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Author: The Grey Literature
This is the personal blog of Benjamin Gregory Carlisle PhD.
Queer; Academic; Queer academic.
"I'm the research fairy, here to make your academic problems disappear!"
A decision is a good one or a bad one ex ante, regardless of what can be said about the results of the decision ex post. By ex ante, I mean, “as evaluated prospectively.” By ex post, I mean, “as evaluated retrospectively.”
You are Deanna Troi (yes, from Star Trek: The Next Generation—don’t pretend you don’t remember this episode!) and the Enterprise suffers a terrible accident. It is about to explode. For some reason, you’re actually in command of the ship, despite the fact that you don’t wear a proper uniform. Against the advice of Ensign Ro, you decide to stick around to wait and see if someone downstairs fixes the ship before it explodes, even though you have the opportunity to escape. You have no reason to believe that anyone else is alive, but if you leave, there will be no power for anyone to fix the ship and save themselves. Fortunately for everyone, Riker and Data’s head go to engineering and save the day just in time.
Superbowl bet
You are a fan of American football, and on the night of the Superbowl, you make a bet with your friend on who will win the big game. You bet $100 on the underdog, knowing full well that they stand little chance of winning. Fortunately for you, the quarterback for the favoured team falls ill and throws up over the rest of the team. As a result, the entire team spends the next several hours projectile vomiting, and they have to forfeit the game. Your friend admits defeat and pays up the $100.
Drunk driver
You are drinking heavily, and you get into your car and drive yourself home, despite your friends’ protests and attempts to stop you. Fortunately for everyone, the streets are empty of both people and other cars, and you manage to bring yourself and your car home completely safe.
In all of these cases, ex post, you made the right decision—by that, I mean, there was an optimal result, if you consider the decision from the perspective of hindsight. Ex ante, however, in all of these cases, you made the wrong decision.
I put these examples in the order that I did because I think that readers will be most sympathetic to the decision in the first example, and least sympathetic to the decision in the last example.
In Disaster, an unreflecting analysis would say that of course Troi made the right decision—it’s the Enterprise, for Pete’s sake! They have to be all right. In Superbowl bet, you might even imagine your friend begrudgingly admitting after the fact that you made the right call (although he might say that it was “just luck,” and for some of us, our intuitions might differ). In Drunk driver, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would say that you made the right decision.
Decision trees
All of these cases have the same form, which I have diagrammed to the left. You can make one of two decisions—choice A or choice B. If you make choice A, you are likely to experience a very bad result, but there is a small chance that you will experience a good result. If you make choice B, you are certain to experience a mediocre result (one that has more utility than the very bad result, but less utility than the good result).
If all of these scenarios have the same form, we should give the same answer to the question as to what should be done in each situation, on pain of acting irrationally.
So even though you won $100 in Superbowl bet, you made the wrong decision. You should have declined to bet. Similarly, even though Troi saved the Enterprise in Disaster, she should have condemned Riker and Data’s head to death.
Why is this important?
Humans are really bad at judging probabilities and systematically make certain sorts of errors. In particular, humans are easily swayed by trying to place experiences into the context of a narrative.
For example, after being told a story about a young woman who participates in feminism rallies and studies math in college, there is a non-zero percentage of people who will say that it is more likely that she will end up as a feminist banker than as a banker, which is logically impossible. (This is the “conjunction fallacy”—all feminist bankers are bankers, after all.)
You may have won bets that were long shots in the past, out of sheer luck. In fact, if you are a betting man, likely those are the bets you remember, to the exclusion of the ones with the same odds that you lost. The point is that you shouldn’t model your future decisions after such mistakes.
Also, if someone is trying to sway your decisions through an anecdote regarding his or her own success in an endeavour that is unlikely to succeed, it is also irrational to take that as evidence on which to base your decision-making process. If the story includes the line, “and against all odds, everything turned out all right,” or something like it, you should interpret that as meaning, “I made the wrong decision, but I was lucky this time,” and treat it as a cautionary tale.
