““Galileo’s Middle Finger” is many things: a rant, a manifesto, a treasury of evocative new terms (sissyphobia, autogynephilia, phall-o-meter) and an account of the author’s transformation “from an activist going after establishment scientists into an aide-de-camp to scientists who found themselves the target of activists like me” — and back again.
As its title suggests, the book is also a defiant gesture aimed at those who would deny empiricism. Yet this middle finger (Galileo’s actual middle finger, in fact, which Dreger stumbles across in Italy) is raised in affirmation as well. It points toward the stars that confirmed his cosmology — and toward empiricism’s power to create a fairer, more rational society. For Galileo is famous not just because he saw how the stars move. He’s famous because he insisted we see for ourselves how the world works, share what we see and shape our society accordingly.
Dreger brings a similar mission to activism and ethics. She insists that both be based on evidence, so that we respond to problems as they really are, rather than as we’d like to see them…
When a motivated group with a playbook of ugly tactics spots a scientific finding they don’t like, they can often dominate public discussion in a way that replaces a factual story with a false one. Only scientists of Galilean character can weather the storm. And even they, like Galileo, might be effectively exiled.”
This is interesting, I super want to read it. I found her because of her live tweets of her son’s abstinence-only sex ed class <link>.
I think there are a lot of issues that aren’t really empirically measurable, or where the measures we have erase the things we can’t measure (for example – we can measure the number of times a black man is stopped by the police in Ferguson but we can’t measure the systemic and implicit bias that is the core problem; we can measure thyroid function in people with depression caused by hypothyroidism but we don’t yet have a biomarker test that can diagnose everyone with depression)
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