Yet another climate post, but like my previous ones, this isn’t really about climate, it’s about science and it’s current state. Everyone by now has read about the leaked emails and source code (source followup here) last week. It’s a big deal.
There was a NY Times post today about a scientist who addresses skeptics. She listed three approaches a scientist can take when confronted by skeptics:
The Climate Research Unit went for #2, the scientist in the article believes that #3 is the best way (I agree), and this got me thinking about where skeptics come from in the first place, and how to deal with them.
One of the reasons I become skeptical about a some scientific and medical research is because the authors hide the data and they won’t make their methods known. I’m not a scientist by training, but I have some background in critical thinking and statistics. I’m not a stupid person (deliberately, anyway). If you show me the numbers and tell me how you interpret them, I can better judge your results.
Which leads to point 2:
“Skeptics are willfully ignorant of the scientific method and religiously cling to unfounded beliefs in the face of contrary data.”
Ok, you see my point? I’ll spell it out for the above mentioned skeptic: not all skeptics are created equally. Smart scientists know this, of course. And smart skeptics know that not all scientists are created equally.
Scientists who follow methods 1 and 2 above are not helping the cause of science. Whenever we use non-scientific tools (such as “consensus,” which is just large scale appeal to authority), we’re not helping the intelligent-but-ignorant skeptic join us, and intelligent people know the difference between a good argument and a bad one.
I understand the frustration when dealing with the hopelessly stupid skeptic—these people are never going to change their minds no matter what evidence you present to them; they should just be ignored.
But please don’t ignore the honest skeptic, the fellow who is simply begging for the straight evidence. A good scientist is also a good communicator, who can take the data and explain it clearly to another intelligent and honest seeker of understanding.
If you have good data, why not share it? If you have iffy data, for the sake of good science, share it too, and we’ll all be wiser.
In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.”
But precisely what was useless and harmful turns out to be Krugman’s own espoused Keynsian beliefs. John Cochrane explains:
Most of all, Krugman likes fiscal stimulus. In this quest, he accuses us and the rest of the economics profession of “mistaking beauty for truth.” He’s not clear on what the “beauty” is that we all fell in love with, and why one should shun it, for good reason. The first siren of beauty is simple logical consistency. Paul’s Keynesian economics requires that people make logically inconsistent plans to consume more, invest more, and pay more taxes with the same income. The second siren is plausible assumptions about how people behave. Keynesian economics requires that the government is able to systematically fool people again and again. It presumes that people don’t think about the future in making decisions today. Logical consistency and plausible foundations are indeed “beautiful” but to me they are also basic preconditions for “truth.”
Cochrane’s short paper is a really beautiful response to Krugman and his archaic, causality-reversing Keynsian answers to everything.
Paul, there was a financial crisis, a classic near-run on banks. The centerpiece of our crash was not the relatively free stock or real estate markets, it was the highly regulated commercial banks.
Ouch.
Certainly, texting while driving is one of the stupidest things a motorist can do. A study published in July by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute showed that drivers who text while driving increase their risk of a crash or near-crash 23-fold compared with those who do not. Reaching out for something moving inside the car represents a ninefold increase in risk; dialling, a sixfold increase; combing hair or putting on make-up raises the risk almost fivefold.
In a previous study, Virginia Tech found that 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes involved some form of distraction within three seconds of the incident. The most common distraction by far was using a hand-held phone.
I’ve been saying it for a while: students learn better with qualified, caring teachers and quality teaching materials than anything else, and One-Laptop-Per-Child is an expensive distraction from real education.
I think everyone who has been educated knows this instinctively. We can all point to a mentor (a teacher, a parent, a caring friend) who guided us, encouraged us, and cared enough about us to help us learn what is worth learning and what is not worth learning.
Giving a child a laptop does neither of these things. Some argue that simply having access to information will be the child’s ticket to a bright future, but now that the results are in, we can finally stop beating this dead horse.
You will always find exceptions: highly motivated students will learn no matter what you do to them, and giving them access to a computer will certainly give them an opportunity to get the information they want faster; but for the majority of students, giving them a computer will do little good, and will often do much harm, to their education.
