Bioethics' Basketball Office Pool
A friend with a sense of humor emailed the office to inform us that our friends down the Hudson hired a PR firm to promote their new
Ponder this: bioethicists are guessing about basketball.
Philadelphia Inquirer took note on its front page today of the "bioethics basketball pool" between Penn, Stanford, Albany and Michigan state. The subject was how anyone could possibly predict George Mason to enter the final four. Professor Liva Jacoby did. Caplan was apoplectic:
"No one could have predicted this," University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist Art Caplan said. He and other Penn professors participated in a March Madness pool with academics from Stanford and Michigan State Universities and Albany Medical College.
"We had a slew of nerdballs studying basketball magazines and statistics. And in the end, you could have easily won our pool by picking the cities you liked," Caplan groused.
"This is a gnawing insult on the minds of sports dweebs everywhere. It'll cause gasping and choking across the United States."
Our thoughtful, serious and measured basketball pool bookie thinker, Jason Schwartz, whose other less important work includes the Penn Ethics and Vaccines project, put the matter this way, in his summary of the likely outcome of our basketball pool:
Special kudos to AMBI's Liva Jacoby, who correctly picked George Mason to reach the Final Four, one of the biggest surprises in NCAA history. However, it should be noted that Liva's bracket also included 15-seed Davidson and 16-seed Southern in the Final Four, so something about a blind squirrel comes to mind.
Seriously.
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Special kudos to Liva Jacoby my foot. The woman is not even in contention to win the overall pool. This is just the sort of spin by those with a conflict of interest that gives independent bioethics of the sort done at Penn a bad name.
Not that it is important but and I hesitate to add this and do so only for purposes of maintaining an accurate historical record about basketball pools in American universities, I can win this pool if UCLA can beat LSU. Not that I feel slighted or anything by all this Liva Jacoby talk.....
- by Art Caplan on Mar 28, 2006 at 4:44 PM | link
A girl at work who knows nothing about college basketball picked 3 of the 4 final four teams! She had Duke losing in the first round!Needless to say that she won the pool. Unbelieveable!
- by Rebecca Taylor on Mar 28, 2006 at 10:37 PM | link
Dear Reader,
Beware! this story is written with a distinct Albany spin.
None I repeat none of the people who are still in contention to win this pool dwell in Albany. Indeed, Albany is DEAD LAST among the schools competing for the crown of 'most dweeby basketball pool experts'.
Might wanna consider a little transparency and disclosure Prof. McGee next time you opine on a critical issue such as this.
- by arthur caplan on Mar 29, 2006 at 12:30 AM | link
Ok, fine. So we can't pick basketball very well. But we did pick George Mason. I just could not have guessed SUNY Albany wouldn't make the final four. It seemed like a sure thing to me. Speaking thoughtfully.
- by Glenn on Mar 29, 2006 at 1:40 AM | link
I'm sorry, Glenn, it's my fault. I discovered over the period of the last week that I have an uncanny mutant ability that, in the future, I promise to only use for good. You see, if I not watching the game, the team I'm rooting for wins...
...but if I do watch the game, they lose.
As a UW student, I was obligated to root for the Dawgs. I was out, though, I didn't get to watch the first game, so they won. As an incoming Albany student, I had to root for them...and was home to watch the game. Then I was home for the Husky game, and well..
I promise to not watch any more UW or Albany games in the future!
;)
- by Kelly on Mar 29, 2006 at 2:30 AM | link
... and how dare Cal lose so quickly. As a Cal alumnus, however, the only thing that matters to me is that Stanford didn't even make it to March Madness. Go Bears!
- by Sean on Mar 29, 2006 at 8:47 AM | link
Hastings checking in hereGlenns friends down the Hudson. We didnt actually bring in a PR firm to promote Bioethics Forum.org, although I suppose thats not a bad idea. PRNewswire is just a way of disseminating news--an Internet wire service of sorts.
I detect some concern in the blogosphere that we describe the Forum as something other than a blog. We think there are already several perfectly satisfactory blogs in bioethics (hey, we even link to them), so no need for us to reinvent it. We really are aiming at something more like a low-budget online magazinea forum for others writings more than for our own.
- by Greg on Mar 30, 2006 at 5:37 PM | link
Everyone, say hi to Greg. Welcome to the group. Now repeat after me: "I am a blogger."
Step 1 on the 12 step program for editorial blogs is admitting you use a PR newswire and fancy blog software. Step 2 is linking to other blogs. Once you reach step two, there's no going back, because you've joined the community. In fact we will gladly be your 12 step sponsor and follow you around and tease you when you fall into denial.
