Krauss: Science must not be tainted by international politics

2024/11/04 Leave a comment

Agree. Dangerous trend here:

…Academic freedom is essential, not because academics are special, but because societal progress is held back whenever such freedoms disappear. The scientific enterprise in the 21st century is inherently international. The internet has levelled the playing field in a wonderful way, allowing young scientists from around the world to have unparalleled access to cutting-edge research.

In this way, science can unify humanity in ways that few other intellectual activities can. There is no Western science, or Eastern science, or Russian science, or NATO science – there is only the universal language of science. Scientists from scores of countries speaking dozens of languages, worshipping their own gods and having potentially conflicting political beliefs, speak and understand the same precise mathematical language of science without translation problems or vague misinterpretations. They can work together to break down not just the barriers that nature puts in the way of understanding, but also the ones created by national and international boundaries.

Large CERN experiments such as the Compact Muon Solenoid require work from thousands of scientists, representing every gender, nationality, race, size and shape of human. That is a heartening testament to what is best about the human species: how awe and wonder can unite us to pursue challenges we would otherwise never dream of conquering. When we introduce artificial political divisions that exclude some people from the enterprise, in the end we all suffer.

Source: Science must not be tainted by international politics


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Paul: A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.

2023/05/05 Leave a comment

Agree with the concerns regarding the risks to scientific research:

Is a gay Republican Latino more capable of conducting a physics experiment than a white progressive heterosexual woman? Would they come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds?

For most people, the suggestion isn’t just ludicrous, it’s offensive.

Yet this belief — that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly — has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings. A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge.

This sounds entirely reasonable.

Yet the paper was rejected by several prominent mainstream journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Another publication that passed on the paper, the authors report, described some of its conclusions as “downright hurtful.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issuewith the word “merit” in the title, writing that “the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow as currently implemented.”

Instead, the paper has been published in a new journal called — you can’t make this up — The Journal of Controversial Ideas. The journal, which welcomes papers that “discuss well-known controversial topics from diverse cultural, philosophical, moral, political and religious perspectives,” was co-founded in 2021 by the philosopher Peter Singer and is entirely serious. This particular paper was rewritten multiple times and peer-reviewed before publication. However controversial one judges the paper’s claims, they deserve consideration.

According to its 29 authors, who are primarily scientists (including two Nobel laureates) in fields as varied as theoretical physics, psychology and pharmacokinetics, ideological concerns are threatening independence and rigor in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, the authors write, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.

Consider the increasingly widespread practice of appending a “positionality statement” to one’s research. This is an explicit acknowledgment by the author of an academic paper of his or her identity (e.g., “nondisabled,” “continuing generation”). Positionality statements were first popular in the social sciences and are now spreading to the hard sciences and medicine. The idea is that one’s race, sex, relative privilege and “experiences of oppression” inherently inform one’s research, especially in ways that perpetuate or alleviate bias.

But whatever validity “alternative ways of knowing,” “multiple narratives” and “lived experience” may have in the humanities, they are of questionable utility when it comes to the sciences. Some defenders of positionality statements maintain that these acknowledgments promote objectivity by drawing attention to a researcher’s potential blind spots, but in practice they can have the opposite effect, implying that scientific research isn’t universally valid or applicable — that there are different kinds of knowledge for different groups of people.

Another concern is the rise of “citation justice” — the attempt to achieve racial or gender balance in scholarly references. The purpose of a citation in an academic publication is to substantiate claims and offer the most relevant supporting research. Advocates of citation justice say these citations too often prioritize the work of white men. But in a field like chemistry, in which fewer than 30 percent of papers are written by women, according to data from the American Chemical Society, and where the foundational texts are almost entirely written by men, “justice” means disproportionately favoring studies by women, regardless of relevance. Many prominent science journals now recommend that before submission, authors run their papers through software programs that detect any citation bias.

A third worrisome development is the statements that researchers are often required to write in order to apply for faculty jobs (and to advance in those positions) describing their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, something my colleague John McWhorter, one of the paper’s authors, has written about in The Times. These are noble goals that in practice, however, can amount to discrimination, and such statements strike many as a kind of political litmus test. At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, in the hiring cycle from 2018 to 2019, three-quarters of applicants for faculty positions in the life sciences were eliminated on the basis of these statements alone. (Grant programs also often require applications for funding in the sciences to include D.E.I. goals.)

Of course, nobody wants to hire a racist. But that’s not what we’re talking about. For a prospective faculty member to say he is determined to treat all students equally rather than to advance diversity initiatives can be enough to count someone out of a job.

Marisol Quintanilla, an assistant professor of nematology at Michigan State University, was required to take a multiple choice D.E.I. test for continued employment, along with all faculty members; she was also asked to write a D.E.I. statement as part of her annual performance evaluations, which weigh heavily in the tenure process. Several designated answers in the test didn’t align with her religious or scientific beliefs, she said. The statement requirement was abandoned in March, but not without a protracted battle. “I’ve heard colleagues of mine saying they need to get rid of white men in academia,” Quintanilla, a Chilean immigrant of mixed ethnicity, told me. “It amounted to clear discrimination. I feel very uncomfortable with this because I think hiring the best qualified candidates would be best for the advancement of science.”

Those are just three troubling practices detailed in the new paper. Sadly, they are part of a much larger set of developments.

“What’s being advocated are philosophies that are explicitly anti-scientific,” Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “They deny that objective truth exists.” Having grown up in the Soviet Union, where science was infused with Marxist-Leninist ideology, Krylov is particularly attuned to such threats. And while she has advocated on behalf of equal treatment for women in science, she prefers to be judged on the basis of her achievements, not on her sex. “The merit of scientific theories and findings do not depend on the identity of the scientist,” she said in a phone interview.

It should go without saying — but in today’s polarized world, unfortunately, it doesn’t — that the authors of this paper do not deny the existence of historical racism or sexism or dispute that inequalities of opportunity persist. Nor do they deny that scientists have personal views, which are in turn informed by culture and society. They acknowledge biases and blind spots.

