Is there a "science" of science communication?

 This

led me to this.

Introduction: Why Science Communication? Dan Kahan, Dietram A. Scheufele, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson #SciComm

Part One  
•  The Science of Communicating Science

1. The Need for a Science of Science Communication: Communicating Science’s Values and Norms Kathleen Hall Jamieson
2. Overview of the Science of Science Communication Heather Akin and Dietram A. Scheufele
3. On the Sources of Ordinary Science Knowledge and Extraordinary Science Ignorance Dan Kahan
4. How Changing Media Structures Are Affecting Science News Coverage Mike S. Schäfer
5. What the Public Thinks and Knows About Science—and Why It Matters William K. Hallman
6. Science Controversies: Can the Science of Science Communication Provide Management Guidance or Only Analysis? Bruce V. Lewenstein
7. A Recap: The Science of Communicating Science Joseph Hilgard and Nan Li

Part Two 
•  Identifying and Overcoming Challenges to Science Featured in Attacks on Science

8. Science as “Broken” Versus Science as “Self-Correcting”: How Retractions and Peer-Review Problems Are Exploited to Attack Science Joseph Hilgard and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
9. Publication Bias in Science: What Is It, Why Is It Problematic, and How Can It Be Addressed? Andrew W. Brown, Tapan S. Mehta, and David B. Allison
10. Statistical Biases in Science Communication: What We Know About Them and How They Can Be Addressed John P. A. Ioannidis
11. Is There a Hype Problem in Science? If So, How Is It Addressed? Peter Weingart
12. Is There a Retraction Problem? And, If So, What Can We Do About It? Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky
13. A Recap: Identifying and Overcoming Challenges to Science Featured in Attacks on Science Joseph Hilgard

Part Three  
•  Science Comunication in Action: Failures and Successes

14. A Comparative Study of Communication About Food Safety Before, During, and After the “Mad Cow” Crisis Matteo Ferrari
15. Cross-National Comparative Communication and Deliberation About the Risks of Nanotechnologies Nick Pidgeon, Barbara Herr Harthorn, Terre Satterfield, and Christina Demski
16. Communications About Biotechnologies and GMOs Across Europe Heinz Bonfadelli
17. A Tale of Two Vaccines—and Their Science Communication Environments Dan Kahan and Asheley R. Landrum
18. A Recap: Science Communication in Action Heather Akin

Part Four  
•  The Roles of Elite Intermediaries in Communicating Science

19. Science Communication at Scientific Institutions Tiffany Lohwater and Martin Storksdieck
20. The Role of Scholarly Presses and Journals Barbara Kline Pope and Elizabeth Marincola
21. The Role of Governmental Organizations in Communicating About Regulating Science Jeffery Morris
22. Science Communication and Museums’ Changing Roles Victoria Cain and Karen A. Rader
23. The Role of Funding Organizations: Foundations Elizabeth Good Christopherson
24. Promoting Popular Understanding of Science and Health Through Social Networks Brian Southwell
25. Designing Public Deliberation at the Intersection of Science and Public Policy John Gastil
26. Translating Science into Policy and Legislation: Evidence-Informed Policymaking Jason Gallo
27. A Recap—The Role of Intermediaries in Communicating Science: A Synthesis Asheley R. Landrum

Part Five 
•  The Role, Power, and Peril of Media for the Communication of Science

28. The (Changing) Nature of Scientist–Media Interactions: A Cross-National Analysis Sara K. Yeo and Dominique Brossard
29. New Models of Knowledge-Based Journalism Matthew C. Nisbet and Declan Fahy
30. Citizens Making Sense of Science Issues: Supply and Demand Factors for Science News and Information in the Digital Age Michael A. Xenos
31.  The Changing Popular Images of Science David A. Kirby
32. What Do We Know About the Entertainment Industry’s Portrayal of Science? How Does It Affect Public Attitudes Toward Science? James Shanahan
33. How Narrative Functions in Entertainment to Communicate Science Martin Kaplan and Michael Dahlstrom
34. Assumptions About Science in Satirical News and Late-Night Comedy Lauren Feldman
35. A Recap: The Role, Power, and Peril of Media for the Communication of Science Nan Li and Robert B. Lull

Part Six  
•  Challenges in Communicating Science in a Polarized Environment

36. Countering False Beliefs: An Analysis of the Evidence and Recommendations of Best Practices for the Retraction and Correction of Scientific Misinformation Man-pui Sally Chan, Christopher Jones, and Dolores Albarracín
37. Using Frames to Make Scientific Communication More Effective James N. Druckman and Arthur Lupia
38. Philosophical Impediments to Citizens’ Use of Science Jonathan Baron
39. Overcoming Confirmation and Blind Spot Biases When Communicating Science Kate Kenski
40. Understanding and Overcoming Selective Exposure and Judgment When Communicating About Science Natalie Jomini Stroud
41. Overcoming Innumeracy and the Use of Heuristics When Communicating Science Ellen Peters
42. Overcoming Biases in Processing of Time Series Data About Climate Bruce W. Hardy and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
43. Understanding and Overcoming Fear of the Unnatural in Discussion of GMOs Robert B. Lull and Dietram A. Scheufele
44. Protecting or Polluting the Science Communication Environment?: The Case of Childhood Vaccines Dan Kahan
45. Overcoming False Causal Attribution: Debunking the MMR–Autism Association Nan Li, Natalie Jomini Stroud and Kathleen Hall Jamieson
46. Overcoming the Challenges of Communicating Uncertainties Across National Contexts Michael Siegrist and Christina Hartmann
47. A Recap: Heuristics, Biases, Values, and Other Challenges to Communicating Science Heather Akin and Asheley R. Landrum

Conclusion—On the Horizon: The Changing Science Communication Environment Dietram A. Scheufele, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Dan Kahan

Index

Yikes. Three editors, 59 contributing authors, 508 pages. And, $149.62 Kindle edition (ugh).

