Muppet Trolling (a comments & tweets post)

Last night I took my two older children to the local library to watch the "The Muppets (2011)."  The fact that this movie receives a 95% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes only proves that kids in this age range do not (yet) vote online. For while I was sitting in the corner cracking up at the regurgitated skits from my youth, the kids in the audience sat in singular silence.  


This experience gave me two thoughts. The first was about the movie's implicit joke -- that its intended audience were the adults. Consider the obvious: there were 0 identifiable kid characters; the timeline was about the Muppet generation 30 years hence; the audience for the "telethon" were overwhelmingly adults (most looking like they were on the back end of a beloved date night where going to Muppets theatre somehow trumps other more intimate acts).

This movie experience also reminded me of my never published post on science, trolls, and social media. Have you ever seen a Muppet Troll?

http://senorgif.memebase.com/2011/08/04/funny-gifs-statler-and-waldorf-muppet-trolls/

A while back a Muppet Troll got past the moderators at astrobetter on a  post entitled, "What's our Greatest Weakness," which asked what could be changed to improve the culture of astronomy.  Quite naturally this post precipitated a wide ranging comment stream, covering topics from the overproduction of PhDs to software skill to the work/life problems that come from the extant academic pipeline.  Late in the stream the troll struck at the apparent willingness of so many astronomers to take the time to read and respond to this post.

statlerandwardoff:  "People blog and think the social media is the end-all, but you know what? That comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

It was a Saturday afternoon, most of the kids were napping, and this kind of thing gets my blood up. So I submitted a reply...writing as Fozzie Bear...which naturally alerted the moderator that something was amiss.   Although the original troll was taken down, and my trollish reply was not permitted, I considered the prose worth keeping and posting somewhere else. Why? Because I hear the troll's sentiment expressed over and over again in real and virtual spaces whenever we try and/or convince scientists to talk about cultural change.

Talking about cultural change is hard. We might try to tackle the problem by focusing on generational divides, such as those reflected in either the intended audience of the Muppets or in the choice of two old white dudes as trolls. Certainly, abstractions of generational divides along side other variables like gender expression might let us understand cultural tensions a bit better: consider the two posts on the Committee on the Study of Women in Astronomy blog about "Women versus Women" that clearly pivot on generational (and gendered) divides.    

Nevertheless, assuming only "age" as a means to unpack the troll's sentiment is, I think, probably going to fail to make accurate predictions about how folks at different stages of their careers feel about defining what constitutes "doing science." I make this hypothesis by asserting that the academy is currently built upon a guild model for training.  A guild has a training model that resists adaptation in part by allowing, in this case, notions of scientific value to be imbued to subsequent generations without adaptation or test. The trainee or apprentice is insulated from testing the bounds of scientific value by knowing that maintaining the status quo will lead them to a higher place in the guild structure. 

I will save working through the concept of the academic guild for another post. Instead I simply wanted to point out that we may not safely assume that either the troll or his message reflect an older generation with antiquated values about "doing science."   Instead I will simply end with my never published astrobetter Fozzie Bear comment, shared with the hope that perhaps some of my silly replies will provide useful retorts for myself or others.  Consider the format of this post as a riff on Shouts & Murmurs from the New Yorker. Except in the blogosphere, maybe it should be called "Comments & Tweets".

Comments and tweets about doing whatever it is that doing science is:

Statler and Wardoff:  "People blog and think the social media is the end-all, but you know what? That comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Dr. Honeydew: "People write papers and think that communicating their science is the end-all, but you know what? That LaTeXing and formating and figure-making all comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Rowlf the Dog:  "People collect data and think that managing and preserving that data are the end-all, but you know what? That work with metadata and standards comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Beaker: "Meep meh meh eh meep meh meep meep oh meep meep, erp meep meh meep? That meep meh meeping comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Kermit: "People have spouses and even children and think that social relationships are the end-all, but you know what? That procreating and living come out of time that one could actually be doing science."

