Tu Quoque

Whether politics is “inherently” a matter of tribalism and emotion is debatable in the abstract. Whether it is factually so, on a pedestrian day-to-day basis, is incontrovertible. And the Right is winning.

But I guess debating matters of “inherently” is more fitting of the academic’s bill.

In this regard, I suppose everyone has read Louis Menand’s article of ten years ago on the subject of how people think, or rather don’t think, about politics.
( http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/08/30/040830crat_atlarge )

That all seems reasonable. So let’s turn to some other scientific issues. What does the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale measure? Is it important in determining life outcomes? What’s the heritability of what it measures?

As a leftist, I’m totally fine with GOM foods, and agree that the science behind the anti-GMO movement is poorly made.

Most of these examples seem to be about assessing risk.

Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger and Eisk and Culture are interesting reading in this area.

The environmental movement’s core political concern is anxiety about some of these risks, so of course you’ld expect it to attract people who are worried about them (whether the anxiety is rationally justified or not); “the left” on the other hand, is not organized around apocalyptic anxiety to the same extent (though Marxian ideas of revolution are kind of apocalyptic in their own way).

I would tentatively add economic collapse to one of the major anxieties of our time. It’s a little unclear how great the risk is. (Some people are already, right now, in serious danger of death as a result of the current economic conditions; the risk to them is real and clear; what is unclear is the extent to which economic collapse in the industrialized west might worsen further to place a much larger proportion of the population at serious risk).

It’s the patents.

This lefty will continue to oppose corporate tyranny. And GM foods (at least in the U.S.A.) are a part of that.
~

“The strongest case for labeling GMO foods is based on consumer-sovereignty. We should as much ban the use of kosher/halal labels as a non-GMO label.”

But “banning” labeling is not on the table. The question is whether or not to have state mandated labelling. One ought to be able to just concoct some opt-in private imprimatur as a certifying agency. Works for Kosher and Halal products, though there’s a case for state auditing along “truth in advertising” lines in that arrangement.

But “banning” labeling is not on the table.

uhm well, Pennsylvania actually requires a disclaimer such as
” ‘According to the FDA, there is no significant difference between the milk from cows injected with rbST compared to those not injected.’ ”
on milk labeled as produced without additional rBGH. The original bill did indeed intend to ban all such labels of milk. Similar bills were/are considered in serveral other states, I know of Kansas and Ohio for sure, so “not on the table” is not quite correct.

I have become interested in how the so-called Medieval Warm Period might have led to the Little Ice Age.

In North America, the Warm Period created an enormous sand-dune desert in the western half of the U.S., stretching from Mexico up to Saskatchewan, with enormous droughts and wildfires on the West Coast. Sort of like conditions now!

But right now, we are also having what appears to be slightly increased precipitation on the East Coast.

Now, one way to get to a cold period would be increased winter precipitation (i.e. snow) that packs and doesn’t melt for much of the summer: increasing earth’s reflectivity or albedo. What would do that?

Welllllll, it turns out the polar vortex shift is a very nice candidate. The Great Lakes are still frozen this year, and the deep ground outside Toronto may not thaw until late summer.

Is this what initiated the Little Ice Age?

I think we may have to consider that earth’s climate never exited from the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. Now there is a frightening topic.

What if 1900-1910 and 1940-1970 may have just been moderate cool phases of the D-O downswing? If this gets worse — if we start having changes of 10 degrees Celsius in ten years, as we know happened long ago, and for thousands of years at a time — we may be suddenly surprised, and suddenly find ourselves unsuccessful in agriculture. There is UNLIKELY to be perfectly predictive modeling of this.

At the very least, all nations should build two or three-year food supplies to cover their own citizens. Will someone please go tell Hillary for a campaign issue? The farmers will love her.

“you need to engage with Kahan’s work on how tribalism and ideology affect reasoning and the evaluation of scientific evidence.”

“You need to” explain why you think that “we need to engage” with Kahan’s work. But I will take a stab anyway. Kahan assumes left-right symmetry and when prompted to explain why that symmetry is patently broken, his response is:

“I’ve finally caught my breath after laughing myself into state of hyperventilation as a result of reading Krugman’s latest proof (this is actually a replication of an earlier empirical study on his part) that ideologically motivated reasoning is in fact perfectly symmetric with respect to right-left ideology.”

Well you get the idea (http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/4/9/more-on-krugmans-symmetry-proof-its-not-whether-one-gets-the.html). According to Kahan, “it’s not whether one gets the answer right or wrong but how one reasons that counts”. “If in aggregate, in the real world, they [liberals] happen to “get the right” answer, then they aren’t to be commended for the high quality of their reasoning. Rather, they are to be congratulated for being lucky that a position they unreasoningly subscribe to happens to be true.” The rest of us think that it does actually matter whether one gets the answer right. At least, a theory based on symmetry ought to account for observed asymmetry but Kahan only hyperventilates.

Kahan conflates two very different issues:
1) How do people form their respective views – are they formed by careful consideration of the available evidence, by appeal to authority, by superstition?
2) How do people respond when they are confronted with evidence that challenges their dearly held views?

It is neither new nor surprising to observe that most people resist changing their views. After all, we have invested a lot of intellectual and emotional capital in our world view. That is true for left and right. It is also true for Galileo and Einstein as much as anybody else. It does not follow however that all positions are equally “unreasoningly subscribed to”. It doesn’t follow that Galileo and his opponents were all equally ideologically driven, and that Galileo just happened to be right.

Oh s*t. Only first paragraph should be blockquote.

= = = But “banning” labeling is not on the table. The question is whether or not to have state mandated labelling. = = =

A number of large agricultural states in fact have laws banning labeling of foods with GMO content. Also,

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/09/genetic-labeling-bill/7519937/

I agree that tGMO’s and labeling would fade as political issues if it weren’t for the IP problem. Evidently, strong IP and high profits are more acceptable in the pharmaceutical industry then in agriculture. Ag biotech is not nearly as profitable, and the research is just as expensive, but the over-reach and greed of the companies involved is more visible I guess. Its hard to feel a lot of sympathy for the industry, but I sort of do, because we are going to need all the help we can get to feed the 9-billion who on their way.

= = = But outright opposition to GM based on spurious claims about health risks is definitely a minority position. = = =

Concern about long-term ecological effects of modifying systems (and systems of systems) we don’t really understand is apparently illegitimate as well?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022629

Cranky

#26: “…intelligence does not immunize a person against the tribalism…this is why the academic economics community is sharply divided along political tribal lines. The best and the brightest have turned out to be easily swayed by political considerations and personal interests. This betrayal of the elites is at the heart of our present problems. We have failed to apply moral tests in the allocation of authority…”

I would put it that intellect does not immunize against emotions. Emotions are spacetimeless. When you are in love, you love the world, when you hate it is easily fed too. Emotions looks for facts to feed on.

But I’n not so sure it is the heart of our problems. I think the greatest thing happening now is the fall of one-way mass media, to insurmountable influence of corrections and discussions on the internet. This is in progress, and will even eventually swamp the Koch Bros. for example.

For about 100 years, we were told what to think, in an essential way. Now we are getting so much information and corrections that we may be prey to a new danger, complexity which overwhelms the brain nodes. (Already it’s well overloaded the Koch’s. But I digress.) My fear is that we could be in danger of a more general cranial abdication due to epistemological foundations. I am not so sure that it can be surmounted even by the wisdom of crowds + institutional experts.

In the meantime, perhaps a very short meantime, the academic community could be enacting the final end of the first modern period. Anyway what is undeniable (except for a few, except for our astonishing host, if Zombie Economics is any indication) is that their presumed intellectual training is now revealed in all its sluggishness.

I want to disagree with your assertion:

“Such policies should, be advocated on the basis that they will make society as a whole better off, and not on the basis that the winners are the right kinds of people and the losers the wrong kind.”

One legitimate goal of public policy is the creation of a just society, and part of that means ensuring that virtue is reward and wickedness punished. This is precisely determining that the “winners” and “losers” are the right kind of people. The motivation of picking the right kind of “winner” and “loser” is particularly dominant in torts and criminal law.

Its precisely this search for justice that leads me to support my country’s Left and redistributionist policies.

I’m not a theist, but theistic evolution gets unfairly maligned. It’s completely different from thinking that Satan put bones in the ground to fool us and filled space with fake starlight. It’s also not the same as Intelligent Design, which goes one step further to claim that theistic evolution is scientifically proven but some kind of Richard Dawkins conspiracy silences that proof. If your intuition is that there is some kind of Divine Something giving the universe’s apparent randomness a nudge here and there, then not only is science unable to rule that out today, but it can’t even rule out the possibility that some day a scary huge computer will crunch all the data and find a divine signal in the noise.

I also think all the complaining I saw today over a poll about how few people are willing are “confident” that “The universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang.” is ridiculous. 13.8 billion? Not 13.7 or 13.9?

I believe the reason many people are nervous about genetic modification is that they understand the human lust for power, wealth, and repute, usually but not always exhibited as capitalism, the dominant social system. They know that if GM becomes a regular, accepted thing, those who engage in it will continue to push the envelope until some kind of disaster occurs. Given the powers of microorganisms, that disaster could be catastrophic. Nuclear power is one model of that type of process, imperial war is another; but neither has the destructive potential of bacteria, the earth’s predominant lifeform.

As for climate change, it is not simply a matter of science. Most depictions of climate change imply that large, expensive changes should be made in everyone’s daily life under a fairly authoritarian regime, even though those who study the question seem unable to determine what is going to happen when with any accuracy. Much of the discourse from ‘climatists’ (?) has, in addition, been hysterical, which is not science and also not very productive politically. In fact it is rather reminiscent of Fundamentalist end-of-the-world discourse. Avoiding or mitigating climate change will not be cost-free, and wrong decisions one way or the other could also be effectively disastrous.

“…takes the form of a tu quoque or, in the language of the schoolyard, ‘you’re another’. ”

Almost, but not quite. In American jargon, at least, the schoolyard equivalent is “so’s your mother.”

(If this was an attempt at Cockney rhyming slang, I hasten to add, it was the lamest attempt ever.)

I see my straw man was superfluous.

zbs, your 3:45 is absolutely appropriate, because it’s not necessarily right that “even when true, the tu quoque argument is an implicit admission of error”. Too often it turns what ought to be a scientific question into a matter of opinion. Ken Ham says that scientists and creationists look at the same facts and come to different conclusions because their world views differ.

Anarcissie #35: “Avoiding or mitigating climate change will not be cost-free…”

But can the new benefits outweigh the new costs? Then there will be a net benefit. It turns out that this looks likely.

I think the first thing to do is fight this head on. If we do NOT mitigate climate change, we will most certainly have an authoritarian regime. Because there are going to be sudden heat spikes which destroy crops, and we are going to have food riots. Even the Pentagon has warned about these kinds of things.

Secondly, the dire warnings of “expensive changes…made in everyone’s daily life under a fairly authoritarian regime” are, these days, not so much about the old dire warnings, as about conservative needs to maintain the old rhetorical villain.

How do we know that it is so? Because now there are a lots of reasonable people who say instead, look, if we adopt the precautionary principle and start now, there need be no net cost, it will be a net benefit. Indeed the evidence increasingly suggests this. Yet it doesn’t stop the post-truth tribalism. So once again we are back to John Quiggin’s post.

But there is something in addition to post-truth tribalism. Climate contrarians are also brainfrozen into the same market fundamentalism that affects conservatives in general: the belief that the way that markets do it, is both freest and most efficient, and any other way will cost more, so there will be a net cost if government gets involved.

Read their materials and speeches all the way through — you’ll find this is a rampant subtext. You can find the idea explicitly stated by people whose intellectual capacities are as different as Lindzen, Monckton and Wattsup.

Of course it is the same argument as, “government spending is less efficient for dealing with welfare”, which has often been employed functionally by some other sorts of people, as we discussed in some other comment threads.

I think that climate contrarianism is additional evidence that it is important to identify and combat this logical loop as a stand-alone intellectual debility. Ask contrarians to consider whether buying a new washing machine is not cost-free: are there benefits? They will reply, “Not if the government is doing it.” Then ask in return, why is that so? You will hear the circular loop.

Consumatopia, with respect to the Big Bang, this Atlantic article offers some background:

Up until 2010, they asked the following question: True or false, the universe began with a huge explosion.