Where they depart from the prevailing ideological winds is in arguing that however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity. (A major study published last week shows that despite decades of sexism, claims of gender bias in academic science are now grossly overstated.) The focus, the authors write, should be on improving meritocratic systems rather than dismantling them.

At a time when faith in institutions is plummeting and scientific challenges such as climate change remain enduringly large, the last thing we want is to give the public reason to lose faith in science. A study published last month, “Even When Ideologies Align, People Distrust Politicized Institutions,” shows that what we need is more impartiality, not less.

If you believe bias is crucial to evaluating scientific work, you may object to the fact that several of the authors of the study are politically conservative, as are some of the researchers they cite. One author, Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago and a critic of some affirmative action and diversity programs, inspired outcry in 2021 when he was invited to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But to deny the validity of this paper on that basis would mean succumbing to the very fallacies the authors so persuasively dismantle.

One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.

Source: A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.

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Why so many people mistrust science and how we can fix it

2022/08/29 Leave a comment

Some interesting thoughts on how to address mistrust:

Not since the Scopes Monkey Trial a century ago, in which a Tennessee high school science teacher was found guilty of violating the state’s law prohibiting the teaching of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, have anti-scientific attitudes been so apparent and openly embraced by political leaders in the United States. 

The denial, now decades long, of the evidence of human-induced climate change by a large segment of the population, reinforced by the rhetoric of powerful Republicans like governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, has been matched over the past two-and-a-half years by the wholesale rejection of scientific evidence about COVID-19 by many of these same politicians and much of the American population, approximately 40% of whom reject the science about both. 

Drawing on decades of marketing and psychology research, which show that it is critical to understand your target audience so that a product can be positioned properly in the market, Dr Aviva Philipp-Muller, professor at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, and her team determined there are four different reasons why people have anti-science attitudes. 

Having anatomised the principles behind each attitude, “Why are people anti-science, and what can we do about it?”, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, proposes strategies to counter each of the four anti-science attitudes.

“Persuasion researchers have known for a little while that getting in your audience’s head and understanding where they’re coming from is step one of trying to win them over. There’s no one-size-fits-all persuasion tactic. So, if you’re not getting through to someone, you might need to reassess why they’re anti-science in the first place and try to speak directly to that basis,” says Philipp-Muller.

Reason one: Suspicions about scientists and experts

The first group Philipp-Muller and her co-authors, Professor Spike WS Lee (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) and Social Psychology Professor Richard E Petty (Ohio State University, Columbus), discuss are suspicious of scientists and experts. 

One reason large sections of the population mistrust scientists such as Dr Anthony Fauci is because of the cynicism about elite institutions (including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the stereotyping of scientists as cold and unfeeling. This view of medical experts contrasts sharply, it is worth noting, with the avuncular characters in television soap operas and films from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. 

A further contributing factor to the mistrust of scientists harkens back to what prompted Tennessee politicians, who had strong support from their evangelical constituents, to ban the teaching of evolution: modern science’s antipathy to Christian teachings, beliefs and values.

During the COVID-19 crisis, faith in scientists has also been weakened by what many in the public saw as confusing recommendations and even backtracking about masking: from there being no need to wear masks, to saving surgical masks and N95 masks for medical workers, to everyone needing to wear an N95 mask. 

(The fact that the recommendations changed because of new information – ie because that is how science works – Philipp-Muller told University World News, is not relevant to how much of the public responded to the recommendations.)

Reason two: Social identities

Both communications professors and marketers have studied how social identities largely determine recipients’ openness to a message. It comes as no surprise that because in the past they were subjected to (often heinous) experiments without their knowledge, both American Blacks and Indigenous peoples are wary of medical scientists, for example. 

“For individuals who embrace an identity [eg evangelical Christians], scientists are members of the outgroup,” Philipp-Muller writes, and are therefore not to be believed. This can be seen in the way, in the United States and some other countries, televangelists and preachers told their flocks that taking the COVID vaccine showed a lack of faith in the efficacy of prayer.

Social identity dynamics, augmented by social media, Philipp-Muller says, play a major role in the rise of (demonstrably false) conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the COVID-19 vaccine contains microchips.

Reason three: Overturning a world view

Perhaps the most infamous example of the third basis for rejecting science – a message that overturns a world view – is the Catholic Church’s rejection of Copernicus’ discovery that the Earth orbits the sun, holding onto an erroneous view that had stood for four centuries. 

To avoid “cognitive dissonance”, individuals will hold to an erroneous view even after they are presented with evidence. This is one reason why “fake news” and misinformation are so difficult to counter, notes the study.

Reason four: Epistemic style

The final basis for anti-science thinking, Philipp-Muller and her team discern, occurs when there is a “mismatch between the delivery of the scientific message and the recipient’s epistemic style”; in other words, when information is delivered in a manner at odds with the recipient’s way of thinking. 

For example, people who are more comfortable thinking in concrete terms are more likely to dismiss issues like climate change because it is often presented in abstract terms divorced from the individual’s daily life.

One of the most interesting points Philipp-Muller and her team make is how, for large sections of the public, the rhetorical structures scientists use end up undercutting the authority of their conclusions. 

Since the science is evolving in real time, when speaking of COVID-19 or climate change, scientists “hedge their findings and avoid over-claiming certainty as they try to communicate the preliminary, inconclusive, nuanced or evolving nature of scientific evidence”. 

Partially because the public is poorly educated as to how science operates – famously summarised by the philosopher Karl Popper as working through the Falsification Principle – the rhetorical structures used by scientists lead people with low tolerance for uncertainty to reject both the information and recommendations that scientists like Fauci give. 

(The Falsification Principle holds that, as opposed to an opinion or statement of religious faith, a scientific theory must be testable and structured so that it can conceivably be proven false.)

“There are a lot of people who don’t really have tolerance for uncertainty and really need to be told things in black and white. And so there’s a mismatch between how scientists tend to communicate information and how whole segments of the population tend to process information,” says Philipp-Muller.

