Now, this is an interesting question – one possibility, off the top of my head, is the (mentioned in the quote) spate of unusually cold weather, which made it salient, and the desire of major news outlets to make large amounts of money selling their product, which made it useful. I don’t know how much activism (by scientists or others) played into it. Again, there’s a distinction here between professional science – however human and flawed – and science journalism. Whether the journalists were contrite and suitably cautious – well, probably not. I’m also very unsure there was any attempt (or even obvious way) to use this to justify social engineering, except, again, in the limited sense of engineering a larger market for the Times, Newsweek, etc.

Sure, sure, even if scientists somehow functioned outside history and culture (which they don’t), once work steps outside the lab it’s liable to be whacked upside the head and sold into white slavery. But this specific comparison – scientists were wrong about global cooling, so global warming probably’s just a crock – is at best extremely lazy, and at worse deeply dishonest. At that time, (fairly far future) global cooling was one rather minor research direction (though not a wildly unreasonable one), which was puffed up by the popular and pop-science press to a status way, way beyond what it had achieved in the scientific community. If that’s currently the case, then it’s rather a marvelously successful con job, one which seems to have fooled quite a number of climatologists as well.

As regards

“The [Club of Rome] is rarely refuted by their political fellow-travelers as strongly as John has done here for similarly unscientific work done by “the other side”.”

You might at least do a Google, say Quiggin+”Club of Rome” check before making this claim. Top hit
http://www.johnquiggin.com/archives/000429.html
(at least on my localisation of Google) refers to the “the (in)famous Club of Rome modelled published as Limits to Growth. The economists pointed out that the Club of Rome model contained no prices and no adaptation to scarcity and was therefore proved woefully wrong on most counts (for example, it predicted that reserves of most minerals would be exhausted before 2000).”

But the fact that a group including some scientists did some bad economics doesn’t justify attacks on science.

And the science behind that is promoted by…

However, it is unfair to associate them with red staters; ag subsidies are definitely non-partisan (who is Tom Daschle? Daniel Inouye? who was Harold Cooley? Jamie Whitten?). Again, are you interested in truth, or just truth that supports your biases?

I’m not sure who’s making such a sweeping statement?

That’s the theology of this post: John picked several issues notable for the political ire they draw and which are backed by science. He is ignoring those issues for which the science was later refuted, but which were supported no less strongly by certain groups.

“ . . . Global cooling?”

{sigh} the idea that there was this intense and widespread concern about ‘global cooling’ in the 1970s appears to be essentially a myth, one pushed by AGW denialists.
…
Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.

I’m sorry you find this so tedious, but you have just illustrated my point. I am claiming that there are people who, on the slightest of scientific evidence, are interested in using that as justification for social engineering. This minor scientific speculation – one of thousands in the 1970s – made it to major news outlets while others didn’t—why? And were the activists suitably contrite afterwards? And cautious with new catastrophic findings?

That’s science?

I’m sorry my examples aren’t great, but as I said, it is difficult to recall examples of failures. Unfortunately, you (and John Quiggin) seem to be getting bogged down in the analysis of the easy ones while ignoring the better ones … and the point. I notice that neither of you addressed saccharin.

“ . . .England ceasing to exist by 2000?”
(Seriously, what is this in reference too?)

It was one of the predictions made by neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich. The work that he, his wife, Donella Meadows, the Club of Rome, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and a slew of other people is regularly cited as evidence in favor of social engineering; it is rarely refuted by their political fellow-travelers as strongly as John has done here for similarly unscientific work done by “the other side”.

@ Quiggin – I’m surprised that you have taken the same rhetorical path as my other respondent and ignored the stronger evidence and the point itself. While those think-tanks you cited may be anti-science on some issues (that was an overly sweeping generalization on your behalf, I think), it is also true that other think tanks cite pseudo-science and poor science in support of various favored schemes. Of course they’re pessimistic: you can’t justify new regulations on the basis that everything is peachy! Neither the anti-scientific approach you describe in the initial post above, nor the uses of junk science to achieve certain ends that I am trying to describe, is right, but you take the partisan approach and say only that your opponents are anti-scientific. Are we for science and truth, or for finding only convenient truth? If the former, please recognize that both sides abuse science about equally.

