Over the weekend,@Scholars_Stage on Twitter went on a bit of a rant about American football, which eventually turned into a somewhat more measured blog post about the game as a source of meaning for many communities, especially in the South. There’s a lot going on there, some of which I don’t really agree with, and it’s nagged at me for several days now.

One thing in particular that struck me was that a number of responses to it on Twitter were of the sadly predictable form “People who derive meaning from a sport and think of high school as the ‘best years of their life’ are just pathetic.” This kind of thing comes up a lot when discussing the intersection of schools and sports, and it always gets my back up, particularly the “best years” piece of this. Having it come around again made me think a bit about why that specific bit irritates me so much.

In part, I think it’s taking a common bit of nostalgic hyperbole too seriously. That is, a lot of people who say “Oh, man, high school/ college was the best” don’t literally mean that it was the absolute peak of their lives. They’re just looking back fondly on (the best bits of) a time they enjoyed, and overstating the goodness of that time in the way that people do.

I’ll cop to a bit of this: I keep in touch with a bunch of friends from college, and was actively involved in planning our 25th reunion last summer, so I’m clearly not opposed to nostalgia for that age. And in a lot of respects, for a lot of people, there’s a lot to be said for the high school/ college stage of life: You’re old enough to have a bit of agency in your life, but generally not overburdened with responsibility, and that combination can be a lot of fun.

(Please note, here, that I’m not trying to belittle or erase the experiences of people who didn’t enjoy high school/ college for any of a wide range of reasons. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m specifically interested in the experiences of people who did enjoy that stage of life, and will focus on them.)

In the cases where the “those were the best years of my life” really is a literal statement, I think the “that’s pathetic” response bothers me because it often has a really ugly socioeconomic class aspect. That is, when you think about the life experiences of somebody who genuinely peaked in high school, it’s often a pretty bleak picture of limited and lost opportunities. That’s a scenario that should evoke sympathy, not derision. When this comes up in highly educated circles, though, there’s often an undertone of schadenfreude, an implication that the people in question somehow deserve to be in this “pathetic” state, and that makes me really uneasy.

Following on that, though, I think the biggest problem I have with this line is that it’s of a piece with a lot of other useless life advice, all of which boils down to “You should be a completely different sort of person than you are.” That is, the whole premise is that the people being looked down on are pathetic because they care about the wrong sorts of things.

This came clear to me in the context of the football post/ Twitter rant linked above because in many ways, nostalgia for past glory is absolutely inevitable in the context of sports. Particularly in the higher-impact sorts of games, sports glory is almost exclusively for the young. That doesn’t mean you can’t continue to participate in sports and find them rewarding– I’ll turn 48 this year, and I continue to play basketball a few times a week, and those pick-up games have the ability to make or ruin my day– but great athletic accomplishments are mostly reserved for those who are young enough not to have accumulated a large number of nagging injuries that just spontaneously hurt for no obvious reason.

That means that if you’re somebody who cares about your personal sporting accomplishments, you’re very likely to hit a peak in high school or college. At that stage of life, you’ll be able to do things that will be simply impossible later in life, and you’ll have opportunities be recognized for doing those things that you simply won’t be afforded after you move on. My personal athletic high point was probably playing rugby my sophomore year, when we beat amherst, and had a game where we took a scrumdown at the 22-meter line and pushed it in for a try. I’ll never be that good at anything sports-related again, so it’s inevitable that I’ll look back on it as a high point.

In that context, what bugs me about derision for nostalgia comes clear: what it’s really saying is “These people care about the Wrong Things.” If those people had just had the good sense to not be the sort of people who care about activities that inevitably peak at a young age, they would be less pathetic. And that bugs me, because I am one of those people, at least in one piece of my life.

And this is one of those things that seems not like a conscious choice, but something deeply rooted in individual personality. That is, I keep my schedule clear at lunchtime as best I can not because I have made a considered choice to pursue pick-up basketball as an exercise strategy, but because I’m the kind of person who values the competition and camaraderie that comes with pick-up basketball. If I just wanted exercise, I could jog at more convenient times, but actually, I loathe jogging and will find small excuses to avoid it, but I love basketball and will re-arrange my schedule and even play through injuries for the sake of a meaningless pick-up game.

