How We Navigate Crowded Spaces

The Economist has a fascinating story (here) about how humans (or "particles with a will") maneuver in groups on more or less crowded sidewalks, concourses, etc. Coincidentally, the story also describes how the pathology of religious fervor (ideology) undermines social norms that coordinate individuals' movement in crowded spaces.

Max Weber Biography

I'm halfway through the English translation of Joachim Radkau's recent biography of the great Greman social scientist Max Weber (Polity 2009), but I'm not sure I'll make it to the finish. Much of the book is excellent, but the author has too much of a taste for psycho-biography for my liking. His various surmises and speculations relating to Weber's lifelong struggles with depression, relationship with his mother (did she, rather than a hired nurse, beat him as a child?), preoccupation with nocturnal emissions, and the breakdown that interrupted his career, tell us as much or more, I think, about Radkau than about Weber.

Studying Climate Change Impacts on Snowmelt-dependent Agricultural Systems in the Western US and Kenya

The NSF recently approved $1.2 million in funding for the project, on which I am a co-principal investigator, along with IU colleagues Elinor Ostrom and Tom Evans, plus Krister Andersson from Colorado and Kelly Caylor from Princeton. The IU News release on the award is here. I hope to learn a lot working with this terrific group of  natural and social scientists, and expect that our study will be valuable for thinking ahead about (re)structuring water allocation institutions in the face of changing environmental circumstances.

Dawkins on Perry and the Dangers of Scientific Illiteracy in Politics

Richard Dawkins has a wonderful column in today's Washington Post (here). I especially like his suggestion that the strength of a scientific theory can be measured as a ratio of the number of facts about the world it explains divided by the number (and, I would add, size and scope*) of assumptions required to explain those facts. "A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory." Notable examples of such "bad theories" are creationism and intelligent design.

By the way, Dawkins' definition of "bad theory" should also have application in the social sciences. For example, the "findings" of economic studies, especially those based on formal models, too often depend entirely on initial assumptions.

The entire column is both instructive and entertaining.

*Merely assessing the ratio of number of assumptions per number of facts explained would actually seem to favor the God hypothesis. After all, it requires only a single assumption: a self-motivating, omnipotent God. And it can explain (if only poorly) every fact in existence. Dawkins makes clear in his op-ed, however, that it is not just the number of assumptions that matters, but their size, scope and plausibility, given facts we already know.

Tim Harford on "Trial, Error, and the God Complex"

From TED:



Hat tip: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Pressing Issues in the Social Sciences

Last April, Harvard held a conference on that issue with contributions from economists, political scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. You can view videos of all the sessions here, and a summary of the conference results here.

That conference was followed in August by an ambitious, but not yet completed, National Science Foundation (NSF) project to assess  the most important research questions in the social, behavioral and economic sciences over the next decade (see here). The Nature article, discussed below, indicates that the NSF issued a final report on its agenda-setting project last week, but I am unable to find it on the NSF website or from any other source.

The February 2, 2011 issue of Nature includes an article on biggest challenges in the social sciences, with a list of the top-ten problems here. Those problems, in order, are:

1. How can we induce people to look after their health?
2. How do societies create effective and resilient institutions, such as governments?
3. How can humanity increase its collective wisdom?
4. How do we reduce the ‘skill gap’ between black and white people in America?
5. How can we aggregate information possessed by individuals to make the best decisions?
6. How can we understand the human capacity to create and articulate knowledge?
7. Why do so many female workers still earn less than male workers?
8. How and why does the ‘social’ become ‘biological’?
9. How can we be robust against ‘black swans’ — rare events that have extreme consequences?
10. Why do social processes, in particular civil violence, either persist over time or suddenly change?

What strikes me about all this, as a legal scholar, are the myriad legal aspects and implications of many of the research questions. It is about time that (a) legal scholars recognized that they are social scientists (whether they like it or not), and (b) other social scientists recognized that legal scholars have special expertise that bears on several of the issues that are greatest interest to them.