The moral of the story is that you should model your thinking after Ensign Ro, and not after Troi.
“John Smith,” “Bob,” and “George,” are very “common” names. That is, they were probably common once, but now, even though they have largely fallen out of use, we all still have a cultural memory of them being “common” and “normal-sounding.” We even use them when we’re trying to think up non-specific names for use in examples or clever aliases. Who among us wasn’t given a set of dummy data to enter into a spreadsheet in grade nine business class that included names like “Bob,” “George” and “Harry” in the “names” column? (Side note: the next time I need a clever alias, I’m going with “John Q. Taxpayer.”)
This summer, I started composing a short list of things I don’t know how to do. Of course, there are lots of things I don’t know how to do that could have gone on this list. It’s easy to come up with specific professional skills that I don’t know how to do: I don’t know how to commit brain surgery, milk a cow, draft legislation, pilot a Tardis … the list could go on indefinitely. But those sorts of things are not what I had in mind with this list.
This list was specifically for “common” skills—skills that are common in the way that the names “Harry,” “Bob” or “George” are common. That is, we think of these skills as being ones that most people know how to do (more-or-less), but in reality, they have fallen out of common use, or maybe never were very common.
For example, in books or movies, when someone is thrown a rope and told to tie a person or a boat or something up, every character instantly knows exactly what knot to tie and how to do it, without thinking, even if it was totally implausible for that character to know how to do that at all. In other movies, cars are hot-wired in seconds. Locks are picked with the use of only bobby pins, and by people who you would not expect to be able to do that. If you drop any character from any movie in the woods, after a brief montage, she will have caught a fish, and be frying it over a fire that she started without matches.
As for me, if I ever even lost the keys to my own apartment, I’d have no flying clue how to get back in.
For the record, I do realise that I shouldn’t aspire to master a set of skills simply because it would make me more useful in an action-adventure movie. That said, there’s a saying, that if you only have a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails. I wonder how many inefficiencies I have endured and problems I have left unsolved simply because the set of skills or tools I possess is limited. I remember my Grandpa Searles always used to carry a knife around with him, and it was useful to him all the time.
With the exception of juggling, I have no concrete plans right now to learn how to do any of these things, but they are all things that I would eventually like to know how to do. After finding this list again, I’m strongly tempted to start carrying around a pocket-knife, a length of rope and a bump key set. Maybe I can look up some YouTube videos for interesting ways to use them.
Here’s the list for your consideration.
Things I don’t know how to do
Clean a fish
Sharpen a knife
Juggle
Do handsprings/backflips/etc.
Drive a car with standard transmission
Change a car’s oil
Change a flat tire
Anything related to automobile maintenance, really
Diving (I can swim a number of strokes decently well, tread water and even do flip-turns, but I could never make myself dive)
Do my taxes (I just go to an accountant. Let him deal with it.)
Start a fire with only rocks
Tie knots
Tie different kinds of ties (I only know one)
Tie a bow tie
Hot-wire a car
Pick a lock
Dance
If you have some other suggestions for things that most of us probably don’t know how to do, but might be a useful thing to know in certain contexts, please leave it in the comments.
My computer’s hard disc has been bumping up against its upper limit for months, and so I’m tempted to just buy a bigger internal hard disc. I could probably get a disc with a much larger capacity for less than $100.
The only thing that’s stopping me is that I think my venerable old MacBook (whose name is “Fermat,” by the way) is about to die. It has been dying a slow death for a long time. The fan makes a “k-tuck-k-tuck-k-tuck” sound when the computer’s running, and when it’s thinking really hard, it makes a sick sort of “whoosh” sound.
