Skip to main content

The Science of Repair - Gwen Ottinger ***

This is an odd one. Ignore the title that sounds like it describes what goes on in a household repair shop - Gwen Ottinger makes an important point about the way that the attempt to use science to support social justice - such as when a community is blighted by pollution from an oil well - can be both positive and negative. While it's true that science can be used to identify pollutants and risks, scientists' natural tendency to caution may make a risk seem less significant than it is - and there is a danger that only the science viewpoint prevails, where the experience of those living in bad conditions is important too. All too often, scientists can dismiss local knowledge. 

My old literary agent's first question when approached with a book idea was always 'is it a book or a magazine article?' I think this would be well applied here. Ottinger's point could have been well-made in a feature-length article, but there was an awful lot of repetition required to stretch out to a (short) book.

This is one of the reasons that I can't rate the book too highly, even though that central idea is a very important one. The inability of citizens to fight back against polluters seems particularly strong in the US (think Erin Brockowich) and they need all the help they can get. The other issue I had was the way the whole story is presented is through the painful lens of US academic obsession with identity politics and race. On the opening page we read 'Its authors, Jay Gunkelman and Marilyn Bardet, were white community activists' - it is totally irrelevant that they were white. 

There is also a lack of acknowledgement of a problem in recognising lived experience - humans are really terrible at distinguishing correlation from causality. Ottinger criticises scientists, for instance, for saying 'there is no evidence that X causes Y', but the alternative, which she seems to approve of, is on a par with witch finding. Historically, if there was a cluster of local illnesses or bad luck, it would be blamed on the local witch. Now it tends to be the phone mast or the power lines. It's natural for random events to cluster - but if we see a cluster of events we attribute causality to our local bugbear, whatever it may be. This doesn't mean there can't be a causal connection, but the reality is that without a rigorous scientific approach there will still be witches to blame. 

The reality is that many scientists are really bad at communicating with non-scientists, and I had hoped this book would give them guidance on how to get facts across to community activists in a way that's useful - but it doesn't. Ottinger is not providing an adequate solution to a very real problem. The subtitle is all about the way that believing in facts leads to better justice: but I'm not sure how this is addressed here.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Six Maths Essentials - Terence Tao *****

This is a book in the 'compact collection of science/maths essays' category beloved of publishers because they can charge hardback prices for fewer than 80 pages of text - but don't let that put you off, because it's excellent. Terence Tao introduces six areas of mathematics: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis and dynamics. Each of these is descriptive rather than practical (there are only a couple of school-level equations in sight), done in a way that gets to the heart of 'what's the point of this subject' with precision and a good level of storytelling. It's a shame in a way that analysis and dynamics form the final third of the book (apart from a short epilogue), because they don't work as well as the other sections. For the first four, practically everyone will have a vague idea of what they are and what they do - but Tao is then able to open our eyes to their wonders and power. Because Tao has to stay away from any detail of what...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Canticle for Leibowitz (SF) - Walter Miller ****

There are a few SF titles that have cut through to be regarded modernish classics in the more general literature sense. One example would be Flowers for Algernon (which I read in English class at school). Another, surely, is the 1959  A Canticle for Leibowicz . There are parallels with Pavane , in presenting a 'modern day' setting with medieval living standards where the Catholic Church remains a major power, yet technology is gradually breaking through. But this is not an alternative history: it's a post-apocalyptic future where civilisation was destroyed by nuclear war, with tiny embers of knowledge kept alive by a monastery dedicated to a twentieth century electrical engineer turned priest called Leibowitz. Divided into three sections, each taking place six centuries apart, we first get a totally medieval view of the discovery of circuitry on a blueprint and more from pre-apocalyptic times. Then we see the gradual re-emergence of electrical technology in the abbey. And ...
Post a Comment
Read more

To Think Like a Statistician - Bradley Efron ****

An old advert had the tag line 'it does what it says on the tin'. There's a vagueness about the title of this book that requires Bayes' theorem to work out whether it really does what it says on the cover. If you think this book will tell you how to think like a statistician, it's unlikely that you will be satisfied. But if you think it will tell you how a statistician thinks, it is much closer to being true. Sadly this makes the tag line I've seen 'Why you don’t need to be a statistician to think like one' entirely wrong. In the book, Bradley Efron gives us plenty of detail on how statisticians apply probability to try to understand better what is happening in the world. He makes a great point that his high school mathematical education consisted primarily of algebra, geometry and trigonometry. While these 'proved invaluable to my subsequent scientific studies' they hardly ever crop up in the news, where the one mathematical subject that does oc...
Post a Comment
Read more