What the Climategate E-mails Tell Us about Communication in the Sciences

A very interesting study by Marianne Ryghaug and Tomas Moe Skølsvold in the September 2010 issue of International Studies in the Philosophy of Science treats the Climategate non-scandal as an example of how scientists communicate with one another on complex and controversial issues. Access to the full article (here) requires a subscription, but here is the abstract:

This article analyses 1,073 e-mails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed 'Climategate', indicating that the e-mails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyse them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of science and technology studies, the e-mails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as 'written conversation' the e-mails provide information about processes of consensus formation through 'agonistic evaluations' of other scientists' work and persuasion of others to support one's own work. Also, the e-mails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus-forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade-long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

Hat tip: RealClimate.org

Wagner, Fisher and Pascual on the Use of Models in Environmental Policy

Liz Fisher (Oxford), Wendy Wagner (Texas), and Pasky Pascual (US EPA) have recently published two articles on the use and abuse of scientific and social-scientific models in environmental policy.

E. Fisher, P. Pascual, and W. Wagner, "Understanding Environmental Models in Their Legal and Regulatory Context," Journal of Environmental Law 22(2):251-283 (2010).

Environmental models are playing an increasingly important role in most jurisdictions and giving rise to disputes. Despite this fact, lawyers and policy-makers have overlooked models and not engaged critically with them. This is a problematic state of affairs. Modelling is a semi-autonomous, interdisciplinary activity concerned with developing representations of systems and is used to evaluate regulatory behaviour to ensure it is legitimate. Models are thus relevant to lawyers and policy-makers but need to be engaged with critically due to technical, institutional, interdisciplinary, and evaluative complexities in their operation. Lawyers and policy-makers must thus think more carefully about models and in doing so reflect on the nature of their own disciplines and fields.

W. Wagner, E. Fischer and P. Pascual, "Misunderstanding Models in Environmental and Public Health Regulation," N.Y.U. Environmental Law Journal 18:293-356 (2010).

Computational models are fundamental to environmental regulation, yet their capabilities tend to be misunderstood by policymakers. Rather than rely on models to illuminate dynamic and uncertain relationships in natural settings, policymakers too often use models as "answer machines." This fundamental misperception that models can generate decisive facts leads to a perverse negative feedback loop that begins with policymaking itself and radiates into the science of modeling and into regulatory deliberations where participants can exploit the misunderstanding in strategic ways. This paper documents the pervasive misperception of models as truth machines in U.S. regulation and the multi-layered problems that result from this misunderstanding. The paper concludes with a series of proposals for making better use of models in environmental policy analysis.

These two excellent articles underscore a point that I have been arguing for a long time: legal scholars and lawyers must approach law-making and law-enforcement processes more like social scientists. This is true not only for administrative processes, such as environmental law-making, but for constitutional interpretation and common-law judging as well. Judges (as judges) rarely, if ever, engage in formal model-building as they seek to "discover" common-law rules and decide cases, but that hardly means they work without models, which, sometimes at least, can be inferred from their decisions. Ultimately, to understand the law, one must try, at least, to understand the models (formal or informal, shared or idiosyncratic) of the participants in law-making and law-enforcement processes.

Experiments with Law

An interesting article in today's Boston Globe (here) promotes Yale Law Professor Ian Ayre's idea to test laws experimentally on a randomized sample population to gauge the effects prior to applying them to the broader population. Doing so would almost certainly result in the improvement of legal rules (except for the many occasions when legislators enact laws as signaling devices with little concern for actual legal outcomes).

The article addresses some of the interesting and important questions raised by Ayre's suggestion, including how such a social-scientific approach to law-making would comport with the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. If an individual is selected to participate in a random sample of the population to pay a tax rate higher than other, similarly situated individuals are required to pay, would that not be unconstitutional?

A Visual Demonstration of Improvements in Per Capita Income and Public Health Over 200 Years

Public Health expert Hans Rosling, on the BBC program "Joy of Stats," provides a stunning visual depiction of how public health has improved along with per capita income (in virtually all countries) over the past 200 years.



Hat tip: Bob Kleinops and LiveScience.com