Science can, at times, feel like religion

Zuska explains how:

Wilson wasn’t saying science IS a religion in the sense that there’s no real underlying objective reality, everything’s all taken on faith, and we all get together and worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster at Friday seminar. But Jesus Christ, I was a grad student once, and I’ll be damned if there weren’t aspects of that experience that weren’t more than a little bit like being indoctrinated into some sort of crazy cult worship. There was a brilliant Chronicle piece some years ago by Thomas Benton analyzing the correspondence between grad school and religious cults. He was speaking about humanities students but, as I recall, it was all the rage with science and engineering students as well. Read it and see if you don’t find it chillingly applicable. My point is: what we do at the lab bench is Science. What we do socially, to each other, when we are not at the lab bench (and sometimes even when we are) can sometimes take on characteristics that very much feel like Science as a Form of Religion.

A thousand years ago, when I was a graduate student, we often used to grumble and joke amongst ourselves about the “sacred priesthood of science”. How you basically had to give up your whole life (including sex, because when did you have time for that?), and take a vow of poverty, to pursue your work. How you had to demonstrate your undying devotion to Science above all other things. And, of course, for us women, the sacred priesthood joke had special resonance, because damn, there were just so doggone many priests running the show and precious few priestesses to be found anywhere in the temples.

Imagine my surprise and amusement, some years later, to discover that our long-running joke had real roots in the way that Western science itself grew out of the ascetic tradition of the medieval Latin church – see: David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. There I was in grad school, joking about being inducted into the sacred priesthood of science – and here came David Noble to explain how Western science was shaped by and formed on a monastic model, designed in part specifically to exclude women.

Noble goes beyond this thesis of science as a religious calling in The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention.

For social historian Noble…Western culture’s persistent enchantment with technology finds its roots in religious imagination. Despite their varied guises and pursuits, science and technology suggest nothing more than our “enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.” The pearl of great value is Noble’s contention that science and technology aren’t guilty of amorality: that was never the intent. Rather, he claims, new technologies aren’t about meeting human need; they transcend it. Salvation through technology “has become the unspoken orthodoxy.” Such is the new Gnosticism. This is a dense, fascinating study of technology and Christianity. Not satisfied with easy equivalencies, Noble challenges the idea of post-Enlightenment science as a secular brave new world and quietly offers that what we’re really hoping for is our reentry into Eden.

Noble is hardly the first historian of science to delve into the ways in which science functions as a religion (though no in the way those crazy Intelligent Designers like to think). But I particularly love what he does in exploring how the ways in which Western science’s birth in the monastic tradition has had long-lasting effects for women’s participation in science.

There are many reasonable, sound, scholarly bases for examining the idea of how science might function as a religion functions, or how it might work to meet needs and fill roles that are in other cases met and filled by what we more normally think of as religions. It might seem scary to ask those sorts of questions in a time where people who have decidedly, virulently anti-science agendas (and deep pockets to help carry them out) wish to put forth their own poisonous notion that science is just another religion so that they can pour their religion into science classrooms and control the agenda of science. But I’d like to think that at least amongst scientists, we can have a conversation about science as science, as cultural practice, as an institution. That we can step back and critically examine what it is we do day in and day out.

If you think the concept of science as a religion is just sooooooo unbearably stupid, high school debate, not-worthy of ScienceBlogs, it may not be the concept that’s ignorant. Just possibly, there’s a whole wealth of information out there to ponder that you are completely unaware of.

Take a look!

Beteille on Levi-Strauss

In The Telegraph.

Saving the fragile predator

I recently bought Ullas Karanth’s A view from the Machan: how science can save the fragile predator. This is a paperback published by Permanent Black and is nicely illustrated by Maya Ramaswamy. From the book I learnt about the writer Kenneth Anderson, about heroes like Chinnappa who almost gave their life to the conservation effort, and about Karanth’s views which are at variance with those of some of the other Indian coservationists — Madhav Gadgil being the example that Karanth quotes by name (and, having heard Gadgil on some of these issues, it was nice for me to learn Karanth’s view point).

A nice book for a Sunday afternoon reading and stongly recommended.

HowTo: take a restorative study break

Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily:

When you’re studying during nearly every free moment, what’s the best way to clear up your mind and refocus yourself for the next round of studying?

One old idea that has re-emerged recently is called “attention restoration theory”, or ART. William James actually discussed a similar concept in his 1892 psychology textbook. The idea that taking a walk in the woods can help you refocus your thoughts is at least as old as Immanuel Kant, and probably older. But how exactly does interacting with nature help focus attention? ART says that the natural world engages your attention in a bottom-up fashion, by features of the environment (e.g. a sunset, a beautiful tree). The artificial world demands active attention, to avoid getting hit by cars or to follow street signs. Since intellectual activities like studying or writing also demand the same kind of attention, taking a break in the artificial world doesn’t really function like a rest.

A must-read post!

