Kind of a Big Fake

Some cool looking data from LaCour and Green's study

By Finbarr Curtis 

In a scene from The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the journalist Brian Fantana anoints himself with a special cologne made with "bits of real panther." The cologne's pungent gasoline aroma does not shake Fantana's confidence in its seductive powers.  As he explains, "They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time."  Fantana's data make no sense, of course, but this is beside the point.  What matters is that "they" have done "studies."

The seductive magic of studies hit the interwebs this past week when it was revealed that a graduate student named Michael LaCour faked the data in an article entitled "When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality."  The study showed that canvassers working on behalf of marriage equality could change people's minds after relatively short conversations.  The essay also compared the persuasive power of straight and gay activists, suggesting that contact with gay canvassers produced longer and more sustainable changes in political attitudes.

LaCour co-authored the article with a professor of political science named Donald Green.  While Green helped to write the study, LaCour gathered all of the data and snookered his co-author into thinking it was real.  Green was not the only one fooled.  The findings made their way to Ira Glass's This American Life, which discussed the article in a story entitled "The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind." The study was appealing because it confirmed liberal ideas about the sources of social conflict: that social divisions are caused by personal prejudices that can be dispelled if only people could get to know each other.  In addition, LaCour's data assured us that people are persuadable.  The takeaway from the study is that voters might be a lot nicer and reasonable then we might have thought.

None of this necessarily means that the findings have been proven wrong.  Ironically, activists who worked to pass a recent referendum for marriage equality in Ireland used the LaCour and Green study as a template for their own political strategy.  If LaCour had not been a quantitative social scientist, he could have simply written the study without the data.  If he was delivering a TED talk or writing an op-ed column, he could have said the same thing and possibly received critical acclaim and invitations to lucrative speaking engagements.

But LaCour inhabits an academic universe in which faking data is a cardinal sin.  Some have concluded that the current scandal proves that the system worked and confirms the importance of reliable data gathering.  As David Brookman, one of two UC Berkeley graduate students who discovered to the fake data when they tried to craft a similar study, explains:

The nature of the work that we do as quantitative researchers is that you allow the data to tell you what you think the truth should be. You don’t take your views and then apply those to the data; you let the data inform your views.

Brookman's faith in data is itself an interesting datum.  The LaCour affair seems to show that data themselves aren't what persuade people.  LaCour recognized that he just needed to have some data, that if he could produce sophisticated charts, graphs, and numbers it was unlikely that anyone would check.

Pardon the Interruption

Governor Scott Walker, Thinker

By Finbarr Curtis

Defending his recent proposal to cut 300 million dollars from higher education in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker instructed professors to work harder to make up the difference.  Many tried to correct the governor by noting all of the work that college professors do.  For my part, I have already written about how an education in the humanities is useful because it teaches students how to work.  The reason that I won't repeat this here is that it seems beside the point in the Wisconsin kerfuffle.  That is, when Governor Walker says that college professors need to work more, he doesn't mean that they need to spend more hours in the office.  As someone who did not do much work in college, Walker is aware that it takes a lot of effort to succeed in school.  Indeed, the students who became college professors were the kind of nerds who worked a whole lot harder than him.

What Walker really means is that the work that scholars do might be interesting to them but doesn't perform any practical economic function.  The harder that professors work, the lazier they are.  The lazy professor is destined to become an austerity archetype in the tradition of the surfing food-stamp glutton or the welfare mom.  Archetypes like welfare abusers or lazy professors persist not because they explain anything about social reality, but because they provide assurances that difficult structural problems can be fixed by reforming the personal habits of people who depend upon public resources.

I could list the many reasons why Walker is wrong.  But in this post I want to consider why his image of the lazy professor resonates with so may people.  It seems to me that the way that professors talk about their own work might contribute to popular perceptions of their laziness.  To this end, I would like to revisit the portrait of professorial labor found in Professor Laurie Zoloth's 2014 address to the American Academy of Religion.  In her address, entitled "Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm," Zoloth called on the AAR to take an occasional sabbatical by canceling its annual meeting.  Her hope is that by canceling the conference every seven years, the AAR could reduce the carbon footprint caused by thousands of academics flying from around the world to stay in hotels and eat meat.

Call For Papers: Religion in Media Undergraduate Research Conference

We Are the MOOC

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Locutus of Borg

by Finbarr Curtis

While there are lots of views about whether Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) should supplement or replace classroom instruction in higher education, at least everyone can agree that MOOCs are bad.  And I mean everyone. Every single person who has ever defended or attacked MOOCs agrees that they are bad.  We might even say that the most widely shared proposition in all of higher education would be these three words: MOOCs are bad.

The main reason we know that MOOCs are bad is that even those people who try to promote and defend them tell us that they are bad.  Take this defense of MOOCs:

Schools like MIT should not be forced to dilute the power of their brand by being forced to give their regular degree to students who simply take some of their tuition-free online courses. However, it is equally inappropriate to give no value to the online learning that occurs in a MOOC, particularly if a student can complete a high-quality, rigorous course and then prove mastery of the material on a separate, proctored, certifying exam.

In other words, schools like MIT know perfectly well that MOOCs will "dilute the power of their brand" but MOOCs are fine for less prestigious educational institutions (ie., schools that failed to develop "brands" because they were preoccupied with the work of teaching students).  But while there is unanimous agreement that MOOCs are bad, we are called to support them because they are "innovative." Take these recommendations by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:

Encourage accrediting bodies to be flexible in response to educational innovation. PCAST recommends that the Federal Government urge regional accrediting entities to be flexible in setting standards for online degrees to accommodate new pedagogical approaches and to avoid stunting the growth of a burgeoning industry.

