Trust in Knowledge Talk: Professor Carl T. Bergstrom

Trust in Knowledge Talks

In-person event

Please join us at this event in the Trust in Knowledge Talks seminar series – a research initiative supported by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and the Research Portfolio at the University of Sydney.

Reproducibility, replicability, transparency and integrity are key attributes that enable excellence in research and research translation. Trust in Knowledge Talks promote these issues, as well as the sharing of ideas and approaches across disciplines, to enable discussion and collaboration on producing robust and reliable research across our university community.

In this Trust in Knowledge Talk hosted by the School of Psychology, we hear from guest speaker Professor Carl T. Bergstrom from the University of Washington.

About the talk

'The impediments to high-risk, high-return research’

Scientific researchers may be driven by curiosity, but they are constrained by the realities of the scientific ecosystems in which they operate and motivated by the incentives with which they are confronted. We can use mathematical models of the research enterprise to understand how scientific norms and institutions shape the questions we ask, the efficiency with which we work, and the discoveries we make about the world around us. In this talk I present a pair of mathematical models aimed at revealing why scientists are reluctant to propose and conduct high-risk research. In the first vignette we look at how peer review filters — ex ante review as for grant proposals and ex post review as for completed manuscripts — shape the types of questions that researchers pursue. In the second vignette, we develop an economic “hidden action” model to explore how the unobservability of risk and effort discourages risky research. Scientific norms and institutions are not god-given; we create and maintain them. If we can understand their consequences, we have the potential to nudge the norms and institutions in directions better tailored to our contemporary research questions and technologies.

The speaker

Professor Carl T. Bergstrom, Department of Biology, University of Washington.

Carl T. Bergstrom is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Trained in evolutionary biology, mathematical population genetics, and infectious disease epidemiology, Carl is perhaps best known for working crossing field boundaries and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. The unifying theme running through his work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies problems such as the evolution of communication, and how the process of evolution by natural selection creates the information that is encoded in genomes. In philosophy and sociology of science, his work explores how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and in turn our scientific understanding of the world; in network science, how information and disinformation flows through massive-scale networks. In epidemiology, he played a prominent role during the COVID-19 pandemic as a science communicator and developed models used to implement proactive testing programs worldwide. His work on the evolution of emerging infectious diseases illustrates the value of evolutionary biology in public health and medicine. Most recently, Carl has teamed up with Jevin West to fight misinformation online by teaching quantitative reasoning and digital literacy. Together, they coauthored Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Digital World (Random House, 2020).

Register

This in-person event will be held on Friday 17 Novembr 2023, 3-4pm at Webster Lecture Theatre in the Veterinary Science Conference Centre (B22). You will receive a reminder notification with confirmation of the room and venue details closer to the date.

Are you interested in hosting a Trust in Knowledge Talk?

Expressions of interest are welcome from any area (Faculty, School, MDI, Network) that would like to add a Trust in Knowledge Talk to an existing local seminar series or has a topic or speaker to suggest. Topics may be abstract, but seminars should focus on the implementation in a particular research area or areas.

This event is presented by the School of Psychology in collaboration with the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research at the University of Sydney.