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Aug. 26th, 2020 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretGalileo's Middle Finger by Alice Dreger
I picked this book out from my library's electronic audiobook collection because I liked the title, not because I had any idea what it was about, other than that it was some sort of science-y nonfiction. I don't think I'd have read it if I realized what it was, but even though I think a lot of it is misguided, it was fascinating to read, and gave me much to think about. There's a lot of books in my library's electronic collection that fall this way- because the selection is limited, I end up encountering things that I otherwise wouldn't. Last year the big one was Unplanned by Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood manager who became a pro-life activist. I'm still chewing on the ideas I took from that book even though Johnson has again made news this week for absurd things she said on Twitter.
I really want to talk about this book with someone else who has read it but I also don't want to tell anyone else to read it. Dreger uses the phrase 'politically correct' too derisively for me to want to recommend anyone else read this. I'm only fine with someone using the term politically correct, or the phrase "following party lines" if they're willing to deconstruct which politics are driving the correctness and how, and Dreger... doesn't quite there there.
Dreger is an academic science historian whose dissertation research into medical treatment of intersex people in Victorian England led her to cross what she calls the academic/activist line and become an activist for modern intersex people as a co-founder of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, which advocated for more humane medical treatment of intersex people in modern America. Initially this was largely about preventing cosmetic surgeries on infants and children, on the theory that exposing children to surgeries they couldn't consent to purely to 'normalize' their genitals exposed them needlessly to the various risks of surgery was monstrously unethical. The fight was hard work, but was met with surprisingly quick successes in changing medical guidelines for gender normalization, and providing access to therapy as an alternative. ISNA then fell apart into factionalism. Dreger doesn't really discuss what happened in much detail, but gleaning hints it sounds like some people wanted ISNA to be a permanent institution advocating for recognition of intersex people as an identity group, and Dreger and people like her just thought that the fight was about preventing unethical medical treatments and wanted to move on with their lives. This cycle of investment and disinvestment is one of the characteristic narratives of the book.
Aaaanyway, Dreger then moved on with her life by getting herself involved in a whole bunch of other academic scientific controversies centered on researchers with what she labels "The Galilean Personality", which is to say, a person who is driven by a combination of scientific evidence and stubborn self-belief to pursue a heterodox scientific theory in a way that pisses off a bunch of people, and meanwhile is a probably needlessly giant asshole about it. She researched the controversies in detail and formed very strong opinions which she then defended in her own Galilean essays. But Dreger, for all her celebration of the scientific method, is a historian, not a scientist, by training, and it shows. Too often, she writes "In fact" to lead into something that actually seems to be a combination of fact and inferentially drawn conclusion. Too often, she writes "Obviously" for things that aren't obvious. She repeatedly uses this rhetorical figure where she explains her own weird initial expectations for a situation ("I thought I would only work on this for a month and it would be resolved; it ended up taking three years") when anyone who had any awareness of science would not have those original expectations. She writes to argue for there to be more room for the scientific method, for debate and uncertainty, but then she presents clear right and wrong on issues that don't seem anywhere near as cut and dry, and buries clearly viable alternate inferences in stray asides.
But what is fascinating about this book is the whole notion of the academic/activist line and her narrative explorations of the way in which people cross it. I've written a number of times here about my dawning recognition that Kuhn's paradigm shift, so clinically described in Structures of Scientific Revolution, is actually a traumatic event driven by personalities and biases. The story of the rise of Einsteinian physics is the story of relativity being set up by the Nazis as 'Jewish Physics" against the purer and more rational (and ultimately less scientifically useful) "German Physics," with polemics not full of experiments but of racist diatribes. Dreger's taxonomies are shallow (she notes in her conclusion that none of the researchers she profiled have renounced their controversial theories, but I think that begs the question of why she never studied any who did, because they certainly exist.), but they reveal the same facts. It's often impossible to challenge scientific dogmas without facing not merely scientific argument but bigotry, harassment, and even threats or violence.