And that’s why, despite not being someone who genuinely feels like he peaked with high school or college sports, I take mild offense at derision directed that way (though I’m evidently good at hiding that reaction, because people talk this way to me all the time). It feels a bit like a shot at a kind of person, and the part of me that is that kind of person doesn’t take it well.

Bringing it back a little to the post that kicked this off, this is also why I’m deeply conflicted about football. (For the record, I never played organized football; I played soccer in high school and rugby in college.) There are obviously no end of problematic aspects to the game, and lots of good reasons to not want kids involved.

(Every now and then, I look at The Pip and think that tackle football really would be the ideal game for him, because he’s not especially fast, but he’s strong and stubborn and not all that deterred by pain. I’m not going to push him in that direction, though, not so much because of safety concerns, but because football programs are often a haven for kinds of douchebaggery that we don’t really need in our lives…)

At the same time, though, a lot of the more strident critiques of football and football culture come across not as specific concerns about that particular sport, but an expression of a general antipathy for organized athletic activity. They feel not like an attempt to address the safety and other issues associated with football itself, but the seizing of an opportunity to get rid of something that’s Not The Sort Of Thing People Should Care About. Which, in turn, feels like a slap at the kind of people who care about that sort of thing.

So, while I’m not a huge fan of football, and am perfectly happy to have The Pip exercise his body and his competitive impulses in some other sport, I’m not all that eager to sign on with any of the pushes to get rid of the game, because it seems like a lot of those folks are hoping it will be the start of a slippery slope. And as someone who has derived a lot of enjoyment and even meaning from playing sports in school and since, I’d really hate to see that go away.

I went downhill skiing for the first time in 25-odd years last weekend. This was, of course, because of the kids– when we were up at Lapland Lake for MLK weekend cross-country skiing, somebody mentioned to SteelyKid that she looked like she’d be good at downhill skiing, so she asked to try it. And The Pip is a determined Little Dude who feels very strongly that if his big sister is doing something then, by God, he’s going to do it, too.

I used to downhill ski fairly regularly up through college, taking advantage of student discounts, but stopped when I moved to the DC area for grad school because 1) there’s very little snow there, and 2) I had no money. Despite moving back up here back in 2001, I never picked skiing back up, because it’s very much not Kate’s kind of thing, and it never seemed like it would be a good idea to go solo. The kids asking to go was a good excuse, though, so we trucked everybody over to Maple Ski Ridge, rented gear, and hit the slopes.

Happily, as it turns out, there’s a significant amount of muscle memory involved in skiing, and I was able to pick it up again almost immediately. I’m not great from a technical standpoint, but I can stop and turn and keep myself under control enough even on the hardest slopes they have to offer (which it should be noted are not terribly impressive, because it’s a very small ski area…). As I noted to Kate, this means that I’m regularly going fast enough that if I wipe out it’s really going to suck, but I’m enjoying it.

The one thing I absolutely can’t do, though, is explain how I do what I’m doing. I’m not really doing the snowplow thing I remember learning back in the Ice Ages, it’s more just a shifting of weight from one leg to the other, but I couldn’t begin to describe how to do it. I knew that would be the case, though, which is why we went to Maple Ridge in the first place, because lots of folks at work praised their ski school, so we signed the kids up for a lesson the first time we went.

This had a couple of benefits, chiefly the fact that the instructor teaching SteelyKid and The Pip the basics does this on a regular basis and knows the language to use to describe it to kids. More than that, though, she’s not me, and as it turns out that makes a world of difference. When it comes to teaching skills or coaching sports, the kids are way more willing to take instruction and coaching from a different adult.

This is not a new thing, of course, and has been most acute with SteelyKid, whose rec soccer team I coached for a couple of years. Attempts to get her to take her turn playing goalie… did not end well, let’s just leave it at that. This year I switched to coaching The Pip’s team, and things went more smoothly for her with a different coach. And the less said about our experience with me as her coach in rec basketball, the better.

