Noises off

My guess is that it is a common experience to feel a bit like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's play. You know, you are centre stage in the spot-light, but all the really important or interesting stuff is taking place behind you, just off stage, just finishes before you enter or only kicks off immediately  after you have exited. One of my Rosencrantz and Guildenstern moments relates to Satoshi Kanazawa who was appointed to replace me at  the LSE when I moved to Oxford. I remember at the time thinking it was an "interesting" appointment: let's say that already in 2002 the man had something of a reputation. I subsequently met him a couple of times at social functions and  he seemed to be perfectly pleasant (to me at least) not that this is evidence for or against anything in particular. Since then his talent for provocation seems to have become unbounded culminating last week in a very public wrap over the knuckles from his employer.

Before I get to my main point let me make my position very clear. Personally I'm convinced by the scientific critics of Kanazawa's more controversial papers and pronouncements that the claims he makes are false and that the intellectual craftsmanship is poor. In my view he is reckless in a way that suggests that his principal aim is to court publicity rather than contribute to understanding. If this is true, he would, of course, not be unique, either at the LSE or in academe in general. I can also understand that  what he writes may well genuinely offend and distress people. Personally I find some of what he has written distasteful not least because it seems to show little respect for the rules and procedures of serious science.

Now comes the however. I find the outcome of the LSE's  disciplinary hearing  a little odd, in fact, I find it worryingly authoritarian and quite against the spirit of a university as a community of scholars in which people engage in discussion to prove (in the old fashion sense) the worth of ideas without anyone telling them what they may or may not think. The principal findings of the hearing appear to be that: a) "...a number of people had been greatly offended by the blog"; b) "...some of the assertions put forward in the blog post were flawed and would have benefited from more rigorous academic scrutiny"; c) "...the author ignored the basic responsibility of a scientific communicator to qualify claims made in proportion to the certainty of the evidence"; d) "...the article had brought the School into disrepute".

I wouldn't for one moment want to dispute that any of these findings are true, what I would question however is whether they are reasonable grounds for taking disciplinary action against an academic. a) giving offence is not a crime. It may be bad manners, but if we are going to discipline people for that then to be consistent we would have to cast the net much wider; b) amounts to saying that he was wrong, OK, so let those who can say that they have never written anything that was later shown to be wrong cast the first stone; c)  if this is grounds for disciplinary action then I would respectfully submit that to avoid hypocrisy the LSE needs to construct a much bigger dock, one that will contain most of the members of some "disciplines"; d) seems to me to be a very dangerous argument to play with and in fact is little more than a fig leaf for those who are ultimately to blame. As I mentioned above, Kanazawa's reputation was well known before he was appointed. Why was this ignored by the selection committee? I have it on good authority that the relevant people were well informed.

Universities are places in which all sorts of intellectual conversations are conducted constrained only by the law and by the conventions of reason. As far as I can see Kanazawa has broken no law, nor infringed any clause of his employment contract. Some of his writing does, in my view, not adhere to the conventions of reason, but the appropriate responses to that are: 1) scientific criticism; 2) ridicule; 3) not bothering to read his stuff. Apart from amongst a collection of rather unsavory characters on the fringes of respectable academic opinion - you probably all know to whom I'm alluding - Kanazawa's reputation is now zero, his academic capital has gone down the pan. He may get a few gigs at events put on by crazies but  he is now persona non grata as far as mainstream academia is concerned. In other words he is already reaping what he has sown and no reasonable person can have any sympathy for him on that account. But it is not the business of universities to dictate what, where and when their employees write and the LSE's witless requirement that he refrain from writing anything for a one year period except in refereed journals seems to me to be an infringement of his human rights. It would certainly be interesting to see whether such a ban would withstand a legal challenge. Regardless of the outcome of such a hypothetical the "senior academics" who made up Kanazawa's disciplinary hearing need to ask themselves whether they really understand the idea of a university.

Academic malpractice

Allegations of scientific fraud have been made against Diederik Stapel a Professor of Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Science covers the story, but I think gets one detail wrong, he hasn't yet been fired, just suspended pending an investigation by the university. Andrew Gelman has been blogging about some recent cases. What is odd in a way is that Stapel is an experimentalist. Making up data from experiments is in one sense easy, but  extremely high risk. In any reputable discipline you have to specify the experimental protocols well in advance, do the power analysis, recruit people and run the experiment. If you turn up with some data but nobody recalls you ever running the experiment then suspicions are immediately aroused.

For what it is worth, in my own neck of the woods I don't believe there is much downright fraud going on. But intellectual dishonesty takes a number of forms. The pressure to publish and to produce startling findings is just too great for many to resist and when you see the pressure that people are under you can understand why they do it. Being selective about the evidence you consider; ignoring inconvenient results; making claims which aren't in any way justified by the meager empirical evidence; making a fuss about statistically "significant" differences without noticing that the "effect sizes" are of no practical interest; projecting trends on the basis of poor measurements taken at two time-points; allowing the press to run away with a sexy story that you know in your heart of hearts probably isn't true - but justifying it by saying: "well it's the best evidence we have at the moment". 

All of this goes on all the time. The reason is simple. Coming up with some genuinely novel findings in the social sciences is hard. A lot of the time the world really is just as it appears to be or is resistant to having the truth extracted from it - especially if all you have to go on are observational data. So if you do find some data that gives you a quirky result you have to be quite saintly not to rush into print with it. So "obesity is contagious" is news and "fat people seek each other out" is not. One can understand that the press is interested in the former. What is less understandable is that some reputable academic journals apparently are extremely reluctant to publish critiques of  headline papers whose claims turn out, on close examination, to have less substance than the authors would have us believe. Let's not forget, that at the end of the day one of the central institutions of  science - academic journals - is a profit making business and  that nobody has succeeded in making the  Journal of Unrejected Null Hypotheses look attractive to a publisher.