Again, I apologize for my poor examples, but it isn’t easy to recall good examples of bad science (one of the biases I mentioned in my previous comment). I have offered the saccharin scare. For those of you too young to remember, in the late 1970’s, the FDA attempted to ban the best-known sugar substitute, saccharin, as a carcinogen based on rodent studies. Given the ballooning American population, a political compromise was reached, allowing the substance to be sold with warning labels. It was later found that saccharin was a carcinogen only to rats – in fact, only to male rats, as I recall. Saccharin wasn’t removed from carcinogen lists until 2000. Other examples may include the furors over chlorine treatment of water, leukemia caused by power lines, autism caused by thimerosal, and so on.

(I say “may” to avoid Taleb’s “round trip error”: the lack of evidence for A does not mean that A is not so. As any good student of science should know!)

[smartass]
BTW, in terms of published work, of course most scientists are wrong most of the time (at least in medical science):

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=16060722

There’s not much point in publishing settled fact as research, is there? Earth is round, news at 5!
[/smartass]

I should also point out that there is a confusion here that is largely ignored. Physical science underpins the need to do something; social science is needed to discover what, exactly, should be done. Far too many people note opposition to the recommendations of the latter and mistake it for opposition to the findings of the former. They are falling for a variation of Caplan’s fallacy.

Well, except for that one incident involving a Professor Esopus Spitzenberg in 1856 . . . .

On which issue, simpler than human behaviour, thousands of scientists have spent 50 years carefully inching towards a point where they would not completely distrust those complex models, although they still rarely speak of them without caveats. Even so, the models are the weakest of the three foundations of global climate change: the basic physics and the actual observations of warming are much less contestable (and so rarely discussed by denialists).

not knowing what he is talking about
it is time to go back to school

If you ask a perpetual motion fraudster how their complex device extracts energy out of nowhere, they will almost certainly attack your credentials, rather than address your argument.

The analogous question, how your complex mathematical model extracts exact precision out of uncertain variables in an unknown causal relation, apparently meets with the same response.

There are several orders of magnitude difference between the complexity of what the climate modellers, with massive computers and a large dose of humility, are attempting to do, and what you seem to be assuming is trivial.

Creating and validating such a model scientifically would require patient generations of experimentation, model-building and iteration. If you started now, your great-grandchildren might start to see the outline of a usable answer.

Luckily there is a quicker way: don’t bother, make some stuff up, use mathematical symbols like Kabbalistic formula, hope no-one notices and shout down anyone who does. Everyone else does it, and some are even more brazen about it, using spurious point estimates instead of spurious probabilities.

It is probably a valid criticism of working scientists that they don’t properly deal with those kinds of para-scientific claims. You never see someone guilty of spouting this stuff have his slide rule snapped across his knee in front of the assembled academy, his lab coat stripped off and trampled in the dust, or any other form of appropriate sanction.

What exactly do you think the practical and philosophical consequences are of this? You seem only enough aware of what scientists do with data to try to make it look sketchy to others who know even less.

@85 I acknowledge that scientists work within history. Reread my comment in 56. Culture can deny us the ability to pursue certain types of research (particularly expensive research), culture can restrict people from certain segments of society from becoming scientists, culture can say that research in some particular area is of utmost importance and stress it over others.
What I object to is the notion that the data and theories produced are inseparable from their time and culture. Scientists are at the whim of history and culture, but the science they produce is not.

and

“Someone who says that is not even wrong, making a statement with no scientifically-relevant meaning.”

Mmmm. What is one to make of a person who responds aggressively, angrily and profanely to a post for which he has not examined the study on which the probability statement is based? When he or she hasn’t asked for clarification about what was meant and what was the nature of the modeling process underlying the statement?