Ironically, those communicating about science often rely on intuition rather than scientific inquiry not only to ascertain what effective messaging looks like but also to determine how to engage different audiences about emerging technologies and get science’s voice heard. For decades, one plausible explanation for this state of affairs was the relative absence of empirical work in science communication. This is no longer a problem. As the essays in this volume confirm, researchers in fields as diverse as political science, decision science, communication, and sociology have examined how science can best be communicated in different social settings and in the process have evaluated different approaches to cultivating societal engagement about emerging technologies. A central task of the work in this handbook is distilling what they know about the science of science communication and unpacking how they know it.

By the science of science communication, we mean an empirical approach to defining and understanding audiences, designing messages, mapping communication landscapes, and—most important—evaluating the effectiveness of communication efforts. The science of science communication, as a result, relies on evidence that is transparent and replicable, theory driven, and generalizable. In short, evidence is derived by the scientific method, drawing on theories and methods from disciplines including economics, sociology, psychology, education, and communications science. What makes science communication distinctive is the fact that science’s way of knowing places constraints on communication that are not present in the same way in other forms of communication—for instance, communication about politics…

The audience we envision for this book includes scholars and students interested in understanding the pitfalls and promise of a scientific approach to science communication as well as, but not primarily, those on the front lines tasked with communicating complex and sometimes controversial science to policymakers and the public on consequential topics ranging from nanotechnology and nuclear power to the need for vaccination.

The Science of Science Communication
In 2012, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took a leadership role in connecting a community of social scientists who were conducting empirical research on different aspects of science communication. Two Sackler Colloquia and two special issues of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences devoted to the “Science of Science Communication” were the result (Fischhoff and Scheufele 2013, 2014). Their intent was both to heighten awareness among bench scientists about empirically based approaches to better communicating science and to promote the exchange of ideas among social scientists working on problems related to science communication in various (sub)disciplines.

Built on the foundations laid by those Sackler Colloquia, this volume is predicated on three major assumption. First, science is not monolithic. Second, the aspects of science or its applications that are being communicated or debated are a function of the nature of the science itself, the types of applications made possible by science or their societal implications, and the social dynamics surrounding emerging science. Finally, communication is an inevitable part of the process of characterizing scientific findings, engagement among scientists about them, and the process of sharing them with policymakers and diverse publics…

(2017-05-08T23:58:59). The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication (Oxford Library of Psychology). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMIES

Since its inception, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Public Face of Science Initiative has sought to understand and strengthen the relationship between science and society. The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the critical role science plays in ensuring the well-being—indeed, the very survival—of both individuals and society as a whole. As we face this crisis, we can take some encouragement from the findings of the Public Face of Science Initiative, which show that confidence in scientific leaders has remained relatively stable over the last thirty years. It is worth noting, however, that this confidence varies based on age, race, educational attainment, region, political ideology, and other characteristics.
 
The current crisis has underscored the importance of a society in which everyone has equal opportunity to learn from, engage with, and participate in science. However, revenue losses and budget cuts are having an enormous, and still-evolving, impact on the professional writers, educators, museum curators, outreach organizers, and researchers who are dedicated to building the connections between science and society. While the goals and suggested actions identified throughout this report are more important than ever, they are even further from being realized due to diminished resources and field-wide layoffs. For those with the power and capacity to support the institutions and organizations that provide access to science, now is the time to act. The priorities and goals in this report highlight important means for local science engagement efforts, science journalists, and the scientific community more generally to communicate and engage more effectively… 

I got on this recurrent riff in part in response to a Science Magazine article touting the so-called "Science of Deliberation." There's also, recall, the putative "Science of Success." And, hmmm... how about "Neuroaesthetics" science? more mundanely, "Data Science." A "Science of Compassion?"

 

"Define Science." 

Oh, and by the way. "I am not a scientist."

Centrally apropos of this post, "Selling Science: Effective communication with decision makers."

 

In a "democracy," citizens are properly among the core decision makers. Hence, science literacy, particularly in the policymaking context, is rather important, ja?

There's no shortage of exigent realities in need of adroit, rational evaluation and decision-making. For starters, beyond pandemic prevention and mitigation, climate change adversity will not disappear.

 

More from Oxford:

Identifying and Overcoming Challenges Featured in Attacks on Science
The overall credibility of science and scientists is higher than that of many communities (Scheufele 2013), with only military leaders eliciting greater public confidence than the scientific community in 2014 (General Social Survey 2012). Nevertheless, popular understanding of how scientists generate knowledge is freighted with misleading simplifications. The gap between how people think science works and how it actually does can itself generate confusion that undermines public confidence.

