The Republican War on Science: Tierney and Bethell

Apparently there’s a GCC skeptic conference going on this week, where Al Gore jokes are de rigeur and the keynote speaker was a standup comedian. I wonder how the long-suffering soles at RealClimate feel about not being invited.

deleted

Sk – Please go away, JQ

One that is missed out in the list above, which I found instructive, was the ozone hole issue. I have seen in several different places this being referred to as a ‘false alarm’. Which raises the point that if you fix a problem foreseen by science before its worst impact is felt, then it gets to be used by the anti-science factions as fodder to decry science to the gullible, lazy and unknowledgeable parts of the public.

Another one has been DDT – even with the instructive examples India and many other places where resistance to DDT was rapidly gained when its use was widespread, you see often repeated junk about some mythical ‘DDT ban’ causing ‘the death of millions’, when in fact the restriction in its use for agricultural purposes is the only reason it is of any use today in the limited areas it still has enough benefit to justify its use.

It’s interesting the degree to which Bethell takes an contrarian, consensus-denying stance on such a wide range of issues, not just scientific ones: he also denies that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him, preferring the claims of authorship made on behalf of the Earl of Oxford. And of course he’s anti-Darwin as well as being anti-Einstein, a global warming denier and an HIV-causes-AIDS denier.

This reminds me of a Tierney Times blogpost (I’m not sure if this was in the print edition or not…it was maybe a week ago) about how pedicabs (and indeed walking) had a larger carbon impact than driving the same distance. This was “shown” by making all kinds of absurd assumptions (the dishonesty of the “reasoning” boogled the mind). What was unclear to me was whether it was trying to prey on the numerical illiteracy of the readers or if it was meant as some form of preaching to the choir.

Though I guess that counterfactual bullshiting of this sort is the whole basis of (the weirdly pervasive) glibertarian/contrarian thought (and the “middlebrow” in general), at least in as much as it appears in the popular media.

“Of course, there’s nothing new about the general viewpoint, that science is just another type of ideological system. It was until recently, widely held on the left.”

When did this stop? I know, sure, that Republicans hate science, but I hadn’t gotten the good news that the left had stopped. I would like to believe you, but personally I haven’t really seen it. Can you point me to any statements by prominent leftist academics repudiating either their or other leftists’ previous positions? When did this happen?

An “epistimo-social” conjecture: One reason that people are susceptible to the sort of vulgar relativism of the anti-science right when it comes to climate, mercury/autism, evolution, cancer causes, the ozone hole, etc., is that scientists are often guilty of scientism, which I define as the belief that science can in principle answer all human questions. A close corollary of this is a naive & often teleological belief in the ideology of progress. A survey of Science Blogs — which I read daily with profit — will reveal instance after instance of such simplistic thinking, in which scientists presume that they work outside history and culture.

“scientists are often guilty of scientism, which I define as”
{yawn}.

“One reason that people are susceptible to the sort of vulgar relativism of the anti-science right when it comes to climate, mercury/autism, evolution, cancer causes, the ozone hole, etc., is that scientists are often guilty of scientism”

Nah, not seeing it. Would you care to explain the connection you see between these two things?

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself for hiring someone sympathetic to global warming skepticism to write for its Science section.

He was hired to be the successor to Safire on the op-ed page, and bullshit glibertarianism wasn’t cutting it (hence Smirking Bill Kristol). One can only assume that a) his contract isn’t up; and either b) Bill Keller owed the Culture desk a favour; c) the Science section had a spare desk.

(The assumption is that people who care about science don’t really need to read it in their papers, and that people who want to read about science in their papers want to read bullshit. Why? Because bullshit sells.)

I don’t think you all should discredit ‘group think’ in Science as quickly as you do. Not to trivialize science, but it takes a long time (depends on field, but particle physics takes tens of years) to verify if some “good idea” is correct. Scientists have to wait those many years for data to come up with an even better idea.

Think: the lumenerious ether. Blood letting. Etc. Good ideas are hard to come by, as are good experiments, and climate modeling is *incredibly* complicated and chaotic.

He just sounds like somebody who has been a scientist.