Perhaps not knowing what he is talking about? Perhaps with little understanding of how statistical analysis can be fruitfully used in decision-making? Perhaps another humanities type still giving evidence to C. P. Snow’s essay on two cultures? Perhaps all of the above?

Let’s start with George Box’s apposite statement: “All models are false, but some models are useful”.

The history of transport planning and investment decision making in the U.S. has been entirely highway focused, done by highway engineers, and often (usually?) done badly. Large infrastructure projects typically come in more expensive, often much more expensive, than forecast. There are political, game theoretic and analytic reasons for this, but the use of Monte Carlo analysis in the aforementioned light rail study was conducted to at least partially overcome the deficient past practice of providing just point or mean estimates of the costs and benefits of the proposed project. Without any sense of the variability of the outcomes, there could be no careful appraisal of the risks, neither of the benefits nor the costs. So the point was to overcome the weakness of using mean estimates with faux single point precision, rather than as an estimate that is clearly uncertain and subject to variability. The Monte Carlo analysis and results helps us overcome that false certainty.

So our study provided some useful information on that dimension. Now since this was engineering and economic analysis, and not laboratory analysis, issues of model validation are the same as for the climate models. Of course the models were not perfect, as George Box reminds us, but transport demand has been quite well studied, and so one fortunately does not have to start from zero with respect both to techniques and findings.

No serious scientist would argue that the error bounds on his estimates are sacrosanct – that is, the estimated variances from which the bounds are computed can themselves be biased. And of course the statements are dependent on the underlying causal relationships as measured with the current state of knowledge, always imperfect. That is true in all science.

So the real issue was whether the probability statement led to better decisionmaking. We think it did in this case, although the finding that light rail performed better than a highway was very “inconvenient” for the highway engineers and some politicians.

Soru should already know about how statistical analysis is used in these situations, but if not, and apparently not, then it is time to go back to school.

Thanks, also, for your response above. Science has indeed been astonishingly successful. Those successes have associated costs, though, and emerge from practices and processes that do not inevitably lead to truth. I want to develop my example about literary truth a bit—after I finish a bnch of grading—& will let you know if I write anything. Thanks again for continuing the conversation.

“About two years ago I hit a wall with it,” she said. “I said I was going to listen to my inner voice. The whole vaccination process is based on fear of getting diseases but I would rather put my faith in God to heal diseases.”” [More Families Are Shunning Inoculations, NY Times]

Incidentally, one (only one, thankfully) of the letters in response does offer a kind of support for the ‘certainty backlash’ argument, although clearly it needs to be formulated a bit differently:

“How refreshing to read that “More Families Are Shunning Inoculations,” but the article should have mentioned that this year’s flu shot did not protect against two of the three strains of influenza that hit hard this season, thereby making it less than completely effective. Thus, all children who were vaccinated still were not fully protected. Perhaps this is why parents are questioning the authorities over what is right for our children’s health and safety. Congratulations to parents like Rita M. Palma and Jaime Polatsek for listening to their inner voices.”

Personally, my inner voice says that if any children die as a result, such parents should face charges, but . . .

Y’know, every single time I have a second or two of misreading the post title as “The Republican War on Science: Tierney and Bentham” – which would be something else entirely . . .

“that is unwarranted”
One can understand how the vast and astonishing leaps in knowledge and ability -however imperfect – over the last century or two could get people a bit overconfident, but fair enough . . .

“ . . . and politically counterproductive.”
That’s what I’m rather more uncertain of, and which I’m not sure you’ve demonstrated. I’d also think one would want to distinguish what scientists say (which sometimes does indeed use said unwarranted rhetorical framework) and what journalists say (which very very often does).

Yes. Are you seriously defending it’s use to calculate a probability to single-percentage point precision from an unvalidated model of human behaviour created for the purposes of the calculation?