When I close the lid, it goes to sleep, but only momentarily. As soon as the fan shuts off, the optical drive spins up again (making a “meh-nah-num-dee-umm” sound) and the computer wakes up. Then it remembers that the lid is closed and it tries to go back to sleep. The cycle then resumes (“meh-nah-num-dee-umm”) and continues until the battery dies, which doesn’t take too long these days. (“Condition: Replace Soon”)
This means that I have to shut down my computer entirely if I want to go somewhere with it. This isn’t such a big deal, but then sometimes when I push the button to turn on my computer, it takes a scarily long time for the screen to turn on and the optical drive to spin up. It doesn’t do this every time, but when it does, I think that I’ve turned my computer on for the last time.
Those are the most serious things, but there are a few weird little problems as well. When I have the computer plugged in to my external monitor, I always turn the brightness on my laptop screen all the way down. Sometimes, when I leave the room with the computer running, I’ll come back after a few minutes to find the screen on my laptop will be turned on. When I touch the mouse or a button on my keyboard, it suddenly switches the laptop screen off, as if my laptop remembered that it’s supposed to have been that way the whole time, and I caught it doing something it shouldn’t have.
Due to the passage of time, the plastic casing has chipped, cracked and is peeling slowly off the computer, and the little pulsing white light that’s supposed to indicate that the computer is sleeping does not work. The DVD burner is flaky at best, and the whole computer runs very hot. By that, I mean it reaches a very high temperature.
Other than that, it works just fine.
My computer has a lot of character, and we’ve been through a lot together, but since I’m afraid that it will die soon, I don’t know if I want to invest the money in a new hard disc. But then if I can squeeze another year or two out of this computer by simply investing $100 for a new hard disc, then that would be a good investment.
I’ve been training hard for quidditch this autumn and periodically after practice, I crave chocolate milk. Naturally, I went looking for some. I’ve been to a number of grocery stores now, but I haven’t found any chocolate milk at all. I’ve found “chocolate dairy beverage,” but nothing that’s actually called “chocolate milk.”
This makes me wonder if there is such a thing as “chocolate milk” anymore. I know there’s strict regulations (suspiciously) on what things can be labelled “milk.” For all I know, it might be the case that anything with enough chocolate in it to be called “chocolate milk” would have too much chocolate in it to be called “milk” at all.
Now here’s where it gets weird. I can’t actually remember if chocolate milk was labelled “chocolate milk” in my childhood. It might have been “chocolate dairy beverage” back then, too, but I just can’t remember.
Is there such a thing as chocolate milk, and was there ever such a thing as chocolate milk?
[Your supervisor] approved your e-thesis on September 23, 2011 at 11:51.
If your thesis has been accepted by all your supervisor(s), it has been sent to GPSO for processing.
If your thesis has been rejected, please make the changes requested by your supervisor(s) to your original document*, and create a new pdf, delete the file on the server, and upload the new file.
You can track the progress of your thesis on Minerva.
Then, this morning, I received the following email.
Dear Benjamin, … We [at the philosophy department] have been told that you haven’t submitted your thesis electronically, and this is one of the graduation conditions. Can you do this immediately? The conditions have to be met by Tuesday, 4 October. Best wishes.
October 4th is on Tuesday (5 days from now). I’m pretty sure that my thesis has been submitted electronically. Here is my evidence:
Minerva lists my thesis as being uploaded and approved
I received the aforementioned email from the e-thesis computer
So I really don’t know what this fuss from the philosophy department is all about, but now I’m nervous that something’s messed up.
The previous tenants of my apartment left this houseplant behind for me. It didn’t always look like this. In fact, when I first inherited it, I wasn’t sure whether it was a real plant or a false one.
Fortunately, it is a very hardy plant, whatever it is, and it started putting out new leaves and bending toward the light. I kept it on the opposite side of the room from the window at first.
