Lateral Reading Project

This page is written as a rubric to be read from the perspective of a student.

The point of this writing assignment is to give you some practice in identifying when and how concepts from the course apply in public discourse about real-world issues, scientific or otherwise. You will find one recent article. It can be a scientific paper or from the popular press (such as a news story, magazine article, or blog post). You also find two other articles that can be contrasted with the first article, but are on the same subject/issue. You will then use three major course topics to analyze how the three articles differ from each other in the way they present the issue, and how these differences may have an influence on the reader's understanding of the issue. Your paper should be concise, being no longer than 2,000 words.

What this Project is NOT

This is not a persuasive essay of the kind you may have written in high school. It's an explorative analysis exercise. Your goal is not to argue a specific thesis about the topic of choice, but to compare the differences between arguments made by your three articles in light of course concepts. You should not have any conclusion coming in. Instead, any takeaways should emerge through the process of examining the different articles.

Structure of Your Paper

Your paper should be clearly broken down into the following sections.

Subject Summary and Brief Description of Articles

Begin your paper with linked citations of the primary article and the two contrasting articles. Follow with a brief summary of the common subject of the three articles, as well as their type (e.g. news article, op-ed, journal article, blog post) and origin (e.g. country, university, news agency), when appropriate. What question or problem are they addressing? Do the articles each suggest a resolution, recommendation, or conclusion?

Concept Application

The heart of the assignment is in contrasting the primary article with the other two articles. Do they suggest different conclusions or recommendations? What evidence or arguments did each one present to support or imply them?

Choose three major course topics (see below) to help you answer the above questions by evaluating the merits of the three articles' arguments or claims. Each of the three articles needs to be critiqued by the end of the paper, and there should be explicit comparisons between them with regards to your chosen concepts. However, you do not need to address all three articles for every one of the three concepts. Only contrast and comment where appropriate. For each topic you apply, include a brief statement of the relevant concepts, and then comment on how they relate to the effectiveness of the arguments or recommendations. Do they reveal any strengths or weaknesses of the articles?

Your three course topics might not require equal amounts of elaboration, but each needs to be applied accurately and saliently, rather than tangentially.

Proposed Resolution

Finally, you should conclude the assignment by providing a summary assessment of the articles' presentation of their common subject in light of your analysis. What takeaway might someone have reading each of the articles outside of the context of this assignment? Would that be different than yours having analyzed the articles through the lens of SSS course concepts? What would need to be changed about these articles (with regards to the course concepts) to give the reader a more complete understanding of the subject?

How to find appropriate articles?

You should choose three English-language articles which are sufficiently different from each other to allow contrast. Below are some examples of trios of articles that we think will make for a good paper, but you are not limited to these.

One scientific article, one pop-sci report from a reputable source, and one pop-sci report from a popular tabloid.
One news article on a current event and two op-ed articles advocating for different conclusions.
Two news articles on a current event from agencies with opposing political leanings and one news article from a different country.

While fringe sources (e.g. conspiracy websites) may contain many violations of course concepts, we recommend against including articles from such sources, as their contrast with mainstream sources is so obvious as to render the assignment moot.

A good place to find different articles on the same subject is Google News, using search terms related to science, policy, or any other topics that interest you. You might also try reading through headlines and stories on major newspapers or online periodicals such as Slate or Salon. Berkeley students have free access to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. If you would like to use an article from one of these sources, there are instructions from the ASUC and Berkeley Library on how to activate your free subscription. When searching for scientific articles, it can be helpful to start by finding pop-sci reports and then seeking out the paper they're based on.

While course concepts could potentially apply to a broad range of topics and types of articles, you're most likely to find good fits for the course if the articles suggest some statements of fact or recommend courses of action. For instance, you might consider articles discussing a proposed tax cut and how it will influence the economy, or articles providing dietary or exercise recommendations based on a new study.

We prefer that you find something recent, but we will leave the definition of "recent" somewhat vague. You should aim for something written in the 2020s, but if you find a slightly older article that you would love to write about, you will not lose points because of its publication date.

Feel free to cite other sources if you think it will provide useful context for your analysis.

How to submit?

Due YYYY-MM-DD at 11:59 PM on Gradescope.

Reminder

Make sure to update due date when sharing with students.

You should submit your paper as a PDF document on Gradescope under the assignment "Project 1". At the top of the paper that you submit, you should include the URL for the articles you are discussing. If the articles are not available online, you should scan the article and include it as a PDF. Likewise, if they're only accessible behind a paywall, you should include downloads of them in your uploaded PDF.

There will be the option to assign certain pages to certain course topics when you submit. This makes the projects substantially easier to grade. You must assign these or you will receive a two point reduction in your project grade.

