I read a hilarious example of childhood-to-adulthood paradigm shifts today. Thunderpuff wrote about having to ask her parents what a phrase in a biography meant. She was shocked to find out that “beaver” didn’t refer to the dam-building mammal in this context. It sounds like she had really good parents who explained without being judgmental. The whole piece could be looked at as a study in how we pass funny paradigms to kids.

I’m going through a bit of a paradigm shift, myself. Matt Might talks about the shift he went through at this stage in his career in his article on the subject. Tenure, publication, funding… these are all a means to accomplish an end. Really coming to terms with that end is hard.

“Life is too precious and too fleeting to waste my time on bullshit like tenure. I didn’t become a professor to get tenure. I became a professor to make the world better through science. From this day forward, I will spend my time on problems and solutions that will matter. I will make a difference.” -Matt Might

That’s inspiration for me. It’s hard to shift over to that view of things when there are urgent pressures like grant writing.

My video log this morning made me think about the moral difference between doing harm and allowing harm. When I was young, I knew this parent of another kid. She was always very prudish and restrictive. She felt good about herself when she prevented things she saw as bad.

I think her intuition came more from the act of intervention then the consequences that she prevented. It’s sort of like the doing versus allowing harm puzzle in moral philosophy.

The question came up in that show Breaking Bad. The main character thinks about killing someone, but can’t bring himself to do it (it’s only the second season or so). But when he sees her overdosing, he refrains from saving her. She’s a problem for him, and by overdosing she has solved that problem. He could have saved her. He chose not to. Is he as morally culpable as if he murdered her?

Let’s change the scenario. If you see someone about to do something unhealthy, and you choose not to intervene, are you then responsible for their ill health? Does this intuition change if you are the parent of a child and thus the outcome is more your responsibility?

I think that this moral intuition drives some parents to make bad choices. I am sure that it feels very good to intervene and prevent an unhealthy outcome. I’m sure it feels very bad to choose not to act and thereby allow a negative outcome. But that feeling is not a good principle upon which to make decisions.

Clearly, when death is on the line, intervention is required. But some short-term negative consequences that naturally result from a kid’s actions are really important for a kid to experience.

I don’t have kids but I do have students. Learning from failure is important in teaching. Especially in the lab. I can’t let someone injure themselves if I can prevent it, but I can let someone screw up an experiment. That’s a learning experience.

I think that popular science does not convey the ambiguities and uncertainties of real science. Science has plenty of ambiguities. The deeper I go, the more ambiguous it feels. Scientific ideas span the gamut from extremely certain to hunches. Some things are in between; we might call them “reasonable hypotheses.” There is a distinction to be made between a reasonable extrapolation from existing data and conclusions directly derived from data.

Here’s an example: “dietary fat causes people to get fat.” That’s a hypothesis with lots of reasonable justification. But it was presented as an empirically derived fact. It was presented as if this premise was borne out by lots of data. Recent years have suggested otherwise.

When people eat more calories than they expend they make fat. That is an empirically derived fact. Fat has more calories per gram than other foods. That is an empirically derived fact. The association between high-fat diets and weight gain is a reasonable supposition based on these two facts. It is not an empirically derived fact. The data does not support that conclusion. A meta-analysis of more than 3000 studies concluded: “In weight loss trials, low-carbohydrate interventions led to significantly greater weight loss than did low-fat interventions… Low-fat interventions did not lead to differences in weight change compared with other higher-fat weight loss interventions.”

People might feel like they had been lied to. It wasn’t a lie: it seemed reasonable at the time. “Eat fewer calories by cutting fat” seemed like good advice. It just wasn’t. And now the data is in. We can change behavior. Hopefully. Unless people don’t want to trust the advice on account of the fact that they now distrust the whole enterprise.

Conflating fact and extrapolation is dangerous. Treating a reasonable hypothesis like a fact can, ultimately, degrade the credibility of science.

Treating facts as if they were hypotheses is just as bad. The Merchants of Doubt documentary talked about this at length. It’s easy to claim anything is “just a hypothesis.”

At one point, someone hypothesized (reasonably) that since tobacco smoke has nicotine and carbon monoxide and tar, it might be harmful.  It started as a just a hypothesis, not a fact.

The tobacconists don’t want to think that they are selling addictive poison. So they start off by saying “the data is not yet in, we can’t be sure.” At first, this is true. After more and more data gets collected, the poison hypothesis moves into fact territory. But it’s easy to move the goalpost and keep insisting that it’s still a hypothesis. Those arguments still sound valid.

I’m not sure how to fight that, but I suspect it would help if we more often pointed out which is which.  But that’s just a hypothesis.

I was thinking about why I am doing this vlog and blog. I am worried about national politics. I am worried about science in this new age. I am worried about changes in the economy and how those are going to affect my life and the lives of people I love. I want national policy to reflect my priorities. I know that if I tune into the news, I am going to see mostly reports about national policy. I know that national policy is not going to reflect my perspective for the foreseeable future.  So I know the news is going to be full of terrible, depressing, frustrating stuff all the time.

But I also know that national policy is not the only thing that matters. Every teacher that keeps teaching matters. Every scientist who keeps doing experiments matters. Every caregiver and every nurse who gets through another very hard day doing God’s work matters.

I’m not going to see lots of news that reflects individuals doing good, creative, interesting things. I’m not going to see a lot of news that reflects the lives of individuals doing hard mundane things.

I can tune into YouTube and watch positive people strive to produce something decent and good every single day. I can watch people try to communicate the importance of their work every day. There are people who put up tutorials on how to change the serpentine belt on their Hyundai. There are people who put up videos on how their 3-D printers are working. There are people who put up make-up tutorials. It makes them happy.

I want to help give voice to the positive, decent, day-to-day fun or challenging aspects of our modern life. Because these are good and they deserve to be shared. The keys to a good life are things like knowing how to cook a good meal or knowing how to make friends or knowing how to play a really good game or solve a really interesting puzzle or how to cure someone of their disease or caring for someone who is healing or even caring for someone who is dying.

These things are unlimited. We can share them without diminishing them. By sharing them we help make them abundant.

I’m traveling Monday, so I’ll be updating early. Here’s a quick description of a DIY spectrophotometer I’m going to use to illustrate some ideas for my instrumental analysis students.

I’m traveling Monday, so I’ll be updating early. Here’s a quick description of a DIY spectrophotometer I’m going to use to illustrate some ideas for my instrumental analysis students.

This morning I saw an animal scurry across the street on my way into work. I’m not sure if it was a very small cat or a very large rat (it was 4AM and still dark). It got me thinking about rats.

I remember reading in Rats that some pest control technicians thought that the older, experienced rats could read. I laughed about it at the time. But there was an article recently about pigeons that can read, so maybe it’s not too far-fetched. I mean, they are recognizing words, not interpreting language, but that could still be an important survival advantage. Being able to recognize “POISON,” for instance, could definitely be an advantage for a rat.

That makes me think of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and how different the book was from the animated movie. The book was more “realistic” and didn’t have the deus ex machina ending. Still, both had a bit of an anti-research subtext. People feel bad for the rats, but lab animals are still necessary.

Maybe not forever, though. There’s  Organ on a Chip technology coming that may make it possible to perform tests on human tissue instead of animals. That would have a lot of advantages. Animal experiments are not always relevant to people. A human organ-on-a-chip would have the biochemistry perfectly matched to human. It would also be easier to get huge amounts of rich, biochemical data from the system. It’s hard to continuously monitor a live animal.

Finally, I see huge potential for personalized medicine in the organ-on-a-chip. This is already happening in cancer treatment.