Since 1990, the number of people answering true to that question has bounced between 32 and 38 percent.
…
In 2012, the National Science Board tried to parse out why Americans were different by adding ‘according to astronomers’ into the Big Bang question for half the survey respondents. Like this:

According to astronomers, the universe began with a big explosion.
60 percent of Americans said this statement was true, versus 39 percent who said so when the “according to astronomers” was not present. This would suggest that 40 percent of people know the science, 40 percent of people don’t, and 20 percent have heard the science, but believe otherwise.

Actually, when I looked at the survey results I was inclined to quibble with the 4.55 billion year age of the earth. It’s more like a measurement of the last time most of the earth’s surface was molten. Certainly it existed as an aggregation of rubble for a long time before that, and its surface may have melted many times.

JQ @36:

” He’s also an anti-vaxer and climate denier. On the latter point at least, drawing majority support from his party, and virtually unanimous support from the intellectual/blogospheric cheer squad of which Captain M is clearly a member.”

I’m pro-ALP actually. I’ve never voted right of centre in my life.

The science denialism on the Right is generally worse than that on the Left but that doesn’t excuse the Left’s own fruit loops, nor does it excuse the type of tribalism that leads critics such as yourself to dismiss in-house critics as part of the right wing cheer squad.

The anti-GM Left is arguably already killing thousands of people: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/03/15/golden-rice-opponents-should-be-held-accountable-for-health-problems-linked-to-vitamain-a-deficiency/

I am, however, in a position to say who I choose to regard as a legitimate/useful person with whom to engage in political discussion.

Who can vote, etc. really isn’t up to you. In a democratic politics, you have to engage in politics, in some manner, with whoever else shows up. Setting standards for the opposition can be a clever tactic, effective when it works, and vanity when it doesn’t.

I echoed Adler’s reference to Kahan, because Kahan makes the point that conservatives are hostile to the climate science, when they see it as a political challenge to their political worldview, which emphasizes a kind of libertarian freedom to act individually or privately. He’s shown that political context matters a lot, and if the climate science is presented in a political context that’s more individualistic and heroic-action-oriented — proposals for climate engineering, say, instead of a blanket carbon tax — conservatives often more receptive to the science. Now, I think “climate engineering” is a dangerous crock, and you may share a similar view, but that’s not the immediate point. The root difference of opinion is a matter of political outlook or worldview, involving questions, not of science, but of political economics — questions like, is there a public good? What is the public good? Can a public good be pursued? applied to the problems of climate change (and peak oil and ecological collapse and overpopulation and resource limits).

Bruce Wilder has made the point I was vaguely gesturing at, but if the argument here is “this particular group of conservatives argue thusly and here is their fallacy,” then I suppose there might not be much left to be said, apart from some specific defense of those writers, for which, it seems to me, this might be an awkward venue. (And though I am just a passer-by, I also feel the queasiness that arises from so many of these ancient lobster arguments, immortal lines about the knowability of science or religion, or the crisis of the political individual.)

Creationism vs evolution is indeed about religion and science, but it hardly affects any policies. The rest is not about science but about trusting the experts and their studies. Obviously, studies do often server an agenda. Some people tend to distrust corporations, others the government, and then other just distrust the establishment all together. In any case, conspiratorial thinking is no more irrational than blind trust; it’s based on real precedents.

I am going to raise the to quoque to the meta-level. Many on the left argue that science cannot be entirely divorced from its political role (I am thinking of cases like Judith Butler on buman biology) and, therefore, strategically arguing against it can be just good politics. We should be highly suspicious of scientific knowledge, even if well evidenced, if it plays a supporting role in existing power structures because power has a way distorting (even creating) knowledge. Many on the US right might agree (if they were even capable of rationalising what they were doing deliberatively like Butler or Bruno Latour). They just have a different set of truths they want to support or demolish.

“It would be nice if we could easily distinguish left from right by their tendency to indulge in conspiracy theories, given one side’s well-known paranoid tendency, […] many industries have long participated in disinformation campaigns.”

Many governments have too. I wouldn’t call it left and right, but rather pro-business/anti-government vs anti-business/pro-government.

In the case of cosmology, some people might be just skeptics, rather than in favor of some some religiously-inspired alternative, such as “young earth”. The mathematics is beyond what most people have studied, the experimental data (e.g. microwave background radiation, doppler shift of light from distant stars) is outside of everyday experience. Which leaves you with argument from authority, which makes a cosmologist look like just another “priest” telling an extravagant creation myth — and we now know to be skeptical of them.

(The Nietzschian allusion is intentional).

Contrast for example Plato’s Meno, where the slave is at least told the mathematical proof of the theorem, rather than being given an explanation that amounts to “because science”.

I’m very glad the obvious reality that left and right are not symmetrical is getting some airtime (especially that Krugman weighs in on it).

As to why, there will likely be psychological or brain chemistry explanations on an individual level, but I think we shouldn’t ignore how liberalism as an ideology promotes empiricism and evidence based policy as tenets of the system. Even if it turns out that one for one, individual liberals and conservatives are equally likely to engage in motivated reasoning, liberalism as a social phenomena promotes resistance to this. It should be obvious that this emphasis on empiricism is not true of conservativism (or libertarianism).

We know this is possible after all, it’s what the scientific method exists to do. Individual scientists can become irrationally wedded to pet theories (even Einstein and equivalent geniuses) but science as a whole manages to move on. The same type of systemic checks that work for science can work for liberalism.

“Many governments have too. I wouldn’t call it left and right, but rather pro-business/anti-government vs anti-business/pro-government.”

Since when are government and business opponents? Their relationship is much more complicated than that.

@63 @69

In fact in seems to me that the real “enemy” of business is other business.

I was not describing relationships between business and government. I suggested that some people tend to trust businesses (“the market”) more, while some others trust the government, and this is how you get (roughly) two camps of skeptics, conspiracy theorists. Vaccination and water fluoridation skeptics would be in one camp, nuclear power and GM food skeptics in the other.

Alan White 04.22.14 at 12:26 am

” On @1 & @2′s debate: I think the Right is winning, because they figured out that effective politics are local, and all you need in the US is to have at least the House to stall stuff, and the Senate to really get things done. They’re on the verge of that too. The recent SCOTUS decision entrenched their position by allowing big pockets to influence local races all over the country.”

I think that too many liberals are assuming a President Clinton, even though it’s a rare thing for a party to get three terms in office. If the GOP wins the presidency in 2016 (along with the expected Senate coat-tails, and the usual couple of Dem Senators going along), and we’d see:

1) SCOTUS staffed back up with a couple of young, *extremely* right-wing justices, who’d embrace the Rehnquist-Roberts philosophy of extreme judicial activists.

2) The rest of the federal bench staffed with the same.

Note – the GOP will respect any constraint on their ability to confirm justices no more than they did in the Bush administration. Except I’d expect that this time, they’d pull the ‘nuclear option’ trigger.

3) A repetition of the Bush-Cheney ‘facts on the ground’ strategy, ignoring any customs which go in their way.

4) A sycophantic MSM, who’d revert to President worship in late January, 2017.

5) A massive extension of the Robertsonian voter suppression effort. The GOP would probably be in near-permanent control of a large number of state governments – the executive, the legislative and judicial branches. I would expect the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to be gutted (and the 1st, the 4th, the 5th).

6) Massive deficit spending, as wasteful as possible, to deliberately cause a crisis in the next Dem administration. By now this a pretty good strategy.

7) A massive sell-off/long-term leasing of as many government assets as possible. In terms of climate change, at that point the pessimistic estimates would be the status quo estimates, if we are very lucky.

8) Wars. Lots and lots of wars.

Oh, and massive ‘deregulation’ of the financial sector (actually, writing them blank legal checks, and shamelessly enacting and enforcing legal corrupt crony capitalism). This will lead to yet another crash – and at this point, I would accept that the leadership of the right *wants* crashes. Wall St and MegaCorps Avenue did well from the last one, and the suckers on Main St will vote Republican, because the Republicans butter them up with empty words.

Note that the right rarely maintains the argument that climate change is not happening. They are just pushing your buttons. What they usually argue is: climate always changes, and we will deal with it.

There are different splits that come to the fore: 1. Individualism (business) vs. government. 2. Sloppy technological fixes vs. complex-system statistics and imprecision. 3. Party seeking political power vs. party seeking political power.

1 is about political economy and morals. 2 is about instrumental rationality and scientific epistemology. 3 is about contingent rhetorical strategies and dynamics.

Suppose it were possible to engineer a microbe that inhaled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — reduced CO2 — and turned itself into gasoline. We could then construct a closed fuel cycle, and maybe a beginning of the end to the greenhouse gas problem. Suppose it were possible: would the left be in favor of it? Technological solutions make them queasy.

It seems to me that a lot of liberal critiques of nuclear power and GMOs are really critiques of corporate profit-seeking and corporate dominance.

I like the idea of GMOs in general, but I don’t like or trust Monsanto. I like nuclear power, but if we are going to go in that direction, we can’t let nuclear plants be run by profit-seeking bean counters, as was done with Fukushima. (The French model of nuclear power, I think, shows more promise in this regard.)

It’s not about distrusting technology, it’s about distrusting the greedy and short-sighted corporations that are deploying it.

“As to why, there will likely be psychological or brain chemistry explanations on an individual level, but I think we shouldn’t ignore how liberalism as an ideology promotes empiricism and evidence based policy as tenets of the system. Even if it turns out that one for one, individual liberals and conservatives are equally likely to engage in motivated reasoning, liberalism as a social phenomena promotes resistance to this. It should be obvious that this emphasis on empiricism is not true of conservativism (or libertarianism).”

This is the kind of thinking that leads to foolishness. For a very narrow version of ‘liberalism’ this might apply, but not as to actually existing political parties once they reach power for a term or so. And it absolutely does not apply to the left in general. There is way too much history in communism, ridiculous post modernism, and anti science new age environmentalism for that story to be true. The only reason I can see to entertain that fantasy is to pretend that the left is immune to the bad part of identity/tribal politics so that we can then just go whole hog in using leftist tribalism to counter rightist tribalism.

Stick to the facts, the right is much worse on tribalism at this point than the left, so what do we do to change that? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m absolutely certain that deciding to cheerleader non reflective leftist tribalism as a counter would end in tears (either by destroying the tenuous efforts at anti tribalism made by our civilizations, or by provoking enough tribalism to get to severe civil strife and then either losing or becoming monstrous.)

Promote good norms. Resist abuse of good norms. (This is especially bad in the US Senate.) whatever the defense of filibusters, they clearly are justified only if rare exercises of extreme concern. If common they are just a loggerjam. If you can’t promote the norm that they be used only in extremis, threaten to get rid of them. I think democratic senators have finally figured that out, but it took a decade too long.

@Sebastian #83:

This is the kind of thinking that leads to foolishness. For a very narrow version of ‘liberalism’ this might apply, but not as to actually existing political parties once they reach power for a term or so. And it absolutely does not apply to the left in general.

I’m not arguing it’s inherent, but a benefit of liberalism as an ideology when practiced, of course various governments can fall away from their ideological foundations, but I’m searching for an explanation for why the left has proven less prone to mass motivated reasoning and bubble realities. Even in power, the liberal response to Obama’s governing errors is more likely to be “yeah, that is broken and should be fixed” (e.g. obamacare website) rather than “damn biased media is failing to report the good news!” If you want to argue that within the admin various bubbles exist, sure, but this is about broad movements.

If scientists decide to abandon the scientific method, we’ll end up with leechcraft and geocentricism too, but so long as they adhere to it, episodes like cold fusion are debunked fairly quickly and do no lasting harm.

Lee A. Arnold 04.22.14 at 3:06 pm

” It is another Republican leadership pickle. Many of their voters hated the bailouts and bonuses. After the next crash, everybody is going to watch this a lot more closely.”

The right had zero problems with 8 years of Bush/Cheney corruption. They only kicked up a ruckus when they had lost. And in several years, what has the Tea Party and the Congressional GOP even tried to prevent the next crash?

GiT wrote:

“The strongest case for labeling GMO foods is based on consumer-sovereignty. We should as much ban the use of kosher/halal labels as a non-GMO label.”

But “banning” labeling is not on the table. The question is whether or not to have state mandated labelling. One ought to be able to just concoct some opt-in private imprimatur as a certifying agency. Works for Kosher and Halal products, though there’s a case for state auditing along “truth in advertising” lines in that arrangement.