Climate science communication furnishes a case in point. The popular conception of the “scientific method” envisions scientists “proving” or “disproving” asserted “facts” through conclusive experiments. The contribution that climate science makes to policymaking, however, consists less of experimentally corroborating basic climate mechanisms, most of which are well-known, than it does of establishing how they interact with one another. To generate such understanding, climate scientists use dynamic models, which are iteratively refined and adjusted to take account of new data. Discrepancies between model forecasts and subsequently observed data are expected—indeed, they are the source of progressive improvements in understanding. By design, dynamic modeling enlarges knowledge through its failed predictions as much as through its successful ones (Silver 2012).

Not only did science communicators fail to make this element of climate science clear to the public, but over the past decade, many of them adopted communication “strategies” that elided it. To promote the urgency of action, they depicted the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports—particularly those of the Fourth Assessment—as extrapolations from settled and incontrovertible scientific findings. But because this framing was selected to accommodate the popular understanding that science warrants confidence based on experimentally “proven” facts, it made climate science more vulnerable to attack by those intent on undermining public confidence in it when, as was anticipated by scientists themselves, actual data diverged from the climate-science model forecasts… [Oxford Handbook, Kindle loc 502]

'eh?

 

Interesting: One of the editors and contributing writers in this Oxford Handbook is Dan Kahan. I ran into his name in another book I'm reading.

Yale law professor Dan Kahan surveyed Americans about their political views and their beliefs about climate change. As you would expect, those two things were highly correlated. Liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to agree with the statement “There is solid evidence of recent global warming due mostly to human activity such as burning fossil fuels.”

So far, not surprising. The twist is that Kahan also measured his respondents’ “science intelligence” with a collection of different questions: Some were puzzles designed to test reasoning ability, such as “If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” Other questions were tests of basic scientific knowledge, such as “Lasers work by focusing sound waves—true or false?” and “Which gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: Hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or oxygen?”

If knowledge and intelligence protect you from motivated reasoning, then we would expect to find that the more people know about science, the more they agree with each other about scientific questions. Kahan found the opposite. At the lowest levels of scientific intelligence, there’s no polarization at all—roughly 33 percent of both liberals and conservatives believe in human-caused global warming. But as scientific intelligence increases, liberal and conservative opinions diverge. By the time you get to the highest percentile of scientific intelligence, liberal belief in human-caused global warming has risen to nearly 100 percent, while conservative belief in it has fallen to 20 percent.

The same funnel-shaped pattern shows up when you ask people for their opinions on other ideologically charged scientific issues: Should the government fund stem cell research? How did the universe begin? Did humans evolve from lower animal species? On all these questions, the people with the highest levels of scientific intelligence were also the most politically polarized in their opinions…

Galef, Julia. The Scout Mindset (pp. 45-46). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

UPDATE

 

Finished The Scout Mindset. Enjoyable read. Not a ton of new ground for me, but worthy nonetheless. Useful "Scout" metaphor.  

 

On deck, pre-ordered (5-18 release):

Amazon blurb:

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the coauthor of Nudge, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones--"full of novel insights, rigorous evidence, engaging writing, and practical applications” (Adam Grant).

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients—or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants—or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
 
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.
 
Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment—and what we can do about it.

All part of a "deliberation science" piece. Whether the topics are judicial, legislative, scientific, or public/social policy deliberations, we need our best honest, objective reasoning efforts, particularly given this time of rampant mis- and disinformation (i.e., shoddy advocacy borne of ignorance and intent respectively).

 

More to come...

_________

On Mother's Day

 

Thinking about my late Mother today.

_________

The Covid-19 Premonition

Michael Lewis
 

INTRODUCTION
The Missing Americans

This book began with an unholy mix of obligation and opportunism. During the first half of the Trump administration I’d written a book, The Fifth Risk, that framed the federal government as a manager of a portfolio of existential risks: natural disasters, nuclear weapons, financial panics, hostile foreigners, energy security, food security, and on and on and on. The federal government wasn’t just this faceless gray mass of two million people. Nor was it some well-coordinated deep state seeking to subvert the will of the people. It was a collection of experts, among them some real heroes, whom we neglected and abused at our peril. Yet we’d been neglecting and abusing them for more than a generation. That behavior climaxed with the Trump administration. My book asked: What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

I had no clue what was going to happen next. I assumed something was bound to happen. But it didn’t—not really. For the better part of three years, the Trump administration got lucky. That luck ran out in late 2019, as a freshly mutated virus in China made its way toward the United States. This was just the sort of management test I’d imagined when writing The Fifth Risk. How could I not write about it? But as I got into it, and found these wonderful characters to tell the story through, it became clear that Trump’s approach to government management was only a part of the story, and maybe not even the bigger part. As one of my characters put it, “Trump was a comorbidity.”

