Archive for November, 2009
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Interdisciplinarity
This was a somewhat odd article contra “interdisciplinarity” by a sociologist at Penn, and this was a more interesting takedown of the original piece. I, particularly from my status as a professor at one of the places cited as drinking deeply from the interdisciplinary Kool-aid, fall somewhere in between.
Before commenting on the article, let me say that one thing I’ve learned about doing interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work at Michigan is how important it is that faculty members are the ones making the connections, rather than graduate students. For pretty serendipitous reasons, many faculty at Michigan have split appointments, which require them to trek across campus and teach courses in different departments. This pays many dividends, and stands in marked contrast to other places I’ve been, where students are the ones to make these connections. It takes grad students some time to figure out what connections are to be made, and then they graduate and leave (damn them!), and connections tend to wither away. In some cases traditions can pass down from one grad student to another (example, my former student Gary Feng got a master’s degree in statistics at UIUC, which became a tradition for his successors), but these are weak links. Having faculty have to live in multiple departments, or in some interdisciplinary unit, seems to be really key to sustainable multidisciplinary programs.
Having said something about the how, what about the why and the whether (and how’s the weather where you are?) ?
I think this quote captures the tone and tenor of the Jacobs article:
Another serious concern about interdisciplinarity is that any promise it holds depends on the presence of strong disciplines. Going too far down the interdisciplinary path by ending academic departments, as some have suggested, would be a disaster. Departments teach techniques needed to conduct high-quality research. Disciplines establish a hierarchy of problems. Interdisciplinarity cannot exist without disciplines and departments. What happens when that structure is broken? Will all problems be equally important? How will quality be judged, and how will the most important advances be communicated?
These are, indeed, all important concerns, although the “some have suggested” move should always signal the flashing “strawman ahead” klaxxons.
But these are problems that any field worth its salt faces more or less constantly. Are they better/worse/different in an “interdisciplinary” context? I would argue that they are actually better, because you can’t use the heavy hand of past traditional judgements to avoid to defining what high quality work is.
As in the natural world, the most promising and interesting intellectual opportunities lie at the intersections of traditional intellectual ecosystems.
Furthermore, there’s some pretty intriguing evidence that scientific groups that reflect different academic backgrounds are more productive than those that are more homogeneous, as well as why that might be the case. Kevin Dunbar at the University of Toronto has done fascinating studies of scientific workgroups in action. In Dunbar (1995) he describes why some groups are less effective at dealing with unexpected results than others:
Why were the members of the laboratory not making use of analogy? One aspect of the laboratory appears critical to whether analogies will be used. It is the social structure of the laboratory. All the members of this laboratory had come from highly similar backgrounds, and consequently drew from a similar knowledge base. In the other laboratories, the scientists came from widely differing backgrounds, and these different sources of knowledge were important components in the construction of analogical mappings. When all the members of the laboratory have the same knowledge at their disposal, then when a problem arises, a group of similar minded individuals will not provide more information to make analogies than a single individual.
The finding that the social structure of the laboratory has an effect on types of reasoning and conceptual change may explain why many experimental studies of reasoning by groups produce no better performance than individuals alone. In these studies, the groups of subjects are generally homogeneous with respect to background, and according to the mechanisms of conceptual change that I am invoking, should not produce conceptual change. We are currently conducting a number of experiments to test this hypothesis. These results go beyond merely stating that social structure is important. These findings indicate the groups of individuals must have different pools of knowledge to draw from to make fruitful analogies.Merely having a group of scientists working on a particular problem (i.e., social structure) will not result in the use of analogies.Overall, I agree with Professor Potter’s argument that Jacobs’ piece is well characterized as “we’re here because we’re here.”
Still, one small caveat. I do worry about grad students who are brought up without a grounding in some recognized discipline. In part because I think it’s important to have a home discipline in the same way that it’s important to have a native country (I’m not sure how defensible this is, but it’s how I feel). More pragmatically, it’s important for students to get jobs in a world of departments. Also, I’ve seen how people whose work spans departments can have problems when it comes to being evaluated. It’s easy for people whose interests just span part of the scope of the person’s work and judge it against others who only work in that area. The sum of a series of such judgments can be problematic (the person is a mediocre chemist, mediocre biologist, etc., ignoring the promise of the sum of the of those parts). And it’s certainly possible to be a dilettante in many fields. Working across disciplinary boundaries is a high risk occupation, but one with pretty high intellectual rewards as well.