Well, that (banning) is arguable: see this, in particular the incidents toward the end of the story (section labeled, “No ‘Hormone Free’ either”)

@52/Nine replying to Bruce Wilder@51 re Kahan

Let’s assume that either the science is correct or it isn’t. Why then should it require appeals to prejudice, self-interest or idiosyncratic belief to convince?

What if there is no other practical way “to convince” than through such appeals, or we do not have the time to argue a preponderant political faction to an acceptance of the policy we deem rational? Then what “should” we do? Would it be more important to us to maintain our allegiance to rationalism, which may not be the same as rationality, or to achieve the particular, rationally determined indispensable good – e.g., rescuing the world from climate catastrophe? Wouldn’t in that instance the allegiance to rationalism be irrational for us?

The “tu quoque” says more than “you’re hypocrites.” Whether the person offering it means to say more or not, it says, “You’re hypocrites, which is bad enough for those who claim to stand against hypocrisy, but, even worse, you’re foolish hypocrites, with the evidence of your hypocrisy being only one element, possibly not the most important element, of your foolishness. It undermines your case, but, politically more devastating, it also exposes you as incompetent – unworthy of allegiance and unlikely to govern effectively or wisely.”

The blogger argues as follows:

What’s more important, though, is what the tu quoque argument says about those who deploy it, and their view of politics. The implied claim is that politics is inherently a matter of tribalism and emotion, and that there is no point in complaining about this. The only thing to do is to pick a side and stick to it.

Why would conceding that “tribalism and emotion” play a critical or even the critical role in politics make it advisable to “pick a side and stick to it”? If one has determined that tribalism and emotion often overwhelm rationality in politics, and the implication is that picking a side will tend to involve one in irrationally chosen and pursued positions, rational responses might include turning away from “politics” so defined to the maximum extent practicable: to seek maximum independence, at least for someone hoping to approach political questions reasonably or as reasonably as possible.

For those involved in politics for other reasons, obviously the calculation would be different, but “picking a side and sticking to it” would still only be advisable under particular circumstances, not as a general rule simply on the basis of an assessment of the importance of tribalism and emotion. One might very reasonably choose to align with the side that best, or most reasonably and realistically, coped with this critical aspect of politics. On the other hand, if you designated a particular issue or objective of paramount importance, you might reasonably hope that the side you favored operated according to a good analysis and proper estimation of tribalism and emotion, and you might advise it to take them into account both offensively and defensively, while remaining aware of own possibly inadequately acknowledged tribalist-emotional motivations.

It may be that the one method least likely to advance the cause of scientific reason in American politics, for example, would be the one that abjured populist, patriotic, moral-religious and other “tribal” and “emotional” appeals, and insisted on a supposedly strictly “rational” mode of argument. It seems reasonable at least to consider the possibility. In regard to climate change catastrophe, we might seek a reasonable estimation of the actually political possible, including a dispassionate or non-prejudiced treatment of, as per Bruce Wilder’s sensible suggestions, different and conflicting notions of the public good.

The Kahan argument reprises the classical critique of democratism in a contemporary language – “social science” – just as Ezra Klein’s presentation of it inched toward the classical conundrum, on creating rationally sound constitutions for irrational or never simply rational human beings. A rational rather than rationalistic response to the not merely familiar but ancient and traditional, possibly eternal, predicament also would include a willingness to examine the degree to which past and often very hard won rational determinations are embedded within seemingly irrational allegiances that this discussion derogates as “tribalism” and “emotion.”

Ze Kraggish @73
Rational people wouldn’t trust either.

O.K. So you are saying people aren’t rational (sounds a like like tribality to me).

When some of the sillier leftist science warrior stuff from the 90s gets cited in support the “left and right both do it” hypothesis, what always gets omitted is that by far the most effective pushback against that stuff came from the left, e.g. the infamous Sokal hoax and its aftermath.

It should also be noted that Sokal’s work in this area sometimes itself gets misinterpreted by those who claim to be his defenders and allies as a repudiation of the notion that science is situated in a social context and thus can be subjected to social, historical, etc. analyses beyond those of a very cursory nature. That’s a position that Sokal himself has never held (and about which he has been very clear).

I should add that I don’t think any of the fine folks here at CT take that view; I’m talking more about the Gross & Levitt types.

Barry #86: “Bullsh*t.”

Not when you get down into the Pew and Gallup polls, and not when I have spoken to the more scientific, rational ones. Whether climate change is caused by people, and whether the catastrophic possibilities are worth worrying about? There, they differ.

Barry #87: ‘The right had zero problems with 8 years of Bush/Cheney corruption. They only kicked up a ruckus when they had lost. And in several years, what has the Tea Party and the Congressional GOP even tried to prevent the next crash?”

Ans.: Zero, and the Democrats, next to zero. But this is not conclusive when the question is, what happens next time? Hatred of the bailouts and bonuses is where left and right met: from Occupy to Tea. A possible populist uprising. The Wash D.C.-Wall St. axis including both Dem to Repub might be at risk.

The Republican leadership doesn’t have any presidential star material, yet they are carefully marginalizing Tean heart-throb Rand Paul (right now, via his foreign policy gaffes). Why? I think it may be because he might not sign on to more bailouts. He may stick with his Tea peeps.

Reason, it sort of is tribalistic, but I don’t see why this has to be explained by tribal loyalty. Ideological assumptions form a model of the world inside our heads. It’s hard to analyze oneself, but it’s apparent in others. The market tends to sort things out, while the government craves power and control, or: the government is (at least somewhat) accountable to the people, while the business will do anything for profit.

Anarcissie: You write “changes should be made in everyone’s daily life under a fairly authoritarian regime, even though those who study the question seem unable to determine what is going to happen when with any accuracy.” You make it sound as if that’s an irrational response. In fact, since by all accounts the second derivative of net utility with respect to change of mean temperature is negative, uncertainty increases the expected value of taking some action to reduce the changes. If you take into account more complicated uncertainties, in changes in climate patterns, not just mean temperature, the case becomes stringer yet.

“but I’m searching for an explanation for why the left has proven less prone to mass motivated reasoning and bubble realities. ”

Your premise isn’t true. The left has proven prone to all sorts of mass motivated reasoning in the last hundred years. It is just is doing better than the right at in the past ten to fifteen–and “better than the right” is very faint praise. Why is it *now*? My best guess is that the wounds from the last couple rounds of leftist tribalism (communist infighting, post modernist garbage, etc) are still fresh enough for people to be wary.

You mention the response to Obama, but the results of looking even at that exhibit some tribalism. The secret assassination order thing had a very muted response, and the Snowden revelations had much less effect in terms of volume from the left than I would have expected if they had been bush’s work.

Sebastian H: The Left also is still recovering, and within that same time frame, or possibly failing to recover despite best efforts, from epochal defeat or failure of its central organizing tribal-emotional identity formation “working class”/”proletariat.” An epochal defeat may not necessarily constitute a permanent defeat, and it could be that the defeat has been misunderstood (would be surprising if it wasn’t), but neither conclusion would justify a denial of the problem posed for theory and practice. Ecologism transfers “world revolution” to a different level: As though nature itself or the Earth or “the world itself,” under very-late capitalism, could and therefore must assume the role of historical subject coming to self-consciousness, and so “revolution” comes even nearer to “apocalypse,” socialism to be finally achieved as necessitated by the war-like conditions of ecological collapse.

Per my comment @92, I should stipulate that I don’t consider Latour to be one of the “sillier leftist science warriors”. I’ve generally found his work interesting, even if I don’t agree with all of his conclusions.

Like AcademicLurker at #107, I’ve found some of Latour’s work to be interesting and even useful, though I also don’t agree with all of it.

belief or disbelief in ‘science’ has always been political, I think. How could it be otherwise?

Bruce Wilder – @110: In what’s destined to be a widely read and cited article in the current Nation, Chris Hayes makes the ‘proletarian Earth” connection explicit, in part by introducing a term I hadn’t seen before: “climate justice.” The conceit of the article is a comparison of climate change to slavery, and of the “climate justice movement” to “abolitionism.” I don’t have the time to attempt a critique of his approach, or to compare it to Jonathan Chait’s very alternative view published today esp. in re the Keystone Pipeline, but the appearance on my twitter timeline – “@zackbeauchamp: .@chrislhayes’ essay comparing abolitionism to the anti-climate change campaign is just fantastic. Read it now: http://www.thenation.com/article/179461/new-abolitionism?page=0,0 ” – struck me as too serendipitous to go unmentioned.

Incidentally, my own reading on geo-engineering leads me to think that it is less than 100% a crock, and I’m therefore reluctant to dismiss it completely for practical as well as political-emotional-tribal reasons. That it is potentially a dangerous distraction – or an excuse for doing nothing – also needs to be taken into account, of course. I’m also not sure that “[t]he science of climate doesn’t tell us how to organize a political economy that can keep civilization from running off the cliff.” Maybe it does or can in some sense, or maybe it will have to.

#102 anarcissie:
If the problem were due to wandering randomly in some multi-dimensional parameter space, yeah, uncertainty can tend to make it pointless to act. Here, although the consequences might show up in some complicated set of climate effects, the driving term is simple. It’s how much GHG we emit. Emit less and you lessen the problems. So the uncertainty about what’s at the bottom of that climate cliff isn’t exactly a good argument for keeping our feet on the gas.

Wow, I’d never have expected to see France under Pompidou and Giscard-d’Estaing compared to modern-day China! Did you read “European History for Dummies”, too?

On the topic of tribalism and cultural cognition (Kahan etc.), I would encourage people to actually read the link I gave at 19. It is pretty embarrassing (for Kahan).

I think the concept of tribalism is a pretty obvious observation. Of course we all are influenced in our thinking by the people with whom we are closest. Plus, we all tend to be reluctant to change our views once they are formed and integrated. The more one has invested intellectually and emotionally in an opinion or an ideology, the more dissonance it takes to modify that opinion. That is neither surprising nor new and anybody who hasn’t experienced and recognized that probably hasn’t spent much time with honest introspection.

What doesn’t follow from all this is that all tribes are equally irrational. It should be obvious that tribes differ in how conformist they are, how much they value authority, how much diversity they tolerate, what example their leaders provide. So whatever the research about these matters says, and some of it is certainly relevant and enlightening, cannot by itself settle the question of asymmetry between left and right.

djr,
There is a vast difference between introducing whole species and introducing one or several genes into a species. On the spectrum of technologies for altering the genetics of an organism, GMO technology is among the most precise and predictable. Inter-specific hybrids which are used commonly in conventional plant breeding mix thousands of genes into new combinations, and yet we don’t worry too much about it. And while being careful not to worry too much, we can acknowledge that there are risks associated with conventional breeding, new allergens, novel toxins, etc can and do crop up.

Worth noting:

1) There are major problems with Kahan’s work – there are rebuttal papers in the review process at the moment. Of course, as always, the first question ask about these kinds of work are “what’s the relationship between these “lab” conditions used for the experiment and life?”

As an aside, most of the work at the “Cultural Cognition Center” misunderstand what culture is… but that’s a much longer battle… which points up that understanding social and human effects is a long way from “settled science” and Kahan’s arrogance about his experiments (and indeed the blind way people quote him) should remind us all how bad the general public is as understand what can be science and what can’t…

2) Large sections of GMO “science” are also being chipped away as non-Monsanto affiliated scientists take up the baton. Particularly in the area of ecosystem (rather than health) effects.

It’s characteristic both of techno-utopians and rightist misleaders to concentrate on the effects on individuals, when the science action appears to be about something else…

@ Metatone

This is interesting in that Kahan has pointed out several times that GMO is NOT an issue prone to “cultural cognition” in the US. While it might well be true that people are quoting him blindly, bringing up GMO in this context is a rather sure sign that he has not been read, at all.

We need to go way beyond current labeling, even if we extend it to GMO.

Everyone should know, for instance, when the oranges were actually picked from the trees — when sold as oranges or orange juice. Especially in the case of the latter. The Atlantic had a good article recently which pointed out that most of the juice we get at the grocery store is quite old, sometimes a year old, and filled with all kinds of things that don’t have much to do with orange juice at all. Having the label tell us “best when consumed by” doesn’t really give us the information we need to make smart choices. OTOH, telling us how long it’s been sitting around, stewing in its own artificial juices, might just make us turn to local sources instead. This would have the added benefit of, hopefully, reducing the garbage sold in stores.