Which course concepts to consider?

Below is a list of the major topics we cover in this class. You may only use topics through 10.2 Blinding as that's all we will have covered by the due date of the project. By "topic" we mean the top-level bullet points. You can include any of the sub-topics as part of your discussion of that topic.

1.1 Introduction and When Is Science Relevant
- Democracy vs. epistocracy
- Facts vs. values
1.2 Shared Reality and Modeling
- Shared reality
- Raft vs. pyramid
- Evaluation of models
- Science vs. decree
- Scientific realism vs. anti-realism
- Operationalism, conventionalism, and realism
2.1 Senses and Instrumentation
- Validation of instruments through interactive exploration, triangulation with other instruments, and comparison with direct senses
2.2 Systematic and Statistical Uncertainty
- Measurement proxies as sources of systematic and statistical uncertainty
3.1 Probabilistic Reasoning & 3.2 Calibration of Credence Levels
- The value of partial and probabilistic information
- Words of estimative probability (probably, likely, definitely, etc.)
- [math]\displaystyle{ p }[/math]-values and statistical significance
- Error bars and confidence intervals
- Strategies to improve calibration of credence levels (feedback, AOT, growth mindset, etc.)
4.1 Signal and Noise & 4.2 Finding Patterns in Random Noise
- Signal-to-noise ratio
- [math]\displaystyle{ p }[/math]-hacking
- Look elsewhere effect
- Gambler's fallacy
- Hot-hand fallacy
- File drawer effect
- HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known)
- Effect size (as distinct from statistical significance)
5.1 False Positives and Negatives
- Thresholds between positive and negative detections
- Trade offs between false positives and negatives
5.2 Scientific Optimism
- Iterative progress
6.1 Correlation and Causation
- Causation as correlation under intervention
- Randomized controlled trials
- Different directions of causation
- Spurious correlations
6.2 Hill's Criteria (Causation in the Messy Real World)
- Natural experiments
- Hill's criteria for causation
- Causal networks
7.1 Causation, Blame, and Policy
- Singular and general causation
- Acts of omission vs. commission (and the omission bias)
- Status quo bias
7.2 Emergent Phenomena
- Global effects that arise through the interaction of small pieces (rather than general causation)
- Explanation at different scales
- Scientific reductionism
8.1 Orders of Understanding
- Orders of magnitude
- Multiple causes of comparable importance
- Orders of importance of causes
- Refinement of models using higher order descriptions
- Scale of impact of policies
8.2 Fermi Problems
- Fermi problems
9.1 Heuristics
- Base rate neglect
- Representativeness heuristic and conjunction fallacy
- Availability heuristic
- Bounded rationality
9.2 Biases
- Fundamental attribution error
- Conformity
- Obedience
- Temporal discounting
10.1 Confirmation Bias
- Selective exposure
- Biased assimilation
- Strategies for reducing confirmation bias (AOT, etc.)
10.2 Blinding
- Techniques for blind analysis
- Preregistration
- Registered replication
- Adversarial collaboration
- Peer review
11.1 Pathological Science
- The spectrum of poor research
- Langmuir's pathological science indicators
11.2 When Is Science Suspect
- The validity and reliability of social science metrics
- External validity
- The difficulty of creating and applying social science metrics in cross-cultural contexts
- How researchers' biases and backgrounds shape their research agendas
12.1 Wisdom of Crowds and Herd Thinking
- The Wisdom of Crowds effect removing independent biases via error cancellation
- How humans can engage in herd thinking to cluster around biased answers to group questions
13.1 Denver Bullet Study
- The Denver Bullet Study process of integrating factual analysis from experts with value ratings from different stakeholders
13.2 Deliberative Polling
- The deliberative polling process of having the general public make decisions as though they were experts
14.1 Scenario Planning
- The Scenario Planning process of predicting and responding to possible futures
- What makes good drivers to use in Scenario Planning

Grading Rubric

Category	Points
General Writing Overall, how clearly written is this paper? Are there a lot of technical/grammatical and spelling errors? Are any of the ideas worded awkwardly or unclearly? How well do the ideas flow?	2
Topic Summary and Description of Articles Is the top summary clear, accurate, and concise? Are the article descriptions?	2
Course Topics (three total) How well is the concept explained? Does it apply to the case in question, and does the student clearly explain how?	12 (4 each)
Proposed Resolution How well does the proposed resolution address the arguments identified by applying the course concepts?	4
Final Evaluation Does the final evaluation follow logically from the preceding analysis? Does the student provide some sense for which course concepts are most applicable to the articles' arguments/recommendations and why?	4
Total	24

Example Project

Havana Syndrome

Example project by Winston Yin.

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All projects

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