My deal with Forbes allows me to re-post content after a short-ish waiting period, but I mostly haven’t been doing that because I’m lazy. the last few times I’ve gone to look at old posts, though, the ads have been really oppressive, and I’m just generally paranoid about not having backup copies of some of these things, so I’m going to start pulling a few of the “greatest hits” (as it were) over here, and posting them in the “Clip File” category from the bar to the left.

The first batch of these went up just now, and are all college advice pieces from 2015-16:

Why Small College Are Great for Science Students

Planning to Study Science in College? Here’s Some Advice

Why Every College Student Needs to Take Science Classes

Why Scientists Should Study Art and Literature

Four Important Things to Consider when Choosing a College

Four Things You Should Expect to Get Out of College

There are some others in this vein in my Forbes archives, which I may copy over as well, but I need to make dinner now, so I’ll stop here for the moment. Anyway, for the half-dozen people out there who still use RSS readers and are wondering what the hell is going on, that’s the explanation.

UPDATE: I added two more to the list of college-advice pieces, these from 2017 and 2018:

7 Suggestions for Succeeding in Science in College

Why Science Is Essential for Liberal-Arts Education (And Vice Versa)

I think this completes the set of pieces with college advice that I want to keep around.

A couple of years ago, The Pip played rec baseball at the single-A level, and after basically every game told me “I should be playing at a higher level.” Last year’s season was completely lost to the Covid pandemic, but this year he was on a double-A team, as it turns out with the same coach he had two years ago. I’m not good enough at baseball to do much more than coach first (where you just yell “Run!!!” when the ball is hit), which also allows a good deal of time for my expensive hobby of taking photos. I ended up with a few thousand photos of the team overall, and 70-odd of The Pip that I liked enough to crop and color-correct in GIMP; a selection of the best of the best can be seen in the gallery above.

The AA level is where they start having kids pitch, which was a bit of an adventure. The Pip turned out to be good at pitching, though– he can always get the ball to the catcher in the air, which wasn’t universally true of the kids pitching, and he was accurate enough to almost always get a couple of strikes. In one game, when my parents came up, he struck out all three batters he faced, and in their first playoff game he pitched two innings, striking out five and accounting for the final out by snagging a line drive hit back at him. He spent the rest of that day periodically saying “Hey, can we talk about that catch?”

He’s also a good contact hitter, though doesn’t get as much power as you might expect from his size. There was only one game where he went 0-2; every other game he got at least one hit, and usually two or three. He was starting to hit with a bit more power toward the end of the season, hitting a bunch of doubles.

The team was pretty good, and the experience was generally positive, with minimal examples of the problematic youth sports stuff that people talk about. The final game did leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of the adults, though– the team they played in the league semi-final was pretty stacked, but also did a lot of cheap little stuff to take advantage of the rules. They had one of their good pitchers moved up a few feet from the rubber, because he was technically allowed to do that since he didn’t play on the travel team (The Pip, meanwhile, always threw from the rubber because we wanted him to learn to do it right). And the coach refused to play a last half-inning that would’ve let The Pip’s team bat a final time, because we were about two minutes past the hour-and-a-half limit for starting a new game; this despite having a 12-6 lead, and probably the best pitcher in the league on the mound. (When we ran into coaches from another team getting end-of-season ice cream and said that, they said “Oh, yeah, that’s how we lost to them, too.”)

The kids rallied pretty well, though, as you can see from the last photo in the gallery, where they’re racing to the snacks. And The Pip has been chatting happily about baseball for the last few days; we may go to see a minor-league game this weekend.

Anyway, it was great to be back in the youth sports game, after a weird and miserable 2020. A real “nature is healing” vibe to the whole season.

In the last Physics Blogging Round-Up post I did here, I commented that it may have looked like I was turning into a book review blogger. Then I didn’t post anything for about six months…

I’ve recently dusted off the Forbes blog for a couple more book reviews:

— The Light Ages by Seb Falk: A book about medieval science, and if that sounds like an oxymoron to you you really ought to read the book.