After a few months of that, I noticed that it was growing so I started rotating it, but by this point it was definitely leaning to one side. Alas, it never recovered and just kept bending and bending. Eventually I leaned it against the wall, next to the window. This did not help things, as it just kept sending out leaves toward the sun. Then one day I decided to go for a strategy of “tough love.” I rotated the plant 180 degrees away from the window. It more or less bent over so the top of the plant was touching the ground, to support the weight of the stalk.
Now the top of the stalk has sort of done a U-turn, and it’s sending leaves up toward the sun, as well as a brand-new little shoot out from the soil.
This week, my goal was to make final submission of my thesis. All the actual work on the document was finished. I just needed to figure out how to hand it in. As per instructions on the GPS website, my thesis has to be submitted in PDF/A format.
For those of you who are unaware, a PDF/A is not the same thing as a PDF. What’s the difference? It’s more expensive of course.
The thesis has to be converted to PDF/A using special software to ensure that it can still be opened in the future. So, in order to submit my thesis, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies recommends that I buy Adobe Acrobat Pro, at a cost of $101.38 with tax—and that’s the reduced student price.
And the most frustrating thing about this? According to the instructions, “Standard PDF files will be rejected unless the thesis was written in LaTeX.” For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you will recall that up until February, I was using LaTeX to typeset my thesis, and it was a painful and scary transition for me to move to Microsoft Word part-way through.
So ultimately, it came down to a choice between trying to convert my thesis back to LaTeX, or spending $100 to avoid all that hassle.
Laziness won, of course.
On Thursday, I went in to the bookstore and bought the software. When I first installed it and tried to convert my thesis, I got an error. Acrobat couldn’t convert my thesis. This seemed strange, since there wasn’t any strange formatting in it. I fiddled with the settings, tried restarting, but the very expensive software wouldn’t do it. Fortunately after a half hour, it auto-installed an update and after that, the conversion went as planned.
So as of yesterday, I have submitted my thesis to McGill. It’s over! Those are all the requirements for my master’s in bioethics! The only thing that’s left is my supervisor clicking “accept.”
By the way, one of the most satisfying things about making final submission of my thesis is the fact that I can take the ugly EndNote app out of my computer’s dock. It was such an eyesore! :P
I have noticed recently that there are certain foods that I have a hard time resisting. Tomato juice is one of them. Taboulé is another. If you’re not familiar with taboulé, it’s a sort of parsley salad with cucumber, tomato, bulgur and garlic. And whenever I buy it pre-made at the grocery store, I eat the whole thing in one sitting.
So, I decided to make some myself, so that I could have a lot of it, without going to the grocery store and buying a half-dozen of them and being judged by the cashier for my dietary choices. I looked on the internet and put some recipes together, and this is the taboulé that I prefer:
Ingredients
1c bulgur
1c quinoa
2c boiling water
1 cucumber, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
8 scallions
2c fresh chopped parsley
garlic to taste
Dressing
1/4c lemon juice
1/2c olive oil
pepper and salt to taste
Instructions
Combine the bulgur, quinoa and boiling water in a bowl. Let sit for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to allow grains to absorb water.
Prepare the vegetables and combine in a large salad bowl.
Combine the dressing ingredients in a small bowl.
Add the grains to the vegetables in the salad bowl. Mix thoroughly, and then add the dressing and mix.
In medical practice, the efforts of the medical team are directed toward therapy. That is to say, when a doctor or a nurse or some other medical professional performs some action on a patient, her actions are morally underwritten by the benefit she hopes to provide to the patient.
For example, a blood draw is somewhat uncomfortable. But we allow medical professionals to take blood if it is done for the purposes of diagnosis. Same thing with setting a bone—very painful, but it is allowed because it is aimed at providing some direct medical benefit to the patient.
In human research, this is not the case.
In human medical research, the efforts of the research team are directed toward gaining useful and generalisable knowledge. That is to say, when a doctor or a nurse or some other medical researcher performs some action on a patient, her actions are not morally underwritten by the benefit she hopes to provide to the patient. Rather, her actions are morally underwritten by the benefit she hopes to provide through the use of generalisable knowledge in informing medical practice.