The limitations of science education

Improving scientific literacy, the default solution of professors, will only go so far towards solving the problem of anti-science attitudes, says Philipp-Muller, especially if such education is conceived of as teaching students a list of facts. 

“That’s not going to be helpful and, in fact, could backfire,” she told University World News. 

Further, for the four anti-science attitudes held in the general public, it is too late for science education. Accordingly, the authors propose strategies to counter each of the four anti-science biases.

To counteract the view that scientists as people are not trustworthy, the study suggests three main steps. 

The perceived “coldness” of elite scientists can be countered by recruiting more females into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. 

Scientists should also simplify their language and write “lay summaries” that should appear alongside the ubiquitous jargon-laden abstracts. 

Because of the low level of scientific literacy among the general public, Philipp-Muller and her team say, scientists must don a teacher’s cap and “communicate to the public that substantive debate and disagreement are inherent in the scientific process” in clear and unambiguous terms, without falling into the false neutrality of what’s been dubbed “both sideism”. 

Marketing and persuasion research show that being perceived as open to other points of view actually increases openness among recipients. Philipp-Muller’s team suggests “honestly acknowledging any drawbacks of their position [such as the infringement on rights by requirements to mask up because of COVID] while ultimately explaining in clear and compelling terms why their position is still the most supported or justifiable one”.

Countering the ingroup/outgroup attitude requires scientific communicators to find a shared social identity with their intended audience. 

In one town, Philipp-Muller told me, proponents did not counter resistance to a water-recycling programme by piling up the scientific evidence for the plan. Rather, more people supported the proposal when the presenter emphasised the fact that she also lived in the same region and thus shared what’s called a “superordinate identity”. 

One way to earn the trust of racialised communities that are wary of scientists is to “train marginalised individuals to be scientists working within their own communities”. In one paradigmatic project, to overcome the suspicions of the Indigenous community where the scientists were studying the human genome, researchers trained Indigenous individuals to be genome researchers.

On overcoming resistance to the scientific message itself, Philipp-Muller says: “I think science education can be a really useful tool for combating anti-science attitudes, especially with number three, which is when the scientific message’s evidence is contrary to a person’s belief. 

“If we can get in and ensure that people have good scientific reasoning skills so that when they’re presented with new scientific information, they are able to assess whether or not it’s valid, that will help ensure that they can get on board with accurate and valid scientific information and also learn what kind of evidence is shaky.”

An appeal to values

A further strategy to combat anti-science attitudes triggered by the content of the message involves appealing to recipients’ deep-seated values. 

The term Philipp-Muller and her co-authors use for this is “self-affirmation”, which has nothing New Agey about it and nothing to do with radical individualism. Rather, self-affirmation refers to a process during which people focus on the values that matter to them, such as caring for one’s family, in ways unrelated to the conflict or issue at hand. 

The finding of common ground has the effect of reducing “cognitive dissonance” experienced when presented with scientific information that is contrary to one’s ingrained way of thinking. 

Studies have shown that increasing an individual’s sense of self-integrity and security reduces the threat that dissonance poses to their sense of themselves. “Self-affirmation interventions have been used successfully,” says the article, “to reduce defensiveness and increase acceptance of scientific information regarding health behaviours and climate change.”

Philipp-Muller’s discussion of how to overcome the many mismatches between individuals’ epistemic styles and how scientists present scientific information is how the science behind marketing informs the proposals. 

After noting that large tech companies use the “fine-grained, person-specific” data to target people to change their consumer behaviour and that consumer researchers learned long ago to use rich psychological and behavioural data to segment and target consumers, they suggest that “public interest groups could adopt similar strategies and use the logic of target communications with different audiences in mind”. 

For example, abstract messages could be delivered to those who think abstractly and concrete messages for those who think concretely.

A timely intervention

Philipp-Muller and her co-authors’ analysis and prescriptions for countering anti-science attitudes could not be more timely.

I interviewed her on the morning of 27 July. A few hours later, Vic L McConought, a member of the Canadian Legislative Assembly (provincial parliament) who is running to be leader of the province’s United Conservative Party, which would make him Alberta’s next premier, tweeted about the leadership debate that evening. 

Despite the fact that 87% of Albertans are vaccinated, he primed his Twitter followers by writing: “I assume the first question is about Science … My answer is ‘Science will be held to task for its crimes if I am elected leader’.”

Source: Why so many people mistrust science and how we can fix it

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Krauss: In Defense of the Universal Values of Science

2021/06/04 Leave a comment

Agree:

The progress of modern science has been a truly global phenomenon, a fact worth celebrating, just as the technological fruits of science have, to varying degrees, impacted the lives of everyone on the globe.

Scientific breakthroughs have paid no heed to geographic boundaries. Modern algebra owes its origins to 10th century Arabic mathematicians. Around the same time Chinese astronomers recorded an early supernova that formed the Crab Nebula, even when no record of this remarkable object was made in Europe. In spite of the attempts by British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington to quash the impact of an otherwise unheralded young Indian physicist, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the latter’s groundbreaking work on stellar evolution altered our picture of stars so significantly that he was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.

Nevertheless, the postmodern notion that empirical scientific knowledge is somehow culturally derived, with little or no objective underpinning, has continued to persist in various social science and literary corners of academia far removed from the rush of scientific progress.

Until recently, it seemed inconceivable to imagine that any physical or biological scientists could become so misguided as to argue against the empirical basis of their own fields. But we are living in strange times. This week, the Divisional Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Oregon sent an email to faculty “to encourage you all to attend this exciting presentation!”, by a visiting physicist, which was described as follows:

Title: Scientists vs. Science: Race, Gender, and Anti-Intellectualism in Science

Abstract: Black thought can help us free science from the white supremacist traditions of scientists. Scientists vs. Science will use Black feminist and anti-colonialist analyses to show that white supremacy is a total epistemic system that affects even our most “objective” areas of knowledge production. The talk hinges on the development of the concept of white empiricism, which I introduced to give a name to the way that anti-intellectual white supremacy plays a role in physicists’ analysis of when empirical data is important and what counts as empirical data. This white empiricism shapes both Black women’s (and other) experiences in physics and the actual knowledge produced about physics. Until this is understood and addressed directly, systems of domination will continue to play a major role in the practice of physics.

