Only Some of These Really Bother Me

(A version of this post has also appeared on my Tumblr)

Article header from io9.com: "10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing"

There's an article on io9.com listing ten words/concepts from various fields of science that are commonly misused by laypeople, so I had to look at it and see if any of my pet peeves made it onto the list.

There were a few:

3. Quantum Uncertainty and Quantum Weirdness
[Astrophysicist Dave] Goldberg adds that there's another idea that's been misinterpreted even more perniciously than "theory." It's when people appropriate concepts from physics for new agey or spiritual purposes:

This misconception is an exploitation of quantum mechanics by a certain breed spiritualists and self-helpers, and epitomized by the abomination, [the movie] What the Bleep Do We Know? Quantum mechanics, famously, has measurement at its core. An observer measuring position or momentum or energy causes the "wavefunction to collapse," non-deterministically. (Indeed, I did one of my first columns on "How smart do you need to collapse a wavefunction?") But just because the universe isn't deterministic doesn't mean that you are the one controlling it. It is remarkable (and frankly, alarming) the degree to which quantum uncertainty and quantum weirdness get inextricably bound up in certain circles with the idea of a soul, or humans controlling the universe, or some other pseudoscience. In the end, we are made of quantum particles (protons, neutrons, electrons) and are part of the quantum universe. That is cool, of course, but only in the sense that all of physics is cool. 

4. Learned vs. Innate
Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk says:

One of my favorite [misuses] is the idea of behavior being "learned vs. innate" or any of the other nature-nurture versions of this. The first question I often get when I talk about a behavior is whether it's "genetic" or not, which is a misunderstanding because ALL traits, all the time, are the result of input from the genes and input from the environment. Only a difference between traits, and not the trait itself, can be genetic or learned — like if you have identical twins reared in different environments and they do something different (like speak different languages), then that difference is learned. But speaking French or Italian or whatever isn't totally learned in and of itself, because obviously one has to have a certain genetic background to be able to speak at all.

....

6. Gene

[Synthetic biologist Terry] Johnson has an even bigger concern with how the word gene gets used, however: 

It took 25 scientists two contentious days to come up with: "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions." Meaning that a gene is a discrete bit of DNA that we can point to and say, "that makes something, or regulates the making of something". The definition has a lot of wiggle room by design; it wasn't long ago that we thought that most of our DNA didn't do anything at all. We called it "junk DNA", but we're discovering that much of that junk has purposes that weren't immediately obvious. 

Typically "gene" is misused most when followed by "for". There's two problems with this. We all have genes for hemoglobin, but we don't all have sickle cell anemia. Different people have different versions of the hemoglobin gene, called alleles. There are hemoglobin alleles which are associated with sickle cell diseases, and others that aren't. So, a gene refers to a family of alleles, and only a few members of that family, if any, are associated with diseases or disorders. The gene isn't bad - trust me, you won't live long without hemoglobin - though the particular version of hemoglobin that you have could be problematic. 

I worry most about the popularization of the idea that when a genetic variation is correlated with something, it is the "gene for" that something. The language suggests that "this gene causes heart disease", when the reality is usually, "people that have this allele seem to have a slightly higher incidence of heart disease, but we don't know why, and maybe there are compensating advantages to this allele that we didn't notice because we weren't looking for them".

Those were the ones that resonated with me the most; others were only minor peeves or didn't actually bother me at all.

Misused Word #1, "Proof," was only a minor annoyance for me in that I'm almost never talking about mathematical proofs, and even if I were the sort of person who does use them routinely, it still seems to me like most things people talking about "proving" colloquially are impossible to express in mathematical terms.

It just seems to me like there wouldn't be very many circumstances in which mixing up the technical and colloquial meanings of "proof" would be an issue that would even arise.

(I have found that the most annoying sources of confusion in scientist/layperson conversations about proof have to do with standards of evidence, or also degrees of uncertainty. You can be more unsure of one thing than you are of another, even if you're not 100% certain about the thing you are more sure of.)

Similarly, "theory" also doesn't annoy me that much because I don't usually have much trouble adjusting to different usages of words in different contexts.

