Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Two

Marie Snyder looking pensive next to a "wise old oak" in a photo provided by her.

The second part of our conversation digs a little deeper into the issues we covered in the first one.

Cloudwalking Owl · Is Gullibility A Question Of When You Were Born

At the end of the above clip Snyder talks about people who don't seem to want to learn how to think critically. I've heard the same thing myself from people, and I find it equally disheartening. For example, I've heard folks say things like "I don't have time to hear the details", "I don't care what you say---I know what I know!", "I'm not an expert---I'm just asking questions", etc. There are also people who let you know that they will go "nuclear" if you question their cherished assumptions---which means most of us will just "give up" trying to reason with them. 

All of these are strategies that people use to avoid being exposed to critiques of cherished beliefs. But I think that probably the most pernicious one is the way people tend to isolate into self-selected "filter bubbles". That label came about as a way of describing how artificial intelligence sorts people into groups on social media, but I think it has always been a problem. "Important" people separate themselves from "unimportant" ones. Rich people don't hobnob with the poor. Educated people don't have much to do with the people who have almost none. The issue is that this limits people's ability to get exposed to different points of view, which makes people comfortable in their misunderstanding. This can create huge problems for society because this self-selection process means that the people who make the decisions often haven't got a clue about how those choices impact others.   

I got a glimpse of this issue years ago when I was at a political conference and was out "pub hopping" with a politician who shall remain nameless. He is a good guy and would have made a great MP if he'd ever been elected. But we bumped into a third person in a wheelchair was begging. The two of them had a bit of conversation while I went off to do something else. When I got back and the two of us went on our way but I could tell that my compatriot was really surprised about something. He went on and on about how "with all the supports we have in our society---how could this guy end up begging on the street?" 

It dawned on me that this guy---who was moderately successful, but had worked hard for everything he had in life---simply had no experience with talking to people who have to live on a paltry government disability pension. He didn't lack sympathy, it was just that he didn't know how small the supports are and how hard it is to live on them. This got me wondering how many others who make decisions don't understand what they are doing to people they've never met.   

Cloudwalking Owl · Separating The Jewels From The Garbage

Snyder talks about the "pay to publish" scandals of various pseudo-academic journals that seem willing to print any sort of rubbish as long as people are willing to pony-up the money. In effect, a class of "vanity publishers" has come into existence for failed researchers who are seeking to pad their resume with articles that won't pass the peer-review sniff test. 

The complexity that I raise is that academic librarians are actually working very hard to create a culture where researchers all pay for the publication of their work. This is called "open-source" publishing. The idea is to create a system where the costs of publication are paid by the organizations funding research instead of by libraries, students, and, the general public.

Open-source publishing is a response to the scandalous way the free market has been strangling the free flow of information by charging outrageous subscription fees. In an article published in The Conversation in 2012, Justin Noirrie wrote the following about Harvard University's decision to support open-source academic publishing as opposed to the old for-profit system:

Subscription prices for online content from two publishers have increased by 145% over the past six years, far in excess of not only the consumer price index but also the higher education and the library price indices, the council said in its memorandum. The annual cost to the university for journals is now close to $3.75 million, which is more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the library acquired in 2010.

"Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands,” the council wrote.

It conceded that “scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive”, but said the publishing industry’s profit margins of 35% and more suggested that “the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

It's important that readers understand (dare I say it) the "complexity" that is intrinsic to the issues that Snyder and I are discussing. There are two different sets of conflicts that overlap somewhat---but not completely. 

First, there is the issue of "peer-reviewed" versus "non-peer reviewed". A non-peer review scientific paper is worthless because the casual reader can't tell if what they are reading is actually true or not. So almost by definition, a real scientific paper is peer reviewed. And a fake journal article is only of any value if they can cite it and the reader assumes that it has been authentically peer-reviewed. As various bloggers have shown, it is possible to make up a nonsense article, pay for it to be published in sketchy journals, and, have it pass a supposed peer review---which just shows that you simply cannot assume that any article from that journal was really peer reviewed. This is why Snyder says it's important to double-check every time someone quotes a supposed academic article that supports some sort of extreme claim.