As far as the OP goes . . . another great example is the one where the right always met (and still meets) criticism of the invasion of Iraq with “The Dems voted for it, too.” As if that made it less despicable, unconscionable or mad.

In general, the ecological impact of agriculture is large, it has been that way for thousands of years.

Except now we have a few more acres under cultivation and a few more guests as the dinner table . . .

It’s that feedback loop between realizing that something you are doing has inadvertent consequences, and having the time and resources to assess and course correct, that seems to be shortening and the political economy system is resistant to doing what is necessary to back off enough to lengthen the feedback loop enough to avoid inadvertent mass suicide.

CK/ Bruce Wilder – “Does the science dictate a political solution? ”

Acknowledging the correctness of the science and agreeing upon a solution – if indeed the science identifies a problem that needs to be solved (evolution vs ID doesn’t need any solution that i can see), then one arrived at by political consensus i suppose – are two very different things. Cultural cognition or not, climate change deniers seems to be reasoning backward from the acceptability of the political compromise solution to the correctness of the science. Accommodating their cultural prejudices seems to be a very cynical and a too clever by half way to achieve consensus.
Here’s a thought experiment – Catholics can presumably be persuaded on evolution or the big bang by appealing to the official teachings of the church on such matters. But what if the afflatus, for its own mysterious reasons, chooses inform the Pope that the universe is 4000 years old ? Karl Rove type tactics tend to work brilliantly well until such time as they stop working.

Bruce Wilder #118: “Lee A. Arnold’s Fire Next Time, if it doesn’t disappoint entirely, is likely to have a neo-fascist character — taking the political response after WWI, when liberal rationalism had been tried and failed in a corrupt and muddle-headed determination to be run over in the middle-of-the-road, as a pattern.”

Actually what I really think is that the plutocracy will fool everybody and finally just fizzle out, without much of a bang. So it may indeed disappoint you entirely! (The blandest version of Schumpeter’s likely scenario.) But I don’t see any usefulness in strategizing about it.

Above, I was only challenging the contention that the GOP leadership wants another financial crash. I just don’t see that at all.

For one thing, the Republican leadership has to keep smoothing the internal split with the Tea’s, and don’t want more anger at bailouts and favoritism towards bankers. They do this by blaming the government for the crash, but there is no guarantee that excuse will work the next time.

For another thing, the GOP leadership hardly needs another crash. Why? Because they don’t need it for the bezzle anyway. Crashes somewhat interrupt the bezzle.

There is no such bridging problem for the Democrats, largely because Occupy has little or no purchase on the Democratic Party. The Teas could be astroturfed into a minor force at the polls (and it looks like the benefits as astroturf are partly backfiring) but Occupy is more diffuse.

in fact, more “natural” methods, crop rotation, rotating crops with animals, maintaining genetic diversity in seed stocks and hybridization, soil conservation and enhancement, etc. long-run would result in higher and more durable and sustainable yields.

That would be awful because you’d have to, like, give people jobs doing it and stuff.

What did Halasz say that was false?

BW @112 JQ @140

I was going to pick up on Bruce Wilder’s comment there as well, but didn’t get around to it last night.

I just don’t see the anti-vaxer problem like this, I think it is more sinister. You see vaccination is a bit like global warming avoidance, it only really works if everybody does it. (And here measels is a classic case in point, but TB and Diptheria are relevant too.) The problem is that this doesn’t parse into our methodological individualism. An individual might well avoid a miniscule associated with the vaccination itself, with an even smaller increased risk of damage from infection, so long as the heard immunity is mantained. Getting vaccinated or not, should be seen not just as a personal choice, but as a moral issue (ultimately, it is part of a collective effort).

This is where the use (by Charles Koch for instance) of collectivist as a derogatory term does so much harm. There is no way around collective solutions for collective problems. This is why I find the business versus government meme so annoying. We need business AND government. The problem is we have lost sight of what the goal of it all is.

Right. There’s certainly a tension between the communitarian value (“public good”) of vaccinations and the individual tendency for free-riding. Since, as a liberal, you don’t like the idea of compulsory vaccinations, and since a mass opt out would destroy any hope to eradicate the disease, a well-meaning public health official has a clear incentive to suppress any reports (false or true) of vaccine injury. In other words, well-meaning public health officials have a bias, and even an incentive to lie – for the common good. Is this not a valid case of rational skepticism?

Maybe I should answer that slightly differently, skepticism I regard in general as a good thing, but cynicism is something else entirely.

Then just make sure you ask to see their evidence.

Prof Quiggin, you’ve actually boosted my point.

In Australia, the ALP state governments have placed “moratoriums” (in reality permanent bans) on nearly all GM crops. We’ve needed state Liberal-National Governments to lift these anti-science bans. Nonetheless, I still vastly prefer the ALP because its economic and social policies favour the working class and the poor whereas the Liberals favour the rich.

Is it really that hard to understand?

They don’t really need to be dishonest, like a trial lawyer doesn’t need to be dishonest. They are biased, and so it’s reasonable to believe that they won’t tell you the whole story, not objectively. It doesn’t imply that they will not try to improve the safety of vaccines. It only implies that in some cases the risk may still be present.

Ze Kraggash @151
This is just getting too silly, I’m going to stop. Either we don’t really have a disagreement, or our disagreement isn’t substantial enough to matter.

dm @ 121

There is a vast difference between introducing whole species and introducing one or several genes into a species.

That’s certainly true, I agree that it’s an analogy of where taking a more cautious approach to what we set loose in the ecosystem might have worked out better in the long run. Another example that’s relevant to the rest of this thread might be the argument as to whether we should be cautious about taking all of the fossilised carbon we can get our hands on and putting it in the atmosphere.

On the spectrum of technologies for altering the genetics of an organism, GMO technology is among the most precise and predictable. Inter-specific hybrids which are used commonly in conventional plant breeding mix thousands of genes into new combinations, and yet we don’t worry too much about it.

Predictable effects on the genotype, but I don’t think anyone would claim that the relationship between genotype and phenotype is anywhere near understood. And there is a qualitative difference between GMO and conventional breeding, it’s not a case of leaving an orange and a jellyfish in the same room with soft lighting and Marvin Gaye playing, and letting nature take its course.

I’m not saying the precautionary principle should necessarily win out, but I do weight it higher than some.

djr,
Right, predicting phenotype from genotype is difficult. For that reason, ideally one wants to perturb the system by adding/removing one gene at a time. It’s slow and painstaking work, that’s why its expensive research. Most alterations don’t nothing, so we scientists tend to get excited if anything at all happens, good or bad. To be honest, except for a few key traits like herbicide resistance, GMO’s are not that important. Molecular assisted breeding methods that rely on existing genetic variation are revolutionizing plant and animal breeding. On the other hand, I doubt anyone’s thought about trying Marvin Gaye and jelly yet… that is scary.

The common themes in left anti-vax and kneejerk anti-gmo are, first, conspiracy and, second, that the short-term benefit of individuals is less important than potential long term risks. Anti-vax results, in my middle class community, in parents not providing basic vaccinations for their kids, and in the recurrence of diseases here and elsewhere that we thought were gone. The kneejerk anti-gmo results in golden rice, a really major innovation, banned or limited and people producing less food for their families. Re use of GMOs in health care, my specialty, the US is reasonably sensible — if there are no g engineered remains in the final outcome, it can be OK. In Europe, it’s crazy — even if there are no GMO residues at all, the use of GMO in producing the product means it’s effectively banned.

At present, glyphosate resistance is manageable, and it’s not a matter of dumping more onto crops. I have not heard that proposed that as a solution, but who knows maybe somewhere on the internet… The ideal long-term solution would be to have at least a couple of herbicide/resistance systems that can be used in rotation. May be that will happen, but in the meantime its possible that glyphosate will lose some of its effectiveness over time at least temporarily. That would be unfortunate, because it facilitates other practices that have long-term benefits like minimum tillage and lower fuel consumption.

I also second Chatham 160, especially the middle paragraph. And a reference:

Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735903.2013.806408#.U1fpi1e0Tzo

“Reviewing the parameters of yield, pesticide use, germplasm diversity and human resources of the US staple crop agroecosystem demonstrates that lessons provided by past technology-derived disasters, such as the southern corn leaf blight epidemic (National Research Council, Committee on Genetic Vulnerability of Major Crops 1972), still have to be learned. The US (and Canadian) yields are falling behind economically and technologically equivalent agroecosystems matched for latitude, season and crop type; pesticide (both herbicide and insecticide) use is higher in the United States than in comparator W. European countries; the industries of all types that are supplying inputs to the farmer are becoming more concentrated and monopolistic (Fuglie et al. 2012) and these tendencies correlate with stagnation or declines in germplasm diversity (Welsh and Glenna 2006, Howard 2009, Domina and Taylor 2010). Farm number is decreasing and scale is increasing, concentrating and narrowing the farming skills. Annual variations in yield, which not only indicate low resilience of the agroecosytem but also can fuel dramatic price changes in agricultural markets, are more severe in the United States than in W. Europe.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/harvard-study-medicaid-expansion-deaths

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/30/1287923/-GOP-s-Obamacare-spite-means-death-toll-for-red-states#

and the man himself in all his glory

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/opinion/krugman-health-care-nightmares.html

All linking to this

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2014/01/30/opting-out-of-medicaid-expansion-the-health-and-financial-impacts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=opting-out-of-medicaid-expansion-the-health-and-financial-impacts

The grisly toll of evil Republicans.

Only the first link is the Oregon Experiment.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1212321

It’s conclusion is

“This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.”

Gold Standard of the group concludes no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years.

The second is too this

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1202099

at 19.6 deaths per 100,0000 that would result in what maybe 1,500, tops, extra deaths from not expanding Obamacare.

The third link is about private insurance versus no insurance and doesn’t even apply.

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2008.157685

Both studies that showed a link between mortality and insurances have major flaws.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/02/03/will-17104-americans-really-die-in-states-that-dont-expand-medicaid/

http://www.rightsidenews.com/2014042134170/life-and-science/health-and-education/does-failure-to-expand-medicaid-kill-people.html

Leaving those flaws aside, taking the 5 minutes to follow the links, and look at the evidence quickly reveals that 7K to 17K people dying every year due to lack of Medicaid expansion is a complete figment of the imagination. Study 1 = no measured health care differences. Study 2 = at most 1,500 deaths per year. Study 3 does not apply. No advance degree in statistics required. All you need is the ability to read and think.

The best evidence is that the link between insurance and mortality is non-existent.

Number of people who care about this evidence? Very, very, very few on either side. That is why Paul Krugman himself can link to that junk and remain a respectable figure.

Neither side cares about the evidence.

reason @ 141: I just don’t see the anti-vaxer problem like this . . .

The documentary, The Greater Good, can be useful. They point their unblinking eye at the public health officials as well as at the anti-vaxxers.

Vaccination against communicable disease is, as you say, a collective action problem. But, it is also a problem of handling risks associated with high-probability low-frequency events with enormous costs to isolated individuals, and even the scientific problems of assigning causality to the realization of risk in low-frequency events. You can say it’s a collective action problem and no doubt you are right, but it’s individuals, who get these devastating illnesses, whether its the rare case of a common illness with serious consequences, or the rare case of a serious side-effect. The scientific information is costly to acquire, and can be difficult to interpret, and it is not always clear that the authorized judgement exercised in setting up and administering a system is responsible and sufficiently informed and politically responsive.

Chris Mooney’s war on Republican science puts the object of his displeasure to shame.

The left has striven to monopolize the scientific conversation since the days of Haldane and Bernal, and the partisan shenanigans of The Center for American progress are but part of that permanent campaign.

Just as an extra sampler – in many of Kahan’s experiments, to create a false sense of balance he had to edit the figures for certain events. The one that comes to mind he altered the figures on gun control and deaths to “make liberals wrong.” The trouble is of course that he altered the figures, so if you knew anything about the topic beforehand, the right thing to do was in fact to question the figures…

The very idea that you can take figures in a single study as some kind of gospel would be laughed out of any academic seminar – and yet it’s the basis of Kahan’s whole critique of human reasoning…

I’m not in detail familiar with Kahan, do you have any useful references?