I can see how it would get really old having to explain the technical meaning of "theory" over and over again, though.

It seems like those are more about the meaning of specific words than they are about whole networks of ideas, so they are easier for me to adapt to when they surprise me in conversation.

The ones discussed in the quoted text above, though? Misuse of ideas derived from quantum mechanics, misinterpretations of evolution and natural selection, or the idea that genes are "for" specific things? Those come with so many other ideas connected to them, so many wrong things tacitly accepted as premises, that I feel like I need a ball of yarn to slowly pick my way back to the start of the conceptual maze.

So, Feministe has a pretty interesting post (responding to this article in the New York Times) about family dinner conversations, and how they shape a person's rhetorical style.


Here's how Jill describes her family's dinnertime ritual:

Even when I go home, still, a sit-down dinner and a long discussion is non-negotiable. The TV gets turned off. We don't answer the phone. There are no cell phones allowed at the table. There isn't a structured conversation --- we just talk. And since I come from a family of political junkies, the conversation inevitably turns to politics; since I also come from a family of people who like to push boundaries and challenge each other, the conversation inevitably turns into an argument. No one yells --- we aren't a yelling family --- but voices get raised and sarcasm gets thrown around and even though we're all lefty liberals we get deep into it.

And then we clean up and we watch some CNN and we all move on with our lives. It never occurred to me that dinner-time arguments over, say, farming subsidies or the proper legal treatment of child molesters could create lasting wounds or ongoing anger. Which is maybe why it's taken me years to figure out that, in the blogosphere, you can't come at someone hard in a comment section and expect that they understand you're challenging them because you respect them and find their views interesting, and that they will respond to your challenges and heated critiques with the same, and you'll both walk away still liking each other and not thinking about it much beyond, "Well that was an interesting discussion." Most people just think you're a flame-throwing asshole. I blame my parents.

One person, in comments, mentioned how they felt like the absence of any dinnertime conversation (or, really, any conversation at all beyond the most perfunctory) while they were growing up deprived them of the chance to develop any kind of rhetorical or conversational skills.


My own experiences are like Jill's in a lot of ways: my family, too, sits down for a home-cooked meal and unstructured conversation every night, and does not really consider any subject to be taboo. Certainly not politics, which is discussed frequently. But we don't argue like Jill's family does; we're more conflict-averse, we're not very emotionally expressive (indeed, we tend to be uncomfortable with strong emotions), and, for me at least, argument is not a style of discussion that I am very good at. My mind works slowly, taking time to unfold and absorb every aspect and ramification of whatever I have just been told (besides the fact that I don't think in words and need to "translate" something into the pictorial/abstract colors-and-shapes milieu of my thoughts, and auditory-processing issues mean it takes me longer to decode spoken language than written language, so in conversation I have a particularly long lag time between hearing and understanding), and any thoughts I might have in response to whatever I've just been told also take time to form themselves. I am thus in the position of not yet knowing what I think when it is time for me to speak. I may not even know what you've just said by the time you're done saying it and waiting for me to respond. 


To accommodate this, I tend to treat discussion less as a contest between ideas than as a process of discovering what each person's ideas are. 


Because I have often found that people's ideas are interconnected in unpredictable ways (including my own), just stating what one thinks about something isn't always enough. Sometimes if you say one thing, the person you're talking to proceeds as if you had said that thing, and a whole bunch of other things you haven't said and aren't sure you even understand. I have also made these assumptions about other people, thinking that I had found a word or phrase to express a bundle of concepts and then finding that, in the other person's lexicon, that word didn't come with all the connotations it carried in my head. So I try and identify the premises I am starting from, and the premises that I and my interlocutor hold in common. From there, I will try to explain how I get to whatever proposition we're debating from those premises, and will also listen to my friend (I can pretty much only do this with friends) draw me a similar map of his or her reasoning.


What Jill's post got me to realize is that this style of conversation, which it has taken me years to develop, might not solely be an accommodation of my cognitive and communicative quirks. It might also be something I have carried with me from childhood, modeled somewhat on the kind of dinnertime conversations my family has.


