Before my break, over at Crooked Timber,
John Quiggin was having a go at John Tierney specifically and Republicans generally on their anti-science stance.
In some of the more hilarious comments, they seem to insinuate that agriculture policies are Republican driven; this may perhaps be the result of a number of non-Americans feeling informed enough to comment on American politics. The most egregious of these policies got their start during the Depression (though some pre-date it), and they grew much larger over the years. That roughly corresponds with the approximately 40-year unbroken period in which Democrats controlled Congress. And as
Stephen Downes recently reminded us, the more enlightened Left actually prefers these policies because it maintains order among the Morlocks:
Speaking as someone from the left, I understand the need to provide these subsidies to rural and suburban regions. They are necessary because the free market, left to its own devices, would leave these regions completely unserved.
This would greatly exaggerate the 'time warp' effect, whereby rural regions would be decades behind urban regions, not only in technology, but also education and health care, and ultimately, attitudes and behaviours.
...
It turns out - and we have the empirical evidence for this now - that it is much cheaper to provide subsidies to these regions [rural areas in the US and Canada? Or Africa, Asia, and South America? He seems to have wandered around a bit by this point, so the antecedent is no longer clear - EH] rather than to take a 'law and order' approach. Responding to religious fanaticism, tribalism and the like by war and invasion costs hundreds of billions of dollars - a non-productive subsidy that amounts to thousands of dollars per resident. [I don't think he is still talking about Iowa ... but he does now seem to be implying that invasions are the necessary alternative to foreign aid subsidies! That is a false dilemma.]
Essentially, Downes is admitting that he and his enlightened fellows understand the need to do these things, but Republicans should nevertheless be blamed for actually doing them, and please ignore the history of New Deal farm policy. [1] I wouldn't let either party off the hook on this, though. Republicans took over Congress with the intent of rolling back some of these subsidies, and actually did so for a while (under a Democrat president), but then reintroduced them all under the Freedom to Farm Bill (under a Republican president). The Democratic Congress recently passed another horrific farm policy law with broad-based Republican support, and the silence over at DailyKos is deafening, except to continue to propagate the meme that the beneficiaries of the bill are Republican farmers.[2] As I said at CT, ag policy is non-partisan. Perhaps I should have said bipartisan?
There is a large group of people who tend to be unified by a mindset that is anti-Western, anti-industrial, anti-free-market. Not all share all aspects of this, and not all share the same level of venom, but they exist. At one end of the spectrum, you have the ignorant, violent kids who tore up Seattle and join ELF, who think that Hayduke was a pansy. At the other, you have the reserved lobbyists of the Sierra Club.
People in this group have a model of the world which is reinforced by pessimistic scientific claims. Anything which looks like an indictment of Western, industrial, modern society is immediately accepted on its face because it reinforces their moral views. This confirmation bias, however, goes unrecognized and unacknowledged because of the myriad of other biases that occur when looking back at it introspectively.
One of the biases which makes it difficult to identify past errors is
hindsight bias, the tendency to believe that one's predictive abilities are better than they are. We tend to forget bad predictions and to remember good ones.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that matches our preconceptions. Another is the winners' bias, in which we tend to examine hypotheses that actually turned out to be true in order to determine whether hypotheses are more frequently true, a bias which is in part
selection bias and in part the
Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy. Selection bias is a distortion created by the manner in which data are collected, in this case resulting from limiting our selection of hypotheses to examine to after the fact rather than before the fact. The Texas Sharpshooter's fallacy is the determination of the hypothesis after the data have been collected. It would be far more constructive if we were to look at all of the hypotheses before the era which was being forecast and to look at which of those were true rather than looking at only the most memorable ones (
recall bias?), which are inevitably the ones that eventually come true.
So, for example, we have the historical examples of
epicycles,
luminiferous aether, and
phlogiston. Epicycles were introduced to try to explain the occasional regress of a planet in order to salvage the Ptolemeic or Earth-centric view of the universe. Luminous ether was the medium in which light travelled. Phlogiston was the element which sustained fire. These were important in their day, but are largely unknown today because they were, of course, wrong. These are just a few of the many
now-discredited theories of how our world works.
More recently, we had the
saccharin scare. Scarcely remembered today, the saccharin controversy was headline news in its day. Having determined that it caused cancer in rats, the FDA wanted to ban it as a carcinogen. They ran into tremendous popular and corporate opposition, since saccharin was the main sugar substitute in diet drinks at the time. They "compromised" by requiring the incorporation of warning labels. Years later, it was determined that saccharin has an effect particular not just to rats, but more specifically to male rats, in a way that does not effect humans. The entire controversy was completely misguided.[3]
Another example is the global cooling scare of the 1970s. It is still well-known that the Earth cooled during the 1940-1970 period, leading to concerns that the trend would continue until we entered a new Ice Age. Pollution was blamed, though it was noted that we are overdue for another Ice Age (in the literature, this is described as the end of the "interglacial period"). Bring this up on a climate change activist website and they will point out that the scare was largely created by articles in Newsweek and National Geographic magazines but was not predicted by scientists. While true that it was brought to the fore of public attention by the popular press, and that few scientists were
predicting as opposed to
positing the possibility of a new Ice age, the actual history at the time proves my point that these memes achieve some resonance in popular opinion despite the fact that they aren't true.[4] Afterwards, those who believed and advocated strong action claim to have never believed strongly.