Like senderista, I was tickled at his relativity article too. The part that stood out for me was his dismissal of of Michelson-Morley, for the reason obviously the Earth is dragging around its own aether, problem solved! Gosh, if only people back in the 19C were smart enough to think about stuff like that.

This willful refusal to even try to understand the concepts being discussed is just — astonishing.

The shorter New York Times science columnist:

Gosh climatology is a tricky business. I don’t really understand it. Therefore, I doubt that climatologists understand it either. Fred Singer though, now he’s a responsible bloke.

Terence:

Climatology is hard, and scientists don’t understand the physics of much simpler dynamical systems. Climatologists do good work, but you shouldn’t trust them as much as you seem to do because the problem is hard and nobody knows the answer.

I’m not argument-mongering, but I’m utterly shocked by the amount of disdain here.

Isn’t this too harsh on the guy? Right after the quote above he says:

But scientific uncertainty doesn’t necessarily imply doing nothing. Given the sum of the evidence today, I think the risk of global warming is sufficient to warrant buying insurance. The question then becomes how much insurance and what kind, and here I think the skeptics are especially useful in challenging what’s mistakenly called “the scientific consensus”:

He claims to be in favour of accepting global warming even if he is not fully convinced of the evidence. After that he appears to be in the “let’s get rich, then we will have the money to fight the effects” camp. That might be much closer to the scientific consensus than he realizes. It’s not as if the IPCC believes we’re really going to cut CO2 emissions enough to make a serious difference.

“After that he appears to be in the “let’s get rich, then we will have the money to fight the effects” camp. , , It’s not as if the IPCC believes we’re really going to cut CO2 emissions enough to make a serious difference.”

Wow. Move over, Mr. Killed-your-parents-and-then-asked-the-court-to-have-mercy-on-a-poor-orphan; there’s a new champion on the Chutzpah Olympics! First the global warming-denial lobby spends precious time denying, delaying, and obfuscating. When that stops working quite well enough, they declare that – in part as a result – by now there’s probably no way to avoid some degree of climate change, we might as well not do anything until some future date when “we will have the money to fight the effects“.

It’s amazing (though of course quite understandable) that one would have to explain to fully-functioning adults with some degree of responsibility why – in essence – the ‘having put off seeing the doctor about [progressive condition] this long, some degree of damage and painful surgery is probably inevitable, and it will cost enough to bite into my leisure budget, so I might as well wait another few years until I save enough that it won’t matter.’

And indeed, it might not.

(It’s even better if, say, the issue involves – say – heart damage from stress caused by overwork, and the ‘solution’ is to work harder . . .)

“When someone {yawns} in one’s face, one is not inclined to further the conversation..”

Indeed. But nevertheless, most of the time someone invokes the specter of scientism, it usually involves a deeply boring and nonproductive complaint,* very often seeming to deny science any epistemological status beyond that of just another completely subjective ‘way of knowing’, and at this point, I honestly just can’t help starting to nod off.

So I guess one could say that one reason for my ignorant and boorish behavior is that certain groups of thinkers are often guilty of a kind of ‘anti-scientism’.

* which is not to deny genuine issues that are clumped together under the mantle of ‘scientism’, but the word’s invoked with much greater frequency for far more petty and particular concerns, perhaps.

@36: I don’t know what I’d do without all the assistance I’ve found here, but sure, Steve, I don’t have a problem with your reformulation, though I was emphasizing why some people reject scientific findings as partly the result of the way science presents itself politically and philosophically. I’m not excusing the denialists, as my original post (I thought) made clear.

Joseph, you weren’t furthering the conversation.

Chris in #24 – it’s always amazing to see people use that argument. Global warming had to fight its way into the consensus, by means of data and predictions. It is a theory which successfully broke through the previous group-think, which was that the Earth’s climate was too large and and had too many negative feedback loops for mankind to alter it.

re: creationism and economics –

I do tend to think that the kind of arrangements that emphasize free trade very well may tend to encourage creationism, actually.

francis:

“Apparently there’s a GCC skeptic conference going on this week, where Al Gore jokes are de rigeur and the keynote speaker was a standup comedian. I wonder how the long-suffering soles at RealClimate feel about not being invited.”