Blood draws are very common in many kinds of medical research as well. But they are allowed in human research, but not because the patient will necessarily receive any benefit. Instead, it is the benefit to others that makes drawing blood from the patient permissible.
To put it simply, medical researchers are not necessarily trying to help their subjects. That is not what they are doing. This is probably pretty clear at this point.
But what about cases where the patient-subject is receiving some new “experimental” therapy? Perhaps our hypothetical example patient-subject has already been through multiple therapies, none of which worked, and this therapy is the patient-subject’s last best hope.
It’s in cases like these where the line between therapy and research becomes fuzzier.
The therapeutic misconception is something that happens when patients regard medical research as medical therapy. Often, patients will have an exaggerated idea of the chances of success of the procedure. In other cases, patients will full-out not understand that it’s possible that they would be randomised to a control group and not receive any treatment other than a placebo.
The therapeutic misconception is a major problem in human research ethics, and different ethicists have had different ideas on how to deal with it. Some have suggested that doctors should wear red labcoats when they are working in their capacity as a researcher, in contrast with their normal white ones. Others have suggested that patient-subjects always be compensated financially for their participation in a trial, so that the patient regards the money she receives as the benefit from the trial, rather than the “treatment.”
I saw Captain America on Friday night. While it is a fun movie, it doesn’t help things too much in terms of the therapeutic misconception. I know it wasn’t written with human research ethics in mind, but really, we’ve got a guy who is a subject of a medical experiment, but who receives tremendous medical benefit.
People who are participating in medical research watch films like this and even though they know that they won’t come out of the research protocol standing a full two feet taller with rippling muscles not having spent a minute at the gym, they still get the wrong idea—that when you’re recruited to human research, one of the researcher’s goals is direct medical benefit to you.
Alternate ending to Captain America
Most of the movie would be the same, but just as Captain America is about to save the world, we find out that Steve Rogers was actually randomised to the placebo group. Captain America crashes the evil airplane into the ice and everyone says, “Oh no. It was just a placebo all along.” The body is never found.
Often it’s nothing more than vandalism, but sometimes graffiti is actually good.
This is an example of some graffiti near the Costco in Montréal, and for about the last year, every time I passed it, I thought to myself, I should come back here and take some photos before something happens to prevent me.
So today, I finally did. I wanted to take the photos during the summer while it was still nice out, and I’m glad I didn’t keep forgetting about it.
The big picture
This particular graffiti is good because of the use of vibrant colours, the cute characters, and the general overall effort that went into painting the side of that building.
It looks very attractive.
Also, I think that the fact that no one has painted over their graffiti helps.
There’s also a consistency of style across the entire wall that makes the whole composition work.
It’s just overall, a good piece of work.
Angry fish
I’m trying to pin down what it is that separates “good” graffiti from “bad.” I mean, the graffiti pictured to the left of this paragraph doesn’t have a lot of the qualities that the first example had.
It’s pretty much monochrome, and others have defaced it, but I like the angry fish.
I wish I could have seen it before it was painted over.
Maybe it’s that I like when graffiti has characters in it, rather than illegible words? I mean, I don’t understand what’s written in most graffiti, but when I see the angry fish, I understand, It’s an angry fish.
I have no clue what this says
But there are some cases of incomprehensible writing that I like.
This one is also pretty good.
No idea what it says, and there’s no characters in it, but I still appreciate it.
By that I mean, if I owned a large building in a city, I don’t think I would be very upset if I came to work one morning and found something like this painted on it. (Assuming that the word, once deciphered, has a non-offensive meaning.)
I mean, it could be a lot worse. It could be spray-painted penises. There are enough of those in Montréal.
Come inside the door. We have candy.
This graffiti is creepy. I think that’s why I like it.
Suspicious-looking bird
So, so creepy. This graffiti also had a suspicious-looking bird on it.