TM,
I’m not sure what numbers you are citing, but annual EU corn production averages about 25% of US production, or maybe I mis-understood the point you were trying to make.

It’s unfortunate that maize is so often derided as a symbol of industrialized agriculture. Maize is the world’s most productive crop, even in China where it has passed rice. That’s not all due to industrialization, especially in places like China and Africa. There are lots of reasons, but the fundamental biological basis is that it is a superb crop with enormous underlying genetic diversity. That means that it responds rapidly to conventional breeding. It’s adaptable in ways that other crops are not. In many parts of the world it is used for direct human consumption. I agree that it is a shame that so much is wasted on ethanol. That has nothing fundamentally to do with GMO technology.

I should say that I don’t believe the vaccine/autism connection.

But I can see why it might be psychologically attractive. It is much more reassuring to think that a risk is due to factors you know, and can control (you can avoid being vaccinated) than to think the risk is due to unknown and uncontrollable factors.

I don’t get the more general anti-vaccine sentiment though — can’t see either the economic or psychological driver for it. [Except, being vaccinated is mildly traumatic, which might be sufficient to trigger a phobia of the cause of the trauma. A paradoxical reaction here — normally, if something makes you sick, changing your behaviour to avoid the thing that made you sick is the correct thing to do — except when the behaviour that made you sick was getting vaccinated].

Backing TM somewhat at 162 and 163 and opposing JG at 159…

Golden Rice is not a product with end-customers in mind. It is solely agit-prop vaporware with which unethical pro-GM corps can sound high minded. There isn’t any purpose for it. Nutritional deficiencies comes from how the cash crop economy forces farmers to not grow nutritious crops for their own consumption, and not because they are preferentially eating milled white rice. In pursuing their campaign, this is the kind of thing Golden Rice backers did: http://www.tuftsdaily.com/news/university-admits-golden-rice-ethics-violation-1.2838537

Pro-GMO practioners are some of the most aggressive and pre-emptive practictioners of Tu Quoque. For instance a few months ago, the New York Time did a feature on GMO citrus here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html?_r=0 . It was pretty outrageously misleading. No, oranges won’t die off entirely. Yes, the citrus industry is in grave danger of being gone in the US. However, there is a sort of massive excluded middle in the article. Agriculture is an industry, and there are industrial components to propagating plants, growing them, harvesting them, and getting produce to market such that it sells. New breeds of plants often takes *years* to enter industry on a serious basis, and there are very narrow tolerances at all points in the cycle. The point I’m getting to was that you couldn’t just do a few gene mods and then put them out to pasture and pump out citrus. The process of getting the *right* gene mod, and then the process of testing, not just for environmental issues, but for compatibility with the capital processes (like, does this citrus produce enough high quality fruit to make this orchard profitable, does the citrus travel well, does the citrus have any off tastes?). The whole process takes for-freakin’ ever. New apples you see in the stores are usually varieties that at best, are only as young as the 80’s from the ag stations, for example. There is no way any GMO citrus can come along before Florida Farmer Jane is wiped out by citrus greening. Yet the NY Times is going around telling Americans that you have to accept GMO Oranges or go without oranges at all! There are some seriously unethical attitudes among the ag giants when it comes to GMO stuff, and GMO products do merit some observation if not outright suspicion for a wide range of reasons, and not just that it might poison you!

Metatone,

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate

Nonsense. He made up some numbers for a skin cream treatment and altered the wording to cities that ban concealed carry had more/less crime for the exact same set of numbers.

If gun control/bans work at all they mostly reduces the suicide rate. In no way shape or form do concealed carry laws increase crime.

I wonder how John reads his own comment threads and keeps his beliefs.

#169 “Chris Mooney’s war on Republican science….”

This really ought to be a category error. But I’m afraid it isn’t.

I read that there was once a time when some people claimed that they were not going to use Jewish physics but instead would create Aryan physics which would get different answers. Muslims talk about creating Muslim science that will not have room for atheism.

I feel like science ought to be just science. But what if the scientific establishment gets corrupted, subverted by people who fake their results for political gain? Then we couldn’t trust scientific results.

If that happened, scientists would get disillusioned. Science is after all an ideology of its own, scientists believe strongly in telling the truth, in controlling for extraneous variables, in making sure their results are reproducible. The scientist who fakes his results and tries to make sure they are so uninteresting and useless that nobody ever checks them, inspires pity.

So if scientists were corrupted, it would make sense that others would actually do science and get results. To carry the torch.

I haven’t seen this happening. I don’t see scientists getting all that much disillusioned with what they do. And what I’ve seen of Creation Science has been — unscientific. They have a strong tendency to study Darwin at great length and look for flaws, the way they would look at the primary texts of a competing religion.

It’s even worse for what I’ve seen of Republican science. They don’t do science. They look at science other people do and look for stories that change the meaning. They don’t act like scientists at all. They act like lawyers.

There shouldn’t be a separate Republican science any more than there’s a Republican electronics or a Republican sanitary engineering or Republican music theory. It should be just science and electronics and sanitary engineering and music theory.

We shouldn’t have a separate Republican science any more than the USSR would have Marxist physics.

But we do.

“Nonsense. He made up some numbers for a skin cream treatment and altered the wording to cities that ban concealed carry had more/less crime for the exact same set of numbers.

If gun control/bans work at all they mostly reduces the suicide rate. In no way shape or form do concealed carry laws increase crime.”

So we’re reasonably asking what is a reasonable response to new scientific research you’ve never heard of before.

And it isn’t unreasonable for use to use some Bayesian reasoning.

So if I see a single report about a car that uses tapwater as its only fuel, I will tend to disbelieve it. If they have disproved thermodynamics they’ve got something a lot more important than a new car.

From everything I’ve seen in the USA, we have never anywhere had the sort of gun control that would actually affect the murder rate much at all. It’s predictable that studies which purport to show that gun control has increased or decreased the rate of shootings, will be wrong.

Similarly, so far it looks like concealed carry has essentially no effect on the number of people shot. The people who are going to shoot somebody will do it whether they can get a concealed carry license or not.

The important correlations I see go the other way round. When crime rates rise, some places the voters demand gun control and other places the voters demand harsher penalties for convicted criminals. In either case, the effect on crime is minimal.

Here is a correlation which is probably more important — when police departments have gone too long without a budget increase, they start to report more crime. Then after they get a hefty budget increase they report less crime for awhile.

Show me a US scientific report that gets results far different than I expect, and I will want to look very carefully at their methods. It isn’t necessarily faked on purpose but it’s probably wrong. Particularly when it’s repeating things that have been done many times before.

As the American National Academy of Sciences says:
“regulating genetically modified crops while giving a pass to products of mutation breeding isn’t scientifically justified.”

That quote actually doesn’t seem to come from NAS, but rather a Bloomberg article attempting to paraphrase their report:

The U.S. National Academies of Science warned in 1989 and again in 2004 that regulating genetically modified crops while giving a pass to products of mutation breeding isn’t scientifically justified.

But it seems that distinction got blurred when it was picked up by a pro-GMO site:

The NAS warns against such mutation-inducing chemicals and radiation treatment, the Washington Post reported, and that “regulating genetically modified crops while giving a pass to products of mutation breeding isn’t scientifically justified.”

And is now being presented by you as a direct quote as a direct quote from NAS.

Read. Learn something.

Yes, all sorts of fun stuff happens when we eschew primary sources and only bother reading sites with questionable accuracy that champion our preexisting beliefs.

For what its worth, this is what the NAS did say:
“Genetic engineering is one of the newer technologies available to
produce desired traits in plants and animals used for food, but it poses
no health risks that cannot also arise from conventional breeding
and other methods used to create new foods. Any method could
result in unintended changes in the composition of the food. The
report concludes that all altered foods should be assessed on a case-by-
case basis before they are sold to the public to determine whether
unintended changes in the composition of the food could adversely
affect human health.”

http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/ge_foods_final.pdf

jch 134: could you provide a reference to the Science 2011 paper?

Re Kahan, I thought along the lines of JQ 185 too. I don’t think this type of research is useless or irrelevant but it looks like heavily oversold.

It’s also been misinterpreted. The gun control experiment didn’t show that “the smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them”, as Ezra Klein famously claimed (see http://www.steamthing.com/2014/04/whos-wonking-who.html). The results are actually quite weird (http://www.steamthing.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/figure-6.png).

“Genetic engineering is one of the newer technologies available to
produce desired traits in plants and animals used for food, but it poses
no health risks that cannot also arise from conventional breeding
and other methods used to create new foods.”

I expect they’re going beyond the evidence there.

The GM insertion methods tend to leave markers behind, often the same markers. It isn’t proven that there is any danger from this, but I haven’t seen a proof that there will be no dangers.

John Quiggin ,

I cannot follow the link right now. I am assuming it eventually leads to

http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf

if not I am presenting the above link for myself.

I read 2.55 firearm suicides per 100K and .43 firearm homicides per 100K and 74% drop in firearm suicides and 36% drop in firearm homicide. I get a reduction of 1.9 vs .16 or 92% of the reduction was from suicides.

So right now I am going to stick with – If gun control/bans work at all they mostly reduce the suicide rate – minus the s on reduce.

I am not claiming conceal carry law decrease crime. I am claiming that conceal carry laws have no impact on the crime rate.

“I am not claiming conceal carry law decrease crime. I am claiming that conceal carry laws have no impact on the crime rate.”

My interpretation of the data I’ve seen agrees with you.

“If gun control/bans work at all they mostly reduce the suicide rate”

The things I’ve seen about “gun control” all involve extremely wimpy US gun control that has had essentially no effect. I could imagine the situation in Australia or elsewhere might be different, but I haven’t looked at the data.

J Thomas,

In Australia it looks like it worked to some degree

http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf

100% substitution cannot be ruled by the authors and my understanding is that the time series for overall suicides and homicides shows no break indicating the policy worked. The timeline numbers do not align well with substitution as an explanation but do not show a break indicating the policy worked. I am thinking the data set is small and pretty variable and I would guess some decent amount of substitution must have happened. But if the cost was only 500 million even with significant substitution the cost/benefit ratio would be very good.

Not possible and probably would not work in the US.

dm @ 191 quoting the US National Academy of Scinces:

“Genetic engineering … poses no health risks that cannot also arise from conventional breeding and other methods used to create new foods.”

Even at best, that’s only thinking about health risks from eating the genetically modified crop itself, not risks to the ecosystem or due to the fertilisers or weedkillers that might be used on it. (Continuing my favourite analogy, the problem with introducing possums to New Zealand was not that vampire possums started attacking innocent Auckland residents.)

djr,
I think that’s right, that particular NAS report was focused on food safety. In conventional breeding there is often emphasis on bringing in exotic germplasm, so I think the risks are if anything greater than for GM. In general, the consequences of introducing a single gene are more predictable, more easily tested and more easily controlled. Anyway, I thought the Marvin Gaye entralled jellyfish was a better analogy.

shah8,
The molecular consequences of interspecific-hybrids is a very active area of research in genomics these days, lots of interesting phenomenology, not at all predictable, lots of context dependence. But, I gather this discussion is not worth continuing.

jch @134 comes out with the usual motherhood statements based on a single paper:

It is impossible to know whether GMOs will play a big role in meeting future “global food production needs”. No-one can know what breakthroughs may occur (or not occur).

Soil conservation (no till etc.), crop rotation etc are a part of conventional agriculture.

Seed diversity is important and it is a good thing that various seed banks and cottage industries maintain many thousands of old seeds. But many old seeds have fallen out of fashion because they are crap. This includes traditional seeds that some communities have used for hundreds of years, hence farmers in these communities leap at the chance to acquire better but much more expensive commercial seeds or start using better free seeds provided by NGOs.

I have a really radical idea: how about we trust farmers to decide whether they want to use traditional seeds, new hybrid seeds, mutagenic seeds, genetically engineered seeds without undue and ill-informed interference from clueless busy bodies. This would mean allowing Irish potato famers to get their hands on blight resistant GM potatoes that don’t need to be sloshed with up to 25 applications of expensive and toxic fungicides as well as delivering twice the numer of tubers. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/scientists-this-gm-crop-would-have-survived-irish-potato-famine.1392621721

[Lee A. Arnold]:

Barry #86: “Bullsh*t.”

Not when you get down into the Pew and Gallup polls, and not when I have spoken to the more scientific, rational ones. Whether climate change is caused by people, and whether the catastrophic possibilities are worth worrying about? There, they differ.

