Sunday morning roundup

India's woman problem.

John Grisham shares a Gitmo story.

Two pipeline spill stories.

Bots are expanding their grip on social media.

Tipping is a flawed system.

Is Sean Carroll an exception?

...most experts in any one academic field don’t know very much about many other fields. This ignorance manifests itself in a couple of ways. First, a lot of scientists are quite comfortable with simplistic philosophy of science. This usually doesn’t matter, but there are cases where good philosophy has something to offer, and scientists rarely put in the work necessary to understand what that good philosophy has to say. Second, scientists tend to think of philosophy as a service discipline – what good does it do for my practice of science? The answer is almost always “no good at all,” which they then translate into thinking that philosophy has no real purpose. The truth is that almost all scientific work can proceed quite happily without philosophy – you can be very good at driving a car without knowing how an engine works. But when it’s important, philosophy very important indeed...

My own default position is that respectable people in other academic fields probably have something interesting to say, even if I don’t immediately understand it. Not always true, of course – there are pockets of nonsense within every discipline. But the less I understand about the basics of some field, the less likely I am to start declaring it to be useless and antiquated.

 On scientism (though he doesn't use the word):

...I think it’s useful to think about the whole spectrum of pseudo-scientific ideas (creationism, climate denialism, the anti-vaccination movement) that stem from ultimately non-epistemic concerns, whether they be religion or politics or personal empowerment. No doubt, the experience of fighting against these ideas has inculcated a bad habit in some scientists and philosophers: to ask of a new idea not simply “Is this true?”, but also “How might this be used against us in the court of public opinion?” But when we get down to brass tacks, most scientists and philosophers care about what is true more than they care about anything else.