Mercurial Artism
Unregistered
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2011
- Messages
- 111
Okay, so I was going back to school during the summer, and one of the classes I needed to take was a college composition class. This would be no big deal, I presumed, since I had been reading at the college level since I was 12, won a national writing award in junior high, and graduated with the equivalent of a college degree in creative writing while in high school. Not that my clumsy writing here would have hinted at this history. Fortunately, due to my background, they moved me into the honors version of the class, English 200.
Apart from my minor gripes about the class (such as reviewing the proper comma use with conjunctions and similar basic grammar, something we were taught in fourth grade), the thing that began to irritate me was the way the professor's biases tinted the lessons and the curriculum, as though preaching certain opinions as absolute truth. I agreed with ~95% of the political opinions she brought up, but it was still annoying. But that's par for the course with professors, and I'd gotten used to that after several teachers like that in high school. I was more stubborn back then and would play devil's advocate, pretending I disagreed just to open up a conversation or just to irritate them depending on how much I liked them, but after awhile I just went with the flow.
No, the thing that bothered me in this class, was that in a class about argumentation, fallacious reasoning, and writing college-level papers, the professor supported views that are contrary to scientific consensus, and happily inculcated a distrust of science/scientists. What's worse, she regularly went to conferences for science journalism and considered herself a big fan or proponent of science. I don't know whether she's actually published any science journalism (the only thing that comes up on a google search of her name are teacher rating sites and facebook).
Now, this is urban New York, so she wasn't espousing creationism (not that urban New Yorkers are immune to this, but I imagine it wouldn't go over well. It was more of the stereotypically liberal pseudoscience tendencies - cell phone radiation is dangerous, there is actually a real controversy about whether vaccines are safe or not, and talking about how she went and got an alternative treatment for a serious, chronic disease, rejecting her doctor's treatment opinions and it worked so well.
Never mind that she has all of the traits that work in favor of a better prognosis, or that it's a disease that goes dormant and then returns. I suspect highly that she was a vegan (from the way she looked to how she tangentially broached animal cruelty a couple times, saying something to the effect she believes animals deserve the same rights or respect as people or something, but she didn't give any sympathy for PETA's Holocaust on your Plate ad when we analyzed it or preach on the evils of eating meat, so that didn't really bother me - I'm an ex-vegan, and for the more committed ones, it really can be a religion).
So one day in class, she hands out an article for us to read and then discuss. This is it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/technology/personaltech/31basics.html
Very disappointing. The article Kate Murphy penned is little more than an instruction manual about how to avoid dangerous cell phone radiation, with no actual mention of the implausibility of such deleterious effects, just saying it's "unclear" and then proceeding to give out a poorly written, poorly researched list of ways to minimize exposure, assuming there is a weight of evidence strong enough to warrant such measures, then scaring any readers who lack sufficient understanding of phsyics or physiology into fearing you have to take these measures to keep from getting cancer or something awful like that.
I could write a whole essay picking this article apart, but when I mentioned this basic concern - namely that it's a to-do list that simply assumes this is a real danger when the weight of the evidence would suggest it is not, which amounts to baseless scaremongering - she deflected this concern by saying, "This is a short article, and the word count really constrains the writer, and you just can't get into a lengthy discussion of all the research. Trust me, journalists do a lot of research, stacks of journal articles this high, even though only a small fraction of that ends up in the finished paper."
Considering I have personally pared down 400+ pages into ~100 pages within a semester, and written nonfiction articles where I researched whole books and numerous academic articles for 500 word essays, I found this defense laughable. I said, "I am quite sure the author did extensive research, as I know first-hand from having written short essays, screenplays, and novels. What I am arguing is not that she did little research, but that she did it poorly. Clearly, after all this research, she either forgot much of it, or decided it was not worth mentioning that there is good reason to believe there's no reason to take these measures."
She again pressed the idea that there's simply no room for it in such a short article.
