Shut it down. Shut it all down.

Those that visit Sneak-Attack via bernardyu.com (and who wouldn’t? It is so much better than RSS or the Tumblr dashboard) will notice that it is shut down. I’ve done so to bring attention to the fights against PIPA and the Research Works Act.

Library dorks: a question

I already have my nonfiction books organized by LCC, but hate GSAFD for fiction. What is your favorite way to physically catalog works of fiction (including magazines such as Analog)? Why? What makes it superior to others?

The sticky problem of truth (vigilantes)

This morning Arthur Brisbane, the public editor for The New York Times, asked whether Times reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about. Responses by people that I follow on Twitter and Google+ have been largely disgust. Not at the question, but that the question should even need to be asked. However, the fundamental question here is one that good journalists of all stripes have often dealt with: Is a journalists’ job to report what happened, or should they also report when newmakers are wrong or make false statement? Should they report when the situation being reported on is based on entirely false pretenses? What is the line between reporting, analysis, and opinion? Sometimes fact corrections are innocuous, but much of the time it can been seen as biased and ideologically motivated.

The problem with truth is not truth in itself (whatever that may be), but an individual’s perception of what is and is not true. More specifically, each individual’s perception of what is true and what is not depends almost entirely on her established worldview. As humans, journalists are not beyond this problem (although since they are often better educated than most on the subjected they report, they avoid the problems of misinformation more easily). However, the problem I want to talk about is not with journalism, but with readers and people in general. The issue is that people judge the validity of the information presented to them based on their established worldview, when a paper of record publishes a lot of information that someone sees as wrong because of bias (even if it is being neutral), they distrust it more. That is not all, as I discuss below there is some evidence that even when information is seen to come from a trusted source, it does little to change perceptions of what is true or false and right or wrong.

(The following is an excerpt from a project I have been working on.)

The limits of persons

We have busy lives. We work, we have chores, we spend what leisure time we have friends and family. Our day-to-day lives are filled with our immediate problems: paying the bills, going to the dentist, whether we are going to get that raise. It would be a tall order to expect every citizen to be fully educated on every intricacy of every social issue. In short, humans are limited.

We like to think that people are rational, making decisions based on established knowledge and changing our views based on new evidence. When ignorant of an issue, we like to think that most people–but especially intelligent and inquisitive people–will take the effort to learn about important social issues. We like to think that we are equal in ability and opportunity, but reality is quite different.

The myth of human rationality

Polls show that American voters are often ignorant of important social issues. A poll in 2009 found that although a large majority of people are worried about rising fuel costs and global warming (89% and 71% respectively), nearly 40% could not name a fossil fuel.¹ Another poll in 2010 found that on average, Americans believed that US foreign aid accounted for 25% of the US federal budget and should be cut to 13%. In actuality, only 1% of the budget goes to foreign aid.² In March 2011, Newsweek administered the US citizenship test to 1,000 US citizens and found that 38% of them failed. 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights.³ US citizens are not only ignorant of public policy, they are ignorant of the shape and function of their own government.

Those who are ignorant overestimate their own knowledge, capabilities, and are incapable of realizing competency in others.⁴ We hope that people choose to learn when they realize their incompetencies–that would be the rational course of action–but that does not happen. While others have found that uninformed voters are able to use information shortcuts to make decisions similar to better informed voters and decision makers,⁵ this only works when the knowledge voters have is correct. Often, voters are not only uninformed, but misinformed.

In a series of studies, Steve Shepard and Aaron Kay found that when people were uneducated of a complex social issue, they avoided the problem.⁶ They consciously tried to avoid any new information, and preferred to believe that the government was fixing the issue. This reaction was strongest when issues were perceived as especially complex and immediately important.⁷ Another study found that when confronted with complex social issues involving injustices people would often try to justify the status quo rather than trying to address the issue.⁸ For instance, when confronted with the problems of gender pay-discrimination, many people–despite their ignorance of the complexities of an issue–would use system-legitimizing stereotypes saying that women made less because they were not as dedicated to advancement or took time off to have children.⁹

The situation does not improve when people directly confront their ignorance. We like to think that when people confront reliable evidence that contradicts an established belief, people change their worldview to match reality. That is not the case. In a series of studies, researchers found that whether people accept the veracity of evidence depends almost entirely on their established worldview. The bad news does not end there. Learning of evidence contrary to established ideology actually had a “backfire effect” that strengthened the misperception.

The first study, held in Fall of 2005, tested responses to information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. Students first read one of two versions of an article (attributed to the Associated Press) about a campaign rally where President Bush strongly implied that there were WMDs in Iraq. One version of the article then included a correction from the Deulfer Report (which documented the lack of WMDs in Iraq right before the US invasion) while the others received a control article that did not include any information from the Deulfer Report. They found that responses depended almost entirely on their established political ideology. Further, conservative students who read the article with the correction were more likely to believe that there were WMDs in Iraq than those that received only the control article.