Back in October 2019—nearly three years into the Trump administration, and before anyone involved was aware of the novel coronavirus—a collection of very smart people had gathered to rank all the countries in the world, in order of their readiness for a pandemic. A group called the Nuclear Threat Initiative partnered with Johns Hopkins and The Economist Intelligence Unit to create what amounted to a preseason college football ranking for one hundred ninety-five countries. The Global Health Security Index, it was called. It was a massive undertaking involving millions of dollars and hundreds of researchers. They created stats and polled the experts. They ranked the United States first. Number 1. (The United Kingdom was Number 2.)…

Critics quibbled with the rankings. The complaints weren’t all that different from the complaints you hear before every college football season. For years the University of Texas football team, with its vast resources and sway with voters, always seemed ranked more highly at the start of the season than at the end. The United States was the Longhorns of pandemic preparedness. It was rich. It had special access to talent. It enjoyed special relationships with the experts whose votes determined the rankings.

Then the game was played. The preseason rankings no longer mattered. Neither, really, did the excuses and blame-casting and rationalizations. As the legendary football coach Bill Parcells once said, “You are what your record says you are.” At last count the United States, with a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths. In February 2021, The Lancet published a long critique of the U.S. pandemic performance. By then 450,000 Americans had died. The Lancet pointed out that if the COVID death rate in the United States had simply tracked the average of the other six G7 nations, 180,000 of those people would still be alive. “Missing Americans,” they called them. But why stop there? Before the pandemic, a panel of public-health experts had judged the United States to be more prepared for a pandemic than other G7 nations. In a war with a virus, we were not expected merely to fare as well as other rich countries. We were expected to win…

Lewis, Michael. The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (pp. xii-xv). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

I have long eagerly devoured everything Michael Lewis has written and published, all the way back to his Wall Street time. Hie latest book has just been published. 

 

Speaking of Wall Street and the pandemic... 

Thia was all that Donald Trump saw and heard. He thought he was gonna ride the Dow-S&P-NASDAQ limo to a second term as Acting President. Everything else was irrelevant.

 

Cited Michael's book The Fifth Risk here.

 

Stay tuned. Just downloaded The Premonition.

UPDATE

 

Finished the book in a day and a half. Great story, compellingly written. Michael Lewis rocks. NY Times book reviewer wrote "I would read an 800 page history of the stapler if he wrote it."

Me too.

The CDC does not come off well in this book (nor do a number of other entities), in part for reasons long pre-dating the derelictions of the absurd Donald Trump.

 

Bring on the screenplay. Erin Brockovich, make room for

 

PUBLIC HEALTH HEROINE CHARITY DEAN

 

Dr, Dean resigned her California public heath position to co-found The Public Health Company (PHC).

Even before she’d quit her job she’d had that odd thought, that the country didn’t have the institutions that it needed to survive. In particular, it did not have what it needed to battle a pathogen. The pandemic had given America’s enemies a clear view of the country’s weakness: its inability to respond to a COVID-like threat. On her calls with the Wolverines, she’d ask: “What does the country need?” She was really asking herself, as no one had the answer. Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.

The problem was a crazy problem. It wasn’t going to have a non-crazy solution. Still, she’d sort of shocked herself. She’d never had the slightest interest in business. But if she wanted to save the country, she’d need to become an entrepreneur, and create a company—though in business, she quickly learned, she couldn’t talk like that. When she said she wanted to build a tool “to save the country,” people just smiled and thought she was goofy in the head. But when she said things like “I’m going to create a data-based tool for disease prevention that companies can use to secure their supply chains,” serious business types nodded. “Five smart people have replied with confusion when I said the company was to save the world and protect our country,” said Charity, after her first attempts to explain her vague idea. “Then when I said, ‘We’re going to do private government operations, like Blackwater,’ their eyes lit up and they said, ‘Oh wow, you could take over the world.’ ” [Lewis, pp. 298-299]

THE UPSHOT

 

 

They've come out of the blocks hot. to wit,

The Future of U.S. Public Health

Abstract

COVID-19 demonstrated a single pathogen’s ability to wreak havoc at global scale. Though organisms with this capacity strike sparingly, their impact nevertheless remains palpable for years to follow. Anticipating such biological threats has been historically difficult. As evidenced by the recent pandemic, our responses are often reactive, rather than proactive, and the consequences unforgiving…

This white paper outlines our framework for the future of U.S. public health as it relates to communicable diseases and public-private partnerships...

Closing remarks

Failing to address the fragmented and antiquated structure of our underlying U.S. public health system will continue to come at the unnecessary expense of lost human lives, shuttered businesses, and worsened divisions in our economic and health outcome chasm.
 
Much of this devastation is preventable but requires early detection, rapid response, and frictionless coordination. The public health system of the future gives private entities and local public health jurisdictions access to real-time information at their fingertips. A robust bio-surveillance and total infection control support system powered by science and technology results in rapid, tactical guidance and avoidance of deadly outbreaks. As pandemics increase in frequency and severity, the U.S. must stand ready with an infrastructure capable of protecting humanity against impending biological threats. We must break through existing structural forces and build a modernized system that has greater reliance on technology (including both genomics and dissemination of expertise via networked hub-and-spoke models) and empowered private sector leaders. As pandemics will certainly increase in frequency and severity, the U.S. stands at the precipice of a critical inflection point: continue with business as usual or use the COVID-19 pandemic as a turning point to reimagine our public health infrastructure.

They are Loaded for Bear, flush with significant VC funding.