(Obviously, it couldn't be an exact copy of my family's conversational style, or I wouldn't have had to develop it, but I do feel that what I have jerry-rigged together for myself probably has roots in how my family communicates. It's an adapted version, but I am starting to see some shared features).


Anyway, if you were going to describe my family in terms of what kind of people they are (like Jill describes her family as political junkies), you'd probably call us science nerds. As much as we talk about politics, it's not the thing we talk about most. Most of our dinnertime conversation is of a technical nature, drawing on whatever field each of us is trained in (electromagnetics, chemistry, biology, medicine). Because we are not all trained in the same things, we often have to include a lot of background information leading up to whatever it is we want to discuss. (When my siblings and I were children, this was almost always our dad explaining something about electromagnetics, but now that I have my own body of knowledge and experience, I will sometimes find myself holding forth about chemistry or biochemistry). So my family tends to explain rather than argue, because many of the things we talk about require explanation before they can be discussed in any depth. 


I think now that habit, as much as my needing to slow conversations down and check repeatedly to make sure everyone is on the same page, has predisposed me to prefer a collaborative, expository conversational style to an adversarial, argumentative one, and to feel myself disadvantaged when I do find myself in the middle of an actual debate.     

Fetal Testosterone and Autistic Traits - Part IV: Verbal Abilities

Apart from eye contact and looking behavior, one of the earliest signs that a child might be autistic is a delay in the acquisition of speech*. Many of us continue to have difficulties with language as older children, adolescents and adults --- difficulties both with producing speech, and with understanding other people's speech.

Thus, if autism really results from hypermasculinization of the developing brain in utero by testosterone, you would expect children exposed to higher levels of testosterone during gestation to 1) develop speech somewhat later than children exposed to less testosterone, 2) have somewhat poorer verbal skills in general, perhaps reflected by an imbalance between verbal and performance IQ, and 3) do relatively poorly at comprehending spoken language, compared to their less-androgenic peers.

To help answer those questions, Svetlana Lutchmaya, Simon Baron-Cohen and Peter Raggatt (full text here) measured testosterone levels in the amniotic fluid of 87 women and then tested their children twice, at the ages of eighteen and twenty-four months, on the size of their vocabularies using the Communicative Development Inventory (CDI).

They found a significant sex difference in vocabulary size --- on average, the 40 girls in this study knew about 87 words at eighteen months old, while the 47 boys had an average vocabulary size of around 42 words. There was a huge amount of variation within each group, though: the boys' scores ranged from zero (which I'm assuming to mean they didn't speak at all --- three boys had this result) to 222 words; while the girls' scores ranged from 2 to 318. So, the least verbal girl(s) could all say at least a few words, while three boys couldn't say any words at all; while the most verbal girl(s) knew almost a hundred (or ~50%) more words than the most verbal boy(s).

This pattern persisted when the children (most of them, at least --- at this stage, the sample consisted of 43 boys and 38 girls) were followed up at twenty-four months old: then, the boys' average vocabulary consisted of 197 words (ranging from a low score of zero to a high score of 414); the girls knew about 275 words on average (ranging from 15 to 415). So, while the most talkative boys had caught up with the most talkative girls by this time, the sexes' average and low-end scores still diverged.

In their statistical analysis of these data, and on the seven other variables they tracked, the researchers found the strongest relationship between sex and vocabulary size, followed by level of parental education. Fetal testosterone came in third for both sexes together, and was not a significant predictor of vocabulary size at all within either sex. So I think it's probably fair to conclude that the reason testosterone showed up as a significant factor at all in the analysis of the pooled data is because it's strongly correlated to sex.

A much older study (Finegan, Niccols, and Sitarenios, 1992) also looked for a potential relationship between prenatal testosterone (measured in amniotic fluid) and young children's performance on a broad assortment of cognitive tests. Some of these tests measured verbal abilities; the Comprehension scale of the Reynell Developmental Language Scales tested a child's understanding of individual words, concepts, and different meanings conveyed by different sentence structures; and several subdomains within the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities --- Oral Vocabulary, Verbal Fluency and Opposite Analogies --- tested the children's expressive language abilities. Of those latter three, the first is a rough measure of vocabulary size (though, unlike the measure used by Lutchmaya and her colleagues, it doesn't ask the parents how many words their child knows; instead, it asks children to define a series of 10 words, increasing in difficulty from familiar objects and animals to more abstract concepts, like "loyal"), while the second two measure how quickly a child can come up with words of a specific type.