So much of Dreger's narrative therefore, is simultaneously serious academic debate and tedious Scene Drama. After Dreger gets involved in defending a Northwestern University behavioral geneticist and sex researcher with a controversial theory about transgendered people from a group of activists and scientists who felt the researcher's work was unscientific, bigoted and unethical, Dreger spends a bunch of time trying to figure out if a muddy accusation that the researcher had sex with one of his research subjects was true. Ostensibly it's about defending his academic and personal reputation from scurrilous attacks, in order that the researcher's science can stand on its own, but at some point Dreger is honest, she cares about this because it's Scene Drama and she is fascinated.
I don't think this is responsible science writing, and I especially think Dreger is irresponsible in taking what are clearly unsettled scientific studies whose results if misinterpreted can have significant consequences for the lives of real people and reporting them as if the results were clear enough to be seriously debated. Dreger also uses language that occasionally comes off as mildly transphobic. But I think the very irresponsibility illustrates what I think are very important ideas to assimilate about How Science Works. I think we'll all be better off if we recognize that the model of science that goes
1. Man in Lab Coat Makes a Hypothesis
2. Man in Lab Coat Conducts an Experiment to Test His Hypothesis
3. Man in Lab Coat Reports his Results in a journal.
4. Many Men in Lab coats debate the result intensely and seriously
5. Everyone agrees the Man in Lab Coat is right or wrong
is actually more like an ongoing series of personality disputes driven by conflicts over money, power, identity, politics, who took the last donut at the conference breakfast, with occasional sprinkles of scientific evidence that are nearly always confounded by a myriad of external factors that are impossible to deconfound. I think it's really important to recognize that science moves forward in spite of and because of our humanity, and there is a lot in Dreger's book that supports this thesis even though she is as misguided about it all as anyone.
I picked this book out from my library's electronic audiobook collection because I liked the title, not because I had any idea what it was about, other than that it was some sort of science-y nonfiction. I don't think I'd have read it if I realized what it was, but even though I think a lot of it is misguided, it was fascinating to read, and gave me much to think about. There's a lot of books in my library's electronic collection that fall this way- because the selection is limited, I end up encountering things that I otherwise wouldn't. Last year the big one was Unplanned by Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood manager who became a pro-life activist. I'm still chewing on the ideas I took from that book even though Johnson has again made news this week for absurd things she said on Twitter.
I really want to talk about this book with someone else who has read it but I also don't want to tell anyone else to read it. Dreger uses the phrase 'politically correct' too derisively for me to want to recommend anyone else read this. I'm only fine with someone using the term politically correct, or the phrase "following party lines" if they're willing to deconstruct which politics are driving the correctness and how, and Dreger... doesn't quite there there.
Dreger is an academic science historian whose dissertation research into medical treatment of intersex people in Victorian England led her to cross what she calls the academic/activist line and become an activist for modern intersex people as a co-founder of ISNA, the Intersex Society of North America, which advocated for more humane medical treatment of intersex people in modern America. Initially this was largely about preventing cosmetic surgeries on infants and children, on the theory that exposing children to surgeries they couldn't consent to purely to 'normalize' their genitals exposed them needlessly to the various risks of surgery was monstrously unethical. The fight was hard work, but was met with surprisingly quick successes in changing medical guidelines for gender normalization, and providing access to therapy as an alternative. ISNA then fell apart into factionalism. Dreger doesn't really discuss what happened in much detail, but gleaning hints it sounds like some people wanted ISNA to be a permanent institution advocating for recognition of intersex people as an identity group, and Dreger and people like her just thought that the fight was about preventing unethical medical treatments and wanted to move on with their lives. This cycle of investment and disinvestment is one of the characteristic narratives of the book.
