Science in its ideal is blind to international borders–scientists from all parts of the world sharing data with each other, even nations that are bitter rivals. To now insist that science needs to be deliberately limited to researchers that meet a social/political ideal stinks of Lysenkoism.
It’s a good thing that no one is suggesting that.
Well, maybe that guy, over there, standing in the field, keeping the crows away. Might be best you take your arguments to him.
Oh, why don’t you go back to arguing that all past Dr. Who versions should be called “she” now?
Tu Quoque: Insisting that science doesn’t need the contributions of people who aren’t male and majority-ethnicity in their country stinks of racism and sexism. (Especially since the majority ethnicity in most of the highly scientifically productive countries is white.) If we want our science to be the best it can be, we want the best of everybody, not just the best of everybody who happens to be of European ancestry and also owns a Y chromosome. And if we see that our systems of professional advancement are standing in the way of that goal, it is in our best interest to change them.
Good thing I’m not saying that, then. What I’m saying is absolutely nothing good can come out of having the science you are “allowed” to reference have to pass through some ideological filter. If good science comes from a diverse source, that’s great. But science that comes from a non-diverse source isn’t something to be shunned for being ideologically impure and counter-revolutionary.
And, BTW, you are being deeply racist by making the assumption that all important science is coming out of labs run by white Europeans. Other countries have valid science, too, you know. Science is a global endeavor and you are giving a deeply provencal argument.
As an experiment, I chose a random paper to look at by visiting the Science Journal web site and clicking on the first paper featured at the moment, which turns out to be “A single dose of peripherally infused EGFRvIII-directed CAR T cells mediates antigen loss and induces adaptive resistance in patients with recurrent glioblastoma” That paper has 51 citations, with many of them listing authors with South-East Asian, East Asian, and Hispanic names among the names with origins from all over Europe. No first names are used, so no clues as to the sex of the paper writers. Do you care to assert if the references of the paper are “diverse” enough, or should some be added or removed to fit the proper quota?
WTF? No-one has said we should “shun” work done by white men. But if we are disproportionately giving publications, grants, tenure, etc. to white men then the system is not working at optimal efficiency. And it has a knock-on effect on the quality of work being produced: it has been shown that groups that are all white or all male are less likely to consider and take into account in experimental planning the groups to which they do not belong, which has in particular been an issue for drug trials, to the point that NIH grant applications now require human subjects research proposals to describe and discuss the gender and ethnicity makeup of their sample populations.
Plus, you know, fairness and equality and all that.
I am a scientist, and I know the distribution of where publications come from, especially those in high-profile journals. The US is way out in front, followed by Europe (aggregated) and China as a poor third. You can play around with this if you want to see some numbers.
Science is expensive, and smaller/poorer countries can’t support that much of it. Things are getting better on that front as economies expand, but it’s slow. So for now and likely for quite a while longer, if science in the US and Europe is not diverse, then science is not diverse, period.
Back to? While Doctor Who is about a time traveler, time travel is actually impossible. So, it would be hard for me to go back to an argument that I have never made, even in the highly unlikely event that I would make that argument in the future.
Have fun fighting these guys.
Science isn’t about fairness, science is about facts.
Dude, read the fucking article rather than relying on your own made-up bullshit fantasy about it. The link to the PDF is right there. No-one is saying that we should “shun” work by white men. The authors are saying that it is a problem if work by non-white and/or non-male researchers is being under-cited. The specific area they are talking about is geography, which is directly involved in societal issues where racial and gender biases exist and where discounting the perspectives of non-white and/or non-male researchers can perpetuate those biases. If you can’t think up any on your own, the introduction to this special issue of a journal for geographers offers a list of areas of geographic research where race in particular is relevant:
[ul]
[li]Spatial Distribution and Interaction (Urban Residential Segregation; Enclave Development—Ghettos, Slums, and Barrios; Housing Policy, Redlining, Mortgage Discrimination; Racial Migration Patterns and Regional Population Distribution; Mapping and Measuring Racial Distribution and Concentration)[/li]
[li]Economic Relations (Labor Markets, Employment, Occupational and Industrial Segmentation; The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis; Economic Restructuring and Uneven Development; Poverty and the Underclass Debate)[/li]
[li]Political Relations (Elections and Minority Voting Rights; Congressional Redistricting and Gerrymandering; Policy—Civil Rights, Affirmative Action, Education, Welfare Reform; Social Movements, Civil Unrest, and Riots; Crime and Hate Crimes; Politics and Cultural Symbolism)[/li]
[li]Environmental Racism and Health[/li][/ul]
And those facts are generated from the collective work of a large body of professional workers at different levels of seniority, recognition and prestige. If that seniority, recognition and prestige is being disproportionately distributed to white men, that is a problem, just as much as it would be for any other field of work.
