I also talked to Stanford researcher Hunt Allcott who was a coauthor on the Yondr study. Allcott has done extensive work on social media and mental well being. He has a more upbeat perspective about the data perhaps than Dee and is refreshingly rigorous in how he discusses results.

Here’s my full Q&A with Hunt.

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Holden Thorp:

So I’m interested in this because for one thing it’s an interesting topic. For another, you and I have a connection about this because Science published the papers from the big Facebook project that you were part of. That was complicated, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we were going to disclose the right data to support that study. And I think the other thing is that I’m very interested in what happens when somebody with a huge platform puts a stake in the ground about how things are going to come out and then lots of researchers have to deal with that. And there are many examples in history where that hasn’t worked out so great. So I’ve been following this since Haidt’s book (The Anxious Generation) first came out, which is around the same time we did that Facebook project of yours.

I want to start with this Yondr study and then I’m going to ask you about some of the other social media stuff you’ve done if that’s okay. I guess my first question would be tell me what you think the positive findings are in your latest NBER preprint.

Hunt Allcott:

So as you know, we study the effects of schools adopting Yondr smartphone pouches in middle and high schools in the US. And I think maybe broadly the online positive conclusion is that the effects of smartphone pouches on student outcomes are broadly small.

Holden Thorp:

And were you expecting them to be bigger?

Hunt Allcott:

Was I expecting the effects to be bigger? It’s a good question. I’m not sure that I had a strong prior. I do think my own personal experience as an educator — I teach class like other university professors and I try to keep my students from using their smartphones in class because I think it’s a distraction — so my intuition was and frankly continues to be that getting digital distractions out of students’ hands will improve their academic outcomes at least somewhat. So then you might ask, how does that prior interface with the results of our study? My own personal view is that there are perhaps two ways to adjust my prior. One is just that maybe there are not very large impacts on student achievement. Let me say it this way. Perhaps the effects on student achievement are not as large as many educators would predict. The second potential conclusion is that there are other dimensions of student academic achievement other than standardized test scores, which we do not measure in our paper.

Holden Thorp:

Right. Tom Dee told me he thought the results were sobering. Would you agree with that?

Hunt Allcott:

I don’t agree or disagree. I think it just is a matter of how you define the word sobering. I think my previous statement about my priors and the interpretation probably covers my reaction and probably would interface with Tom’s comment.

Holden Thorp:

Okay. And so there have been a lot of studies on time spent on social media that you and others have done that also produced very small effects, sometimes not a lot at all and sometimes something. Do you think this finding is consistent with all of those?

Hunt Allcott:

I think there is a collage of different types of evidence that we need to put together on effects and effects sizes on the different possible outcomes that social media and smartphones might affect. So I’m not sure that I would say these results are inconsistent or consistent with our previous results writ large, but I would say they’re all part of a collage of evidence. The reason I’m sort of saying it this way is that we’ve done randomized experiments, which have a four to six week time horizon, four to six week treatment period, and that has the clearest causal interpretation because it’s a randomized experiment, but the duration of the treatment is very small. And so what I’d really like to know is if you get kids to stop using their smartphones or social media for six years as individuals or maybe as entire social groups of students, how does that impact outcomes? And the school level treatment is longer term. It’s probably not as 100% effective as our deactivating Facebook experimental treatment and its group level. And so because it differs in these different ways, I’m just not sure that I could line up all the effect sizes and say that something is consistent or inconsistent.

Holden Thorp:

Well, let me ask it more directly. Haidt has said that the phone-based childhood is the major cause of the adolescent mental health crisis. Do you agree with that?

Hunt Allcott:

I don’t know.

Broadly, I found his book to be a valuable addition to the discussion and broadly a thoughtful book. And in my interactions with Jon and his team, outside of my reading his book, I have found them to be thoughtful and careful and I’ve learned a lot from the work that they’re doing. Would I myself be positioned to have written that book? I don’t think so, at least not based on my own personal work. I think our work, some of the stuff that you’ve edited and then some of the other work we’ve done, including the paper that came out last week, I think is particularly valuable at providing causal evidence on the effects of smartphones and social media. I don’t think you could go from that alone to Jon’s book, but that’s the value of what Jon is trying to do. He’s trying to combine the causal evidence that our group has provided with many other types of evidence to try to paint a picture of what’s happening and that’s what I think is valuable.

Holden Thorp:

But do you think that the success of it has made it harder for the public to see all these nuances, including the ones that you’re working on that underlie this whole thing?

Hunt Allcott:

I don’t know if there has been a causal effect of the book on the reception of our work other than to say I do think that Jon has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of smartphones and social media. And so actually I think it’s possible that the paper that we released last week got more attention because Jon has drawn attention to this issue broadly than it would have without Jon’s efforts.

Holden Thorp:

I’m confident that’s true.

Hunt Allot:

I didn’t follow all the details of how every individual is responding to the paper that we released, but I found the media articles that I have read in The New York Times and others to be broadly thoughtful and reasonable in presenting the work that we did. So I have no evidence that Jon’s book has made it harder for society to see opposing views or to see evidence that smartphone bans in schools, for example, don’t have the large effects that some might hope.

Holden Thorp:

But I guess my question is if social media and phones are as powerful as, and it’s not just him but lots of people who agree with him, are saying in terms of the mental health consequences that they might have, I mean, shouldn’t we be as scrupulously careful with our messaging as we can possibly be?

Hunt Allcott:

Your question is, if smartphones are as bad as Jonathan thinks, shouldn’t we be scrupulous in the messaging?

Holden Thorp:

Yeah. I mean shouldn’t we go out of our way not to overstate what the effect is until we have a lot of science? I mean, his answer would be that the problem is so bad that — and he told me this on the record when I first started writing about this — that the problem is so bad that it’s a good idea to go ahead and launch this movement before all these academics have done all their causal analysis and everything because it’s hurting people and [he’s] stopping that from happening. And the harm of doing that is not significant. Now, there are plenty of people who say that there are harms from creating this massive movement. And I guess my interest in the harm of that is that if a lot of people are convinced that this is the main reason why we’re having an adolescent mental health crisis where test scores have been going down, and then they see your study and there’s no effect — and I get there’s tons of caveats there and that you would prefer to do your study many, many different times and have all kinds of different permutations to it — but if the public starts seeing, “Oh, we did this and there wasn’t any effect,” I mean, isn’t that going to make the public less trustful of science in this area to begin with?

Hunt Allcott:

I see. Your worry is that a scientist like Jon getting out in front of scientists without the most ironclad evidence will discredit science if it turns out that he’s wrong.

Holden Thorp:

Yeah. Or even if it turns out that he’s 80% right, but the other 20% is really important.

Hunt Allcott:

I guess here would be my view. I think that something is going wrong in Western societies as measured by surveys of subjective wellbeing and some other outcomes. It’s important that we figure out what’s causing that decline and generally that we do everything we can to help our societies do better. And I think smartphones and social media have been one of the leading hypotheses. I don’t think that we will soon reach a point where we have ironclad causal evidence on what’s causing the degradation in mental health. And so in the absence of ironclad causal evidence, it may be beneficial for us as a society to act on our best guess as to what should be done, maximizing expected net benefits. And I think Jon would say, if I’m right that smartphones and social media are quite harmful, then banning them, effectively reducing their use and being smarter about their use, will have potentially large benefits.

If he’s wrong, then we kind of go back to where we were 20 years ago before this stuff when I grew up, and it’s true that we would miss entertainment value. If you restrict the use of something that is useful or entertaining, that’s bad for its users, its consumers.

So being wrong entails a loss, making policies to restrict smartphones and social media if Jon is wrong will entail a loss, but I think a policymaker should act to maximize expected net benefits. And I do think that Jon’s book has helped to clarify many people’s thinking and make a strong argument. And so I think that’s been useful in helping us all evaluate the issues.

Holden Thorp:

Yeah. Okay, good.

Hunt Allcott:

Maybe it’d be useful if I explain why I think the causal evidence is going to be hard.

So I think our randomized experiments (such as those in Science) were awesome, but as I said, they’re individual level and they’re only a few weeks long and so far they’ve been only in the context of elections and so you have these questions as to like what are the effects on wellbeing generalized to longer periods to group level deactivation to 2026 outside of an election. Some of those questions I think I’m more concerned about than others, but there are questions. Then you have our school smartphone study that we released last week, but that’s like a ban on smartphones during school and it’s not all the outcomes, as I said earlier, there may be other student outcomes we’re not measuring. And the teachers love it. Honestly, if I were the principal at a school, I would buy Yonder pouches.

Holden Thorp:

Yeah, I probably would too. I mean, I don’t like it when devices are in my classroom.

Hunt Allcott:

So that’s a case where I wrote a paper saying the effects of Yondr pouches seem to be small, but yet I would still, as the decision maker, implement some phone ban policy such as Yondr pouches.

Holden Thorp:

Yeah. I mean, you’re probably telling people not to pull their devices out in your classroom, right? So you’re effectively doing the same thing.

Hunt Allcott:

Exactly. And especially at the K-12 level, the teachers would probably rather not have to enforce that class by class as opposed to like a school-wide programmatic ban or a Yondr pouch type enforcement mechanism.

The next round of causal evidence that will come through is on the youth social media bans, but I don’t think that’s going to answer all the questions. I think in Australia there’s a huge amount of non-compliance with the ban, people evading the ban. I’m excited to do work in other countries to see how that plays out.

So I think we’ll learn some things there, but then we’ll only learn what are the impacts on 15 year olds on certain outcomes that are measured. And in any non-randomized study, there’s always a concern about confounding. And so I think we’re going to continue to get a collage of evidence and it’s going to get a little bit stronger over the next couple of years, but we’re also going to have to rely on other forms of evidence other than just large scale causal studies done by mostly economists trained in causal inference techniques.

We’re going to have to rely on what teachers say in surveys about whether they like smartphone bans in schools. We’re going to have to rely on what parents see in their families with their own eyes or what they tell us on surveys when they get smartphones out of the hands of their kids and make their kids wait until eighth grade or later to get smartphones. We’re going to have to rely on all sorts of non-causal evidence. I think that’s part, again, of the value I see in Jon’s book is providing this collage of evidence, and I think we’re going to need all of it because the causal evidence is never going to be perfect.

Holden Thorp:

So let me ask a very specific question about social media. So you’ve studied Facebook and Instagram, but what about YouTube? I mean, isn’t YouTube the most popular social media now and how do you ban that without stopping people from watching? And I’m disclosing that I’m on the board, but what about PBS Kids or other TV kind of material that would be good for them to watch?

Hunt Allcott:

I think this is such a hard question. I think that we probably need a partnership among governments and firms and civil society to have effective change here. Because what a government could do is a government could say, “Well, we require age verification subject to some safe harbor provisions for certain set of apps.” And then while you get other apps and you get kids circumventing whatever age verification is safe harbored. And so at this point, I kind of wonder if you really need the platforms to want to do as much as they can and you see things like child accounts and I think if those were designed well, you could imagine YouTube having a child account that allows PBS and doesn’t allow less good content and has a screen time limit on it.

You probably need the smartphone makers themselves to make truly good parental controls and screen time controls so that I can’t just spend an hour on YouTube and then spend my hour on youth Instagram and then spend my hour on youth TikTok and still add up to a lot of hours staring at my screen. I think it’s going to take a collage of work and I think some of it’s going to be very hard to regulate. It’s going to have to be that the platforms are going to want to help probably even more than they already do.

Holden Thorp:

But how does YouTube separate YouTube shorts from, I realize this is a very specific question, from long form video that for kids who don’t have resources and are at home might be good things for them to be watching.

Hunt Allcott:

I think it can’t be done perfectly, but I’m pretty confident that a combination of the bright folks at technology companies could figure out the right way to make sure that kids don’t spend too much time on any individual device and that the content on that device is broadly appropriate. So I think YouTube specifically could create a child account that the smart folks at YouTube have decided is appropriate and I don’t know, they may have already, you probably know better than I do and if you don’t like exactly how that’s been done, I’m sure it could be tweaked. So that’s for the content. And then the overall time I think requires a combination of parents monitoring their kids and the device makers, Apple and Android, making even more useful screen time controls so that parents can say like, “Oh, you spent your hour on YouTube and that’s it, “ as opposed to you got your hour on YouTube and an hour on all of the other apps that are trying to limit themselves individually.

Holden Thorp:

This is great stuff and I appreciate it. The point of my article is just to explain that there’s all these subtleties here. I believe most people in the zeitgeist think the phones and social media are evil and we already know that and it’s scientifically proven, but the science here is much muddier and more complicated than that.

Hunt Allcott:

I agree the science is uncertain. Can I share two other things before we have to go?

Holden Thorp:

Sure,

Hunt Allcott:

One is I have been impressed with Jon Haidt. I mentioned this earlier. I’ve been impressed with Haidt’s interest in the details and the science. So I don’t know if Tom told you this, but after we released our paper, Jon and his collaborator, Zach Rausch sent us a detailed email with a bunch of questions.

Holden Thorp:

Yeah, I bet they did.

Hunt Allcott:

And they were good questions and we’ve answered some of them. We’re working on some others and he’s read our paper as carefully as anybody I’m aware of outside of our collaborator team. I really appreciated that and I appreciated the good questions they’re asking and his famous wiki of evidence about smartphones and social media, I guess there’s several wikis now. I think that’s another example. So I’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness and then as I’ve read his blog, I’ve been impressed by the thoughtfulness and like what if I’m wrong and this sort of stuff.

So that’s one thing. The other is that I have read many papers and meta analyses of papers that confuse correlation with causation, specifically with regard to social media use and mental health. So obviously as you know well, if you run a survey and correlate people’s social media use with mental health, it could be that more social media use causes worse mental health. It could be that worse mental health causes people to retreat into social media. So there could be reverse causality. It could be there’s some third factor that causes both. It could be that the causation is positive and the other correlations are negative. And so you get a negative correlation, even though the causal effect is positive, you could get any configuration of results. And basically the correlation studies about social media and mental health and in many other areas really tell us very little, perhaps nothing.

And so I have read some number of meta analyses that say, “Oh, well, we’re not sure because there are 73 correlation studies that show positive correlation and 54 studies that show negative correlation. And so who knows?” And my answer would be, who knows, but not because the studies go in different direction, but because they’re correlation studies to start. And so that’s why we did this work on the causal stuff. So I would encourage people to discount statements that are made on the basis of correlation studies in this space. And many of the statements that I’ve made based on correlation studies are statements such as we just don’t know because the correlations go in all directions.

In social science, all relationships are noisy because there’s like a ton of things that cause people’s mental health, their background, how they’re doing from day to day, like whether they got hurt playing basketball and possibly how much social media they use. And what we really care about here is acknowledging that there are many things that cause mental health to get better or worse. What is the slope of any relationship? And so that’s what our causal studies, our randomized experiments identify. So I think you might just, as you read some of the stuff out there outside the economics space, you might just be on the lookout for that confusion.

I’m out with a column yesterday on the disastrous proposal from the Office of Management and Budget to create regulations that would cripple American science through a lot of things but the two biggest are: (a) mandating political review of every individual grant, and (b) obtaining case-by-case political approval of all grants that involve spending money in other countries. There are plenty of other terrible things summarized well here. This basically eliminates the authority of the NIH and NSF Directors and puts everything in the hands of HHS. It’s hard to see how anyone would want to run these agencies now or in the future under these rules. These rules essentially amount to making the entire enterprise live by the “compact for higher education” that everyone rejected.

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The architect of it all is, of course, Russell Vought, who has dubbed himself the “keeper of the commander’s intent.” He is subverting the bipartisan budget and sidelining scientific merit as a criterion for American science. My last paragraph of the piece (which is called “Another red alert for American science”) is:

The time to act is now. The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period, open until 13 July. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized. I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then. The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.

Of course, I wasn’t going to leave a Star Trek analogy on the table.

Why there’s no reason to hold back at this point

I’m saying “all hands” because I believe this is the event that has evaporated any plausible reason not to speak out. I have been sympathetic to folks who stayed out of the fray building up to last years’ budget process, because the Republican Senators who supported the restoration of the science budgets last year needed to be as clear as possible to do the right thing. (Not all my friends were thrilled with this.) But it takes a village, and the village got the budget deal done.

