Predictably Irrational, a forthcoming book by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT, tells about an experiment done to learn how sexual arousal influences decision making. The experiment involved showing pornography to male undergraduates while they masturbated.

Before allowing the research to begin, Dean Richard Schmalensee assigned a committee, consisting mostly of women [professors], to examine the project. This committee had several concerns. What if a participant uncovered repressed memories of sexual abuse? Suppose a participant found that he or she was a sex addict?

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov quotes a psychoanalytic textbook by Erich Fromm “used in American colleges, repeat, used in American colleges”:

The little cap of red velvet in the German edition of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation.

The narrator comments: “Do these clowns really believe what they teach?” Did the MIT professors really believe those outcomes were serious dangers?

For similar stories, see IRB Watch.

In 2003, Saul Sternberg and I published an article that claimed that some work by Ranjit Chandra, an Order-of-Canada-winning scientist, was unbelievable. You can learn more about the Chandra story here. In February, someone named Peter S. Morris made a long list of additions to the Ranjit Chandra entry in Wikipedia. The additions make Memorial University of Newfoundland, Chandra’s employer, look better. They include:

The vice-presidents [investigating a charge that Chandra had fabricated data] were unable to secure the data, and, as a consequence, were unable to verify research fraud conclusively.

What a statement. Not being able to “secure the data” is what you would expect if data were fabricated. Either the vice presidents were mentally retarded or this is false. The whistle blower who reported Chandra to Memorial, a nurse named Marilyn Harvey who had worked for Chandra, did so at considerable risk. That Memorial did a travesty of an investigation and failed to protect her is horrible — and now someone is lying about it.

A Peter Morris is Director of Public Affairs in the Division of Marketing and Communications at Memorial University.

My earlier post with this heading.

College students are often bored by lectures. With their laptops open in front of them, and WiFi, they can express this boredom in a new way. Professors are unhappy. I got an email about this problem from someone who tries to improve teaching at UC Berkeley. It included what he called “excellent suggestions”:

Tell students to keep their laptops closed unless they are doing an online task that you assigned.

Set specific objectives for them to accomplish in their in-class laptop assignments, and hold them accountable-e.g., randomly ask students or teams to report their progress to the entire class.

Set tight time limits for these assignments.

Design these assignments for pairs, triads, or quads. Aside from the likely learning benefits, group work will help keep the students on task, as students will not be able to agree on a renegade web site.

Walk around the room and stand in the back to monitor their screens during these assignments.

Have students bring their laptops to class only on certain days, and tell them explicitly not to bring them the other days.

Mark students absent for the day if you catch them at a renegade site.

“Will not be able to agree on a renegade web site” — from an ancient Chinese book of maxims, I suppose. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education shows that the problem is widespread.

Addendum: In response to this email, a professor replied:

Today one of my GSIs informed me that several students were looking at internet porn during lecture. This not only proved a distraction but made several people uncomfortable. The GSI warned the student to close the site immediately and tried to get the names of the students. Of course, the students declined to give their names and one even just simply left class rather than be reprimanded further. Now I am left with the unpleasant, but necessary, task of trying to track down these students.

Marc Andreessen is starting a series of posts of what I am sure will be excellent career advice. This is from the first:

I believe a huge part of what people would like to refer to as “career planning” is being continuously alert to opportunities that present themselves to you spontaneously, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time. . . . [for example:]

* Your former manager has jumped ship to a hot growth company and calls you three months later and says, come join me.

I am continually amazed at the number of people who are presented with an opportunity like one of the above, and pass. There’s your basic dividing line between the people who shoot up in their careers like a rocket ship, and those who don’t — right there.

A friend of mine worked at UC Berkeley with Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. One day he got a call from Joy: Want to join me at Sun? My friend would have been employee #5 — something like that. He said no. It was a huge mistake, just as Andreessen says.