"Um...of course there's room. It just would be a very different article, apparently one the author didn't want to write. It doesn't even mention even the possibility there is no danger, just assuming it from the get go and serving as an instruction manual, which seems to go against the journalistic credo of telling both sides."
I hated to invoke that "both sides" thing, since it is so often used to justify bad science journalism, but I'm not too good at being spontaneous. She then said that, if it turns out there is a danger, wouldn't you rather it gets reported on even if it isn't verified yet, so you have advance warning? The cost of not acting if there is a danger is just too high.
I said, "Whatever reporting is done should reflect the plausibility and current research. You don't get on the news and tell everyone there's a tornado coming and they have to hide out underground the next few days if it's unlikely the tornado will reach the area. You qualify the warning based on evidence and probability. Otherwise, it would be a good idea for everyone to bring an umbrella with them every day of the summer no matter how sunny, on the off chance that it's going to hail while they're outside. If there's a very small possibility we're grievously wrong about basic physics and oncogenesis, then report there's a very small possibility. Otherwise, it's just scare mongering."
She ended on a note of saying that since the result of there being a link is too costly, she would rather take precautions than face even a slim possibility of it. I said that was fine for her to choose that, but journalist owe it to people to report facts so they can make their own informed risk assessment. The conversation was dying at that point anyway.
Now, obviously I was less well-spoken in real-time - there was quite a bit more stuttering and repetition and so forth, but those were the thoughts I expressed, in roughly the same order.
Then another day she also mentioned anti-vaccination, and how she had disagreed with her husband on that, and they compromised by getting just the polio shot. She was the one who insisted on not vaccinating. This was in the context of us choosing the topic for our final presentation, so we had to say what we were choosing, and some of the basic reasons why. I mentioned how Andrew Wakefield was a fraud, that autism rates continued to go up for years after the mercury-based thimerosal was removed, that even if autism was a real risk in vaccination, that it would still be preferable to the many who would die or become otherwise seriously disabled.
She said that the jury is still out, that it's an "open question" with "evidence on both sides". Except, I pointed out, the evidence on one side is manufactured for the love of money by lawyers and quacks, and the evidence on the other side is overwhelmingly consistent and independently confirmed by scientists and medical doctors. She remarked on one of my papers that "the other side has valid evidence too."
I replied to by saying, "all opinions may be valid, but many opinions are wrong - or do you think young earth creationists should have equal time in science classrooms?"
She changed the subject to how well-focused my thesis was - was it just vaccines are safe, or that they don't cause autism? Because there's more possible risks than just autism. I wanted to go more in-depth, but I already had a ton of journal articles from when I researched the vaccine-autism thing when I was 17, so I would have to do far less research for that specific question, and I was rather sleep-deprived.
Fortunately, another person mentioned Wakefield was a fraud (she was cool, and I wish I'd gotten to know her better), and another person also did the vaccine topic - for vaccination. That was good, considering I became ill and unable to attend the day of my presentation, though I hope her arguments weren't very weak, and that the prof didn't tear it apart in the middle of class with fallacious arguments.
This has been far from my only experience, but it is also the most blatant. Hypothetically, it shouldn't be as big a deal for college professors teaching adults (and I certainly would rather such a person to teach 18-20 somethings than to teach small children), many of the people in my class had poor education prior to this point, including fairly bright students.
Seriously, my 11th grade regular English class covered the various fallacies better than this, and I went in learning nothing (though part of that I may owe to the excellent argumentation class I attended at the community college when I was in high school, where our prof showed us video of Suzanne Somers and that bioidential thing, among others), whereas there were people who had only just recently learned how to write in a five paragraph structure and needed to wean off of that, which we did in the 5th-6th grade at my schools.
I went to a district where most people were wealthy, though, so the advanced fourth grade math met 6th grade standards. My education always seemed very slow-paced, so I had no idea how good I had it until I met students who weren't dumb, but just didn't have the same kind of opportunities and had to play catch up later. It stuns me that the slow-paced, lowest-common-denominator education really was among the best, which I always thought of as nothing but the school puffing up its chest to enhance their precious reputation.