This is different because the very people and process that led to that bill are now being undermined by the OMB regulations. Of course, strong advocates like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Stand Up for Science will and are speaking out. They were already doing that. But this event should make the tent a lot larger, because speaking out against these regulations is speaking out in favor of a bipartisan effort, mainly one driven by Republicans. For those who believe in the model, long practiced by science lobbyists from associations and universities, of seeking science funding through bipartisan lobbying (and not everyone does), these regulations would render that process meaningless because the White House can undo whatever it wants.

Another reason is that these regulations will (if history is any guide) one day be in the hands of a Democratic White House. If you think they would just put them back to the way they were, you’re an optimist. Why wouldn’t a Democratic President want this kind of power? You could imagine all kinds of new programs enforced that fit the policy agenda of the administration. While I might agree with some of these initiatives, I think it would be just as bad. It would weaken the principle that science, not politics, should be the driver, and we could end up with massive whiplash as programs are stopped and started every time the administration changes, leaving past work unfinished and making it impossible to build a scientific workforce. So if you want to stop so-called “woke science,” this is a way you could actually have more of it one day.

To battle stations

You can submit comments to the OMB regs, and Stand Up for Science has made it easy at this link. The comments can be ignored, but stirring up as much activity as possible is crucial at this point. Flood the zone. Call House and Senate members, especially if you live in a red state (remember not to call members outside your state - that makes things worse). And press universities and associations not to hold back. (You don’t need to press AAAS, because they’re already on board.) There’s no reason to hold back now. If they want to use the methods they’ve developed over the last 80 years to drive science funding, they have to put it all on the table to fight this.

Let’s go.

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Dee was extremely careful and has a very moderate position on all of this (and in political matters related to education). He said the results were sobering, did not realize the hypothesized benefits, and could be characterized as disappointing, but he still wants to continue to work to see if phone bans can improve learning outcomes and had ideas for how that could happen. When I asked him if phones were the major reason why school performance has deteriorated, he said we need to learn more, but he offered two reasonable alternatives: the introduction and then abrupt roll back of test-based accountability through No Child Left Behind, and the Great Recession. He also said about the extent to which phones and social media explain everything, “I’m always concerned about overly facile or monocausal explanations for any large scale social phenomenon.”

Read the whole thing if you’re interested in this topic. There’s a lot of other great stuff in here. He started off by lamenting with me the fact that fads come along in education and then are stopped before the data says whether they work or not. Here’s our conversation:

Tom Dee: A concern of mine over my career is just some degree of frustration with the mercurial faddishness we have where there’s a kind of flavor of the day reform that attracts a lot of attention. Then there’s sometimes uneven implementation and then some results that are discouraging and then people simply move on instead of engaging in a kind of focused intentional cycle of inquiry, trying to refine a certain reform or understand what other contextual factors might need to be in place. I would argue this happened with No Child Left Behind, where we had test-based accountability brought to scale nationwide and we stayed with that 1.0 moment for a long time because even while people recognized the need to reform it in some ways, because it became politicized. And by the time the Obama administration came around, they were issuing waivers against the strictures under No Child Left Behind and it wasn’t until 2015 that that federal legislation got reauthorized and essentially devolved accountability to the states.

I’ve also worked on the controversial teacher performance assessment reforms in Washington DC introduced by Michelle Rhee. They were actually well-designed, well-implemented and pretty effective and other places tried to replicate that without the same political will, without the organizational acumen and produced disappointing results. It led to this narrative of “this doesn’t work” rather than “we need to know more about what’s going on in these settings to understand how to replicate and scale best practice.” That’s just a little bit of background that informs what I’m bringing to the table in interpreting these results.

But let me back up a little bit about this study. At a high level, I think three distinctive features make it unique. One, to our knowledge, it’s the first study of phone bans in the US that’s national in scope. Two, part of what made this research design appealing to us was our capacity to measure phone bans that were actually restricting the in-school use of phones. So as you may know, a lot of phone bans being adopted appear a little more cosmetic than substantive no-show bans where students still keep their phones, they’re just being asked to keep them out of sight. And we suspect that that they may have weaker effects and really be uneven in its implementation. So instead, what we did was we were able to partner with this company Yondr that’s a major seller of lockable pouches.

So schools using the lockable pouches give us a clean measure of really binding restrictions on the in-school use of phones. And we can validate that for lack of a better word, treatment manipulation in the GPS data and in survey data available to us. We see when and where schools take up these pouches, a substantial decline in the in-school use of phones. So then the third feature of the study is I think an unusually comprehensive set of outcomes: test scores, attendance, discipline measures, social-emotional survey questions of students around their subjective wellbeing, classroom attention, their experience of online bullying. Given everything that is hypothesized to be related to phone use, we thought it was important and meaningful to have that broad catchment.

I can add a fourth thing that is important to me. As you probably know in experimental social science, pre-registration has changed the field over the last 10 years. Ironically, for studies like this, exist for quasi-experimental studies that try to draw causal inference from real-world data, that open science practice pre-registration has not been a norm. I’ve been arguing publicly it should be because quasi-experimental researchers like our team have vastly more degrees of freedom than experimentalists do in terms of the measures we construct, the measures we construct, the methods we use, et cetera. And there’s empirical evidence that p-hacking is a problem, several forms of empirical evidence actually in quasi-experimental studies. So one of the other things our group did in this study and I’ve been doing my own work is pre-registering the outcome measures we used and our design before we undertook the analysis. So there’s a link to that in the study. I want to stress that’s not the standard of practice, but I personally believe it should be. (For more on preregistration, see here.)

So then in terms of the results, as you see, I’ve been in a lot of conversation with our team about how to describe these accurately and how to describe their implications in the right way. I’m going to choose my words carefully here. I would characterize the results overall as sobering. Obviously, these reforms are being widely adopted, school phone bans with some expectation that they’ll meaningfully change a variety of student outcomes. And we’re just not seeing that right away. In fact, if you look just at the core pre-registered outcomes, the only significant effects are the increase in student disciplinary incidents and an almost trivially small decrease in middle school test scores. Now, if you dig beneath that in a more exploratory posture and look at effects by period, you see that those overall effects do appear to be obscuring some interesting dynamics. The increase in discipline is concentrated in the first year and then returns to baseline within two more years.

And the null effect on student wellbeing is obscuring a really interesting dynamic where there’s a big decline in student wellbeing in the first year and by the third year it’s above what you would’ve predicted at baseline. And that’s the one I think advocates of phone bans are mostly picking up on that, oh, eventually students are reporting higher levels of wellbeing and the disciplinary effects appear to be transitory. But also there are a lot of null findings here as well. And so I characterize them as sobering. If someone said they were disappointing, that would feel sensible to me too. And this is where engaging in some of the translational commentary is a little difficult because obviously these results indicate we’re failing to realize the hypothesized benefits at least to this point.

But at the same time, given the preamble I gave you at the beginning about how we often don’t persist in trying to refine and understand policy innovations I also hope people won’t take this as nature’s final word on these policies and will persist in trying to understand what it might take for them to do better. So for example, I can throw a couple examples out here. One is it may be that phone bans don’t go far enough and that the problem is about digital devices more broadly and that the growing movement towards digital-free schools might come a little closer towards what some of the proponents are discussing. Alternatively, or even in concert, it may be that the bans are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the kinds of gains people hope to see.

For example, getting students off their phones might be a start, but once they’re off their phones, are they in high quality learning environments? Do they have effective teachers using high quality instructional materials and evidence-based pedagogy? There’s certainly some reason for concern around that. As an aside, you may have seen some of this in the current sturm und drang around the science of reading. One of the big issues in education policy right now is the growing realization that teachers have been trained to teach early reading in ways that don’t align with the best evidence on how students actually learn to read. In particular, they’ve been underemphasizing early phonics and phonemic awareness and things of that sort. So anyway, so that’s the position we’re in right now and it’s interesting to watch having spent this week watching how this was consumed and understood by different people and different journalistic outlets.

Holden Thorp: Great preamble. I guess my first question would be tell me the positive effects that you did see.

Tom Dee: So the main positive effect was that by the third year of a phone ban, it appears that students’ self-reported subjective wellbeing is higher.

Holden Thorp: And what about the teachers? Weren’t they also kind of happy with the whole thing?

Tom Dee: Yeah, we have teacher survey data. That’s a little bit more of a descriptive posture and wasn’t part of our pre-registration that we’re collecting more data and hope to do more with that. But there’s no doubt that teachers are incredibly supportive of these policies and they see good things in their wake.

Holden Thorp: I certainly like my classroom better when there aren’t any devices in it if we’re having a discussion. For sure. Yeah. All right. So for the quantitative measures where you didn’t see much effect, I know it was a pre-registered study, so you were going to publish whatever you got, but were you expecting to see a signal?

Tom Dee: There’s always this challenge of putting yourself back in that original position, but I think we were. And at some level, having been an education researcher for as long as I have, I feel maybe a little sheepish about having been hopeful because certainly I’m very experienced, have had a lot of experience, in reforms around which there was a lot of enthusiasm that when carefully examined, produced disappointing results, but we chose these measures intentionally. For example, it would make sense that if students got off their phones and were paying attention, I think it’s reasonable to think there might’ve been some meaningful learning gains in the short term, simply because the teachers now have their attention, but the disruption can confound that. If teachers are having a more difficult time, at least initially, maintaining classroom order, that’s going to complicate learning in the classroom.

Holden Thorp: And do you think that’s the main reason why you didn’t see a signal?

Tom Dee: Well, I have to be careful there. We can’t really say. I mean, a virtue of this kind of work is it’s got, I think, a strong causal warrant, but the big demerit of this type of quasi-experimental design is we can’t really tease apart mediators. So we can’t even be sure why discipline rose. The increase in discipline, for example, could be due to enforcing the phone ban and having to identify students who aren’t complying, but it could also be that in the absence of access to a phone, students who had been docile because they were sitting there scrolling TikTok or whatever, are now acting out in compliance with a ban, but acting out in a way they wouldn’t without the ban.

Holden Thorp: Yeah. So there’ve been a lot of studies on screen time and effects on internalizing symptoms and things like that, which also didn’t produce much signal. And do you see this as consistent with those or is there this difference somehow?

Tom Dee: I think to my mind, it appears consistent that these bans and the adoption of these lockable pouches drove down the in-school use of phones without producing clear academic gains.

Holden Thorp: And to the extent that there was a gain in wellbeing, it was very small and delayed.

Tom Dee: Oh, it was delayed. I’d have to go back to the paper about or take a second look at the effect size. I wouldn’t characterize it as really small, but I guess part of the reason I’m equivocating a little is, again, it’s so hard to know what mediation is behind these kind of reduced form results. It could be that phone bans in schools simply, for example, lead to some intertemporal substitution, students who are using them less in school, but maybe more intensively outside of schools in ways that attenuate any expected gains. So that would be consistent. This is why I was equivocating about, is this consistent with the meager evidence you described around social media, et cetera, because one could say, “Well, these results are consistent with a world where social media use is bad for kids, and it’s just that the bans shifted it intertemporally away from the school day to out of school time.” So that’s why I think we have to not get over our skis in interpreting these results.

Holden Thorp: Boy, do I agree with that. So Jon Haidt said in his book that the phone-based childhood is the major cause of the adolescent mental health crisis, and that’s a pretty bold statement. And I’m wondering if you agree with that and whether your study supports or refutes that or is silent on it.

Tom Dee: Well, I can answer the latter question, which is I think our study has to remain silent on it in part for the reasons I described. I mean, one could argue at the most superficial level, we reduced youth phone use and there were no clear gains. And maybe there’s a moralizing hysteria that’s wrong about digital device use among teens or it could be that Jon’s right and what happened here was that kind of intertemporal substitution. On the broader question, I would recommend you talk to some of my other colleagues, Hunt Allcott in particular, because as you probably know, they’ve done direct research on social media use and youth. So they’re more authoritatively steeped in that literature than I am. (Allcott is quoted in the piece and I will post his interview soon.)

Holden Thorp: That’s fair. But you probably have an opinion on the overall discourse on this. I mean, I think unless you read scientific journals, if you only read the millions of books that Jon has put out and the numerous appearances on podcasts and talk shows, you see a pretty simple story here that I think to a lot of people in the public would seem that the science is resolved. And do you worry about the asymmetry of that?

Tom Dee: Well, I’m always concerned about overly facile or monocausal explanations for any large-scale social phenomenon. But I will say, and this is something that may or may not be on your radar that I think contextualizes this some of the most important research I think I’ve seen done in education in the last couple years or actually (and several people have done this independently), were some descriptive pieces that took achievement data in the US and noted that the decline in achievement we’ve seen, it did accelerate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but is timed to around 2013 where you see an inflection point. And that’s the kind of thing I think Jon has latched onto and others and saying, look, this coincides with the rise of social media. But in the educational research, people also discuss how it coincides with other major changes. One is the one I described around walking back school-based test accountability with Obama’s first administration, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds if this seems off-piste to you, but No Child Left Behind in 2001 brought test-based accountability to scale across the nation, focused on reading and math achievement and asked states to devise systems that would flag schools that were failing to make adequate yearly progress towards their state proficiency standards in work that actually my co-author on this study, Brian Jacob and I did, we found that there were some non-trivial gains in learning from collecting data and trying to hold schools accountable for overall performance goals and subgroup goals, et cetera. Then largely what happened was when Obama was elected, it was around the time when everyone knew we needed to redesign that system in some ways. It was only focused on reading and math, it focused on achievement levels and not value added.

So there was some consensus around this needs to change in some ways, but it was also when the hyperpartisanship we see now began to accelerate with the rise of the Tea Party, and all the political centrism that had supported that reform evaporated. And that’s when the Obama administration started issuing waivers to states who were no longer meeting their NCLB requirements. And after a long torturous period, the federal government really walked away from that accountability, those accountability reforms and there was a devolution to the states in 2015 under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Well, that’s the other major hypothesis for that inflection point in student achievement nationally. You’ll often hear researchers say, “We took our foot off the pedal in terms of accountability and it’s reflected in our achievement results.” So this is an area of active inquiry. How do we understand these macro trends given that inflection point coincided not just with the rise of social media use among teens, but the walkback of school accountability and some other factors like repercussions from the Great Recession. So I think that’s important context that would underscore why we shouldn’t overgeneralize from national trends the effects of one particular historical change.

Holden Thorp: I did want to ask you a little more about the effects of the Great Recession. I mean, there are some data that show that particularly with mental wellbeing, access to resources is a huge determinant and especially the mental health of your parents. And so you say that the effect of the Great Recession is yet another potential hypothesis for this, right?

Tom Dee: It is. And not just working through some of the economic implications for families and what that means for students, but also school’s capacity to fund student mental health services over that period. I mean, I don’t have exact data on this to hand, but I would hypothesize that it was compromised by the Great Recession. So other things were happening at that time.

Holden Thorp: And so you’ve given me two alternative hypotheses, but are you worried that if one of those turns out to be the right thing, that it’s going to create public confusion because the story that it’s the phones and social media is so prevalent right now?

Tom Dee: Yeah, I am just generally concerned about the way we integrate research policy and practice in the US. I wrote about this in an essay at the beginning of this school year for Education Week that the integration between them, at least in education, is incredibly poor.

Part of it is that too much of the education research that’s produced by our universities and think tanks and contract research organizations just isn’t meeting the needs of practitioners. And some of that is, I think it’s overindexed on qualitative methods. Sometimes it’s very transparently ideologically coded and avoids more to sort of positivist scientific postures. But even when we know something is effective, it often doesn’t get picked up by practitioners and policymakers. The recent movement after decades of scholarship to move towards embracing teaching methods that are aligned with how kids learn to read is one important example of that where even where the research does speak with a fairly consistent voice, that doesn’t always punch through to the way teachers are trained and the kind of in-service professional development they get. And then the other concern is that when states make policy pronouncements or even districts, it doesn’t necessarily change practice on the ground.

So I think that’s a potential concern for phone bans if you believe they work, well, many states are saying, yes, ban phones, but then giving districts local control in doing so. And that could lead to implementation that is at best uneven and at worse cosmetic. So the alternative reality that I think I and other kind of technocratic evidence-based policy researchers would like to see is one where we have what are sometimes called inquiry cycles or continuous improvement, where our schools try to function like learning organizations, piloting innovation and planning for rigorous assessment of whether they’re working and then taking a moment after evaluating something to decide what to do next. Should they adapt a reform in some way? Should they take it to scale if it seems promising? Should they walk away if it’s not working? In continuous improvement, we call these PDSA cycles, plan, do, study, act, where the act stage focuses on should we abandon, adapt or adopt a reform?

