Social beliefs, including those about gender, race, sexual orientation, fatness, and disability, impact science. Here’s a 🧵 of examples I find interesting and wanted to share. Feel free to add! I’m going to keep growing it over time. The Lover's of Modena - two skeletons buried holding hands in ~5th CE - were long assumed to be a male and female. More recently it was determined they were two males. 1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovers_of…

Out at last!! Do moral judgments impact COVID risk judgments? We find people think infection risk is lower when doing morally good things. online.ucpress.edu/collabra/artic… With interdisciplinary team @weatherall_jim @daniel_relihan @AshleyJ_Thomas Kyle Stanford and Pete Ditto 2

"I was so wrong", a 🧵. @KevinZollman argued that less connected groups of scientists might be more successful than more connected ones. They preserve a diversity of practices longer b/c they communicate less (and thus avoid herding onto a bad theory). 1 link.springer.com/article/10.100… Co-authors and I critiqued this "Zollman effect" by arguing that it only shows up in a small portion of parameter space in his models. We argue that it thus likely doesn't apply in lots of cases, but that disconnection carries other harms. 2

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

New Paper! We find that subjects think you are less at risk of COVID infection when engaged in morally good actions, and more likely to catch COVID while doing morally bad things. In other words, risk judgments are systematically skewed.

osf.io/preprints/meta… We present subjects with vignettes where the exposure is always identical, but the reasons for the exposure vary. I.e., Joe always gets caught in an elevator with neighbors, but might be headed out to buy drugs, or to help an elderly friend. 2

Threats to the ACA make me feel almost physically ill. Many non-Americans, or even wealthier citizens, don't know anything about living without health insurance. It is awful, even when you are young, healthy, and otherwise privileged.
1 I grew up middle class, but after college didn't get the kind of job that provides health insurance. Who can afford to pay for it our of pocket? This began a four year period of mostly not having insurance.
2

Kino Zhao is finishing her dissertation this year in LPS. Let's have a little thread about her and her work. Here's Kino: Her dissertation in the philosophy of social science is totally exciting. She looks carefully at the details of practice in different fields to think about successful methodology.

A PSA thread since many savvy intellectuals seem confused about this basic point: sexually differentiated behavior in animals is not the same as gender. 1 Animals with two sexes often have distinct behaviors. Ones that engage in coitus, for instance, behave differently during it because they make different sized gametes that necessitate different roles. 2

There are a lot of stories shared in philosophy about how young women are discriminated against by older (usually white) men. Most of my bad experiences have actually been with students. Am I alone? Or are we not talking about this bc they are young and under our protection?
1 There was the grad who interrupted a seminar to explain how I should be teaching it. He had never taught a grad seminar.
2

New paper - "Measuring Conventionality" that I'm really proud of. Perhaps my favorite paper I've written.
1
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… Argues that we should conceptualize of conventions as coming in degrees, and provides an information theoretic measure of how arbitrary an evolved convention is. (Here is the free preprint on my website: cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/upl…)
2

PUMPED that my paper "Dynamics of Retraction in Epistemic Communities" with Travis LaCroix and Ander Geil will appear in Philosophy of Science. We use network models to think about why retractions often fail. (More below.)
1
cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/upl… We focus on the feature of retractions that they tend to be relevant only to those who already heard about the original, false finding, or who know that others did. So retractions aren't expected to spread context free. This makes them different from many other claims.
2

"Groupthink in Science" is out - lots to interest metascience/philsci people. Our chapter (free link below) overviews some epistemic network models, connecting them up with case studies - big tobacco, peptic ulcer disease, Semmelweis etc.

springer.com/gp/book/978303… False Beliefs and the Social Structure of Science: Some Models and Case Studies: cailinoconnor.com/wp-content/upl…

Thanks to @rickhasen for spearheading this report on holding fair elections during a crisis. It was my pleasure to contribute (in a small way) along with a bevy of amazing co-authors. Some keys points in thread.
1
law.uci.edu/faculty/full-t… Media outlets need to do a lot of work to set expectations about how fair elections go - counting takes a long time, ensuring security takes a long time with mail-in ballots, *many elections should be considered too close to call on election day* - that's normal now
2

A thread about our family's coronavirus story. And why *testing* and *policy* really matter!
1 On Sun 3/15 my daughter developed a fever. We called her doctor and public health officials. Of course there were no coronavirus tests. They assured us it was almost certainly flu, that we didn't need to quarantine.
2

A rant about toxins, lobbies, and my simultaneous rage and helplessness.

Discovered that toxic flame retardants are common in children’s pajamas.
1 Ran up and discovered four sets of such PJs in my children’s drawers. I guess these toxins impair proper neural development. Threw out the PJs in a rage. 2

A thread about LPS student Mike Schneider! Mike has basically done two dissertation projects - one in phil physics, and the other in formal social epistemology. Here is Mike's website. On there you can read about his work on the cosmological constant, and dark energy. I don't know anything about those things.

philosopherof.science

This is the hardest project I ever did, and the one I'm most proud of. Now that it's out, have been meaning to write a post about the content. It looks at the emergence of unfair conventions and norms across social groups (especially gender). Chapters described below: Chapter 1 introduces gendered division of labor as a target phenom. I discuss what conventions are, how they relate to coordination games, and argue that coordinating on complementary roles (i.e. different ones) poses a special problem for large groups.

A thread about LPS student Kino Zhao (@kinozhao2)! Here she is... @kinozhao2 Kino works in the philosophy of social sciences, and on statistics. She has a great talent for choosing socially relevant research topics, as well as the mathematical and philosophical chops to tackle them thoroughly and carefully.

And now for a conversation about Aydin Mohseni (@__mnml ) my student at LPS! He works on philosophy of science, the replication crisis, scientific interventions, game theory, and modeling. Here he is! (A thread.) @__mnml Aydin got an MA from CMU with @KevinZollman - started researching issues with evolutionary models and dynamics. This was really good stuff. But, to me, over the years his work has gotten more and more socially relevant and exciting.

The #metascience2019 meeting got me thinking about reproducibility in modeling. From now on, in collaborative modeling projects, I'm going to have two individuals reproduce the same results separately. A thread. Shirley Wang had trouble reproducing results from big data sets trying to reimplement the code others developed.

HEYO, my book 'Games in the Philosophy of Biology' will be published with Cambridge. It surveys the literature using game theory and evolutionary game theory to investigate the evolution of social traits, focusing on work in philosophy. Chapters described in thread Chapter 1 intros game theory and evolutionary game theory, and discusses the differences between these methods.