Now, we do have a "critical thinking" course, which goes into why we can't just trust senses and first impression, biases, why people believe strange things, basically skepticism 101, it seems, though I haven't taken it and can't say how decently the course is actually taught. The only people required to take it are those in the honors program, though, which seems silly.
Such a course should be available to everyone, and required of everyone getting an academic degree (as opposed to just learning a trade, although I would argue that it should be strongly encouraged, at least until the high schools can step up to the plate and teach something like this effectively to all). Maybe have an honors sections that goes beyond the basics and into more philosophy and stuff, but yeah.
Another thing: How can or should we respond to such professors?
Particularly since it's completely contradictory to the skills they're supposed to be teaching in the course. I got a good grade (it probably would've been a little higher if I hadn't missed my presentation, so I have no gripes about getting an A- instead of an A or A+), so there's no evidence of biases affecting students' grades adversely, even though I was quite insistent to not give up intellectual honesty for the sake of appeasing a prof.
I figured it wouldn't matter if I got a C even, since my essays and so on when I transferred would demonstrate I clearly knew to write, and before it even got to that point, I would have a very good case to protest a bad grade, since my writing far exceeded course expectations while staying within guidelines, and I turned in my assignments on time and attended the classes. So I was very outspoken and that did not change the grading. So there is no reason to bring up that kind of charge.
But how should students and others address this kind of situation? On the one hand, we don't want universities constraining faculty speech too much, but on the other hand, they have a duty to teach what they're supposed to be teaching at a high quality level. I mean, biology profs don't get to teach creationism, unless it's a religious school. (If they are, FSM help us...
) So why should a prof charged with teaching reasoning and constructing non-fallacious arguments have free reign to argue using fallacies, practicing what they preach not to do, doing this unintentionally as opposed to then pointing to it and saying, "See? That's what you're not supposed to do."
And just telling a prof to quit teaching pseudoscience doesn't stop them from writing a book, or a blog, or whatever to speak about whatever the heck they like without censure. Is there any real recourse available to deal with this kind of situation today? If there isn't, should there be? What kind of system could we put in place to deal with this scenario?
Apart from my minor gripes about the class (such as reviewing the proper comma use with conjunctions and similar basic grammar, something we were taught in fourth grade), the thing that began to irritate me was the way the professor's biases tinted the lessons and the curriculum, as though preaching certain opinions as absolute truth. I agreed with ~95% of the political opinions she brought up, but it was still annoying. But that's par for the course with professors, and I'd gotten used to that after several teachers like that in high school. I was more stubborn back then and would play devil's advocate, pretending I disagreed just to open up a conversation or just to irritate them depending on how much I liked them, but after awhile I just went with the flow.
No, the thing that bothered me in this class, was that in a class about argumentation, fallacious reasoning, and writing college-level papers, the professor supported views that are contrary to scientific consensus, and happily inculcated a distrust of science/scientists. What's worse, she regularly went to conferences for science journalism and considered herself a big fan or proponent of science. I don't know whether she's actually published any science journalism (the only thing that comes up on a google search of her name are teacher rating sites and facebook).
Now, this is urban New York, so she wasn't espousing creationism (not that urban New Yorkers are immune to this, but I imagine it wouldn't go over well. It was more of the stereotypically liberal pseudoscience tendencies - cell phone radiation is dangerous, there is actually a real controversy about whether vaccines are safe or not, and talking about how she went and got an alternative treatment for a serious, chronic disease, rejecting her doctor's treatment opinions and it worked so well.
Never mind that she has all of the traits that work in favor of a better prognosis, or that it's a disease that goes dormant and then returns. I suspect highly that she was a vegan (from the way she looked to how she tangentially broached animal cruelty a couple times, saying something to the effect she believes animals deserve the same rights or respect as people or something, but she didn't give any sympathy for PETA's Holocaust on your Plate ad when we analyzed it or preach on the evils of eating meat, so that didn't really bother me - I'm an ex-vegan, and for the more committed ones, it really can be a religion).