And I wish we took that kind of approach to studying both phone bans and more generally, how to manage digital devices within schools. And part of the reason that matters too is there’s a hyper-localness to that approach that I think is really critical for understanding what can work and what can work in specific types of school settings or communities. So if I were advising state superintendents, I would encourage them to adopt an appropriate stance of humility about what we really know in these spaces and build a robust learning agenda that can help us answer the kinds of questions we have and build an evidence base that we can disseminate. Does that make sense?

Holden Thorp: It does. I think it’s very rigorous and has less public bombast in it than the moment that unfortunately we find ourselves in. So let me ask you, so one of the things that some of the critics of, and I don’t know if you would agree with this, but I think if you went to Capitol Hill, everybody on both sides of the aisle is focused on the phones and social media and that is probably drowning out some of these other measures that I’m sure the education community would like to pursue.

Tom Dee: It’s just a general problem when they’re so popular the political system’s going to respond to that popularity rather than the more, I think, nuanced approach I was suggesting of saying, “Well, let’s be clear about what we don’t know and let’s plan to learn.”

Holden Thorp: Yeah, perfect. So one of the things that the critics of the phone message say is that no matter how much you try to say you’re blaming the social media companies or big tech or whatever, it still comes off as blaming teenagers for spending too much time on their phones and that that has a deleterious effect. What do you make of that critique?

Tom Dee: I don’t know. That seems off point to me. I don’t think it’s necessarily about blame. Technology is a part of our lives and I can’t imagine a world in which it’s not going to continue to be so. And in fact, increasingly so. I think it’s up to us to think about how to best put guardrails around it and we can do so without us necessarily assigning blame, certainly not assigning blame to the only people involved in these interactions who are children.

Holden Thorp: Well, that covers a lot of what I want to ask you about. I will call your colleagues about the social media part. Is there anything else that’s not out there in the discourse that you’d like to suggest I bring up?

Tom Dee: Yeah. Well, a number of states are considering and moving towards digital device-free school environments more broadly. So I think that’s just what I’ve mentioned, our sense is that’s going to be the next issue and we’re trying to position ourselves to have some high quality evidence that will speak to that. Because again, that’s another explanation for the sobering results we see, which is, hey, we hear, for example, anecdotes about, yeah, the phones might be banned, but everyone’s sitting there with a Chromebook and all a student has to do is open up a slide presentation that they’re ostensibly working on jointly with their peers and all of a sudden they’re communicating with each other within the slide deck typing messages, things of that sort. So I think again, just underscore the broader concern and the ways in which we still need to learn more. And yeah, it’s been an interesting week seeing the way this gets swept up into a very reductive kind of binary maelstrom when I think our team, or at least I’ll speak for myself, want to advocate for this kind of humble approach to saying, let’s try to figure out more what’s going on here.

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When a recent study showing that locking phones away at school for three years had no or very modest effect on positive outcomes in the classroom was released, I sent it to an editor at a major national outlet who asked me if I wanted to write about it for them. I interviewed the authors of the study and got quotes from Haidt and one of the main critics who wasn’t on the study, Candice Odgers. I wrote the piece up and it was all set to run and then killed at the last minute the night before it was supposed to appear by the top editor.

I’m running the piece below. In the next three posts, I’ll run fuller Q&A’s with the two authors I interviewed and then something about what I think would make this debate more generative. Here is the first Q&A with Tom Dee.

I am not a fan of social media companies, in fact, I have tangled publicly with Facebook over their optimistic interpretation of papers we published and then over whether they were honest with the researchers. I do believe that phones and social media are partial contributors to poor mental health and that there may even be a causative element to it. But Haidt has claimed it was the “major cause.” We would never allow a claim like that in a scientific paper unless there was substantial evidence for it. Is it OK to put that claim in a bestselling book that has captured the public zeitgeist? Interesting question. Our friends over at Nature have argued that “public-facing science-communication work should adhere to the same research-integrity principles that are used for scholarly publications.” That is certainly not happening here.

The best deeply reported piece on this so far is from Stephanie Lee at the Chronicle of Higher Education. A quote from one of the academics in the piece that sums up the situation is that Haidt is “telling a story with Google Docs. Hundreds of academics who aren’t being listened to are doing science.” At least, he means, doing science by publishing peer-reviewed research articles and not Google Docs, commentary, and op-eds.

Here’s the piece:

Caveats don’t launch movements

It feels good to give up your phone or cut back on social media. Two years ago, I got off Twitter (now X) and Bluesky and haven’t looked back. More recently, I took my work email off of my phone and deleted the other social media apps (it’s not like my laptop is that far away). Also an improvement.

Anecdotes like this are real and plentiful, and they fuel support for asking young people to get off of their phones so that they can flourish, too. This idea is everywhere in the last two years thanks to Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, which has captivated the media and political discourse. But systematic studies that show benefits of giving up phones on youth mental health are hard to come by. So what does it mean if it feels good to give up your phone in the moment, but that never shows up in the data? And what if all the work to stop these evil devices and platforms won’t actually fix what ails America’s youth?

Because Haidt’s book and media appearances are so widespread, many in the public could understandably believe that the science showing the damage created by phones and social media is resolved. But it’s not. Other researchers have been measuring the changes on adolescent mental health parameters and failing to observe statistically significant changes when phones were restricted. Many of these researchers believe that Haidt has prematurely created a moral panic without sufficient evidence—and that the decline in adolescent mental health is more likely caused by a lack of parental support, economic distress, a decline in parental mental health, or many other possibilities.

I’m not an expert on this kind of research. But in my day job as the editor of Science magazine, I’m constantly watching scientists argue with each other—and then seeing how these debates play out in the public eye. In this case, one side has a massive megaphone and has dominated the public discourse while the other side is mostly putting their findings in scientific journals. What’s more, much of the public and the political class has embraced a simplified version of the evils of phones and social media when, in fact, the reality is much more complicated. What happens to public confidence if it turns out that the supposed gains from eliminating phones and social media aren’t enough?

***

The Anxious Generation was certain to be a bestseller. Haidt had already seized the public’s attention with his 2018 anti-woke barnburner Coddling of the American Mind, and his legions of fans were sure to buy this one. It claimed that the replacement of play-based childhood with phone-based childhood was the “major cause” of the international epidemic of anxiety and depression in teens. After all, social media and phones took hold right at the time that large increases in adolescent anxiety and depression occurred. And the increase occurred simultaneously for adolescent girls around the world, suggesting that locally different effects could be ruled out as potential causes. The four-fold solution to the problem, Haidt argued, was (1) no phones before high school, (2) no social media before age 16, (3) phone-free schools, and (4) more time playing outside.

Around the same time, though, a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study came to a less exciting conclusion: “available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations…. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

The Anxious Generation was also met with howls from a number of academic practitioners, especially Candice Odgers, Andrew Przybylski, and Chris Ferguson. Odgers, for instance, wrote a scathing review in Nature. “I will probably use The Anxious Generation in my classes as a terrific example of how not to interpret correlational data and infer causation,” she wrote.

Nonetheless, The Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 106 weeks, and Haidt has spread his message far and wide. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have embraced his framing enthusiastically, and phone and social media bans are beginning to be rolled out around the world. In 2024, President Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, called for a warning label on social media, calling it an “important contributor” to the youth mental health crisis. (Note that he didn’t say it was the major cause.)

In the words of Arlo Guthrie, “And friends, they may think it’s a movement.”

***

Since the publication of Haidt’s book, the two camps have traded studies and analyses. On one side, more studies have emerged showing negligible to small changes in well being for the time spent on social media. Meanwhile, Haidt has controversially cited surveys of researchers generally supporting the idea that social media and phones have a negative (but not necessarily major) effect on mental health.

A couple of weeks ago, a study by researchers who are generally hopeful about phone bans but not strictly in either camp was posted as a preprint, meaning it has not yet been submitted to a journal and peer reviewed. In this study, the researchers were able to get three years of data on the use of pouches made by a company called Yondr that lock phones away for the school day. The researchers set out to determine —and publicly stated the methods—whether locking phones during school would lead to improvements in test scores, attendance, and discipline. The researchers also collected student-reported data on their well-being, classroom attention, and extent of online bullying.

Instead, the study showed no detectable effect on test scores or attendance. Although discipline problems increased in the first year they recovered back to the baseline after that. Student well-being also went down in the first year and then improved modestly above the baseline. There was no statistically significant change in perceived online bullying or, more strikingly, in classroom attention. If taking phones away made it easier to pay attention, it didn’t register.

While advocates of phone bans might latch onto the improvement in self-reported student well-being, one of the authors, Tom Dee of Stanford University, told me the study had failed to realize the hypothesized benefits: he called the results “sobering.” Still, Dee hopes this isn’t the final word. He is hoping for more experiments to nail down whether looking over periods longer than three years or at other measures would support the idea that phone bans improve student learning.

Another of the co-authors, Hunt Allcott, also of Stanford, told me he was very appreciative of the spotlight that Haidt has put on the field. Still, he characterized the effects measured in the study as “broadly small.” Allcott’s other studies are among those showing an improvement in reported adult well-being when social media is restricted. He’s generally on board with phone bans. But when I asked him if phones and social media were the major cause of mental health declines, he said, “I don’t know.”

Allcott said that his findings alone were not enough to justify a book like Haidt’s. What he finds compelling about Haidt’s argument is that he has produced a “collage of evidence” that includes some strong anecdotal and descriptive evidence from surveys along with some forensic evidence, which—despite effects that some other researchers may see as underwhelming— is supportive. However, that forensic evidence remains hotly contested in academic circles, and even a fan like Allcott concedes that “the causal evidence is never going to be perfect.” Rather, he says, we have to rely on various types of evidence, including people's reports of what they perceive the effects to be, to complete the collage.

One thing is for sure, though: adults really love phone bans and restricting social media. The teachers in the Yondr study overwhelmingly supported the policies. Parents were enthusiastic about the bans and expected significant gains in test scores and mental health. I can relate to this. After 40 years of teaching college students, I’m acutely aware of the changes to the classroom resulting from devices and am much more satisfied teaching when they are put away. When I told Haidt that I benefited from getting devices out of the classroom, he said “most people seem to share your experience— that reducing the interruptions and distractions of our phones makes us feel better and be better able to concentrate. And teachers widely report seeing it in their students; they seem almost universally to love phone-free school policies.”

***

For someone who writes about disagreement in science, this has been an irresistible drama. When I first started writing about it two years ago, Odgers told me that “the most shocking thing is the distance between what people believe and what you can see in the data.” The Yondr study is the latest to bear it out. Parents and teachers believed that the phone bans would produce significant gains that ultimately weren’t there. Similarly, when Australia announced a nationwide ban on social media, economist Tyler Cowen called out the same problem in The Free Press, writing, “After much rigorous investigation, the harms are relatively small. Yet in headlines they are reported as major negative effects.” As Cowen predicted, Australia has had major challenges implementing the ban.

When I contacted her for this column, Odgers told me her view hadn’t changed, and she was emboldened by the Yondr findings. “What is clear is that adults feel good about banning phones and politicians know that supporting bans is a political win,” she told me. “What is not clear is that spending all this energy, money, and time on banning and blaming digital technology does anything to benefit our kids.” Indeed, as I was writing this, another preprint appeared showing “no clear evidence that the school ban policy reduced screentime or improved psychological wellbeing.”

Haidt’s “collage of evidence” includes both anecdotal and forensic evidence. The anecdotal findings—individual stories of shocking harms, tech companies behaving badly, or personal satisfaction with putting the phones away—are not particularly controversial. But Haidt’s forensic evidence is hotly contested. For example, critics say that when asking teens whether they had positive experiences giving up social media, they know the researcher wants a “yes.” And the effects measured are all either undetectable or much smaller than expected. These lines of evidence are likely to remain contested; even ban-friendly researcher Allcott is cautioning that convincing causal evidence is unlikely to emerge.

When I asked Haidt if he had changed his mind about phones and social media being the major cause of the adolescent mental health crisis, he stood firm. He certainly has been consistent: when I asked him two years ago if he should have included in his book more of the research that argued against his position, he said, “I don’t think so.” It’s a strange position for someone whose previous crusade was for viewpoint diversity. But then, caveats don’t launch movements: a recent study shows that public health messaging with too many disclaimers is largely ineffective.

***

To my mind, it is unlikely that the status of this field will change much. We will continue to drown in anecdotal information suggesting that phones and social media are dangerous, and that people feel good giving them up. Meanwhile, causal evidence that is convincing enough to create a scientific consensus will remain elusive. However, the phone-free movement has so much momentum that bans will continue to spread despite little demonstrable and measurable benefit any time soon. “No study is definitive, nor should it be,” Odgers said about the Yondr study, “but these findings should cause us all to pause and ask ourselves whether trying to ban our way out of a youth mental health crisis and learning loss is the best use of our limited resources and time.”

I worry more that the public will eventually lose confidence due to the overselling of the bans as the benefits continue to be unconvincing. The history of science is riddled with episodes of scientists ultimately undermining trust by enthusiastically overpromising benefits that never appear. A recent example is the error made during the pandemic of creating the impression that the Covid vaccines would completely stop transmission rather than just reducing it. (Despite what you read about me, I was one of the first people to call this out.) When that was walked back, the public understandably became skeptical of the other real benefits of the vaccines. Will that happen here if studies continue to show none-to-meager benefits of banning phones and social media? We don’t know yet, but it’s not a pleasant thought to contemplate.

Note: A few minor changes were made to this after the original posting. The most important is that the original piece characterized the pre-registration in the Yondr study as publicly hypothesizing that an effect would be observed instead of saying that the authors were just making a commitment that certain things would be measured. That has been corrected.

Proud to be a Retriever!!

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I wish everyone fussing about higher education right now could go to UMBC and see what they are doing. It’s a real university with real people. Lots of students of all different identities having their lives changed for an affordable price. Faculty who clearly care about their students. Staff excited to be there.

The president, Valerie Sheares Ashby, is someone I’ve known her whole career. I gave her the first job she had in administration and knew should would be a president one day. When I acknowledged her from the podium, the crowd cheered - not something many presidents get to enjoy any more. Getting a degree from her rather than the other way around was a thrill.

Someone needs to tell the New York Times and the Atlantic to stop covering Yale and Harvard and go see a real university like UMBC doing real stuff.

Graduation speakers have been getting booed this year talking about AI. I always interview students before writing these to find out some inside info and what they want me to talk about. They definitely wanted me to talk about AI - just not telling them they were doomed. I don’t believe they are. You can see what I said in the video or below. The sound was really great, so I got more reaction than usual.

Thanks to President Sheares Ashby and the awesome people of UMBC. I had a blast.

Here’s the video and remarks below. My part starts at 51 minutes in.

Hello, everybody!

UM!

[BC!]

UM!

[BC!]

Congratulations, Retrievers! Class of 2026!

You made it through a lot. Pandemic, divisive politics, international conflict.

And many of you started out in Susquehanna Hall. A dorm so bad that when they painted a stripe on the wall in the lobby it actually livened the place up.

You managed to take all the classes you needed. Some of them were hard, but the classes weren’t nearly as challenging as getting registered for them on myUMBC. Fortunately, you learned how to drop what you were doing just at the time your slot opened and push the button faster than your classmates.

You got to class despite encounters with the world’s largest squirrels and a guy who roams the campus with a snake around his neck.

But you felt safe, because Spider-Man was always nearby thanks to someone named Ronan.

And you needed him, because there weren’t lot of ways to escape. When I asked someone who is graduating today where they went to drink and hang out, he said, “literally nowhere.”

That was good for the Uber drivers who took you to Federal Hill.

Despite the isolation and the quirky traditions, when you came to UMBC, you joined an amazing community that succeeds together where you were taught how to learn and how to work in teams by professors like Joseph Washington and Tiffany Gierasch. They got you through hard material not by bombarding you with more information, but by helping you realize that you could learn it.

And you went to school with students with similar interests to you.

You wore your nerdy label with pride.

When I went to college at a university full of frat boys and sports fanatics, people made fun of the fact that I was the first person to solve the Rubik’s Cube on national television.

If I’d come here, people would have made fun of how slow my time was.

Well, graduation speeches have three ideas in 12 minutes. So, I’d better get going.