When I was covering the healthcare startup space, I saw a lot of "Silicon Valley HBO" SMH stuff. PHC is immeasurably different. Totally substantive. As serious as a heart attack (read the white papers). I wish them well.

"Bears" watching.

 

The only thing I'd recommend goes to my recent study of Davarian Baldwin's "In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower." PHC lists its prospective business lines as encompassing "Business, Government, and Healthcare" sectors. What about "Academia?" See Dr.Baldwin's riffs on "Meds and Eds"—

Indeed, urban universities and their medical centers—the “meds and eds”—stand as one of the most central yet least examined social forces shaping today’s cities. In today’s knowledge economy, universities have become the new companies, and our major cities serve as their company towns. But unlike Amazon, Microsoft, and other info-tech industries, higher education claims responsibility for our public good. It’s time we investigated that promise, asking whether a school’s increased for-profit ambitions can undermine the interests of the public. In fact, the presumption that higher education is a public good has for too long distracted critics and urban residents from getting to the heart of the matter: what makes universities good for our cities? We need fewer assumptions and more analysis...

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower (p. 6). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

If your cardinal goals iinclude communicable disease prevention and mitigation, the urban environs comprise the fish in the barrels. Leverage academia.

MORE PHC WHITE PAPER STUFF

Summary
Although it is difficult to predict when the next ‘big one’ will happen, it will likely be similar to something we have seen before. The pandemics of the last century have all been caused by influenza. The COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a pathogen related to a seasonal coronavirus that causes colds and the SARS epidemic in 2003. Thus, the next pandemic will likely be caused by another airborne pathogen, probably in the influenza and coronavirus families, with a period of pre-symptomatic transmission able to disseminate quickly and widely due to global air travel and crowding.

However, a global pandemic is not the only biothreat the U.S. should prepare for. Epidemics that spread across parts of the country or across a single continent can still have grave repercussions for healthcare systems and economies. Dengue, Zika, and Ebola epidemics have increased in frequency in recent years despite being caused by pathogens that have been known for many decades, and they will likely return to U.S. shores once global travel resumes. Furthermore, pathogens (whether released intentionally or accidentally) present a less likely but far more catastrophic biosecurity risk that could cause large outbreaks in the U.S. due to extremely high case fatality or transmission rates.

While fortifying healthcare and technology infrastructure is needed for pandemic preparedness,
we also need to safeguard the parts of the system that have protected us over the last year: public health officers, epidemiologists, public health nurses, doctors, nurses, scientists, janitorial staff, and delivery services.

There are hundreds of pathogens that could cause outbreaks in the U.S. spread through any of the transmission routes described in this white paper. Improving infrastructure to better prevent, detect, and contain these smaller but more frequent threats will help us prepare for the next ‘big one.’ These improvements are further detailed in another white paper, ‘The Future of U.S. Public Health.’

UPDATE: COVID COMPLACENCY ADMONITION

 

 

Click the screengrab.

MAY 8TH NEWS

It's not over.

 

IRASCIBLE COMMENTARY

Grr.r.r.r...

 

ONE LAST UPDATE FOR THIS POST

 

PHC issued a new White Paper

Abstract
In the COVID era, public health jurisdictions around the world have used SARS-CoV-2 genomic data in their pandemic response at unprecedented scale. As of April 23, 2021, over 1.2 million viral genomes have been sequenced for public health purposes. These data have enabled policy decisions (e.g., Denmark increasing interventions despite falling cases in response to detecting the UK variant), cluster investigations (e.g., uncovering transmission clusters across healthcare facilities that share staff), diagnostic test and vaccine development (e.g., establish diagnostic assays to detect the UK variant), and more.

A good read. As is Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition, which got me down this path.

MAY 9TH AFTERWORD

_________

    

MayDay

 

Musical diversion. My friend Bill Champlin.

 

BONUS TRACK

 

As my Vegas peeps would say, this cat is just WRONG!

_________

"Tax-exempt hedge funds that conduct classes"

What?

 

 

Yeah. Basically, an eloquent expose of the cumulative consequences of neoliberal kleptocracy—uhhh..."public/private partnerships"—run amok in the academic space.

 

I got onto this book via an interview with the author the other day on PBS Amanpour & Co. Topically relevant in what I've come to regard as priority overlapping exigencies brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic: ECON disruption, Academic turmoil, racial/social justice upheavals, climate change mitigation, pollution, and threats to Democracy.

 Grateful for having run into this heads-up. An excellent read. I'm now in the Epilogue. Stay tuned.

UPDATE

 

Finished. Nice. Very nice. Written in the consistently engaging style of a fine piece of "investigative journalism." I hope it gets wide airing—all the way up to the Biden White House. 

 

Core takeaway: Blatant abuse of 501(c)(3) non-profit status by elite postsecondary schools (mostly private) is a foundational tactic for their engaging in lucrative (often eminent domain-assisted) commercial gentrification real estate businesses and intellectual property / patent endeavors, all to the detriment of students, lower-echelon staffs, and local residents—replete with armed, largely unaccountable private "campus" police forces exceeding their legitimate briefs, beyond campus borders into adjacent, usually at-risk sociodemographic neighborhoods. Not to mention property tax payers in general.