Coarsening of software firms

Joel Spolsky as to why you should grow at break-neck speed if you do not want to disappear:

Then I came across a quote from Geoffrey Moore, who is best known for his best-selling book Crossing the Chasm, which is about how businesses cross over from their initial niche markets to dominate larger markets. In another book, called Inside the Tornado, Moore writes about the great battle between Oracle and Ingres in the early 1980s. The winner of that battle is well known: Oracle now has a market cap of more than $100 billion, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of Ingres.

“What set Oracle apart from Ingres,” Moore writes, “was that [CEO] Larry Ellison drove for 100 percent growth while Ingres ‘accepted’ 50 percent growth.” Executives at Ingres meant well. According to Moore, they felt that the company “simply cannot grow any faster than 50 percent and still adequately serve our customers. No one can. Look at Oracle. They are promising anything and everything and shipping little or nothing. Everybody knows it. Their customers hate them. They are going to hit the wall.”

Of course, Oracle overcame those concerns and eclipsed its rival. And this got me worried. Were we Ingres?

I had to wonder. We do have a large competitor in our market that appears to be growing a lot faster than we are. The company is closing big deals with big, enterprise customers. And the wheels are falling off the donkey cart over there as the company stretches to fulfill its obligations. Meanwhile, our product is miles better, and we’re a well-run company, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Why?

Moore explains that “for pragmatist customers, the first freedom in a rapidly shifting market is order and security. That can only come from rallying around a clear market leader. Once the apparent leader-to-be emerges, pragmatists will support that company, virtually regardless of how arrogant, unresponsive, or overpriced it is.”

Uh-oh. Are we actually losing our market leadership position because we’re careful?

It’s entirely possible. Think of it this way: If you’re growing at 50 percent a year, and your competitor is growing at 100 percent a year, it takes only eight years before your competitor is 10 times bigger than you. And when it’s 10 times bigger than you, it can buy 10 times as much advertising and do 10 times as many projects and have meetings with 10 times as many customers. And you begin to disappear.

A nice and must-read post.

Two popular myths about writing and the need for deliberate practice

Peg Boyle Single has started a four part essay on dissertation writing. The first piece debunks two popular myths about writing. The second one talks about deliberate practice:

So what is deliberate practice? It is not inherently fun nor is it intrinsically rewarding. It is work. Deliberate practice is effortful practice with full concentration and includes a mechanism by which the results of the practice can be evaluated and improved upon in future sessions. Often a coach or master teacher oversees the deliberate practice, chooses individualized training tasks, and evaluates the results of the training. Experts more often engage in deliberate practice during the morning; research has supported that we have the greatest capacity for sustained, engaged and demanding cognitive activity during the morning. Research has also supported the many anecdotal accounts that four hours is the length of time that deliberate practice can be sustained. Mind you, these experts did not start by engaging in deliberate practice for four hours a day, they worked up to it. Also, I want to emphasize that research on expert performance underscores the importance of sleep and that experts tended to spend more time sleeping than a comparable reference group; they maintained that being well rested was crucial for engaging in deliberate practice.

One of the results of engagement in deliberate practice is enhanced pattern recognition. Ericsson and Charness present research showing that pattern recognition differentiates expert from novice chess players. In one study they cite, a chess game was set up mid-game and expert and novice players were given a moment to study the board. Then, both groups were asked to remember the location of the pieces. The experts exhibited enhanced recall of the location of the pieces compared with the recall of the novice players. But, and this is an important but, this superior performance in recall only occurred when the chess pieces were in a meaningful pattern on the board. When the pieces were randomly placed on the board, the recall was about equal.

This result tells us that experts look at the configuration of pieces as a whole and examine it from a broader perspective. They recognize meaningful patterns and by focusing on the patterns, they are able to remember better the location of the individual pieces. Novice players view the configuration of pieces as individual items and examine it from a narrower perspective. Although when the pieces were randomly placed on the board and no meaningful patterns existed, the experts’ previous advantage was stripped away and both groups were relying on straight recall. So, what differentiates the expert chess players is their ability to examine a board from a broader perspective and their ability to recognize meaningful patterns on the chessboard.

Of course, these two pieces are a must-read and I am looking forward to the next two.

Why are physicists sometimes arrogant to outsiders?

Robert P Crease tells why, here, in this must-read piece:

In my own encounter with Feynman – which, incidentally, is recounted in the epilogue to James Gleick’s biography Genius – I asked him questions about episodes of his intellectual development. Feynman’s replies were direct, but accompanied by intense curiosity about why I was asking; he sought to learn. Then I asked him about progress in science. This did not interest him. A physiological change in his face told me that I had abruptly gone from scholar to scribbler.

All at once he grew angry, stood up, and began shouting. “It’s a dumb question,” he yelled, “I don’t know how to answer it. Cancel everything I said!” He slammed his fist into the mountains of papers on his desk, then strode to the door. “It’s all so stupid. All of these interviews are always so damned useless.” He walked down the corridor, shouting: “It’s goddamned useless to talk about these things! It’s a complete waste of time! The history of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful!”

In that instant, witnessing his curiosity evaporate, I realized this had nothing to do with me, nor with contempt for outsiders, nor with scorn for history. Rather, it had everything to do with Feynman’s absorption in his own work – the same kind of absorption that made him a great physicist.