Nobody’s Normal

I don’t think I can stand in front of this many students and not mention the fact that we are in a mental health crisis among young people. As many as 50% of college age students have sought mental health services. That’s a lot of people here today who are hurting. I can understand why anyone would be struggling given all that’s going on in the world – and especially with the stress of college and the political environment. Lots of pundits want to tell you why this is happening. Some say it’s your phones. Well, a recent study in the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that taking phones out of schools for three years had no detectable effect on test scores and very small effects on measures of student well-being. I’m pretty sure the problem is not the phones but an outdated and biased idea of what it means to be ‘normal’ that most of us can’t conform to.

You may notice that my hand movements, the lack of modulation in my vocal tone, and the fact that I can’t stop swaying back and forth are a little unusual. That’s because I’m autistic. Lots of famous and successful people have had this diagnosis. But far more autistic people -- and those who had autism but were never diagnosed, and therefore never given the supports they needed -- were much less fortunate, sometimes requiring constant care and exhibiting much higher rates of anxiety and depression than the general population. And that’s partly because, particularly in some sectors of society, our awkward traits come with significant stigma.

As an autistic person, I have the greatest admiration for all of you who had to do team coding group projects in CMSC 447.

For me, that even would be worse than trying to find a parking place for a 10 am class.

Now one reason I’m telling you this is so you know that if you have mental health struggles of your own, you can still be the speaker at UMBC commencement one day. In fact, all of us up here in our robes with our fancy degrees may look completely together, but every one of us has had challenges just like you may be having. So as my GW colleague Richard Grinker says, remember that if you look closely enough, nobody’s normal.

Do the work

Now as we are sitting here, science in the United States is in a state of turmoil. Rapid cuts to science and engineering funding and employment are roiling the workforce, stranding many young people who had plans to participate in admirable federal programs that no longer exist. No one would blame anyone here for being anxious about this.

Other countries around the world are seizing on this opportunity by recruiting US scientists abroad. It was already the case that science is growing in Asia at faster rates than here. The technological leadership that the United States has achieved over the last 80 years has enabled all of the commercial and political success that the country has had and, ironically, has produced many of the very people who are now trying undo it all.

These technocrats think it is now OK to weaken American science because they believe intelligent machines are going to do science and engineering for us, apparently even curing all diseases. There’s a simple reason why that won’t work. Because even if the machines can do a lot, they can’t benefit people without interacting with, well, people. And because you went here, you know a lot about how people interact with machines and with each other.

A recent study has shown that when AI agents do research, they are even more prone to ethical lapses than humans. When much of the public is doubting science, that’s the last thing we need.

So good news: we still need humans to do research. I believe we always will.

Still, nobody my age can stand up here and tell you with certainty that this will all be OK or precisely how it will play out. Too much is changing for us to know that. But what we can say is that over the course of tumultuous times in the world, the people who did the most to get us to the next place were the ones who did the work even when forces were trying to stop them.

So if you want to engage in resistance, do what you want to do as a person to defend science, but don’t stop doing the work you came to UMBC to learn to do. Make engineering generative and humane. Make sure that when AI does science, it does science that appreciates the properties and fragility of nature. Make machines that actually help people, especially those who haven’t benefited from the analog world as much as some of us. Energize people around you, including people who think differently and have different opinions.

When in doubt, stop the doomscrolling and do the work.

Your grit is true

Right now across America, graduation speakers are telling students that what they need to succeed in the world is grit. In 2016, Penn psychology professor Angela Duckworth told the world in a bestselling book and TED talk that achievement was a result of a unique combination of passion and perseverance. Well, she was only 29 years late, because your mascot has been True Grit since 1987.

UMBC is the original place where grit translates to achievement. You didn’t need a professor from Penn to tell you that.

And you don’t just have grit, you have true grit. True grit is not an absolute measure. True grit knows your story. True grit knows what you have overcome to get where you are. True grit understands the arc of history and the barriers it has placed in your way.

So only you know if your grit is true. Don’t listen to the voices that say you have to achieve this or that to show you have grit. Your parents can’t tell you. There’s no one on Instagram or TikTok who knows. Even Mr. Beast doesn’t know.

Only you know when your grit is true.

But I know this: you’ve got it or you wouldn’t be here.

You’re right on schedule

This may sound daunting, but we’re going a long way toward all these goals today because all of you are graduating!

Now some of the talk about changing the world that always shows up at graduations might make you uneasy. Some of you might not have your grand plan worked out. If that’s the case, you’re right on schedule. Most of you who do have a plan are going to change it multiple times.

So don’t worry if you don’t have it all figured out yet. And remember that whatever you do next, it’s the right thing if it’s what you want. Try to tune out what your parents and your advisers think you want. They don’t know everything that you know about what’s right.

They also didn’t get handed this divided world where everyone is obsessed with who belongs and who doesn’t. A world filled with uncertainty about politics, artificial intelligence, and the climate.

Tune it out and do what you think is right. You have the tools to decide and execute. You have the knowledge. You have the conscience. You just need to remember that when you leave here, you’re not going to have Spider-Man walking around to look after you.

You’ll have to deal with the Green Goblin and Doc Ock on your own.

The good news is you’re ready to take ‘em on.

And when you need to, you can come back to campus to be reminded of the things you learned and the people who changed your life.

And maybe Roll Fed one more time.

So that’s my talk.

Nobody is normal.

Do the work.

Your grit is true.

With these ideas, you’re ready for anything.

And remember, no matter what life throws at you, there’s one thing you can always cling to: you will never have to log onto myUMBC again!

UM!

[BC!]

Congratulations to the UMBC class of 2026!

Ghosted every time.

One person who is enthusiastic about the administration who has written for us, Prineha Narang, did agree to talk to me. Dr. Narang (she goes by Pri) is a very successful professor of physics at UCLA who has published multiple times in Science, won many awards, and is on the board of trustees at Caltech. I was really grateful she came on to talk to me so that our readers can hear why she’s excited about what is going on in science in the US. I think it’s our job to make sure folks like Pri have a fair chance to tell their story and also to help our readers understand the reasoning behind the administration’s actions. Here’s the video of our conversation on the new Science Podcast channel (please subscribe!!):

The overall theme of Pri’s optimism is mainly around making applied research more successfull. While she expressed hope that the NSF would still continue to fund basic research, most of what excites her is new opportunities for students, universities, and the federal government to collaborate with industry. She is hopeful about the nomination of Jim O’Neill as the NSF director, mainly because she feels he will drive these kinds of collaborations. My employer, AAAS, is skeptical about O’Neill’s nomination.

When I asked her about the abrupt cuts to some universities (including her own) by the administration, she explained that she understood the actions partly because conservative faculty like her were not being heard. She encouraged introspection by the institutions like what is in the latest report from Yale about how they should work to rebuild public support. (I am also a fan of the analysis in the Yale report, although I told Pri that she and I probably wouldn’t agree on the remedy of what to do about it.)

What that cemented for me is the notion that trying to build support for science separately from trying to rebuild trust in universities isn’t going to fly. As long as the universities are unpopular, overall support for science will be limited, even if the main public objections to universities (particularly selective privates) — like the cost and some content in the humanities — don’t have much to do with science. That’s going to be hard to do when there isn’t good agreement over whether universities should respond to the political moment or double down on their traditional values.

I really appreciate Pri talking to me and hope others will do the same. We need to get these ideas out in the open in the scientific community so that we don’t have to speculate on what the motivations are and what some in our universe would see as acceptable solutions.

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Theo had found questions about some of Tessier-Lavigne’s papers on a website called PubPeer where potential problems with data, mostly images, are posted publicly. He connected with Elisabeth Bik who is one of the best known people who find these. Two of the papers had been in Science and were published before I became the editor.

The science world that follows this kind of thing was abuzz about this. Theo wanted a comment in seven hours before he posted his story, which I couldn’t do, but I congratulated him on finding something likely to be of wide interest and told him I would check into it.

As it turns out, we had discussed these papers with Tessier-Lavigne before, but for some reason we could not determine due to the passage of time, had not posted corrections that he had sent. I apologized for that and had to take some justified grilling from Pulitzer Prize winners about whether we had buried them on purpose, but eventually, they were satisfied. We’ll never know what happened, but wherever the error occurred, it was by someone who had no idea who Marc Tessier-Lavigne was.

During all of this, I talked to Theo on the record for an hour from the Acela phone booth, and I could tell he was a very special student journalist. After that, we started texting and talking about research integrity and lots of other stuff. I love student journalists and always have, and always want them to get scoops over the better resourced outlets that they are competing with.

“It didn’t seem friendly”

Tessier-Lavigne eventually ended up stepping down, and it was a major academic drama. Much has been written about all the details. Theo became the youngest winner of the George Polk Award for investigative journalism.

Now Theo has written a book about his year doing all of this called “How to Rule the World,” which is named after a secret class at Stanford where students actually learn how to rule the world. The book chronicles his work in journalism but also unearths the culture at Stanford that seems to prize cutting corners to achieve world domination, giving us sagas like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried. He and I have joked that even though it’s a bad look for Stanford, it will probably make more people apply, not less. The book launch is burning up the internet right now, and it’s a sure bestseller. Theo has sold the movie rights, and I’ve joked with him that I want Mark Hamill to play me in the movie. (Narrator: The Science editor will not be in the movie.)

When I first congratulated Theo in 2022 for finding something of interest, he took it as sarcasm. “It didn’t seem friendly,” he writes in his book. I don’t love reading that now, but it was a long way from six months ago when I was one of the first people to read his manuscript. This is a common saga for me and many others with a lot of autistic traits. People think we are disinterested in them at first, but then can form even stronger bonds later. I will talk a lot about this in my book, Leading with Autism, which will be out in 2027.

Theo has been coming to speak to my class on science and politics at GWU, and is always the top rated speaker:

Congratulations to Theo and thanks for letting me tag along on this crazy drama. In the meantime, if you care about how the culture of a university can shape the world, run and get Theo’s book.

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We are using this interview to launch our new Science Podcast channel on YouTube, where we will continue to post this kind of content. Here is the full interview and the full transcript is on the Science website with the column.

Snyder paints a forceful yet nuanced picture of how resistant should work. While he was appropriately critical of anyone in the establishment who silences what he called “troublemakers” (in the good trouble spirit of John Lewis), he also said that not everyone needs to be a troublemaker and that people would all respond differently in any given political moment. Rather, he says, the right thing is to ensure that someone is pushing back and that they are appreciated and not squelched by the others who are riding their coattails. As for individuals in the scientific community, he makes the point that everyone should be doing something, which could range from going to a public protest or something much more local like volunteering with your political party at a polling place.

The whole interview is worth a watch, and the high points are in the column.

Comparisons to 1930s Germany

One of the sayings that I wanted to ask him about in this moment is “whatever you’d be doing in 1930s Germany, you should be doing it now.” It’s common to hear this. When I’ve seen Snyder — who is an expert on authoritarian moments — asked about this, I’ve noticed he is extremely careful to be very rigorous about the comparisons (he said to Scott Galloway, “When you’re about to talk about Nazis, you try to be as fair as you can be.”) When I asked him about the parallels to Germany, he explained that history doesn’t repeat itself (as you hear often), but it instructs. (This part of the interview is not in the YouTube version, but I put the full transcript below if you want to read all of his remarks.)

“I think it’s nonsensical to say that we are Germany in 1933, but it’s also nonsensical to say that we are any country at any time,” he told me. Rather, he explained, we should look to what happened then for patterns that help us understand our current moment - as we should with many other times in history.

Synder’s first lesson was that in 1930s Germany, the left and far left failed to form a coalition, while the right and far right did, which allowed them to come to power with fewer votes. This was aided by the fact that Stalin had told the far left to attack the Social Democrats. Snyder sees the US as failing to learn that lesson. “It could happen that people who are centrist and liberals, and focus on things like the rule of law, could get in a big fight with people who are more concerned with social and racial injustice. I see sparks of that every day,” he explained. “It could happen that the reason that you lose an election is because the people who are center left and the people who are far left can’t get together for whatever reason.”

This is why it’s crucial for the scientific community to work together around our internal differences. That will require discomfort for everyone, but failing to form a coalition that fights for science together is a sure way to make the attacks on science from the outside more effective.

The other lesson Snyder pointed out was the failure to imagine that the worst things could happen. Many in the scientific establishment failed to recognize that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could actually become the health secretary despite his views on vaccines or that the office of management and budget would actually try not to disburse funds that had been appropriated by Congress.

Find your something

“If you’re an American and you’re thinking about resistance,” he said, “you have to look to history for that because we have a history of resistance. And the more you know about it, the more you see its strengths and its weaknesses. If you just drop the history and say, okay, everything’s fresh and everything’s new, then you’re going to underestimate certain things. You’re going to overestimate certain things, you’re going to miss possible alliances. And also you’ll be caught by surprise when tactics that should have been familiar to you are used against you.”

I left my conversation with Snyder with greater clarity about the current moment. I have been a broken record about how we need to be painfully meticulous whenever we publish anything, but especially research, news, or commentary that will enter the political sphere. I asked Snyder if it was unfair that we were held to that standard when the folks attacking us were not. He agreed it was unfair, but that didn’t change anything. “It’s just the way it is,” he said. A free press covering science and science policy combined with journals that publish and maintain papers based on the highest scientific principles are an important part of the means of withstanding the attacks.

But the rest of it involves each of us finding our own way to contribute, as Snyder explained far better than I can. Tim Snyder is an outstanding voice to help bring the scientific community together in a common cause.

As the number of awards made by the agencies and overall disbursements continue to be even slower than last year, it’s time to find our somethings.

The full transcript of Snyder’s remarks on Germany

Because the section about Germany was cut from the YouTube version, I’m pasting the whole transcript here for those who are interested in hearing more from him about this.

Holden Thorp: All right, so one other thing that I want to know about is how do you compare the US to other moments like this that you’ve studied? And I’ve noticed you are very careful talking about that. But one thing that tends to run around is, oh, you should be doing whatever you would be doing in 1930s Germany. Do you worry about the generalization of that?

Tim Snyder: Colleague to colleague, I will tell you how I find that hard and how I try to deal with the difficulties. I find it hard because of course there is an endless amount to know about Germany in 1932. And I’ve done a little bit of work on Germany in that period. There are of course colleagues who are much greater authorities than me on Germany in that period. And when you know something about something, then you’re of course always hesitant, right? Because no matter what anybody says in public about Germany in 1932, pretty much there’s gonna be something wrong with it, right? And so on the one hand, it’s hard because you think ‘We don’t have enough history. I need everybody to know more history. There’s just so many more levels to what you’re talking about.’ Okay. all true. At the same time, I think that history is there not because we have to know everything about it, because the every single thing is gonna repeat pixel for pixel, datum for datum, fact for fact, day for day. Because from history you can get certain patterns and the, and the patterns can help you with the recognition. And so that’s where I aim for. So I think it’s nonsensical to say that we are Germany in 1933, but it’s also nonsensical to say that we are any country at any time. We’re not, that’s not how it works.

What you can do though, is you can learn from Germany in 32 or 33 to recognize certain things. So you can say, okay, in Germany in 32 and 33, the left failed to form a coalition. And the right, the far right, even though it had fewer votes, came to power. That’s happened, right? And something like that has happened in other places and something like that could happen in the US. It could happen that people who are centrist and liberals and focus on things the rule of law, it could happen that they get in a big fight with people who are more concerned with social and racial injustice, right? That could happen. I see there’s sparks of that every day, right? It could happen. And it could happen that the reason that you lose an election is because the people who are center left and the people who are far left can’t get together for whatever reason. In Germany, they had the excuse that Stalin told the communists to attack the social Democrats. Okay? So that’s why that happened. It was Stalin’s fault, but there’s a pattern there. There’s something, there’s something that you can, that you can notice, right?

Or to stay in Germany, another pattern is the old right not recognizing the new right. Which is the history of fascism in the twenties and thirties that you have. And I’m not saying the old right was great either then or now. But you have, you have an old right, which is concerned with continuity, with law, with certain kinds of economic exploitation, and then you have a new right, which is different. It’s a fascist right. They believe in unreality and motion over reason, but there’s enough overlap that the old right thinks, ‘oh, these new right guys, they’re just kinda like me, but they’re younger and stronger and more spirited, and maybe I should help them come to power.’ Something like that happened in Oma, Romania. Something like that happened in Germany. Something like that happened in Italy. That was an element to these fascist transformations. Is it exactly like what happened in the US? No, but I think it is fair to say that as in the early part of the 21st century, some people in our old right, like looked at new things coming down the pike and they said, well, that looks, that’s just kind of me, but more interesting.

