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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
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- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Writes TerryH in an email, “The public’s refusal to internalize the dogma of climate change as settled science now motivates the warmists to embrace their inner Gramsci and use the politicized wings of the academy to create a new false consciousness that will enable the consensus to become perceived reality. The force of government will be required, naturally, to compel the masses to embrace the one true religion of ClimateChange.”
Pragmatism.
As a scientist, I find this approach very troubling. Sounds like propaganda to me, and settled science has no need for propaganda. I see what they’re trying to do here, and it is both sad and frightening.
And it isn’t like they haven’t been trying all this crap already.
Oh, good. Because it’s been at least 10 minutes since a filmmaker has made a film about ruthlessly killing the Climatology non-believers.
And I see that journalists are thought of as “creative artists” now. That’s about right.
They are right – the reams of technical data (unassailable by most, because it’s incomprehensible and taken on their authority) are not enough. Climatologists are not enough. You need a broader coalition to penetrate the public.
The problem is, it ain’t artists.
They need to convince the computer programmers, mathematicians, physicists, etc. The other damn scientists.
Except they can’t, because their science is shit.
It’s funny in that their methods are consistent. Toward the science and toward social acceptance of it, they’re trying to force it by gaming it backwards in an utter reversal of cause and effect.
Cargo cult.
Build the aistrip, put a guy out there in a vest waving batons to control traffic and a thatch tower with radio made of coconuts, and the airplanes will come and drop off cargo.
If you want a plane of cargo, you need a plane of cargo. The airstrip is built because the plane is coming with the cargo. The plane of cargo does not get summoned because the mock airstrip was built.
“And it isn’t like they haven’t been trying all this crap already.”
Yep, they’ve got a demonstrable proof in the success of their “social science” nonsense.
As a scientist, I find this approach very troubling.
You should. Lysenko II: Electric Bugaloo, coming to a theater near you.
I know a few scientist-types who would have been inclined to believe in AGW, but when they found out the data and the procedures were crap, they were pissed because it gave science a bad name. If your science is bad, and this obviously is horrible science (if one can even call it that), then you will not convince any other objective scientist.
The only people that can save the pristine reputation of science amongst the general public are scientists.
To do that, they must amputate the gangrene.
Else the institution will rot. And when John Q. Public believes the expert scientist is a crap-filled self-interested snake-oil scam artist no different than lawyers or politicians or actors, he’s not going to believe you when you contradict his pastor who says the earth is 6000 years old either.
He may very well burn CERN to the ground in a riot, lest those naughty Higgs bosons destroy the planet as prophecied in the book of Revelations. Or cuz strangelets make your children gay.
Wut?
I guess “journalists” are granted “creative license” that is not permitted to the mere “reporter”. This explains a great deal, actually.
In some sense it seems to me that there is no institution, and hence, that science done well won’t stand to rot, for science done well depends on thinking individuals and not an institution. Unless, that is, we should insist to identify big money science — which entails institutions — with science as such, a thing which seems to me at least theoretically avoidable, though admittedly problematic in differentiation. Or is this wrong?
“Scientists: Reams Of Technical Info Not Enough To Spur Social Acceptance Of Climate Change”
Reporter: “So tell me, whats the deal with climate change…With all this pile of data that’s been collected for decades, why don’t we know whats coming and what to do about it?
Climatologist: “Well, its a problem of time…..We simply have not been at it long enough to make any concrete determinations or even to be able to effectively interpret what we’re seeing.”
Reporter: “If that’s the case, then why all the alarm?”
Climatologist: “That’s only natural. When people don’t know they get anxious.”
Reporter: “There are those that say whatever we do, when its not based on reality could actually make things worse. How do you answer that?”
Climatologist: “I’m a Chicago Cubs fan.”
sdferr, as a child, a pastor telling me and some other children how to evangelize said some things that stuck with me, essentially about epistemology – how do we know what we know? Why do we believe what we believe?
He said the way to convert people was not to walk up and tell them Jesus loves them, or that homosex was bad.
Rather, to offer them some of the day-to-day practical wisdom contained within the bible, perhaps without even identifying the source. Like… do not either squander nor horde your financial savings, but rather be a caretaker and tend them, by investing them and making them grow. Or: Break it off immediately with your buddy’s girlfriend.
Then, when that helps them with their problems, tell them ‘oh by the way, here’s the source of that advice’. Do that a few times. This establishes the trustworthyness of the bible as a source of information. It establishes it’s authority. If it’s right 5 times in a row, well… maybe I should consider what else it might be right about. And they’ll come to you, asking ‘what else does that book say’?
