What Made the Ratman Sick?

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Evidence alone is not enough: policymakers must be able to access relevant evidence if their policy is to work

It is not enough to look for evidence of a previous policy success. Jeremy Hardie and Nancy Cartwright argue that exactly what evidence is needed, and of what, is the key question that needs to be asked for making real evidence-based social policy interventions

Laws

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How to Learn about Causes in the Single Case

RCTs have gained considerable prominence as a ‘gold standard’ for establishing whether a given policy intervention has a causal effect, but what do these experiments actually tell us and how useful is this information for policy-makers? Cartwright draws attention to two problems. First, an RCT only establishes a claim about average effects for the population enrolled in an experiment; it tells us little about what lies behind the average. The policy intervention studied might have changed nothing in some instances, while in others it triggered large shifts in behavior or health or whatever is under study. But, second, an RCT also tells us nothing about when we might expect to see the same effect size in a different population. In short, “identifying a cause is not the same as identifying something that is generally true,” Cartwright says. To assess how a different population might respond requires other information of the sort that qualitative case studies often uncover. Cartwright identifies the key elements we need to know in order to decide whether the effects observed in an experiment will scale

Rigour versus the need for evidential diversity

This paper defends the need for evidential diversity and the mix of methods that that can in train require. The focus is on causal claims, especially ‘singular’ claims about the effects of causes in a specific setting—either what will happen or what has happened. I do so by offering a template that categorises kinds of evidence that can support these claims. The catalogue is generated by considering what needs to happen for a causal process to carry through from putative cause at the start to the targeted effect at the end. The usual call for mixed methods focusses on a single overall claim and argues that we increase certainty by the use of different methods with compensating strengths and weaknesses. My proposals instead focus on the evidence that supports the great many subsidiary claims that must hold if the overall one is to be true. As is typical for singular causal claims, the mix of methods that will generally be required to collect the kinds of evidence I urge will usually have little claim to the kind of rigour that is now widely demanded in evidencing causal claims, especially those for policy/treatment effectiveness. So I begin with an exploration of what seems to be intended by ‘rigour’ in such discussions, since it is seldom made clear just what makes the favoured methods especially rigorous. I then argue that the emphasis on rigour can be counterproductive. Rigour is often the enemy of evidential diversity, and evidential diversity—lots of it—can make for big improvements in the reliability of singular causal predictions and post hoc evaluations. I illustrate with the paragon of rigour for causal claims, randomised controlled trials (RCTs), rehearsing at some length what they can and cannot do to make it easier to assess the importance of rigour in warranting singular causal claims

Objectivity and Intellectual Humility in Scientific Research: They’re Harder Than You Think

We begin from the assumption that where scientific research will predictably be used to affect things of moral significance in the world, you have a special duty, a duty of care, to ‘get it right’. This, we argue, requires a special kind of objectivity, ‘objectivity to be found’. What is it that’s to be found? In any kind of scientific endeavour, you should make all reasonable efforts to find the right methods to get the right results to serve the purposes at stake and neither exaggerate nor underestimate the credibility of what you have done. That, we take it, is what in this context constitutes objectivity and intellectual humility. But where your results will affect the world, you have a more demanding duty: a duty to ‘get it right’ about the purposes the endeavour should serve. Often the most morally significant purposes are those that ‘go without saying’ and because they are not said, we can too easily overlook them, sometimes at the cost even of human lives. We illustrate this with the example of the Vajont dam design and the flawed modelling that resulted in the Hillsborough football disaster

A face for all seasons:searching for context-specific leadership traits and discovering a general preference for perceived health

Previous research indicates that followers tend to contingently match particular leader qualities to evolutionarily consistent situations requiring collective action (i.e., context-specific cognitive leadership prototypes) and information processing undergoes categorization which ranks certain qualities as first-order context-general and others as second-order context-specific. To further investigate this contingent categorization phenomenon we examined the “attractiveness halo”—a first-order facial cue which significantly biases leadership preferences. While controlling for facial attractiveness, we independently manipulated the underlying facial cues of health and intelligence and then primed participants with four distinct organizational dynamics requiring leadership (i.e., competition vs. cooperation between groups and exploratory change vs. stable exploitation). It was expected that the differing requirements of the four dynamics would contingently select for relatively healthier- or intelligent-looking leaders. We found perceived facial intelligence to be a second-order context-specific trait—for instance, in times requiring a leader to address between-group cooperation—whereas perceived health is significantly preferred across all contexts (i.e., a first-order trait). The results also indicate that facial health positively affects perceived masculinity while facial intelligence negatively affects perceived masculinity, which may partially explain leader choice in some of the environmental contexts. The limitations and a number of implications regarding leadership biases are discussed

Astro2020 Science White Paper: Triggered High-Priority Observations of Dynamic Solar System Phenomena

Unexpected dynamic phenomena have surprised solar system observers in the past and have led to important discoveries about solar system workings. Observations at the initial stages of these events provide crucial information on the physical processes at work. We advocate for long-term/permanent programs on ground-based and space-based telescopes of all sizes - including Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) - to conduct observations of high-priority dynamic phenomena, based on a predefined set of triggering conditions. These programs will ensure that the best initial dataset of the triggering event are taken; separate additional observing programs will be required to study the temporal evolution of these phenomena. While not a comprehensive list, the following are notional examples of phenomena that are rare, that cannot be anticipated, and that provide high-impact advances to our understandings of planetary processes. Examples include: new cryovolcanic eruptions or plumes on ocean worlds; impacts on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune; extreme eruptions on Io; convective superstorms on Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune; collisions within the asteroid belt or other small-body populations; discovery of an interstellar object passing through our solar system (e.g. 'Oumuamua); and responses of planetary atmospheres to major solar flares or coronal mass ejections.Comment: Astro2020 white pape

XIII FUNDAMENTALISM vs THE PATCHWORK OF LAWS

For realism. A number of years ago I wrote How the Laws of Physics Lie. That book was generally perceived to be an attack on realism. Nowadays I think that I was deluded about the enemy: it is not realism but fundamentalism that we need to combat. My advocacy of realism-local realism about a variety of different kinds of knowledge in a variety of different domains across a range of highly differentiated situations-is Kantian in structure. Kant frequently used what should be a puzzling argument form to establish quite abstruse philosophical positions (0): We have X-perceptual knowledge, freedom of the will, whatever. But without 0 (the transcendental unity of apperception, or the kingdom of ends) X would be impossible, or inconceivable. Hence 0. The objectivity of local knowledge is my 0; X is the possibility of planning, prediction, manipulation, control, and policy setting. Unless our claims about the expected consequences of our actions are reliable, our plans are for nought. Hence knowledge is possible. What might be found puzzling about the Kantian argument form are the X's from which it starts. These are generally facts that appear in the clean and orderly world of pure reason as refugees with neither proper papers nor proper introductions, of suspect worth and suspicious origin. The facts that I take to ground objectivity are similarly alien in the clear, well-lighted streets of reason, where properties have exact boundaries, rules are unambiguous, and behaviour is precisely ordained. I know that I can get an oaktree from an acorn, but not from a pine-cone; that nurturing will make my child more secure; that feeding the hungry and housing the homeless will make for less misery; and that giving more smear tests will lessen the incidence of vaginal cancer. Getting closer to physics, which is ultimatel