Aaaanyway, Dreger then moved on with her life by getting herself involved in a whole bunch of other academic scientific controversies centered on researchers with what she labels "The Galilean Personality", which is to say, a person who is driven by a combination of scientific evidence and stubborn self-belief to pursue a heterodox scientific theory in a way that pisses off a bunch of people, and meanwhile is a probably needlessly giant asshole about it. She researched the controversies in detail and formed very strong opinions which she then defended in her own Galilean essays. But Dreger, for all her celebration of the scientific method, is a historian, not a scientist, by training, and it shows. Too often, she writes "In fact" to lead into something that actually seems to be a combination of fact and inferentially drawn conclusion. Too often, she writes "Obviously" for things that aren't obvious. She repeatedly uses this rhetorical figure where she explains her own weird initial expectations for a situation ("I thought I would only work on this for a month and it would be resolved; it ended up taking three years") when anyone who had any awareness of science would not have those original expectations. She writes to argue for there to be more room for the scientific method, for debate and uncertainty, but then she presents clear right and wrong on issues that don't seem anywhere near as cut and dry, and buries clearly viable alternate inferences in stray asides.
But what is fascinating about this book is the whole notion of the academic/activist line and her narrative explorations of the way in which people cross it. I've written a number of times here about my dawning recognition that Kuhn's paradigm shift, so clinically described in Structures of Scientific Revolution, is actually a traumatic event driven by personalities and biases. The story of the rise of Einsteinian physics is the story of relativity being set up by the Nazis as 'Jewish Physics" against the purer and more rational (and ultimately less scientifically useful) "German Physics," with polemics not full of experiments but of racist diatribes. Dreger's taxonomies are shallow (she notes in her conclusion that none of the researchers she profiled have renounced their controversial theories, but I think that begs the question of why she never studied any who did, because they certainly exist.), but they reveal the same facts. It's often impossible to challenge scientific dogmas without facing not merely scientific argument but bigotry, harassment, and even threats or violence.
So much of Dreger's narrative therefore, is simultaneously serious academic debate and tedious Scene Drama. After Dreger gets involved in defending a Northwestern University behavioral geneticist and sex researcher with a controversial theory about transgendered people from a group of activists and scientists who felt the researcher's work was unscientific, bigoted and unethical, Dreger spends a bunch of time trying to figure out if a muddy accusation that the researcher had sex with one of his research subjects was true. Ostensibly it's about defending his academic and personal reputation from scurrilous attacks, in order that the researcher's science can stand on its own, but at some point Dreger is honest, she cares about this because it's Scene Drama and she is fascinated.
I don't think this is responsible science writing, and I especially think Dreger is irresponsible in taking what are clearly unsettled scientific studies whose results if misinterpreted can have significant consequences for the lives of real people and reporting them as if the results were clear enough to be seriously debated. Dreger also uses language that occasionally comes off as mildly transphobic. But I think the very irresponsibility illustrates what I think are very important ideas to assimilate about How Science Works. I think we'll all be better off if we recognize that the model of science that goes
1. Man in Lab Coat Makes a Hypothesis
2. Man in Lab Coat Conducts an Experiment to Test His Hypothesis
3. Man in Lab Coat Reports his Results in a journal.
4. Many Men in Lab coats debate the result intensely and seriously
5. Everyone agrees the Man in Lab Coat is right or wrong
is actually more like an ongoing series of personality disputes driven by conflicts over money, power, identity, politics, who took the last donut at the conference breakfast, with occasional sprinkles of scientific evidence that are nearly always confounded by a myriad of external factors that are impossible to deconfound. I think it's really important to recognize that science moves forward in spite of and because of our humanity, and there is a lot in Dreger's book that supports this thesis even though she is as misguided about it all as anyone.
*
Date: 2020-08-26 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-26 03:42 pm (UTC)This strikes me as an interesting installment in History of Science, whose discipline is it? Possibly also how humanities could do with some Human Research Subject ethics/philosophy.
I might throw myself down the hole, but it will be a bit yet for that.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-26 10:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-09-07 07:09 am (UTC)