On issues I care about, college presidents have a terrible record. After Margot O’Toole accused Imanishi-Kari of scientific misconduct, David Baltimore — later president of Rockefeller University and Caltech — stood by as O’Toole’s career was ruined. Both O’Toole and Imanishi-Kari were in Baltimore’s lab. I’m sure O’Toole was right; ink and digit analyses made it clear that Imanishi-Kari’s data was fake. The current Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, when he was head of the University of Toronto, stood by as a job offer to the psychiatrist David Healy was withdrawn because Healy had criticized drug companies. President of Reed College Colin Diver failed to grasp that what he strongly objected being done to him was what Reed professors did to their students every day. Axel Meisen, President of Memorial University, has allowed his university’s lawyers to defend the indefensible: Memorial failed to protect the nurse who tried to stop Ranjit Chandra. Henry Bienen, President of Northwestern University, allowed Lynn Conway and Deidre McCloskey to use the power of his university to punish Michael Bailey for saying something that Conway and McCloskey didn’t like.

I might have given Columbia University President Lee Bollinger credit for supporting free speech when the President of Iran spoke there a few days ago. But I won’t, because here is how Bollinger introduced him:

[long self-congratulation] . . . Let me now turn to Mr. Ahmadinejad. . . [long no-stone-unturned condemnation] . . . Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. . . . Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change? . . . You held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers. For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda. . . . When you have come to a place like this, this makes you, quite simply, ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . Because of this, and for many other reasons, your absurd comments . . . I close with this comment frankly and in all candor, Mr. President. I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions. . . . your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens . . . I am only a professor, who is also a university president.

Ugh. Ahmadinejad objected:

In Iran, tradition requires that when we demand a person . . . to be a speaker, we actually respect [the audience] by allowing them to make their own judgment, and we don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given . . . to provide vaccination.

Bollinger did not understand that freedom of speech means nothing unless you listen to those allowed to speak.

Addendum: Bollinger, a former Law School professor, teaches a class on freedom of speech. At the next meeting of this class, shortly after the remarks I quote above, “ the students erupted in cheers.”

The present system of working for examinations by students is one which is doing a great deal of harm in every way.

From a 1883 letter by J. S. Haldane to his mother.

In a recent post I described an amazingly influential class on epidemiology taught by Leonard Syme, a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Andrew Gelman (”inspiring”) and Matthew Henty (”THIS is how to learn”) were impressed. To find out more about the class, I asked Syme a few questions:

1. What gave you the idea of teaching the course this way?

I was struck by the fact that we can’t do classic experiments in epidemiology. We can’t assign one randomly selected group of babies to be smokers for the rest of their lives and another random group to refrain. Instead, we have to study people as we find them (in religious groups, in jobs, in various locations, marital statuses, etc) and then try to statistically adjust for the things we think might be confounders. In general, we end with evidence that is not very good and the burden on us is to assess the data very, very carefully. I have defined epidemiology as the the activity of evaluating lousy data as best we can. The class merely illustrated this issue. The theme of the class was how can so many bright and caring people come to such different conclusions looking at basically the same data. The lesson was that we really needed to be clear about our biases and expectations and that we needed to think about the data as carefully as possible. I thought the class should have been called “The Sociology of Knowledge”.

2. What were a few of the accepted ideas that you covered?

a. Everyone knew that high fat diets were related to serum lipids and coronary heart disease. The data then (and now) do not support that belief.

b. Everyone knew that the surgical treatment of breast cancer required radical surgery. There was a rumor that lumpectomy would do as good a job but few people believed that. The evidence showed that a more limited procedure was just as good.

c. Some people had been calling for research on the relationship between race and IQ. Majority scholars argued that no good could come from such research and they were refusing to fund such work. How do we decide what is worth studying? Because there might be harm?

d. A major national clinical trial on the treatment of diabetes showed no results but it turned out the randomization procedures were seriously flawed. People in the treated group consistently had higher risk factors to begin with and this doomed the trial. How do we take account of the fact that randomization is a method and not a result. Unbalanced randomization results will occur with a
predictable regularity. This study led to the idea of stratification in sampling.

e. Everyone knew that multiphasic screening was good to do. It detected disease early. The evidence did not support this. The evidence showed that early detection means you live longer with the disease but you still die on Thursday morning at 10 AM. You just knew about it longer.

