name for a principle?

There is a principle that I want to refer to in an upcoming talk, but I can't find a name for it. Someone must have named it after themselves by now. It is related to Ockham's razor, and to parsimony, but is distinct.

The principle is that an explanation for a pattern should preferably be applicable as broadly as the pattern is observed, but not more broadly. For example, an evolutionary explanation for group living that can be applied to all the group-living insects is preferable to an explanation that works only for one species of ant. The explanation should preferably not explain the pattern more broadly than it occurs. For example, an explanation for the fusion reaction of the sun merely in terms of the presence of hydrogen would also tend to predict fusion in many other contexts where it does not generally occur, making this explanation less desirable than a more complex one which also specifies the need for the physical conditions which encourage the hydrogen to fuse.

This is the sort of logical statement that is so obvious as to rarely need to be said, yet I need to say it for this talk. If you know what I should call it, please let me know.

Focus

We turned the living room into a seminar room for the night, all the couches and chairs facing the blank white west wall, onto which we projected my PowerPoint slides. The audience was diverse: in addition to a dozen adults from several professions, I spoke to two little girls (neither of which understand English), an eight month old baby and a big old shaggy dog who curled up by my feet. Before I had gotten through my introductory slide the dog was snoring loudly under the table I was using as a podium, one of the little girls was raising her hand wanting to go to the bathroom, and the baby was waving at me with both hands and saying, "bob bob bob bob bob bob bob bob." As I described the success of my laboratory experiments to date, the dog woke up and began snuffling in the trashcan next to me, and at some point one of the little girls came and tried to sit behind the podium. Despite these disruptions (or perhaps because of them?) the presentation went well, the assembled nonexperts seemed to think the presentation clear and convincing, and their comments, while helpful, require only minor changes to the talk.

I hope that the distinguished scientists I am to present to on Wednesday will be somewhat more decorous. If they are not, it may give me an unfair advantage over the other applicants.

All I have to do in 15 minutes...

according to my boss, is convince the committee that I am brilliant, that my work is revolutionary, and that I am a natural leader.

I have now completely reworked my talk, put the phrase "path breaking" in there, redone all my figures to make them more non-specialist friendly, and made all the font real big in case anyone of the ≤ seven audience members is sitting way at the back of the room. My next task is to run through it several times before my next practice talk this Thursday.

This is why we give practice talks.

I gave my practice talk yesterday. About 25 people came, including my bosses, my students, and most of the people I collaborate with in the Institute. The talk went well, I presented lots of cool results, I answered all the questions comfortably, and then asked for suggestions on how to fix/improve the talk. The audience gave me so many helpful comments that I pretty much have to start from scratch. It was a great talk for presenting my work to others in my field, but not so much for communicating with an audience of non-biologist non-demographers. So the beautiful Lexis Diagram has to go. The bar graph has to be chopped down. The definitions have to be less precise in order to be more clear. I need to have less detail on my research process and more on why the question is original. The slides should be prettier. And so on. It is sort of exhausting.

I am giving another practice talk next Thursday, this time to complete non-experts. By then I hope to make it comprehensible to that audience.

Innervation

I have an almost complete first draft of the PowerPoint slides for my job talk. I have a week and a half until my practice talk, and two more weeks after that before the interview. It has just occurred to me that I’ve never actually given a job talk before. I’ve heard lots of other people’s job talks, and practice job talks, and I’ve given lots of non-job talks. I am not generally nervous about public speaking, and I don’t find myself too nervous about this. I wonder if I should be more nervous than I am, and if thinking of this as my first job-talk, instead of my hundredth talk, is a good way to accomplish that.

There is perhaps good reason for concern. The other applicants I’m competing against are likely to be an extraordinary group. I have no indication of what fraction of us they're likely to hire. I have the bare minimum professional experience necessary to apply. I'm a biologist interviewing in the Humanities Section. What to an American seems an appropriate level of self recognition can strike many Germans as immodest boasting. My slides are currently a bit too wordy and dense.

All that said, I don't feel nervous yet; they don't expect me to describe my work in German. Just the idea makes me sweat.

Linguistic injustice; it's good to be a native Anglophone

The English language is good to me. Much of my success in science to date can be attributed to my English skills. The quality of my writing and my speaking attract the praise of my peers at least as frequently as the originality or soundness of my ideas. (I am not such a good speller, but at this point that has very little effect on me.) Further, my wife’s work is very much based on her English skills; she teaches English as a second language and edits scientific articles to improve their English.

All this came to mind when I saw this letter
“Awkward wording. Rephrase”: linguistic injustice in ecological journals

and this response
‘Linguistic injustice’ is not black and white

in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE).

TREE is a high profile journal, publishing mostly excellent review articles, but unfortunately most of its content is not free to the public.