The Swedish Chef: "Peuple-a spend teeme-a cuukeeng und ieteeng und theenk thet celureec inteke-a zee ind ell be-a ell boot, yuoo knoo vhet? Seteesffying thet beseec hoomun need cumes oooot ooff teeme-a thet oone-a cuoold ectooelly be-a dueeng sceeence-a." (see also Google, Bork)

Elmo: "People sleep and think that suspended sensory activity is the end-all, but you know what? That dreaming and resting time comes out of time that one could actually be doing science."

Cookie Monster:  "Me eat cookies and think that, graargh, large doses of cookies be the end-all, but you know what? That cookie eating time comes out of time that one could actually be eating MORE cookies. OM-NOM-NOM-NOM..."

Wocka wocka wocka!

on open science and anonymous peer review

I recently participated in a Facebook discussion about the Scientific American article by Mary Carmichael: All Together Now: Scientists Take Peer Review Public  The discussion took place behind the doors of a closed FB group and was posed next to the question: "So is this Open Science?" 

Is public peer review open science?  I found myself drawn to the question of who constitutes the public audience and whether or not the "public" (whoever they might be) passively observed or actively participated in the publication review.  I was somewhat surprised that the gist of the subsequent comments focused on the role that anonymity plays in peer review; the question of who is this public was addressed only to express concern that an active audience would provide something other than the civil, "evidence based" review provided by anonymous peers moderated by activist editors. 

I've come to realize that its probably a bit hard to think about the ramifications of open public peer review because one giant issue consumes everyones thinking.  The core argument for anonymity is pretty simple:  anonymity insulates the scientific culture from the friction (aka 'static')  produced in open debate.  The argument moves serially to assert that anonymity is necessary to protect junior scientists from retribution by senior authors, whether that retribution be by exclusion or through subsequently negative peer review behind the closed doors of job evaluations or well, behind the anonymity of peer review.  This reasoning has certainly been repeated elsewhere, probably like the passing of an oral history, and most recently observed by me in the comments (e.g.) on Peter Coles post / poll about peer review. 

Holy cow. Look, I have no idea if the stupid mistakes I've made as an open peer reviewer are viewed that much worse by the offended authors than the stupid mistakes I've made in my papers. What I do know is that the intellectual contributions I've made to papers as its anonymous reviewer have yielded exactly ZERO career benefit compared to the papers I've written. 

Anyway if you've been able to listen to me past the whine then you've come to the point of my post, which is that I wanted to reproduce some of my FB comments here.  I'm asserting that the issue is not about absolutist (or even pragmatic) approaches to the current culture (where apparently retribution is an assumed behavior) but about changing the culture...

This argument is about culture and cultural norms. Cultures rarely change overnight so we can't very well ask that we drop anonymous peer review in favor of something else for some of the very reasons that you mention -- the current culture does not support it.

Open science is about acting to change current cultural norms and create new ones. These people [in the SA article] are acting this way for this reason; they aren't asking you to do so. They are acting to change the current culture where a senior scientist can destroy [behind closed doors] another scientist over valid disagreements, where overloaded editors are incapable of scientifically brokering referee/author debates, where reviewers get zero attribution for hours or days of effort put into peer reviewing of a paper, and where arbitrary actions by gatekeeper journals sculpt science in an unaccountable way. There are other things that they are trying to change that we haven't even mentioned: a culture that does not value or recognize public engagement through education and public outreach, a culture where data are wasted due to negative or unclear results..

And create new ones: time and time again "communities" have shown themselves capable of crafting expected norms of behavior and this is exactly what happens in science blog comments and forums. The "new articles comments" get winnowed away by a community that does not accept them.

Open science isn't trying to recreate the journal system either although they each believe in improving science through peer action. The journal system is what it is albeit one that exists entirely on the backs of unpaid, uncredited reviewers. Open science is proposing to create new systems (on the backs of unpaid, uncredited actors) that may also improve scientific communication and collaboration. The fact that the "rest of us" can see into the process is another important but also distinct goal.