Not strictly relevant

One reason for setting this site up was to centralise comments I was making on other sites. Friends could then point out inconsistencies and point at me singing “You are an argumentative sod after all”. To which, of course, I vigorously disagree. I’ve since not commented on anything. Prof Rubenstein’s thoughts on evolution almost stirred me, but he was receiving (a richly deserved) collective put down from a horde of people who thought it was bad biology. I don’t think many have picked up on it being atrocious history too, so I’ll add something on that later on in the week.

What’s roused me now me now is a post at Buridan’s Ass. Buridan’s noticed a Call for Papers. “Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets.” I suggest you read the whole thing because some of it is a little self-contradictory and it would be easy to accidentally quote out of context. I think the passage that made me jump, because it’s out of character for Buridan is:

The larger issue here, and the one that I find more interesting, is not the particular relevance of the social construction of public toilets but the increasing trend in social science research that is so far removed from the pressing concerns of modern society that my mentor, Michael Lewis, calls it “the silly science.”

I am aware I’m spending a surprising amount of time in toilets at the moment and hopefully it will stop but there are a few points I could put up for discussion. The gendered nature of toilets is interesting. Why do we have women’s and gentlemen’s toilets? This would seem like a no-brainer. But we don’t impose this division at home where toilets are unisex. With private cubicles unisex toilets would be feasible in cities. You could even ask why the cubicles need to be private.

Public toilets are odd because they’re private space in the middle of public space. I’ve mentioned light-heartedly the graffiti in the toilets in Oxford’s classics library. Athena’s response suggests the experience in the female toilets is different. I wouldn’t know. I suspect that if I tried to find out then, even after the screaming had stopped, “I’m doing fieldwork, I’m applying rock art techniques to graffiti.” would not be a convincing alibi.

Graffiti as rock art? Not my idea.

I saw a paper by Dave Robinson and Hector Orengo yesterday: “Venues of conflict: Temporality and conceptions of place in an urban context” Dave studies Californian rock art and, with Hector, he’s started studying Roca Street in Barcelona. Roca Street is one of the narrow medieval streets Barcelona still has, connecting a couple of main roads. From their surveys it’s clear the street is an informal public toilet some of the day. There’s graffiti, used condoms, a catholic shrine… So in the heart of Barcelona there’s this cramped, dirty and threatening place. What causes that? And all of a sudden thinking about privacy, toilets, gender, Californian art and so on addresses a serious public concern.

I get the implication that Buridan sees the sciences as ‘relevant’. I’m reminded of a story I read a few years back. A cosmologist was going to be interviewed on the radio. He had a problem. He asked a colleague: “What should I say are the practical applications if they ask me?” His colleague shrugged and said there were none. Nevertheless the cosmologist felt compelled to make some to be ‘relevant’. So who was the guy who saw no practical application to cosmology? Richard Feynman. I think the story’s in “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” which is an excellent read.

I’m not going to say cosmology is irrelevant, because there are practical off-shoots. Lobster eyes were used to help design X-Ray lenses for telescopes. Now at Leicester that design has been taken to help improve medical imaging. Imagine getting those projects past a board that insists on relevance. I’m willing to bet neither the lobster research nor the X-ray telescope would have got funding from the MRC, but that didn’t make it valuable research. The research became relevant. Dabbling around on a whim can lead to things that make whole knew fields of obviously important inquiry possible. Some whims don’t and people get annoyed, but if we knew what was a dead end before we started then we wouldn’t have to bother with this whole ‘research’ thing.

Contrary to Buridan I’d argue it’s not irrelevance that’s the problem. It’s spurious relevance. When social scientists reframe their research as ‘social complexity theory’ or ‘fractal agency’ to catch the zeitgeist then I cringe. Or at least I do if it’s done badly, which is my final point.

What really catches me by surprise is that Buridan seems to be suggesting that some areas of research should be off-limits. I may reading too much into this or taking the position to the extreme, so read the original. It seems to me as though the argument is that some things are wrong to research because they’re irrelevant as defined by people outside the field. I disagree with this strongly. Bad physics, like Pons and Fleishman’s cold fusion, is bad physics. It’s not inherently more noble simply because it’s physics. The big advantage the sciences have over the social sciences is that when something like cold fusion happens, because Pons and Fleishman made the details of a replicable experiment known, it was possible to find the results weren’t indicative of cold fusion. Social science on the other hand isn’t a science, so swatting bad ideas there is often an argument of opinion. It would be great if we could have replicable results, but until someone discovers the formula for World War II we can’t apply the same rigour as scientists.

I realise that now, under Godwin’s law, I’ve just lost the argument. 🙂 —–