But it wasn’t interesting. It was actually something else, like something that you enabled maybe, but it was something else. So maybe that’s a boring example, but there are, there are plenty of other ways that you can look at a period.

The classic example from Germany, 32, 33 is the lack of imagination, a normalization that even though things happen pretty fast, people still adapted to them and they thought, oh, the next thing isn’t gonna happen. And if you know that’s true of Germans or even German Jews, which it was true of German Jews, many of them, then you can ask yourself, okay, is that something that’s happening to me or people around me?

So that’s what I think history is for. It’s not ‘cause you get people get locked in, they either say it has to be exactly like that or it’s not relevant. And that it can’t be exactly like that history doesn’t repeat. Or they say I found a perfect historical analogy. No, there’s no perfect historical analogy.

What there are are patterns. There is another point which I think has to be made. I say in the book, I think I say it On Tyranny that history doesn’t repeat, but it does instruct and it should instruct us.

But another thing to keep in mind is that even if we drop history, people who wanna destroy science and people who wanna destroy liberty, they’re thinking about history.

Like I read, I read their stuff. They are perfectly aware of a lot of the history of the 20th century. They know a lot more about Spanish or Portuguese far right politics. They know sometimes a lot about post-war French fascist revival. They often know quite a lot about intellectual history that we might be tempted to discard.

And so when we think about history, we often have to remember there may be playbooks out there, which the other side is using, and if we decide we’re not gonna pay attention to history, we might miss that as well. And then I should say also like if you’re an American and you’re thinking about resistance, you have to look to history for that because, um, we have a history of resistance.

And the more you know about it, the more you see its strengths and its weaknesses and the more capable you might be. But if you just drop the history and say, okay, everything’s fresh and everything’s new, then you’re gonna underestimate certain things. You’re gonna overestimate certain things, you’re gonna miss possible alliances. And also you’ll be caught by surprise when tactics that should have been familiar to you or used against you.

This is usually a moment of revelation. If they get a flash of how much they overreact to curve balls, it often sends them on a journey to learn more about their autism because they want to know why it’s so hard for them.

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There’s a special episode of Carl the Collector that nearly every autistic person can identify with where Carl plans a sleepover for all of his friends. (Click here and watch the second episode in the pair.) The sleepover is to occur in the tree fort on the night of the Super Blue Moon, which happens at precisely 9:37 pm. Before that, Carl has planned 7 activities that all occur at a certain time, which he has laid out in a checklist on his clipboard and presents to his mother via PowerPoint.

Despite his mother trying to prepare him for the fact that things might not go precisely according to his plan, he charges ahead. As expected, things don’t go quite right: someone is late, the pizza arrives early, not everyone wants to sing the moon karaoke songs he has picked out, and pretty soon, Carl is in bed with the covers over his head. Of course, it being a show for young children, his very understanding friends figure out how to put the pieces back together, and everyone is happy watching the Super Blue Moon in the tree fort by 9:37. (For children with greater impairment than Carl has, this happy ending might not be achievable.)

I really identify with Carl on this one. His compulsion comes from a very sincere place of wanting his friends to have fun. The effort that he put into making the plan allowed him to make a connection with them (even if they didn’t know it), because he spent a lot of time thinking about what they might want. He doesn’t want anyone to miss out on doing something they wanted to do (at least as he imagined it) because they didn’t stick to the schedule. But his friends logically think initially that he is just being selfish and dogmatic by insisting that everyone stay on the schedule.

I have a home in Orlando, FL. We get a lot of visitors who want to go to the Disney parks with their kids or grandkids (or, let’s face it, them). Because of the way Disney has changed the system, you need to pay to reserve times to go on the big rides if you don’t want to spend all day waiting in line. (It also causes greater financial burden on people who want to go who can’t afford it.) This means the old days of just going over and going on what you want are pretty much out the window.

These changes are a playground for my autistic mind because you have to know where every bathroom is, how far apart the rides are, and what the likelihoods are of getting a time reserved, which unfortunately, you can figure out by looking at the rabbit holes of data on the internet. So, I can absolutely write you an optimal plan that will get you on everything you want to go on that is supported by hard evidence.

When I go over with people, I get pretty anxious if they don’t stick to the schedule. It’s not for me, I’m usually not going on the rides. I just hate the idea of getting to the end of the day and having someone say they were sad they missed something that they could have gotten on if we’d stuck to the schedule. Just like Carl, I watch things throw people off the plan. They get hungry, they realize they don’t like a certain kind of ride, they get too tired. My head says that they’re going to have a good time anyway, but that is so hard for me to fight through. They do always seem to have had a great time and realize that the planning really mattered in terms of what they got to do (again, Disney has given them relatively no choice about that).

The versions of Carl’s story that take place in work environments don’t always end so well. Autistic employees often want plans like Carl’s, even if we didn’t make them. Tight plans lower unpredictability and allow us to be sure we’re going to accomplish what we’re responsible for. In my case, this usually just leads to unnecessary drama, but for many autistic people, it makes it hard for them to keep a job.

Lots of autistic people who contact me now share these same stories. I’ll be writing much more about this in Leading with Autism, which will hopefully be out for autism awareness month in 2027.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone who is bringing awareness to autism in April and all other months!

And take a look at Carl. He’s got something to teach us all.

The foundation has begun recognizing people they feel embody Leonard’s values with the “Live Long and Prosper” award, which David told me they wanted me to accept. I said, “well, for someone who still sleeps in a blue Star Trek shirt every night, I guess I should.”

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Trekkie for life

As a nerdy kid in the 1970s, Star Trek coming on every day at 5 pm in syndication was crucial. It hurt when I missed it. There weren’t a lot of Trekkies at my school, but in 1975 when I went to a camp for what we used to call “gifted” kids, I met people who made my fandom look mild. The other kids had all the books, including the novelizations of all the episodes by James Blish, and we sat around looking at them and talking about Trek whenever we had free time.

So I ended up collecting all the stuff, too, and it didn’t wear off. In high school when I got my first computer (a TI-994A), the first thing I did was program a Star Trek game that I made up.

And, of course, I identified with Mr. Spock. Like other autistic people, his command of science and his adherence to logic and not emotion were a refuge. But Nimoy’s characterization did more than that, because — long before we knew much about the double-empathy problem and how autistic people are longing for connection even though we may not appear to be doing so — he portrayed Spock in a way that clearly showed he also craved human interaction.

There’s another thing I learned, which was how to be a second-in-command. When I left UNC as chancellor to go to WashU as provost was right when the second JJ Abrams film came out. There’s a scene where all of the starship captains are called to Star Fleet Command along with their first officers. The visual of that put me in the right mindset to go to WashU to be a provost after spending five years as a chancellor. When people asked me how I was able to go from being a chancellor to being a provost, I used to say, “Easy. Just take off your gold Star Trek shirt, and put on your blue Star Trek shirt” (that’s when I started sleeping in one).

Spock also created the first time I heard the words “Science Officer.” Companies and countries have many science officers, but I sometimes think of my role at Science as one of those (among many), so I kept my shirt when I came to DC.

I also learned some important lessons from Captain Kirk. The main one is that if you are forced to choose, the crew of the Enterprise always comes before Star Fleet Command. The fact that I believe this has frustrated many of my bosses, and especially the boards, that I have worked for over the years, but it’s a good mantra to live by. People I work with are used to hearing me say, “Well, all we have to do is decide what’s best for the 432 crew members of the Starship Enterprise.”

LLAP

So, the call from David Knight was pretty full circle. The list of other honorees is impressive, and it’s an honor to join them in bringing attention to the work that Nimoy-Knight is doing for two of my favorite causes. There are folks who have promoted science and people who have done extraordinary work making life better for autistic folks. I’m particularly proud to join Temple Grandin and Keivan Stassun who have helped me so much on my own autism journey.

Here I am with my LLAP T-shirt and pin:

And here’s the quote that I gave to the foundation:

I’m honored to receive the “Live Long and Prosper” Tribute Award presented to me by David Knight and Julie Nimoy with the Nimoy-Knight Foundation.

As an undiagnosed autistic boy in the 1970s, Star Trek airing on weekdays at 5 pm was a focal point of every day. I collected the plans to the Enterprise, the Star Fleet Technical Manual, and all the James Blish novelizations. Leonard Nimoy created a character as Spock in which so many people like me could see ourselves. And not just in his quest for a life ruled by logic, but one in which human connection was still possible, something all autistic folks crave. He made it desirable for many of us to aspire to the title of “Science Officer.” And for those of us who have served as second-in-command, he also showed how to be deferential to leadership while calmly providing factual bases for decisions. Leonard Nimoy generously understood the effect that his character had on people, and he didn’t shy away from engaging with fans and making his own new human connections. I am so grateful to be recognized by the Nimoy Knight Foundation with the Live Long and Prosper Award and admire greatly their efforts to promote science and awareness of neurodiversity. These are goals that embody Leonard Nimoy’s generosity as a touchstone for so many people.

Live Long and Prosper, y’all.

The Scientist Network for Advancing Policy (SNAP) is a group of graduate students from around the country who have engaged in advancing science policy in addition to their research work. The students on the panel were: Miles Arnett, Erin Morrow, Alex Rich, John Patrick Flores, and Isako Di Tomassi (links are their LinkedIn profiles).

There was a lot of correct and tough medicine from the students for PIs, institutions, and scientific societies. The best summary was their characterization of the AAAS meeting as an echo chamber, and the related panels and speeches as “talk about talk.” SNAP is more focused on action and challenged everyone to think about what they were going to do on the Monday after the meeting rather than just nodding their heads in the panel and then going home and doing everything the same way.

I’ve written about a lot of things they brought up, like why PIs and institutions should give graduate students more freedom to pursue things outside of science that may better position them for careers outside of academia. Some of the most gut-wrenching moments I had as a provost were when graduate students came to my office to say that their PI had criticized them because they wanted to get out of academic science after graduating or to spend time in graduate school working on things like SNAP.

They also talked about the endless conversations in academia about the incentive structure. Institutions know how to put points on the scoreboard - grants, papers, awards, new buildings - and they’re basically built to optimize their ability to do that. PIs who don’t want their graduate students doing things like SNAP are responding to this incentive (which they should resist!). My column about this was called “Groundhog Day,” but “talk about talk” is even better.

Alex Rich also talked about the absurdity of college presidents navigating the current crisis in science without better communicating with their campuses. She sharply said, “you can’t defend the house by pretending it’s not on fire.” I’m probably more sympathetic to the presidents who need to play it carefully to protect their budgets, but I’ve also advocated for more direct communication with the campus at the same time. (Here is my piece from April where I tried to wrestle with how this could be done.)

These messages are far more compelling coming directly from the SNAP crowd rather than an old guy like me who just engages in talk about talk, so the best thing to do is watch the whole video below. A strong group of other SNAP members was in the audience to support their colleagues, so there is a lot of cheering and clapping during our panel. Below that is a summary from NotebookLM that I heavily edited.

Pretty good edited AI summary of video (but you should watch the whole thing!)

Miles Arnett, a PhD candidate at Penn and president of the Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group, described the SNAP’s mission as a dual-pronged effort to “mobilize for large-scale initiatives” and, perhaps more pivotally, to “reconnect scientists to the communities they came from and the ones they serve”. This focus on connection was a reaction to the perceived isolation of the modern researcher.

The first major spark for SNAP was the “McClintock letters” project, an op-ed campaign led by Izzy Di Tomassi and Emma Scales. After Damasi’s own advisor, a federal scientist, was fired, she observed local social media comments questioning the value of scientific work. The realization was stark: the public often has no idea what happens inside the research institutions located in their own backyards. SNAP’s response was a “lightning in a bottle” moment. They coordinated over 600 scientists to pledge to write op-eds for their hometown papers, focusing on their origin stories and why they care about their work. This resulted in over 200 published pieces across 45 states, effectively humanizing the face of science for local audiences.

The Dimming Light: Addressing the PhD Crisis

One of the most poignant moments of the plenary came from Alex Rich of Yale University, who addressed the psychological toll of modern graduate education. Rich described a “canonical” experience for PhD students: arriving with passion and brilliance, only to have that enthusiasm eroded by the systemic failures of academia. “You see over many years the light drain from a PhD student’s eyes,” Rich observed, noting that this decline is often treated as an “accepted part of the PhD”.

Rich argued that this “noise of academia”—ranging from authorship disputes and lack of mentorship to sexual harassment and the relentless pressure to publish—is “everything but the science”. When the focus shifts away from the actual research and toward navigating a broken institutional structure, the passion that drives discovery is lost. This loss is not just personal; it is a systemic failure that drives talented individuals away from the fields where they are needed most.

The Incentive Struggle: “Forgiveness, Not Permission”

A recurring theme throughout the session was the conflict between student advocacy and the traditional incentives of Principal Investigators (PIs). While some panelists, like Miles Arnett and JP Flores, praised their PIs for being supportive of their “non-lab” activities, they acknowledged that they were a “biased sample”. Many of their peers were “barred” from attending the conference or felt they had to hide their policy work to avoid being seen as “wasting time”.

Erin Morrow’s approach to this tension has become a mantra for many in the network: “I personally tend to abide by the rule ask for forgiveness not permission”. Morrow noted that even if a PI is not intentionally obstructive, they are not “incentivized” to support advocacy because the current academic system only rewards experiments and publications. Rich and Morrow argued that without a “broader change of those that incentive structure,” the cultural shift toward public engagement will remain a fringe activity rather than a core component of scientific identity.

To combat this, SNAP members are working on practical solutions like the “PI’s Guide to Science Policy”. This document aims to “legitimize” the field for senior faculty who may view policy as a distraction from “running PCRs”. The goal is to drive home the idea that understanding policy is “part of what it means to be a scientist”—a realization that must begin as early as the undergraduate years.

Defending a House on Fire

The panelists were equally unsparing in their critique of the institutions themselves. Alex Rich utilized a vivid metaphor to describe the current state of higher education: “We can’t defend [the house] by pretending it’s not on fire”. Rich argued that while universities are facing unprecedented attacks from outside actors, some of those attacks are rooted in “good faith” questions about the value and transparency of research. By ignoring the “alarms” raised by early career researchers regarding incentive structures and career preparation, institutions are neglecting the very people inside the “house”.

The critique extended to how institutions attempt to “talk” about these problems. Rich ridiculed the trend of “talk about talk series” regarding public trust in academia. She described the irony of “a bunch of academics sitting around academically talking about mistrust in academia” while the public is entirely absent from the conversation. JP Flores added that these discussions often become an “echo chamber,” where the same points are repeated without any “actionable thing” resulting from them. Flores challenged the audience to think about what they would actually do on Monday morning—whether they would change their behavior or simply share quotes from the conference.

A New Blueprint for Scientific Societies

The panelists also addressed the role of scientific societies like AAAS. While acknowledging the importance of leadership and “clarity” during times of crisis, they noted a disconnect between the “email inbox” of a society and the “community” of the lab. Miles Arnett pointed out that when a crisis is met with “silence” or statements that are “out of step with reality,” societies lose credibility with their members.

The solution proposed by SNAP is “co-design”. Rather than top-down initiatives, societies should tap into the energy of grassroots organizations to create “open access material” and build infrastructure together. JP Flores emphasized that the future of science is not just about the people in leadership positions who haven’t “touched a pipette” in 30 years, but about the students who are “going through it” right now. By giving a “seat at the table” to these younger voices, societies can ensure their missions align with the evolving needs of the workforce.

The Future: Unmuzzled and Action-Oriented

Looking ahead, SNAP is not slowing down. Their current initiatives include “Stance on Science,” a nationwide effort to ask candidates for public office specific questions about science policy from the perspective of early career researchers. They are also developing an open-access science policy course and hosting “hackathons” at various institutions to solve policy-related problems.

As the session drew to a close, JP Flores offered a final, stirring reminder to the plenary audience. He gestured to the rows of SNAP members in the room, stating that “the future of science is really in this room”. He invited the leadership of AAAS to the SNAP reception to speak with these students in a more “candid” and “unmuzzled” manner. The plenary session served as a public debut for a movement that seeks to redefine the scientist as a civic actor—one who is as comfortable in a legislator’s office or a local church as they are at a lab bench.