— Hawking Hawking by Charles Seife: An unauthorized bio of Stephen Hawking that didn’t quite work for me.

The long silence is work-related: I was team-teaching a new course on quantum computing, which involved a whole lot of work to stay just ahead of the students, I had to do edits on A Brief History of Timekeeping, and I had a ton of administrative work to do in my Director position, made worse by, you know, the global pandemic. It’s been an interesting year, in the apocryphal-Chinese-curse sense.

The reason I’m doing book reviews specifically is maybe-interesting, though; enough for a light blog post, anyway. In part, it’s the fault of politics: the election of 2020 was so stressful that on the night the returns started coming in, I turned off my phone, grabbed the non-connected iPod and our copy of A Night in the Lonesome October and read a paper book completely offline. Which was maybe the smartest thing I did the whole election season– I was sooooo much less freaked out in the coming weeks of counting than I would’ve been had I watched returns come in live on election night.

This made me realize that reading paper books was a good anti-doomscrolling tactic, and so I’ve intermittently been doing that at bedtime rather than reading stuff on my phone. I don’t always have the mental energy for it, but when I do it’s a whole lot better.

I’ve mostly been reading pop-science books during this phase because I’ve had a horrible case of “reader’s block” at the same time: I keep looking at the ebooks we have and going “ugh, I don’t want to read any of this…” That predates the pandemic to some degree, but has been exacerbated by it because bookstores were either closed or felt unsafe. I used to discover a lot of stuff by just going to the local big-box store and looking through the SF section shelves to see what new hardcovers were out, then order the ebooks of any that seemed good.

Without that browsing, I don’t really have a great way to discover new stuff that’s interesting to me. The kind of thing that’s generating most of the buzz these days doesn’t appeal to me, and for some reason all the recommendation algorithms on bookseller apps suck now. I’ve gotten and liked a few things in the “latest book by known author” vein, but outside of that, it’s been kind of bleak.

Pop-science, on the other hand, remains pretty good for discoverability. In part because I’m known as an author and a blogger who does occasional reviews, so publishers send me press releases, and offer me free review copies of things. And, you know, I can then write reviews that serve as blog content. So it’s been a good stretch for non-fiction reading– I’ve got another half-dozen recent reads in the queue to write about .

Now that Kate and I are both vaccinated, and things are opening up a bit more, I can probably start going to bookstores again, so might work in some more fiction. Which still leaves the problem of the buzzy stuff not being to my tastes, and the stuff I like not being talked about, but that’s for another day…

The Pip’s school was closed yesterday for contact-tracing of someone who had a positive Covid test, so he was home all day. It was the most awkward time of year for this, because the temperature was below freezing but there isn’t any snow yet, but I did force him to take a brief break from playing Super Smash Bros on the Switch and do something active. This included a brief period of playing catch with a baseball in the back yard.

While we were playing catch, I was struck by two things: first, The Pip is really good at baseball. I mean, I’m his dad, so I would say that, but he reliably catches the ball if it’s anywhere near him, and his throws to me are both fast and accurate. Especially considering that he only turned nine at the start of November. There were only 2-3 times that a throw really went wild on him– for the most part, they were right on target.

The second striking this was how little thought I had to put into throwing and catching a baseball. I just kind of… did it, automatically. I’m not saying I was painting the corners of the plate like Greg Maddux, or anything, but I could get the ball close enough to The Pip to be catchable on a variety of trajectories with only one or two attempts. And aside from those couple of wild throws, I caught pretty much everything he threw at me.

Here’s the thing: I’m not good at baseball. I played a bit back when I was a kid, but quit when I was not much older than The Pip is now. I could throw pretty hard, because I’m big, but was never a good fielder, and couldn’t hit worth a damn. I never even made it into the upper tier of Little League before I gave it up, and I didn’t even play beer-league softball in college or grad school. I don’t think I had a baseball glove on my hand more than maybe three times between, say, 1982 and 2016 (when SteelyKid took up softball).

