Continuous Variables: when will we stop drawing lines?

Categories. Groups. Cliques.

People love to classify things. Walk into any store, search any website. From the sections of the supermarket to the tags on this blog, there is a common feature of clustering based on commonalities.

But this desire to categorize extends beyond things. People love to classify people. We classify ourselves, our peers, even people we have never met.

Take your friends, for instance. You have your friends you call when something big happens, your “first responders” if you will. You have your “casual friends” who you might meet up with every few weeks or so for coffee. Then you have your friends who you can go months without talking to and yet the friendship never deteriorates. But we have all experienced the agony of that intermediate friendship that we don’t know how to categorize. You ask yourself analytical questions to determine whether or not this is the type of friendship where you can invite them to the movies the day of without scaring them off.

So why do we like to categorize? It seems to make our lives easier. When we place situations or people or foods or anything else for that matter into a box, then we can treat all of those things in that box the same way. We learn how to respond to one object in that box, and we then know how to respond to all of the objects grouped in that box. We can learn what we like and don’t like, what is important to us and what might be “dangerous” without the hassle of fully and singly experiencing everything out there. As detailed more in NPR’s Invisibilia episode“The Power of Categories,” categorizing the world around us begins at a young age and provides us with comfort without requiring a change in ourselves.

I’ll offer another more personal example of how people use categories to cope. My grandmother was born and raised in Thailand to a Chinese family that had recently migrated there. She grew up in a neighborhood almost completely populated by Chinese migrants, and daily saw the juxtaposition of Chinese culture with Thai culture. My grandmother quickly learned how to categorize in an effort to have ideal interactions with many different people; Chinese people do this while Thai people do that. I have no doubt that it was beneficial to do this in order to be broadly respectful, but at the same time I always wondered if Person A might just do this because they were Person A.

Using statistical terminology, it seems like our world can become ruled by discrete variables that we assign to anything and everything, but aren’t continuous variables more realistic? Politically, people rarely identify 100% with one presidential candidate, or are 100% Democrat or Republican. Morally, we are not 100% good or bad. Racially, few of us are 100% of one race. Even medically, we have turned to more personalized treatment based on individual needs. More recently, our society has seen a pushback against established discrete social variables concerning gender and sexuality. There is a cry out to recognize the continuous variables of identity that people truly are, instead of continue on with the discrete variables that society has so lazily established. As illustrated in the image below of a political spectrum, the assignment of broad discrete categories ignores the intricacies of the data.

 

It’s an overwhelming reality that we must venture out of our comfortable categories and observe every new thing on its own and of its own, but it’s a reality nonetheless. Who’s to say what the best approach is, whether it is completely changing the current system or simply adding more categories until they are nearly indistinguishable. But perhaps the first step is adding new words to our vocabulary.

Spectrum. Blend. Continuous.

Scientists as Idols

When I tell people I have a degree in chemistry, they often respond with a variation on the theme of “Wow, you must be so smart, I could never do that.” I also find that people will defer to me in a number of areas, regardless of whether they’re in my field, only on the basis of me being a scientist. Sorry, friend. I know nothing about mold…Yes, I know it’s science, but I study immunology...No, I won’t come look at your bathroom to see what species is growing…Call an exterminator.

This idea of a scientist having above-average intelligence and thus being worthy of more respect is so pervasive in our culture that we tend to put them up on a pedestal. Look, here, a glittering example of erudite logic, someone who we can trust to be correct and awe-inspiring and know which toothpaste is the best toothpaste. While I sometimes enjoy this, I also think it’s a factor in a number of the problems pointed out in the reading for this week.

At the individual level, scientists often feel a huge amount of pressure to live up to the standards imposed by society. We need to study something high-impact, something worth the grant money, mentorship time, and resources, something that our parents can brag about— and something that can get published. As pointed out in the Economist article, people don’t want to pay for replication, no matter how necessary it might be to the core tenants of empiricism, and people don’t want to publish repeats or failures.

This selection bias in publications leads to a false idea that if you’re doing things right, it’ll all work out. If it doesn’t, then your perceived competence, funding, and perhaps graduation date are in jeopardy. Indeed, the only real failures of scientists we see are those of eminent researchers being ripped from their pedestals when they’re caught with false data or their drug trial goes poorly. These incidents exemplify the idolization of scientists when the popular media harps delightedly on the fall of the mighty and the dissolution of the trust the public had in science overall. Against a backdrop of such high standards and fear of failure, scientists themselves perpetuate the need for flawlessness and continuous “miraculous breakthroughs” among themselves. (Recently, a study found that much of the hype surrounding mundane results originates in the press releases from institutions themselves.)

As Jared Hovarth wrote in his Scientific American article:

“In reality, science progresses in subtle degrees, half-truths and chance. An article that is 100 percent valid has never been published. While direct replication may be a myth, there may be information or bits of data that are useful among the noise. It is these bits of data that allow science to evolve. In order for utility to emerge, we must be okay with publishing imperfect and potentially fruitless data. If scientists were to maintain the ideal, the small percentage of useful data would never emerge; we’d all be waiting to achieve perfection before reporting our work.”

We all strive for perfection in our work, to live up to the expectations set by our peers, our mentors, our funders, our publishers. Unfortunately, our inherent imperfections and inability or aversion to recognizing them leads to bad science and bad publications.

Social factor: an important player in research overselling

The article “Half of the cancer drugs journalists called “miracles” and “cures” were not approved by the FDA” ( http://www.vox.com/2015/10/29/9637062/media-hype-cancer-drugs ) highlights a behavior that is more and more present nowadays, especially in medical research.
Scientists working on human diseases face a constant daily pressure, which is exerted by a society willing a cure for a certain diseases, and by their own awareness that finding the right treatment could alleviate the pain of many other people.

The problem is that no one is immune to this type of pressure. The president Obama during his last State of the Union speech says “Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer… For the loved ones we've all lost, for the family we can still save, let's make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJDyBBGncQc )

This type of prevailing sentiment is affecting researchers all around the world and the quality of research gets more and more susceptible to bias and overselling.

In addition to the social pressure, there is another big factor...money. The financing of the research reaches amounts that we cannot even imagine. As a young scientist I am just approaching to this kind of issues and I’m starting to see the loop in which researchers are trapped. In order to be able to perform the experiments, scientists need money, which is given only if good, novel and interesting results are shown.

Nowadays, it is not only the quality of work that matters, but how good you can “sell” it to the people that will decide if you can get founded or not. If this type of loops keeps going on, universities should start consider introducing a marketing course for the scientific tracks.

Most of these issues aroused from the fact that the amount of money given to the research was diminished, on the contrary, the number of scientists increased, making more difficult for everyone to get the necessary financing.

Scientists are constantly under social and financial pressure and this is affecting the quality of the research that gets published. More accurate revisions are needed by the scientific journals and even more rigorous should be the journalists, because the public belief has a huge weight on the type of research conducted.