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 quotations reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write a post on a common fallacy that I like to call statistical essentialism. In this...
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Public Policy: What Philosophers of Science can Contribute
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 you’ll see from those slides, AAAS policy fellows are primarily natural scientists and engineers; while it’s common to have a handful of social...
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When "Feeding the World" Doesn't Mean "Feeding the World"
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 frustrating thing about this situation is that almost everyone wants the same outcome: a reliable, sustainable, equitable supply...
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Feminism and Science: Frenemies?
A friend of mine sent me a message on Facebook this morning:
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Regulatory Science Reform?
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 story doesn’t do a very good job of explaining why the two bills are controversial — indeed, it doesn’t even...
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