These investment goobers who call me on the phone all day apply the same method. They do not call and ask me outright to invest $15k with them. They call, ask me only to remember the name, and 1 stock pick. Then if that stock does well, they call back with another. They figure if they give me 5 stock picks and they all triple, I’ll remember their name and I’ll call them back asking them to invest my $15k.
This is why science is as respected as it is today, and this is why people who have nothing to do with modern science research – plumbers, accountants – tend to believe scientists when they say something new. Like… cigarettes cause cancer.
Because science has a track record of being right (or at least, much less wrong than the town Doomsayer or the chicken bones). In the days when it was still fighting for validation, there was no ‘science’ as we know it – scientists were philosophers, theologians, alchemists and astrologers. It was but one path to attempt to divine knowledge, often practiced right alongside the casting of the goat entrails, by the same person, no more or less valid. Different competing theories were regarded as different competing ‘natural philosophies’.
Thus, it has become an institution. A cultural institution. And if ‘scientists’, in some ill defined concensus, say ‘potassium-dimethylchloride’ will kill all the asian carp but hurt none of the local wildlife, people will dump 500 tons of the stuff in the Chicago river. Because scientific research says so.
But since it is based on such a track record that validates it as a credible source of information, a flood of wrong and damaging information can damage it’s reputation irrepairably. And if John Q. Public does not trust ‘Science!’, he does not trust ‘Science!’, and will ignore it, no matter what it is saying, rather than trust it.
Right now if Science says toothpaste causes heart disease, Mr. Public will quit using toothpaste. If, after his teeth rot out, he has a heart attack and finds out toothpaste prevents heart disease, when science says ‘This bridge cannot stand’ he’s liable to say ‘what the hell do you know? I’m building it and driving my car across.’
If the good name of science is discredited among the great majority of people who don’t practice it directly, it will not stop good scientists from conducting good science research.
It will however mean that no one will listen to them. Or perhaps, see value in the research and fund their projects.
In it’s own way that WILL solve the problem of snake-oil salesman infilitrating or masquerading as science to use it’s good reputation to dupe people. It may not be the way those good scientists want it to happen though.
So my point is, if you’re working on developing self-navigating computers, if you’re studying the fluid dynamics of an octopus, if you’re creating microscopic black holes in a particle accelerator, if you’re cloning stem cells, you’ve got a big stake in the global warming debate, and all the other crap pseudo-science being used to wield authority over the public.
And if you don’t step up and address it, in the name of the methodology and the procedures and the integrity, if you ignore it because it’s not your field, I’m very worried how it pans out.
Jesus H, Entropy – that was marvelous and a bit frightening. Jeff – maybe that should be a post by itself!
Oh and “The urgency of the moment is matched only by the magnitude of the opportunity for meaningful change.” Now where have we heard something like that in the last couple of years…?
I’m not worried. Simple as that, I guess.
Slightly related:
It sounds as if the science has been polluted with a substantial quantity of bullshit, does it not?
“Societal action in response to climate issues needs to better merge the cultures of environmental science, social science, philosophy, religion, and even the creative arts, the experts said. Needed changes will only come when communication efforts are “more diverse, more personal, more interactive, more compelling, and more participatory,” they wrote in their commentary in Frontiers in Ecology, a professional journal.”
Gee, and I thought it was enough that they were indoctrinating all the grade-school kids on the horror of AGW; to the extent that during a recent discussion at a relatives house, the chidren were aghast that some of the adults, including “Uncle Bob the rocket scientist”, considered that “settled science” to be a connivance, and for a time tried to defend the notion.
Leading me to wonder if they weren’t also instructed to handle “deniers” by “getting in thier face!”
These folks have absoluely no compunction to go on and reccommend what is essentially a propaganda campaign, with the government doing thier part to “compel” the “discussion”.
Maybe they could “compel” Al Gore, the pope of AGW pimps, to substantively debate a knowledgeable “denier” like Lord Monckton…
Not to mention that many of these AGW “scientists” are working from the same data set, notwithstanding thier own unique “conditioning”.
the chidren were aghast that some of the adults, including “Uncle Bob the rocket scientist”, considered that “settled science” to be a connivance, and for a time tried to defend the notion.
And fine replacements for him, this new generation shall make.
Entropy is right on the money. I’m a physicist and my big problem is these yahoos are ruining MY credibility by slow erosion and association. If I were older and braver, I would put in my resignation from the American Physical Society right along with Hal Lewis. When honest questions are met with what might as well be shouts of “heretic!” and the people doing the shouting are raking in millions in grant money and speaking fees, well it’s not science anymore.