Hmmm, it sounds as if some have reached the bargaining stage.

“I have a really radical idea: how about we trust farmers to decide whether they want to use traditional seeds, new hybrid seeds, mutagenic seeds, genetically engineered seeds without undue and ill-informed interference from clueless busy bodies.”

Captain Moonlight, I don’t really have a sense of who you are, so tell me — do you believe evolution happens?

/me shakes head…

NO.

At base, you’re confusing the idea that hazards can happen with hazardous process. I have never had a problem with GMOs. What I have a problem is with the free fire under-regulated zone that surrounds GMO, in gray areas of FDA or USDA oversight. Also the attempts at legal leverage.

And dude, 214 makes me think that either you have very little genuine understanding of genetics/biochemistry, or have tremendous contempt for your audience, one way or another. We’ve been doing most of this for ten thousand years, from selective breeding to making cuttings of plant sports. No, genetic mods ain’t that different, but it was never actually about the technology, but the will to use it safely and developing it for things we need, rather than what makes that quick buck no matter the consequences. Abusing BT toxin was just the first of it all. Leave the science-splaining for the people who don’t have degrees in STEM fields, if such people can tolerate it.

In the late 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a new headquarters building for S. C. Johnson & Son (aka Johnson Wax), Racine, Wisconsin. The design of the building was singular and original, a masterpiece of its genius architect: a sealed space lit from above.

The local buildings department did not know how to assess the unusual design, with its many unique features, but settled on raising strenuous objection to the slender dendriform columns, which were to hold up the roof of the “Great Workroom”. The columns, only 9 inches in diameter at the base soar to what Wright termed, a “lily pad”, 18 feet in diameter at the top. To satisfy the building inspectors, apparently unaware of the nearly infinite compressive strength of concrete, Wright was required to demonstrate that a test column could support 12 tons. Wright loaded the test column with 12 tons and continued to add weight until the column finally crashed to the ground under 60 tons, breaking a water main 30 feet underground in the process.

The design really was crap, though; the instincts of the building inspectors were not entirely wrong, just wrongly focused. The dendriform columns weren’t the problem. The philistine building inspectors had focused on the wrong problem. The problem was the roof of skylights and clerestory, made of Pyrex glass tubing, which the columns supported: it leaked like a sieve.

The political dispute — the problems of political economy right and left are arguing over — are problems of system architecture, and most acutely, problems of novel system architecture.

In systems of political economy, the architectural design of the system is a public good. The prevailing neoliberal ideology and the Friedmanite “free market economy” idealizations scarcely even acknowledge that there are institutionalized, administered systems, carefully designed and managed by experts, informed by many years of experience. Systems of traffic control and food processing safety, systems of standards for automobile design, and aircraft design, and toy design. Regulatory systems that govern who drives the trucks, and workplace safety, and what fabrics make up child’s toys.

Like all such systems, at the core is control through feedback. People learn by making mistakes, building theoretical models that allow them to recognize the nature of the mistakes, and then correcting those mistakes by constraining the system. The cost of the mistakes can be considerable, but they cannot be entirely avoided. All information is about difference, and all learning is from error.

In the 1920s, people realized that they could boost the octane of gasoline, used to power the automobiles proliferating across the U.S., with Tetraethyllead (TEL). Probably, if an expert chemist thought about it seriously and critically, he might realize that TEL was a really bad idea. Not many people have the deep technical knowledge to make such judgments. The chemist responsible for TEL, Thomas Midgley, Jr., also gave the world the freon that punched a hole in the ozone layer nearly wiping out life on earth, so you can see good judgement and technical expertise do not correlate perfectly. TEL happened to be uniquely profitable to some very powerful patent holders — thank you, Intellectual Property law. Anyway, as the use of gasoline containing TEL increased, the U.S. gave itself a serious dose of lead poisoning.

From the beginning in the 1920s, there were some very serious public health questions raised. But, most of the “science” was funded by the lead industry. The rest of the story is sadly predictable. The industry lied, fought regulation, slandered responsible scientists, etc. I won’t repeat it in detail.

That science figured it out and pressed for a ban on lead in gasoline and other products, like housepaint, depended on the existence of public investment in scientific research. Private research funding was predictably corrupted. Some heroic individuals figure in the story. And, some of the research was not particularly “directed”. The guy, who discovered just how high lead levels were in the general environment was trying to calculate the age of the earth, based on the principle that uranium deteriorates into lead, and his laboratory measurements of lead were contaminated. Meanwhile, criminologists studying the crime wave that began in the 1960s missed lead, and seriously misconstrued the implications of juvenile delinquency; the U.S. incarceration rate is absurd.

All of this is a long, woolly story endorsing what shah8 has been saying: it’s about the system that’s developed.

The problem of tu quoque and supposed ignorance or denial of science is misdirection. I think what divides right from left on these issues is appreciation of the public good and authority in service of the public good.

The right is ultimately trying to legitimate profiting at the public expense, privatizing profit and socializing losses, and externalizing costs and risks onto the politically powerless.

Part of the ideological fog obscuring their agenda is the nonsense of Friedmanite “free market economics”, which minimizes, when it doesn’t completely ignore, the role of public good regulatory systems in making the economy work.

J THomas says: “Captain Moonlight, I don’t really have a sense of who you are, so tell me — do you believe evolution happens?”

I’m from Oz, JT and I’m a left wing pro-science atheist. I detest science deniers including John Quiggin’s version of lukewarmism. Science isn’t perfect but it sure beats the ignorant and fearful mob, including the one assembled here.

America is the only western country where Creationism etc are taken seriously by all but a fringe. For whatever reason, Americans are 50 years behind the rest of us. Come on mate, it’s time to put away childish things and catch up.

J THomas @ 218 says: “Meanwhile Captain Moonlight says we should just let businessmen sell absolutely anything they want to sell, and each individual customer will decide which products are in his individual self interest to buy, and there’s no need for any caution”.

Nope. I think it is easy to create an irrational climate of fear and the public is very easily spooked. When you also have vested interests, like an American organic food industry with $30 billion in annual sales and growing at 10% per year, there is a huge incentive to demonise the alternatives.

My preference for public policy making re agriculture and food safety would be a form of subsidiarity with techocratic characteristics, with farmers, industry and university and public sector scientists running the show.

J Thomas says: “I think the public should get a choice.”

The public can buy organic. Did you miss the bit where I said organic food is a $30 billion industry in the US alone? Unfortunately the public is hopelessly irrational, hence the recent permeate milk scare in Oz, the prevalence of silly ideas about GM food and the prevalence of sky fairy fantasies.

Personally I prefer my food, medicine and transport to be designed by people who know stuff. Marj and Harold from the local Community Network of Concerned Citizens may be lovely folk, but I don’t want them designing the jet I fly when I go on a holiday. I also don’t want Matilda or Beryl from the Parent-Teacher Association designing the science course in my kid’s school. And I certainly don’t want wide-eyed types like Bruce Wilder (see @ 112 above) running the school vaccination program.

I guess you can call me elitist.

J Thomas says: “I think the public should get a choice.”

“The public can buy organic.”

But in the USA for some time the public could not legally buy food that was labelled as non-GMO. Because they are hopelessly irrational and might choose to avoid GMO food if they had the choice?

“And I certainly don’t want wide-eyed types like Bruce Wilder (see @ 112 above) running the school vaccination program.”

He has a point. Our immunization programs have multiplied and the costs have gone up. Wasn’t there a case where millions of people got exposed to the same (maybe harmless) virus because one facility was responsible for too many doses, and their cell culture was contaminated…. If that was less centralized, we would have more accidents but smaller accidents. In biological situations where an organism can exploit on a big scale if it happens to be adapted to exploit one niche which gets repeated over and over…. We do better to have many varying immunizations than just one.Even though the result may not be as good as using only the best, the risk of catastrophe is reduced.

Interesting points BW 217. I would like to get us more to talk about “system architecture” rather than design details.

http://training.gov.au/Training/Details/HLT60612

Bloix 04.25.14 at 4:00 pm @ 228 — It’s hard to know what to do, given the well-known desire of the medical industry to run up income by overmedicating, the ability of the moneyed to bend science (or ‘science’) to their will, and the tendency of capitalists to increase profits by cutting the cost of product quality, especially when that quality is invisible.

reason: I’m not sure exactly what you are trying to say here.

I’ve been struggling to express some of these ideas for a while, and I haven’t mastered my own argument, yet. I am arguing for a different set of connections between ideas introduced in the OP and subsequent thread.

First, re: political division by ideological worldview. The whole business about contemporary conservatism entailing “anti-science” views seems like an unnecessary curlicue, that obscures more than it reveals, by bringing in the psychology of tribalism, etc. I think Kahan is an a*hole, but his work suggests that the current, most active conservatism is ideologically conservative libertarian in outlook, which is to say, anti-public-good, and opposed to a “communitarian” left, which is pro-public good. Rather than get distracted into a discussion about who is most realistic about science or scientism, I think it would be better to cut to the chase, and argue the political economy of public good v private good, rather than the finer technical points of a particular body of science. Quiggin’s gambit is to write off conservative libertarians, who are not lying about their selfish or pro-plutocrat views, as illegitimate for not justifying their proposals in terms of a general welfare or public good, and then write them off again, when they lie about the science.

I think American politics is trapped in the straight-jacket of a neoliberal v. conservative libertarian dialectic, which no one sincerely believed-in to begin with, and which is now nothing but an empty ritualized language, but, unfortunately the only framework for our discourse. Behind that dialectic is the living-dead neoclassical economics of the “market economy”, every foundational assumption of which is a lie, beginning with the cliche, “market economy”.

The language of “market economics” makes it hard to have a discussion, which fully recognizes the importance of hierarchy, regulation and authority, particularly the public good hierarchy, regulation and authority that forms the essential architecture of a well-functioning political economy. “Science”, I think, stands for that public good hierarchy, authority and regulation, in this discussion, but the discussion is not (or shouldn’t be) about the technics of science — the discussion should be about the political economy of providing adequately public goods of hierarchy, authority and regulation. Many of the private corporations on the other side, so to speak, in this political struggle are among the most oriented to science organizations in society; the problem is that the private science of Exxon-Mobil or Monsanto (or tetraethyllead in my parable) is necessarily opposed to the public good of science, we need to constrain private interests.

Captain Moonlight, god bless him, has been providing a greek chorus reciting the litany of “market economy”, lest we forget the blind and wilful nature of civilization’s self-destructive tragedy-in-the-making. In his telling, it’s all Friedmanite “Free to Choose” in a Hayekian economy coordinated sufficiently, even optimally, by price. Irish potato farmers know all they need to know, to optimally allow Monsanto to design our agriculture for us. dm gazes over a 10,000 year history of famine and blight, drought, depletion of fertility and soil erosion, and echoes alfred e neuman: Wot — me worry?

I’m saying it doesn’t work that way. It has never worked that way. I’m saying that Piketty’s documented increasing inequality and r > g is our politics permitting private interests to eat the public good infrastructure of the economy alive. We are disinvesting madly, and our dysfunctional systems could, literally, compound overpopulation, global warming, peak oil, etc., and, if not exactly do us in, cause great human suffering. (already happening)

I am saying our political economy requires abundant provision of public goods, including science and education and, yes, regulatory oversight of system architecture, to function effectively. I am saying the economy is not primarily or even importantly organized by markets, and people, who insist on talking that way are liars, who should be called out on their lies. If that means shoveling the whole economics profession into a 21st century grave, I say, start digging. We need to break out of the neoliberal-libertarian dialectic, which keeps us talking past each other about things that don’t matter, and non-solutions. I am saying the economy is organized around technical control hierarchies, coordinated in elaborate systems, which require considerable investment in public good infrastructure and administration.

Saying that conservatives are anti-science or that people trying to raise alarms about GMO, vaccines, climate change or whatever are anti-science misses the point in different ways. The conservative libertarians are anti-public-good, in part because they have bought into an faulty economics, and in part because they represent one end of a spectrum of legitimate ambivalence about authority, public v private good, etc. The hysterics of the left are having a hard time finding a realistic imaginative vision and even language to express their often legitimate concerns, which also often include concerns about, and hostility to authority. (It would really be useful if academic political economics could say something useful about 80% of economic organization, so people had a common language and framework.) In my Wright parable, they are like the building department facing a architectural design they don’t understand, and not identifying the actual fault. The first step is to recognize that the architecture of the system is the problem, not the possibility of science creating frankensteins along the lines of a Hollywood b-movie script. I thought shah8 did a commendable job of making that case, and against getting distracted with pseudo-science techno-babble, as he put it.

dm gazes over a 10,000 year history of famine and blight, drought, depletion of fertility and soil erosion, and echoes alfred e neuman: Wot — me worry?