I will quote; the letter’s author, Miguel Clavero, begins,

International scientific communication is monolithically dominated by English, particularly within natural sciences. The professional career of individual scientists relies on their ability to publish in internationally relevant journals, and writing in English is the only way to achieve this. Non-native English speakers (NoNES) seem to be clearly disadvantaged with respect to native English speakers (NES) when trying to get their work published. In fact, English language proficiency has been shown to be a strong predictor of scientific output...

This argument makes sense to me. I have colleagues who are both smarter and harder working than I, who are quite fluent in conversational English, who take much longer to write a paper than I do. Writing crisp, clear, precise, flowing science while staying within word limits is hard, and frankly I’ll never learn a second language well enough to pull it off in anything but English. If Greek, Latin, French, Chinese, Arabic or German were the dominant language of science, I would be in deep trouble.

The response published in TREE points out that other disadvantages (e.g., being from a developing country) are vastly harder to overcome than being NoNES. A Swede has a much better chance to succeed in international science than an Anglophone African. A Swede may even come to speak and write English which is better than that of some Anglophones. It also points out that most English language journals won’t reject a paper because of language problems, so long as the science is sound and the writing is comprehensible and reparable. Both of these things are surely true, but don’t negate Clavero’s point. Bad English may not be a huge disadvantage, but skilled beautiful English is, it seems to me, a big advantage, and native speakers are much more likely to speak a language beautifully. This is particularly true, I think, when it comes to job applications. When one is being evaluated not only on the quality of one’s work, but also on one’s presentation skills, ability to answer complex questions clearly and leadership potential, language skills are important. I have seen application talks at the Institute given in such poor English that I had trouble following them; these people were not hired. The graduate students and post-docs I work with are mostly NoNES; a larger portion of the Research Scientist and lab heads are NES or have lived for extended periods in English speaking countries. This is not because of hiring decisions beeing made inappropriately. Rather, those fluent in English tend to be more successful in those tasks on which hiring decisions are legitimately based.

I doubt that English will cease to be the dominant language of science in my lifetime, and for this I am glad. That said, I take Clavero’s point, and I suppose we should add NoNES to the list of groups disadvantaged in scientific careers (females, underrepresented minorities, the disabled, citizens of developing nations, etc.). I am not sure what is to be done about it. Clavero argues that journals should cover the costs of language editing by charging a fee to all authors, whether they need language editing or not, spreading the costs. They would have to waive this fee for those without sufficient funding to cover them. Some journals in fact already do this, paying in-house language editors from author fees. This has not obviated the linguistic injustice. I am not sure what will, short of sci-fi quality automatic simultanious translation technology. I would love to have this technology, if for no other reason than because then I could stop struggling to learn German.

Two talks at once!

My task, apparently, is to give a talk to both audiences simultaneously. Those viewing my job talk will include “a specialist in your field” as well as committee member representing the breadth of backgrounds of the Human Sciences Section of the Max Planck Society. That Section consists of the following Institutes, which I have casually categorized:

Anthropology:
MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale

Psychology:
MPI for Human Development, Berlin
MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig
MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Economics:
MPI of Economics, Jena
MPI for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn

Law:
MPI for Foreign and International Social Law, München
MPI for Intellectual Property, München
MPI for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg
MPI for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg
MPI for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg

Sociology:
MPI for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen
MPI for the Study of Societies, Köln
MPI for Demographic Research, Rostock

History:
MPI for Art History, Florence, Italy
MPI for the History of Science, Berlin
MPI for European Legal History, Frankfurt/Main

You will note that I put my own institute, Demography, under the heading of sociology. Demography is in many way rooted in sociology, despite my belief that it should be a branch of biology. You will also note the preponderance of topics such as Law, Economics and Psychology, which have little theoretical overlap with evolutionary demography.
This is, in a way, a brilliant way of evaluating an applicant. Anyone who can describe their topic in a way which is simultaneously comprehensible and exciting to experts in one’s own field and experts in distant fields is at least a talented communicator. If they threw in some toddlers, who also had to like my talk, and maybe a few Tea Partiers, then it would be a real challenge.

Passed round one

They said they would get back to me in December, but I was starting to doubt, as today is effectively the last working day of the year for those few Germans who aren't already on vacation. But I got the email this morning.

I've been invited to give a short talk on my research to the committee deciding which applicants will be invited to form Research Groups. The interview will be mid-February in Berlin, and I should know very shortly after that if my application was successful.

This means I have a month and a half to write a talk, make impressive figures and graphs, and so forth. The hardest part for me in writing the talk is figuring out who my audience is. The committee that wants to interview me is from the Human Sciences Section. This includes institutes focusing on anthropology, economics, art-history, law, religious and ethnic studies, linguistics, sociology, the history of science and the study of cognition. It also includes demography, evolutionary anthropology and a fair bit of other natural sciences. I can't simply give the same talk to a group of biologists and demographers that I would give to a committee of lawyers and ethnographers. I don't yet know if the committee as a whole will be judging my talk, in which case I have to assume a great diversity of background, or if they will have a smaller group of specialists assigned to each talk. I can give a good talk either way, but not both simultaneously. I've got some thinking to do.