And, you know, I’m not complaining. I’m competent enough that my fourth-grader thinks I know what I’m doing, and that’s all you really need as a parent. It’s just kind of amazing to think about how deep muscle memory goes. There’s a lot going on with throwing and catching a baseball, and it’s not something I do with any regularity, but having learned to do it forty-ish years ago is apparently enough.

This process of rediscovering skills that I haven’t used in three decades has happened to me a fair bit since the kids came along. I took SteelyKid ice skating a bunch of times a few years ago, and roller skating a few other times. I also had gaps of twenty-odd years between times going cross-country and downhill skiing, both of which I last did in college before taking them up again 2-3 years ago. Downhill was particularly terrifying to resume, because the local downhill ski area doesn’t have a big middle ground between the too-small kiddie rope tow and the awfully steep start of the trails at the top of the lift. It came back very fast, though I was very glad we signed the kids up for lessons because I couldn’t begin to explain to them what it is that I do to turn.

Riding a bike is, of course, the canonical example of a thing that you never forget once you’ve learned it. The gap there was a bit smaller for me, because I got a bike in 2003 when we moved to our house in Niskayuna so I could ride to work when the weather was nice. (This has come in really handy during the pandemic, because it’s good socially distant exercise…) That gap was probably 1985-2003, give or take a bit on the start. But again, after a couple really wobbly laps around the parking lot of the bike store, it came back, and I don’t need to really think about how it all works.

The downhill skiing and biking examples are, in some ways, the more consequential versions of this, because in both of those cases I’m just good enough at the muscle-memory task to be able to put myself in moderately significant danger. More than once I’ve thought, particularly while trying to keep up with SteelyKid on the slopes, “Boy, if I wipe out at this speed, it’s really going to suck…” But, then, that’s part of the fun of downhill skiing… It’s also what makes biking so much more enjoyable than jogging– there’s that little added element of danger if I should happen to bite it moving at 15mph on the bike that’s not there if I’m just plodding through the neighborhood on foot.

Anyway, I probably could (and in some sense ought to) spin this out into a bigger science-y post about all the physics involved in throwing a baseball, tracking the ball in flight, balancing a bike, turning on skis, etc. But that would be more work than I feel like doing; I just wanted to marvel briefly at how amazing it is that we can do all these physical things without really needing to think about what’s involved in any of them. Even if we haven’t done them in literally years, and were never really good at them in the first place.

As noted a couple of posts ago, I get up very early in the morning, and during the pandemic months of 2020, The Pip has been joining me in that. This isn’t too bad on weekdays, when there’s only a short time between when I finish my morning routine and when Kate and SteelyKid need to get up, but on weekends it’s a bit of an issue, because they’ll both sleep until 11am if allowed to. Which leaves me wide awake with nothing in particular to do for a couple of hours.

The Pip is old enough and responsible enough that I don’t feel too bad about leaving him home as the only one awake, so at some point in the spring I started just going on long bike rides during this time (I think my record was about 35 miles, out the bike path to Rotterdam and back). Around May, though, I was feeling in need of a bit more variety, so I started doing “Photo Walks,” taking my DSLR camera out and taking random artsy photos of stuff. This worked both as a rest day from biking and a creative outlet (I also started going to a local park to shoot baskets by myself, just to vary up the more intense workouts, too…)

This started with nature hikes, but there are only so many pictures of trees I can take, so for variety I started mixing in trips to more built-up areas. This had the added bonus effect of giving me something to do in the afternoon/evening, namely downloading and processing all the images from the morning.