In the case of skiing, the problem wasn’t SteelyKid (who just naturally excels at any activity requiring balance and coordination, and if you can explain how that comes out of the combination of my genes and Kate’s, there’s likely a Nobel in it for you). In this case, The Pip was the problem. Maple Ridge only has a single “green circle” hill with a rope tow to get kids to the top, and SteelyKid very quickly moved beyond that, so she came up the chair lift with me to their one “blue square” trail. This is genuinely pretty steep at the top, and on her first run she ended up missing a turn and bombing straight down the hill at high speed, which she found scary, but not enough to deter her. By the end of our second visit this past weekend, she was flying down the “black diamond” trails.

(Here’s some shaky cell-phone video from the top of the blue hill on her first day of skiing:

SteelyKid approved putting this on YouTube, for the record.)

The Pip was initially content to stay on the rope tow, but as noted above, he’s a determined Little Dude, and if his sister’s doing something fun, then he’s going to do it, too. So after a while, he showed up at the lift line, demanding to come up with us.

That… did not go smoothly. When we got to the top of the hill, he exclaimed “It didn’t look this steep from the bottom!!!” I tried my best to show him how to do the back-and-forth trick to control speed, but he wasn’t really having it, and fell down every time he was supposed to turn. And unlike his naturally graceful sister, when he falls on skis he’s like a baby deer– arms, legs, and skis splayed all over the place, and getting him back upright is an incredibly complicated and wobbly process. After taking about ten minutes to cover a quarter of the slope, we just pointed his skis in the right general direction, and sent him down on his butt.

Despite declaring “New rule: No skiing down hills nine thousand times taller than Dad,” though, he demanded another run at it this past weekend. Which also was less than completely successful, though we did a little better when I suggested he follow and imitate SteelyKid. It still ended with a baby-deer fall and sliding down two-thirds of the hill on his butt, though.

Bringing it back around to the coaching thing, though, I kind of suspect that had we sent him up there with an instructor who wasn’t me, he would’ve made it, because there was an element of freaking out that I don’t think he would’ve had with a different adult in charge. (And, of course, they would be better able to explain what he needs to do to make the turns at the sides of the slope…)

Earlier in the winter, he signed up for a youth wrestling program, and a couple of times in that he got paired up with a slightly hyper kid who knocked him around a bit. At one point, there were some tears, and I fully expected him to want to quit, but he stuck it out after a brief conversation with one of the coaches. I kept out of sight back by the door, because I was pretty sure that if I got involved it would be the end of wrestling.

When I talked to him after, and said I was proud of him for not giving up, he gave me a weird look and said “Dad, it’s wrestling practice. There’s no quitting in practice.” That seemed kind of backwards to me, but like I said, he’s a stubborn Little Dude, particularly when I’m not involved.

I expect we’ve got at least a couple more ski trips in our future before this winter ends, and I’m pretty sure that even if he just went with me and SteelyKid, he’d make it down that hill after about two more attempts, because that’s how he operates. We’ll get him another lesson, though, because I think the process will go a lot more smoothly with a different adult in charge explaining what needs to happen. And I think he’s really only about one lesson away from being able to handle that hill.

That will make The Pip enormously happy, of course, but probably the happiest person when he makes that leap will be Kate, who will no longer be required to stand out in the cold at the bottom of the rope tow hill in case The Pip skis off into the woods…

(As with yesterday’s noodling post about careers, this is largely a thinking-out-loud sort of deal, brought on by a need to write something that isn’t a carefully worded administrative email, because it’s been a terrible week full of those…)

Looking back at yesterday’s reflection on the randomness of my working life, I’m reminded of the tricky balance that has to be struck with these things between acknowledging the role of luck and the role of hard work. That post may have tipped a bit too far toward the “it’s all random” side of things, because it was a near-stream-of-consciousness thing and that was the mood of the moment.

While luck has played an essential role in my career to date, though, I feel like I might’ve downplayed the amount of work I put into getting where I am. Because there was a lot of that, too– I got the opportunity to go to grad school in large part because of a fortunate connection between my undergraduate professors and my eventual research group, but they kept me around and gave me a degree because I got stuff done. I got an interview for my current job in large part due to another connection, but in the end I got the job because I killed it when I gave my job talk. I got an agent because of a freak viral moment for a silly blog post, but I’ve published four books because I worked my ass off writing good proposals and good books.

