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The Subway Test

~ Joe Pitkin's stories, queries, and quibbles regarding the human, the inhuman, the humanesque.

The Subway Test

Category Archives: The Time of Troubles

I Marched for Science

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Musings and ponderation, Politics, Science, The Time of Troubles

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scientific literacy, sociology of science, The March for Science

March for Science2

Photo credit–Carlyn Eames

I’m not a professional scientist. I do have enough training to work as a lab tech if there’s ever some neo-Maoist Cultural Counter-Revolution where we’re all rounded up and forced to work in research facilities–it goes without saying that that won’t be happening during this administration. I’d be reluctant to call myself a scientist because I have published no peer reviewed papers, and my field work is competent at best (and often in graduate school I wasn’t at my best).  Having said that, I have actually worn a lab coat and safety goggles as a part of my job–for a week here and there, anyway–and I  have all the love for the scientific enterprise that an enthusiastic amateur science fiction author can have.

Across the republic, the streets were filled with people like me last Saturday at the March for Science. Well, based on the signs people were carrying, I’m sure that a lot of the marchers were bona fide scientists–at least bona fide lab techs and grad students. And, while there has been a healthy debate within the sciences about whether this kind of public advocacy is helpful or harmful to the cause of science, put me down as one who believes it’s valuable for scientists and science-lovers to stand up and be counted.

MArch for Science1

I appreciate a properly footnoted sign. Photo credit–the lovely Carlyn Eames

There has been push-back from some scientists–this article at Slate is a typical example–that the march was an orgy of uninformed and misinformed pro-science good-feelery from non-scientists. That is, according to Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust, the folks marching mostly don’t understand science enough. If marchers did understand the state of science, with its almost guild-like patronage system, its rampant data mining and cherry picking, its Potemkin peer review, they wouldn’t be so eager to draw up witty signs and march in its defense.

Faust does have a point: I suspect few of the people on the march this weekend understand what statistical significance really refers to, and even fewer would be ready to talk about the many misuses of p<.05 that researchers engage in because they’re trying to score a publication (or, more likely, because most scientists are not statisticians and often use statistical tools in ways they were not intended).

And yes, that’s a problem. But that’s not what the march is about. One can support the scientific enterprise, be willing to march in the rain for it, without knowing everything about science. None of the marchers, even the scientists, have a full understanding of all of the sciences humans engage in. The geologists on the march don’t know any more than I do about high energy physics, and the high energy physicists know less about environmental biology than I do.

Many of the scientists out there, even the duffers like me, know that there are deep problems with the sociology of science, with the misuse of methods and publication and statistical analysis. But something the marchers all had in common, scientists and non-scientists alike, was a support for the idea underlying science: that the scientific method can be used to describe our environment and make useful predictions. Faust is right that the scientific method is a roundly abused idea even within the sciences, to say nothing of non-scientists. But one can love and support a good idea without understanding it fully.  Whether any individual marcher can be picked out of the crowd and made to follow the scientific method to Dr. Faust’s satisfaction is beside the point.

The scientific enterprise is flawed, just as representative democracy is flawed. I marched because I believe in the idea of science (and, for that matter, representative democracy). The way to reform the institution of science is the same as the way to reform the republic: it will be saved by people who care for and love those institutions. Science and civil society won’t be reformed if we roll over when the administration attempts to hobble the EPA or reverse even modest US actions to counter climate change.

“Proteus” Is In Print!

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact, monsters, sci-fi, terraforming, transhumanism, utopia, Venus

My latest story, “Proteus,” is out in the May/June issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact! On the spectrum of my work, “Proteus” is closer to the hard sci-fi  pole–hence its appearance in Analog, widely regarded as one of the preeminent publishers of the hard stuff.

“Proteus” is the second of my stories set in the John Demetrius cycle, set (so far as I can imagine) about 100-200 years in humanity’s future. The whole cycle takes up questions of our coming experiment with transhumanism, as well as a kind of meditation on the nature of utopia and dystopia–I’ve tried to create a world like our own, in which utopia and dystopia coexist in different parts of the world and for different people at the same time. “Proteus” was also an immensely fun story to write–it involved a good deal of research into the terraforming of Venus and the nature of any possible human colony on Venus.

