Angela Saini - Four Way Interview

Angela Saini presents science programmes on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, and her writing has appeared all over the world, including New Scientist, the Guardian, Science, Wired and the Economist. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University and has won a string of awards, including the ABSW Best News Story and the AAAS Gold Prize for radio. Her most recent book is Inferior: how science got women wrong, and the new research that's rewriting the story.

Why science?

I didn't think it would be necessary to write a book about how science can get things wrong but, surprisingly, it is. Social scientists have understood for ages that we need to be careful when we think about data and evidence to place it in context. It's strange that the public still so commonly believe that we should take published scientific papers as 'the truth' simply because scientists wrote them.

Why this book?

I only wanted to understand myself better. We get so much conflicting information in the press about the differences between women and men, and I wanted to sift the fact from the fiction, the hype from the more sober, reliable research. The truth is, the picture that science has painted of women is deeply flawed for many reasons - prejudice, bias, laziness, and a lack of humility on the part of some male scientists. My hope is that Inferior will help people think about science more critically and understand how the process works.

What’s next?

I'm making a few radio documentaries for the BBC World Service at the moment, and travelling the country giving talks about Inferior. I'd love to get started on another book, but I'm taking a break from heavy duty writing for now.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I have a stack of books that I haven't had time to read, so I'm looking forward to diving into them this summer. They include Homo Deus, Why I No Longer Talk to White People About Race, and The Kingdom of Women. These are interesting political times, and although it's easy to be pessimistic about the state of the world, it's certainly fascinating to watch debates unfold about the kind of societies we want to live in.

Comments

The AI Delusion - Gary Smith *****

This is a very important little book ('little' isn't derogatory - it's just quite short and in a small format) - it gets to the heart of the problem with applying artificial intelligence techniques to large amounts of data and thinking that somehow this will result in wisdom.

Gary Smith as an economics professor who teaches statistics, understands numbers and, despite being a self-confessed computer addict, is well aware of the limitations of computer algorithms and big data. What he makes clear here is that we forget at our peril that computers do not understand the data that they process, and as a result are very susceptible to GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. Yet we are increasingly dependent on computer-made decisions coming out of black box algorithms which mine vast quantities of data to find correlations and use these to make predictions. What's wrong with this? We don't know how the algorithms are making their predictions - and the algorithms don't kn…

Infinity in the Palm of your Hand - Marcus Chown *****

A new Marcus Chown book is always a treat - and this is like a box of chocolates: a collection of bite-sized delights as Chown presents us with 50 science facts that are strange and wonderful.

The title is a quote from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence: 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour.' It would seem particularly appropriate if this book were read on a mobile phone (so it would be literally in the palm), which could well be true for ebook users, as the short essays make excellent reading for a commute, or at bedtime. I found them distinctly moreish - making it difficult to put the book down as I read just one more. And perhaps another. Oh, and that next one looks really interesting...

Each of the 50 pieces has a title and a short introductory heading, which mostly give a feel for the topic. The very first of these, however, briefly baffled me: 'You are a third mus…

How to Invent Everything - Ryan North ****

Occasionally you read a book and think 'I wish I'd thought of that.' This was my immediate reaction to Ryan North's How to Invent Everything. The central conceit manages to be both funny and inspiring as a framework for writing an 'everything you ever wanted to know about everything (and particularly science)' book.

What How to Invent Everything claims to be is a manual for users of a time machine (from some point in the future). Specifically it's a manual for dealing with the situation of the time machine going wrong and stranding the user in the past. At first it appears that it's going to tell you how to fix the broken time machine - but then admits this is impossible. Since you're stuck in the past, you might as well make the best of your surroundings, so the aim of the rest of the book is to give you the knowledge you need to build your own civilisation from scratch.

We start with a fun flow chart for working out just how far back in time you are…

Search This Blog