And, like I say, it’s a tricky balance to strike, particularly when giving advice, because it’s unquestionably true that I’ve had doors open for me simply because I was in the right place at the right time and knew the right people. But that enormous good fortune and privilege isn’t close to the whole story– those got me opportunities to do stuff, but taking advantage of those required committing to getting that stuff done. And I have certainly seen people who were provided similar sorts of opportunities who just didn’t take advantage and get the stuff done that needed doing.

I got asked not long ago for a favorite motivational quote, and I went with Michael Faraday’s advice on the secret of success in science: “Work. Finish. Publish.” I’ve written about this before, but that’s a quote that sticks with me. I think it’d be fair to add “Get Lucky” as an item on that list (whether fourth or zeroth, I’m not sure), but then again, Faraday’s advice covers everything you have any hope of controlling. You can’t make luck, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But you can commit to working until you’re finished; in fact, that’s the only thing you can do.

We’re having a colloquium talk today by a former student, class of 2010, who initially started grad school in physics, but left after a couple of years to do business consulting, and now something in data science. This is part of an effort I’ve been making in the last several years to bring in people with a physics background who aren’t in traditional academic physics positions, so students get a better sense of the full range of their options.

Kinda-sorta related to this, I’ll be giving an invited talk at the APS March Meeting on the 17 years ([Jeremy Piven in Grosse Point Blank voice]: Seventeen! Years!) that I’ve been talking about science on social media. If you’re at the meeting and up early on Tuesday, I’ve promised to offer reflections on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else, so stop on by.

Both of these generally fall under the heading of “career information and advice,” and those plus some other stuff I’ll only subtweet, as it were, have me thinking a bit about my career to this point.

And, you know, that feels kind of weird. Not because there’s anything particularly wrong about reflecting on things– I realized not that long ago that I’m probably close to the midway point of my minimum academic career. This is my eighteenth year at Union, and it’ll be another fifteen years before both kids are out of college. That’s a reasonable point to be taking stock of things.

What feels weird about it is that the word “career” to me carries a connotation of intentionality that I don’t think fits with my actual path to this point. I don’t feel like I have a career that was the result of any kind of coherent plan, it’s just a bunch of stuff that… happened.

It is true that I went to grad school with a plan of sorts– I decided my undergraduate professors had a pretty good gig, and went to grad school hoping to end up a professor at a small college. While I’ve ended up more or less where I wanted to be, though, all the steps along the way have been pretty random. I ended up at NIST by way of a chance connection, got a post-doc by cold-emailing a half-dozen people and asking if they had any openings, got hired into a faculty job through another chance connection, and so on. Even the NSF grant that I got was for a project that only came up because I gave a lab tour to a visiting speaker who realized the system I was building for something else was possibly relevant to his work. There’s a huge amount of luck in every step of that.

And that’s just the formal academic part of my working life. The stuff I’ve promised to talk about at March Meeting is from the writing side, which is even more random. I started blogging as a lark, and ended up getting paid for it because an intern at Seed magazine liked my work and recommended me for the initial batch of ScienceBlogs bloggers. The talking-dog books happened because one of my posts randomly went viral, and got the attention of an agent. I’ve ended up doing talking-head spots and consulting for TV shows because somebody randomly googled up one of my blog posts, and I’m now in a spot where reporters randomly call me up to comment on sports stories. (The most recent example is being quoted in story about college football, though there are others.) I’ve gotten years of hate mail from Patriots fans because a guy I play basketball with talked me into writing a piece about underinflated footballs, which led to a couple of other articles, one of which turned into a chapter in an academic book.

It’s all weird and random and unfocused. I’m not completely surprised that I’ve ended up writing books– I’ve always enjoyed putting words in a row, and could’ve envisioned writing popular science books at some later time– but the way that came about is not anything I planned, or even would’ve been able to guess at.

But of course, the same is almost certainly true for just about everyone. The former student who’s giving career advice today is on our speaker list precisely because he’s gone through career shifts that probably seem at least as random as anything in my CV. I suspect that people who make a detailed plan for what they’re going to do at a relatively young age and follow it through in a coherent way are a very rare exception. Most of us are just going from one weird thing to another.