It’s been a while since I looked at a journal.
Do they include the authors’ genders etc. now?
I am resolutely unbiased when it comes to sexism, though several experts in the subject have suggested otherwise. They are wrong.
I note that many female academics write papers and use their initials for the “author” line. I think that is a nifty protocol, and should be adopted by male academics as well.
Especially when it’s super hilarious like B. O. Plenty or I. P. Freely.
In the paper I linked to a few pages back, all names in each of the 51 citations were last name plus initials only. I clicked on one of the actual articles at random (it was number 47) and the full names are listed in the actual paper (and going by the names, at least two of the authors were women and at least two were non-whites.)
You and me both, brother.
Plenty of people have made the argument better here than I have - this diversity in science thing, it matters. It’s not bullshit.
Consider a very not-politically charged example. I am left-handed, which means I’m a minority. A huge percentage of RTCs on drugs are done on right-handed people. I’ve been excluded from neurological and mental health studies because of my left-handedness. I get it, sort of - we’re a wild card, our brains are not just different, but unpredictably so. But we exist.
As a result, you know that list of side-effects that comes with every medication? It’s fucking guaranteed I’m going to get it worse than the average person, and it’s always some random shit that affects .02% of the people in the study, because I’m lucky that way. I’ve had medications give me seizures, fuck with my coordination so much I’m walking into walls, and freeze up half of my face. I was once driving down the road on the way home from work and totally forgot where I was. I had to pull over because I was immediately lost. I’m talking fucked up shit. There is some evidence that people who are left-handed have it worse when it comes to medication side-effects because apparently nobody gives a shit how our brains work.
This isn’t a perfect analogy but it holds true for any sort of population study. The more people you exclude, the shittier your data. Depression is a good example. You do depression studies on a bunch of white guys, you have learned how to help a bunch of white guys with depression at the exclusion of anyone outside that demographic. And we do have evidence not only that depression manifests itself differently depending on racial/cultural context, but that treatment efficacy also varies based on demographic.
So yeah, it matters.
When I hear people arguing against diversity in science, I hear, ‘‘We’d like fewer data, please.’’ Which seems so totally unscientific to me, I dunno.
You have characterized me with having exactly the opposite opinion than what I have been stating. Here’s what I have been talking about–let’s say that five years ago a team did an extensive study on the effects of SSRI’s on left-handed people, following 500 subjects for two years. But a modern researcher–following third-wave intersectionalist feminist science–rejects that paper because the study was done by all white heterosexual males, and instead uses a study from 20 years ago that followed five subjects for two months. These feminists are the ones asking for fewer data, not me. You have to play with the cards that you are dealt (the existing researchers and the existing research) than the cards that you wish that you had been dealt.
That’s not remotely what they’re asking for. You misunderstand the essence of their argument.
Yeah, that’s a total mischaracterization of their argument, so I guess there’s a lot of that going around.
What I don’t get is this:
If I’m busy sciencing, and there’re no indicators of someone’s gender nor of their skin tone included in the articles I’m using, how am I suppose to activate my preferential bias for folks of a certain gender or skin color?
Do I have to track the authors down on sciencey social media before I can continue my research in a properly biased manner?