Ka-boom.

Somehow it seems to me that take-home message from this “conference” isn’t supposed to be anything about the science itself. Rather, the take-home message is that John Coleman is going to sue Al Gore.

(Which brings me to the question: Why are global warming denialists so obsessed with Al Gore?)

In their fight against science Republicans use trial lawyer tactics rather than reasoned argument. This is consistent with their style of argument overall.

Someone said about William F.Buckley that he loved his own ideas more than he hated theirs (liberals I guess). I think that’s probably false. But that phrase characterizes the critical tenor of the anti-science types. They hate what science produces, but they have no basis on which to do so, and no alternative method of gathering and evaluating evidence. Thus, this claim:

they rarely present a coherent critique that would explain why, on so many different issues, they feel its appropriate to rely on their own politically-based judgements and reject those of mainstream science.

Makes a good deal of sense.

Besides this, they perpetually confuse “reporting about science” with actual science. Those are different things.

#32 (Zamfir) is right. Tierney goes on not to deny that global warming is a problem but to deny that one must accept Kyoto+ as the solution. He endorses a carbon tax! That doesn’t undercut Quiggen’s larger point that the Republican-led anti-science campaign (I’m getting tired of people calling things “wars” all the time) rests on treating scientific findings in a bizarrely relativistic way.

But there are two things overlooked in this discussion. First, certainty is a red-herring. To say that we cannot take action on an issue because we are not “certain” about the cause or the prediction is to say we should do nothing. Scientific methods rarely can be provide “certain” answers. It usually can provide probabilities; it is a political decision to decide what risk levels to accept or to act on. For example, during the Eisenhower presidency, the ability to verify test ban compliance was debated. Scientists could not guarantee with certainty that any test would be detected, but they could guarantee that it would be improbable they would miss one. The amount of risk to accept, they argued, was a political decision. Over global warming, denying the results of modeling and experiments is anti-scientific, but being scientific means recognizing the degree of uncertainty in the findings. The IPCC findings do not say: we have absolute confidence that catastrophic effects from warming will occur in 50 years unless we enact a Kyoto+ system in the next 10 years. Although they do come close, and the issue is more what counts as ‘catastrophic’ rather than merely ‘harmful.’

The political question is: given the results, what degree of response and what kinds of actions are appropriate (from do nothing to eliminate all possible global warming-causing gas emissions)? Should there be a carbon tax and cap-and-trade, or just a carbon-emission cap? These are not scientific questions outside of the estimates of their effects on mitigation. Tierney is saying that we are at this stage, with the feasible set starting at no-regrets measures and extending upward. Doing nothing is not an option.

The second issues is complexity. James Burke had noted in his original PBS series “Connections” — only the claim is hardly novel — that the increased complexity of modern technology (and the accompanying science) made democratic decisionmaking about it hard because real knowledge about how it works is beyond the ken of anyone but experts in those fields. Most of us believe what the climate-science modelers tell us. And Tierney is right that climate science is complex. But that cuts both ways: the limits of the models could mean that the effects will be far worse that has been predicted. We lack the expertise to evaluate the models. In the late 80s and early 90s, the models were far less precise; greater computing power has helped increase confidence in their estimates.

“For instance, how is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field distorted by history or culture?”

I can’t imagine that any scientist simply pores over all the data from the Hubble. The first thing you would do is clean up the data – decide what is important and what isn’t. There’s a beautiful book by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison about this, Objectivity, which traces the notion that any impinging on the ‘data’ is ‘distortion’. Are there any scientific papers that simply consist of a stream of data? I doubt it. The data is subjected to various methodological grids – it is compared to other data – inferences are made connecting one data set to the other – and so on. There’s no divine revelation from raw data, and never will be. Describing science as an ongoing (and thus necessarily incomplete) process of discovery is not an insult to science, or some lefty way to discredit science. On the contrary, it gets to the very heart of the scientific process, pointing to the continuity that is laced through the whole enterprise even though, at every epoch, scientists are dealing with incomplete theories, false assumptions (for instance, of aether), and the contingencies that afflict any social enterprise. To make Steve Fuller, of all people, representative of the lefty view of science is preposterous. Much closer would be Stephen Jay Gould, who showed, again and again, how certain supposedly innocent assumptions about evolutionary theory were not only pernicious in terms of the theory, but were connected to dubious social assumptions.