Of all those measures, only one --- Language Comprehension --- was found to correlate with prenatal testosterone, and that relationship was only seen in girls.


(Figure 1, in Finegan et al., 1992 --- graphs showing the relation of prenatal testosterone levels, plotted on the x-axes, with scores on the Reynell Language Comprehension subscale. The graph on the left, with the black dots, shows the results for girls; the graph on the right shows boys' results. You can see that there's only a correlation of any kind for the girls).



In girls, there was a negative quadratic relationship between prenatal testosterone and scores on the Language Comprehension test, meaning that girls with middling levels of prenatal testosterone exposure --- not the highest or the lowest --- tended to get the highest scores on this task. No relationship whatsoever was found between prenatal testosterone and either comprehension or expression of language for boys.

That study tracked other variables as well as prenatal testosterone, and while none of those variables (including testosterone) predicted how well the children did on any of the expressive-language tasks, family background (a measure including parental socioeconomic status, and the mother's IQ and education) was also a significant predictor of language comprehension. This is somewhat in line with Lutchmaya et al.'s results, which found parental education to be an important predictor of a child's vocabulary size, but also a little different, since Lutchmaya and colleagues were measuring how much the children in their sample spoke, not how much they understood --- expressive language, not receptive language, which Finegan and colleagues did not find any predictors for. Finegan et al.'s children were older than Lutchmaya et al.'s, though, and the measures the two groups of researchers used were very different. The one thing they seem clearly to agree on is that there probably isn't any correlation between prenatal testosterone exposure and language abilities as manifested in early childhood, or if there is it's a very weak one.

*This impairment in verbal communication is actually one of the diagnostic criteria for various ASDs --- with (classical autism) or without (Asperger syndrome) delayed acquisition of speech.

Sources:
Lutchmaya, S., Baron-Cohen, S., & Raggatt, P. (2001). Foetal testosterone and vocabulary size in 18- and 24-month-old infants Infant Behavior and Development, 24 (4), 418-424 DOI: 10.1016/S0163-6383(02)00087-5

Lutchmaya, S., Baron-Cohen, S., & Raggatt, P. (2001). Foetal testosterone and vocabulary size in 18- and 24-month-old infants Infant Behavior and Development, 24 (4), 418-424 DOI: 10.1016/S0163-6383(02)00087-5

Wheelchair Dancer on Gender and Disability in Everyday Interactions

One of the posts highlighed in today's Recommended Reading post on FWD/Forward was this little gem from Wheelchair Dancer, describing a conversation she overheard.

It was between a man and a woman, about the rules of bridge. The man is explaining something very authoritatively, to which the woman, for the most part, listens passively, occasionally asking questions which the man cannot always answer. It becomes apparent that he's just as new to the game as she is --- he's just assumed the role of The Authority in this conversation, even though he's no more an authority on bridge than she is.

As far as the negative power relation between men and women goes, this conversation, sadly, would not stand out were it not for the way in which the woman responds to the answers she gets.

For every thing she doesn't understand right off the bat or simply gets wrong, she claims a disability. So far, she has memory issues, is dyslexic, is losing her mind, is "slow ...". As I listen to her, I suppose that any or all of these things could be true. ... Nonetheless, as the stream of different disabilities continues, I begin to wonder if claims of disability function as a cushion between the painful abruptness of her partner and her desire to do better and earn his acceptance. In other words, the woman may be disabled in all those ways, but in the context of the conversation, disability also serves as an excuse/reason for her "stupidity" in the face of her partner's "brilliance."