I’ve been sharing Google Photos albums on social media as “This Week in My Expensive Hobby,” and to kill some time yesterday I went through all of these and pulled out the best of the lot. That led to this “Best of 2020” album, with 187 photos in it. This is probably something like the top 5% of the total pictures I took; the individual photo walk albums are probably about 10% of the photos from any given day, and the “Best of 2020” album is a bit more than 25% of the total photo walk collection.

And just so there’s something visually interesting in this post, here are a baker’s dozen of my favorites:

Now that we’re heading back toward winter, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do to take the place of this. One of the other problems I’ve discovered during this lockdown is that I don’t have any indoor hobbies that don’t involve the Internet, but clearly I’m going to need to find one…

I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to blog over the last several weeks, partly because I was working on the book-in-progress, but largely because of politics. It’s not just that the US election and its ongoing aftermath is sucking up tons of attention in a way that makes it seem futile to write about anything else, it’s that writing about politics itself seems futile and depressing.

This is not to say that I don’t have thoughts about the election and the various associated issues, or even about the innumerable Takes out there on what happened and why and what needs to happen next. I do, in fact, have opinions about all those things, but they’re all pretty much overridden by one more general thought, which is that in the current partisan environment, attempting to write about it would be an exercise in futility. It’s not just that nobody wants to hear my squishy moderate views, it’s that I don’t think anybody is capable of hearing them right now.

And that’s deeply frustrating, because I think a lot of what’s out there is just blisteringly stupid and counter-productive. But much of the very dumbest stuff being written and shared around is in the form of extreme responses to tendentious misreadings of what seem to me to be far more sensible positions. Many of these I see because they’re shared into my social-media feeds by people who ought to be able to recognize them for the gross caricatures that they are. And, you know, that doesn’t suggest to me that there’s any upside to trying my hand at expressing similar positions.

In a weird way, this echoes something that happened to me with physics writing a while back, specifically around the topic of quantum foundations and interpretations. While on the one hand, this is an endlessly renewable source of clicks writing anything at all positive– or even generally agnostic– about, say, the Many-Worlds Interpretation just brings down an endless and wearying argument in which people on one side or the other insist on pegging my position to one extreme or the other. It’s exhausting in a way that makes it feel utterly pointless to broach the subject at all.

The political conversation, of course, is orders of magnitude worse, because the stakes are so much higher. What position one takes on interpretations of quantum mechanics is completely and utterly inconsequential, but winning or losing elections can literally save or cost lives. Which makes it just crushingly depressing to watch a lot of what passes for political discourse at the moment. And the disconnect is at such an incredibly basic level– a matter of incompatible theories of political change– that it’s difficult to see any plausible path toward anything better. To mathematicize it a little, there just isn’t even an agreement on what axioms should apply to the situation, which makes it impossible to converge on a proof.

So, as it says at the top, depressing. At this point, I’m pretty much hanging on to my current social media feeds just for the illusion of feeling informed about evolving events. I think once the Electoral College vote is done, I’m going to do some really aggressive muting and unfollowing to try to get back to a better place. And also see if I can’t find some healthier topics to write about; what that is, I can’t say, but I know damn well it’s not going to be quantum interpretations…

In a bit of a reversal, for the last few days I’ve been the one skipping out on family interactions to watch live-stream events. Usually, this is SteelyKid’s shtick, but this is the weekend that the Hold Steady would’ve been doing their usual multi-night stand at the Brooklyn Bowl. They obviously couldn’t do it in person, so they replaced it with a live stream of three shows and a sound-check event over three days. I’d usually make the trip down to Brooklyn for just one night, but since this was all taking place on the Internet, I went for the full package, which has meant a lot of evening and weekend Zoom.

I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this. On the one hand, they’re the kind of band that really feeds off the energy of the crowd, so playing in an empty bar might come out kind of flat. On the other hand, though, I’ve found socializing over Zoom with my close friends from college and our usual Friday happy hour crowd surprisingly satisfying. I figured that, worst-case, I’d check out the Thursday night show and the Friday sound-check would have some Q&A that might be interesting, and that would be pretty good.