By the way, there is an interesting story about S Chandrashekher too in that piece — one that you don’t get to see in the pages of, say, Current Science:

Horgan once flew to Chicago for a prearranged interview with the late astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars.Chandrasekhar, who was then writing a book on Newton’s Principia, demanded to know Horgan’s purpose. Horgan replied that he was writing a two-page profile about Chandrasekhar and his project.

“What!” the Nobel laureate hollered, ordering Horgan out. “You think that you can summarize Homer’s Odyssey in two pages? You think that you can write about the Sistine Chapel in two pages?” Horgan laughed nervously, wondering if this was a joke. It was not. Chandrasekhar again demanded he leave.

A University of Chicago public-relations aide eventually coaxed Chandrasekhar to stop the bullying and go through with the interview – but afterwards Chandrasekhar insisted that Horgan should not print anything about their meeting. Horgan, within his rights, did so anyway, penning a delicate, toned-down description of the encounter.

Horgan’s book, The End of Science, is full of such stories.

Link via John Hawks.

Gender equality in Carnatic music

Sriram Venkatkrishnan has a nice piece in the Hindu:

Within a year, Nagarathnamma was to discover that she, and other women, would not be allowed to participate in the Tyagaraja Aradhana, then considered a male preserve. There began a battle for equality, with a separate women-only Aradhana being conducted at the rear of the Samadhi. As was to be expected, this festival conducted by the women outshone the rival events conducted by others. In 1940, everyone saw the light of day and the warring factions were united in their worship of Tyagaraja. The festival then took on its present dimensions.

What is interesting is however the role of women in ensuring a proper memorial to Tyagaraja. If Nagarathnamma showed the way and several Devadasis helped her in the women’s festival, the silver vessels used for worship came courtesy Padmasini Bai, a leading Harikatha artist. The electrification of the Samadhi was done in 1962 thanks to Kolar Rajam, consort of Palani Subramania Pillai. This was of course long after Nagarathnamma’s death, but she would have been pleased. For years, flowers for worship would come from Ammapettai Chellam Ammal, yet another hereditary artist. The inscribing of Tyagaraja kritis in marble slabs was envisioned and implemented by Srirangam Sundaram Iyer with donations and help from several people. But a survey of the slabs will show the contributions from M.S. Subbulakshmi.

Breaking the bastion

There remained the question of women’s participation in the unchavriti. This was a men- only-affair and that too performed by the most orthodox. Nagarathnamma had shown that women could participate in it indirectly, for she sponsored her own team of male bhagavatars who went around Tiruvaiyyaru and participated in the symbolic collection of alms. But still it was an event in which only men could participate.

Then during an Aradhana, many years after Nagarathnamma’s passing, three women came forward and broke the last bastion most musically. As the procession wound its way down Tiruvayyaru’s narrow lanes, Brinda, Muktha and M.S. Subbulakshmi joined the singing and walked with the group.

After so many years, it is impossible to fathom whether this was a premeditated move on the part of the trio or whether it was done on the spur of the moment. Presumably it had the backing of T. Sadasivam, MS’s husband who would have anyway loved challenging established taboos. And so they joined in and sang along. Not one voice of protest was heard. And so it became an accepted aspect of the Tyagaraja Aradhana. The spirit of Nagarathnamma lives on.

In a field where even now it is not uncommon to hear male singers refusing women accompanists and even worse, women singers refusing accompanists of their own gender, such stories are heart-warming and indicate that gender equality in Carnatic music, though not yet fully achieved, is definitely a success story.

FFT faster than FFTW

Frigo and Johnson’s FFTW is a software that I have used extensively and continue to use. Today I learnt of another FFT that is faster than that of FFTW (pdf):

My djbfft software at http://cr.yp.to/djbfft.html computes power-of-2 discrete Fourier transforms at extremely high speeds. It’s several times fasterthan a typical “optimized” FFT library. It’s even faster than the Frigo-Johnson “Fastest Fourier Transform in the West.”

I got the link to the pdf file from Aaron Shwartz’s post (which, by the way, has some very nice quotes) which I reached thanks to Abi’s sharing of a link at Google Reader.

The broom of Ockham

Although it is increasingly difficult to gauge what people can be expected to know, it is probably safe to assume that most readers are familiar with Ockham’s razor – roughly, the principle whereby gratuitous suppositions are shaved from the interpretation of facts – enunciated by a Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century. Ockham’s broom is a somewhat more recent conceit, attributable to Sydney Brenner, and embodies the principle whereby inconvenient facts are swept under the carpet in the interests of a clear interpretation of a messy reality. (Or, some – possibly including Sydney Brenner – might say, in order to generate a publishable paper.)

In due course, the edge of the carpet must be lifted and the untidy reality confronted, and in this issue of Journal of Biology we are launching an occasional series of Opinions in which contributors inspect the sweepings and discuss their implications.

Thus begins an editorial of Miranda Robertson in the Journal of Biology. A nice concept that is worthy of emulation by other journals too!