The expression of this need came up at the workshop, but no one there mentioned that such a statement already exists HERE from the APA.  Thanks to Jonathan Ellis and Kelly Parker for help in finding it! Apologies to APA for my ignorance.]
  2. A list of scholarly journals that are public philosophy friendly (i.e., where one can submit and publish work that includes public philosophy). The list would need to be curated so that new journals can be added and old ones removed when they fit or don’t fit the bill.
  3. A list of tools for making the case for the value of public philosophy. I have in mind things like altmetrics (see HERE or HERE or HERE), but it could also include building capacity among a set of potential peers who could serve as reviewers for public philosophy scholarship.
  4. Of course, developing a cohort of peers will mean developing a set of community standards for what counts as good public philosophy. I wouldn’t want that imposed from above (somewhere?) and think this will arise naturally if we are able to foster the development of the community.
  5. Some sort of infrastructure for networking. It’s supposedly a network, right? Is there anywhere people can post profiles?
  6. A repository of documents related to promotion and tenure in public philosophy. Katie Plaisance described how she developed a memorandum of understanding detailing the fact that her remarkably collaborative work deserved full credit as research, despite the fact that she works in a field that seems to value sole-authorship to the detriment of collaborative research. Katie was awesome and said she would share that document with me. But what if she (or everyone) who did smart and cool things like this to help guarantee their ability to do public philosophy had a central repository where all these documents could be posted for everyone to view and use? What if departments that have good criteria for promotion and tenure — criteria that allow for or even encourage public philosophy as scholarship — could post them on such a repository as resources for others?
  7. Leadership! Developing and maintaining these (and no doubt others I’ve missed) resources will require leadership, and maybe even money.

I’d be interested in thoughts on this list, including things you think should be added to it.

What a difference a day makes: How social media is transforming scientific debate (with tweets) · deevybee · Storify

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This is definitely worth a look, whether you’re into the idea of post-publication peer review or not.

What a difference a day makes: How social media is transforming scientific debate (with tweets) · deevybee · Storify.

Lethal Autonomous Robots (“Killer Robots”) | Center for Ethics & Technology | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

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Lethal Autonomous Robots (\”Killer Robots\”)

Monday, 18 November 2013 05:00 pm to 07:00 pm EST

Location: 

Global Learning Center (in Tech Square), room 129

WATCH the simultaneously streamed WEBCAST at: 

http://proed.pe.gatech.edu/gtpe/pelive/tech_debate_111813/

Debate and Q&A for both

Lethal Autonomous Robots (LARs) are machines that can decide to kill. Such a technology has the potential to revolutionize modern warfare and more. The need for understanding LARs is essential to decide whether their development and possible deployment should be regulated or banned. Are LARs ethical?

via Lethal Autonomous Robots ("Killer Robots") | Center for Ethics & Technology | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA.

‘Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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“The ‘big’ there is purely marketing,” Mr. Reed said. “This is all fear … This is about you buying big expensive servers and whatnot.”

via 'Big Data' Is Bunk, Obama Campaign's Tech Guru Tells University Leaders – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Also funny what he says about his own education ….

Me on the Web, According to ImpactStory.org and Altmetric.com

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Impact Story is one of the two altmetrics tools that allow individual researchers to find out something about the social media buzz surrounding their activities; the other is Altmetric.com. Although other developers exist, I can’t seem to figure out how I, as an individual, can use their tools (I’m looking at you, Plum Analytics).

There are a few major differences between Impact Story and Altmetric.com from a user standpoint. First, Impact Story is not for profit, while Altmetric.com is a business. Second, Impact Story steers one to create a collection of products that together tell a story of one’s impact. Altmetric.com, on the other hand, steers one to generate figures for the impact of individual products. Third, Impact Story allows for a range of products, including those tagged with URLs as well as DOIs; Altmetric.com only works with DOIs. This means that Impact Story can gather info on things like blog posts, while Altmetric.com is focused on scholarly articles. Finally, and this is a big difference, Impact Story deemphasizes numbers, while Atlmetric.com assigns a number, the Altmetric score, to each product.

Here is my latest Impact Story.

Here is one of my products according to Altmetric; here’s another; and another.

It’s interesting to see how Impact Story and Altmetric differ, both in their approaches and in terms of what they find on the same products.

