The underrated value of sincerity

Reflections on a quiet revolutionary value

We live in what can often feel like insincere times. In this world of spin, “fake news,” and performative social media, sincere honesty can feel like it is in short supply. Much of what is said is said for effect—to drive online engagement, to be liked, to gain advantage—rather than for the purpose of sincerely expressing something. This is particularly true in today’s charged political climate, where words may or may not correspond to the true feelings of those who speak them, and the purpose of speech can just as easily be to obfuscate or confuse as it can be to convey deeply held principles. As individuals, we can sometimes find ourselves avoiding sincerity in favor of projecting irony, cleverness, or some other trait we deem more socially attractive. We may also avoid sincerity simply to avoid the vulnerability that can come with it, echoing Shakespeare’s Iago when he said:

“For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In complement extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at…”

We, too, may hesitate to wear our hearts on our sleeves, avoiding the daws (which, by the way, refers to Jackdaws, birds in the crow family), and preferring to keep our sincere feelings safely unexposed. Yet, even as we may drift away from sincerity, most of us have an ineffable sense that this drift is not good, and that sincerity is a virtue to which it is worth aspiring. At some core level, we do not like encountering insincerity, or even well-faked sincerity. This is clear in the world of politics, where voters place a high premium on “authenticity,” and it is frequently the candidate who best conveys a sense of speaking with sincerity that wins elections.

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Open Science, Open Access

In 1665, the Royal Society in London published its first installment of Philosophical Transactions. This new journal signaled a novel commitment to the idea that all new scientific discoveries should be circulated as widely and freely as possible and that secrecy slowed progress. This was open science, the first defense of the idea that scientific knowledge is nonproprietary and a public good, like clean water or highways.

Over the next 350 years, this commitment has been chipped away at. The production of science has been commercialized, often to protect information rather than disseminate it, and the publication of scientific knowledge has likewise become big business. The current annual subscription price for Philosophical Transactions, amazingly still in print, is about $6,000, mostly paid for by library-based subscriptions, although subscribers get access to the journal online now, as well.

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Learning from disasters

A reflection on the EF-3 tornado that hit St. Louis on Friday.

Last Friday, an EF-3 tornado struck the city of St. Louis, where I live, and tornados struck other parts of the central US, including Kentucky and Wisconsin. The Missouri storm, which was the strongest to hit St. Louis since 2011, cut through the city at 55 mph, with winds up to 152 mph, destroying thousands of homes, injuring 38 people, and killing five. As of last Sunday, 23,000 homes and business were without power.

The heart of these events is always in the stories of the people who are most affected—stories of loss of loved ones, of homes destroyed, of the challenge of coping, as a community, in the near- and long-term. And, in particular, such stories are, here in St. Louis today, and always after such events, more acute in already economically precarious neighborhoods, including, today, neighborhoods like Fountain Park and the Greater Ville that have long faced a range of challenges before the storm struck, now made worse by the moment.

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Acknowledging challenge, engaging with hope

Some thoughts, inspired by the class of 2025, on the challenges and opportunities of the moment.

Last Monday, I had the privilege of attending the Commencement ceremony at Washington University in St. Louis, where I serve as dean of the School of Public Health. I have long felt that graduation is the happiest day of the academic year, an enduring source of inspiration and joy. Coming together as a community to recognize the achievements of our graduates always ends the academic year on a hopeful note.

That perhaps fits uneasily in times of challenge and disruption, such as the current moment. It has been a disorienting few months. The election of a new administration has led to an array of proposed changes, some countermanded shortly after being introduced, some leading to court challenges and stays that change little but leave a policy Damoclean sword hanging over a lot of the work we do. Some of these actions directly affect what we do both in the academic world and in a world where we are aspiring to promote the health of populations. While I have written about where I see these policies endangering the health of populations, I also have tried hard to keep an open mind about the remit that should be afforded any administration to implement the agenda it feels it was elected to pursue.

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On Apostasy

The movable type printing press was invented in the mid-fifteenth century in Germany by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg. The press, which could produce up to 3,600 pages a day, was a dramatic change from previous ways of reproducing texts, which could produce at best a few pages a day. This was transformative for the spread of texts and ideas, and within a few decades, by the start of the sixteenth century, hundreds of printing presses existed throughout Europe.

The printing press heralded changes throughout the Western world, not the least of which was its challenging the hegemony held by the Catholic Church over religious ideas and attendant beliefs. With the advent of the printing press, religious texts could be distributed more readily, giving space to individual interpretations and finding mainstream audiences. Most notable was the spread of the work of Martin Luther, which led to the development of the Protestant Reformation throughout Europe.

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Can Science Lead to Real-World Change More Efficiently?

Lead has been used as a conduit for water for thousands of years. The Roman Empire, in particular, made extensive use of lead—a malleable material—for water transport. Scientific observation about the harms of lead in drinking water goes back at least hundreds of years. Bernardino Ramazzini documented disorders associated with lead exposure among workers in the 1700s. J. Lockhart Gibson documented the consequences of lead poisoning among children in 1904, and at the turn of the twentieth century, there was rapidly growing awareness of the potential harms of lead poisoning, particularly in children.

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency put in place a ban on lead in plumbing materials in 1986, followed by the Lead and Copper Rule as the National Primary Drinking Water Regulation in 1991. Today, about 9.2 million lead service lines continue to deliver water to communities in the U.S. The EPA created a $15 billion fund to eliminate this problem, literally hundreds of years after science first documented the challenge of using lead pipes to deliver water.

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“We must disenthrall ourselves”

On letting go of habits and ideas that do not serve us in this moment.

In his second annual message to Congress, Abraham Lincoln wrote:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

I have been reflecting on these words lately. This moment, for all its challenges, is not the same as the one with which Lincoln contended — we do not face a crisis of slavery and civil war, though the legacy of both continues to echo through history. However, our occasion is “piled high with difficulty,” and our case is indeed new. We face a range of intersecting, novel challenges that has made this an era unlike any other. Political disruptions, climate change, technological developments such as AI, and global conflict have made this a time of difficulty, a stormy present. These challenges beg important questions: How should we respond in this moment? What should we — can we — do to build a better world when the one we have seems to be so much in extremis?

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Can Science Be Done More Efficiently?

Sir Francis Crick and James Watson are towering figures in science for identifying the double helical structure of DNA. But they perhaps loom even larger in the public imagination for their race to be the first to identify this structure, a science thriller immortalized in Watson’s book The Double Helix. The book became a bestseller and remains to this day a gripping account of what seemed to be feverishly fast science, a competition racing towards an Eureka-moment of discovery. 

This is a very partial picture of what science looks like, though. Science is generally slow, plodding even, with discovery after discovery unfolding systematically over many years. Even the story of DNA is nowhere near as dramatic and fast-paced as our memory of the headline-grabbing identification of the double helix would suggest.

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