On its own, this racist nonsense would not deserve remarking on here, even if it does lead one to wonder how its author, who apparently doesn’t understand the empirical basis of her own discipline, could gain an appointment at a physics department. But the response it produced by the administrator at Oregon is more worrisome.

The Dean at U. of O. should know better, being a professor of Anthropology, although his specialization in Folklore and Public Culture suggests he might be particularly sympathetic to arguments that knowledge is culturally or racially derived.

The Dean’s email apparently received wide circulation beyond U. of O. in the academic community. A tweet from Bruce Gilley, who is a professor of Political Science and Public Policy and on the board of the National Association of Scholars saw what the U. of O. Dean had missed, namely that the underlying pretext of the talk was itself racist. As he remarked “Neo-racism is now spreading like wildfire in the academy with the normalization of racist and anti-scientific ‘research’ that freely denigrates people based on their race. This talk below will use ‘black feminist and anti-colonial analysis’ to debunk ‘white empiricisim [sic].’”

Galileo would have discovered four moons of Jupiter with his telescope regardless of his sex or pigment, and DNA is a double helix regardless of whether it was Rosalind Franklin’s crystallography that demonstrated it, or Watson and Crick’s analysis of that empirical data. Empirical evidence is not white, or black, and the term “black theory” makes no intellectual sense.

As it turns out, the U. of O. talk was abruptly cancelled, with no reason given in the announcement. I agree with Professor Gilley’s assessment that, having been announced, a better course would have been to have proceeded with the talk, and allowing those present to then ridicule its premise via intelligent rebuttal.

I wonder however, whether that would have happened, or whether there would have been polite applause, for fear of appearing racist by asking pointed questions. I happened to attend another online talk by this individual, in this case a physics seminar. Each slide shown also included a reference to a different racist incident that had happened in the US. Speaking to other colleagues after the seminar, I wasn’t the only one who questioned the appropriateness of this political commentary from beginning to end in a seminar on dark matter, as would I would have equally squirmed had each slide quoted a different lie uttered by Donald Trump when he was President. Yet none of us spoke up at the time to raise any concerns.

We need to be willing to be more vocal up front in our critical assessment of nonsense emerging in academic science settings. In more reasonable times, this nonsense would never have passed the selection criteria applied by seminar organizers in any serious academic department in the first place. In current times, such gibberish instead helps promote a dangerously distorted view of science that can fall upon receptive ears among even senior academic administrators.

Source: In Defense of the Universal Values of Science

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When You Can’t Just ‘Trust the Douthat: Science’ The vaccine debate is the latest example of how our coronavirus choices are inescapably political.

2020/12/21 1 Comment

Overall, a good nuanced discussion of where the science largely ends and values and ethnics inform (or not) political choices. The one major weakness in his arguments is that while a focus on seniors primarily means a focus on whites, personal care and healthcare workers tend to be significantly non-white, and so there is less of a contradiction than he assumes:

One of many regrettable features of the Trump era is the way that the president’s lies and conspiracy theories have seemed to vindicate some of his opponents’ most fatuous slogans. I have in mind, in particular, the claim that has echoed through the liberal side of coronavirus-era debates — that the key to sound leadership in a pandemic is just to follow the science, to trust science and scientists, to do what experts suggest instead of letting mere grubby politics determine your response.

Trump made this slogan powerful by conspicuously disdaining expertise and indulging marginal experts who told him what he desired to hear — that the virus isn’t so bad, that life should just go back to normal, usually with dubious statistical analysis to back up that conclusion. And to the extent that trust the science just means that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a better guide to epidemiological trends than someone the president liked on cable news, then it’s a sound and unobjectionable idea.

But for many crucial decisions of the last year, that unobjectionable version of trust the science didn’t get you very far. And when it had more sweeping implications, what the slogan implied was often much more dubious: a deference to the science bureaucracy during a crisis when bureaucratic norms needed to give way; an attempt by para-scientific enterprises to trade on (or trade away) science’s credibility for the sake of political agendas; and an abdication by elected officials of responsibility for decisions that are fundamentally political in nature.

The progress of coronavirus vaccines offers good examples of all these issues. That the vaccines exist at all is an example of science at its purest — a challenge posed, a problem solved, with all the accumulated knowledge of the modern era harnessed to figure out how to defeat a novel pathogen.

But the further you get from the laboratory work, the more complicated and less clearly scientific the key issues become. The timeline on which vaccines have become available, for instance, reflects an attempt to balance the rules of bureaucratic science, their priority on safety and certainty of knowledge, with the urgency of trying something to halt a disease that’s killing thousands of Americans every day. Many scientific factors weigh in that balance, but so do all kinds of extra-scientific variables: moral assumptions about what kinds of vaccine testing we should pursue (one reason we didn’t get the “challenge trials” that might have delivered a vaccine much earlier); legal assumptions about who should be allowed to experiment with unproven treatments; political assumptions about how much bureaucratic hoop-jumping it takes to persuade Americans that a vaccine is safe.

And the closer you get to the finish line, the more notable the bureaucratic and political element becomes. The United States approved its first vaccine after Britain but before the European Union, not because Science says something different in D.C. versus London or Berlin but because the timing was fundamentally political — reflecting different choices by different governing entities on how much to disturb their normal processes, a different calculus about lives lost to delay versus credibility lost if anything goes wrong.

Then there’s the now-pressing question of who actually gets the vaccine first, which has been taken up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a way that throws the limits of science-trusting into even sharper relief. Last month their Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices produced a working document that’s a masterpiece of para-scientific effort, in which questions that are legitimately medical and scientific (who will the vaccine help the most), questions that are more logistical and sociological (which pattern of distribution will be easier to put in place) and moral questions about who deserves a vaccine are all jumbled up, assessed with a form of pseudo-rigor that resembles someone bluffing the way through a McKinsey job interview and then used to justify the conclusion that we should vaccinate essential workers before seniors … because seniors are more likely to be privileged and white.