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That time of the school year
It’s the time of the year when academic debts come due, and the chaos of some students’ lives crash against the demands of schooling. I thought that this was a very good reflection on the problems this creates for both students and professors. Over time, I think I’ve grown more hardhearted and policy-oriented, although I’ve found it useful not to be very punitive about late papers, and also to give students one “get out of jail free” card to turn in one assignment late. Most students never use it, but they seem to appreciate it, and it gives me a way to be just a bit lenient as a matter of policy.
But there are students whose lives are chaotic and disordered, very often due to family demands, and I feel sorry for the waste of very expensive schooling and even more precious time that that entails.
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Every culture has its fears when it comes to raising children.
But this was kind of amazing to me: In Italy, Eating Gets Graded.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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Big in Japan
Thought this was interesting. Maybe because I’m just on the cusp of being ok on that dimension, after being far, far beyond it for about the last decade. I also flew through Salt Lake City airport last night, and was struck by how many thin people there are compared to the Detroit metro area where I live. I know that Utah is the youngest (I think) state, and some of it might be that. Minnesota was the furthest west I’ve lived in the U.S., and there was a different feeling about living there (and also a pretty thin populace when I did so).
That’s all.
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Born to run
I just finished reading a most remarkable book, Christopher Macdougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
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The book has received a lot of publicity for its discussion of the Tarahumara in Mexico, an indigenous group of amazing runners. I found a few other aspects of the book more fascinating. Macdougall presents a really interesting argument, echoed in this recent New York Times article, that humans evolved to run, and that our bodies and brains are exquisitely adapted to long distance running. Compared to Neanderthals, we’re lighter and weaker (and they were able to do things like hunt collectively, so it’s not clear that we were necessarily smarter in ways relevant at the time). But this kind of unilateral disarmament was associated with a remarkable ability to run, that in turn made possible something called “persistence hunting.” We’re not as fast as many other animals, but we can run for a longer distance and time and so do things like a run a deer into the ground. This in turn provided a way to get the massive amounts of protein and fat needed to support our energy-intensive brains.
The book also provides a great discussion of how the whole approach to making running easier, by swaddling our feet in cushioned shoes to reduce the sideways and vertical movement of the foot has completely backfired. I’d gradually come to this understanding on my own, through a circuitous route. I put a treadmill in our basement and started running on it in bare feet, which was nice because it’s a fairly springy surface. But I needed some kind of protection, and so bought the lightest running shoes I could find in a local store (the Nike “Free”). Then I took them along on a trip, because they take up very little space, and realized I enjoyed running in them much more than my regular shoes. So I started running in them at home, and find them much better than my regular shoes (I haven’t done any very long runs in them yet – I have a regular route that’s slightly over 6 miles, partly on trails, and that’s as far as I’ve gone yet), but I much prefer them to my old shoes, and seem to have fewer ankle issues than before.
One big problem with regular running shoes is that they encourage you to land on your heel and to really slam it down. If you have weak ankles like I do, the chance of turning it is much bigger if you’re landing on your heel instead of a more neutral landing position. If you’re slamming your feet down, you’re also increasing the stress on your legs, which are likely to show up wherever you have a week point (ankles, feet, knees, etc.). It seems counterintuitive that greater padding would lead to greater stress but such seems to be the case.
The story of US distance running might be a great example of the problems with extrinsic motivation. Up until the mid 1980s, US runners were some of the best in the world. Soon thereafter, there was real money to be made in running, and US elite running declined precipitously. This might seem to be the result of the rest of the world catching up, but the interesting thing is that elite US runners have actually been slower than they were in the 1980s. Part of this may be the result of some bad ideas about training and shoes that were accepted wisdom, but there’s also an interesting motivational tale. Running fast is hard, and it may be too hard to do for external reward. I’m loathe to draw too strong conclusions from one case, but this does fit nicely into current ideas about motivation, e.g., Mark Lepper’s work.
The final point of the book is an obvious one, but one surprisingly easy to forget. Running can be a lot of fun, and it really needs to be. The Tarahumara races involve teams that are moving a small wooden ball along with them, tossing it ahead with their feet and then retrieving it when it gets stuck in rocks or rolls of the trail. Like the Hash House Harrier runs I do in Beijing, adding another task to running makes it a great group activity and much more interesting exercise than running by itself. Running by itself, as well as running with others, can be a lot of fun and there probably isn’t any reason to do it if it’s not, but somehow that’s an insight that’s easy to forget.
Gotta run…