On some level, I guess that makes it less weird to be thinking about all this random stuff as a “career.” It doesn’t make it any easier to pull it together into some coherent message to deliver to others, though… I’m looking forward to seeing how today’s distinguished alumnus deals with that challenge, and not so much looking forward to needing to do it myself a month or so hence.

Last week, Derek Muller of Veritasium, who makes some awesome physics-y outreach videos, took to his secondary channel to complain about social media:

Coincidentally, I had heard a lot of anti-social-media talk the previous week at the annual Renaissance Weekend event, so I was thinking a bit about this. And Muller’s video nicely encapsulates a couple of the things that bug me about the genre, so it’s a reasonable jumping-off point for talking a bit about why I find these anti-social-media posts more annoying than helpful.

There are basically two lines of argument in the video for why social media is a problem, the first of which is that what you see from friends and acquaintances is a curated slice of their actual lives, chosen to project a particular image. I don’t disagree with that at all, as a statement of fact– outside of a handful of people who are totally committed to documenting absolutely everything they do, everybody on social media is deliberately projecting a particular image as a deliberate choice.

The problem I have with this as an anti-social-media argument is that this isn’t anything new. Everybody does this all the time, in person just as much as online. We choose our clothes, our accessories, our conversation topics to project an image of ourselves as we would like others to see us, and try to hide the things we’d rather not have everyone else know. All that social media is really doing is making the artifice unmistakable– it’s not the media part of “social media” that makes this happen, it’s the “social.” We curate a public image on social media because projecting a particular chosen image is what people do when interacting socially.

The second line of argument is the common complaint about people with phones not being sufficiently “in the moment” of whatever they’re experiencing, because they’re too busy trying to find the angle for the perfect selfie to post to Snapface or whatever. I have two issues with this, the first of which is pretty much the same as with the first line, namely that this is actually a social phenomenon, and nothing new.

Muller implicitly acknowledges this when citing a Kahnemann piece about photographs and memories, which was written before ubiquitous cell phones and social media. But having done a lot of solo tourism in a lot of places over the years, I can assure you that this kind of thing has been going on for decades– the absolute number of people taking photos may have increased thanks to the rise of smartphone cameras, but twenty years ago when I was in Japan, you’d see huge lines of people at major tourist sites waiting to get their picture taken in just the right place.

But the other thing to notice about this is the behavior of groups of people who aren’t on their phones all the time. You’ll most likely see that they’re not focused on their surroundings, either, but on each other. That’s because most people are social by nature, and like to experience things as a group.

And that’s a huge part of the selfie-snapping thing– the phones are a way to expand the group experience beyond those who are physically present. People who are taking photos and videos for social media are doing it to include their friend groups in the (curated) experience, and the comments and likes they get are an extension of the social chatter you get among groups. When I’ve been to cool places with family and groups of kids, the people are an essential part of things: the look on my kids’ faces at seeing a humpback whale dive, or the ridiculous joke a friend told on a tour that became a part of our repertoire of cryptic inside references, or the giant water fight my uncle initiated back in the early 80’s at Zion National Park. In a lot of cases, I remember some of those social human moments more clearly and fondly than the external experience we were there to share.

And that kind of brings it around to the other piece of this second argument that gets up my nose, which is that it’s essentially policing the aesthetic experience of others. It depends on the idea that there’s some ineffable authentic quality to an experience that can only be appreciated through total concentration. If you’re thinking about camera angles, or friends on the Internet, you’re Doing It Wrong.

Now, I’m not denying that putting the phone away and concentrating on being “in the moment” is a different aesthetic experience, and one many people find preferable. But ultimately, like all aesthetic matters, it’s a highly subjective and personal phenomenon. If people derive enjoyment from the social aspect of sharing their experiences, good for them. It’s really not my business to correct them.

When you get down to it, I even question the fundamental premise that the act of taking photos for social media is necessarily something that detracts from an experience. As anyone who follows me on social media knows, I take a lot of photos, and I’ve actually found that I observe a lot of things more carefully as a result, and enjoy some things that otherwise would be kind of bland. Looking for just the right shot, and how to frame and capture some piece of what I’m doing is an enjoyable process for me, and heightens my appreciation of what I’m doing more than it distracts from it.