Wheelchair Dancer doesn't think it's an accident that the woman's (apparent) disability functions like this --- to diminish her presence, shrink her further and further into the background --- she sees this uncomprehending silence, this unquestioning acceptance of the man's greater expertise, this constant deprecation of her own understanding, as part of the way the woman has chosen to "do disability":

She does disability in the old way, a way in which the value of our diverse minds and bodies is not acknowledged. Her disability is a weakness that separates her from an actively feminist goal of being an equal partner in the conversation and the game.

Rather than stop the conversation and ask the man to go slower, repeat something, or rephrase or elaborate on something until she feels she understands what he's trying to say and can either agree with it or challenge it, she stays quiet, unwilling or unable to ask him to adjust his manner of speaking to her needs. She's shrinking herself, subordinating herself to him, taking part in the conversation either on his terms and at his pace or not at all.

A commenter pointed out that, from the way Wheelchair Dancer described him, the male half of this duo could very well have some communication impairments of his own --- on the "sending" rather than the "receiving" end.

I think they might be right, because there are elements of Wheelchair Dancer's description of the man's conversational and interpersonal style --- his rigidity, his lack of eye contact, the apparent effort with which he speaks --- that are in fact features of a disability I have, which does interfere with my ability to communicate via speech.

But even if that's true, and the man, too, has some communication impairment that's making him have to work very hard even to put his thoughts into words at all --- let alone rearranging and streamlining those words so that they are intelligible to the woman, who seems to have receptive language difficulties --- the man would still be using his disability to silence the woman, to shut her out of equal participation in the discussion.

By dominating the conversation, by taking on the role of The Authority, he's still saying that, whatever impairments he may have, he's the one setting the terms for this interaction.

Also, even if they both have disabilities affecting their ability to communicate, she's the only one who ever references them --- and she only references her own disabilities, and that in a self-deprecating way, not in a way that indicates she's asking the man to accommodate her. Whether the man has a disability of his own or not, he's set himself up as the standard against which she has to measure herself. Does she understand his sentences? If she doesn't, there must be something wrong with her, because they're totally clear to him!

So, still working under this assumption that both participants in this conversation have language difficulties (receptive or expressive), we find that both partners have different ways of "doing" disability, and --- surprise! --- both of them involve the woman shutting up and retreating into the background.

Stop, Look and Listen --- It's Autistics Speaking Day

First, a little background information:

Today, there's something going on called Communication Shutdown, in which people are encouraged to abstain from Facebook and Twitter all day to 1) raise awareness of autism --- while users are offline today, their pages will display an icon that explains why they're offline; 2) simulate what it's like being autistic, i.e. being cut off from the wide world of social communication; and 3) raise money for various autism charities around the globe via participant donations.

(For a brief, but really enlightening, discussion of why autism charities are problematic, see this post on Cripchick's blog).

Lots of autistic bloggers, Facebook and/or Twitter users are annoyed with this autism-awareness campaign, partly because abstaining from social media isn't very enlightening as far as what it's like to be autistic.

Social media and the Internet actually represent ways autistic people connect with others, to a greater extent than we can in our non-digital lives. The Internet has allowed us to meet other autistic people around the world, talk about issues that are important to us, commiserate and empathize with each other over things that non-autistic people --- however kind or well-intentioned --- just don't understand. Social media can enable us to maintain friendships across distances that we might not be able to cross in the physical world, since autistic people are often unable to travel as freely as non-autistic people to whom driving a car, riding a bus cross-country or flying on an airplane and navigating a busy airport do not constitute serious challenges.

So, for some autistic people, a better awareness campaign would be something like Corina Becker's idea: Autistics Speaking Day, in which autistic people take to their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to write about what it's like to be autistic.

Let us use this day to flood every social networking site we know with our accounts, our experiences, what it feels like to be Autistic.

Every sensory pain, every communication frustration, every account of being bullied, every wondrous moment, every peaceful calm, every instant of understanding and joy.

Let them hear our voices and take back the Autism community.

Let us speak.

Let us tell you what it's like to be us.

And that, would be true Autism Awareness.

* * *

For Me to Speak, You Have to Listen.

