philosophy of science, data science, environmental policy

 

The parable of fire ecology

On Wednesday, after the election, I experienced a minor depressive episode: anhedonia, insomnia, loss of appetite, GI weirdness. I cleared the few remaining things on my…
Nov 8, 2024
Dan Hicks

 

Writing a draft is sketching, not vomiting

Yesterday our Environmental Philosophy class had an interesting discussion about writing first drafts. Several of the students used a vomiting metaphor to describe this…
Oct 4, 2024
Dan Hicks

 

Why aren’t Trump supporters worried about the Seal Team 6 Scenario? (Rejected from r/AskTrumpSupporters)

This was originally written as a Reddit post on July 5, about a week after the Trump v. US decision.
Jul 15, 2024
Dan Hicks

 

Were you aware that Democrats do not want to undermine democracy? (Rejected from r/AskTrumpSupporters)

I’m somewhat active on the subreddit r/AskTrumpSupporters. The board is intended to be a place where Trump supporters and critics can talk about the differences across their…
Jul 14, 2024
Dan Hicks

 

Defusing the Democracy Defense: Scientists as Epistemic Representatives

I gave a talk at the Center for Dewey Studies in Carbondale on April 4. Slides are here, the recording is here, and the abstract is below.
Apr 5, 2024
Dan Hicks

 

Epistemic interdependence or epistemic hierarchy

Given my intests in public scientific controversies and the politics of expertise, it might be a little surprising that I don’t really find much of interest in the social…
Nov 12, 2023
Dan Hicks

Fact checking ChatGPT: An activity for Critical Thinking

This week I did a “fact checking ChatGPT” activity with my Critical Thinking class. It has some distinct aims from other ChatGPT activities I’ve seen, and seemed to work…
Nov 10, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Teaching ethics of expertise in Critical Thinking

I’m teaching expertise and appeals to authority in Critical Thinking about a month, and start to wrestle yet again with how to approach this.
Sep 25, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Do scientists have power? Does science?

I recently read (most of) Lukes (2005). Lukes offers an influential account of (political) power, and I wanted to see if it would be useful for answering a question that…
Sep 20, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Misinformation and trustworthiness: Frenemies in the analysis of public scientific controversies

Lewandowsky et al. (2022) examine public scientific controversies through two contrasting “lenses” or analytical frameworks, using Covid-19 as their primary case study. The…
Sep 8, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Revisiting the Nazi Problem

In theory this will be a quick post. In theory.
Jun 7, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

New preprint: tmfast fits topic models fast

Yesterday I published a new preprint on the arXiv: “tmfast fits topic models fast”. Here’s the abstract:
May 4, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Anarchy and Covid-19

I started working on this two or three weeks ago, got about 1500 words in, and then had to shelve it to deal with a minor deluge of grading and some other things. I thought…
May 4, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Pluralism about problematic situations

Matt Brown has some commentary here.
Apr 7, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

The Nature endorsement and the value-free ideal

In October 2020, Nature published an editorial endorsing Joe Biden and criticizing Trump (“Why Nature Supports Joe Biden for US President” 2020). A few days ago, Nature…
Mar 22, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Constructivist accounts of representation, in science and politics

Political theorists developed a constructivist approach to political representation around 2010; Saward (2010) seems to be the canonical citation for this approach, but I…
Feb 8, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Undue influence of epistemic values

[We discussed this post on Facebook.]
Jan 30, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

The presence-absence model and epistemic representation

In 2015-16 I was working for1 the US Environmental Protection Agency. My work colleagues were technocratic managers, most of whom had PhDs and were professionalized as…
Jan 26, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Technocratic legitimacy and the value-free ideal

Holman and Wilholt (2022) argue that, as philosophers of science work to dismantle the value-free ideal, it is important to understand the function that the ideal played.…
Jan 24, 2023
Dan Hicks

 

Leftist dynamics for city simulation games

I’ve been playing Cities: Skylines recently, and that prompted me to go back and re-read Kevin Baker’s Model Metropolis, on the libertarian assumptions baked in to the…
Jun 26, 2021
Dan Hicks