The Internet is not a discriminator of information, and this is its chief problem. A classically-based education, as an example, imposes a hierarchy on knowledge. It says, “These things are more important than those things.” And when I say “it” I really mean a classically trained teacher guiding a student through a classical curriculum.
The Internet can’t do that for you by itself. You still need a guide, a mentor of some kind to help you know what’s worth learning. Autodidacts learn this early on and quickly learn which voices in life they want to trust (generally by way of books and other reading material), but the rest of us simply don’t know where to go.
And while we’re on the topic of online learning, did you hear of the recent meta-study by the US Department of Education? Everybody in the tech world is feeling validated, but they shouldn’t. It claims:
The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.
Read the study and notice that it’s a meta-study, largely sampling the results of self-selecting, uncontrolled learning experiements. Highly-motivated students, the kind who opt to take online courses, will always perform better than unmotivated students, no matter what medium they’re using.
The abstract concludes:
Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).
(emphasis mine).
So don’t take this as a validation for K-12 computer learning. Additional studies over OLPC and K-12 computer learning aren’t encouraging:
Under the auspices of the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education and Mathematica Policy Research recently completed a rigorous, two-year test of reading and math software (using programs that had at least some nonexperimental evidence that they “worked”) in dozens of school districts nationwide. With one minor exception, the studies found that children using the software scored no better than peers who did not have access to the software.
and this:
Economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches studied a program in Romania that distributed discount vouchers for the purchase of home computers to low-income families. When they compared the families that used the vouchers to acquire computers with families that were just above the income cut-off to receive the vouchers, they found that computers had a negative effect on students’ grades and educational goals.
and this:
(Leigh) Linden (an economist at Columbia University) also led one of the few experimental studies to show a positive impact from the use of computers — a project in India that provided computers and education software to schools and randomly assigned some schools to use the software during school hours and others to encourage computer use after hours. This study found that using computers during school hours-—essentially substituting computers for teachers—actually hurt learning, while using them after hours as a supplement to traditional classroom teaching had dramatic positive effects on the weakest students. Even this outcome doesn’t really support the OLPC mission, though; the software evaluated is very much in the “drill and practice” model that Negroponte has explicitly derided.
I won’t spoil all the fun of this article, but there are far, far better and less expensive ways to improve education than giving a child a laptop. In developing countries the list includes deworming children, providing tutors, and creating more private schools.
In the United States, computers in classrooms and schools should be removed and with the money not spent on technology, hire additional teachers or give the existing teachers a raise. I’m certain we’d get more of what we’re really looking for.
Politics and the English Language
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
Anyone? Anyone? George Orwell, 1946 [link]. Read on:
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.
My own experience tells me that bad writing is always a result of one of two factors: 1) the author is uneducated and doesn’t know how to write or 2) the author is lazy.
The first problem can be solved with practice and hard work: anyone can learn to write well if they’ll care enough to read what they’ve written and change it until the words are right. Good elementary and secondary school teachers who understand and can teach this are as angels from heaven. The second problem is solved when the intended audience stops reading and goes elsewhere.
Remember a few weeks ago when I griped about global warming? What bothered me wasn’t that we have fringe groups, conspiracy theorists, and “deniers.” These folks will always be with us in everything (sometimes they’re even right).
What bothered me was that there seems to be a legitimate case against the predominant view and few scientists in the mainstream are addressing it directly and scientifically. Almost nobody from the scientific “consensus” community are taking these people on, rather they’re using name-calling and ostracism to maintain their position. It also bothers me that scientists feel they have to stoop to “consensus” and PR smear campaigns to make their point.
Consensus is fine—great—for some things, but not in science:
If the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not—how could so many climatologists be wrong?
What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. “We still have whole domains we can’t talk about,” Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.
(tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com)
I would argue that there are even more things than psychology that aren’t being talked about, including climate change, because of this fear of consensus. Politicians and business-types are the kinds of people who look for consensus of opinion—that’s because they don’t actually know or do anything. They mobilize opinion to get other people to actually think or do. But scientists are different—they’re doers. Science is for observing, gathering, analyzing and interpreting data with confidence intervals. Maybe come up with a theory. Scientific disagreements should be about the data and its interpretation, not posturing and raspberry-blowing.
