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skeptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes.
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keptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes.
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This under-appreciated role of criticism, incidentally, may also be responsible (in part, i.e. egos and turf wars aside) for the continuing diatribes between philosophers and physicists, where too often the latter do not appreciate that the role of philosophy is a critical one, with the discipline making progress by eliminating mistaken notions rather than by discovering new facts (we’ve got science for the latter task, and it’s very good at it!).
The climate blogs have been swept by quite a scoop in the past few days. An anonymous leaker identified only as "Heartland Insider" has dumped a cache of documents on climate blogs purporting to reveal the inner workings of the Heartland Institute, a vigorous promoter of skepticism about anthropogenic global warming.
Over the course of a few days, details have emerged. According to Heartland, someone contacted them pretending to be a board member, and requested that the organization "resend" their annual meeting board package to an alternative email address. And apparently some gullible staffer actually complied. The result is here. There are loads of juicy details about who donates what, and who gets money from Heartland.
Predictably, climate blogs are having a field day. Much of the attention has centered around an explosive document titled "2012 Heartland Climate Strategy", which contains stuff like their plans for "dissuading [K-12 teachers] from teaching science".
Heartland has confirmed the provenance of most of the documents, in a blustery press release which I think they're going to end up regretting heartily:
The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
But in that press release, they unequivocally deny that the "Climate Strategy" memo came from them, or anyone in their employ. And after reading through the documents, I'm inclined to believe them.
The entire Heartland document episode has become far more interesting than a typical tale of an advocacy group paying off shills now that it seems clear that one of the documents that was leaked was in fact a fake. Megan McArdle at The Atlantic does a heroic job examining the documents (something that apparently most reporters failed to do) and concludes that it is fake (I agree):
The memo doesn't add new facts, just new spin. Naturally, because the spin is more lurid, it's what a lot of the climate blogs seized on.
If the faked document happened to be produced by a climate activist or scientist (as some are already suggesting), then the leaked Heartland documents will go down in history as one of the more spectacular own goals in the history of the climate debate (with the consequences proportional to the stature of the faker).
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the episode already illustrates much of what has become of the activist wing of the climate science community -- Apparently, reality is not good enough, so it must be sexed up. This sort of thing feeds into the worst imaginings of skeptics and blinds them to the fact that there are real issues here despite the frequent over-egging of the pudding.
I study the history of climate science, and my research has shown that the think tanks and institutes that deny the reality or severity of climate change, or promote distrust of climate science, do so out of self-interest, ideological conviction or both. Some groups, like the fossil fuel industry, have an obvious self-interest in the continued use of fossil fuels. Others fear that if we accept the reality of climate change, we will be forced to acknowledge the failures of free-market capitalism. Still others worry that if we allow the government to intervene in the marketplace to stop climate change, it will lead to further expansion of government power that will threaten our broader freedoms.
But most Americans do not work for the fossil fuel industry, and most Americans accept that there is an appropriate role for government to protect human and environmental health. So why has the denial of climate change achieved so much traction?
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In my travels, I have met many, many people who have told me that they are not in denial about climate change; they simply don't know enough to decide. It strikes me that these people aren't unlike my fellow jurors at the start of jury selection. They are trying to keep an open mind, something that we are routinely enjoined to do in many other aspects of daily life.
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, there has been clear-cut evidence that the climate is changing because of human activities: burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. For the last decade or so it has been increasingly clear that these changes are accelerating, and worrisome.
Yet many Americans cling to the idea that it is reasonable to maintain an open mind. It isn't, at least not to scientists who study the matter.
cynicism is a cheap form of skeptical one-upsmanship. In other words, it’s easy to seem more skeptical than the next guy just by being more cynical.
Both evolution and global warming are “controversial issues” in the public sphere, but are not controversial in the world of science. There is some overlap between the two issues, but far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers. What is interesting to skeptics, however, is the similarity in the techniques that are used by both camps to promote their views. The scientific issues are presented as “not being settled,” or that there is considerable debate among scientists over the validity of claims.
Evolution and global warming opponents also demonize the opposition by accusing them of fraud or other wrong-doing. Denialists in both camps practice “anomaly mongering,” in which a small detail seemingly incompatible with either evolution or global warming is considered to undermine either evolution or climate science. Although in both cases, reputable, established science is under attack for ideological reasons, the underlying ideology differs: for creationism, the ideology of course is religious; for global warming, the ideology is political and/or economic.
Have you heard about The Debunking Handbook? It's a must-read for anyone interested in dispelling the misinformation put out by climate change deniers.
The Handbook's tips are taken not from the latest climate science, as you might expect, but from psychological research. As its authors, John Cook (creator of the Skeptical Science website) and Stephan Lewandowsky (a professor of psychology at the University of Western Australia) explain, debunking a myth requires more than just "packing more information into people's heads." Our brains don't work like hard drives - they're much more complex.