It's almost a
Lake Wobegon effect: all of today's environmentalists are above average in their ability to have picked only the true environmental scares of the 1970s. How did the belief in global cooling ever get so popular? Was there a die-off among environmentalists in the 1980s? That damn Reagan is probably behind it.
Finally, we have people who accept the claims of Paul Ehrlich:
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." [1968]
"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." [1969]
Far from being ostracised for making a string (or two) of laughably wrong predictions, Ehrlich has received several awards for his "research". People want so badly to believe him that they continue to discount his way-off-the-mark predictions and accept his newer work at face value.
------------------------------
Most scientists must necessarily be wrong most of the time, at least in published journal articles. This is the nature of science as a search for truth (truth which is as yet unknown): one must submit hypotheses to tests. Either most of those hypotheses must be wrong, or scientists are surprisingly good at guessing right answers, or
publication bias is a factor. In fact, those are the findings of scientists researching the results of research: see
this article by John Ioannidis and
this article by Douglas Allchin for examples.
What is required is a substantial amount of skepticism, even for "accepted" conclusions. At one time in the not-so-distant past, ulcers were thought to be related to nerves, stomach chemistry, and diet. Not until 1979-1981, when two Australian researchers (Warren and Marshall) showed that most peptic ulcers were caused by a bacterium,
Helicobacter pylori, did we have the truth. It is fortunate that Warren and Marshall rejected the consensus on this. Howard Aiken's assertion that you shouldn't "
worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats," summarizes the reception Warren and Marshall's ideas received from the medical community. Humans are not good at identifying truth that is at odds with their world view, or at identifying when falsehoods are confirming their world view.
We must be as skeptical of those who claimed that they always knew that Global Warming was true as of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) itself, even if (or perhaps especially if) we believe it to be true. Skeptical, not hateful, dismissive, and/or obtuse. Not skepticism because we "feel" it isn't true, but skepticism for its own sake. The doctors who doubted Warren and Marshall made them prove their claims; that's as good for all of us as is the skepticism of Warren and Marshall that led to the discovery in the first place. Those who claimed they always knew the truth of AGW (especially the non-scientists), even when the evidence was more scant than at present, likely believed (and continue to believe) every pessimistic prediction, but conveniently forgot those that later turned out to be false. They weren't prescient; they were and remain ignorant. They are also ignorant of their ignorance.
---------------------------------------------------------------
[1] A while back, I said that the Left may not be in favor of
the Police State, but they are in favor of
a Police State. They build it and then feign surprise when the other side uses it. They refuse to believe reports that their own guys use it for anything less than righteousness.
[2] This continues to be a vexing problem about which I intend to post sometime in the near future. That is, a completely misguided application of demographics along with confusing correlation with causation. In this case, we have policies which benefit farmers. Farmers are known to live in rural states. Rural states tend to vote Republican. However, less than 2% of the population farms. Furthermore, it is well known that a small portion of farmers receives most of the subsidies. They alone cannot account for the number of votes received by Republicans. Believing that it is Republicans representing Republican farmers that managed to pass a bill
318-106 in the House, and 81-15 in the Senate, defies explanation on any grounds other than partisan blindness. When you further find out that of those 15 voting against it, only two were Democrats while 13 were Republicans, you really must examine your premises. In other words, it is time for Democrats to drop the sanctimony on farm policy.
In other news (and a demonstration of this same misguided approach to demographics), Democrats are the party of the wealthy and they emit most of the greenhouse emissions. More to come on this, eventually.
[3] Curiously, Quiggin's response regarding the saccharin scare was that it was driven by the USDA, which he sees as a Republican creature:
As regards saccharin, a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that the anti-saccharin push came from USDA. I don’t think it would be too hard to look behind the curtain to red-state sugar and corn producers.
In the first place,
the Wiki article specifically points out that the USDA opposition was mostly one man acting in accordance with the law, a law written by the meat-packing industry, so I can't completely discount Quiggin's claim. But Quiggin's assertion that red-state farmers were behind it is typical of the partisan blind under which the subjects of this article labor. Yes, some of those farmers were Republican. Some are Democrat, but he is blind to them. The laws were all written, supported, and not repealed by the Democrats even though they have controlled Congress for most of the period since 1907, and the White House for about half of it.
In the second, this doesn't explain how the FDA came to attempt to ban it.
In the third, doesn't this illustrate exactly what many of us have been saying with respect to regulatory capture? Specifically, that the government mostly exists to defend corporations in the guise of defending the average citizen?
[4] In fact, this has become a new interest of mine: How do such ideas get created and transmitted to seats of power? It isn't always via the press, and the locus of power is not always popular opinion. Take, for example, the ideas of the German Historical school, which got mainstreamed under the name of Progressivism by a route that seems to have included Robert Ely, John Commons, Herbert Croly, Robert M. LaFollette Sr., Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and finally FDR's cabinet. Why that school of thought? Why that route? Pure chance?
My point here repeatedly escapes the comprehension of the pessimists. I am not saying, "Scientific consensus in the 1970s was in favor of global cooling and impending an Ice Age." I am saying, "Public opinion in the 1970s was tipping toward a belief in an impending Ice Age and a desire to do something about it." It therefore doesn't matter what scientists were publishing in journals, or that there was no scientific consensus predicting the end of the interglacial period. What matters is that a significant number of voters believed it. How did they receive the information? How credible did they perceive it to be? How strong were their beliefs, and how far were they willing to go to act on them?
Labels: AGW, organization, philosophy, science