The global warming consensus is a great example of the way science works. The consensus is not that we will surely have a warmer climate for sure in 2100, but that we have introduced variables into the climate, notably CO2, that will have a radical volatile effect on the world’s climate such that if we don’t have a warmer climate in 2100, this will only because the unexpected result of our pushing the atmosphere will have produced some other worldwide event. For instance, the faint possibility exists that the Gulf Stream will be effected by the addition of cold water from the arctic area ice melt so that it stops, which would certainly create catastrophic conditions of cold in Europe.

There is no scenario, so far, that doesn’t attribute to the increase in CO2 increasing global climactic effects. Global warming is the simplest way to describe them because so far those effects have clustered around global warming. It seems pretty clear to me that the denialist are fighting a hopeless battle – one in which they claim, in effect, that the addition of massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere will have no perverse climactic effect. So far, we know what the perverse effect is – warming – and there is no reason to think that it will be anything but warming until we cease pushing the CO2 frontier. There is no scenario in which this has null effect.

In this way, it is much like the tobacco company battle of yore, which was that inhaling smoke, tars and resins, and the various chemicals in cigarettes would have no effect on your body. Even before we had good epidemiological evidence that it did, we had common sense suspicions that probably cigarettes were bad for you. The denialists are as nutty as they are in part because their position forces them to oppose both common sense and science.

I agree with almost every point regarding the “Republican War on Science,” except for the claim that it is primarily a Republican thing. I mean . . . it has been for the past 8 years, but that’s because the Republicans have all of the executive authority.

Liberals, meanwhile, believe in an autism/ themiserol link, believe in the dangers of “Frankstein foods” (agricultural biotech), believe that power lines cause childhood leukemia, and other variations of the theme “corporate pollution causes X disease in the poor” that have no scientific evidence supporting them.

There is a war on science, but it is a war of all interest groups (including, but not limited to, Republicans.)

@52, step back for a second. Take this quote from the original post:

“Of course, there’s nothing new about the general viewpoint, that science is just another type of ideological system. It was until recently, widely held on the left.”

I would hate for this to descend into a discussion of what constitutes “widely” and “the left”, but I think it is pretty fair to say that John Quiggin’s view (and mine) of how a large portion of the left sees (or according to John recently saw) science is pretty far from that of Stephan Jay Gould.

“The data is subjected to various methodological grids – it is compared to other data – inferences are made connecting one data set to the other – and so on. There’s no divine revelation from raw data, and never will be.”

Where to start with this? Sure scientists do lots of things with their data, but they are usually pretty careful to justify them or else once their data is public someone will refute them. Healthy science fields have their own internal skeptics who are much better than outsiders at spotting unstated assumptions, unrecognized statistical errors, etc.

“The first thing you would do is clean up the data – decide what is important and what isn’t.”

Different scientists (and scientific subfields) decide that different things are important and pursue them accordingly. As far as I can see what culture does to science is to encourage (or discourage) certain fields relative to one another or to change where scientists come from in a society, but the ultimate conclusions are largely free of any cultural bent. How would General Relativity, say, be different if our culture were different? We might not have an accurate theory of gravitation if society suppressed research on it, but how could it be equally sophisticated and different? It would still have to fit the same data regardless of who the scientist is.

Barry in 40:

That’s not how science works though: ideas don’t just one day get enlightened to the realm of fact. Climate modeling, compared to other fields of science, is a experimental data limited field: we can’t turn carbon emissions on or off to see what happens. And I argue that on a more fundamental level, we don’t understand some of the basic physics that underlies climate dynamics since we have still a lot to learn about the non-linearities of fluid dynamics (ie. weather).

I’m just utterly shocked by the response to this article by somebody who said that he wanted to understand the climate models to see if they made sense. I would say that climate models with carbon emissions provide strong evidence that there is global warming, but anybody who listens to a panel of scientists clearly has never been on such a panel.