I think the implications of these tools are enormous. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts!

What does it mean to prepare for life in ‘Humanity 2.0’?

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Francis Rememdios has organized a session at the 4S Annual Meeting in which he, David Budtz Pedersen, and I will serve as critics of Steve Fuller’s book Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0. We’ll be live tweeting as much as possible during the session, using the hashtag #humanity2 for those who want to follow. There is also a more general #4s2013 that should be interesting to follow for the next few days.

Here are the abstracts for our talks:

Humanity 2.0, Synthetic Biology, and Risk Assessment

Francis Remedios, Social Epistemology Editorial Board member

As a follow-up to Fuller’s Humanity 2.0, which is concerned with the impact of biosciences and nanosciences on humanity, Preparing for Life in Humanity 2.0 provides a more detailed analysis. Possible futures are discussed are: the ecological, the biomedical and the cybernetic. In the Proactionary Imperative, Fuller and Lipinska aver that for the human condition, the proactionary principle, which is risk taking, is an essential part should be favored over the precautionary principle, which is risk aversion. In terms of policy and ethics, which version of risk assessment should be used for synthetic biology, a branch of biotechnology? With synthetic biology, life is created from inanimate material. Synthetic biology has been dubbed life 2.0. Should one principle be favored over the other?

The Political Epistemology of Humanity 2.0
David Budtz Pedersen, Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University
In this paper I confront Fuller’s conception of Humanity 2.0 with the techno-democratic theories of Fukuyama (2003) and Rawls (1999). What happens to democratic values such as inclusion, rule of law, equality and fairness in an age of technology intensive output-based policymaking? Traditional models of input democracy are based on the moral intuition that the unintended consequences of natural selection are undeserved and call for social redress and compensation. However, in humanity 2.0 these unintended consequences are turned into intended as an effect of bioengineering and biomedical intervention. This, I argue, leads to an erosion of the natural luck paradigm on which  standard theories of distributive justice rest. Hence, people can no longer be expected to recognize each other as natural equals. Now compare this claim to Fuller’s idea that the welfare state needs to reassure the collectivization of burdens and benefits of radical scientific experimentation. Even if this might energize the welfare system and deliver a new momentum to the welfare state in an age of demographic change, it is not clear on which basis this political disposition for collectivizing such scientific benefits rests. In short, it seems implausible that the new techno-elites, that has translated the unintended consequence of natural selection into intended, will be convinced of distributing the benefits of scientific experiments to the wider society. If the biosubstrate of the political elite is radically different in terms of intelligence, life expectancy, bodily performance etc. than those disabled, it is no longer clear what the basis of redistribution and fairness should be. Hence, I argue that important elements of traditional democracy are still robust and necessary to vouch for the legitimacy of humanity 2.0.
Fuller’s Categorical Imperative: The Will to Proaction
J. Britt Holbrook, Georgia Institute of Technology
Two 19th century philosophers – William James and Friedrich Nietzsche – and one on the border of the 18th and 19th centuries – Immanuel Kant – underlie Fuller’s support for the proactionary imperative as a guide to life in ‘Humanity 2.0’. I make reference to the thought of these thinkers (James’s will to believe, Nietzsche’s will to power, and Kant’s categorical imperative) in my critique of Fuller’s will to proaction. First, I argue that, despite a superficial resemblance, James’s view about the risk of uncertainty does not map well onto the proactionary principle. Second, however, I argue that James’s notion that our epistemological preferences reveal something about our ‘passional nature’ connects with Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power in a way that allows us to diagnose Fuller’s ‘moral entrepreneur’ as revelatory of Fuller’s own  ‘categorical imperative’. But my larger critique rests on the connection between Fuller’s thinking and that of Wilhelm von Humboldt. I argue that Fuller accepts not only Humboldt’s ideas about the integration of research and education, but also – and this is the main weakness of Fuller’s position – Humboldt’s lesser recognized thesis about the relation between knowledge and society. Humboldt defends the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake on the grounds that this is necessary to benefit society. I criticize this view and argue that Fuller’s account of the public intellectual as an agent of distributive justice is inadequate to escape the critique of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

Developing Metrics for the Evaluation of Individual Researchers – Should Bibliometricians Be Left to Their Own Devices?