There were 10 sessions like this. Three hours each! Students (n = 15-20) had to read hundreds of pages each week and had to present their case with great frequency – probably 3 or 4 times during the semester. The only rule for presentations was that people could not summarize the papers. Everyone had already read everything and they had to get on with the argument.

3. How long did you teach the course? Did the course change over the years? If so, how?

I taught the course for 12 years. It changed each year only because I updated the literature on particular issues and because I found a new issue that I thought might be more interesting than one of the older topics. But the way in which the course was organized did not change.

4. Apart from lots of epidemiology, what did you learn from teaching the course? For example, did you learn anything about teaching?

I’m not sure. As a teacher, my emphasis has always been on challenging people to think hard about issues. My favorite definition of a good book is one that forces you to do your own thinking. When I lecture, I get very nervous when I see people taking notes. What are they writing? What I’m saying? Not good. Unless they are writing things down so that they can refute my points later on.

To my previous post about Gary Taubes’s NY Times article, Andrew Gelman adds that it is good to see public discussion of these issues. I agree. I also like seeing them raised in a dramatic context: Who’s right? Powerful people making serious mistakes. How will we know? Health at risk! That sort of thing.

Speaking of drama and epidemiology . . . For many years the introductory epidemiology class for graduate students in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health was taught by Leonard Syme. I learned about this class at party. I spoke to someone who had taken it and, as a result, had switched from public policy to epidemiology. Very impressive. I knew Syme slightly. I went to his office to learn more about how he had managed to influence someone so much. “Lots of students have said that,” he told me as I entered his office. Lots of students, after taking his class, had decided to become epidemiologists. The list included Michael Marmot, one of the most important epidemiologists in the world, who studies the social gradient in health — the tendency for the people at the top to be healthier than the people at the bottom, even after controlling for all sorts of things.

The class met once/week. Every week there was a new topic. For every topic Syme would assign a paper laying out the conventional wisdom — that high cholesterol causes heart disease, for example — plus three or four papers that cast doubt on that conclusion. I think he even had American Heart Association internal emails. Several students would present the material and then there would be debate — what’s to be believed? The debates were intense. If ever the students seemed to be reaching agreement, he would say something to derail it. “You know, there was a study that found . . . ”

Practically all classes make you think you know more at the end of them than you knew when they began. Practically all professors believe this is proper and good and cannot imagine anything else. With Syme’s class, the opposite happened: Your beliefs were undermined. You walked out knowing less than when you walked in. You had been sure that X causes Y; now you were unsure. At first, Syme said, many students found it hard to take. A three-hour debate with no resolution. They did not like the uncertainty that it produced. But eventually they got used to it.

The overall effect of Syme’s class was to make students think that epidemiology was important and difficult — even exciting. It was important because we really didn’t know the answers to big questions, like how to reduce heart disease; and it was difficult and exciting because the answers were not nearly as obvious as we had been told. This is why many students switched careers.

Marmot on Syme: “I have never come across anyone in the academic world who had quite the powerful influence on students that Syme did.” Nor have I. That meeting with Syme, about five years ago, was one of two conversations in my life that really taught me something about how to teach. I was the only person at Berkeley to ever ask him about his teaching, Syme said. What a pity.

Syme on how his research began.

Richard Blum, chairman of the UC Board of Regents, rescinded a speaking invitation to Larry Summers after some UC Davis faculty complained:

After a group of UC Davis women faculty began circulating a petition, UC regents rescinded an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, to speak at a board dinner Wednesday night in Sacramento. The dinner comes during the regents’ meeting at UCD next week. Summers gained notoriety for saying that innate differences between men and women could be a reason for under-representation of women in science, math and engineering. . . Professor Maureen Stanton, one of the petition organizers, was delighted by news of the change this morning, saying it’s “a move in the right direction.”

Northwestern University Provost Lawrence Dumas is responsible for allowing Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey to use his university’s considerable power to try to silence Michael Bailey. At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok calls the UC Regents’ action “shameful.” I agree.

Thanks to Matthew Pearson.