So one day in class, she hands out an article for us to read and then discuss. This is it: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/technology/personaltech/31basics.html
Very disappointing. The article Kate Murphy penned is little more than an instruction manual about how to avoid dangerous cell phone radiation, with no actual mention of the implausibility of such deleterious effects, just saying it's "unclear" and then proceeding to give out a poorly written, poorly researched list of ways to minimize exposure, assuming there is a weight of evidence strong enough to warrant such measures, then scaring any readers who lack sufficient understanding of phsyics or physiology into fearing you have to take these measures to keep from getting cancer or something awful like that.
I could write a whole essay picking this article apart, but when I mentioned this basic concern - namely that it's a to-do list that simply assumes this is a real danger when the weight of the evidence would suggest it is not, which amounts to baseless scaremongering - she deflected this concern by saying, "This is a short article, and the word count really constrains the writer, and you just can't get into a lengthy discussion of all the research. Trust me, journalists do a lot of research, stacks of journal articles this high, even though only a small fraction of that ends up in the finished paper."
Considering I have personally pared down 400+ pages into ~100 pages within a semester, and written nonfiction articles where I researched whole books and numerous academic articles for 500 word essays, I found this defense laughable. I said, "I am quite sure the author did extensive research, as I know first-hand from having written short essays, screenplays, and novels. What I am arguing is not that she did little research, but that she did it poorly. Clearly, after all this research, she either forgot much of it, or decided it was not worth mentioning that there is good reason to believe there's no reason to take these measures."
She again pressed the idea that there's simply no room for it in such a short article.
"Um...of course there's room. It just would be a very different article, apparently one the author didn't want to write. It doesn't even mention even the possibility there is no danger, just assuming it from the get go and serving as an instruction manual, which seems to go against the journalistic credo of telling both sides."
I hated to invoke that "both sides" thing, since it is so often used to justify bad science journalism, but I'm not too good at being spontaneous. She then said that, if it turns out there is a danger, wouldn't you rather it gets reported on even if it isn't verified yet, so you have advance warning? The cost of not acting if there is a danger is just too high.
I said, "Whatever reporting is done should reflect the plausibility and current research. You don't get on the news and tell everyone there's a tornado coming and they have to hide out underground the next few days if it's unlikely the tornado will reach the area. You qualify the warning based on evidence and probability. Otherwise, it would be a good idea for everyone to bring an umbrella with them every day of the summer no matter how sunny, on the off chance that it's going to hail while they're outside. If there's a very small possibility we're grievously wrong about basic physics and oncogenesis, then report there's a very small possibility. Otherwise, it's just scare mongering."
She ended on a note of saying that since the result of there being a link is too costly, she would rather take precautions than face even a slim possibility of it. I said that was fine for her to choose that, but journalist owe it to people to report facts so they can make their own informed risk assessment. The conversation was dying at that point anyway.
Now, obviously I was less well-spoken in real-time - there was quite a bit more stuttering and repetition and so forth, but those were the thoughts I expressed, in roughly the same order.
Then another day she also mentioned anti-vaccination, and how she had disagreed with her husband on that, and they compromised by getting just the polio shot. She was the one who insisted on not vaccinating. This was in the context of us choosing the topic for our final presentation, so we had to say what we were choosing, and some of the basic reasons why. I mentioned how Andrew Wakefield was a fraud, that autism rates continued to go up for years after the mercury-based thimerosal was removed, that even if autism was a real risk in vaccination, that it would still be preferable to the many who would die or become otherwise seriously disabled.
She said that the jury is still out, that it's an "open question" with "evidence on both sides". Except, I pointed out, the evidence on one side is manufactured for the love of money by lawyers and quacks, and the evidence on the other side is overwhelmingly consistent and independently confirmed by scientists and medical doctors. She remarked on one of my papers that "the other side has valid evidence too."