“Liberals John McCain, meanwhile, believe[s] in an autism/ themiserol link . . . .”

“ . . . believe in the dangers of “Frankstein foods” (agricultural biotech), believe that power lines cause childhood leukemia, and other variations of the theme “corporate pollution causes X disease in the poor” that have no scientific evidence supporting them.”

Well, there are some extreme attitudes here – for example, some of the OMG! We are meddling in the forbidden by creating GMOs! Mother Nature will strike us down!’ that I think are scientifically foolish and ignorant. But much of this list also reflects not particularly unreasonable precaution and healthy skepticism towards corporate actions – especially as they get to play an ever greater role in writing their own regulations and policing their own behavior. One certainly doesn’t have to imagine that people working in large corporations are somehow inherently and especially evil – it’s a very simple issue of incentives, and known track records.

And of course, while these things doubtlessly do skew left, we really can’t say ‘liberals belive’ – 38% of Democrats believe “humans and other living things” existed in their present forms since the beginning of time, a number that only drops down to 29% if you single out “liberal democrats” [2005 Pew Survey].

More importantly, the difference at the political level is that neither the Democratic Party nor major Democratic/liberal organizations are working towards banning biotech or tearing down power lines or promoting anti-vaccination hysteria or etc. (Indeed, you’ll find anti-vaxxers both on the left (quasi-magical natural living) and right (homeschoolers, etc.)

As a 2006 Science article on attitudes about evolution noted, “In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of “creation science.”.” In contrast, the (for example) 2006 Platform of the Democratic Party of Colorado had these insanely radical things to say about biotech:

“We support . . . .ensuring fairness to farmers and ranchers in their dealings with biotech companies that sell genetically engineered seeds, plants, and animals;
full disclosure of all ingredients, especially genetically engineered organic substances, in commercial products . . .”

Crazy, right? Actually providing accurate label information so the free market can work . . .

They also, I notice, supported:
“returning the freedom of inquiry to scientists, appointing qualified scientists to panels without regard to political or religious beliefs, and allowing scientists to publish their results without political interference in order that we may have open, honest debate on public policy;”

(and the “adequate funding of all public and academic libraries“. I’m pretty much a single-issue library funding voter,* but sadly we don’t have much clout. Maybe we need to wave horrifying signs and billboards of worn-out books and empty shelves . . .)

* Ok, not exactly true. But surprisingly close.

“Now, the hypocrisy of such people as Tierney consists in trying to reverse this state of affairs – pretending, when the topic is economics, that the neo-classicals have proved various things from their models about free trade and such, and, when the topic is climate change, suddenly going all skeptical about models and assumptions.”

Well said. Not just economics, though – pop evolutionary psych, as well. Odd, how it works out like that.

“I’m just utterly shocked by the response to this article by somebody who said that he wanted to understand the climate models to see if they made sense”

Ok. Are you also utterly shocked when promoters of ‘teach the controversy!’ turn out not to be clear-eyed skeptics but quasi-theocratic drawers-up of secret ‘wedge strategies’ aimed at “to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions,” and who babble to carefully selected audiences about how “Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory“?

Science isn’t politics. But politics is politics.

Not everybody who criticizes is stupid or doesn’t understand science. I just remembered reading or hearing something by Freeman Dyson ages ago (one of the most famous physicists alive):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson#Criticism_of_global_warming_studies

if you’re curious. I don’t support everything he says, but I firmly believe in his lack of faith in scientists because science is still a human endeavor.

Tierney’s presence in the science section may perhaps be explained in this PressThink post (on an inferred NY Times attempt to present itself as being “Iconoclastic toward its own perceived liberal image”)

roger @59,

I don’t think we disagree too much about how we view science, I think we disagree about whether our view is dominant on the left. Basically I would say that you, me, and most working scientists tend to think about science in a way that was best described by Karl Popper. Many academic leftists, on the other hand, seem to prefer the views of Thomas Kuhn (or worse), which I tend to think are both wrong and destructive.