In spring 2006, the researchers performed a second series of studies that tested if perceived bias from the source affected reader influence and varied the news source to be either from the New York Times or FoxNews.com. This time, they found that moderate conservatives were much more likely to believe the correction, but extreme conservatives did not (they found that the source of the article had no meaningful effect). During this time, national polls showed that fewer Republicans believed that Iraq had WMDs before the war, likely because conservative elites had changed their rhetoric supporting the Iraq war. In short, people’s acceptance of any sort of evidence is independent of the veracity of any statement. Instead, their reasoning and decision making is motivated by ideological preference.¹⁰

While there is a substantial amount of research on whether citizens are knowledgable enough to meaningfully participate in civic life (to mixed results), these studies are disheartening. When ignorant, we think we are more educated than we really are and refuse to learn more. When misinformed, all evidence supports our established ideologies, even the evidence that does not.

An open-access policy for government-funded research encourages academic collaboration and communication.

(This letter is my response to the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research.)

Government-funded research should be publicly accessible, for free and without restrictions. Public access to publicly-funded research is limited. If an article is not open-access, many publishers charge between $15 and $50 for access to a single article (a few charge even more). In other words, taxpayers would have to pay to read the results of research they already funded through their taxes. But that is not the only reason that the results of publicly-funded research should be available for free: open-access policies can be used to encourage collaboration and increase academic communication.

Although the Association of American Publishers argue that requiring open-access publishing would deny them fair compensation, for-profit science, technology, and medicine publishers already enjoy massive profits at little cost. The Economists notes that in 2010 Elsevier–the biggest publisher–made “£724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.” In a chapter of her thesis on scholarly communication, Heather Morrison notes that high profits and low operating costs are common in the industry:

Springer’s Science + Business Media reported a return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or € 294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over the profit of the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, John Wiley & Sons (2011) reported profit of $106 million for their scientific, medical, technical and scholarly division on revenue of $253 million, a profit rate of 42%. This represents an increase in the profit rate of 13% over the previous year. The operating profit rate for the academic division of Informa.plc (2011, p. 4) for the first half of 2011 was 32.4%, or £47 million on revenue of £145 million, an increase of 3.3% over the profit of the previous year.

As others have written (including Michael B. Eisen, the founder of the Public Library of Science), academic publishers enjoy very low overhead costs for the journals they publish. They do not need to fund research, neither do they fund the researchers who review articles (reviewers volunteer their time as part of their employment).

Government policy does not just set rules for what is to be done, it sets policies that people believe are right and wrong. When policy supports the status quo, people believe that the status quo is right and change is wrong, even when all evidence suggests otherwise. When we set policies that discourage sharing, people are less likely to share. But when policies are made to encourage sharing and open-access publishing, it changes the mindset. People become more willing to share their knowledge, research, and communicate with others. Policy does not merely set what people can and cannot do: It shapes the collective consciousness. It shapes how we think about ourselves and act towards each other.

In the last few years academics in every field of study have been discussing new ways to publish research including reforms to the peer-review process and entirely new methods for review and publishing. This is an area where government can not just set policy, but also promote innovations in academic communication. Along with requiring open-access publishing, government can set policies to foster intra-laboratory collaboration by requiring that publicly-funded research is not only published open-access (many for-profit journals now also publish some articles as open-access), but also require that raw data from publicly-funded research also be published online (e.g. through open APIs) so others may analyze and contribute to their data in new and novel ways.

Today, many researchers are insular and secretive: protective of their domain, funding, and laboratories. Many refusing to share their discoveries until they are published. This hinders progress and goes completely against the role of government in society. Many of the best discoveries and innovations occur not in a single laboratory, but in the intersections of disciplines which does not happen easily in closed academic environments: Medical imaging leading to advances in astrophysics. Quantum theory and artificial intelligence. Network theory and public medicine. Further, scientists unaffiliated with any institutions or businesses can still access and contribute to public research.

If we set policies to encourage sharing, people will be more willing to collaborate. Some may resent the intrusion, but most will turn around and those who do not will retire. When we set policies to encourage sharing, researchers will be more willing to collaborate. Some may resent the intrusion, but most will turn around and those who do not will eventually retire. Many of the new generation of scientists are already trying to do new work in this paradigm: through projects just as openthesis.org, blogging and other social media. We need to support what they are doing in policy, it is the future of academic scholarship. Promoting an open-access policy for government-funded research is not just about the giving taxpayers access to information that we paid for, it is about open collaboration and encouraging new forms of communication in our community.