Sometimes, people with disabilities need more space than people without disabilities do. This applies not just to physical spaces --- aisles, car and bus interiors, seating, sidewalks, doorways, hallways, etc. --- that need to be broad enough to accommodate wheelchairs, walkers, scooters, service animals, or other mobility and assistive devices, but also to interpersonal spaces.

A conversation can be accessible or inaccessible, just like a building can be. Just like there are places where only people who can do certain (physical) things --- climb stairs, squeeze through narrow openings, open heavy doors, etc. --- can go, so are there social and political environments where only people who can do certain (verbal, mental, emotional) things can participate.

You have to be able to speak, loudly and rapidly. Most of the time, you'll need to be able to control your need for pauses, for breathing or thinking space, so that you can get a complete thought out in one piece. You have to be able to intellectualize --- not to get so upset that you become incoherent, which can be hard if the issues being discussed have a direct bearing on your life. You also can't be too intellectual, or you'll lose your audience. You can't talk for too long. You can't be too abrupt. You have to be able to see where the conversation is going, as if it were a living thing that could walk, float, flutter, slither or ooze its way around a room, and adapt whatever it is you want to say to fit what your audience expects to hear.

It's the speed of group conversation that's hardest for me to deal with, for a lot of reasons. One reason is that, since I don't hear tones of voice or anything "meta" to the actual words being spoken (I can infer sarcasm from context --- say, if I know the person and they are saying something diametrically opposed to what I know they believe --- but my first instinct is always to take things literally), I cannot tell the difference between a silence that signifies that someone has finished speaking, and a pause in the middle of a block of speech. I distinguish them by waiting to see if the person resumes speaking; if they never do, I decide that the way is clear for me to respond.

Of course, in all the time it takes me to do this, someone else has already perceived the opening and begun to speak.

The other big problem I have with speaking, and responding to other people's speech, is that I don't think in words. It can take me a very long time to convert what's going on in my head --- which is sometimes a single still image, sometimes a slideshow of images, sometimes just a jumble of colors and shapes, moving and changing, and sometimes looks like nothing at all, even to me on the inside --- into coherent, grammatically-correct, meaningful language. It is somewhat easier to effect this transformation in writing, where what I have already written stays there for me to read, to orient myself and build on, while in speech all the progress I've made evaporates into the air, leaving me nothing to work with. Most importantly, though, in writing I have the luxury of waiting as long as it takes for my thoughts to solidify into nameable concepts.

Time is not on my side when I'm trying to participate in a group discussion. I can't wait for my thoughts to reveal themselves to me in communicable form, but neither can I describe what I see as it appears to me; most of the things I see elude description, or, if they can be described, defy interpretation. The thing I can do earliest is perceive an absence; sense something that is not being addressed. I can't always see what's missing, but I can usually tell that something is.

When that happens, I've learned to tell people to wait.

* * *

Other Autistics who are Speaking today:

Bev at Square 8 says, "Squawk?"

Corina Becker has posted a roundup of her own past writings about autism

The Untoward Lady writes about being autistic and in love

Amanda Forest Vivian has two posts, one about how 1) passing as non-disabled can be a mixed blessing and 2) therapies that are primarily geared toward turning non-passing people into passing people are misguided; and one about "Regular Person Listening Day"

Kat Bjornstad has a link roundup, and a discussion of her experiences starting a blog and running an Autistics Speaking Day Facebook event

Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg at Journeys with Autism speaks her mind, and also speaks from her heart

Clarissa wants to know, "How Does Silence Support Autism?"

Astrid van Woerkom sometimes loses the ability to speak

Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone has reposted several of her poems --- "Articulate", "Analogy > Simile > Metaphor and Me", "Feet", "Poetry and the Vision of Thought", "To Inspiration", and "Allied, Unallied, Re-Allied" --- and an "accessible interpretation" of her poem "To Inspiration"

Leah Jane at The Quixotic Autistic talks about a project she's been working on with her local autism club

Clay Adams reposts an essay by Ari Ne'eman

(That's not all, not by a longshot. Kat's link roundup has more, and Sunday Stilwell at Adventures in Extreme Parenthood and Kim Wombles and Kathleen Leopold at the Autism Blogs Directory all have link roundups of their own)