Here is my full interview with Bill. He’s a wordy professor, but there is a lot of really interesting stuff based on his deep scholarship. When you get to the end, you’ll see that his solution is more cooperation, not less, because, as he says, “the US cannot lead alone.”

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What explains China’s extraordinary rise in biopharma?

I would say that we’re seeing both the results of very long-term developments and some very remarkable short-term developments. In the long-term, of course, over the course of the 20th century, the American universities, research universities, and particularly in the sciences rose to be the leaders of the world, the position that the Germans had been in until 1933. But we’re in a moment in which, as the Germans showed in the 1930s, it’s possible to self-destruct. We’re not self-destructing in quite the same way that the Germans did with immediate purges and unleashing a war that would destroy them physically. But the leading universities in the world probably through the 1920s, maybe eight of the 10 leading universities in the world were German.

And today it’s rare that a single German university reaches the top 50 in the world. Whereas our friends in China have five of the top 50 in the world. The Americans, of course, have much more, but we’re an increasingly declining share. That’s one general point. If you look at the American scene, we’re looking at not just this wanton attack on universities by the Trump administration, which bizarrely is targeting — because it’s the one thing that they really control — the financing of science, which is the least political area in which these universities engage, but it is targeting them and setting us back significantly. But at the same time, we are in a position to reflect on the gradual and steady defunding of science, and particularly of science and public higher education institutions over the course of more than the last three decades. If you were to look at the budgets of the great public universities, Michigan, Berkeley, University of Washington, and places also with extraordinary medical schools, out of 50 American states, 43 have disinvested per capita in public higher education since the Great Recession of 2008 and continue to disinvest.

And so we have a slow motion decline as well as a more immediate and dramatic attack. Whereas in the Chinese scene, if you’re looking at how they have risen so dramatically, on the one hand, it is very dramatic over the last 20 years and the last 30 years. On the other hand, they began a foundation of serious work in higher education and serious research also in the sciences more than a century ago for national defense purposes, and then taking a page out of both the German and American books for what they would call domestic self-strengthening, a strong foundation of small but powerful research universities before the communist takeover. The communists set them back dramatically from 1950 to the 1980s, nearly destroying the system, places like Tsinghua, which had been one of the best research universities in Asia, nearly destroyed Peking University, all of them brought to their knees in the cultural revolution.

But particularly since about 1997, an extraordinary amount of investment in higher education institution has brought them really to the forefront in so many different disciplines. So you have today, university rankings only matter up to some degree, but you have Peking University and Tsinghua University ranked globally according to QS higher than all but two of the so- called Ivy League.

And you can add to that the University of Hong Kong and very close behind that, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. And so three Hong Kong universities also in the top 50 in that regard. And this is, as you know, eight of the top 10 universities in Nature’s 2024 institutional rankings are Chinese institutions, mainland Chinese institutions. If you just look at universities, Harvard, if I’m not mistaken, is like number one and MIT is number 10 and everybody in between except the Max Planck Institutes which is not really a university, but everyone in between is a Chinese university. And the Chinese Academy of Science is bigger than everybody. And if you look at your own journals, China, what is about 2022 overtook the US for its contribution to natural science journals tracked by the Nature Index and only a slight blip during the COVID years, but returning an even more powerful upward trajectory after that.

For us, for Science, which is the most selective, we expect China to pass the US probably in the next three or four years. And for Science Advances, which is kind of our next level down in terms of selectivity, Chinese papers are already passing the US.

So if you were to go to that bizarre domestic ranking operation, the US News and World Report, the old news magazine that found a new lease on life by inventing the rankings game. So according to US news, in the top 10 global universities for computer science, number one, of course, Tsinghua. Top Global University for material science, Tsinghua. Top Global University for Engineering, Tsinghua. It’s not by accident, and it’s not just money. It’s also an ecosystem in which they encourage their very best and brightest after college to test themselves against the best in the world by going to American, European, Japanese doctoral programs. Just like in the late 19th century, you could not get a professorship in several leading American universities without having studied in Germany. You can’t get a job in a leading Chinese university and still largely cannot without an international PhD from a prestigious place in the highest ranked of those universities. And so they are encouraging international engagement, international partnerships.

It’s kind of infamous for all the wrong reasons, but tou remember the so-called Thousand Talents Program, which has recruited many more than a thousand people, but it’s basically doing what you did at WashU, what I did when I was dean at Harvard. You recruit the best and the brightest from wherever you can.

Every university worth its salt has a thousand talents program if they can go that high, if they have the resources. It’s what universities do. And just in money, Tsinghua University, its budget is just barely behind Harvard’s. It’s annual budget, and it will soon easily surpass it.

One could just go on and on and on, but it’s a matter of long-term investment, obviously national strategy. We had a national strategy too in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and have not sustained it.

So our readers will probably know what you said about Tsinghua and where they’re number one, but I think one of the things that I’m wanting to help them understand is the rise that China has had in biomedical science. Westlake is as good a place as any, including Harvard Medical School, to do science. As Noubar points out in his article, a third of in-licensed drugs in the US are licensed from China now. So do you have any insight into how they also made this huge surge in medicine or why materials came first?

Engineering on the whole came first, this massive number of people in STEM disciplines goes far beyond engineering and so on. And in medical science is an area of comparatively more recent rise, although with a strong foundation, China had one of the best small medical schools in the world with the founding of Peaking Union Medical College, I think in 1919 with Rockefeller Foundation assistance. And it is now basically the medical school for both Tsinghua and Paking University, but every major university itself of the top five or seven, top five anyway, have strong medical schools, but not as well known or not as internationally famous or prestigious as their American counterparts. Part of it also must have to do with the massive international cooperation, and the massive international investment by Western pharma in China.

Just like Apple.

Yeah, just like Apple. If you look at Apple, and here’s an example from a different industry. So one of my recent HBS cases is on the company Xiaomi. Xiaomi makes a phone that looks remarkable like an iPhone, and it’s a very good one, but they now make a car that looks remarkably like a Porsche, except that it’s an EV and handles even better and goes zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds. And this part is actually one thing I meant to mention earlier, a lot of the big Western pharma companies, Novartis and others, are in industrial parks in China. These are industrial parks that are established not just by the central government, but mostly by local governments competing with each other, also to be leaders in science and leaders in medicine. And so the one in Shanghai is called the Xiangshan Industrial Park.

And I remember this vividly, maybe 15 years ago, we were establishing Harvard’s first office in Shanghai, and we didn’t have a place yet. And Novartis had this new campus, and they invited me to come out to look and see if we wanted to cohabit with them for a few years. And I went out there. It was a big dusty place just being built and so on. And in honor of my coming, they tore down the last village on the site, and the dust was still settling when I got there. So I just felt awful about it and I decided not to do that, but I was just stunned at the scope of the investment there.

And in that industrial park today is Shanghai Tech, this new locally funded, Shanghai-funded public research university, which aims to be a little bit like Westlake University, the Caltech of China. And the founding president of that, a guy named Jiang Mianheng is the son of late President Jiang Zemin, the man who began the seriously huge investment in higher education in the 1990s. But you can look, you can go to outside of Zhejiang University, you can go to Wuhan University, and every city in which there’s a major university also has a high-tech park and many secondary and even tertiary cities will have high-tech parks. Duke University, I helped them start their campus there in Kunshan, and that’s in the Kunshan High Tech Park. Now that’s a liberal arts college more than anything else. But the initial aspiration, I am sure from the city of Kunshan was would be a science-forwarded university. And it will be strong enough in science, but it’s not going to be a major player in the same in quite the same way. But that’s a local initiative. And if you look at almost every industry in which China is a leader today, and higher education is among them, you have both national priorities and local competition leading their rise to the top. There are 1150 or so, maybe 130 today, electric vehicle companies in China, every one of them competing to be one of the five or 10 winners at the end of the day of a ruthlessly competitive internal operation. Competing universities today in China compete in the way that American universities compete for talent, but even in many cases, more ruthlessly.

So that’s part of the story as well.

And so my next question is, given all this, why aren’t we having a Sputnik moment in the US? I mean, there’s the attacks on science for the administration, but in 1945, people were scared because the Nazis almost got the bomb. In the 50s, they were scared because the Russians launched the rocket. Now China, which is overtaking us on all these things, and it’s hard to get it to register with the American public.

It is remarkable. I’m working right now on the draft outline of a potential book called, Why Are We So Afraid of China? And what’s remarkable under the Trump administration, we’ve gone from a bipartisan paranoia about everything China to a kind of ... Yes, you demonize it now and again, but you basically are showing no sustained response to it. And I think part of it is the rise, if you can look at almost every area, whether it’s universities, of course, if you look at electric vehicles, you look at industries in which China has just dominated solar, drones and so on, the American response is occasionally to demonize it, but with the exception of some areas of the Biden administration, like in semiconductors and so on, not a serious collective effort to compete. You have some efforts by the part of Congress to restrict our cooperation with China, as you know, in universities, to restrict Chinese graduate students.

And on the one hand, Duke has been told that they should close their campus in China, which they’re not going to do, but there’s no serious response of what we do at home. I think it’s a sense of they’ve won in many of these areas, and there’s not a sense that these are areas in which we actually can win despite the rhetoric. We have a sense of paranoia about China, but a sense of an inevitability of American decline and nowhere more obvious in the funding of higher education and the funding of research with no leadership in this regard. And you won’t expect it from this administration, but it’s remarkable how little there is even on the part of meeting supporters of science funding in Congress.

You have a moment in which a lot of people feel politically cowed in this country as well, but I don’t know if you have a better explanation than that.

So let’s say, yeah, they won on engineering and the areas we’ve been talking about. They probably haven’t won yet when it comes to medicine, but it’s close and they’re going to. So they’re going to, if there aren’t changes in the US, or maybe it’s already too late. I mean, that’s debatable. So what would be the sort of cultural argument to say, oh, but the US has, we have the innovators, we have the IP protection, we have the ... Is there an argument for how the US is going to sort of be okay economically anyway?

Our approach has been to condemn them and to limit cooperation. The likely operation, the likely takeaway is that is to actually, first of all, to take several pages out of China’s playbook, develop an enduring industrial and investment policy that invests in universities, R&D, workforce development, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure, all of that. China’s government sector spent twice as much as the US federal government to support R&D in 2023.

Elite Chinese universities have twice the amount of government funding compared to their American peers, and this is before the advent of the Trump administration, but money isn’t everything. And we have led the way by being open at our universities, in particular by open to scholars from all parts of the world, and we have to remain open, and actually we need to cooperate more, not less with China and elsewhere. And any American university that isn’t open to talent from every part of the world, in particularly China, India, is going to be on a glide path to decline. Our response to China’s technological rise can’t rely on sanctions, blacklists, visa restrictions, and tariffs. It should be defined instead by strategic investment, openness, and confidence somehow in our own capacity to lead. But at the end of the day, and this is the big takeaway from that, to me, from the Biden years where every confrontation with China was the one in which we have to win.

We can’t lead alone. We have to be realistic and to accommodate. Why do we have to win a semiconductor war? Why should we resist advanced Chinese technology and electric vehicles, energy, and infrastructure? A policy of containment, which is still there in part, not only doesn’t limit China’s progress, but we have to work with China to advance a model on selective engagement, managed coexistence, and real cooperation where it makes sense to us.

Perhaps one of the most stunning findings of late is that one-third of the drugs licensed by US pharmaceutical companies are compounds from China. What’s surprising about this is that many Western scientists realize that China now dominates rankings in fields like engineering and materials science, while the US still leads in life sciences. For those of us who believe that knowledge is a public good, the success of China in the life sciences is to be commended, and the logical solution is de-risked collaboration. But given the bipartisan description of China as an adversary by the US government, it is surprising not to see a more carefully articulated response. The National Institutes of Health did not respond to a request for comment for my column.

One of the industry leaders sounding the alarm is Noubar Afeyan, the leader of Flagship Pioneering. Flagship starts biopharma companies from scratch with a novel model that is different from traditional venture capital. In his annual letter, Afeyan called for more aggressive support for the scientific method and recognition of the intense competition the US is facing. I interviewed Afeyan for my column, and the full Q&A is below.

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Why did you decide to make such a bold statement right now?

The last few years, the annual letters have been more about the environment and then I wrote about poly intelligence last year, which was kind of a different way to think about how AI and nature and humans will interact. And I think in this year, especially in the last few months, it’s become increasingly clear that however we look at it, it’s not just isolated to one technology, one science, one institution. There is this underlying doubt being cast on the process by which the output comes. And so while any one of these lines of criticism to vaccines or technologies seems in an isolation specific to that, if you add it all up, it really does create a really tough environment for the science and the science output, which impacts society through our industry biotechnology, and for that matter, many others.

So I thought that it was important to point that out. It really does feel to me, holding 39 years into doing startups in the science technology arena, as a moment poised for the unexpected in the positive sense of the word by virtue of where we’re seeing with AI giving humans capabilities we just didn’t have. And so the two together, let alone China with a competitive, increasing competitive presence that is very much doubling down on the outputs of the scientific method and the scientific enterprise, that we thought this needed to be put out there for debate.

I’m really interested in the rise of Chinese biotechnology and the inability of the US to respond to it, or in some cases even be aware of it. You’ve got a lot of this in the letter, but tell me some of the high points of how China is rising in pharmaceutical science and biotech.

Well, it’s really doing what the US has done for decades, which is to essentially in a consistent, somewhat longer term kind of way, commit to excellence in science. They obviously have a great education system plus people who are coming back from US and European institutions to together create the human capital. I think that the ability for them to collect data and make it available is giving an advantage to a lot of the AI activities and model training. In the letter, we mentioned they are allowing people to do physician-sponsored trials very quickly, there’s a massive advantage in getting some human data, which as you know, is the determinant of business development interest often.

Often you have to try to attract partnerships with pharma by showing animal data and by kind of hoping that investors will come in early and then help the biotech companies along [to eventually get data from humans]. Now, [China is] coming with similar molecules developed quite rapidly, but then with human data. I would say that’s an advantage that should be emulated. And I know that the FDA has talked a bit about figuring out how they can stay competitive with that without obviously creating any safety concerns. Those are some of the examples, but there just seems to be a clear moment in acceleration that happens to coincide with what I see as a deceleration or certainly a lot of uncertainty being created with cuts in academic funding, cuts in immigration policies or visas and all the other things that I mentioned.

In 1945, the US was were able to rally the public around American science because the bomb won the war in a lot of people’s minds and the Nazis almost got one. In the ‘50s, the same thing happened with Sputnik. We’re at a similar moment. This is a Sputnik moment with China in many ways, but why do you think the US isn’t responding in the same way?

The moment is being cast as skepticism about one or another piece of science, but I think that there is, from a political ideology standpoint, seemingly greater doubts about the scientific enterprise and therefore the scientific process, which is embodied in that enterprise, as though there’s another way we can arrive at the these objective truths. I believe we’ve relied upon an approach that said, “You don’t have to believe my data, my output, you can try to replicate it, but if you have another set of data that I need to take into account, present it in that way.” What’s happening is much of the discussion has become a large body of data-driven argumentation counteracted by data-less argumentation or sparse data that doesn’t stand up to the same rigor.

And you might say, “What does that have to do with why aren’t we jumping to this public moment?” I think that it’s being somewhat undermined by this doubt that’s been infused into the system, which, as I write in the letter and I thought long-believed, science is an activity of organized skepticism. It is kind of a collective process that from which the then truth can emerge and then can be revisited. That’s not being followed in a lot of the discussion. Ultimately, we got to a good place with tobacco. Ultimately, we got to a place with a number of environmental contaminants. There was a healthy debate, there is still some on climate, but if you can kind of approach this in a way that you could dismiss science behind things and set policy based on other considerations, somebody has to rise and say, “Look, we’re going to really hurt ourselves through this process,” but it hasn’t happened.

Obviously, my letter and those activities of others are attempting to create this awareness and I’m hoping that folks who are in the policy world would take this issue up and either put forward an alternative view, an alternative way to settle the facts other than science scientific method, or we should agree that this is a real growing concern, and take some proactive steps to strengthen our position here. I think there’s a lot of strengthening of the American position being discussed. We’re seeing it in AI with a lot of expenditures, but I don’t see that in science and the scientific output.

And so if the US got the message, what would be the first set of things that they would do in response to what you’re saying?