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- Focus on the truth, not the myth. You want to increase your audience’s familiarity with the right facts, not the misinformation. Don’t give the myth more attention than it deserves, or your efforts might “backfire.” It even helps, before you mention a myth, to add an explicit disclaimer: “The information to follow is FALSE!”
- Less can be more. Although it might be tempting to list every piece of evidence that disproves a denier’s argument, research shows this is “overkill.” It’s best to keep your argument simple. People are most likely to believe information that’s easy to understand.
- Be clever and present information in a way that is least threatening to your audience’s worldviews. If we’re not careful, our debunking efforts could further polarize the climate change “debate”. Check out this past blog post or listen to this podcast for more info.
- Finally, expose the strategy behind the myth you’re attempting to debunk. Does the myth stem from teachings of a faux-expert? Is the myth a piece of information that’s “cherry-picked” and used out of context? What motives may have been behind the spreading of the misinformation?
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Sceptics and believers quarrel about the science because they both start from a mistaken premise: that science will determine what we do about climate change. The idea is that once we agree what the science says, policy will automatically follow. That’s why the Nobel committee gave Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a peace prize.
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The sceptics and the apathetic will always be with us. There’ll never be full consensus on climate change. But if governments could only act when there was unanimity, no law on anything would ever be passed. The US invaded Iraq, bailed out banks and passed universal healthcare with much less consensus than exists over climate change. In short, the sceptics are not the block to action.
Rather, the block is that the believers – including virtually all governments on earth – aren’t sufficiently willing to act. We could do something. But shouting at sceptics is easier.
Sceptics and believers quarrel about the science because they both start from a mistaken premise: that science will determine what we do about climate change. The idea is that once we agree what the science says, policy will automatically follow. That’s why the Nobel committee gave Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a peace prize.
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the demonization of skeptics is a key strategy in elevating the importance of science in the political debate.
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If it wasn't for the alleged risks that skeptics pose to our future, we'd have to instead be arguing about things like values, goals and priorities, which are messy and carries with them none of the imputed authority of science. It is in the interests of both skeptics and their opponents to argue about science, because it suggests that their debate is somehow directly relevant to policy action. It is not.
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"Shared identities like skepticism are problematic at the best of times, for numerous reasons, but I can accept them as a means of giving power and a voice to the disenfranchised. And indeed, this is how skeptics like to portray themselves: an embattled minority standing up for science, the lone redoubt of reason in an irrational world, the vanguard against the old order of ignorance and superstition...
However, it's a narrative that corresponds poorly with reality. In the modern world, science, technology and reason are central and vital, and this is widely recognised, including at the highest level...
The nerds won, decades ago, and they're now as thoroughly established as any other part of the establishment. And while nerds a relatively new elite, they're overwhelmingly the same as the old: rich, white, male, and desperate to hang onto what they've got. And I have come to realise that skepticism, in their hands, is just another tool to secure and advance their privileged position, and beat down their inferiors...
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It's never pleasant to watch a group of university graduates ganging up to sneer at people denied their advantages in life, especially when for some of them it's a full-time hobby. It's an unfair fight between unequal resources, and far too few skeptics care about this inequality or want to do anything about it. If anything, I'm convinced that most of them would prefer to keep the resources unequal...
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One demographic skeptics are particularly uncomfortable with is the female of the species...
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First, there are plenty of practitioners and manufacturers of alternative medicine out there who market themselves to parents. There are also plenty of parents who are suspicious enough of conventional medicine that they will seek out alternatives. Too often, they seek out CAM in lieu of treatments known to work. Also too often, practitioners and parents will defend their choices insisting that they are the ones with the child’s best interest in mind, and that they have the right to make the choice anyway, evidence notwithstanding. As this is happening, children’s rights and needs are pushed aside.
Who advocates for the child when parents are bombarded by misinformation, are marketed to vigorously, and the agencies charged with protecting consumers are unable or unwilling to intervene? I don’t know, but I’d like to start the conversation. I will suggest that we all begin to pay closer attention to when the pseudoscience we’re dealing with affects children disproportionally. It’s not just about the science, it’s also, and more importantly perhaps, about the victims.
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Here’s what commenter “Anon” contributed:
“Every person on this earth has choices, and that Mom has EVERY right to choose for her child, because it is her child! Not the drug companies child, not your child! Gain some research under your belt before you start trashing a mother who chooses not to put vaccinations in her kids arms”.
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people easily conflate the ability to make a choice for their children with the nonexistent right to make whatever choice they want. Children are not chattel. The choices that are made by a parent for their children are best described as responsibilities. You have the responsibility to make choices for your children, and these choices are reasonably limited by various laws in place to protect children from the harms that result from bad parental choices, among other things.
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Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions, and that polar bears are not primarily threatened by climate change.
But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world's largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.
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freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN's leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.
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"I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research," he said. "I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research."