Analog on MAX

Photo credit Carlyn Eames

To get a promotional shot for the blog, my wife obligingly took a couple of pictures on our way to The March for Science this morning. I’m dressed as the most terrifying greenhouse gas on the planet, old silent-but-deadly methane. And given the name of my blog, I thought it best for her to take the photo on the MAX train, Portland’s closest analog to a true subway.

 

Analog on MAX2

It’s hard out here for a simple hydrocarbon. Photo credit Carlyn Eames

Analog can be purchased wherever fine science fiction magazines are sold, including at the 800-pound Amazonian gorilla.

 

Retiring Mr. Methane

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Advertising, The Time of Troubles

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

marketing, profile photos, The March for Science

It is with mixed emotions that I retire my current profile photo for this blog: good old Mr. Methane:

methane

This is one of my favorite pictures of myself, taken by my wife on Halloween 2015. I thought I did a decent job making myself into a ball-and-stick model of the most frightening greenhouse gas on the planet. And the picture captures what I’ve always considered the essential ridiculousness of my writing enterprise.

But, I suppose if I want people to take my writing seriously, I might get more of the right kinds of attention if my profile pic doesn’t show a man in a black body suit and Styrofoam deedle balls.

And, I’ve been lucky to work with a truly talented photographer, Pat Rose, who took the most flattering photos of me I’ve ever encountered. The one I call “Smiley Joe” will go on the back cover of Stranger Bird when it comes out:

Joe Stranger Bird cover photo

And for the blog itself, I’ll be using another of Pat’s fabulous shots, the one I don’t have a name for yet:

Joe web profile photo

I’m open to any names you want to suggest. “Oddly intense sci-fi man?” “Half-light Raconteur?” Really, he needs a name.

And old Mr. Methane? My wife had the genius idea that I should pull the old costume out for the March for Science. If I can wear a black bodysuit and stand up for civil society? What more could I want out of the weekend?

The Seeds of Trump’s Undoing

14 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Musings and ponderation, Politics, The Time of Troubles

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Electoral Fraud, Putin, Russia, Trump, Watergate

I’ve been working on a couple of long blog posts that I have wanted to finish for a while. However, I back-burnered them all today as I digested the news of Michael Flynn’s resignation as Trump’s national security advisor. I was reminded of something I told my wife on the night of the election, and which I have repeated many times since: the seeds of Trump’s undoing are right in front of us.

I was not making a prophecy. I had simply been reading the news which was available to us since before the election, such as this groundbreaking piece by Mother Jones veteran David Corn. Many have suspected for months that Donald Trump was receiving aid from a hostile foreign power, a power determined to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election.

There are many Republicans in Congress who have circled their wagons around Trump because he is one of their team, because presumably they see some advantage to themselves in protecting the president. But even within the famously disciplined Republican Party there are increasing calls for investigations, not four weeks into Trump’s presidency, into “what did the president know, and when did he know it?”

The echoes of Watergate are obvious, but facile. Our current national nightmare is a great deal worse than Watergate: we are talking about an enemy state, ruled by an anti-democratic strongman, subverting our electoral process in order to bring a favored candidate to power. And Trump, Putin’s favored candidate, has been artlessly, bafflingly open about his desire to reward Putin for the help.

Today on CNN, Democratic congressman Seth Moulton called out the elephant in the room: the support of an enemy state’s agenda at the expense of the interests of your own country is, by definition, treason.

There is chaos and trouble ahead. In the same way that I wonder about my parents’ and grandparents’ stances in 1974, our kids and grandkids will ask about how we acted, and what we did, during the time we’re living through.