 

Talk: Open science can’t solve the replication crisis

I gave this talk yesterday at the Digital Studies for Digital Science (DS2) online conference. You can watch the recording on YouTube.
Mar 19, 2021
Dan Hicks

 

Teaching critical thinking in 2020

Back in May, I read a blog post by Cathy Davidson, an English professor at CUNY Grad Center, “The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course.” It’s…
Jul 10, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

Configuring Github and Travis-CI for Automated Lab Feedback

Last summer, anticipating teaching for the first time since 2013, I started reading about ungrading, and somewhere (maybe even in that piece, I didn’t check) read about a…
Jul 10, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

Replication, reproducibility, and Strengthening Transparency

Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science is an open science rule that the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed in April 2018. If adopted, the rule would…
May 18, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

Talk: “When Virtues are Vices: The Weaponization of Scientific Norms”

Back in March, I was supposed to present at a colloquium at the University of Dayton on “Doing Science in a Pluralistic Society.” Due to the pandemic, the colloquium was…
May 18, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

COVID-19 needs adaptive management

[I wrote this general-audience piece during the last week of April and first few days of May. I pitched it to a few popular outlets, but couldn’t find it a home.]
May 12, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

Why I won’t give you a hug

Dear family member,
May 8, 2020
Dan Hicks

A map of California, showing the study area of the Central Valley in blue. Chlorpyrifos use is indicated by a cloud of redish points; the cloud is densest in the San Joaquin Valley.

Paper: Census Demographics and Chlorpyrifos Use in California’s Central Valley, 2011–15: A Distributional Environmental Justice Analysis

In Spring 2018, I audited a spatial data analysis class taught by Noli Brazil at UC Davis. The pesticide chlorpyrifos had been in the news for the past year, as one of the…
May 4, 2020
Dan Hicks

bar chart of responses to block 1

A “Toolbox-lite” for the First Day of Philosophy of Science

This semester I get to teach an undergraduate philosophy of science course for the first time ever, and today was the first meeting of the class. I’ve always struggled with…
Jan 21, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

Radical Immanent Critique

My general approach to philosophy might be characterized as radical immanent critique. This might seem paradoxical. The goal of this blog post is to resolve this apparent…
Jan 19, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

Comment: Inductive Risk, Science, and Values: A Reply to MacGillivray

Last fall Jessey Wright, P.D. Magnus, and I put together a short commentary replying to a paper on inductive risk published in the journal Risk Analysis. The paper is now…
Jan 6, 2020
Dan Hicks

 

White Supremacy and Evolutionary Games

This morning I’m productinating (productively procrastinating) by reading Ann Cudd’s review of Cailin O’Connor’s The Origins of Unfairness. I started to read O’Connor’s book…
Dec 6, 2019
Dan Hicks

 

Paper: Network analysis to evaluate the impact of research funding on research community consolidation

A new paper by myself and three UC Davis collaborators (David Coil, Carl Stahmer, and Jonathan Eisen), “Network analysis to evaluate the impact of research funding on…
Jun 18, 2019
Dan Hicks

 

Luck and the Academic Job Market

First, some news: starting this fall, I will be an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced. I…
May 30, 2019
Dan Hicks

 

Paper: Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science

A new paper by Manuela Fernández Pinto and me, “Legitimizing Values in Regulatory Science,” has just been published in Environmental Health Perspectives. This paper will be…
Mar 14, 2019
Dan Hicks

 

Slides: Explainable Machine Learning: An Integrated Epistemic-Ethical Analysis

Machine learning (ML) algorithms have become widely adopted over the past decade. Contemporary ML can achieve near-human levels of accuracy, but operates as an inscrutable…
Feb 1, 2019
Dan Hicks

 

Slides: Why Baier? Feminism, Trust, and Power

Here are the slides for my talk at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting this past weekend in Seattle: Why Baier? Feminism, Trust, and Power
Nov 6, 2018
Dan Hicks

