Tag Archives: academia

The Men Who Stare at Goats: University of Alberta edition

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According to wiki, which is always right, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a book by Jon Ronson concerning the U.S. Army‘s exploration of New Age concepts and the potential military applications of the paranormal. The title refers to attempts to kill goats by staring at them. The book is companion to a three-part TV series broadcast in Britain on Channel 4 — Crazy Rulers of the World (2004) — the first episode of which is also entitled “The Men Who Stare at Goats”. The same title was used a third time for a loose feature film adaptation in 2009.

spoon-bendingHallucinogenic drug use to make more aggressive soldiers in Vietnam was much more plausible – see Jacob’s Ladder.

Yet the intersect of science and the silly continues.

Universities are supposed to lead, not accommodate.

My buddy Tim Caufield, an academic lawyer who has found fame as the author of Is Gwenyth Paltrow Wrong About Everything (we served together on a biotech advisory committee for the Canadian government back in the day) was the first to call out his own academic institution for promoting bullshit.

According to CBC, after a healthy dose of online ridicule, the University of Alberta has cancelled a workshop at which doctors were supposed to learn to bend spoons.

With their minds.

When Tim Caulfield first spotted a poster for the event, he didn’t understand what he was seeing.

“When I first saw the post I thought it might be a magic show,” said the professor of health law and science policy at U of A. “But this wasn’t being presented as that, or as satire, it was being presented as a real event where you’re supposed to use the power of your mind to bend spoons.”

The seminar, titled simply “Spoon Bending and the Power of the Mind,” was arranged by the university’s Complementary and Alternative Research and Education program or CARE, as part of the Pediatric Integrative Medicine Rounds, a series of monthly seminars presenting a specialist in the field of integrative medicine to a clinical audience. 

goat.startingWhen Caulfield heard about event, he immediately tweeted about it causing many on social media to ridicule the workshop and the university.

It was to be taught by Anastasia Kutt, an Edmonton “energy healer” who specializes in reiki, a form of therapy in which the practitioner is believed to channel energy into the patient in order to encourage healing. 

On her website, Kutt said she “has been studying [and] experiencing techniques such as yoga, meditation, and other energy healing techniques for over 10 years.”

Her website explains energy healing as “removing issues and stress from your energetic field, to bring it into balance and its original state of good health.”

She has taught similar seminars on spoon bending, also described as PK bending — psychokinesis bending.

Kutt is also a research assistant in the CARE program and co-ordinates the education arm of the program.

The poster boasts that at the end of the day, 75 per cent of the doctors, with guidance from Kutt, would be able to bend spoons solely with their minds. 

It’s a notion that Caulfield, along with many others online, scoffed at.

“Spoon bending is kind of ironic because it’s been debunked so often,” said Caulfield.

“There is absolutely no physical way you can bend a spoon with your mind. That’s why it’s so frustrating that it’s being presented in this legitimate way at a science-based institution.” 

tim.caufieldThe event poster featured the disclaimer that states, “This workshop is experiential and is meant to spark interest. This will not be a scientific evaluation of the process.”

The University of Alberta released a statement saying the workshop had “been withdrawn by the presenters.”

For Caulfield, the issue is that programs like CARE lend legitimacy to these sorts of ideas, something he doesn’t believe an institute of higher learning should do.

“That’s my sort of umbrella concern with this,” Caulfield said. “Is these kind of programs legitimize the pseudo-science. The problem is, it always sort of slides into the embrace of pseudo-science.

“It’s always presented in a legitimate fashion. You don’t have that critical component to it, you’re working arm in arm with energy healers, reiki experts and homoeopathy practitioners.” 

He said he’s not sure what exact role the University of Alberta played in the organization, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The poster featured the university’s logo, which links the event directly to the institution. 

“It really does seem like they are part of academia and that, to me, is problematic.”

The program echoes of the now disbanded and disgraced University of Toronto Sick Kids’ MotherRisk program.

They’re the brilliant folks who said it was OK for moms-to-be to eat deli meats and soft cheeses as long as they came from reputable sources, in the wake of the Maple Leaf Listeria outbreak that killed 23 in Canada.

Is a $5.5 billion-a-year company reputable?

Science and blogs: Gelman vs. Case-Deaton

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Case and Deaton, welcome to the blogs.

french knightsProminent academics are often astonished at the rapidity with which the blogosphere occasionally pounces on and dissects their research findings. In this case, it happened to Case and Deaton, authors of a recent much-publicized study entitled “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.” The pounce was done by Phil Cohen, and – most prominently – by Andrew Gelman. 

The TL;DR version is that rising mortality in some of the subgroups spotlighted by Case and Deaton was increased by a composition effect – the average age within the subgroups increased over the observation period, which pushed up death rates for the aggregated subgroups. If you remove the composition effect, the mortality increase among these groups was considerably less.

Anne Case responded with the consternation typical of researchers first encountering blog attacks:

Case said that she didn’t buy this argument. “We spent a year working on this paper, sweating out every number, sweating out over what we were doing, and then to see people blogging about it in real time — that’s not the way science really gets done,” she said. “And so it’s a little hard for us to respond to all of the blog posts that are coming out.”

Academics are used to the cozy, staid world of academia. Responses are slow, polite, and vetted by third parties. Arguments happen in seminars, in office discussions, and at dinners. Disputes are resolved over a matter of years – when they are resolved at all. And never do intellectual adversaries take their case to the general public!

But academics are going to have to get used to blogs. The technological advances of the web have simply made it easier for crowds of outsiders to evaluate research in real time. How often that process produces the “wisdom of crowds”, and how often it merely adds unhelpful noise, remains to be seen. Certainly we’ve seen the internet do both of those things at different times. But blog criticism of research looks like something that’s here to stay, and academics whose work appears in the popular press will have to get used to it!

Blog discourse has some distinct advantages – above all, the speed of responses and the diversity of people who get involved in discussions. How often do you see two economists arguing with a sociologist and a political scientist/statistician? That’s pretty cool! There is, however, a tendency for blog debates to become too antagonistic. 

I think Andrew Gelman’s latest salvo against Case and Deaton falls into this category a bit. He is put out that Case and Deaton have, so far, refused to issue a public mea culpa about what he sees as a major gotcha. Gelman writes up what he thinks such a mea culpa should say, and includes these bits of snark:

Had it not been for bloggers, we’d still be in the awkward situation of people trying to trying to explain an increase in death rates which isn’t actually happening…We count ourselves lucky to live in an era in which mistakes can be corrected rapidly[.]

Gelman is dramatically overstating the importance of what he found! To say that the increase in death rates “isn’t actually happening”, first of all, is not quite right – Gelman’s rough-and-ready composition adjustment removes all of the increase, but more careful examination shows that some portion of the increase remains.

Second, Gelman is kind of assuming that zero is the important benchmark for what constitutes an “increase”. He makes sure to point out that the paper’s main finding – that American white mortality increased a lot relative to various comparison groups – is not changed by the composition adjustment. But when he claims that the increase “didn’t really happen”, Gelman is saying that “increase” is an absolute rather than a relative term.

Andrew, you’re a stats guy. You know full well that people analyzing time-series data detrend stuff all the time. Measuring increases relative to a trend is totally standard practice! 

So like many blog debates, this one ends up making a mountain out of a molehill. The composition effect was a useful and instructive observation, but it doesn’t really change anything about the paper’s result. And publicly demanding that the authors engage in an equally public mea culpa over such a non-issue is a little unrealistic. If it leads to rancor in the long term, that will be a shame.

I like what blogs have done for research, but I think we should work to make those discussions less about point-scoring and more about a cooperative, crowdsourced search for truth.