Having written the above, there are also open-source journals that do honestly peer-review submissions. The difference from other reputable, traditionally-published publications is how they are funded. In the former, publishing the results of the trial is simply considered part of the cost of doing the experiments in the first place. This means that the editorial, web-hosting, profits, etc, get paid for by the researcher instead of the library. The added benefit is that because the costs get paid up front, there is much less pressure to raise revenue where-ever possible. And that means that the huge pay-wall costs that are imposed on people not affiliated with a university can also be reduced or eliminated. (Journalists often find that they simply cannot afford the ridiculous prices charged for downloading a single article. I usually balk at this myself. For example, there was one I found about 'spoofing' article rankings that I thought might be of interest---but unfortunately, it cost $37 to download, so I decided to 'do without'.)

It's important to understand these issues when you think about what Marie Snyder is saying. It is true that there is a problem with pay-to-publish in fake academic journals. But the answer isn't to avoid open source publishing---which is exploding in popularity because capitalism got its dirty claws on scholarly publishing and was quickly pricing it out of existence. Instead, the real issue is that people aren't making the effort to distinguish between real and fake open-source journals. And this takes us back to the "curators" that Snyder suggests are so important.

Ben Goldacre, from FaceBook

Another thing that needs saying is that even if you read an article in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal there are problems that you should know about. Ben Goldacre has written a book about one particular one: cherry-picking what research you publish on the basis of whether or not they support the hypotheses of the people paying the bills. 

In a nutshell, he makes the point that researchers working for big pharma have a tendency to not publish the results of experiments where their drugs don't work the way they are supposed to. In the first chapter of his book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients he explains---in terms a well-educated lay person can understand---how this happens, how widespread it is, and, why it is such a terrible problem for doctors like him when they want to prescribe medication for their patients.

Teresa Tam, Wiki Media Commons

All of this isn't to say that people should not be willing to believe peer-reviewed articles. It just means that this belief should be provisional. This is an important point that people often don't "get" about science. When Teresa Tam originally suggested that ordinary Canadians shouldn't be wearing masks, she did so working from a set of assumptions and current best understanding. When these changed, she started recommending things like home-made, old-fashioned cloth "surgical" masks. Then, as more information came in, she suggested that it was a very good idea to start wearing three-layer masks with one layer being polypropylene. And later on after that, it was recommended that another cloth mask be added on top of the three-layer to add extra protection.

I've read that some people get angry about the fact that Dr. Tam can't seem "to get things straight". But these people don't understand science. If she didn't keep changing her advice based on emerging information, I'd be worried that she wasn't listening to researchers and was instead following a political agenda. The issue is that in a world where nothing is "nailed down" all we can do is accept the given moment's best guess---and go on from there.   

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In a sense, I'm cutting my own throat in promoting the idea that there should be "curators" mediating between readers and authors. Where's the intermediary who tells my readers that I can be trusted? This is why I so liberally salt my articles with hypertext links. They are the evidence I use to support statements. And, in the case of the interviews, the fact that I have recorded sound clips makes these articles 'primary sources' in the sense that my guests may or may not stating the truth, but it is at least true that they are saying them.

Beyond that, all I can hope for is that I am developing credibility with the people of Guelph simply because of the quality of the work I'm putting out.

This is a good point to ask for subscriptions. I'm bringing readers interviews with people of interest in the hope that this will make our complex and confusing world a little easier to understand. Surely that's something that's worth supporting---if you can afford it. And, of course, Patreon and Pay Pal make it easy to do. 

Cloudwalking Owl · The Velocity Of Communications And Dumbing Down

I'm not sure that I share Snyder's pessimism about the ability of young people to read and assimilate complex ideas. I'm old enough to be a grandfather to anyone who's in high-school today, and I know lots of people in my cohort who aren't that interested in either books or ideas either. My gut instinct is that there are still lots of thoughtful, intelligent young people today. They may not see the world the same way I do, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong for doing so. We need to change the world and that won't happen without changing people too.

Linus Torvalds, Wiki Media

I am interested in Snyder's idea that the velocity of social media is causing problems. I am really interested in her idea that it could be "tweaked" in order to slow down and help people do a better job of selecting and testing the ideas they absorb from it. The artificial intelligence that is used to promote ideas is designed simply to heighten the number of eyeballs on a screen and clicks on advertisements. What if it were instead designed to increase knowledge and comprehension? The result might not be easily maximized for profit---but it might do wonders for society. The world might respond very positively to such a thing, and maybe some future Linus Torvalds is already working on it. (If you don't know who he is, take the time to click on the link and find out.)  

I think that this is about as good a place to stop as any other. There'll be more of my conversation with Marie Snyder in my next article. Until then, remember to be nice to the people you're living with, keep your distance from the others, wear a mask, and, try to keep things together until this pandemic is over. 

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!