Auto-tagging posts + the nDH metric

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This morning I added a new feature to the blog posts: an R script that automatically generates and applies tags, allowing users to find old posts on (potentially, roughly)…
Oct 25, 2018
Dan Hicks

 

Poster: Contributions of Women to 20th Century Philosophy of Science

math
I’m going to be presenting in the poster session at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Seattle next month. You can get the poster here and I’m going to try…
Oct 23, 2018
Dan Hicks

Difference-in-differences in R

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This post recreates this post with proper formatting, syntax highlighting, etc.
Oct 10, 2018
Dan Hicks

 

A care ethics for data science

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Care ethics is an approach to ethical theorizing and reflection that emphasizes personal relations rather than abstract principles or rules. For example, ethics codes and hum…
Feb 28, 2018
Dan Hicks

 

Old posts

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Posts dated prior to 2018 were migrated from an old Tumblr site during a website redesign in September-October 2018. I selected the posts to migrate based on a quick skim of…
Jan 1, 2018
Dan Hicks

 

Problems with Trolley Problems

reasoning
Trolley problem scenarios are non-monotonic: adding additional details can change the valence of the consequences
Dec 27, 2017
Dan Hicks

 

No, psychologists haven’t shown that GMO opponents don’t care about evidence

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Earlier this week, the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science published a paper by a team of psychologists on “absolute moral opposition” to GM foods. The paper has…
May 26, 2016
Dan Hicks

 

Against ‘Science-Based Policy’

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Today, as part of the preparation for my AAAS science policy fellowship, I filled out a brief survey on science and public policy. Several of the questions dealt with…
Aug 21, 2015
Dan Hicks

 

Industry-funded research and publishing independence

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Industry funding of scientific research was in the news last week. The most prominent story was that Coca-Cola is funding obesity research. But I had an interesting Twitter…
Aug 19, 2015
Dan Hicks

Scatterplots of simulated data. Group means are statistically significantly different, but there is substantial overlap between the two groups.

Statistical essentialism

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Somehow this piece on the character traits of chronically late people showed up several times on my Facebook feed this morning. The sweeping generalizations in the…
Jul 9, 2015
Dan Hicks

 

Public Policy:  What Philosophers of Science can Contribute

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I spent last week in Washington, DC, interviewing with about 10 different federal government offices as a finalist for a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. As…
Apr 23, 2015
Dan Hicks

 

When “Feeding the World” Doesn’t Mean “Feeding the World”

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A common lament in the GMO controversy is that both sides really want the same thing. As Ottoline Leyser puts it in a piece in PLoS Biology from this summer, “The most…
Dec 8, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Feminism and Science: Frenemies?

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A friend of mine sent me a message on Facebook this morning:
Nov 26, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Regulatory Science Reform?

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Over the last few days, several people have brought to my attention this story about two regulatory science bills passed earlier this week in the US House. Since the linked…
Nov 21, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

HSS Reflection: Practices, Science, and Criticism

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This is the second of my posts this week about the 2014 HSS/PSA conference. Here, I’d like to think a little about Andrea Woody’s comments on the paper I read at a HSS session…
Nov 14, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Work and Hackwork

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Should you love what to do, or “live to work”? This post suggests not:
Oct 13, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Virtue Ethics for Robots

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Autonomous automated systems — machines capable of acting on their own for extended periods of time in complex environments — have been a major trope of science fiction for…
Jun 18, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Thoughts on FIRST

funding
The Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act is the current biannual funding authorization bill for the NSF, one of the major science funding…
May 6, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Is the Finnish Model Irrelevant to North America?

