truth – Bean Thinking

Freshly roasted coffee, Pulp, Papa Palheta, KL — Coffee on the cutting machine at Pulp

There have been a few great cafés opening up recently in Kuala Lumpur, including Pulp by Papa Palheta in Lucky Gardens. However the space that Pulp occupies is unrivalled: The old cutting room of the Art Printing Works. It really is geek meets hipster in this café, with old electric fittings and the original paper cutting machine housed alongside a fantastic range of freshly roasted coffee.

There is a great range of coffee on offer too. From pour-overs to espresso based drinks and cold brew, Pulp is a great place to discover a wide range of coffees. I had a pour over Ethiopian (Suke Quto) that was beautifully presented with tasting notes ready for me to enjoy. A nice touch was that the cup had been pre-warmed so I got no condensation around the rim of the mug when I filled the cup with coffee. The coffee itself was very fruity, presumably very lightly roasted in order to retain the fruity notes of the beans. (On a second visit I enjoyed a long black which was also very fruity though less so than the pour-over).

pourover at Pulp, Papa Palheta, KL — Taking time with a beautifully presented pour-over

Although there are plenty of seats in this café, on both occasions we visited it was crowded and hard to find a seat. It seems that this is a very popular spot for good coffee in KL, so do be prepared to share a table! Indeed, one of these ‘tables’ is formed from the old cutting machine itself, the machine that used to prepare the paper used for newspapers and books. Sipping coffee here, in a place steeped in the history of printing, it seemed only natural to consider the role in our current society of fake news and whether there is anything that we can do about it.

The issue of fake news or of exaggerated or incomplete news stories is not just limited to issues surrounding the recent US election. Reporting our experimental results honestly and our theories thoroughly underpins all scientific research. However, as funding decisions and employment prospects increasingly depend on publications in prestigious journals, question marks can start to hover over each scientist’s paper (the “publish or perish” problem). Does reporting a result honestly include waiting for that last result (that could contradict or delay the ‘story’ thereby making publication in “high impact” journals such as Nature less probable)? Do we read the papers of others thinking that they have reported everything as truthfully and fully as possible or do we shrug as their next paper (in a lower impact journal) reveals the ‘caveats’ on their previous work? The chemist and scientific philosopher, Michael Polanyi wrote in 1946:

“… Suppose scientists were in the habit of regarding most of their fellows as cranks or charlatans. Fruitful discussion between them would become impossible…. The process of publication, of compiling text books, of teaching juniors, of making appointments and establishing new scientific institutions would henceforth depend on the mere chance of who happened to make the decision. It would then become impossible to recognise any statement as a scientific proposition or to describe anyone as a scientist. Science would become practically extinct.“∗

Pulp, Papa Palheta KL — Where else could you see all these old electrical boxes?

Although we are hopefully still very far from that scenario, it is fairly clear that similar levels of trust are required for our society to function well too. For our society to flourish, these same standards of integrity are required of our press (and indeed of ourselves if we publish – or share – articles online). The perception that our society is moving into an era where fake news is as valid as proper investigative journalism has led to some calling ours a “post-truth” era. However, as Emmi Itäranta has argued, we should endeavour to avoid calling our times “post-truth”, in part because the term itself is not neutral. Our words and language matter and when we use the term we contribute to the idea that truth is no longer meaningful.

Such thoughts remind us of our own responsibility and contributions to society. If we don’t want fake news to influence politics, we need to be careful what we share or publish online. From our language to our values, we need to behave as if truth matters. And, to me at least, it seems that enjoying a coffee can help us with that. Stopping to appreciate the moment as we savour our well prepared coffee, we can step-back from the “retweet” or “share” button and think, is this evidence based and true or else, what is it that I gain by sharing this?

It strikes me that cafés such as Pulp, with their mix of great coffee and interesting surroundings are perfect spaces in which to slow down and think rather than react and retweet. Perhaps that is what we need for 2017, more time contemplating in cafés, less time on social media. Let’s hope for some quiet time ahead.

Pulp by Papa Palheta is at 29-01 Jalan Riong, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,

∗Michael Polanyi “Science, Faith and Society”, Oxford University Press, 1946

journals in a library — How can we assess the work of scientists? Should we count the number of papers that they write?

In the past few weeks there has been a bit of a media storm about the state of science. A paper that had been published in the journal Science, was retracted because it turned out that the study had, quite possibly, been faked. The retraction highlighted the problem of “publish or perish” which has been a concern for many scientists of late. A second article, this time an editorial in Nature, took a different and perhaps surprising perspective on things. Apparently the public trust scientists much more than scientists think that they do. Why would that be the case?

