…and Malthusian hells. Some interesting stuff from Rob Bailey.
Category Archives: Philosophy
The Failure Of Intelligent Design
…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.
The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.
It is indeed frustrating to argue about science and evolution with people who understand neither. And they don’t realize how much damage they do to their cause.
Is North Korea
…a “right wing” or “left wing” regime? Serious question. I’m particularly interested in the opinions of “left wingers.”
The Roots Of Obama Worship
Thoughts on the religion of humanity.
FWIW, I consider that the closest thing to my own religion. What I’ve never understood is why, for so many, it is inextricably intertwined with elitism, collectivism, and fascism of various enthusiasms.
A Critique Of Pat Robertson
Logical Fallacy
In a review of a movie trailer (and a forties movie reviewer) by Lileks:
Let me just go on record as believing that it is not a good or necessary thing to make comedic action movies about 12-year-old girls who shoot people in the head. Because this is what I think of when I read a quote about the loss of dignity and importance – the way a culture, not individuals, loses its sense of dignity and importance by finding opportunities to leach the innocence from anything previously regarded as sacrosanct.
The comments on the HotAir thread are full of the usual scoff-talk – why, comics were once considered corrupting to children! Elvis was forbidden to be seen from the waist down! Piano legs were covered by Victorians! Christians chopped peeners off Roman statues! and so on. If there was once a standard now seen as silly and puritanical, it must mean our current standards are the same.
This is the same fallacy as that engaged by someone who, in response to a critique of his loony ideas cries, “They laughed at Einstein, too!” To which the rational rejoinder is, “They also laughed at Soupy Sales.” It’s an unjustified extrapolation, and a more robust defense is required.
Avatar And Pantheism
Some thoughts from Ross Douthat.
Science, Epistomology…
…and science reporting. An interesting post by Derb:
…science has more epistemic depth than most of us can cope with. That water quenches thirst and puts out fires, I can confirm by experience. That it is composed of hydrogen molecules bonded to oxygen molecules by electromagnetic forces, I take on trust. “What the deuce is it to me?” I take it on trust because water’s real useful (see above). I’d likely be skeptical about the hydrogen/oxygen business if it were detached from the thirst-quenching and fire-extinguishing. It sounds improbable on the face of it, and one can easily think up folkish objections, of the kind that creationists make against evolution. (Hydrogen’s highly flammable. If there’s hydrogen in water, why isn’t water flammable? Etc., etc.)
When unmoored from utility, abstract ideas have to appeal to the human mind on their merits; and the human mind is so structured that the only abstract ideas it regards as having merit are those that concord with the “naïve duality” that is our default metaphysic — “medium-sized dry goods” being acted on by human wills, or by invisible spirits possessed of human-like wills. That’s as much epistemic depth as most of us can handle. Abstract ideas at odds with that schema just irritate us. And of course, an abstract idea widely held among people we dislike for personal, social, or tribal reasons, is doubly unappealing.
When the science has as powerful real-world implications as climate “science” (sorry, it’s hard to say it without scare quotes at this point) does, it must be trusted much more than it currently deserves to be, based on the behavior of its ostensible practioners.
Government By Wishful Thinking
Steven den Beste, on the teleology of the left. And yes, I am in Mojave.
Science, And Politics
Some thoughts from John Derbyshire:
That’s the spirit of scientific humility. You get a conceptual model that works — fits known data, and has strong explanatory and predictive power — and you work with it to uncover new truths, always understanding that it might yield to some better theory.
It’s an ideal, of course. The guys who perpetrated the great scientific frauds didn’t adhere to it, and it doesn’t look as though the EAU climate researchers did, either. That’s humanity for ya.
Ideals matter, though, and this one is peculiar to science. You will never — I guarantee it! — hear an imam say: “Can we really be sure that Muhammed was the Messenger of God? Will new discoveries overthrow this idea and replace it with some other theology?” Nor will you ever hear a Marxist economist begin a sentence with: “If some day the Labor Theory of Value is replaced by a better theory, …”
And always in science, as the decades roll by, the fraudsters, cranks, and political entrepreneurs fall by the wayside and the scientific spirit triumphs at last. We then know more true facts about the world than our fathers did. And that’s a very wonderful thing. Which I extol.
And it is very clear now that what many of the leading “scientists” in the climate-change fiasco weren’t doing science at all, and had little interest in it.
Tom Blumer notes one of the most absurd, and egregious failures to follow the science this morning, by Trenberth:
He can protest until the methane-generating cows come home, but the following implication of Trenberth’s trembling response is inescapable: “Even though we’ve relied on them all along to build our case, we suddenly can’t rely on temperature measurements to prove or disprove the existence of global warming. Our models nonetheless simply have to be right.” His backup argument if the temps are indeed correct — which would mean that the model generating “the CERES data” and other similar simulations will have been proven to be flawed — would be, “Well, even if the models are wrong, we still have proof in melting Arctic sea ice, rising sea levels, etc.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work Trenberth cites in a recent paper to support his belief that “global warming is unequivocally happening,” doesn’t name any other factors beyond temperature, ice, and sea levels in the pull quote of its “Summary for Policymakers”: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.”
So unless Trenberth has something meaningful in the “lot of other indicators” he casually cites in his response to his email’s release, he and his brethren are in a heap of trouble. That’s because by his own logic, temperature measurements must be rejected as credible evidence. Further, his presumptive, supposedly settled-science arguments about Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels melt upon only a cursory review.
Who are you gonna believe, me and my Charlie Foxtrot of a model, or your lying thermometers?
Along those lines, William Briggs explains what is and isn’t evidence for global warming.
And Ian Plimer says that we should be angry. Very angry.
I know I am, and anyone who cares about science (at a minimum) should be.
[Update a few minutes later]
Ilya Somin on the social validation of knowledge:
Most of us, however, lack expertise on climate issues. And our knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.
At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm. To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.
At the same time, it’s important not to overstate the case. I don’t think we have anywhere near enough evidence to show that the academic consensus on global warming is completely bogus, or even close to it. Nor has it been proven that all or most prominent scientific supporters of global warming theory are as unethical as those exposed in this scandal.
On balance, therefore, I still think that global warming exists and is a genuinely serious problem. But I am marginally less confident in holding that view than I was before. If we see more revelations of this kind, I will be less confident still.
I’ve always been an agnostic on these issues, but willing to accept the notion that the planet is warming and that we are causing it. Where I’ve dug in my heels was on the notion that the proposed cures weren’t worse than the disease, and I agree with Bjorn Lomborg, who (almost alone among the people discussing this) seems to have his head screwed on straight in terms of the economics. But this episode has increased my skepticism about not just the proposed policies, but the science itself. I would say that, at this point, the burden of proof has shifted in the extreme, and is now on those who demand that we impoverish ourselves (at least in relative terms, and don’t fool yourself that this isn’t exactly what they’re demanding) in the name of the science. The science is flawed.
There are no doubt sincere scientists working on this in good faith, but the charlatans in East Anglia and other places have had an inordinate influence on the work of the entire community, and we can’t know to what degree others’ work was affected by it and the false consensus. All climate science is suspect at this point, and the notion that we should be making global policy on it has to be seen now as completely absurd. It will be interesting to see how heretical people will feel comfortable in being in Copenhagen.