Word of the day: Hogarthian

The word of the day is Hogarthian:

Etymology:  < the name of William Hogarth (1697–1764), English painter and engraver + -ian suffix.

 

Of, relating to, or characteristic of William Hogarth or his style; resembling or characteristic of the subjects depicted in Hogarth's work.Much of the work of Hogarth is characterized by the use of satire to examine questions of morality, and often features vivid characterizations of the disreputable side of 18th cent. English life. (OED)

"Hensher's take on what's wrong with England is ambitious, but it is undone by a Hogarthian zest for vituperation and by the sheer number of things that get his goat."

 - Deborah Friendell, "Blighty: A provocative novel of Britain in crisis", 12 September 2011 The New Yorker

The Mismeasure of Science...continues

The Berman Institute of Bioethics's bulletin called my attention to this New York Times article about this PLoS Biology article, and all I can think is, whatever happened to peer review?

Sure, one interpretation is that Stephen Jay Gould just made it up.  I'm not going to say that's impossible.

But let me get this straight: we're testing the hypothesis that a priori biases can affect supposedly objective scientific observation by...making scientific observations and assuming they're objective?

This entire paper hinges on the premise that, sure, racism may have existed way back in the 19th century, but certainly we modern scientists have no a priori biases that could possibly influence our own measurements.  The experimental design to test Gould's premise is built entirely around assuming the premise is incorrect.

This paper doesn't prove that the biases don't exist, they're just showing that they're reproducible, which is not at all unreasonable: racism isn't just an individual's opinion, it's a system incorporated structurally into our society.

Fortunately, science has invented a way to get around this problem (or at least try to).  It's called blinding your data.  Instead of picking a skull out of the bin labeled "African" and then measuring it (which appears to be how this study was done), could you at least have one person take the skull out of the bin, slap an identifying code onto it, and then hand it to a second person, who makes the actual measurement (and doesn't know which bin it came out of)?.  This only partially avoids the problem (because you might still be able to guess by looking at the skull what ethnicity it comes from), but the authors didn't even do that much.

PLoS Biology, I'm not impressed.

The word of the day is suasion:

< Latin suāsio, -ōnem, n. of action < suādēre to suade v. 

a. The act or fact of exhorting or urging; persuasion.   

b. moral suasion: persuasion exerted or acting through and upon the moral nature or sense. (OED)

"He-man style, it [the Daily News] likes its women mute and interchangeable, with a show of leg and bosom.  Family-man style, it grumbles over higher taxes and is capable of outrage when innocent women, children and animals are hurt - but, he-man again, sometimes it thinks that gals get what is coming to them.  (Blacks, too, although the News has shown some uncertainty of late in its vision of blacks, a lesson of the moral suasion of political power that women must learn.)"

 - Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 1975