What I meant about the General Relativity example is that yes a different culture might not have GR, I cannot deny the ability of culture to destroy science, but that if any culture does have an advanced theory of gravitation, it will look a lot like GR. Basically that culture can either promote or impede scientific research, but that it cannot dictate what the results can be. You see this as a trivial point (as do I), but not everyone does.

On the comment thread to Tierney’s column, I proposed a nice bet – reproducing that stupid bet made by Jules Simon and Paul Ehrlich involving a basket of commodities. You’ll remember that bet was about the price of those commodities ten years hence – and that Ehrlich lost (he should have held out for another decade and a half – that basket of commodities has been going up in price by leaps and bounds over the past eight years).

The bet would be similar. Take a basket of effects – ground temperatures in the tundra zone, areas of glaciation in mountain regions, species creep from the South to the North – and have the Heartland Institute put money on the land temperatures staying as they are now or going down, the glacial area staying as it is now or increasing, the species invasion of Southern species into Northern climes (you can chose your species) being stopped or eliminated in ten years time. Have heartland bet some nominal sum – $50,000 – on its skeptical take.

Actually, no way they would do this. It would be a sucker bet. They are liars and propagandists, not suckers. In every domain I’ve mentioned – all effects of the CO2 pushing of the atmosphere – we will see worse numbers in ten years. That’s pretty much guaranteed.

And Popper’s view of science is incomplete, at best. That there are scientists out there who reject Kuhn out of hand simply confirms the point I made earlier about scientists’ own philosophical naiveté leading them to sometimes make insupportable claims about the nature of science. In consequence, idiots like Tierney get to make politically driven critiques for free, as it were.

Roger: “Now, the hypocrisy of such people as Tierney consists in trying to reverse this state of affairs – pretending, when the topic is economics, that the neo-classicals have proved various things from their models about free trade and such, and, when the topic is climate change, suddenly going all skeptical about models and assumptions.

That, I think, may be the difference between the left and right when it comes to science.”

I was going to point this out, that economics is a very complicated subject, in which many factors are simultaneously operating, and for which data is limited. It’s also (for many areas) a limited-data field, for which a certain small number of historical time series are available.

Also, economists are notorious for being both arrogant, and not working with other experts well, or at all (psych, history, sociology, poli sci, etc.).

But I’m willing to bet that global warming denialism and ‘faith-based’ acceptance of neoclassical economics are strongly and positively correlated.
but this doesn’t stop

Chris:

“Barry in 40:

That’s not how science works though: ideas don’t just one day get enlightened to the realm of fact. ”

I didn’t say that this happened ‘one day’; the process occupied much of the post-WWII era. Some examples: discovering that the water and CO2 absorption spectra did not block each other, as previously thought; the use of isotope studies to examine the amount of ‘new’ and ‘old’ carbon in the atmosphere; Keeling’s work on CO2 accumulation. Read The Discovery of Global Warming for a fascinating science history story. The interplays and feedback cycles within and between fields are very interesting, and were very enlightening for me.

“Climate modeling, compared to other fields of science, is a experimental data limited field: we can’t turn carbon emissions on or off to see what happens. And I argue that on a more fundamental level, we don’t understand some of the basic physics that underlies climate dynamics since we have still a lot to learn about the non-linearities of fluid dynamics (ie. weather).”

Um, just to clue you in, the story climate modeling of the past thirty years is (among other things) the story of increasingly sophisticated models using an increasingly sophisticated understanding of atmospheric/oceanic characteristics to produce models which both (a) predicted current climates, (b) predicted the effects of perturbations (e.g., the eruption of that big volcano in the Philipines, the Younger Dryas era, and much Ice Age climate), and (c) predicted the effects of global warming. Although from what I’ve read, the models *underpredict*; the story of the past 5-10 years is that the predictions erred on the low side.

Chris, you’re basically stone ignorant here. At best. The things which you are saying a flat out factually wrong. They exhibit no sense of the history of the field, or the verification techniques developed to deal with the limitations of certain types of data.

“I’m just utterly shocked by the response to this article by somebody who said that he wanted to understand the climate models to see if they made sense. I would say that climate models with carbon emissions provide strong evidence that there is global warming, but anybody who listens to a panel of scientists clearly has never been on such a panel.”

