PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND PRACTICES - Column 171
behavior.” Again, when you see/hear something, say something. And write about it. Letters to the Editor and other submissions are needed to demonstrate that AIPG is not a reactionary group of misogynists, even though some of our members haven’t gotten the point yet.
The AGI Workforce Program webinar
series recorded Preventing bullying and harassment in the field on April 19, 2019. This 55-minute webinar presents several scenarios of bullying and harass- ment (sexual and otherwise) that are a good follow-up to Gries’ address. The scenarios examined help broaden one’s awareness of potentially inappropriate behaviors and present some ways of avoiding such situations in the first place and/or dealing with them as they arise. The webinar can be viewed at https://
youtu.be/au_iDfdtsJI. When viewing this webinar, do so with the full screen setting; the
icon on the lower right of
the screen because some slides use grey on white text or are otherwise harder to read.
Why smart people do stupid things “Why smart people do stupid things”
was the headline of a story in March 7, 2019 National Post article by David Robson. Robson asserts that history is full of brilliant people who believe stupid things or make stupid mistakes. He cites Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s belief in mediums despite the best efforts of his friend, Harry Houdini, to dissuade
him, or Steve Jobs’ refusal to undergo treatment for pancreatic cancer prefer- ring health scams and fad diets. Robson points out that the latest psychological research shows that highest scores on IQ, SAT, or other measures of intelligence do not correlate with wise judgment.
Robson posits a process called “moti-
vated reasoning” that occurs when we feel emotional about an issue and thus tend to apply our intelligence to one- sided, biased reasoning that serves our own beliefs and preconceptions so that “we always get the answer we want to see. That may involve only searching for evidence that backs up your point of view while also using elaborate reasoning to explain away any criticism or disagree- ments. And the more intelligent you are, the easier it is to build more creative arguments that support your beliefs.” Robson points out that this process can produce the polarization around such politically charged issues as gun control or climate change.
“Honesty—avoiding the misuse of
models” is the title of one of the lec- tures I’ve given in the past year dur- ing my appointment as the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Distinguished Lecturer for Ethics. One of the key points I tried to make was that we need to work hard to recog- nize and eliminate our unrecognized biases. A slide on this point quotes Richard Feynman’s admonition that “… you should report everything that you think might make [your conclusions]
invalid—not only what you think is right about [them, and report] other causes that could possibly explain your results” (Feynman’s 1974 Cargo cult science lecture at Cal Tech; available on the web). Scientists frequently do not properly acknowledge the limits of what they really know and the uncertainties involved. Yet acknowledging these limits and uncertainties are what stating the “whole truth” and transparency are all about.
The Lorenz attractor
The summarizing sentence of my Honesty—avoiding the misuse of mod- els talk is “All models are wrong; some are useful.” This is not a condemna- tion of models, rather it is a plea that we recognize a model’s limitations and inaccuracies. Edward Lorenz, a profes- sor of meteorology at MIT, is known for his 1963 discovery of chaos theory, best known as the “butterfly effect.” Sensitivity to initial conditions is what causes nonperiodic behavior; the more a system has the capacity to vary, the less likely it is to produce a repeating sequence. Lorenz noticed this sensitiv- ity when he changed the precision, the number of significant figures, in one of the parameters in a model he was run- ning. This change in precision produced dramatically different results. This sen- sitivity makes weather very difficult to forecast far in advance. But chaos is not randomness. The “Lorenz attrac- tor” illustrates the point that almost all chaotic phenomena can vary only within limits. The double oval shape (like a butterfly’s wings) of the Lorenz attractor gave rise to the butterfly anal- ogy. Identification of a model’s limits of uncertainty and their disclosure should be part of the model’s description. Such disclosure helps determine the model’s usefulness. The fact that there are limits to weather forecasting and that differ- ent weather models produce different results does not mean that weather forecasts are useless. We still pay atten- tion to them and their accuracy (within limits) is increasing.
Marcia Bjornerud points out in her
2018 book, Timefulness: how thinking like a geologist can help save the world, that “Interpreting the Earth has always been deeply entangled with our self- perception as humans and our cherished stories about our relationship with the rest of creation. No wonder it is difficult to step back and see things in perspec- tive.”
Lorenz Attractor.
Source: Dynamical Systems, Individual-Based Modeling, and Self-Organization - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from:
https://www.researchgate.net/ figure/Lorenz-attractor_fig4_267999915 [accessed 1 Jun, 2019]
40 TPG •
Jul.Aug.Sep 2019 “When the conclusions of physics
[Lord Kelvin’s objections to estimates of hundreds of millions of years of geo- logic time] seemed incompatible with
www.aipg.org
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