As Matthew Yglesias noted, this (provisional, it should be stressed) recommendation is a remarkable example of how a certain kind of progressive moral thinking ignores the actual needs of racial minorities. Because if you vaccinate working-age people before you vaccinate older people, you will actually end up not vaccinating the most vulnerable minority population, African-American seniors — so more minorities might die for the sake of a racial balance in overall vaccination rates.

But even if the recommendation didn’t have that kind of perverse implication, even if all things being equal you were just choosing between more minority deaths and more white deaths in two different vaccination plans, it’s still not the kind of question that the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has any particular competency to address. If policy X leads to racially disparate death rates but policy Y requires overt racial discrimination, then the choice between the two is moral and political, not medical or scientific — as are other important questions like, “Who is actually an essential worker?” or “Should we focus more on slowing the spread or reducing the death rate?” (Or even, “Should we vaccinate men before women given that men are more likely to die of the disease?”)

These are the kind of questions, in other words, that our elected leaders should be willing to answer without recourse to a self-protective “just following the science” default. But that default is deeply inscribed into our political culture, and especially the culture of liberalism, where even something as obviously moral-political as the decision to let Black Lives Matter protests go forward amid a pandemic was justified by redescribing their motor, antiracism, as a push for better public health.

When we look back over the pandemic era, one of the signal failures will be the inability to acknowledge that many key decisions — from our vaccine policy to our lockdown strategy to our approach to businesses and schools — are fundamentally questions of statesmanship, involving not just the right principles or the right technical understanding of the problem but the prudential balancing of many competing goods.

On the libertarian and populist right, that failure usually involved a recourse to “freedom” as a conversation-stopper, a way to deny that even a deadly disease required any compromises with normal life at all.

But for liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital-S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-science.html

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Krauss: Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?

2020/11/26 Leave a comment

Good question and discussion:

In the mid-1980s, when I taught a Physics for Poets class at Yale University, I was dumbstruck when I gave the students a quiz problem to estimate the total amount of water flushed in all the toilets in the US in one 24-hour period and I started to grade the quiz. In order to estimate this, you have to first estimate the population of the US. I discovered that 35 percent of my Yale students, many of whom were history or American studies majors, thought the population of the US was less than 10 million! I went around campus interrogating students I met, asking them what they thought the population of the US was. Again, about one-third of the students thought it was less than 10 million and a few even thought it was greater than a few billion.

How was such ignorance so common in a community commonly felt to contain the cream of the crop of young US college students?

Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t that these students were ignorant about US society. It was that they were rather “innumerate,” as the mathematician John Allen Paulos had labeled it in a book he wrote in the 1980s. They had no concept whatsoever of what a million actually represented. For them, a million and a billion were merely both too large to comprehend.

It remains a badge of honor for many who like to describe themselves as highly cultured or artistic to describe themselves as mathematically challenged, or to say that their brains aren’t wired for mathematics. Because many of those they hold in high esteem have made similar claims, there is no real social penalty to them for doing so.

When it comes to science rather than mathematics, it isn’t so simple. Proudly proclaiming scientific illiteracy is not de rigueur. Instead another refrain has recently become popular among politicians and public figures: “I am not a scientist, but…” Equally prominent, is the statement “I believe in science” (as if there is a choice) which is then followed by some scientific gibberish.

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which continues to exist even when you stop believing in it.” The line between being scientifically or empirically controversial vs being politically controversial has been blurred to the point of erasure. In Washington, and many other seats of government throughout the world, belief trumps reality.

Different aspects of the problem were on display recently during the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett. When asked by Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy about her views on climate change, she said: “You know, I’m certainly not a scientist,” and added, “I have read things about climate change—I would not say I have firm views on it.” Later, following questions from Kamala Harris about whether she acknowledged a relationship between smoking and cancer, and whether the coronavirus is infectious, both of which she answered in the affirmative, she was asked, “And do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?” Coney Barrett responded, “I will not do that. I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial…”

It would have been appropriate for Justice Coney Barrett to argue in both cases that the confirmation hearing was not an appropriate place to discuss her scientific expertise but rather her legal expertise. However, that is different than claiming, as she did, to have insufficient knowledge of the issue to possess any viewpoint at all.

In this, and all areas where scientific evidence is both public and sufficiently overwhelming, public figures who even feign ignorance for reasons of political expediency should be called out. In her second exchange, having established her bona fides regarding the science of smoking or the coronavirus, an appropriate response from Justice Coney Barrett to Harris’s last question might have been to answer that yes, climate change is a scientifically established fact, but that she was not going to be roped into commenting on related controversial public policy questions.

By the same token Senator Harris’s last question reflects a pseudo-religious “I believe in science but I don’t need to think about what it actually means” mantra. Climate change, which is happening, presents numerous potential threats, but not to the air we breathe, as if it were akin to industrial pollutants.

I raise this point, which may seem like mere semantics, because we have to encourage intelligent and literate discourse from both sides of the aisle. Inappropriate claims like this by politicians who want to be on the right side of science but who can’t be bothered to think about what it implies don’t help. Rather they encourage rational skeptics and irrational deniers alike to reject the actual science by dismissing the statements of those who claim to defend it. Similarly, it also helps encourage a distrust of scientists.

I wrote my new book, which presents the fundamental science behind climate change, in part to specifically respond to this sorry state of affairs. Outrageous denials, or outrageous doom and gloom predictions equally subvert the ultimate goal, which is to develop rational public policy. Gaining a perspective of the fundamental science, which I would argue is not beyond the grasp of a Supreme Court Justice, or a United States Senator soon to be Vice-President, is a precursor to proposing rational policies to address one of the most significant global challenges of the 21st century.

I should underscore that when I discuss scientific illiteracy, I am not focusing on how many scientific facts people may remember. I rather mean the process of science: empirical testing and retesting, logical analysis, and drawing conclusions derived from facts and not hopes. The impact of increased CO2 on heat absorption in the atmosphere is something that can be tested, as can the expansion coefficient of water as heat is added, one of the key factors affecting measured sea level rise. Accepting the reality of these is not something that should disqualify you from, or assure you of, a government appointment.