When I was a grad student, my group had a rather public disagreement with another over a measurement. Lots of pride on both sides but the instant reaction to a challenge on the data was, “Sit down, let me show it to you!” Asking real scientists to explain their data is kind of like asking Grandma why her grandchildren are special: the answer is generally expansive and confident. When the reaction is to stonewall or tap dance it’s generally because they’ve been caught in some shenanigans.
It as actually the reactions and then shifty responses of the global warming crowd that caused me to look more closely – and then to be a skeptic. As I wrote to some colleagues at the time, this is a vitally important to the future of informed policy. Those who believe in anthropogenic global warming should be at the forefront of this effort to get to the truth. We base policies on science with the assurance that its results are impartial and rigorously reviewed. Ignoring manipulated results because we like the outcome allows the public to argue that science’s impartiality is a sham and its recommendations no different from opinion.
– As the money for such tom-foolery dries up this nonsense will die quietly, save for a few of the usual die-hard fanatics.
If you’ve ever worked for or with people who were more interested in maintaining a false narrative than in the truth, or who are interested merely in power over productivity, you’ll recognize the behavior of these pseudo-scientists right away.
Ignoring manipulated results because we like the outcome allows the public to argue that science’s impartiality is a sham and its recommendations no different from opinion.
Except that most people don’t want to wade into the “I must be skeptical of experts’ opinions” swamp. We WANT to trust the scientists to be rigorous and impartial. Having to do your own homework on every damn topic is exhausting from the outset, not to mention difficult, when you don’t have expertise in the area.
If it weren’t for Steve McIntyre, I wouldn’t know whom to believe. I don’t understand his statistical analysis, but he (a) is doing it on his own dime (b) shows his work (c) is agnostic about AGW.
In other words, he behaves like an honest man, whereas the scientists whose work he critiques are behaving like a clique of high-school girls who don’t want their social domination challenged.
Remember the adage about what happens when you add a drop of wine to sewage, vs. adding a drop of sewage to wine?
As the money for such tom-foolery dries up this nonsense will die quietly, save for a few of the usual die-hard fanatics.
AGW, maybe. But the problem is larger than too… but AGW is the most prominent battleground.
It’s not just AGW, it’s almost the entirety of the ‘environmental’ sciences. Any time a frog dies, anthropogeny is guilty until proven innocent.
And if you look into a lot of the science with social or policy implications you find dodgy shit. Health studies are basically crap. Such-and-such cause cancer. Mostly crap, or at least they’ve been irresonsponsibly hyperbolized and sensationalized.
The problem with health studies is they rely on correlation, and computer modeling and statistics are probably the two areas of science most habitually and ignorantly abused by scientists that are neither computer scientists/programmers nor statisticians and don’t really appear to understand either. A biologist runs a computer program he didn’t write to apply 350 different algorithms in an attempt to find some mathematical correlation he doesn’t understand and then claim x causes y in some unremarkable 1-of-a-billion study that will almost assuredly get covered in the newspapers, who will even further overstate the causation after a journalist major skims the summary.
Crichton wrote “Aliens cause Global Warming”. The ‘science’ used to promote SETI was nothing of the sort. That’s innocous enough, but it’s part of the same problem. As a finding in a journal, it would be a non-starter, not even wrong. It was nothing talk with nothing implications. But it sounded ‘sciency’ enough to market and as rhetoric masquerading as science it got allocated millions and created public policy.
Actual research these days into evolutionary biology is nearly totally disconnected from evolutionary pedagogy; while the former has some noteworthy shenanigans going on the latter is almost entirely constructed of them.
Government + science = Lysenkoism. And I fear the first casualty is real science. I’m pretty sure earnest (dissenting) agriculturalists where the first ones killed by Stalin’s farm policy.
But not the last.
Or when a frog appears with multiple legs. ISTR this was first blamed on the depleted ozone layer, then AGW.
Then it was discovered to be a naturally occurring infection.
Oh, and the “mysterious disappearance” of bees: “colony collapse disorder”. OMG! Cell phones! AGW!
No, fungal and viral infections that overwhelm the ability of the hive to deal, with the only “mystery” coming from the absence of bee corpses at the hive. Perhaps the improper use of anti-fungal medications contributed, perhaps some new bee-keeping practice has somehow weakened the hive’s immune system.
(I’d bet we find out real soon now that bees that “feel sick” fly away from the hive as a matter of course: evolved behavior to reduce the odds of infecting the rest of the hive.)