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So, I am sorry to have missed most of the Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy. On the other hand, I wouldn’t trade my involvement with the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility for any other academic opportunity. I love the CSFR meetings, and I think we may even be able to make a difference occasionally. I always leave the meetings energized and thinking about what I can do next.

That said, I am really happy to be on my way back to the ATL to participate in the last day of the Atlanta Conference. Ismael Rafols asked me to participate in a roundtable discussion with Cassidy Sugimoto and him (to be chaired by Diana Hicks). Like I’d say ‘no’ to that invitation!

The topic will be the recent discussions among bibliometricians of the development of metrics for individual researchers. That sounds like a great conversation to me! Of course, when I indicated to Ismael that I was bascially against the idea of bibliometricians coming up with standards for individual-level metrics, Ismael laughed and said the conversation should be interesting.

I’m not going to present a paper; just some thoughts. But I did start writing on the plane. Here’s what I have so far:

Bibliometrics are now increasingly being used in ways that go beyond their design. Bibliometricians are now increasingly asking how they should react to such unintended uses of the tools they developed. The issue of unintended consequences – especially of technologies designed with one purpose in mind, but which can be repurposed – is not new, of course. And bibliometricians have been asking questions – ethical questions, but also policy questions – essentially since the beginning of the development of bibliometrics. If anyone is sensitive to the fact that numbers are not neutral, it is surely the bibliometricians.

This sensitivity to numbers, however, especially when combined with great technical skill and large data sets, can also be a weakness. Bibliometricians are also aware of this phenomenon, though perhaps to a lesser degree than one might like. There are exceptions. The discussion by Paul Wouters, Wolfgang Glänzel, Jochen Gläser, and Ismael Rafols regarding this “urgent debate in bibliometrics,” is one indication of such awareness. Recent sessions at ISSI in Vienna and STI2013 in Berlin on which Wouters et al. report are other indicators that the bibliometrics community feels a sense of urgency, especially with regard to the question of measuring the performance of individual researchers.

That such questions are being raised and discussed by bibliometricians is certainly a positive development. One cannot fault bibliometricians for wanting to take responsibility for the unintended consequences of their own inventions. But one – I would prefer to say ‘we’ – cannot allow this responsibility to be assumed only by members of the bibliometrics community.

It’s not so much that I don’t want to blame them for not having thought through possible other uses of their metrics — holding them to what Carl Mitcham calls a duty plus respicare: to take more into account than the purpose for which something was initially designed. It’s that I don’t want to leave it to them to try to fix things. Bibliometricians, after all, are a disciplinary community. They have standards; but I worry they also think their standards ought to be the standards. That’s the same sort of naivety that got us in this mess in the first place.

Look, if you’re going to invent a device someone else can command (deans and provosts with research evaluation metrics are like teenagers driving cars), you ought at least to have thought about how those others might use it in ways you didn’t intend. But since you didn’t, don’t try to come in now with your standards as if you know best.

Bibliometrics are not the province of bibliometricians anymore. They’re part of academe. And we academics need to take ownership of them. We shouldn’t let administrators drive in our neighborhoods without some sort of oversight. We should learn to drive ourselves so we can determine the rules of the road. If the bibliometricians want to help, that’s cool. But I am not going to let the Fordists figure out academe for me.

With the development of individual level bibliometrics, we now have the ability — and the interest — to own our own metrics. What we want to avoid at all costs is having metrics take over our world so that they end up steering us rather than us driving them. We don’t want what’s happened with the car to happen with bibliometrics. What we want is to stop at the level at which bibliometrics of individual researchers maximize the power and creativity of individual researchers. Once we standardize metrics, it makes it that much easier to institutionalize them.

It’s not metrics themselves that we academics should resist. ‘Impact’ is a great opportunity, if we own it. But by all means, we should resist the institutionalization of standardized metrics. A first step is to resist their standardization.

Update

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I have accepted an offer to become Visiting Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am thrilled to return to Atlanta for a year. I am also thrilled to join the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech.

I expect to resume posting more regularly after the move. But I’ll pat myself on the back for not having missed a PhyloPic Phryday … yet!

More soon from the ATL … Hotlanta … no more Texas T.