 

A few Kindle edition snips **:

 

** These come from a new Kindle reader platform feature contained in the version downloaded to my new iPad. Pretty cool. You can easily share stuff straight to Twitter, Facebook, email, etc, or save to file.

Quite the revealing tour of colleges and universities, including Yale, Columbia, NYU, Johns Hopkins, UChicago, ASU, and Trinity College. A salient excerpt:

Yale University often gets credit for “saving” the once beat-down city of New Haven, making it safer while attracting new industry and development. But the truth is much more complicated. In March 2016, New Haven was struggling to balance its shrinking budget. And then-mayor Toni Harp joined local politicians and labor unions to set their sights on Yale. They called for a state senate bill to help fine-tune the university’s property tax-exempt status, an area where the school’s prosperity was directly tied to the city’s despair. Universities and their medical centers are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits.

Because of the public services that higher education institutions ostensibly provide to surrounding communities, their property holdings are exempt from taxation in all fifty states. But New Haven officials said Yale’s multimillion-dollar tax exemption actually contributed to the budget deficit of the city. The Connecticut bill, SB 414, would have allowed the state to tax university properties that generate $6,000 or more in annual income.

At a city hall press conference, Harp immediately acknowledged the need to uphold the tax protections for nonprofit organizations, including Yale. She celebrated the university’s undeniable role “in the city’s transformation.” Over the past forty years, Yale had become the single largest commercial power in New Haven. But Harp also warned that although cities rely “more and more on eds and meds,” New Haven leaders must “be clear… about the fiscal impact of this transition.” The mayor reminded listeners that “we still have to run a city.” Yale offered, as a compromise, an annual $8 million “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT. By 2019, that payment jumped to more than $12 million. These contributions are voluntary, however, and are a fraction of the taxes Yale would pay based on the assessed value of its properties. But Yale didn’t have to worry; SB 414 did not pass, and the city of New Haven still struggles while its largest local economic entity remains exempt from property taxes.

Yale’s financial dominance in New Haven is tied to the meteoric ascendancy of the knowledge economy. Here, academic research is used to create profitable, commercial goods or patents in a range of fields, from the pharmaceutical industries and software products to military defense weaponry. Yale, in particular, has cultivated relationships with a number of biotech firms to produce new jobs and draw commercial revenue to the university and its host city. But this partnership between private industry and academic research has also created a property-tax “gray area” where profitable research produced for private companies is conducted in educational buildings that are not on the tax rolls.

Yale’s revenues from patent licenses grew from just more than $5 million in 1996 to more than $45 million in 2000.4 And it has also been difficult for New Haven to attract investors to this unlevel playing field. New businesses must pay taxes, and they struggle to coexist with competitors in the same market that are affiliated with the tax-exempt behemoth of Yale. Local politicians such as Harp simply wanted the university to contribute its fair share to the broader community.

But Yale’s financial position in New Haven is the result of more than just biotech. The school also oversees a lucrative portfolio of commercial and residential assets managed by its University Properties. Both students and alumni marvel at the transformation of the area from what was once dingy and even a bit dangerous. Now, when walking through the blocks surrounding the campus, they enjoy a new range of restaurants, shops, and housing options. By 2014, Yale’s more than four hundred downtown properties totaled roughly $2.44 billion in value…

Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower (pp. 17-19). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

Similar stories are recounted from a number of cities around the nation. Several were of particular personal interest to me: My late younger daughter Danielle did her Master's in Religion at UChicago's Meadeville Seminary. I'm hip to the South Side. Second, I now live "in the shadow" of the Baltimore quasi-autonomous "Vatican City" of Johns Hopkins. And, I lived in Las Vegas for 21 years (where I got my Master's at UNLV in 1998). I'm no stranger to Phoenix, which is a quite similar socioeconomic, cultural, and desert environment.

Dr. Balwin's accounts of the NYU and Columbia U machinations were also acutely illuminating.

Erratum: Among the phrases that cause my hand to slide reflexively over my wallet are [1] "Gaussian Distribution" (where it goes to non-physical phenomena), and [2] "Public-Private Partnerships." The latter too often comprise havens for economically rapacious scoundrels.

For now, just let me observe that we are lucky to have the likes of Dr. Davarian L. Baldwin. Heartily recommend his new book.

 

Cool photo.

SOME RELATED READING

IVY-COVERED CASTE SYSTEM
We like to position education as the great leveler. But in fact it has become a caste system, a means of passing privilege on to the next generation. Sure, we let in a few freakishly remarkable kids from the masses so we can pretend to be a meritocracy, but between legacy admissions, high school inequality, and straight up pay-to-play arrangements, the wealthy are wildly overrepresented in our colleges. Wealthy kids today are over twice as likely to go to college as poor kids, and over five times as likely to attend an elite school.8 At 38 of the top 100 colleges in America, including 5 of the Ivies, there are more students from the top 1% of income than there are from the bottom 60%.9 You could argue that at this point, the Ivy League undergraduate programs are not colleges, but hedge funds that educate the children of their investors…

Galloway, Scott. Post Corona (pp. 130-131). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

DESPERATE
Why would college presidents put their students, employees, and neighbors at risk like this? The ugly truth is that many believe they have no choice. College is an expensive operation with a relatively inflexible cost structure. Tenure and union contracts render the largest cost (faculty and administrator salaries) near-immovable objects. The bulk of the teaching is done by adjuncts and assistants, who receive anemic compensation (and grad students, who work for nearly nothing), while the aristocracy of higher ed, the full professors, have their high salaries protected by tenure. In addition, universities have let their non-teaching staff costs bloat obscenely—growing head count is always easier than shrinking it. After working in higher ed for two decades, I believe nearly every decision is made with one goal in mind: how to increase the compensation and decrease the accountability of tenured faculty and administrators.