Blah blah sociology

Taking a look at the videos on the British Sociological Associations web site of  its last conference I found one nice thing - richly deserved life-time achievement awards for Michael Banton and Chelly Halsey.  Otherwise I found the rest of the content  utterly depressing. If this is the best that British sociology can do then we are doomed. As far as I could see the usual waffle merchants were pumping out the same old  empty generalities decked out as profundities - what the Dutch sociologist Wout Ultee calls "Blah blah" sociology - while firmly slapping each other on the back and telling each other how wonderful they are. Frankly I hadn't a clue what most of them were talking about or what their point was.  None of the talks seemed to have much truck with carefully articulated questions addressed with appropriate empirical evidence. That would be too boring wouldn't it? Or perhaps too difficult. My alienation from the mainstream of British sociology began a long time ago and I found nothing here that  is likely to reverse it. I wonder what Michael Banton and Chelly Halsey made of it all?

More like the movies

A propos of nothing in particular, I've been watching a fair number of movies recently, catching up on stuff I somehow missed when  first released.  I try to follow the spirit of the advice  an old friend once gave me to the effect that  every now and again  one should go to see a play that the critics have rubbished simply because the critics aren't always right. Of course this works both ways and sometimes they rave about the most appalling old tosh. Joaana Hogg's Archipelago is a case in point. I thought it was tedious and pointless. Why would anyone want to watch what looked like  home movies of the banal  mumblings of a bunch of toffs on holiday? I certainly didn't and, having lost the will to live, I couldn't watch it to the end.

I had to take Bela Tarr's The Man from London over two nights and after barely surviving the first hour it was touch and go whether I would go back to it. On the whole I'm glad I did because for a movie in which very little is happening in front of your eyes - sometimes literally nothing - it kind of grows on you. The action is mainly psychological and after a while you succumb  to the mesmeric way in which the film is shot. 

The Bill Douglas Trilogy won't be to everybody's taste, but I thought it was superb. Douglas has the reputation of being a bit of a miserablist and he certainly had a lot to be miserable about. Even by the standards of the time his upbringing was harsh and at times brutal. You can't go through that sort of childhood without being damaged in some way. To turn those experiences into an autobiographical work  of cinematic poetry is little short of redemptive. I'm lost in admiration for the man even though he could be, by all accounts, an awkward cussed bugger. Great artists are allowed to be intolerant of things and people that get in the way of achieving their vision. I also enjoyed his feature film Comrades about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. It's a simple story, simply told from complex material and succeeds in narrating the human tragedy without the political preaching that comes from hindsight.

Other things I've enjoyed recently: Capote  (brilliant performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman); Of Time and the City (Terence Davies' love song to Liverpool); The Cement Garden (a very creepy rendition of Ian McKewan's early novel); Black Cat, White Cat (a hilarious Serbian gypsy comedy); 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 days (grim but exceptionally well made Romanian film about illegal abortion); The Visitor (a tale about illegal immigrants in New York with superb ensemble acting from the 4 principal players).

Economists and empirical evidence

I don't suppose that economists are less likely than any of the rest of us to make  daft pronouncements about empirical issues without appearing to bother about the empirical evidence. So the letter to yesterday's FT  signed by a gang of 20 "leading economists" arguing (I use the word loosely) that the 50 pence top tax rate should be abolished isn't a particularly surprising event. The replies in today's FT from Alan Manning and Andrew Oswald (also leading economists) seem to me so reasonable - let's look at the existing evidence and wait for the new evidence that will shortly be available - that clearly there is some flaw in their reasoning that is so subtle that I haven't spotted it.

One member of the gang of 20 is the Cambridge economist Bob Rowthorn. This is the man who said in a 2008 interview with Alan Macfarlane:  "...I wouldn't regard myself as left-wing any more. I regard myself as left-wing in the sense that, saying there are a lot of poor people in the world that deserve a better deal and that those that are better off maybe could make some sacrifice." What kind of sacrifice would that be then? Obviously not one of a financial nature. In the course of the interview he confirms the essential soundness of his judgments by  confessing that he  supported the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

All arguments have to be considered on their merits, but perhaps Professor Rowthorn and his colleagues should take some advice from Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Blind to art

I'm an occasional visitor to Modern Art Oxford, mainly, it has to be said, because the promise of a cup of hot chocolate in the cafe is a guaranteed way to get the young Ms Mills out of the house and out from under her mother's feet on a rainy Saturday afternoon. A couple of weeks ago we visited Haegue Yang 's "Teacher of Dance" exhibition. OK, I'm going to have a  boorish Brian Sewell moment and I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but really it was pretentious crap. A room full of venetian blinds hung from the ceiling, a "sculpture" made from discarded light bulb packaging... To quote the gallery blurb: "Predominantly using domestic materials, Yang discloses narratives, individual portraits and her own sentiments, reflecting the balance of research and intuitive enquiry that underlies her practice." Really? Well, she didn't disclose them to me and I'd be interested to hear what exactly she "disclosed" to anyone else. And no I don't think that art has to be representational, and yes I do like abstraction in painting and sculpture (how dreadfully middle-brow) but surely whatever art is it has to communicate something to the spectator's gaze. Isn't that the difference these days between talent and bullshit?

Intelligence, Libya and LSE

It was really just a throw-away line but  this Guardian story  makes my original intuition about the Libya, Intelligence, LSE nexus look a whole lot more plausible.