An equally pernicious misunderstanding of the scientific process involves confusions about uncertainty, as we are witnessing with the current pandemic. Epidemiology is a very difficult part of science because it often relies on sparse data that is very hard to accumulate. Like all aspects of science, the conclusions one draws are only as good as the data one has. Yet, politicians and the public alike have often accepted sweeping claims about the perceived lethality or transmissibility of COVID-19 well before appropriate data has been available. Donald Trump was at one extreme, but others who exploited for political reasons early predictions that millions would die usually did not qualify their remarks with either a reasonable estimate of uncertainties, or with the proviso that this dire prediction was for a world where no ameliorative actions were taken.

It is possible, and indeed I expect likely, that we will not have firm knowledge about the details of its lethality or transmissibility for years, or at least until after the current pandemic is over. And even then, uncertainties will remain. This issue has recently taken on a more personal aspect for me, as I write this while convalescing from what appears to be COVID-19. (Thanks to the vagaries of the US healthcare system, and the recent surge of cases, the results of my test will take seven days to arrive, by which time I am hoping to be well on the way to recovery.)

When it comes to public perceptions of medical or scientific prowess, I blame in part science fiction programs on television or in feature films that give the illusion that faced with a technical problem, sufficiently talented scientists and engineers can both ascertain the cause and create a solution in hours instead of years or decades. That is just not the way science often works. Most important scientific developments are not revolutionary. More often than not they are baby steps taken along a long road of discovery. The recent announcement of two new COVID vaccine efficacies has been remarkable, so that perhaps by the end of 2021 most people will be vaccinated. But while two years is lightning speed in this area, many people remain surprised that it has taken this long.

Fewer people may proudly proclaim their scientific illiteracy than their innumeracy, but our cultural role models nevertheless often openly express their lack of comfort with questions that you shouldn’t have to be a scientist to understand or appreciate. I saw it when I taught at Yale, and I saw it in the Senate confirmation room. It is considered quaint to say something like, “my mind just doesn’t work that way” when it comes to science, as an excuse to stop thinking. But we wouldn’t accept that statement so easily if the question related to Shakespeare’s contributions to literature, or the historical impact of the Holocaust.

The Enlightenment was well-named because it led to a greater understanding of ourselves, our society, and our environment, and was accompanied by the rise of the scientific method. Acting for the common good requires subjecting our own ideas to empirical scrutiny, being open to considering and empirically testing the ideas of others, and letting empirical data be the arbiter of reality. The most compelling reason that all of us, most importantly our public figures, should take science seriously, and honestly, was expressed best by Jacob Bronowski, a personal hero who exemplified the union of the two cultures of science and humanities:

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and president of The Origins Project Foundation. He was Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 2007–2018. His newest book, due out in January, is The Physics of Climate Change. 

Source: Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?

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Opinion: Diversity of thought needed in our pandemic response

2020/11/07 Leave a comment

Good, thoughtful commentary that applies more broadly than to the pandemic, and the risks of simplistic thinking and solutions:

Over the past nine months, we have seen an incredible change in the way we live, work and interact. The world is clearly different now. Our lives are intertwined with the evolving COVID-19 pandemic, and many look to experts from a variety of fields for guidance. Medical, public health and scientific leaders have become sources of insight and direction. Many may think there is only one “scientific truth,” and therefore every expert should be of the same opinion. But science, particularly when dealing with a novel threat, comes with many uncertainties.

As with any important issue, personal values influence how people interpret the science. We all have biases, which are influenced by our life experiences, cultures, emotions and personal beliefs, and experts are susceptible to these factors, as well.

This matters because diversity of thought, spurring civil debate, can help us collectively think through complex issues such as our pandemic response. Disagreement among experts is a normal and essential part of scientific discourse, as data continues to accumulate over time. However, one’s inherent beliefs and biases may play a significant role in the interpretation of the evidence at hand, and the messaging that follows.

Some may be motivated by their fear of infection, some by an urgent desire to return to a sense of normalcy and others by political or ideological beliefs, or even a need for notoriety. Some of the more polarizing views are what sow division among the population.

Oftentimes, the loudest voices espousing simplistic answers are not the correct ones, yet they may garnish the most attention and support in the media and online. The public — not aware of all the nuances — may lose trust in science after being bombarded with polarized, and often incorrect, views that are given as much, or more, attention than those that follow fundamental scientific principles and are transparent about their level of uncertainty. This eroding trust in the scientific community further splits populations.

Due to the emotions at play and the public-facing nature of the discussion, scientific discourse risks becoming politicized and devolving into a polarized conflict.

On the one extreme, discussion is interpreted as fear-mongering by people who think the potential harms of COVID-19 have been greatly exaggerated and that the harms of certain interventions have been underestimated. On the other extreme, the idea of personal freedoms are elevated over disease control and the focus becomes primarily on the harms of lockdown. Both of these positions have a nugget of truth in them, but the dogmatism may preclude any meaningful discussion that could lead to an evidence-based consensus.

Moderate voices that try to find a balance between the two more extreme views matter in this pandemic. It is important to listen to arguments from across the spectrum and try to interpret the data in as nuanced and unbiased a manner as possible. This is a tall order, as the moderate view often carries with it significant uncertainty, and pivots as available evidence evolves.

Recognizing the nuances and complexity of disease is crucial to forming a more complete understanding. Moderate voices may not make headlines or get clicks because the answers to simple questions are long and complex, but they are important to listen to. The moderate voice is not one single voice: opinions vary between the two extremes and the answers are often complex.

In contrast, the more extreme viewpoints have a tendency to be amplified to a great degree within their own echo chambers, which can then be prone to politicization. This drives false dichotomies, and polarized discussions — such as masks versus no masks, aerosols versus droplets, lockdowns versus personal freedoms — where in reality, the answer often lies in between.

People with extreme views often choose to compare countries to prove their point, celebrating certain jurisdictions while condemning the approach of others, but give no consideration to the complex demographic, social, political and geographic factors that lead to particular situations, as well as the changes that occur over time.