Readings for the Time of Troubles

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Musings and ponderation, Politics, The Time of Troubles

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hamfisted con men, racism, resolutions, utopia

I was surprised to learn that the textbook my daughter was using for her US History class is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I had long been an admirer of Zinn’s lefty outlook on the world from interviews Zinn did in the last years of his life, though I had never read any of his work. Finding out that my daughter is reading his signature book was apparently the encouragement I needed to read the book myself.

While the first edition of People’s History was written nearly 40 years ago and the last edition is over ten years old, the book is timely, and oddly comforting in these last weeks before the inauguration of Trump. I came away from People’s History with two guiding consolations. First, Trump is no aberration. His misogyny, nativism, racism, and venality have deep roots in the history of the United States. If this doesn’t seem like much of a consolation, I might put it another way: the country has been through crises like Trumpism before. Second, for all the suffering the Trump administration will cause millions of people, for all the theft of public goods that is coming, there is a countervailing force of decency in the American character as well. The courage of Frederick Douglass and Fannie Lou Hamer, of Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, of Daniel Berrigan and César Chávez–and of millions of others–is available to us as well. We can fight, in many small and powerful ways, if decent Americans are willing to give up their self-satisfaction and passivity and security to stand up for our country.

While I was familiar with every period Zinn wrote about in People’s History, I don’t think I had ever seen all these periods stitched together into a single overarching vision. Basically, Zinn’s contention is that the true history of the United States is not defined by the actions of presidents and congresses who have worked at practically every turn to enrich a tiny economic elite–by preserving slavery, by massacring the natives, by invading Mexico and Cuba and The Philippines, by overthrowing democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Chile and Iran. Rather, American history is made up of the often overlooked struggles of the oppressed, the working class, the unrepresented. It is a history of people fighting, over centuries sometimes, to be included in the opening phrase of the Constitution: “We the People.”

It’s an inspiring–if sometimes flawed–vision. I believe that what it offers, in a crowded field of history texts, is a truly alternative analysis of the history of the nation. Many critics have accused him of bias, though I would argue that what Zinn has done instead is abandon the pretense of objectivity that sometimes smothers the work of other historians. No historian, no human being, can be a thoroughly objective observer of the human experience. In telling any history, we leave neutrality behind as soon as we decide which events we will focus on and which ones we will omit.

And so many history texts, even those informed by the counter-cultural critique of history that came out of the 60s and 70s, still focus the actions of “the great men,” the Jeffersons and Jacksons and Roosevelts, with entire social movements of millions of ordinary people receiving comparatively little mention, or in some cases no mention at all. Zinn’s timely contribution is to argue that US History was not made by the Jeffersons and Jacksons and Roosevelts–that our elected leaders were responding to massive social and economic currents that they could barely influence, let alone control.

Presidents and congresses and supreme courts are led by the people, not the other way around. Unfortunately, according to Zinn, our elected leaders have usually been in thrall to what Occupy Wall Street popularized as “the 1%”: industrialists, financiers, speculators, robber barons. But frequently enough, a demand for justice will rise up from the roots of society with enough force that the elected leaders must listen and the law responds. The end of slavery, women’s suffrage, the 40-hour work week, the civil rights movement–all of these changes came, not from the courage of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, U.S. Grant, or L.B.J., but in response to the demands of ordinary Americans. Those demands took decades to make themselves felt sometimes, and the success of those demands depended on the tremendous courage of millions of people, but nearly every advance that the US has made in social justice has been led from below, not from above.

One can work towards neutrality and fairness in writing by committing to telling as many sides of the story as one can–a very common, and admirable, approach among the historians I’ve read. But it’s also valuable to have someone standing outside that system, observing from without, making no claim to neutrality–someone who pulls back the curtain on the mainstream view of American history to expose the so-called historical consensus as a fiction. Zinn’s book has helped me see my country in a new way.

And he’s helped me get my game face on for the time to come: if I want a humane minimum wage for Americans, if I want truly public college education and single-payer health care, I have to fight for those things. Not because I expect the hamfisted con man we just elected to respond to my demands, but because he may make enough people angry enough to care. The day will come when we have a free and equitable society, ruled by justice and reason. It’s up to us to make it.

 

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