Scientists are of course entitled to have opinions as much as the next op-ed writer, but a scientist is expected to have some rigor and discipline when engaging in and refuting arguments. More importantly, a scientist is expected to be a thinker capable of ignoring the ridicule of his or her peers to get to the truth of a matter.
An article in the New York Times recently wrote about how Groupthink might be the culprit of our financial crisis (read: “collapse”):
In his classic 1972 book, Groupthink, Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.
(I think Peter Schiff would agree.)
When scientists bond together and form a consensus, science itself is imperiled. Because scientists are human and care about what their peers think, they take a big risk of stifling creative, scientific thought. Science is, at its core, the opposite of what we achieve by consensus. Science needs naysayers and village idiots every bit as much as the respectable, well-groomed, mainstream thinkers.
Paul Graham wrote an essay called “What you can’t say” that puts it even better:
Of course, we’re not just looking for things we can’t say. We’re looking for things we can’t say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
Another way of putting it is Bob Sutton’s “strong opinions, weakly held.” Whatever we call it, it’s something more scientists need to learn apparently. We’re not in high school anymore, and any scientist who puts popularity and peer acceptance ahead of their scientific rigor, even in their spare time, is doing more harm than good.
From What went wrong with economics:
In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
Alright, maybe not all of economics is bunk, but I think a lot of macroeconomics was simply invented by economists to justify their own positions. Even economist John Kenneth Galbraith (lousy Keynesian) said:
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
Create an academic field around a small idea and pretty soon your experts in that field will be finding new ways to justify themselves. It’s true in every field. We do this in the name of science, of course, but the trouble is that there aren’t enough people in the world to say “Hey, your entire field of study is stupid and wrong. You’re making things worse.”
Well, I’m going to say it here: Macroeconomists, you’re making it worse. Stop pretending you have answers. You don’t. I don’t either, but I’m not pretending. Stop talking to policy-makers. Tell them that you don’t know and nobody else does either. Tell them that maybe we ought to consider getting out of debt as a country, to spend less than we make, as a lark, you know, to see what happens. Then please find another area of study.
Lest my readers think I’m a “denialist”, I post here a link to a great article about interpreting the numbers on global warming.
But while these recent posts have ostensibly been about climate change science, they’ve really been about the nature of science itself. For example, I’m still troubled by the heavy political language. Here we have someone skilled in statistical analysis using the same kind of browbeating against any dissent that Paul Krugman uses in his recent article:
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
Treason? That’s pretty strong language (but this is Prince Krugman—he can say whatever he wants and never be wrong, even as a non-scientist). I think all sensible people realize that things are warming up (even if there are local variations from year to year). The long-term indicators we can measure say that the globe is warming. We can accept that (though apparently some can’t—that’s fine too).
What is hard to stomach is the assertion that the near-universal scientific consensus about what is causing the warming to this this fantastically complex system we call Earth implies that there can be no more inquiry into the matter.
There is some dissent, and there is plenty of room for skepticism and rebuttal to the dissent. That’s the kind of science I’m talking about.
It is not science’s job to quash dissent through consensus. It is science’s job to welcome honest differences and to acknowledge places where we still lack data. A good scientist does the research, crunches the numbers, and gives the confidence intervals. Let the Op Ed writers push the policy.
Whenever you adopt science as your religion, you should be prepared to deal with the atheists, agnostics, and general skeptics with grace, civility, and respect. Those who fail to do this do not deserve the honorable title of scientist.
The world is full of plenty of things to believe and plenty to doubt, and a real scientist withholds judgement on both sides, knowing that the jury is always out in the face of new evidence.
Scientists who have signed up to turn climate change science into climate change dogma by ridiculing or ostracizing any nay-sayers are giving all true scientists a black eye. Science is about open and honest inquiry. Leave the political jockeying to lesser minds.
Wall Street Journal: Climate change is changing.
No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste
I’m a fan of nuclear power. I was delighted to come across this recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
So is this material “waste”? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth’s crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.
Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 — which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains — from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy — beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
“Nuclear waste” is only waste because it was designated so by Presidents Ford and Carter in the 70s.