The first transmissions from Science House

The lizards strike back

Photo cred: my dad

Back in September, I laid out a plan for Science House.

The idea was simple: academia is a big ship, and it turns slowly, if at all. But there’s no reason for us all to be on the same ship, fighting over the helm. Instead, we should launch lots of little ships that can explore the seas in all directions.

That’s what a Science House does. It’s like a hacker house for basic research, a freestanding lab that does science and posts it directly to the internet, like this. You could form a Science House around any niche—a Weird Biology House, a Speculative Physics House, etc.

This summer, it’s happening! I’m running a prototype Science House, thanks to a grant from Emergent Ventures. The focus of this house is training. We’re bringing a couple of aspiring scientists together, sticking ‘em in a house, giving ‘em some money and mentorship, and letting ‘em set sail. It’s kind of like a PhD program except it doesn’t give you clinical depression.

The two inaugural Scholars of Science House are already publishing their work to the world. I’m excited to introduce them to you:

Ruth Daniel

AKA

The Righteous Mugwort

. In their first post, Ruth dares to ask whether we’ve all been bamboozled by Big Noodle:

Her friend admitted that when making macaroni and cheese, they don’t wait for the water to boil before adding the pasta. Instead, they put the noodles into cold water and boil everything together. 

My initial reaction to this was shock and dismay. How could a person break one of the cardinal rules of cooking pasta? This quickly turned to confusion. What if the person was right? What if all these years I had been following the conventional wisdom of “Big Pasta” and waiting for my water to boil, when all along I could have been making my pasta in a million different ways? 

Violet and I were about to throw a party, so we figured this was a chance to get to the bottom of things.

See the results here:

Long Ago and Farfalle

And

Violet Henriques

AKA

CounterfeitBees

. Her first post is about sleep, the limits of scientific knowledge, and the wonders of doing science for yourself:

Most human attributes fall on some kind of distribution. Here’s a graph showing the distribution of human grip strength:

And here’s a (very scientific) graph showing the distribution of human height:

I believe that human sleep has any amount of variation in it, where some people need more sleep and some need less. This contradicts the idea that everyone needs eight hours of sleep a night since it would mean some people are longer sleepers, and some are shorter sleepers.

Read the whole post here:

Don't Let The Man Tell You How To Sleep

BULL FIGHTERS

We didn’t plan it this way, but Ruth’s and Violet’s first posts are both about bullshit.

When people are like, “you must salt your pasta water, or else it will taste awful,” or “you must sleep eight hours a night, or else you will die,” and they don’t have any data to back themselves up—that’s bullshit. It’s just people saying stuff, a bit of ventriloquism where someone’s lips move while they are, in fact, talking out of their butt.

Bullshit is dangerous because it lulls us into thinking we know things when we don’t. That’s how we can go 1,000 years believing that heavy things fall faster than lighter things, or that rotting meat turns into maggots. If you want to learn anything about the world, you must first clear your mental pipes of bullshit.

The best defense against bullshit is skepticism. When Martha Stewart is out here slinging claims like, “Scientifically speaking, there’s only one valid reason to salt your pasta water: it seasons each noodle evenly from the inside out,” your immediate reaction should be “What the hell are you talking about?”¹ This statement is about as trustworthy as the old college adage that, before you drink boxed wine, you must remove the inner wine bag and slap it vigorously to “activate the sugars.”

But we can do more than defend against bullshit. The best offense is empiricism. If sleep and pasta are as obvious as people claim, then you should be able to run a study in your kitchen or your bedroom and see the giant effects for yourself.

(I would use the phrase “do your own research,” but unfortunately it’s been co-opted to mean “don’t pay attention that crummy establishment research! Pay attention to this crummy anti-establishment research instead!”)

So while Violet and Ruth’s posts are ostensibly about cooking noodles and catching z’s, they are ultimately about the detection and destruction of bullshit. This is the cornerstone of scientific training, and no offense, but a lot of people out there seem to have skipped Bullshit Day during their PhD, because the level of their confidence and the quality of their evidence are all out of whack.

Case in point: when I suggested that maybe the universal pre-publication peer review system doesn’t work so well, a lot of people said something like, “Well, it’s not a great system, but it’s better than all the others.” This is a bullshit claim: exactly zero of those people have ever tried any other system. What they’re really saying is, “When I imagine other ways of doing things, I imagine that they won’t work as well.” But the thing about science is that, whenever possible, we replace thought experiments with actual experiments, and we must never confuse the two.

Skepticism and empiricism are both necessary, but if that’s all you got, you’re just a pedant. This is where a lot of people get stuck after they get fed up with mainstream science—they become perpetual grumps and spiteful debunkers, always ready to kick things over, never brave enough to build anything up.

To succeed in science—or anything else, really—your distaste for bullshit has to be outmatched by your love for truth. That’s what I appreciate most about the work Ruth and Violet have done so far: they treat science like we’re all a bunch of meddling teens trying to solve a mystery together, rather than rival basketball teams trying to score points on one another.

DITCHING THE DITCHES

I’m excited that there are lots of new institutions trying to diversify the scientific ecosystem—ecosystems rule, monocultures drool, etc. But as far as I can tell, nobody’s tackling the training problem. If you want to learn science, PhD programs are still the only game in town. That is, to join a shiny new scientific institution, you must first become a refugee from an old, decrepit scientific institution.

This is a big obstacle for this whole scientific revolution thing we’re all trying to do. In a true ecosystem, each organism fills a different niche (lizard, fern, jellyfish, etc.) But right now, it’s like every niche is filled by humans in costumes (human in lizard suit, human in fern suit, human in jellyfish suit, etc.).

People at least seem to be aware of this. I was recently at a metascience conference where the CEO of one of these new scientific organizations said, to a roomful of knowing nods, “When we hire academics, the first thing we have to do is de-program them.” Which is bleak! That programming took a long time, and it was probably funded by taxpayers. Imagine spending six years digging ditches and then you get a new job and your new boss is like, “The first thing you have to do is fill all of those ditches back in.”

Digging ditches isn’t just a waste of time—it increases your tolerance for bullshit. You start to believe that it is perhaps noble and good to move shovelfuls of dirt from here to there, and that we should honor and respect the people who have shoveled the most. What these ditch-diggers really need is a different kind of training, and perhaps a good night’s rest and a well-sauced plate of linguine.

MAKING SCIENCE HOUSE A SCIENCE HOME

Lots of folks have reached out to ask how they can help support Science House—thank you! The best thing to do is to subscribe to

CounterfeitBees

and

The Righteous Mugwort

. If you have feedback, ideas, expertise, or just encouragement, leave ‘em a comment!

We’re also looking for ways to turn this 7-week experiment into a year-round institution. If you’re the kind of person with a big wad of cash marked “FOR SCIENCE,” please get in touch. Just as a reminder, you could fund a Science House forever with the same amount of money that Harvard spends on postage every year.

1. Here are some other whoppers from Martha:

The most effective way to salt the water—and how this simple step is taught in cooking school—is to add the salt when the water comes to a boil.

How could this possibly make any difference? Has anyone ever tested this?

Avoid iodized salt, which will impart an off taste to the noodles.

Except in this double-blind study, people couldn’t tell the difference between iodized salt and regular salt. Those researchers used pickles instead of pasta, though, so hey, maybe noodles are different.