The actual event vastly exceeded my expectations. I’ve watched parts of some lockdown shows by other bands, which have mostly been hand-rolled sort of affairs, just a step or two above singing to a propped-up iPhone, but this was a full-on professional operation. The band was set up at the Brooklyn Bowl as usual, with full lights and the works, just no fans. They had at least half a dozen cameras, some fixed, some handheld, and cut between different angles pretty effectively. And the sound was pulled right off the board, so it was impeccable. Major props to the folks at the Brooklyn Bowl and Fans.live (who I had never heard of before) for the excellent technical work.

The shows also worked really well thanks to the commitment and professionalism of the band. It’s got to be super hard to summon real energy playing to an empty room, but they did a great job making it work. Craig Finn did all his usual frontman moves– wild hand gestures, bad dancing, pointing to imaginary people in the crowd– and Franz Nicolay was jumping and dancing like crazy behind his keyboard. And, of course, they’re just really good musically, a very tight unit playing very complicated songs nearly flawlessly.

They did have some element of fan interaction, via an adjunct Zoom feed and big video monitors in the Brooklyn Bowl. There was a Zoom link you could click to join a meeting with other fans, and somebody on the tech team was cycling through the video feeds from fans at home, putting them up on the monitors (and cutting some of them into the video feed of the show). This added a weird fun element– lots of people dancing in living rooms around the world, many with small kids, and some with pets (about which more later). They also had chat windows in both the main video feed and the Zoom meeting, where people could comment on the proceedings (mostly simulating yelling along…).

It took a little while to get this sorted out– Thursday night, I’m not sure they really knew what it was going to be, and at the start of the Friday soundcheck, Craig got distracted by the video feeds and flubbed the lyrics of “Sweet Part of the City” so badly they had to re-start it. They hit on specifically requesting people to hold up signs sayin where they were from, though, and also asked people to show off pets and drinks, and that gave it a bit more form. They carried that over into the Friday night and Saturday evening shows, and it served as a pretty effective vehicle for between-song banter.

(I joined the Zoom for the soundcheck and the Saturday evening show, but needed to be at my desktop to do it, as my Chromebook would pause the main feed any time I tried to pull up the Zoom window, which kind of defeated the purpose. The Thursday and Friday shows I just watched on the Chromebook from a more comfortable chair.)

The clear highlight of the Zoom videos for the weekend was the moment on Friday night when they were cycling through shots of pets, and cut to two turtles who appeared to be, as someone in the band (I think Steve) drily noted, working on making a third turtle. This was immortalized in a T-shirt, and a lyric change Saturday night when “Mosh Pit Josh” altered the breakdown in “Stay Positive” to “It’s one thing to start it with a positive jam/ It’s another thing to see turtles screw.”

There were, of course, some weird aspects to seeing them live and alone. It’s very strange to actually hear the background vocals from Franz, Tad Kubler, and Steve Selvidge– usually, there are several hundred people yelling along with those bits, that kind of drown them out. It was also amusing to seem how many places Craig stumbled over the words, because again, normally the crowd can kind of carry that. (This is not a knock on Craig, by the way– as he said in a response to a question at the soundcheck, they have something like 118 officially recorded songs, all of which are pretty heavy on the lyrics. That’s a lot to keep track of when you’re on stage…) Finally, it’s pretty weird to do the set/encore break when there isn’t a crowd to cheer and yell through the break, but it was okay in the end.

As for the content of the shows, one of the things that makes them a great live band is that they have that deep catalog, and they’re not afraid to use it. Somebody in the chat shared a Google Sheet where they were keeping track of which songs got played each night, and the three main shows included 56 different songs, with only 15 played more than once. (The list of songs played every night is pretty obvious if you’re a fan: “Stuck Between Stations,” “Constructive Summer,” “Chips Ahoy,” “Entitlement Crew,” “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” “Sequestered in Memphis,” and “Killer Parties”) There were a another half-dozen that showed up only in the soundcheck (where they basically played through Heaven Is Whenever, replacing a few tracks with material from the bonus tracks in the just-released anniversary edition) but they didn’t make the spreadsheet. A handful of these were brand new tracks, from the album that will be coming out in February, and they all sounded great.