We have to undo the indiscriminate cuts in funding of basic and applied research and academia. Congress has been pushing back, but the notion that you would even put forward these massive, massive cuts as though the whole process is kind of not essential to many of the things we’re talking about here and many needs we have in health, human health and many other activities [is unacceptable]. I think that some of it is to kind of revisit that and understand how these things are tied together. And so funding is an important element of it. I think that restricting the talent from coming to this country and adding to what has always been a melting pot of ever stronger, ever more devoted people who want to join the US kind of scientific enterprise. I think that is doing damage to ourselves and I think that should be for sure revisited.

And for the policy makers and the administration, what’s their theory? I mean, if you say, China’s putting these many more medicines on the market and a third of the licensing deals are now Chinese products and they’re going to pass us, what would their theory be as to why it’s going to come out okay? Why do we not need to worry about that? Is there something special about America and how we’re going to be able to adapt to this or something? Like what’s the theory?

I’m a self-professed paranoid optimist, which is how I think you have to be in the startup innovation world. So the optimist part of me believes that they do not deeply recognize the impact these levels of multiple fronts of attack are having to the underlying scientific enterprise, and that there will be some realization driven adjustments and that it isn’t like there is an alternative theory. And if there is one, I really hope my letter and discussions around it can reveal what that might be. I also think that there is an anti-expertise, anti-kind of institutional authority element to the thinking that has been espoused in various circles.

This is not just to me the administration. There are ideologies out there that people who are professing saying a lot shouldn’t be trusted, shouldn’t be followed. And that contrarian view of scientific authority, if I may, is being debated. And I think that’s in the scientific method, that’s a healthy debate in the sense that everybody should be able to express their views and back it up with facts, but if you don’t have to back it up with facts, then it becomes the realm of politics, not science nor political science. So I think that’s kind of the way I see it, and I’m hoping that people realize that we’re doing damage to our own self-interest in the US.

I can imagine them saying, “Oh yeah, but America will be better at commercializing it.” We’re the ones who have the intellectual property (IP) protection and the ability to put the financial resources behind these assets. And so if the drugs are invented in China, that’s not the end of the world. Do you think there are people who think that?

Let me put it this way, in starker terms: we are seemingly wanting to bring back to the US manufacturing jobs as it relates to the ingredients of low cost drugs, which has been previously outsourced to China. Everybody got alarmed that, “Oh my God, we don’t control our own supplies of drugs. We’ve got to control it.”

In this process, we’re now outsourcing high paying innovation jobs and IP creation jobs. In our industry, the manufacturing of the IP, and I’m using those words carefully, the manufacturing of the IP is a far more profit generating, long-term value generating and constantly improving on itself portion of the enterprise than is the manufacturing of the input ingredients. So the trade we’re making of insourcing, frankly, well, manufacturing jobs and outsourcing innovation jobs is, in my view, not economically sensible.

• Laptops in the classroom

• CD-ROMs for general chemistry and related classes

• Moving class registration onto the internet

• Making figures for scientific papers using Photoshop

• Massive-open online courses (MOOCs) like Coursera and EdX

• Moving scientific journals online

• Integrated HR/finance/accounting systems like Workday

• Electronic health records like Epic

I have been involved in implementing every single one of these in one way or another, either doing it myself as a faculty member or overseeing and paying for these things as an administrator. Every single time, the salespeople convincing me about this stuff told me I would be able to do more and save money because less human effort would be required. Every single time, they were half-right. I could do more, but I spent a lot of money implementing them all (all the way up to 100s of millions for Epic and Workday), and I needed even more people to make sure the systems were working properly and to take advantage of all of the new capabilities.

In some cases, the effects of these cycles have been very damaging. The University of Virginia famously fired their president because she wasn’t adopting online courses fast enough. Within a few years, MOOCs would be an add-on to higher education at best. Fortunately, the faculty saw through this and she got her job back. The move of scientific publishing online was supposed to eliminate journals, but it only made commercial publishers bigger and more profitable. And integrated systems like Workday and Epic have allowed people to do tasks they must do, but the number of jobs in university accounting and health care administration has only increased.

Here they come again

And now the salespeople are showing up with their AI wares. Tools for everything under the sun. I can’t possibly answer all the LinkedIn messages from the next person with the tool that will not only change my life, but save it from the coming apocalypse. (Also, I don’t answer these, so sorry for those I’m ghosting.)

This week, I’m out with a column about how this plays out for Science in 2026.

Like everything, AI is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s leading to a degradation of the scientific literature as bad summaries and AI overviews lead people in the wrong direction, bad AI images and text show up in papers, incomplete scientific review carried out by AI leads to stuff getting through, and worse.

On the other hand, it can be used to make scientific papers better. We have long used it to look for text plagiarism, and now we can use it to catch more altered images and to make sure that adequate supporting data are posted with papers; check out this excellent blog from Valda Vinson and Lauren Kmec about how we are doing that. But all of these improvements have cost money. The software has to be licensed, the reports have to be analyzed by humans, and the problems that are turned up all have to be dealt with. Yes, these tools are making our papers better, but they are not saving money! I know because I have to ask for the resources to pay for all of this.

This time is different - (ha)

When I explain my skepticism to AI zealots, I often hear that “this time is different.” I’m conditioned never to believe this statement. Why would the whole history of technology suddenly change? I believe AI will change jobs, and I’m confident it will make many lower-paid workers’ lives worse by increasing surveillance. But I’m going to stay skeptical that knowledge work will be less expensive until I see hard evidence of that.

In the meantime, human-curated science is getting more important, not less. As AI turns the existing literature to secondary mush and generates even more primary mush, we’re going to keep our heads down and publish papers that we are willing to stake our human selves behind.

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I have no trouble falling asleep but as I’ve aged, I wake up at night and often can’t go back to sleep. And I have an autistic brain that loves details. So most gear for sleeping more makes it worse for me. I wake up and can’t wait to see what my gadget has to say about how I’m doing. Did I get an hour of deep sleep? (I did it enough times that I now know the answer is usually yes, so goodbye Oura ring.) I’m going to describe something much simpler that has helped me and maybe it will help you.

Bargaining with the sleep gods

If you’re above a certain age like I am, you wake up during the night, sometimes more than once. I remember being young when this didn’t happen. What a time that was. It was a long time ago. Then I went into a period where I woke up and then went back to sleep without any trouble. When that first digit of my age changed from a 5 to a 6, suddenly the interregna started getting longer and often I couldn’t go back to sleep. The worries of the next day and the things I had to do could outcompete my ability to go back to sleep.

If you google any semi-legit page about what to do about this, the first thing you will get is “don’t look at the time!”. Good advice. When you’re awake at 1:30, you’re bargaining with the gods of sleep about how “if I can just get a couple more hours, I’ll be OK.” Or, “what is wrong with me that I woke up so early?” If it’s 4:30, then you’re wondering about whether to go ahead and get up. Etc. Might as well start the coffee.

So, resolving to follow this advice, the next night you put a pillow on top of the alarm clock, but that doesn’t work either because many of us still want to know if it’s OK to get up when we wake up. The problem here is that a regular alarm clock is good at telling you when to wake up, but it’s really bad at telling you when to go back to sleep. For me, there’s a time when I’m OK getting up but which I would also love to sleep past. My sleep goal is 7 hours and I usually fall asleep around ten, so that time is 5 am. Sure, I’d love to sleep later, but if I make it to 5 am, I’m OK getting up, especially since I’m finishing a book. (If you’re 30 years old, I know this is hard to understand but just wait.) So, I don’t want to set the alarm at 5, but I might want to know when I wake up if it’s 5 am yet. Also, my wife is a much better sleeper and I try not to disturb her, so setting the regular alarm for 5 is out.

Enter the reverse alarm clock

Remember these?

You might recall that before everything in our houses was connected to the internet, we used these analog devices to set a light in the living room to turn on and off to make it look like we were at home. You can still buy them cheaply online. The reverse alarm clock is one of these connected to something that dimly lights up. For me, it’s set at 5 am. And I use my Kindle, since it’s next to my bed, anyway, and has a pretty subtle power light. Plenty of other small lights will do the trick as long as they are not bright enough to wake you up.

If I wake up before 5, the light isn’t on. I can go back to sleep knowing it’s not a good time to get up while most of the time not thinking about what time it is and beginning to bargain with God. If the light is on, I can go back to sleep if I can and want to, but can also get up knowing I’m not in terrible shape. All of this happens usually without waking up my spouse. If I need to get up at a later time, I can set the regular alarm clock for that.

Since I started doing this, I’ve been going back to sleep more often. Your Oura ring has a lot more cool technology in it, but this may do you more good. If you wake up and can’t go back to sleep a lot, you might want to give it a try.

And if you’re young enough to sleep until your regular alarm clock goes off, enjoy it while it lasts.

Happy New Year.

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Three have to do with China and/or the debate over whether the US can build things the way they do and how much our inability to do that will matter in the long run. Apple in China by Patrick McGee explains how exporting technology to China for their superior and less costly manufacturing has led to geopolitical and economic dangers, similar to those that have accrued through the transfer of solar energy and lithium battery technology. For folks who know a lot about the story, Apple in China may seem a bit simplistic, but McGee does a nice job of laying out the story from the very beginning of Apple, and I was enthralled by the whole thing.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson captured the political zeitgeist on the center-left more than any other book this year. So much has been said about it on podcasts that there’s not a lot that can be added except that it tells the aspect of the story to Apple in China, which is why the US must outsource the manufacturing to begin with. Our inability to make hard choices and overcome political objections has made it harder for the US to build housing and to compete in science, among other topics.

My favorite of the three is Breakneck by Dan Wang, which is a sequence of “letters” that lay out the differences between China as an engineering state and the US as a lawyerly state. China can do things big and fast while the US struggles to overcome its policies and politics to do the same things. While it’s common in science right now to look enviously at China and the massive investments being made, the high appreciation for science by the government, and the speed with which it all can be implemented, Wang lays out reasons why the US might win in the end. On which country is better positioned for the future, Wang says:

Beijing has been taking the future dead seriously the past four decades. That is why China will not outcompete the United States. The engineering state has delivered great things. But the Communist Party is made up of too many leaders who distrust their own people and have little idea how to appeal to the rest of the world. They will continue to bring literal-minded solutions for their problems, attempting to engineer away their challenges, leaving the situation worse than they found it. Beijing will never be able to draw on the best feature of the United States: Embracing pluralism and individual rights. The Communist Party is too afraid of the Chinese people to give them real agency. Beijing will not recognize that the creatives and entrepreneurs it is chasing into exile are not the enemy. It will not accept that their creative energy could bring as much prestige to China as great public works.

It feels right now like we are exiling talent in the US, also, but Wang’s point is that based on our history, the US is more likely to get back to a footing we once had than China is to get to a footing it has never had.

Here are a few others, most of which are on plenty of other lists.

Miracles and Wonder by Elaine Pagels. My favorite of the year. As an Episcopalian who has no trouble accepting the secular description of the scriptures and how the events of the New Testament may or may not have happened, I’m a big fan of Pagels’ books. This is a synthesis that brings together a lot of her earlier works into a cohesive picture of Jesus’ story. If you’re like me and want to dig into all of the possibilities, this is a great read, but I also think if you’re more of a believer who wants to understand the historicity of the scriptures, this is a great way to get it. (If you’re a very strong believer, you may find it sacrilegious.) Pagels is an engaging writer who brings a lot of personal narrative to the story to push it along.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. If you’re one of almost all of us who are stuck with using and studying social media to make our way in the world, this is a fun one. Very juicy and scandalous stuff about the Facebook brass.

Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp. I grew up in Fayetteville, NC where most of this book takes place. My first jobs were all in theater and music on the Fort Bragg base, and I rode my bike through many of the neighborhoods where some grim things in this book happened. Harp deals with the challenge of training people to be killers and then bringing them home when many of them are crippled by violent instincts, addiction, and PTSD. I grew up with all of this in a big way. He makes a compelling case that the military brass knows how dangerous it is but considers it an acceptable cost of having a capable military. Was hard for me to know how much people would like this book if they didn’t grow up with it all like I did, but it has been pretty well acclaimed.

John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie. Hard for me to top a review written by the great T Bone Burnett, which is here. But having read more Beatles books than most, I’d put this up there, not quite, with the definitive tome by Bob Spitz but within striking distance. The book is organized by song, which is a good way to tell the story of the partnership. I kind of started doubting the premise towards the end when Leslie makes the case that seemingly every song from their solo careers is about the love/regret relationship between Lennon and McCartney. But the first 80% of the book is pure joy.

Tonight in Jungleland by Peter Ames Carlin. It was a big year for bios of the Boss. I read Tonight in Jungleland, which is about the making of Born to Run along with the earlier Deliver Me from Nowhere, which is about the making of Nebraska. The latter was the basis for the movie of the same name. Both books are mainly about the partnership between Bruce Springsteen and Jon Landau, which, like Lennon/McCartney, is one for the ages and gave us amazing music. Loved reading both books, and only liked part of watching the movie, which had two standout performances from actors named Jeremy that weren’t enough to overcome the drag of a predictable romance that was manufactured for the narrative. So if you were disappointed by the movie and wanted more about the partnership and the music, both of these books are a good remedy.

How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto. This is a couple of years old, and someone just suggested it to me this year. I don’t read many novels, but this was hilarious and a stinging indictment of sexism and power dynamics in academic science. A good departure from all the difficulties (or at least an opportunity to laugh at them).

Finally, if you’re like me and skeptical of all the AI hype, I recommend The AI Con by Emily Bender. Bender takes apart a lot of the subterfuge and panic, and also lays out how bad AI is going to be for people with fewer resources in our society.

One thing AI can do, however, is make this picture of me for this column:

Enjoy. Happy Holidays.

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The Burnett Seminars are affiliated with the UNC Learning Center, which provides services to students with learning disabilities and other challenges. Over the years, the talk has been given by some great leaders and thinkers about autism and ADHD. A few years ago, my Carolina connection Eric Garcia gave the talk about his terrific book, We’re Not Broken.

A lot of people from my past showed up. So, as I said at the beginning of the talk, I’ve given this talk in front of lots of people, but not as many that I’ve known since I was 9. It was emotional at times and interesting to see some people nodding their heads about me and others thinking that they’d never noticed me having these challenges.

The format was two 45-min lectures because it qualified for some sort of credit for some people. The first talk was what I have learned so far about autism and what the science says, both about autism itself and the disagreements in the autism community. I tried to make the case that there wasn’t as much disagreement as the discourse lets on — and that these disagreements are mostly counter-productive.

Here’s the video:

In the second part, I talked about my own experience and what I think we need to move forward as a community. In particular, how those of us who have autistic traits that may or may not rise to the level of a diagnosis can manage them — and how the world can help. I express this in this diagram where we have four challenges.

1. How can autistic people and their families figure out how far to push ourselves or our children to the right level of discomfort of social interactions that would make life more fulfilling?

2. How can autistic people manage our social challenges to make this easier while remaining true to ourselves?

3. How can the world adapt to make autistic traits less stigmatizing and more accepted (and therefore make the world better for everyone!)?

4. How can we turn down the temperature in the autism community so that we can work on these things rather than fighting about labels.

Here’s the slide I came up with for this:

None of these things on the triangle can work by themselves. If all of the burden is on autistic people to figure out where they fit in and adapt, then that will just lead to more isolation — and to more people needing the support that comes with a diagnosis. If the burden is solely on the outside world to adapt, it will not lead to the fulfillment that comes with autistic people accomplishing things they didn’t expect to accomplish. So, all three points of the triangle work together.

And ironically, the arguing over what autism is and who is autistic is only going to cause more people to seek a diagnosis. Those who like to say that the mild end of the spectrum is somehow just imagining things or demanding too much are driving more people to get a diagnosis, not fewer.

It was an emotional and fulfilling day in Chapel Hill, and I was happy to be able to participate and put in a plug for the great work of the UNC Learning Center.

Still a lot to be grateful for

As we hit the holiday season of one of the most tumultuous years in the history of American science, it would be easy to feel like there’s little to be grateful for. It’s true that science has lost much in the U.S. Crucial research that addresses differences in human outcomes based on demographics has been summarily stopped . Programs that sought to give access to the scientific enterprise to those who have been systematically excluded have been eliminated. New barriers to the ability to bring talent from around the world and a generally corrosive rhetoric towards science threaten to lose a generation of scientific talent. These are all real losses that must be acknowledged and mourned—with the hope that one day they can be recovered.