I replied to by saying, "all opinions may be valid, but many opinions are wrong - or do you think young earth creationists should have equal time in science classrooms?"She changed the subject to how well-focused my thesis was - was it just vaccines are safe, or that they don't cause autism? Because there's more possible risks than just autism. I wanted to go more in-depth, but I already had a ton of journal articles from when I researched the vaccine-autism thing when I was 17, so I would have to do far less research for that specific question, and I was rather sleep-deprived.
Fortunately, another person mentioned Wakefield was a fraud (she was cool, and I wish I'd gotten to know her better), and another person also did the vaccine topic - for vaccination. That was good, considering I became ill and unable to attend the day of my presentation, though I hope her arguments weren't very weak, and that the prof didn't tear it apart in the middle of class with fallacious arguments.
This has been far from my only experience, but it is also the most blatant. Hypothetically, it shouldn't be as big a deal for college professors teaching adults (and I certainly would rather such a person to teach 18-20 somethings than to teach small children), many of the people in my class had poor education prior to this point, including fairly bright students.
Seriously, my 11th grade regular English class covered the various fallacies better than this, and I went in learning nothing (though part of that I may owe to the excellent argumentation class I attended at the community college when I was in high school, where our prof showed us video of Suzanne Somers and that bioidential thing, among others), whereas there were people who had only just recently learned how to write in a five paragraph structure and needed to wean off of that, which we did in the 5th-6th grade at my schools.
I went to a district where most people were wealthy, though, so the advanced fourth grade math met 6th grade standards. My education always seemed very slow-paced, so I had no idea how good I had it until I met students who weren't dumb, but just didn't have the same kind of opportunities and had to play catch up later. It stuns me that the slow-paced, lowest-common-denominator education really was among the best, which I always thought of as nothing but the school puffing up its chest to enhance their precious reputation.
Now, we do have a "critical thinking" course, which goes into why we can't just trust senses and first impression, biases, why people believe strange things, basically skepticism 101, it seems, though I haven't taken it and can't say how decently the course is actually taught. The only people required to take it are those in the honors program, though, which seems silly.
Such a course should be available to everyone, and required of everyone getting an academic degree (as opposed to just learning a trade, although I would argue that it should be strongly encouraged, at least until the high schools can step up to the plate and teach something like this effectively to all). Maybe have an honors sections that goes beyond the basics and into more philosophy and stuff, but yeah.
Another thing: How can or should we respond to such professors?
Particularly since it's completely contradictory to the skills they're supposed to be teaching in the course. I got a good grade (it probably would've been a little higher if I hadn't missed my presentation, so I have no gripes about getting an A- instead of an A or A+), so there's no evidence of biases affecting students' grades adversely, even though I was quite insistent to not give up intellectual honesty for the sake of appeasing a prof.I figured it wouldn't matter if I got a C even, since my essays and so on when I transferred would demonstrate I clearly knew to write, and before it even got to that point, I would have a very good case to protest a bad grade, since my writing far exceeded course expectations while staying within guidelines, and I turned in my assignments on time and attended the classes. So I was very outspoken and that did not change the grading. So there is no reason to bring up that kind of charge.
But how should students and others address this kind of situation? On the one hand, we don't want universities constraining faculty speech too much, but on the other hand, they have a duty to teach what they're supposed to be teaching at a high quality level. I mean, biology profs don't get to teach creationism, unless it's a religious school. (If they are, FSM help us...
) So why should a prof charged with teaching reasoning and constructing non-fallacious arguments have free reign to argue using fallacies, practicing what they preach not to do, doing this unintentionally as opposed to then pointing to it and saying, "See? That's what you're not supposed to do."And just telling a prof to quit teaching pseudoscience doesn't stop them from writing a book, or a blog, or whatever to speak about whatever the heck they like without censure. Is there any real recourse available to deal with this kind of situation today? If there isn't, should there be? What kind of system could we put in place to deal with this scenario?