High praise! (I’m actually more of Zaphod Beeblbrox, but better looking)
Sure, you can piously proclaim that agriculture is worst ecological catastrophe since the evolution of oxygen evolving photosynthesis, but what does that gain you but a bit frivolous frisson. That makes you just another narcissistic twit spewing self-satisfied bullshit – your horseshit isn’t going to feed 9-billion, but hey that’s not your problem, you’re just wanking for the applause. Neither you nor shah8 would recognize pseudo-science techno-babble from horseshit. You imagine that you are operating at some higher level conceptual level. (shah8 can’t string two phrases together to make a sentence). The implementation details matter, they have always mattered. If you can’t be bothered with those details, the math, the data and background needed for interpretation, do the rest of us a favor and shut up – or write fantasy fiction.

Ah, fantasy fiction! Okay! Yes!

BWilder:
“…our politics permitting private interests to eat the public good infrastructure of the economy alive…”

That’s a really nice phrase there.
Moonlight’s brand of scorn and derision were starkly prominent back in the US evolution wars. I learned a lot from that.
I don’t like scorn, contempt, derision, for personal reasons.
If you look through the dust of battle, what both sides in that pseudo-conflict carried with them is the refusal to allow “evolution” to do anything but what it’s told. By humans.
Still the main philosophy, even here.
Evolution is bad unless we’re in control of it. And the goal of that control is fixated entirely on the immediate.
“Think of the lives we’re saving, feeding, making comfortable.” And its inverse.
That’s the moral impetus.
It’s an emotional position, not a rational one. And it is not at all realistic.
The vaccine/GMO/name it disputes operate there.
___

CapnMlight:
“I guess you can call me elitist.”
How about, instead, a continuation of the autism spectrum out past Aspberger’s toward a still-unrecognized high-function-but-missing-parts-other-humans-think-are-central-to-being-human? Probably that would sound better in a foreign language.
You’re a “leftist” only because the right has vaulted wholesale into absurdity, pulling the center with it.

“sky fairy fantasies”
I like this expression very much, because it exposes the nasty arrogant refusal to wonder on the part of the speaker.
Where else but “the sky” could something non-human be, except on the surface of the earth, or under it?
And your arrogant over-confident view precludes anything but the human having any conscious existence, except maybe some theoretical human-analogs on a theoretical earth-analog planet yet to be “discovered”.
So any positing about non-human beings perforce would locate them “above” in “the sky”.
Which is a purely subjective direction, since beyond the context of gravitational reach, say a few dozen miles from sea level, “up” and “down” lose any utility whatsoever.

Fantasy fiction extrapolates:
Given enough time and a clear runway you guys will frack the sun.

I’m not a GMO fan but I don’t see that dm is arguing in bad faith: he’s just speaking more about the product than the process.

Bruce Wilder, I like your #233 a *lot*.

The whole business about contemporary conservatism entailing “anti-science” views seems like an unnecessary curlicue, that obscures more than it reveals, by bringing in the psychology of tribalism, etc.

Because of the psychology of tribalism, it makes sense that liberals who like science would say that conservatives are anti-science. Science is good and conservatives are bad, so conservatives are against science. QED. And of course it follows that conservatives who think they like science would then argue that liberals don’t like science either. It isn’t an argument about tribalism, it’s a result of tribalism. Independent of the degree of truth to it.

I think American politics is trapped in the straight-jacket of a neoliberal v. conservative libertarian dialectic

Yes! And to break out of that, we must break out of it. Start discussing things in some other way, with whoever will discuss it in those terms, and build momentum until the old ways seem quaint. Isn’t that how it works, the only way it works? We can’t shame people into giving up their empty forms. Some old people will prefer their old language until they die, simply because it’s familiar like comfy old houseshoes.

I prefer to think in terms of ecological goals, because maintaining biomes that will support us is part of our minimum requirement. Somehow people interpret that as me wanting the government to control people. They assume that I assume they will try to tear up their own environments out of sheer perversity, and I need the government to make them do what I want instead of what they want. But to me that’s a side issue.

Behind that dialectic is the living-dead neoclassical economics of the “market economy”, every foundational assumption of which is a lie, beginning with the cliche, “market economy”.

Yes! But we can’t expect people to give up their language for us. So we must look for ways to translate into their language. It might be a robust enough language to allow lots of things to be translated into it.

Here is something I want to promote: We don’t want to have businesses that are TBTF, and we want free markets that will be competitive. Government should be a referee in the game of business, and not much of a participant, but the rules that government should enforce should be simple and clear since government may tend to not be a particularly good referee. So I say that one simple, clear, valuable rule is that no one corporation should get too big. When a corporation gets too big — either in number of employees or cash flow — it should have to split into two corporations.

There are many advantages to this. With more businesses we get more competition. We get more market and less command-by-corporate-bureaucracy. A company which has doubled in size because it does something right, probably knows how to grow from half its size to its full size once more. But if it grows from its current size to double its size it is in new territory, doing something new, maybe approaching its Peter-Principle stall.

All that is left is to choose the maximum sizes. This is not simple if we try to decide the right size for every business. But we can do a lot of good by setting global maxima and splitting up the biggest companies first.

Say that the USA first sets the maximum number of employees at 2 million. Walmart splits in two. Then we set the maximum at 1 million. Walmart splits into four. Then we set it at 500,000. Walmart splits into eight. Then we set it at 250,000. Walmart splits into 16, and IBM, McDonalds, Target, Hewlett-Packard, Kroger, UPS, GE, Pepsi, Sears, BOA, Berkshire-Hathaway, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, YUM Brands, Home Depot, JP Morgan, AT&T, and FedEx split once. We can start breaking up the biggest companies that definitely don’t need to be that big. We can decide later when to stop splitting up the biggest companies.

The language of “market economics” makes it hard to have a discussion, which fully recognizes the importance of hierarchy, regulation and authority, particularly the public good hierarchy, regulation and authority that forms the essential architecture of a well-functioning political economy.

Start that discussion, using whatever pastiche of a language you need. Then people who insist on using only the old language cannot join the discussion. They can only say that there is nothing to discuss, that you are evil for wanting hierarchy and regulation, etc.

roy belmont @ 237

Evolution is bad unless we’re in control of it. And the goal of that control is fixated entirely on the immediate. . . .“Think of the lives we’re saving, feeding, making comfortable.” And its inverse. . . . That’s the moral impetus. It’s an emotional position, not a rational one. And it is not at all realistic.

There’s a strong preservationist impulse, animating both left and right, which does not want to come to terms with some of the hard, long-term . . . constraints is the only word I can come up with at this moment, for natural and social limits. And, yes, that preservationist ethic is very much connected with short-term, linear thinking, or thinking that ignores the dynamic system. It’s not anti-science, per se, and I wouldn’t say it reflects symmetry between left and right, so much as a common commitment to stupid.

I am convinced that conventional mainstream economics, in its myriad deficiencies, contributes to the syndrome, by making what passes for rational thought such a nullity. Tom Murphy’s famous blog essay, Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist was an eye-opener to me.

I don’t know how to reach dm, let along Captain Moonlight.

J Thomas:

“Science is good and conservatives are bad, so conservatives are against science. QED. And of course it follows that conservatives who think they like science would then argue that liberals don’t like science either. It isn’t an argument about tribalism, it’s a result of tribalism. Independent of the degree of truth to it.”

Very nice.

J Thomas: Here is something I want to promote: We don’t want to have businesses that are TBTF . . .

It’s a start.

Just a handful of thoughts. There’s a lot to be said for government regulations, which are bright, dumb lines. You wouldn’t have to know how big is too big, in banking, for example, if we defined different kinds of financial institutions, and prohibited financial holding companies from owning different kinds — in other words, if we abolished so-called “universal banks”, separating brokerages from insurance companies from investment banks from commercial banks from thrifts from loan sharks. We could limit commercial banks to doing business in only one of several overlapping regions — a partial revival of rules against interstate banking.

It would help I think, if economists knew that banks are hierarchies, which underwrite credit, and when they get the underwriting wrong, that’s dysfunctional. (It can cause a housing bubble!) The present enthusiasm for the magic of efficient markets as a substitute for the routinized professional assessments of human beings with access to the books and familiarity with local economic conditions is a disease of TBTF, but also of the decrepit state of economics.

Anyway, I could rant indefinitely — the only point, really, is that reasonable people can spin out a lot of sensible analysis and assessment and even the beginning of an outline for policy, if they leave aside the nonsense of canonical market failures and free market rah-rah cheerleading. Economics, itself, has lots of useful insights, once you give up the search for insights from toy models and reinforcement of adolescent ideologies, and undertake the sometimes hard work of understanding how the actual system operates, what business processes are, etc.

#233

I am saying our political economy requires abundant provision of public goods, including science and education and, yes, regulatory oversight of system architecture, to function effectively.

Yes. How can we manage that?

I am saying the economy is not primarily or even importantly organized by markets, and people, who insist on talking that way are liars, who should be called out on their lies.

I’m not sure that’s useful. I predict the result is mostly more tribalism. You call them liars, they call you a liar, where does it go from there?

To a large extent they will agree that the economy is not organized by markets *enough*, and they will argue that it should be more market and less hierarchy. If you argue that won’t work, how do we decide who’s right? Science? But science depends on people doing their experiments and observations in good faith, and we don’t expect that from people we call liars.

So here’s a point of view you disagree with, how do you handle it? If your approach is to argue against it until it goes away, maybe you will have fun in a very long rumpus. I don’t think that is a good way to get it to go away.

I suggest instead invite them to the party. Look for ways to arrange lots of stuff like regulatory oversight of the system — with some sort of market structure. Look for ways to create market structures that actually work. Do research on ways to get markets to work. Look at examples of market failures with an attitude of finding alternative market structures that would not fail that way. You aren’t trying to prove it can’t work, you’re trying to find ways to make it work.

Expose faulty reasoning with the intention to create better reasoning. Like, prediction markets are designed to solve one simultaneous equation in two variables. When it doesn’t matter what the predictions are, someone who knows what will happen can make money betting against people who don’t know what will happen, and the prediction will improve. But when people care more about influencing the predictions than about winning the bets, they can falsify the predictions fairly cheaply. Prediction markets tend to give honest predictions as long as nobody particularly cares what they predict, but they get falsified when they matter. The reasoning is faulty. If you argue they are bad then you are the enemy who will be ignored, but if you look for ways to fix them, maybe you can get some leverage.

Markets are fundamentally anti-hierarchy, in principle if not in practice. Anybody who can persuade people he has a better product can get the sales. If we have technical elites who make decisions that might be wrong and there’s no appeal, that’s bad.

But how can we set up a free market in truth? People usually aren’t in the market for truth. I have a sad story of a MD in a university hospital who was sure his experiment proved his pet hypothesis. But the statistician disagreed. So he went down the hall to other statisticians, looking for a second opinion, and a third opinion, and a fourth opinion…. Finally he hired his own statistician. And when his own hireling told him the truth he fired her…. A free market in scientific results would take something special. I don’t know how to do it just now. But it would be valuable if we could make it work.

The conservative libertarians are anti-public-good, in part because they have bought into an faulty economics, and in part because they represent one end of a spectrum of legitimate ambivalence about authority, public v private good, etc. The hysterics of the left are having a hard time finding a realistic imaginative vision and even language to express their often legitimate concerns, which also often include concerns about, and hostility to authority.

Yes! We need a way for authorities to be judged by results. “By their fruits you shall know them.” It would need to be transparent and fair. I don’t know how to do it. But people are hostile to authority partly because they don’t trust its legitimacy. Better to have clear rules about that, which most people agree to.

The first step is to recognize that the architecture of the system is the problem, not the possibility of science creating frankensteins along the lines of a Hollywood b-movie script. I thought shah8 did a commendable job of making that case, and against getting distracted with pseudo-science techno-babble, as he put it.