So MOOCs should be allowed to compete.  But MOOCs cannot compete because MOOCs are bad.  Therefore, accrediting bodies need to lower the standards so that MOOCs have a chance to compete on a level playing field.  And by level playing field we mean that the MOOCs will offer bad education and we will decide that this just as good.  If this logic doesn't make sense to you, then you are one of those benighted intellects that fails to understand innovation.

Religious Studies! Huh! Good God Y'all. What is it Good For?

by Finbarr Curtis

Absolutely Nothing.  Or at least absolutely nothing is how Edwin Starr characterized the fruits of war back in 1969.  Because Starr’s sentiments are shared by many in today’s academy, scholars are likely to be troubled by a recent Guardian article about the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative.  In some ways, Minerva’s objectives seem familiar.   The DoD provides grants to researchers who “define and develop foundational knowledge about sources of present and future conflict with an eye toward better understanding of the political trajectories of key regions of the world.”  To do this, Minerva hopes to encourage a “basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.”  It’s that last part about strategic importance that is jarring to many scholarly ears.  Humanists and social scientists are uncomfortable with such bald-faced assertions that we seek to know the world in order to control it.

Among other things, Mineva hopes to understand social movements that might foster organized violence.  One possible source of such violence is labeled “belief.”  The hope to better understand belief shapes the first priority research topic entitled: “Belief propagation and movements for change.”  Under the category entitled “mobilization for change,” Minerva welcomes research that helps to develop a “better understanding what drives individuals and groups to mobilize to institute change. In particular, models that explain and explore factors that motivate or inhibit groups to adopt political violence as a tactic will help inform understanding of where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how one might circumvent its spread.”

While many scholars of religion might distance themselves from the DoD’s desire to study belief in order to protect security, few eyebrows are raised when religious studies is tasked for civic projects such as “promoting peace” or “teaching tolerance” or “encouraging interreligious harmony.”  While “security” and “peace” conjure up different political associations, it is not clear that they are so analytically distinct.  The Minerva Initiative seeks to identify peaceful and tolerant beliefs that support religious freedom and minimize the threat posed by narrow and intolerant religions thought to produce violence.

The Humanist as Producer

by Finbarr Curtis

This one time in college I learned that if you work hard enough you can get Sonic Youth to play Eric’s Trip. It’s not that complicated. You just yell the name of the song until Thurston Moore says (pretty much to shut you up): “Okay, okay, we’ll play it.” As the third track on Daydream Nation, Eric’s Trip is an education of sorts, but not the kind offered by college. As the song tells us:

I can't see anything at all
All I see is me
That's clear enough
That's what's important
To see me

Back then, I probably found more irony in the lyrics that authorial intent would have it. Coupling “I can’t see anything at all” with “All I see is me” came across like a disavowal of anything like “enlightenment” and seemed calibrated to measure just the right amount of ironic distance native to the New York punk scene of the last millennium. But now I’m not sure. So it might be better a couple decades later to read the mantra “to see me” at something like face value. It’s a safe bet this was meant as something countercultural, a quest for interior fulfillment at the expense of conventional measures of educational, career, and worldly success.

Eric’s Trip’s pedagogical philosophy would seem, then, to be a far cry from the sober warnings to undergraduates to think about the marketability of college degrees in the humanities. In this post, I want to think about what people are seeing when they look for the “value” of humanistic education. My view is that supporters and critics of the humanities, while seemingly at odds, actually share the view that an education should satisfy what students really want, or should really want. Choosing whether to satisfy some deeper longing or material need, students can either free their minds from social constraints or happily enslave themselves to the capitalist vision of worldly success. I propose that these options miss the point by trying to figure out what the humanities give you rather than what the humanities produce.

Steven Pinker Likes You. He Really Likes You.

by Finbarr Curtis

I want to be Steven Pinker’s friend. As a humanist, then, I was relieved when he told me in a much discussed New Republic essay that science was not my enemy. This is good because I did not think science was my enemy.  Just in case there was any confusion, Pinker assures us that he is a big fan of the humanities. Or, at least, he likes what the humanities once were and might be again if humanists could be more like their Englightenment predecessors. As Pinker explains,

These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information, computation, and games had yet to be invented. The words “neuron,” “hormone,” and “gene” meant nothing to them. When reading these thinkers, I often long to travel back in time and offer them some bit of twenty-first-century freshman science that would fill a gap in their arguments or guide them around a stumbling block. What would these Fausts have given for such knowledge? What could they have done with it?

Not to brag, but I have read some of all of these thinkers at some point or another. For this, I can thank my humanistic education. But what puzzles Pinker is why people like me can read such good books and ask such bad questions. He sees an achievement gap between science, which has advanced by leaps and bounds, and the humanities, which have regressed from the Enlightenment to what he calls “postmodernism.”

The fix, then, would be to pick up where the Enlightenment left off. But let’s think for a moment about Pinker’s longing to travel back in time to school our early modern theorists in some freshman science. Take our friend Thomas Hobbes, who Pinker likely has in mind when he bestows the title of evolutionary psychologist on pre-Darwinian thinkers:

They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms." 

For Pinker, Hobbes’s proto-scientific attempt to describe the state of nature could have gone so much further if he had more empirical data. If he only knew what scientists know today about evolutionary psychology Hobbes could have come up with the political and legal theory that could solve the problems that plague us all. This knowledge would have helped to settle disputes between other heavyweights like Locke and Rousseau, both of whom had their own speculative visions of the state of nature.

Here is where humanists, or at least the kinds of humanists that vex Pinker, are likely to see things differently. From many of us, the states of nature described in Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau tell us less about the early life of the human species and a lot more about the early modern nation states in which these thinkers lived. In this approach, Hobbes's theories about the state of nature can be best understood as the imaginative projections of a guy living in a seventeenth-century England embroiled in civil war.