That’s not to say there aren’t issues with social media, as a whole– there are huge issues with managing the scale of these mediated long-distance contacts, and with abusive behavior. But I don’t find these specific arguments against social media especially compelling– the behaviors in question really aren’t anything new, just perfectly normal human social activity.

There’s been a good deal of buzz about the results of a recently complete round of proposals for Hubble telescope observations, which used a double-blind process where the reviewers got science proposals without information that would identify who made the proposal. The headline result of this was that the approval rate for proposals with female PI’s (8.7%) was equal to that for proposals with male PI’s (8.0%). This is in stark contrast to the previous round where those fractions were 13% and 24%, respectively. This is a striking enough change that even political pundits took note.

The basics of this have been well covered by people actually in astronomy, but here are some miscellaneous thoughts as an outsider to the process:

— First, the obligatory note that these acceptance rates are sucktastic– parity at an 8% funding rate is only like a cheer-and-a-half scenario. There was something weird about the timing of these, though, and the number of submitted proposals this round is way higher than the previous, so maybe that’s a one-time downward fluctuation.

— Second, while the acceptance rates were equal, the raw numbers were still very unequal– 12 approved proposals with female PI’s vs. 28 with male PI’s. This reflects a big difference in the number of submissions, which in turn reflects the demographics of the field as a whole.

— A aspect of this that I haven’t seen discussed is this bit from the description of what they did:

In response to the key concern raised by the community, adding a (non-anonymized) “Team Expertise and Background” section, to be made available after the final ranking, to allow the TAC to assess whether the proposal team would be capable of executing the proposed investigation. If there were clear, sufficient deficiencies, the panel could flag a proposal for disqualification; panels would not have the option of recommending replacement proposals.

I find this aspect interesting, for reasons I’ll get into in the next point, but there isn’t any discussion in the presentation of results about whether this came into play at all. That would be interesting information to have, to see whether there were proposals whose idea seemed good that were deemed unfeasible for the particular PI’s, and whether there were any patterns to those.

(You could easily imagine a gender difference in either direction for background-based decisions. Unblinding might lead a biased committee to rate some female PI’s as less able to carry out the work, or it might reveal some overconfident male PI’s who proposed stuff they really don’t have the background for. I suspect the “no replacement” clause keeps the number of rejections on this basis low, though, possibly even zero.)

— I find the “Expertise and Background” part interesting, because when I think about whether double-blind review could work in my own field, that’s the biggest sticking point. This, I think, reflects a big difference in the way research is done in astronomy versus experimental AMO physics. I suspect expertise and background looms larger in experimental AMO.

From the outside, this looks very much like a “user facility” sort of deal– that is, the proposals in question are requests for acquisition of and access to data from a common instrument. The proposers don’t need to know directly how to work the Hubble, just how to do image processing and analysis with a fairly standard set of tools. In this case, past experience will play a smallish role– it’s probably not trivial for someone with a background in, say, radio astronomy to move to analyzing Hubble images, but someone who has only worked with images from Kitt Peak in the past probably won’t have much of an adjustment.

The corner of physics I work in, on the other hand, deals with unique apparatus– labs are local things, where the PI and students build a system custom-designed to study a particular problem. Because of that, past experience is going to be a bigger factor. I once heard Wolfgang Ketterle asked whether it was difficult to make a Bose-Einstein Condensate, to which he replied (paraphrasing slightly) “That depends on whether you’ve made one before.” There are a lot of tricky bits to the process, and it’s easy to get hung up along the way. Having done it once, though, you’ll know where the biggest pitfalls are, and the second time will go more smoothly.

A proposal for an experiment that calls for making a BEC and hitting it with a pulsed laser, then, will read as much more feasible if the PI has past experience working in labs that have made BECs and used pulsed lasers. Someone who has done neither of those things might have a great idea for an experiment, but it’s not at all clear that they’ll be able to pull it off in a timely manner.