Government support for education has also been on the decline for generations. The result is that while some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion-dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent. If students don’t return in any given semester, many colleges will have to take drastic action that could have serious long-term impacts on their ability to fulfill their missions… (ibid, pp. 138-139).

See also

 

These books add some useful broader context to Dr. Baldwin's eye-opening work.

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Three years ago today

 

Sux to only be able to refer to your daughters in the past tense.

 

In November of 2017 we did a family 8-day "bucket list" trip to Manzanillo, Mexico for Danielle. She bought us this little local handcrafted ceramic (above), which has since been our sugar bowl. Every morning it is my kitchen counter shrine as I fix my coffee and wistfully think of her.

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New: The Journal of Controverslal Ideas

"Judging the strength and significance of arguments is not easy."

But, a lot of our fellow citizens didn't get The Memo.

 

EDITORIAL

"One year after the official launch of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, we are pleased to present the first issue to our readers...

We—the editors, as well as some members of our editorial board—had previously dealt with angry reactions from the non-academic public, but the situation changed after the internet became the unregulated global agora it is today. As the world became increasingly interconnected and digitalized, academic conversation altered quite profoundly.

Twenty years ago, most academic journals were available only in university libraries, or to paid subscribers, and hence almost exclusively to academics. Nowadays, many journals have an online version that is accessible to everyone in the world and even if the journal is behind a paywall, it only takes one person to cut and paste a passage and distribute it via Twitter or Facebook for everyone to be able to read it.

The benefits of the digitalization of information are undeniable. The internet has allowed academics to make their research available to a vast audience, widening its potential impact and increasing the quantity and quality of information now accessible to everyone. This is one of the great achievements of our era. Yet what is widely shared over the internet is often neither genuine academic work, nor popularized but accurate accounts of academic work, but instead the conclusions of academic articles taken out of context and stripped of the reasons for holding them. These distorted conclusions are then circulated to people who are liable to respond with outrage, and this outraged response then proliferates in the manner typical of social media. Some academics get death threats, while others may justifiably fear that their career prospects have been irreversibly damaged. Understandably, they and others who see what has happened to them may decide that the cost of continuing to work in a controversial area is too high.

Angry reactions from the public are an unpleasant experience that can have an inhibiting effect on academic research; but there are more serious threats that come from within the universities.

Some students have demanded that speakers holding views they consider offensive be prevented from speaking at their university, and that professors holding views the students consider objectionable should be sanctioned or even dismissed. Some topics, and even entire areas of research are now considered off limits, and teachers are required to adapt to the new curriculum and choose their syllabi accordingly.

Ronald Dworkin regarded “the paradigmatic duty” of professors and others who teach and study in universities to be “to discover and teach what they find important and true.” He added that this duty can override what is in the best interests of the audience.1 Clearly this conception of the university is now under threat.

Surprisingly, these attempts to stifle academic debate often receive support from academics themselves. In recent years there has been a surge in open letters and petitions denouncing researchers and their work, signed by academics who seem to be unwilling to rely on the traditional academic practice of finding flaws in the arguments with which they disagree. They instead demand that administrators sanction colleagues who have expressed ideas they oppose. Some of these petitions, signed by hundreds of academics, even demand that editors retract published articles that have passed standard peer review processes. In an alarming number instances, editors have been cowed by these demands and have succumbed to them. A few who have defended academic freedom have been compelled to resign.

All this indicates that freedom of thought and discussion in the universities is no longer a universally held value, even among academics. So we must ask: why should academics be free to write and teach whatever they want, including what most people find tasteless, unnecessarily provocative, or even dangerous? One reason is that when the open discussion of certain ideas is suppressed, the ideas don’t disappear. Instead they are discussed in forums read only by people who are attracted to them, and are never exposed to counter-arguments. The ideas become more virulent and irrational, and more influential than they would have been had their purveyors been openly refuted rather than being transformed into martyrs by being silenced or persecuted.

A second reason why freedom of expression matters is that it is only by discussing all ideas—even those that many regard as offensive or immoral—that we get closer to the truth. Moral, intellectual, and material progress in human history are the results of a constant exchange of ideas, many of which were initially considered abhorrent, and there is no reason to believe that this pattern has changed. When some answers to questions are considered taboo, how can we be confident that we are not in error? It is not difficult to find past examples of ideas that when first advanced were suppressed, but are now recognized as having contributed greatly to our knowledge, or our moral progress.

Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were considered so dangerous that authorities tried to silence them, and in the case of Socrates, Jesus, and Bruno, as well as many of Bruno’s lesser-known contemporaries, the persecution ended in execution. The Index of Prohibited Books, established by the Council of Trent in 1564 and discontinued only in 1966, included books by Hobbes, Pascal, Descartes, Spinoza, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and many more.