I see! Looking back, dm continually focussed on poisons, and the probably small but unknown possibility of getting new poisons by traditional methods versus the probably small but unknown possibility of getting new poisons by GM. I thought he was technically correct in what he said, but he ignored the rest of the picture.

I think shah8 was only barely adequate at making his case. Each time dm ignored shah8’s points and came back with more poison talk, shah8 spent the major part of his time arguing dm’s points. He talked some about the bigger picture of badly regulated GM, which dm each time ignored. Probably the better approach by the second or third time around is to concentrate on the important part and ignore the distraction completely. Don’t even criticize it as technobabble, just ignore it. Spectators can decide which part of the discussion is more important.

When shah8 argued against dm’s technical points in ways I thought were not correct, I paid attention to that even though I didn’t see why dm cared so much about those points. It’s an interesting side issue, and it can make the NAS position look like it isn’t completely unreasonable, but so what? If shah8 had stuck to what he thought was important and not made flawed arguments about a side issue, I would have paid more attention to his main point and to dm’s ignoring it. I’m not saying I did the right thing, or that I was justified, only that it’s better to encourage third parties to do the right thing than to help distract them.

= = = J Thomas 04.25.14 at 11:23 pm : I suggest instead invite them to the party. Look for ways to arrange lots of stuff like regulatory oversight of the system — with some sort of market structure. Look for ways to create market structures that actually work. Do research on ways to get markets to work. Look at examples of market failures with an attitude of finding alternative market structures that would not fail that way. You aren’t trying to prove it can’t work, you’re trying to find ways to make it work.= = =

That is exactly the process that was proposed for the US [1] provision-of-electricity industry in the late 1980s, and implemented with various “market reform” acts beginning in 1994. The results have been very poor for everyone – except those who have worked themselves to the top ranks of ‘unregulated’ entities. However it is now not only impossible to reverse any of the changes that haven’t worked but intervenors are literally forbidden from making ‘non-market’ arguments in front of the FERC and its associated bodies. Evidence describing fundamental market failures is discarded; suggestions that regulation be reinstated in specific areas are disallowed. Insistence on pointing out market failures is met with calls to create more (and more complex) ‘markets’ to address the failures.

So… I see the one-way lobster trap and the concentrated benefits for specific entities and persons. I don’t see the rational process of evaluating outcomes that the system you describe requires, nor how such an evaluation process could be created given the incentives.

Hoping I’m wrong.

Cranky

J Thomas, you can always pipe up yourself, and put some focus on the “important” parts that were being neglected. More than that I’d at least like to know where I’m incorrect.

I’ve never allowed myself the idea that I was ever a nimble and precise thinker. Scattershot is what I do, unless write and rewrite, etc.

> I suggest instead invite them to the party.

Are they excluded?

How are they excluded? Why are they excluded?

#251

That is exactly the process that was proposed for the US [1] provision-of-electricity industry in the late 1980s, and implemented with various “market reform” acts beginning in 1994. The results have been very poor for everyone – except those who have worked themselves to the top ranks of ‘unregulated’ entities.

[sigh] Yes, you’re right. Other things equal, liars can manipulate people who believe them.

To the extent that it’s people who really believe in markets, attempts to create workable markets could support them and get their support. It would take a long time to convince them, and there would be unpleasant side effects to disenfranchising them.

But to the extent it’s ruthless liars who care about nothing except getting more power for themselves, what do you do? The obvious solution is to fight them as hard as you can. They will spend whatever it takes to get the legal right to steal more, while you can spend what people will contribute for truth and justice. They will tell whatever lies they think will get them ahead, and you will probably tell the truth. It looks like a hard situation.

Prof Quiggin says: “You quote Ludwig, whose position is identical to mine, and Singer, ditto as far as I can tell, with approval, but repeatedly describe the same views as lukewarmer (ie denialist) when I express them. What gives?”

Actually you are all over the shop on GM and there is a massive difference in your treatment of climate change deniers and GM scaremongers. You’ve harshly disparaged the former while largely mollycoddling the latter.

You have also said “I don’t see too much wrong with the UCS position ..” in reply to a link to this page: http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/

The UCS doesn’t call for an outright ban on GM but it is extremely negative, arguing that GM has been a badly applied and largely a failure; calling for “rigorous and conservative” regulation; playing up the safety risks; and arguing that alternatives which it calls “crop breeding” and “agroecological farm management” are superior and should be publicly funded.

A post in which you unequivocally state what you actually believe, free of weasel words that appease the tribe, would hopefully clear things up.

John Quiggin:

1. I’m sympathetic to your position as moderator here.
2. I’m not taking an anti-science position
3. I’m deeply sympathetic (I’m a sensitive guy) to the front-line combatants in the battle to bring reality into public awareness and policy concerning anthropogenic climate forcing.
4. What you replied to was a rhetorical question mostly.
5. There are rhetorical questions at the end of this piece, not directed at you

The best the NSA had in 1975 was the cooling trend. The science wasn’t there. It’s there now, and a lot of the most knowledgeable climate scientists are scared shitless.
That’s all I need to make my point.
We’re continuing to mess with really intricate fundamental systems, motivated almost exclusively by personal greed, and now fear.
Greed and fear are not the highest forms of human aspiration.
We can’t see enough of the variables, we can’t get to an accurate process of evaluation. Not at the levels of complexity we’re operating in.
But the arrogance of the lesser lights of the rationalist clad, polarized by the gibberish of the truly ignorant on the other side, keeps insisting we can, we have to.
We can’t.
Climate change proves that.
What do sensible people do in a spot like that?
They change their attitudes, and do something else.
You can cite documents, I can cite poetic testimony from the first appearance of the internal combustion automobile.
From before, way before, William Blake was warning us about those dark, Satanic mills.
The people who were not on board, who were skeptical of that gas-spewing contraption, were derided and marginalized to the degree their concern’s now non-existent. As if it was never there.
They were people then like the ones your buddy Moonlight’s showering contempt on now. They were right. The automobile was a mistake.

Human beings survived thousands of generation’s worth of all kinds of bad shit, not en masse and not comfortably, but they made it.
Our ancestors.
We were all taught to despise them and to look down on contemporary versions of them.
We, who’ve literally broken the weather.
What’s wrong with that picture?

Maybe some humility would be in order.

Prof Quiggin,

Alright then,I’m sorry if you think I’ve been unfair. Having re-read my comments, I can see how that is a reasonable interpretation on your part.

Actually GM is about the only issue I which I disagree with you and I have a copy of Zombie Economics under the bed.

If it was up to me, you’d be cloned ten thousand times over- a vast army Quiggins would be, on balance, a worthy recipient of the Iron Throne.

Hugs and kisses.

The best the NSA had in 1975 was the cooling trend. The science wasn’t there. It’s there now, and a lot of the most knowledgeable climate scientists are scared shitless.
That’s all I need to make my point.

Your point is very simple?

We’re continuing to mess with really intricate fundamental systems, motivated almost exclusively by personal greed, and now fear.
Greed and fear are not the highest forms of human aspiration.

There’s also curiousity. I like curiousity. One time I was driving down a country road with a 10-year-old boy, and he looked at the glove compartment and found a push-button. “What does this do?” I was distracted avoiding potholes and told him “I don’t know, do you want to push it and find out?” He pushed it and the trunk flew open and blocked my rearview mirror. I had to stop and close the trunk, but we found out what the button did. It was pretty safe, they aren’t going to put a button in easy reach that does something dangerous. Too bad evolution didn’t design things to be safe from us.

We can’t see enough of the variables, we can’t get to an accurate process of evaluation. Not at the levels of complexity we’re operating in.
But the arrogance of the lesser lights of the rationalist clad, polarized by the gibberish of the truly ignorant on the other side, keeps insisting we can, we have to.
We can’t.

Yes, but we have to. That gives us a good excuse to have fun trying. What else should we do, give up?

You can cite documents, I can cite poetic testimony from the first appearance of the internal combustion automobile.
From before, way before, William Blake was warning us about those dark, Satanic mills.
The people who were not on board, who were skeptical of that gas-spewing contraption, were derided and marginalized to the degree their concern’s now non-existent. As if it was never there.

It gave clear obvious short-term benefits. And the world wasn’t that organized, if they didn’t do it somebody else would, and that somebody else would get the short-term benefits. Including warfare benefits.

If a new idea works in the short run, it’s much easier to do it yourself than it is to stop everybody else from doing it. But if it doesn’t work in the short run then it’s hard to get it started no matter how well it will do later.

You told stories, here’s one — The Inuit used to live in land that nobody else wanted. Small groups of them could survive in places nobody else could, because they knew how, and a few hundred of them went as far as the north pole. They had the custom that you should give other people anything they asked for, whenever they asked. But of course they should also give you anything you ask. “Whips make dogs, and gifts make slaves.” Their population went up in good times and down in bad times. When they expected the migratory caribou to pass through their area and the caribou did not come, that was a serious problem.

Someone in the Canadian government reasoned that the only difference between caribou and raindeer is that raindeer are domesticated. If the Inuit could domesticate their caribou and herd them, their lives would be better. They got an inuit to try it. He had his herd of domesticated caribou and he told everybody not to hunt them. “These are MY caribou. I’ll kill them when I’m ready to.” They humored him some. “Please, Mr. great hunter, may I have one of your caribou?” But he refused to give them away. Everybody agreed that he was a bad man and quite unreasonable. He was not really an Inuit at all but a white man living inside an Inuit’s skin.

The automobile was a mistake.

To be really sure we’d need to try it both ways. Perhaps trolleys would have been better for urban people? But back then we had a lot of rural folk too. Steam engines? The CW says that automobiles let us have bigger cities than we could arrange with just railroads. Suppose they’re right, would we have been better off with more smaller cities and more sprawl?

I guess the central problem is that we get innovations which give us the chance to build a great big population and then likely they’ll stop working and we’ll have a population crash. Has this happened before? Likely. Our genetics implies we had a population bottleneck maybe 80-100,000 years ago. We went over a million years without much innovation in fist-axes, though maybe things changed a lot in ways that don’t show. Then we started changing things faster and faster. If we could just slow down our changes to the point that the population went up and down with the weather, because we had a technology that worked well for the long run with a particular population size, maybe we’d be better off. But how would we enforce it? Somehow we probably enforced that on ourselves for a very long time, but then we lost the knack….

Maybe some humility would be in order.

What does it get us? Will humility at this point help us survive? How would we find out? I know that “I’ll be humble once I decide for myself that it serves my best interest to be humble” is not a humble position to take, but what attitude is better for finding out whether humility serves my best interest?

shah8,
One more thing, the reason I have focused on toxins is that is an example where I can outline a realistic mechanism and where there is evidence that such things can happen. Allergens are another important example, about which I learned just about everything I know from a seminar just last week.

(aargh typos)

@270:

The term “neo-liberal” was invented by the Mont Pelerin Society in that late 1940’s. It’s not exactly new and, though it might not be your specialty, you might want to work on your economic priors. That neo-liberal policy regimes have emerged triumphant from the very midst of their utter failure is one of those puzzles that invite inquiry into.

Ezra Klein’s followup with Peters, 25 years later, is far more revealing that Peters understands:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0705.klein.html

#274

If in the United States ‘libertarian’ has come to mean ‘Republicans who want to keep the option of dating liberal women’

I may be out of date here, but my impression is that it takes at least as much fast talking for a declared libertarian to date liberal women as he would if he called himself Tea Party.

He’d do marginally better to call himself an anarchist.

“If GM skeptics need proof of a negative for something as benign as markers, I find it hard to believe the movement is much more than ‘perfect state of nature’ fetishism.”

No, think about it. There was a standing claim that GM methods have the same risks as any other plant breeding.

But when they introduce new genes, and the new genes tend to be the SAME new genes across a variety of species, this is something new. There could be risks there which are not shared by other genetic methods. The sort of thing that after it happens we think “Why didn’t I think of that?” but beforehand we don’t in fact think of it.

I don’t say that’s likely. I have no idea what the risks are, and it’s plausible they might be very small. But it’s something new.

We get whatever risks come from the other methods, plus whatever is new and special from this. Very likely the risk from GM as we currently practice it, is higher than the risk without it. The standing claim that there is no new risk at all, is likely false.

It’s an unknown risk and likely a small one. We’d want to balance that against the known benefits. They’re probably wrong to say it’s no new risk whatsoever.