These two stories should concern us because they lie at the heart of a current problem in science. According to the dictionary, ‘science’ is “systematic and formulated knowledge”. Such knowledge takes time to develop, it takes us time to understand what goes on, both on an individual level and as a society. The ‘publish or perish’ culture acts in opposition to this. Within a ‘publish or perish’ culture, the way that science works is that the more papers that you have, especially those that get cited and are published in (apparently) good journals, the more successful you will be in your career and in your ability to get research funding. It is essential to publish “high impact” papers in order merely to survive in science. In more extreme cases this has led to data being faked and subsequent retractions of the papers (if it is ever discovered). Active faking of data though is only the tip of the iceberg. The pressure to publish high profile papers quickly, can lead to the original paper not having been investigated thoroughly enough. In fact, there are even motivations to publish too quickly. Firstly, if you are wrong, you just publish a second paper a few months later. Two papers, two sets of citations. Secondly, publishing early means getting there first, ie. more citations. It has got to the point where it is advantageous to quickly publish poor quality research with hyped key words than it is to do a thorough job and perhaps be beaten to the publication by a more incomplete work. This cannot be good for science or our society and it suggests that, in order to have a scientific career you must, to a greater or lesser extent, cease to behave scientifically. It is perhaps for this reason that scientists themselves have a doubt as to why the public would trust them, they no longer trust themselves.

lilies on water — Is there symbolism here? There’s certainly a lot of physics.

The ‘publish or perish’ culture has come about partly as a consequence of needing a metric by which to judge the worth of research. In itself this is understandable but it does suggest that we are no longer confident of our ability, as a society, to measure the ‘good’ of something. To judge something as ‘good for society’ necessarily involves many different inputs from many disciplines. Assessing something as good is a value judgement. To redefine ‘good’ purely into something that we measure (by profit, or by number of papers) is to artificially reduce what is good for society to an arbitrary, but on appearance scientific, method. Rather than admit that questions over what is ‘good science’ are, essentially, value judgements, we try to give a false ‘scientific’ measure of their worth, one based on citations and publications. We still have our biases but we have become less conscious of them and instead try to hide them with a false scientism.

How could we change this, how else can we assess who is a ‘good’ scientist or what research will benefit society? This is, I think where it is important for everyone to get involved and to slow down. It is open for everyone to investigate, for themselves, what they think would make a ‘good’ society. Clearly the quest for knowledge, and in particular scientific knowledge, will form part of that good but for us, as a society to realise what is good we need to stop and think about it. There is a need to encourage clear methods of thinking but at the same time everyone must feel eligible to be a part of this natural philosophy, purely as a consequence of their being a citizen of society. On a practical level, this can be achieved by our maintaining a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of the world, and society, around us. In my own field of magnetism for example, to know the physics behind magnetic attraction is to make it more beautiful. And that is in essence what I am trying to communicate with Bean Thinking; just as an artist does with a painting, I am attempting to share the beauty that I see as a result of seeing physics all around me. The saying of Pierre Duhem that “Physical theory is a mathematical painting of reality” can be taken at many levels. As a scientist, I am to a certain extent, an artist.

rain drops on a tulip — A tulip in spring. The water droplets on the petals suggest some very deep physics. As the flower opens into the sunshine, each layer (physical and metaphorical) of petals reveals a new level of beauty.

Of course, there is no immediate connection between appreciating the beauty of knowledge and allocating research funds. Yet if we, as a society, appreciate science and beauty where we see it, we are going to slowly move back to a more sustainable, scientific way of doing science. “By learning to see and appreciate beauty, we learn to reject self-interested pragmatism”¹. By allowing ourselves to assess the good of society across many measures, we recover science. Denying the fact that what qualifies as ‘good’ is ultimately a value judgement and instead covering it in false metrics, imperils science. It is in the history of humanity to ask ‘why’. Moving to a predominantly technology driven quasi-science does not enrich us as a species. Good art, good music, great science can. Great discoveries of the past have not been obtained by chasing the latest chimera of a device, they have been uncovered through an insatiable curiosity. A demand to know ‘why’ things are the way they are. We are destroying the very science we are so keen to promote if we conform to the key-word, hype and technology driven ‘publish or perish’ culture. It has got to the point where, in order to save science, it is imperative that we, as a society, recover our ability to appreciate the beauty in science.

I hope that Bean Thinking prompts at least some people to question the world around them. It is not important to agree with what is written in Bean Thinking indeed, perhaps with some things it is more important to disagree. The key thing is to notice the world around. The practise of slowing down and noticing things is the reasoning behind the cafe-physics reviews, as much as anything it enables me to practise slowing down and noticing too. To slow down and to appreciate what is there will mean that slowly, imperceptibly perhaps, we challenge the culture of ‘publish or perish’. To do so may not be too far short of a need to recover our humanity, to quote Laudato Si’ again, “[w]e need to see that what is at stake is our own dignity”².

¹ Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, (2015) #215

² ibid, #160

Further thoughts:

Michael Polanyi “Science, Faith and Society”, Sapientia Press, 1964

Michael Polanyi “Personal Knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy”, University of Chicago Press, 1974