This depth makes every show unique, and is one of the reasons fans will turn out for every show of a three- or four-night run. They did some fun stuff with these– following “Chips Ahoy” with its sequel song “The Weekenders,” running the “youth services” ending of “Multitude of Casualties” into the start of “Blackout Sam,” and of course the ever popular combo of “Constructive Summer” into “Hot Soft Light.” They had the “Horn Steady” (Peter Hess and Jordan McLean on sax and trumpet) in the house for the Friday and Saturday shows, and mixed them in pretty effectively. My favorite setlist trick, they pulled twice, doubling up classic set-closers. On Friday they followed “Southtown Girls” with “Slapped Actress” and then Saturday did “Slapped Actress” into “How a Resurrection Really Feels.” There’s really nothing better than the moment when the a capella “Whoah-oh” bit at the end of “Slapped” ends and then Tad hits the opening riff of “Resurrection,” even if it was only over the Internet.

Of course, there is something lost by not being in the room to feel the crowd react to that riff, and the events of this year inevitably cast a bit of a pall on the proceedings. Craig actually seemed to get choked up doing the “So! Much! Joy!” speech at the start of “Killer Parties” the first night, which carried into the start of the lyrics after the first guitar break, and the Saturday show closed with the video feed cycling through fan signs offering various positive messages. On the whole, though, it was much more participatory and cathartic than I would’ve expected from a mere live stream. I left each show with a huge grin, and the world feels a little brighter this morning than it did earlier in the week, and not just because the weather has improved.

And, ultimately, that’s why these guys are my favorite band. I can’t wait to be back in the room with them– maybe as soon as next year if these vaccines pan out– but even on streaming, their music makes everything a little bit better.

Over in Twitter-land, Razib Khan wrote:

one change btwn 2000 and 2020 is that i respect ‘science studies’ a lot more. in fields i keep close track of i’ve seen wholesale reinterpretation of the same data which reflects cultural shifts, not underlying data.

not happy to admit this but it is what it is pic.twitter.com/BH7cjK5fb3

— Razib 😈 Khan (@razibkhan) December 1, 2020

I tweeted something cryptic about this, because I found it an interesting comment, but not one that really lends itself to a tweet-length reply. Both the subject matter and my relationship with it are a little too complicated to parcel out a couple hundred characters at a time. But, you know, I have this little-used blog platform on which I can type stuff at greater length, so let’s see if that still works.

I’m not really certain what specific data reinterpretations Razib is referring to, but I think what he’s getting at is that he’s become more convinced in the correctness of the critique that science has political elements to it. Which is to say that what gets accepted into the “scientific consensus” is not entirely determined by objective criteria, but is shaped by ideology and power. Results that are more consistent with a preferred narrative, or that are more congenial to a powerful elite are more likely to be accepted. When there’s a shift in the narrative, or who holds the levers of power, the prior consensus can be discarded and the same basic results reinterpreted to suit the new narrative preferred by the new elite.

This is a critique that grows out of the “science studies” corners of academia, and has not exactly been enthusiastically embraced by working scientists. This is the kind of thing that a certain type of STEM professional is prone to denouncing as “postmodernism” (kind of a dubious classification in a lot of ways, but whatever), and people get very worked up about this. 

As with any academic field, there is a branch of this that descends into self-parodic nonsense, but I think there’s absolutely a core of truth to the critique. I don’t see how anybody who’s gone through the process of getting a journal article published can deny that there are social and political elements to science– every time a referee forces you to add dubiously relevant citations to papers you’re pretty sure they’re an author on, that’s a low-level example of this.  I don’t think it’s even all that hard to find examples, particularly in 2020, of the “scientific consensus” being bent in directions that conform with a particular political narrative at a much higher level.