So, when I think about the possibility of double-blind review for experimental AMO physics, the need to assess the past experience of the PI’s is a big issue. This two-stage process seems like a work-around with some promise, though: assess the quality of the scientific idea first, then go back and look at the backgrounds to check for feasibility after you’ve identified the most promising of the ideas. But, again, I’d be curious to see how much this came into play in the astronomy case, where background seems a less significant factor.

— That said, double-blinding seems more immediately applicable to physics fields that already work in a “user facility” sort of mode, such as particle and nuclear and some parts of condensed matter. I don’t know a great deal about how those fields allocate their resources, but I hope people who do take a good look at this, and strongly consider implementing something similar.

— I’ve wondered in the past about the possibility of doing gender-blinded faculty searches, and will file this away as something to use the next time we need to make a case for this kind of thing. (Which I hope to God won’t be for a few years yet, because I’ve been on more than enough faculty searches already…)

In the end, I think this is a book about marketing.

Of course, there’s a lot that could mean. As a book of argumentative nonfiction, it is of course trying to sell a number of things, not least the idea that Bruno Latour is smarter than you are. It is also a work that is itself extensively marketed, though things like the New York Times piece that prompted an earlier blog post as offering a transformative vision of new philosophical view of the world.

But in the end, I think it’s about marketing, in the sense of offering strategies for shaping words to sell people on a particular thing or course of action.

That probably seems awfully reductive for such a sweepingly grandiose book, full of footnotes and semi-obscure scholarly references. It takes as its subject the entire world, and posits the need for a comprehensive re-orientation of philosophy and politics and science to confront the “New Climatic Regime,” one of a host of phrases rendered proper nouns so as to freight them with greater importance and imply meanings that are subtly different from their common usage. It’s full of talk of the Local and the Global and the Terrestrial and the view of Moderns, not to mention hyphenated phrases (nature-universe, nature-as-process) and quasi-scientific diagrams and italicized words beyond numbering.

(As I noted on Twitter while reading it, this is loaded with writing tics that I recognize as crazy-person signifiers from Usenet in the 1990’s. I find sentences with lots of emphasized words to be wildly distracting because they remind me of Archimedes Plutonium and others of that ilk.)

So, why do I say that such a grand edifice can be dismissed as something as mundane as marketing? Because of its discussion of science.

Now, to be sure, I have some skin in the metaphorical game when the topic turns to science, and Latour does a number of things to get under that skin. He airily dismisses as immaterial any science that isn’t immediately concerned with the “Critical Zone,” the habitable portions of the Earth, which does little to endear him to an atomic physicist. He writes at length about how science attempts to take an impossible objective stance: “Everything has to be viewed as if from Sirius– a Sirius of the imagination, to which no one has ever had access.” (p.68) A good many of these references to the “view from Sirius” read as contemptuous, but maybe that’s just because he’s French.

At the crucial point of the argument as it pertains to science, though, I think there are clues that the whole enterprise only makes sense as a piece of and a guide to marketing. That is, his discussion of the scientific enterprise is flawed in ways that suggest he’s not really talking about science as it exists, but about public discourse about science.

Take, for example, the bit that immediately follows the Sirius sentence quoted above, also on pg 68:

Furthermore, this promotion of the Earth as a planet that has become part of the infinite universe, a body among bodies, has the disadvantage of limiting to just a few movements– at the beginning of the scientific revolution, to just one: the falling of bodies– the whole gamut of movements grasped by the positive sciences.

Yet on the Earth seen from the inside, there are many other forms of movements that have become harder and harder to take into account. Little by little, it has become more cumbersome to gain objective knowledge about a whole range of transformations: genesis, birth, growth, life, death, decay, metamorphoses.

As someone seeing science from the inside (albeit not as one who studies the “Critical Zone,” so maybe I don’t count as in insider…), this seems spectacularly wrong, or at least wildly out of date. It’s arguably true that, say, forty or fifty years ago we were restricted to laboriously studying only the simplest sorts of processes, but I don’t think that’s true now. On the contrary, I think that the advance of technology in any number of fields has vastly increased the rate of knowledge acquisition in science, and the complexity of the processes that can be studied. A huge portion of current work in the life sciences is concerned not with mechanistic description of incredibly simple idealized systems, but with the rich and complex interactions between the enormous number of factors that come into play in real systems.