Who can be trusted given all the conflicting information? First of all, diversity of thought is crucial. And second, it is important to recognize our own biases and how they influence our perceptions and how we interpret evidence. People who are adaptable to messaging and acknowledge uncertainty as the evidence evolves are key, given that the scientific method is meant to gain more precision over time. Dogmatic stances are best avoided.

We are moving into the future with an evolving roadmap for how to deal with COVID-19 — one that’s guided by lessons learned from our collective global experience. Different perspectives offer valuable insights in this pandemic and together they can offer a clearer picture of the truth. That said, the “infodemic” will continue with the pandemic, and it is important to try to put information into context, recognize our own biases and be willing to revise our positions in the face of new evidence.

We require a diverse group of voices at the table, but must continue to make an effort to foster healthy public discourse that’s free of politicization, by appreciating and considering the input of experts from all walks of life. The general population is as diverse as their experts in their values and opinions, and public policy should try to find the middle ground. Therefore, moving forward, now more than ever, a balanced, pragmatic and evidence-driven approach to the interpretation and messaging of the COVID-19 pandemic is needed.

Zain Chagla is an infectious diseases physician and an associate professor at McMaster University. Sumon Chakrabarti is an infectious disease physician with Trillium Health Partners Mississauga and a lecturer at the University of Toronto. Isaac Bogoch is an infectious disease physician at Toronto General Hospital and an associate professor at U of T. Dominik Mertz is an infectious disease physician and an associate professor at McMaster.

Source: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/opinion-diversity-of-thought-needed-in-our-pandemic-response/wcm/c064636f-583e-41e0-8c8f-3b65a3b14e8b

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The Second Wave: Science Meets Leadership

2020/10/17 Leave a comment

Good nuanced discussion of the complexities in finding a balance between public health, economic and other concerns:

When the pandemic first hit, none of us knew what to expect. Medical experts called for a lockdown and governments took their advice. This time round it’s different. Our political leaders are being called on to protect both our health and our economy. As Doug Ford noted on Tuesday, that can be an unpleasant place to be.

In his press conference, Ford commented on his decision to reinstate Stage 2 measures in three key regions of Ontario, much as François Legault has done in Quebec. It was, he says, one of the hardest decisions of his career. We get it but, frankly, he should get used to it. Governments everywhere may be called on to make lots more decisions like this in the months ahead.

Businesses are hurting badly, and many are stepping up the pressure on politicians to help them get through these tough times. This is not just about financial support. In Ottawa, for example, business groups have challenged Ford to produce the data that justifies stricter measures. There is a growing sense that politicians have the tools to open the economy without putting the public at risk, but do they?

We think this is a discussion worth having – cautiously and respectfully. We’re not disputing that public health is the No 1 priority. The hard question is whether it can be better aligned with other priorities. A recent poll from the Innovative Research Group helps us get at the issue:

The response to Question 1 caught our attention. It shows that Canadians are almost evenly split on whether they think experts have too much influence on governments. This sheds important light on the tensions Ford is dealing with, and why other premiers will likely face the same issues, as the second wave grows. Some, such as Legault, already are.

Basically, during the first wave, political leaders deferred to public health officials on how to respond to the pandemic. This served us well, but governments have come a long way over the last eight months. New knowledge and new tools like rapid testing and contact tracing now allow leaders to manage the risks in ways that were not possible before.

For example, experts now know enough about how the virus spreads to contain it within a region, so that governments don’t have to shut down a whole province. This is currently the approach in Ontario and Quebec.

However, there is a price to pay for plans like this. Generally, the more complex they get, the less likely they are to be guided by medical science. In Ontario, for example, the government’s decision to shut down bars, restaurants, and gyms while leaving schools open has raised eyebrows.

There are serious questions about how far the science on COVID-19 can help decision-makers assess the importance of getting children back to school. Striking a balance between public health risks and learning involves weighing lots of things that are outside the purview of medical science.

So, how are these tradeoffs getting made?

In a second slide, IRG reveals an important feature of our political culture. The slide uses a scale of 1 – 100 to assess how strongly Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP members feel about the role of experts in government decision-making. The poll finds a 24-point spread between Liberals and Conservatives, with the NDP in the middle. (See the line on Political Populism.)

Basically, the data show that our political leaders are predisposed to treat expert opinion differently: progressives are more inclined to accept it and conservatives to question it.

Neither predisposition is wrong, but predispositions of any kind can be a barrier to a thoughtful, informed discussion of the issues. They incline us to trust some views more than others and this can shape how we think and talk about the issues.

This is a critical consideration as the second wave advances. When health experts declare that “the evidence” calls for actions that favour health over, say, the economy, political leaders need a reliable way to weigh this advice against other concerns and priorities. And they shouldn’t look to health experts to provide it.

Health experts view the world through a health lens. Their role doesn’t train them to consider how this affects other priorities, such as the economy or learning. That is what elected officials are supposed to do – but they need a reliable way of thinking through the issues.

As things stand, the poll suggests that these decisions often come down to a leader’s predispositions – whether they are a conservative or a progressive. We don’t think that’s not good enough.

Increasingly, our governments are being called on to respond to all aspects of the pandemic, not just public health. Predisposition are not a reliable guide to this. They will not disappear, but we can be conscious of them and keep them in check.

Different priorities should be publicly discussed and balanced against public health. To be clear, we are NOT disputing that public health is the No 1 priority, but we do believe that governments need the flexibility to experiment with different options and to respond to other priorities.

That is the way forward.

Andrew Balfour is Managing Partner at Rubicon Strategy in Ottawa.

Source: The Second Wave: Science Meets Leadership

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Black Microbiologists Push for Visibility Amid a Pandemic

2020/09/29 Leave a comment

Of note, particularly important given disparities in health and healthcare:

A few days before her fifth-grade science fair, Ariangela Kozik awoke to the overwhelming scent of poultry past its due. It was exactly what the young scientist had been hoping for.

“Whew,” she recalled thinking at the time. “There is definitely something growing in here.’”