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Whenever confronted with a new claim, it’s reasonable to think that the null hypothesis is that the claim is not true. That is, the default position is one of skepticism. Now the tricky part is that type I and type II errors are inversely proportional: if you lower your threshold for one, you automatically increase your threshold for the other (there is only one way out of this trade-off, and that’s to do the hard work of collecting more data). So if you decide to be conservative (statistically, not politically), you will raise the bar for evidence, thereby lowering the chances of rejecting the null hypothesis and accepting the new belief when it is not in fact true. Unfortunately, you are also simultaneously increasing your chances of accepting the null and rejecting the new belief when in fact the latter is true.
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A type I error is the one you make if you reject a null hypothesis when it is in fact true. In medicine this is called a false positive
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A type II error is the converse: it takes place when one accepts a null hypothesis which is in fact not true.
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Why should we care how many people vote? The answer is that democracy, our ability to chose who governs and sets policy is of vital importance to skeptics and free thinkers. Health policy, like whether or not alternative medicine is integrated into our health care or if naturopaths are able to prescribe medicine, is decided by our elected officials. If we don’t elect politicians who understand the importance of these issues, we could seriously jeopardize public health.
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If we elect politicians who believe that global warming is a conspiracy, we’re unlikely to see any attempt to safe guard the environment. Likewise, if we elect someone who believes in creationism over evolution, what can we expect to happen to funding for sound, evidence-based, science?
Democracy is also vital in that if we elect politicians who believe in free inquiry, free speech and free expression, we can safeguard our society from fear mongering, intolerance, and instability.
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Some would say that voter apathy is the reason we see such small voter turnout numbers. The apathy in this case means that a large majority of the electorate simply don’t care who gets elected. The implication is that voters simply don’t care enough to follow through with voting. For example, they’re tired after work and don’t want to go down to a polling station.
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it is important to remember that your position exists on a spectrum, and there are likely people who hold a weaker version of your position. When someone is arguing against a variant of your position, it does not necessarily mean they are attacking a straw man of your position. This false straw man charge is also common.
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It is easy to slip into accepting a straw-man caricature of the other side. We all do it to some degree. The danger for skeptics is to focus on the most extreme examples of a belief as if they are representative, while ignoring the more reasonable (if still wrong) end of the spectrum.
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while there is a continuum, there are those who make a sincere effort to treat their opponents fairly, and those who are stramenticidal maniacs (sorry for my lack of Latin scholarship, but that’s as close as I can come to someone who likes to murder straw men).
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Liu starts out by writing: “It's a well-trod truism of folk science that you can’t prove a negative. But can you build a popular movement — or at least a well-received dinner party — around one?”Well, it may be a truism of folk science, but it is wrong. There are plenty of situations where proving a negative is very easy. Not only both logic and mathematics abound with proof of the impossibility of X (where X can be a conjecture, theorem or whatever), but there is a number of empirical negatives that are also easily provable. For instance, if I claim that I do not have a million dollars in my bank account, it is child's play to verify my (negative) statement in a matter of minutes.
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Contra Liu, the skeptical movement isn’t built around proving negatives. It is built around the positive value of critical thinking (which you would think journalists would make their own), and the simple Humean idea that “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
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Scientists, philosophers and skeptics alike are familiar with the idea of Ockham’s razor, an epistemological principle formulated in a number of ways by the English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1288-1348). Here is one version of it, from the pen of its originator:
Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora. [It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer] (Summa Totius Logicae)
Philosophers often refer to this as the principle of economy, while scientists tend to call it parsimony. Skeptics invoke it every time they wish to dismiss out of hand claims of unusual phenomena (after all, to invoke the “unusual” is by definition unparsimonious, so there).
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I was reminded recently while reading an old paper by my colleague Elliot Sober, one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers of biology. Sober’s article is provocatively entitled “Let’s razor Ockham’s razor” and it is available for download from his web site.
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Sober didn’t throw the razor in the trash. However, he cut it down to size, so to speak. The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.
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“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.” (David Hume, On Miracles)
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it is Easter weekend, and even National Public Radio had to broadcast some cheesy story about religion. Even so, I was not prepared for the amount of sheer nonsense that I heard from Barbara Bradley Hagerty over at Morning Edition.
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We are not afraid to be called climate "deniers". In fact we embrace it as medal of honor bestowed on us by our alarmist foes. Galileo was a Denier. It is not an insult. I call this blog "Denier Depot" for that reason.
Welcome to my climate science blog.
I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.
We stand unimpressed by "textbooks", "peer review journals" and so-called "facts". There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can't grasp anything as certain as a fact.
Nothing is settled and we should question everything. The debate is NOT over Gore! When so-called "experts" in their "peer reviewed journals" say one thing, we dare the impossible and find imaginative ways to believe something else entirely.
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One of the defining attributes of scientific skepticism is so-called metacognition – we think about thinking
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Just one nugget of such metacognitive knowledge is the so-called fundamental attribution error – we tend to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors while ignoring or downplaying external or situational factors.
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