I think he also stumbles a few pages later, in making a contrast between a “Galileian” picture of simple objects obeying simple rules and a “Lovelockian” picture that attributes agency to collective entities making up the biosphere. On page 77, he writes:

With Galileian objects as the model, we can indeed take nature as a “resource to exploit,” but with Lovelockian agents, it is useless to nurture illusions. Lovelock’s objects have agency, they are going to react– first chemically, biochemically, geologically– and it would be naive to believe that they are going to remain inert no matter how much pressure is put on them.

[…] The conflict can be summarized simply: there are those who continue to look at things from the vantage point of Sirius and simply do not see that the earth system reacts to human action, or do not believe it possible; they still hope that the Earth will mysteriously be beamed to Sirius and become one planet among others. Basically, they do not believe that there is life on Earth capable of suffering and reacting. And there are those who seek, while keeping a firm grip on the sciences, to understand what is meant by distributing action, animation, the power to act, all along the causal chains in which they find themselves entangled.

Again, if this is to be taken as referring to science and scientists, it seems to me to be incredibly wrong. It basically waves off something like fifty years worth of environmental and ecological science, which since the late 1960’s has been heavily invested in investigating just exactly how “the earth system reacts to human action.” I doubt you could find a working scientist studying the “Critical Zone” (which is, after all, the only area that matters…) who espouses anything close to the naive view he’s suggesting is common.

So what is the real point? I think the key bit comes between the pages quoted above, on page 73:

No progress will be made toward a “politics of nature” as long as the same term is used to designate, for example, research into terrestrial magnetism, the classification of the 3,500 exoplanets that have been spotted to date, the detection of gravitational waves, the role of earthworms in soil aeration, the reaction of shepherds in the Pyrenees to the reintroduction of bears, or the reaction of bacteria in our intestines to our latest gastronomic overindulgence. That nature is a real catch-all.

There is no point in looking any further for the slow pace of mobilizations in favor of nature-as-universe. It is completely incapable of churning anything political. To make that type of beings– the Galileian objects– the model for what is going to mobilize us in geo-social conflicts is to court failure. Trying to mobilize that nature in class conflicts is like getting ready to go out on a protest march by stepping into concrete.

This, I think, makes clear that the issue is nothing to do with the process or practice of science, but with its rhetoric. That is, the problem isn’t really that scientists with our view-from-Sirius are doing science wrong, it’s that we’re talking about it in ineffective ways.

The real problem, in this analysis, isn’t internal to science, it’s in science’s interaction with the world of politics and policy. The Lovelockian view of natural systems as agents that respond to human activity isn’t a transformation in the way scientists pose and answer questions, it’s a transformation in the rhetoric that should be used to talk about them. People in general, and in particular the people who drive decision-making, aren’t inspired by sterile talk of simple systems and rules, but might be moved to action by talk of species and ecosystems as conscious agents capable of suffering and responding.

In other words, it’s about marketing.

Reading the book in that light makes a lot of the talk about science make more sense– it’s not really about science, it’s about how science is talked about. It’s also something of a relief, because otherwise it’s extremely difficult to see what concrete practices of science would be changed by thinking about policy as a negotiation between some wide range of “agents” that includes both various groups of humans and also ecosystems. The “Lovelockian” approach is tricky to parse at best, and mystical mumbo-jumbo at worst, but it’s not necessary to apply it to doing science.

In practical terms, the science of the “Critical Zone” can continue more or less as it has been for the last several decades– studying the complex interactions of species and systems making up the environment. The responses of the individual components can be studied with the same tools and physical laws as are already being used with great effectiveness. When it comes to stirring action, though, the language of agency is simply more effective. Re-casting policymaking in terms of a negotiation between agents doesn’t require different input in terms of practical science– it’s still a matter of measuring “If we change these things in this manner, this is what happens”– but the way to talk about those inputs changes.

If that sounds disappointingly less than radically transformative, well, yeah. That was pretty much my reaction when this interpretation clicked– it seemed like a lot less than what was suggested by the cover copy and the claims internal to the text. But then, that’s marketing for you.