She rushed into her kitchen, where a neat stack of glass Petri dishes awaited her, each filled with a gelatinous brown disk made of beef broth and sugar. Atop many of the cow-based concoctions was a smattering of what looked like shiny, cream-colored pimples. Each was a fast-ballooning colony, teeming with millions and millions of bacteria, including several from the swab of raw chicken juice she had dabbed on three days before.

Dr. Kozik, then just 11, had set up an experiment to determine what brand of dish soap was best at killing bacteria. (The answer: Joy dishwashing liquid.) But her results yielded an even bigger reward: a lifelong love of microbes, exquisitely small organisms with an outsize impact on the world.

“It felt like I had just discovered a new form of life,” said Dr. Kozik, who is now a researcher at the University of Michigan, where she studies microbes that live in human lungs. “It was so cool.”

Two decades later, Dr. Kozik still considers her science fair project, for which she won first place, one of her first formal forays into the field of microbiology. In the months after her experiment, she devoured every book she could find on the topic, until she had worn her parents down with endless chatter about infectious disease. About 10 years later, she was on track toward a Ph.D., which she earned in 2018. And on Monday, she kicks off Black in Microbiology Week, the latest in a series of virtual events highlighting Black scientists in a variety of disciplines, as one of its two lead organizers.

Like earlier, similar events, Black in Microbiology Week will be hosted entirely through virtual platforms like Twitter and Zoom. The event will feature seven days of talks, panels and online discussions, spanning a range of topics under the microbiology umbrella, including the coronavirus, and addressing disparities in medicine, education and career advancement. Everything is free and accessible to the public, and will be live-captioned. Registration is required to attend.

“This is really a chance to welcome new voices and amplify those that have not been heard,” said Michael D. L. Johnson, a microbiologist and immunologist at the University of Arizona who will take part in Friday’s Black in Bacteriology panel.

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Khan: To unearth the ‘hidden figures’ of Islam, sexism against Muslim women must end

2020/03/09 Leave a comment

Another interesting piece by Khan to change narratives:

On Feb. 24, Katherine Johnson – the esteemed mathematician who was part of an exclusive group of scientists at NASA’s Flight Research Division, where she used her mind, a slide rule and pencil to calculate flight paths for the Apollo 11 moon mission in 1969 – passed away at the age of 101. And if you know her story – as well as that of her NASA cohort of brilliant African-American female mathematicians – it may be because of the 2016 film Hidden Figures, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly.

That film was a revelation to much of the American public. It shattered many stereotypes and showcased the intellectual talents and resilience of women who wouldn’t let institutionalized racism and segregation get in the way of achieving excellence.

Those themes are universal, though. Groundbreaking accomplishments by women have always occurred. We just need to dig deep enough in history to find these gems. And Muslim women are just starting to get their similar due.

Thanks to the painstaking research of Islamic scholar Mohammad Akram Nadwi, the dean of Cambridge Islamic College, the stories of accomplished Muslim female scholars, jurists and judges have been unearthed. Over the past 20 years, Mr. Nadwi’s research of biographical dictionaries, classical texts, madrasa chronicles and letters has led to a listing of about 10,000 Muslim women who have contributed toward various fields of Islamic knowledge over a period of 10 centuries.

Not only is the sheer number impressive, but so is the manner in which these women operated: Many were encouraged by their fathers at an early age to acquire knowledge, and many travelled to seek deeper understanding of Islamic sciences. They sat in study circles – with men – at the renowned centres of learning, debating and questioning alongside their male counterparts. And they taught their own study circles to men and women alike. Some were so revered that students came from near and far to absorb their wisdom. They approved certifications of learning and provided fatwas (non-binding religious opinions); as judges, they delivered important rulings.

A few notable examples include Aisha, the youngest wife of Prophet Mohammed, who was known for her expertise in the Koran, Arabic literature, history, general medicine and juridical matters in Islam. She was a primary source of authentic hadith, or traditions of the Prophet, which form part of the foundation of Sunni Islam. Umm al-Darda was a 7th-century scholar who taught students in the mosques of Damascus and Jerusalem, including the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. She was considered among the best traditionalists of her time. “I’ve tried to worship Allah in every way,” she wrote, “but I’ve never found a better one than sitting around debating with other scholars.” And one of the greatest was the 8th-century scholar Fatima al-Batayahiyyah, who taught in Damascus. During the Hajj, leading male scholars flocked to her lectures. She later moved to Medina, where she taught students in the revered mosque of the Prophet. When she tired, she rested her head on the grave of Mohammed. Fatimah bint Mohammed al Samarqandi, a 12th-century jurist, advised her more famous husband, ‘Ala’ al-Din al-Kasani, on how to issue his fatwas; she was also a mentor to Salahuddin.

These are but a few of the thousand luminaries found by Mr. Nadwi, a classically trained Islamic scholar. Initially, he thought he would find 20 or 30 women; his compilation now fills 40 volumes. While a 400-page preface (Al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam) has been published, the remainder sits on a hard drive, waiting for a publisher. Given the far-reaching importance of Mr. Nadwi’s work, surely a Muslim country or UNESCO can help disseminate it.

This research provides a stark contrast to contemporary practice in parts of the Muslim world. Some mosques, including ones here in Canada, forbid women. Rarely do Muslim women give lectures to their own communities. And the idea of women being intellectually on par with (or superior to) men is laughable in many quarters. Muslim women have a long way to go to reclaim their rightful place. Even his groundbreaking research will not change much, laments Mr. Nadwi, until Muslim men have respect for women – respect that starts in the home. He’s seen too much family violence in Britain, India and Pakistan. He’s highly critical of those who discourage or deny women from pursuing education, comparing it to the pre-Islamic practice of burying baby girls alive.

Muslims have just begun to discover our own “hidden figures” and there are many more yet to find. If we fail to deal with the present-day sexism that has eroded the egalitarian nature of our own historical communities, this excavation becomes all the more difficult.

Source: To unearth the ‘hidden figures’ of Islam, sexism against Muslim women must end: Sheema Khan

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