The thing I go back and forth on a bit is to what degree this is actually useful.

To be sure, there’s a cynical sense in which being aware of the social and political aspects of science is useful in that it helps you “play the game.” This takes the form of the tacit knowledge advisors pass on to students in the process of writing papers and grant proposals: how to frame results in keeping with the preferred narratives, how to anticipate the dubiously relevant citations that will be demanded by referees from powerful groups, what buzzwords to work in to enhance your chances of getting funding, etc. Recognizing that stuff as an inherent part of the process, rather than a perversion of some imagined “pure science” can make a lot of things go more smoothly.

It’s less clear to me that this is helpful to the process of actually doing science in a day-to-day operational manner. That is, knowing that there is a political element to the process is not all that helpful in choosing what questions to research, or deciding how to attack them. I suspect this is why, to the endless frustration of actual philosophers, Popper’s falsification model remains so popular among working scientists. It may fail as philosophy, but it continues to be a useful heuristic for thinking about how to approach research questions. Asking “What measurement could I do that would prove this model wrong?” is a reasonably good path to generating ideas that can be put to practical use, in a way that “What is the prevailing narrative around this topic?” is not.

I also end up having a problem with the sloganized version of these ideas, which generally ends up as something like, “Science is inherently political.” To the extent that this means that elements of power and ideology help determine what gets accepted as part of the “scientific consensus,” again, I think that’s clearly true, and ought to be relatively uncontroversial. Unfortunately, it gets used in (at least) two other ways.

The first of these is as a justification for talking about the political and social context around scientific problems. I’m basically okay with this– I agree that it’s essential for discussing scientific problems that relate very directly to policy matters (things like climate and many areas of public health). I also think it’s perfectly reasonable to, for example, talk about how Einstein’s early career was affected by the virulent anti-Semitism of the day. To the extent that we’re teaching students to be scientists, it’s important for them to be aware of how power and ideology shape the acceptance of ideas.

The version of “Science is inherently political” that I’m less okay with is the one that transforms this into an active obligation to teach a particular narrative about politics. Again, it’s not the idea of putting political content into a science course per se that I find problematic– there are decent arguments that this enhances and complements the scientific content for (some) students, so if you’re moved to do that, have at it. What I find troubling is the obligation and the particularity, and more the latter than the former.

That is, when “Science is inherently political” gets amended with “…therefore, we must teach political content in science classes,” it’s not a general “Every teacher should present ideas of politics.” The people who usually make that amendment very actively do not want, for example, the sort of STEM faculty who rail against a cartoon-bogeyman version of “postmodernism” sharing their worldview in class. Most people proposing an active obligation to include political content in science syllabi want that content to support and conform to a particular narrative about politics. And as much as I generally agree with that narrative, I find that imposition troubling.

I think what bothers me is that this ends up turning what is a generally reasonable critique into a nakedly cynical power play. What started as the (largely correct) observation that the “scientific consensus” has to some extent been shaped by ideology and power turns into a program of actively shaping it to conform to a particular preferred ideology. That makes me very uneasy. “Power and ideology shape science, and thus you should be wary of this, and think about whose interests are served by particular results” is a valid criticism and a useful guide to future action. On the other hand, “Science has long been shaped by power and wrong ideology, therefore we should bend it into the shape of our new and correct Ideology 2.0″ seems like it goes to some bad places.

So, as noted up top, my relationship to “science studies” and ideas derived therefrom is kind of complicated. As a result, I try to keep the whole thing kind of at arm’s length. Which I’m kind of blowing to hell by writing this out, but it’s been useful to (somewhat) clarify my thoughts for myself, which is one of the parts of blogging I kind of miss…