For your first sentence in the paragaph above: as somebody said above, we’ve see the ‘teach the controversy’ people, and know the trick. Your last sentence – well, it simply doesn’t make sense.

roger @77: “I’m partial to the school that came out of the pragmatism of Patrick Suppes at Stanford, which gave up a lot of philosophical dreams about the ‘unity of the sciences’ and such.”

Having never heard of Suppes before, I just read an article of his I found online “Pragmatism in Phyiscs” (1998). Not sure I agree with everything there, but definitely good stuff nonetheless, thanks for the tip.

@81 The analogy to Einstein (or Godel) would only really work if a.) the misinterpreters were prominent physicists (or mathematicians) and b.) Einstein (or Godel) was still alive, but didn’t do a whole lot to refute this misreading of his work.

@82 Good point John. I remember as an undergrad telling a TA that I would be a lot more willing to take Naive American creation mythology a lot more seriously when I could buy a cd player designed and built based on its teachings.

This is why that whole movement bothers me so much. Not only was it bullshit, but it was bullshit peddled by people who knew it was for cynical reasons of self aggrandizement and sold to wide eyed students who didn’t know any better. It was intellectual vandalism, with probably a bit of vigilante revenge for science’s role in the Manhattan project and Cold War thrown in for good measure.

A very conservatively done study (underestimated the benefits, and put in the most extreme cost assumptions, all within a Monte Carlo framework) we did here showed that a starter light rail would have mean benefits twice the size of the costs, with only a four percent probability that the net benefits would be negative based on the underlying probability distributions.

Historically, I think that is much more at the heart of the issue than pomo bullshit: para-scientific bullshit. A light rail project is quite likely a good thing, but it is absolutely outside the capacity of human scientific knowledge to state that the chances of it not being so are ‘4%’. Someone who says that is not even wrong, making a statement with no scientifically-relevant meaning.

The system of a city of humans embedded within a global cultural and economic system is vastly, massively, more complex than their model, and they are:

1. not correctly accounting for those complexities by assuming they are simply random factors.

2. not doing a fraction of the testing and validation needed to debug such a model

Politically, the problem is that opposing meaningless scientoid bullshit of that kind is very likely to bleed over into a support for attacks on genuine science, simply because the parascience so closely mimics the language of actual science.

Obviously, at one level, those who spout those attacks do so because they are paid to. But they only get paid because such attacks work, have cultural traction. Sex sells, because sex exists – 1960s Madison avenue didn’t invent it.

Similarly, attacks on stupid experts only exist because some experts really are stupid.

I’m not going to defend anti-scientific Republicans, but doesn’t this post suffer a little from one or more cognitive biases? You seem to be selecting those which turned out to be correct predictions (although the inclusion of passive smoking is a little questionable) and saying, “Aha! See? Pro-regulation science is *always* right” while leaving out the inconvenient gaffes. Saccharin? Global cooling? Y2K? England ceasing to exist by 2000? It is much harder to reach back in time and memory to find those predictions of science that were wrong than those that were right, and nobody here is even trying.

And, as I have pointed out here before, I still don’t understand how people who can line up behind every pessimistic prediction can justify their automatic acceptance of it while demonizing those who are early skeptics … and then claim to be defending science! The skeptics are at least as important if not more so to the scientific process so long as they can justify their skepticism on the existence of known and unknown unknowns.

The scientific evidence produced by the cancer establishment has supported lots of restrictions on smoking, air pollution, the use of synthetic chemicals and so on, all of which are opposed by Republicans.