The really hard part of this activity for a journal's editorial group is acceptance. When we first described blog.bioethics.net we used the phrase "an experiment," to connote both the tentative stab we were making into territory no other medical or science editors' group had attempted before.
The idea of an editors of a biomedical journal putting together a blog just didn't seem like it would have much staying power, because, after all, there is both the risk that the content might be redundant or insufficient and the risk that the editorial values of the journal might in some way be compromised by the medium.
Eventually though a group of risk taking junior editors, then senior editors, in the Nature group, and then from all around biomedical science, joined us, and many of us talked about our shared experiences, about how to manage time, etc. Several joined us for a series of meetings to talk about the questions that now face pretty much everyone who tries this nutty thing we've birthed.
And the very first thing we said in the very first meeting was that we were working so hard on the project because it just seemed obvious to us that bioethics needed a, uh, well, something like this, but not really a blog, really, rather something more like continuing commentary. We too eschewed the "blog" label. After all, this isn't Daily Koss and it certainly isn't Wonkette. But finally, there came a point where Mooney and others pointed out that the radical phenomenon of academic blogging - described most vividly in the piece about journals' blogging in Nature (see the link at the top of our blog) - gets its energy and secures its role by acknowledging the significance of the other people doing similar work, rather than inventing the wheel.
And of course there are great people out there keeping incredible blogs as their primary mode of scholarship. The fact that these scholars could use the word "blog" made it easier for us to parse the role of blogging in scholarly discourse - we could learn a lot from the way that Chris Mooney or PZ Myers or Carl Zimmer use the medium. And work with them.
Among the key lessons we've learned is that there is a kind of demeanor that is shared by a lot of the bloggers we most admire, and how that sort of disposition merges or differs from that of a good editor would occupy us for a long long time.
We were all excrutiatingly careful - to give each other credit, a critical part of blogdom's success - and to not build redundancy where it didn't need to exist. And, from others, we learned that while it is important from our point of view that the editors' role in the blog be consistent or at least coherent with the role of the editors in our AJOB work, it is equally important that we invite others to the table. To date we've had more than 30% of our blog entries from others - editorial board members, guests from all sorts of places, regular contributors from around and about.
There's no concern up in Smalbany about how bioethics' most beautifully written journal and its excellent editor name the Hastings' blog - "low budget magazine" is clever, but, just FYI, that is also a definition that has often been used to describe academic blogs. Whatever we call these things, the key is that they are good - and the Hastings blog is good - and that they play fair.
The last part is important. There are, sort of, rules in blogdom about how to be nice and even how to be mean. There's no money in this, no scholarly credit, no political power. It is just a thing we do because it is, hopefully, good to do. But blogging gets awfully mean quickly when people do not play fair. So we'll all play fair, or better yet, collaborate.
Our view is that we'll find and point to the work of all sorts of people, including lots of links to pieces in Hastings Center Report. And it is great that in blogdom folks have repeatedly said of our stupid little blog - which doesn't even have a commercially sophisticated template - that they appreciate the fact that the creation of an "editors' blog" is an idea that isn't just original to AJOB but in fact reflects the whole point of AJOB. That compliment means something to everyone in Philly and now in Albany who put hundreds or thousands of hours into one or another part of the blog. Suddenly our whole weird electronic experiment - from bioethics.net to highschoolbioethics.org to the stuff that didn't work as well (the search engine, the video library) is a lot more fun - we've got pals to talk with about this new medium, editors whose day jobs include physics or genomics or philosophy, and instead of a lonely post in the middle of the night, the primary activity these days for those on our blogging team has become talking to other people who want to create a blog for their journal or school or project.
SO for whatever it is worth, it is great you guys are linking to others, and even better that the content is so great, and still better yet that we can joke with each other. God knows the politics of journals in this field could use a shot of happiness and humor. But we have much love for you and even the blind squirrel doesn't mean anything by teasing you about the nonblog.
- by Glenn on Mar 30, 2006 at 11:35 PM | link
The teasing is welcome and probably warranted, since I probably do describe the distinction between a blog and an online magazine as clearer than it really is. Thank you for the kind words about it, whatever it is, as well as for your comments about the Report. Keep up the good work upriver.
- by Greg on Mar 31, 2006 at 5:02 PM | link
It is refreshing to know that the self-professed academic gurus have a sense of humor. Isnt it great to be able to laugh at oneself? That is what you are doing here ..correct????
- by Cindy Collins on Apr 11, 2006 at 11:55 AM | link