Many authors have published their more controversial work either anonymously or under pseudonyms in an effort to protect their lives, liberty, and careers. If the history of freedom of thought and expression teaches us anything, it is that scholars must not stop inquiring when their inquiries lead them to answers that displease them or that displease their government, religious authorities, colleagues, employers, potential employers, or other members of their society. They have a duty to go further, to pursue ideas as deeply as possible, and to follow arguments to their logical conclusions—especially when they lead to disturbing conclusions people don’t want to hear. The truth may be concealed among those unsettling thoughts.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill offered a third reason in support of freedom of thought and discussion that is especially significant in the context of a university or other educational institution. Even if we are correct in our belief that we already know the truth on some topic of great importance, and that the contrary ideas we suppress are erroneous, to suppress those opposing ideas is, Mill said, to turn that true belief into a dead dogma. If we want it to be a living truth, to appreciate the reasons for it, and to understand why we are justified in continuing to believe it, we must allow it to be challenged.2

We have launched this journal because we have become concerned that in the current social and cultural climate, some people will not feel free to explore ideas that may embroil them in unwelcome controversy. As a result, some of our false beliefs will not be shown to be false, while some of our true beliefs will become dead dogmas and more vulnerable to attack because they are not defended against apparently plausible objections. Researchers at an early stage of an academic career may be so worried about the repercussions of controversial publications that they end up focusing only on uncontroversial research, even when they think that there is something potentially more significant to explore. By permitting publication under a pseudonym, we hope to enable authors to fulfil their duty to pursue the truth without putting their careers or physical or mental security at risk. Intellectual and moral progress should not require heroes or martyrs.

While it is perfectly normal to feel annoyed, threatened, offended, or even insulted when our deep beliefs are challenged, we should respond with reason and argument, rather than outrage. No one should ever ask their colleagues to retract a paper that has been accepted after peer review, except on such grounds as demonstrable error, misrepresentation of data, or plagiarism. Disagreements should be settled by exposing the purported mistake, not by attempting to suppress the idea or punish the author. We need to teach students how to disagree, not how to silence people with whom they disagree. And we need to show the media and the public that presenting controversial ideas is not our privilege, but rather our duty—even when they hate us for what we have to say. As Fritz Machlup said, “Academic freedom is a right of the people, not a privilege of a few. … It is the people at large who have a right to the cultural and material benefits that may flow from the teaching and the inquiries of scholars who have nothing to fear when they make honest mistakes.”3

We hope that the Journal of Controversial Ideas will, by providing a forum for discussing controversial ideas in a reasonable and non-polemical way, promote freedom of thought and discussion. By introducing fellow academics and the lay public to a healthy and lively debate about ideas that are genuinely controversial, we seek to foster appreciation of reasoned discussion and pave the way for more fruitful public and academic debate.

Three out of the ten authors publishing an article in this first issue have chosen to use a pseudonym, a choice that some will find objectionable. Indeed, when we announced that we would allow authors to use a pseudonym, we were criticized by people who argued that authors need to be accountable for the content of their papers, and so should not have the option of concealing their identity. In an ideal world, we would accept this view, but we do not live in such a world. The history of philosophy is replete with instances of philosophers who concealed the authorship of at least some of their works: Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Hume, among others. Ideas ought to be judged on their own merits, not on the basis of any characteristic of the person who happened to formulate them.

Judging the strength and significance of arguments is not easy. Since we issued our Call for Papers one year ago, we have received 91 submissions, accepted 10, rejected 68 and we are still processing 13. We have put a lot of effort into finding the right reviewers and providing the authors with constructive, though often challenging, comments. The ten papers in this first issue cover a variety of topics and perspectives. Collectively, they support our conviction that some interesting and important public conversations will take place only if there is a forum in which controversial ideas can be published and, if the author wishes, published under a pseudonym. This does not mean that we, the editors, believe all or perhaps any of the ideas presented here are right or that they are more worthy of attention than ideas published in other journals. Possibly most readers will find at least one of these articles distasteful, misguided, infuriating, or offensive. Our claim is only that the ideas articulated and defended in these articles are worth discussing. Indeed, we welcome the submission of papers that critically discuss articles in this issue – albeit by criticizing the ideas rather than the authors.

In establishing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, we said that we would be neutral with respect to political, philosophical, religious, and social views. We believe that the papers published in this first issue, based on the recommendations of our reviewers, support this claim. We have done our best to be impartial between papers attacking ideas favoured by liberals or progressives and papers attacking ideas favoured by conservatives or libertarians...

Ideally, the need for this journal will be short-lived because our efforts will help to foster cultural conditions in which editors of academic journals will no longer have to worry about publishing controversial papers, and researchers will be able to publish controversial articles in any journal they find appropriate without fearing that doing so will endanger their well-being or career. But until then, we will do our best to make sure that the fear of a hostile response does not intimidate authors from publishing important, well-argued, but controversial ideas..."

McMahan, J.; Minerva, F.; Singer, P. Editorial. Journal of Controversial Ideas 2021, 1(1), 11; doi:10.35995/jci01010011. [Creative Commons license permission.]

JournalOfControversialIdeas.org

 

See what you think.

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