17 thoughts on “The Myth Of The “Scientific” Leftist”

  1. The study found that medicaid had benifical psychological effects regardless of health outcomes. This is precisely the effect on liberals. Having medicaid gives them a psychological euphoria regardless of its effectiveness.

  2. Shutting down a lefty whining about conservative scientific literacy is simple: Ask them to define scientific literacy.

    They seem to think it is something like capacity to agree with experts.

    2. It annoys me no end to be smugly admonished “you don’t understand science” by people who don’t even know what a differential equation is, much less how to solve one. Yes, the willingness to abdicate responsibility to reason things out on your own to a soi disant class of “experts” seems to be their definition.

      They seem to have no inkling that the “experts” often have an agenda, and that model has failed time and time again throughout history. It is, in fact, normal to have the “experts” lined up overwhelmingly on the wrong side prior to a paradigm shift.

  3. BDavis – Quite so; mine too. Of course, sometimes one has to take the opinions of experts on trust – at least their opinions on matters within their field.

    However, I submit that the people most likely (close to 100%) to be guilty of this fallacy are religious conservatives. Of any religion. Relying for advice on a book one thousand to several thousand years old (depending on which book), written by one of the few semi-literate members of a tribe of illiterate Bronze Age goat herders, is… suboptimal.

    2. Yeah, because, you know, human nature has changed so much since then, for sure. And we’re all technologic and scientific and stuff and we’re way better than people were then. We’re so smarter and we know how to use ipods and twitter and things. Those olds people used to worry about silly stuff like Roman government (or Babylonian, like whatever), power, being rich and poor, having parties, wearing the best clothes, who was popular, getting married, having kids, having a place to live, having better stuff than the neighbor, stupid stuff like that that doesn’t mean anything any more. We’ve got google and internet and Kardshians, and some people do cool ‘speriments and some people make cool tech gadgets, and we get to use those gadgets so we’re a lot better than those goat herders and Roman subjects, because we’re so enlightened. And technologic.

      2. Sure. Please tell me how you’re going to use the Genesis account of geology to help you in oil exploration.

        1. Strawman–nobody does that anymore (for good reason, but that’s not the point). You’d have a better argument if you picked another example (stem cell research, euthanasia, various tragedies of the commons)–there are plenty to choose from.

    3. “Of course, sometimes one has to take the opinions of experts on trust – at least their opinions on matters within their field.”

      Actually, one doesn’t. What one can do is ask the expert to explain his position and justify it. For scientific opinions, this justification comes in the form of siting the reproducible experiments that support the opinion. This ability to site such experiments is what makes the expert “scientifically literate.”

      For example, I make this request routinely when dealing with doctors, vets and mechanics. The good ones can justify their opinions. The buffoons suggest compliance based on years of experience.

      “I submit that the people most likely (close to 100%) to be guilty of this fallacy are religious conservatives”

      Really? Because the most standard (only?) defense of AGW is that experts assert it is true followed by an elaborate classification of who gets to be defined as an expert. Are you aware of any place in the main stream media where the actual scientific argument is made? I’m not. There are some blogs. That’s about it. Their arguments are exceptionally weak. In fact, I recall at Real Climate a few years ago one of the contributors wanted to present the argument to engineers but ended up saying nothing and concluding, “It’s complex.”

      Buffoons.

      In fact, the standard left wing scientific argument is an assertion that the experts agree with them. I may agree with the opinion but that doesn’t make the argument in favor of the opinion, scientific.

      The modern left is the only intellectual movement to my knowledge that has made a philosophical attempt to sideline the scientific method. See such examples as the Sokal affair or look up “Newton’s Rape Manual.”

      Creationism is as strong as it is in some quarters because a bunch of scientifically illiterate imbeciles have been using evolution to troll religious people. The people doing the trolling are largely scientifically illiterate when it comes to evolution. Proof: Find one – or ten – and ask him what adaptive radiation is. My sense is they are not supporting evolution in the name of “science.” They’re doing it to irritate religious people.

      So why should I think of them as anything but fools?

  4. Especially when you consider that Marxism is economic “Intellegent Design” (or maybe even “Creationism”). Marxists rely for advice on a book written by a man who wasn’t even semi-literate when it came to economics. He never did any research outside of copying (and falsifying) other people reports, never visited any factory to see “Capital” and “Labor” up close. Talk about “suboptimal”. (And the fact in the last century true-believers in that book killed well over 100 million people in trying to implement it needs to be factored in.)