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But there is still much to be grateful for. Over the course of the year, I have been invited to speak at campuses all over the country with a plea to “help cheer us up.” I don’t think of myself as an optimist, but I came to realize that the political situation has made it difficult for information to flow freely, and I can help by giving as much straight talk as possible about what is going on. (Anyone who knows me knows that straight talk is the only thing on the menu.) In the course of these travels, I have been comforted and inspired to see the great research and teaching that is still going on everywhere.

The political discourse—and its coverage in mainstream news outlets—has focused on a handful of mostly elite institutions; a general reader could easily conclude that American science is at a standstill. But getting out into the country tells a very different story. At the great public universities that do most of the research and teaching in the United States—and the private universities that are less in the news—the work forges ahead. And this is because dedicated faculty, staff, and students are keeping calm and carrying on in spite of the noise. These scientists and educators join a long tradition of people who continued to seek the truth even when external forces tried to stop them. It is inspirational to see these folks continue to probe the wonders of nature and create a scientific workforce that will sustain us.

I’m also inspired by the people of the United States who continue to support science. It’s easy to say, based on the political rhetoric, that all support for science has been lost, but surveys show that overall confidence in scientists to act in the best interest of the country remains high. And while the president’s proposed budget had draconian cuts to the science agencies, Congress is attempting to restore those cuts in a bipartisan way. That would only happen if the support from their constituents was strong.

Mary Woolley, the outgoing president of Research!America, has great advice for scientists who struggle with answering a member of the general public that asks about what they do. She says we just need four words: “I work for you.” This is a reminder that ultimately, all of us who work in the scientific enterprise in the U.S. do so thanks to the support of taxpayers. If we can flip the script and make it clear that we’re serving them, support can be strengthened.

Despite all the challenges, it’s an honor and a privilege to do science under the employment of the American people. As we correctly mourn our losses and acknowledge the pain, we should also remain grateful to those who are soldiering on and those whose support makes it possible.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief, Science

Ed asked me to be the keynote speaker at his inauguration, and I got a chance to work through some of these things. My remarks start at 42 min in, and text is below. Stay for Ed’s speech - fearless presentation of the challenges facing higher education and the road ahead.

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Hello, everybody!

Congratulations to the people of John O’Leary University!

Actually, although I think it’s still called Saint Louis University in some circles, my soul IS on fire and I hope yours is, too..

What a happy day this is for us all.

And congratulations to President Feser and Kathy.

In our line of work we have a saying, any day you put your robe on is a good day.

Today is one of those days.

Ed and Kathy, since you got here, you probably have felt the need to correct people on several things. Now that isn’t a good way to win friends and, Lord knows, you need a lot of friends. So, I’m going to save you some trouble and maybe some heartache. Here are the answers to some of the questions you have of St. Louisans. The questions themselves should be obvious.

Yes, we know it’s not really an Amoco station.

Yes, we know that a cracker with cheese whiz on it isn’t actually pizza.

Yes, we know we are not pronouncing Creve Coeur and DeBaliviere correctly.

And yes, we know you can now get a reservation at Pastaria.

It wasn’t always this way, so don’t take it for granted.

I understand you have had many common adventures for new presidents. Like Bob who works at Chaifetz asking if you had any proof that you were the president before he let you in.

Or the student parked in your parking place who – when you asked him to move – told you to be careful because the president sometimes parks there.

Don’t worry, they’ll figure it out.

And you’ve probably figured out that you work with a lot of priests. Remember that they have a very different job from you. And that may be difficult, because there are four ways in which your jobs are very similar.

1. You visit the sick.

2. You ask your congregation for money.

3. You occasionally put on a robe and stand in a pulpit and try to say something inspirational.

4. Everyone thinks they know how to do your job.

I’m going to come back to #4 in a minute, but first, here are some things about Ed.

Red Bluff to Corvallis

Ed Feser grew up in the west in national parks where his father was a ranger. He was born in Canada because it was the closest hospital to their Montana cabin in Glacier National Park.

They got their groceries by snowmobile.

After a stop in Olympic National Park, the Fesers moved to Lassen Volcanic National Park where Ed attended a two-room schoolhouse in Mineral, CA. There he developed his appreciation for access to education.

Ed was drawn to Jesuit values at the University of San Francisco where he learned the benefits of Catholic higher education in the college classrooms and the nave of St. Ignatius Church.

He learned what it means to have a university and a city truly connected.

He met Kathy on a semester abroad, and when they came back, his friends wondered how a city boy from California was dating a country girl from Georgia.

They had it backwards – Kathy is from Atlanta, Georgia. Ed is from Red Bluff, CA.

In 1980, the population of Red Bluff was 10,000 people.

Ed and Kathy went to Chapel Hill where he got his PhD and joined the faculty in City and Regional Planning.

One of his colleagues was some smart aleck who was raising hell in the chemistry department.

That was me.

From Chapel Hill, Ed and Kathy moved to the University of Illinois where he rose up the ranks to interim provost before moving back to his roots in the west to be the provost of Oregon State University.

Jane Lubchenco is an Oregon State faculty member who has served the United States on environmental issues in two presidential administrations, including as the director of NOAA. I asked her if she had anything about Ed I could share in this talk.

She did.

“Ed was the most amazing Provost I’ve ever known,” she said. “He’s the consummate, inspiring leader. He’s able to make tough decisions with everyone on board or at least respecting the decision. He makes change possible when it’s needed -- and does so at the speed of trust. He earns trust. He listens -- and is always thinking about what’s best for the people of the institution. These traits would be valuable in any age, but they are particularly relevant today, as universities and society navigate troubled waters. He’s deeply committed to higher education and the overarching importance of creating the best possible learning, growing, thinking, and discovering environment for students, faculty, and staff. Can you tell I miss him?”

We can, Jane, but sorry – Ed’s in St. Louis now.

Questions and answers

And that brings us to today. Since arriving in St. Louis -- and waiting for everyone to realize he can park wherever the hell he wants – Ed has lived up to Jane’s billing as a leader who listens while not being afraid to push forward.

And she’s right that we need that right now.

Student government president Grace LoPiccolo told me that she can tell Ed knows that SLU wouldn’t exist if the students didn’t want to come here. That he asks the right questions about the well-being of the students and how to make sure they find a way to belong.

And that’s a rare thing right now – and this gets back to my point about everyone thinking they know how to do Ed’s job.

Because despite what you might read in the press or overhear at a board meeting, universities are not hedge funds. They’re not real estate companies. They’re not sports corporations.

They’re schools.

And sorry everyone, but they’re not here for the donors. They’re not here for the board. They’re not here to chase the latest buzzwords around AI or quantum.

They’re here for the students.

The rest of us are here to support that.

All the acrimony and division that are ripping higher education apart boil down to this simple point.

And we can help. We can help by ensuring that our actions reflect the true reason that St. Louis University exists.

And by realizing that we have entrusted exactly one person with all of the information needed to decide what those actions are, particularly when those decisions are ones nobody else wants to make.

I promise you from experience that he already knows things about this place that NONE of us wants to know. So, since we don’t have that information, it’s better to mostly give him support and occasionally give him advice rather than the other way around.

Fortunately, we can do that with someone who won’t forget what he learned in the desert of Red Bluff or the pews of St. Ignatius.

Which means SLU doesn’t have to hire consultants to run an offsite with butcher paper to find our North Star, core values, or mission statement.

It’s right there in the apostolic preferences and the Sermon on the Mount.

And in Jesus as a 12-year-old boy sitting with the rabbis for three days, listening and asking questions.

“Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.”

These twin ideals of compassion and knowledge propel us forward to a more equitable and loving future.

President Feser is prepared to lead us there with his own Jesuit education and his stellar record of academic accomplishment.

And because he knows that in the long run, it’s not the university presidents, politicians, and business executives that will lead us out of the caustic world we are currently living in. It’s certainly not the podcasters and the pundits (by the way, that’s me).

It’s the people who actually talk to folks and understand them. Who get their hands dirty and meet people where they are.

It’s the family practitioners, the clergy, the social workers, the nurses, the schoolteachers, and the civil rights lawyers.

“For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.”

It is not the influencers or the power brokers but those who tend to the least of these who will lead us.

And Ed Feser is going to make sure that we’ll teach those people here.

We’ll teach them in the liberal arts tradition and the academic principles of knowledge and free inquiry.

We’ll teach them in the ideals of a Galilean rabbi who was not afraid or ashamed to touch and be seen with those marginalized by disease, poverty, and injustice.

We’ll teach them in the Jesuit traditions of compassion and higher purpose.

And we’ll teach them in this amazing and crazy city of mispronounced French words where barbecue is inexplicably made from a cow.

We will do these things because Ed Feser has spent his life learning and defending these traditions and ideas.

Because he didn’t come here by accident.

And because Ed Feser is not the president of just any university. He’s the president of SAINT LOUIS University.

People of St. Louis and Saint Louis University: welcome your new president.

Ed Feser.

Congratulations to us all!

I was honored they asked me to be on a special episode about autism. I was on with Jennifer Phillips and April Robinson, both moms of children with autism who believe that their children became autistic after vaccination with their MMR vaccine. Also on was Rachael Bedard, who is a physician and writer and did an excellent episode of the Ezra Klein show that asked the question “Is MAHA the wrong answer to the right question?” Highly recommend. Rachael also just had a piece in the NY Times arguing for why Casey Means should not be confirmed.

Since I started talking to people in the leaders in the autism world, I came to realize that the conflicts in the autism community are very similar to the conflicts that we have in many other realms, including over science and academia in the US. The main conflict is whether the “real” autism describes people with high support needs and an intellectual disability (sometimes called profound autism) while those of us with lower support needs just have eccentric personalities. Or, the “real” autism is the whole spectrum, all one thing from eccentricity to impairment.

As someone who reads the science and talks to a lot of these folks — and as an autistic person who takes things very literally — my view is that both camps are right and both camps are wrong. It’s true that many traits are conserved across the entire spectrum, so the autism-is-all-one-thing group is correct about that. But it is also true that different subtypes can be seen in the genetics, so the advocates for profound autism as a separate category are correct that there are differences. However, the low support needs group also has a real genotype and phenotype, which means that trivializing it as all in our heads doesn’t work, either.

This is a very literal reading of it all where the current scientific evidence is prioritized. But I’ve learned from talking to people across the spectrum that their experiences are also real — and so are mine. Sometimes when I worry I might be imagining the whole thing, something surfaces from my past that brings it all back. Recently, a reporter at the News and Observer dug up a quote from me that was in the Charlotte Observer in 1982 when I was 18 and had just won a Rubik’s cube contest where I said, “I say the colors over and over in my head.” I certainly had no idea about autism or Asperger’s or anything else then, but that statement was waiting for me this whole time. Or recently when I was interviewing a famous autism expert, he commented on my “very direct questions” and that I “didn’t try to sweeten the pill.”

Similarly, the experiences that others have with autism are equally real and valid. And that includes parents who are taking care of children and then adults who have severe challenges. If they see their baby change when they get a vaccine, I could try to explain to them that there’s no evidence that it was the vaccine or that there is no plausible mechanism by which that could happen. But it would be pointless. Better to try to convince them that I am truly looking for the truth and to hope that one day they will want to ask me about it.

During the podcast, the public health scientist (Maggie) talked forcefully about how none of the research credibly supports what RFK and the MAHA movement is saying about vaccines. I said I agree, but elaborated further:

I think there’s another important issue here, which is that scientists prioritize scientific information. To us, that’s the most important information. But it’s not the only information and knowledge in the world.

There’s people’s experiences, there’s sociology, there’s politics, there’s religion. So we’re always making what to us seems a perfectly logical — but some people see as arbitrary — decision that we’re prioritizing scientific knowledge over everything else. But the experiences that April and Jennifer have had are just as valid.

And when we treat scientific information as always prioritized over somebody’s experience, then that just makes people trust us less. I used to be one of the people on Twitter yelling about, oh, the science says this, what’s wrong with everybody? But over the last couple of years, I’ve realized that it’s my decision to prioritize scientific knowledge.

Some people prioritize other things. And when I criticize that, that’s what causes them to lose trust in, in this case, science. So I agree with Maggie and what she’s saying about what constitutes an excellent scientific study in this area.

But I think that has to be considered alongside the experiences of autistic people and moms of autistic people and lots of other folks as we work our way through this.

So first we need to show people we are sincerely looking for the truth before we try to explain what it is. It’s frustrating to have to do this in two stages when we are so far behind on so many things. But if someone doesn’t trust that we’re sincerely looking for the truth, then we have to do is stop trying to convince them of our view on a specific topic right off the bat. As I said in a recent post about Agnes Callard’s book Open Socrates, a debate that has a winner isn’t a sincere search for the truth. A discussion where both parties are equally happy to be right or wrong is a search for the truth. So with folks like Jennifer and April, we’re better off trying to show through our actions that we are using scientific methods to find the truth rather than invalidating their experience. That doesn’t mean we can’t say that there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism or that no mechanism exists that would allow for that. It’s just that invalidating their experience is probably not a step towards convincing them of either of those things — and maybe their experience has something to teach us.

Leaving character limits behind

As I said on the podcast, I gave up Twitter/X now nearly two years ago. I went over to Bluesky for a while but gave that up also. The level of vitriol and polarization in both places makes it impossible to search for the truth. It’s a constant debate in search of a winner - and definitely not good for my way of thinking. My decision to get out of it coincided with beginning to explore the meaning of my autism diagnosis where I found how destructive that level of acrimony can be. I was more convinced I made the right decision when the 2024 election came along, because it demonstrated that snarkily shouting scientific facts didn’t change very many minds. Admittedly, we don’t have proof that it mattered the other way, either. In fact, recent research published in Science Advances supports the idea that the nature of online debates probably doesn’t have much effect on polarization.

So not everyone agrees with me that we should broaden the tent by first demonstrating our sincerity. After the election, when I started trying to write and talk about how science and higher education need to adapt in light of the results, people on Bluesky criticized me for drawing false equivalences and complying in advance, even though I stated strongly that Science’s principles would not change. No shade on them for continuing to double down, because, hey, I could be wrong and need to be just as happy if I’m proven wrong as I would be to be proven right. The folks who are fighting back in different ways are all part of the picture. It takes a village and we all want the same thing.

Ezra Klein has laid out compellingly why in politics, the Democratic Party needs both progressives like Zohran Mamdani and moderates like Abigail Spanberger. (Trump has already shown that Republicans need supply-side conservatives and MAGA.) Similarly, science needs people who are both passionately making the case and those who are trying to engage people who haven’t come in yet. And in the autism world, folks need to band together to work on the real problems, namely support and acceptance for everyone across the spectrum, rather than arguing about the words. So we need the neurodiversity movement and the high-support-needs advocates. The way to do that is not to reflexively invalidate anyone dealing with real struggles.

Let’s find what works.

Related ideas from historian Jill Lepore

Recently, historian Jill Lepore was on David Leonhardt’s opinion podcast series about the search for a the next American story. In talking about whether some of the criticisms of universities from the right were correct, Lepore agreed that we should take stock and consider reform.

The public shaming stuff, I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control in many occasions. Do I still deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on, I think those are crucially important. But I think it just surprises me no end when people are like, well, there was really never a problem on college campuses.

I don’t know what college campuses they’re talking about. I think the place I put blame is quite different than the places that the right would put blame. I think the corporatization of higher education has been a real problem.

So I have a different understanding of what has gone wrong with higher education. But I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.

There will likely be criticism of Lepore’s points as giving in to the administration. But I agree with her that we should be willing to examine how trust has been lost if we want to have any credibility when we try to earn it back. Whether her analysis is the right one, I don’t know, but I agree that the corporatization of the university is the root of most of these challenges.

Will it matter?

There’s plenty of evidence that more civil discussions might lower animosity and improve information sharing but are unlikely to reduce polarization or political violence. But maybe that’s because it’s a long slog. Maybe the first step is to convince people who disagree with us that we’re willing to be wrong in the face of the compelling evidence to the contrary - and that we would be happy if that happened! Then we might get a chance to share the evidence with our critics in an open way. We need to find out.

And while changing from debate with winners and losers to discussions that seek the truth may not change minds, it could lead to a way for people with differences to work together on things they agree on.

Ancient Greece didn’t have social media, but Socrates says that’s the way.