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Like many professional educators, I’m a fan of the Finnish education system, especially its emphases on recognizing the autonomy of teachers as highly-trained professionals…
Mar 20, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Notes for an Ethics of Community Interventions

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Last week, in response to the Ludlow affair — the most recent in a string of high-profile cases of sexual harassment/assault in academic philosophy — students at…
Mar 14, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Is Motivated Reasoning Bad Reasoning? III

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This is part III of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog.
Mar 12, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Is Motivated Reasoning Bad Reasoning? II

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This is part II of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog.
Mar 11, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Is Motivated Reasoning Bad Reasoning? I

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This is part I of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog.
Mar 10, 2014
Dan Hicks

 

Diversity and “the” Philosophical Tradition

students
A typical problem for introductory philosophy courses is that the list of readings is dominated by privileged authors — white men, members or adjuncts of the ruling classes…
Dec 7, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Sexism, Philosophy, and the Reciprocity of Virtue

virtues
Sexism in philosophy has been on my mind lately, between my colleague Kerry McKenzie’s review of a disastrous attempt at philosophy of physics by notorious sexist philosopher …
Dec 2, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

The Climate Debate: Ignorance, and/or Complexity?

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Why is the climate change debate so interminable? From the perspective of many scientists, we’ve had compelling data since the 1970s and more than enough reason to reduce…
Sep 27, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Objectivity is a Unicorn

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Following up on my last post and a semi-related conversation with a new officemate, it seems to me that a lot of people might react something like this:
Sep 6, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

How to Use Citations to Create Ignorance

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I spent most of Monday working on some “deep literature analysis” for my research on genetically modified organisms for food, or GMOf. This meant, in practice, that I spent…
Sep 4, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

The History of Philosophy as a Social Network

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As I discussed in a post last month, I recently took a Coursera class on network theory and analysis. I did this in part because I wanted to evaluate the MOOC format from a…
Jul 21, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

MOOCs do not Make for Successful Math Classes

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In this post, I’m going to discuss MOOCs, based on my recent experience in a Coursera course on Social and Economic Networks. I’m going to start with a brief explanation of…
Jun 4, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

The Adversarial Method: Where’s Moulton?

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Yesterday 3:AM Magazine posted an interview with Rebecca Kukla. Kukla said some things about the adversarial method in philosophy, with which Jenny Saul disagreed. You can…
May 28, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Local Food, Global Justice

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I had the pleasure of attending the First Annual Workshop on Food Justice and Peace this past Friday and Saturday at Michigan State University, and at that workshop I had…
Apr 14, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

The Funding Effect and Noxious Markets: Weak Agency

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(In this series of posts, I’m applying Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets to a specific aspect of commercialized science, the funding effect. In the first post, I…
Feb 25, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Why Local?

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[I feel like my blog posts tend to be pretty technical and academic. This post is an attempt to write for a broader audience, while still being philosophical.]
Feb 23, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

The Tangled (Food) Web We Weave

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The basic reason I find the food system so fascinating is the complex and often surprising connections between issues that, at first glance, don’t seem to have much to do…
Feb 20, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

The Funding Effect

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In this series of posts, I’m applying Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets to a specific aspect of commercialized science, the funding effect. In the first post, I…
Jan 30, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Notes on Predators and Animal Ethics

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In this post, I’ll be discussing one of the common arguments against (moral) vegetarianism. (Moral vegetarianism is the view that vegetarianism is morally required, or that…
Jan 13, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Satz’ Account of Noxious Markets

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In this post, I’ll summarize Stanford political philosopher Debra Satz’ account of noxious markets. (Satz 2010; unsourced page number citations will be to this book.) This…
Jan 11, 2013
Dan Hicks

 

Two Conceptions of Human Nature

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In his essay “Two Philosophers Skeptical of Negative Liberty” in Libertarianism Defended, Tibor Machan comes close to a significant insight concerning the fundamental…
Jul 23, 2012
Dan Hicks

 

Fetishism and Innate Differences

(Going through my folder of notes and paper ideas, I came across the following, which I wrote last June.)
May 23, 2012
Dan Hicks

 

The Agroecological Argument for Eating Meat

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The New York Times has announced the six finalists in its Tell Us Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat essay contest. Readers have until April 24th to vote for their favorite.…
Apr 21, 2012
Dan Hicks

 

Friedersdorf: The Sex-Friendly Case Against Free Birth Control, part II

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Part I
Mar 14, 2012
Dan Hicks

 

Friedersdorf: The Sex-Friendly Case Against Free Birth Control, part I

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Link  
Mar 14, 2012
Dan Hicks
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