Except that most people don’t want to wade into the “I must be skeptical of experts’ opinions” swamp. We WANT to trust the scientists to be rigorous and impartial. Having to do your own homework on every damn topic is exhausting from the outset, not to mention difficult, when you don’t have expertise in the area.
In this way, we’ll find scientists moving from the “implicitly trusted” column into the “trust but verify” column. Your average white-coated physicist will no longer be trusted just by dint of his credentials; he’ll have to establish an individual track record of being honest (and better yet, being right). In this way, we’ll see the hard sciences fall to the plane currently inhabited by stock analysts and fantasy football coaches, where personal reputation and track records count for more than job titles.
The bright side is that you won’t be forced to do all the math yourself; you just need to find, support, and listen to a trusted source who can do the analysis for you. We’re fortunate in that there is an army of scientists and mathematicians out there who have a vested interest in defending the scientific method and getting at the truth. It’s just a matter of identifying them.
The primary question for me is how much damage gets done in the meantime, when appeals to authority still carry enough weight to get bad policy written into law. The other question is how long it takes for honest, competent scientists to gain back their good reputation, and what they do to the charlatans who spent so long huffing their own fumes that they brought down the whole field.
From the article: “The urgency of the moment is matched only by the magnitude of the opportunity for meaningful change.”
Thus said every leftist revolutionary of the past 100 years.
Rob, that was my second thought when I saw this. My first is that since it apparently kills by blocking digestion, they may simply feel hungry and fly away to search for nectar.
I was lucky enough to have some very good professors. Right from the start we were taught how to spot bad science and informed that any papers turned in that even had elements of bad science would not receive a passing grade.
The first rule was simple. If you get the results that you are looking for during an experiment, it probably means that you did the experiment wrong. You had to check and re-check and have another person go over your work.
It’s strange. We almost have a neo-luddite culture among the elite. Do any of them understand the consequences of this?
So they need new synergies to achieve thoughtful and engaged discussion, effective response, and social acceptance? Why am I getting the image of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss?
The word “understand” has three syllables and is clearly a compound word. They don’t even understand “understand.”
Yep, pretty much. We’re getting the same thing up here in Wyoming regarding sage grouse. The sage grouse are disappearing, no one denies that. The wildlife biologists maintain that oil & gas development is destroying the sage grouse habitat, causing the decline. But that doesn’t explain why the grouse are disappearing even in vast areas where there has been no development of any kind, areas that were once teaming with grouse. It becomes clear that the grouse are just a stick being used to beat the oil & gas industry.
One on one I’ve actually gotten a couple of wildlife biologists to admit that the decline in the grouse population probably has a good deal to do with the current over-population of the notoriously nest-robbing ravens we see sitting on every fencepost. But that doesn’t fit the narrative and it doesn’t pay the bills. No one is going to give them much funding to study the relationship between predator over-population and prey population decline, but there’s tons of money to be had studying the effects of oil & gas development on wildlife population decline. The money draws wildlife biologists like shit draws flies and once they’ve taken the money the results of their studies are a foregone conclusion.
Advocacy: The moral obligation of Scientists.
http://www.fw.msu.edu/documents/MoralObligationsOfScientists.pdf
“Still, the commitments to society override one’s commitments to
science. When scientists reject advocacy as a principle, they reject a
fundamental aspect of their citizenship. Because of the nature and
depth of their knowledge, they have a special responsibility. It is a
perversion of democracy to muffle the voice of the most
knowledgeable among us and consequently amplify the voice of
those with the greatest ignorance.”
How about you just make good science?
One might even venture “intellectually incurious”.
The possibility that they might be mistaken is profoundly uninteresting.
The perversion of using the term “settled science” by global warming advocates turned me away from listening to them. The fundamental nature of any science is doubt, skepticism and advancement of knowledge. When you use the term “settled science”, it is the biggest oxymoron since “helpful government” or “benign despotism”. The laziness and malingering behind the political hacks advancing global warming is perfect for the generation of slackers who slept through the “rocks for jocks” classes or discussed their deepest political philosophies through the haze of a bong.
Entropy:
You mean that scientists in other fields ought to be concerned when climatologists are caught crying ‘wolf!’ because the public may just lump them in with the scam artists via guilt by association?
What a fascinating theory!
:)
If science were ever truly “settled,” I somehow doubt that middle-school students taking lab courses would be assigned to replicate simple experiments whose results have already been replicated millions of times.
Learning how to replicate an experiment and check the result would be a waste of time, if science were ever truly “settled.”
kevin – Our experiments usually went wrong because the equipment was left over from the 50’s. I wasn’t around then but sputnik must have scared this country into buying a lot of science equipment.