Not true. Though you could fairly say that the opposition has largely consisted of Republicans, you cannot say that all or even most Republicans oppose them. Republicans with children, for example, tend to favor anti-smoking ordinances. The organic apparel market, especially for children, is driven more by income than politics. The last Clean Air Act and at least one of its predecessors was signed by a Republican. This is more stereotyping of Republicans as “people who favor pollution”, which is not helpful to those of us trying to engage rather than talk past or down to them. Unfortunately, the echo chamber here seems to accept this characterization. To be fair and balanced, you might want to at least consider the fact that Michigan, West Virginia, Tennessee, and other Democrats have regularly fallen on the anti-regulatory side with respect to many clean air laws (Kyoto, Clean Air Acts which favor shifts in fuels rather than scrubbers) for local political reasons (auto manufacturers, coal mining, tobacco farming).

by the way I agree with the central premise of tom bethell’s book

A problem is discerned, or invented, the government steps in, and then the problem seems only to grow more serious. And that suits the scientists just fine. They are more interested in their own funding, tenure, and security than in any detailed accounting of progress or decline in their own field. They have learned to “game the system,” in other words.

If you work at a scientific lab, you know how true that is. The superstar in your work group is not the brightest mind, or the person with the best idea. No! It is the guy who writes the best research grants, ones that start off with great new sounding ideas like “Nanotechnology” or “gengineering nano-viruses.” Sometimes I am surprised that any science ever gets done just because everyone is so focused on grant writing and funding all the time. You can’t blame the scientists, they gotta eat.

What is wrong with tom bethell is that he is a kook. He believes in weird stuff, really bizarre and strange things, that is the real problem. That is the core problem with the republican party. They are the party of wide-eyed lunatic kooks.

You know how the democratic party is supposed to be the big tent party? And the republican the small tent? Well in one way that is true. Republicans throw out the gays the atheists the muslims and the latinos. But . . . the democrats throw out those who believe a demon or god lives in the sun and this being controls the weather, they throw out people who believe that small amounts of smoking is good for your infant children, they throw out people who think that gravity is caused by static electricity, they throw out people who wear tinfoil to protect them from cosmic rays, while the republicans welcome the kooks. The republicans are the big tent party for science kookery.

I’m not sure if that is good or bad. Certainly nobody knows science, nobody in the democratic party nor the republican party. They just repeat whatever they believe or have been told. There is zero amount of actual scientific thinking in the political discourse. But in science, the democrats are the ones with message discipline.

@96: Thanks, John, for your response. You catch my drift pretty well, but I’d want to stipulate that the decisions a scientist makes about what problems are important, how to frame them, etc. derive at least in part from his or her cultural / historical position, i.e., the terms of the prevailing paradigm, the money available for lab equipment, etc. But that’s basic Kuhn & uncontroversial, I think. Even classically objective data like that from the Hubble telescope has to be endlessly interpreted and lined up with other data, filtered through competing theories, and rechecked before it can be considered true. Sir Arthur Eddington famously made a selection of the photographic data from eclipse observations because some of the observations didn’t fit Einstein’s theory. I’m not alleging fraud — that’s just the way science is done.

As for literary truth claims, let me offer an anecdote from last week’s seminar in Modern American Poetry. We’ve been reading the poets of the 20s & 30s, including the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, along with Kenneth Fearing and Genevieve Taggard, whose poem,
Ode in Time of Crisis, addresses American immigration policy at the time. Taggard makes a literary and moral argument in her poem against policies based on both the biological and social science of the times — bad science, it turns out, though it seems to get endlessly recycled. Taggard’s poem makes a literary truth-claim that seems to me to be superior to the truth-claims made by (at least some) of the science of the period. Taggard was right and the eugenicists and biological racists were wrong.

To conclude: My original point in this discussion was that sometimes scientists present their conclusions — even when they are correct — using a rhetorical framework of certainty and objectivity that is unwarranted and politically counterproductive. (It goes without saying that this does not excuse the even worse rhetorical sins of the denialists on both the right and the left.)

Do you know what Monte Carlo analysis is?

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?

“Rita M. Palma, of Bayport, N.Y., sought a religious exemption from vaccines for her three sons but was turned down after a hearing with school officials. She said she had become increasingly uncomfortable with the vaccines the boys were getting.

“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 . . .

Soru said: “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?”

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.

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

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.

@91

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.

ag subsidies are definitely non-partisan

And the science behind that is promoted by…

OK, forget Tierney. And let’s consider each issue separately, instead of lumping them together as “science” that must be globally accepted or rejected. What about Michael Crichton’s skepticism about global warming? ( http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html)He has a scientific background, and no particular political agenda that I can see.