  5. Mr. Triscari – I didn’t make myself clear enough; my bad. What I meant is this: Although scientific experiments are in principle reproducible, so if you really wanted to you could check the work of a scientist testing a hypothesis – in practice, just about all the time the veracity and competence of scientists has to be taken on trust. Reasons include money, lack of the required skills and equipment, and so on.

    In the specific case quoted of AGW, the normal procedures of science are impossible. Why? Well, the use of a control is impossible; there is only one Earth. Deliberately experimenting with Earth’s climate is dangerous and incredibly expensive, so not even an uncontrolled experiment is really possible. And it is also completely unethical.

    For all those reasons, we are reduced to the use of models – which may exclude important factors one hasn’t thought of – and explaining historical data which is limited in scope and accuracy. But an attempt has to be made, because there is at least the possibility of catastrophe at some (not yet determined) level of greenhouse gases. For an example of just how badly the climate could conceivably be ruined, look at Earth’s ugly sister in the next orbit inwards.

    Raoul – Completely agree about Marxism. A communist society would work well but only if no humans were greedy or lazy. The situation recalls the Tragedy of the Commons. Also, something I saw pointed out in an SF novel, of all things:

    “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Great. Now: Who gets to decide what you need? Is it you? Probably not.

    1. For a computer model to have any credibility, it has to be validated. For something as complicated as the environment, you need to validate each of the inputs as well. For example, some scientists use tree ring data as a proxy for CO2 levels in the past. However, how much of the tree growth in a given year is attributable to CO2 levels and how much to other things like rainfall? Then there are factors that are harder to determine such as clouds and solar output. What about water vapor levels and volcanic activity? You then have to be able to prove that your input models can accurately project what’s likely to happen in the future.

      Different models can use different factors to test hypothesis. But if the inputs have not been validated, you’re in a literal “garbage in, garbage out” situation.

      Finally, if the models are to have any credibility at predicting the future, they must prove that you can start at a known condition sometime in the past and see how well the model’s outputs reflect what actually happened in the environment. If it can’t do that without cheating (such as hard coding the expected outputs), then why should we believe the model can predict the future climate?

      All of this is a lot of work. From what I’ve read, it isn’t happening. In fact, some of their source data for past temperatures is “unavailable” making it impossible to replicate their results. This isn’t science.

      1. The problem is even deeper. It is one of observability. A system is observable only if each process influencing the measurements can be uniquely determined from those measurements.

        Even if you use validated processes as part of your model, you may have left something out, and that something may not have been observable or separable from the process you were looking for within the timeline of observations. That leads to overestimation of the potency of the process to which you attributed the observations and, when its effect diverges from the unmodeled portion, you are apt to see things like the unanticipated stall in global temperatures of the last decade and a half.

    2. “I didn’t make myself clear enough; my bad. What I meant is this: Although scientific experiments are in principle reproducible, … in practice, just about all the time the veracity and competence of scientists has to be taken on trust. Reasons include …”

      No need to apologize, I understood you perfectly. Your follow up is unnecessary as no matter the reason, if you do not follow the scientific method – compare ideas to reality with reproducible experiment – you are not doing science. Scientific experts understand that valid scientific theories are those ideas that have been compared to reality and found consistent. When an expert throws his weight as an expert behind a theory, he is implicitly stating that he is prepared to present the evidence that supports his beliefs.

      This commitment ostentatiously absent among many popular left-wing “scientific” arguments. Such arguments tend to dismiss the scientific method as too unwieldy and expensive. They then follow-up examinations of motives. Exploration of credentials. Pascal’s wager. And so on.

      Not science.

      The motives for not doing science are irrelevant. It doesn’t become science if your motives are pure, you have a Ph.D., a second post-doc under your belt and an h-index of larger than 10.

      If you compare ideas to realty and find reality different and you decide your ideas must carry the day in any case – as is done the current climate models you sited – then you are not doing science.

      It doesn’t matter how much anxiety you feel when you look at Venus.

      This brings us to the subject of the blog post. Many on the left actually believe that science defined as what sufficiently credentialed scientists do. Their arguments prove this. For example, on this blog there’s a poster who will often site press releases from various scientific professional organizations as support for AGW.

      That the left thinks science are the thoughts approved by scientific experts is a lapse in the understanding of science that is far more barbaric than any criticism religious people have of evolution.

  6. Bumper sticker suggestion-

    GLOBAL WARMING:
    Al Gore says it!
    I believe it!
    That settles it!

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