You come across the claim that some contentious issue has been settled, that it has been shown that capital punishment deters (or does not deter) crime, that right wingers are authoritarian and left wingers are not, that legalizing concealed carry reduces crime
I trace my skepticism about AGW, since rebranded as Climate Change, to the fact that its main proponent refused to share his data with all and sundry.
In science, especially a non-experimental science like climatology, one must share everything; the raw data and the metadata. We should accept nothing less.
My skepticism regarding AGW stems from the fact that all of the "solutions" proposed are non-sensical and can never solve the problem without destroying human civilization.
If they were serious about reducing CO2, Gore's proposals would have been to build 500 new nuclear reactors in the USA, change the tax and subsidy structure to move freight from trucks to rail, electrify the railways as much as possible, move the navy's nuclear technology to commercial shipping. Ten years after Gore, the technology became available to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels with "capture" CO2 using nuclear energy as the source. Why not switch from extracted hydrocarbons to synthesized hydrocarbons and preserve our huge fuel distribution and vehicle infrastructure. But that's too simple, the entire infrastructure must be replaced at huge expense.
When the solutions that "must be followed" cannot work and are pushed relentlessly, how real can the problem actually be?
Regarding John Boswell and his critics, I call it the liars method: which critics take the most shortcuts with what passes for the truth? If they prefer to lie instead of rebut the arguments, my instinct is to believe they have the wrong side of the argument.
Case in point, global warming. When I first heard of it, I remember how odd it was that global cooling and imminent ice ages had reversed course and now the world was doomed to bake to death, but I mostly ignored it; global cooling had never gone anywhere, why should global warming?
But the more strident they got, the more I paid attention, and came to the conclusion at least a decade ago that they were out and out liars. Michael Mann's hockey stick, the climate gate emails, and most especially all those hysterical predictions of no snow, no Arctic ice, no more coral reefs, no more polar bears or penguins ... one hysterical lie after another. By now I am absolutely convinced that whatever role humans play is too insignificant to measure, CO2 is good plant food and better for us all, and however you measure "global temperature", even a 5°C rise would be overall beneficial, although of course adjustments would have to be made.
Just look for the lies, that's my motto when the subject is too deep for the amount of time it would take to really study it.
I think you are over reacting. The hysterical predictions are not what you get from the IPCC reports or William Nordhaus's work, and the fact that some people wildly exaggerate the problem for one of several reasons doesn't mean it isn't real. There is good evidence that global temperatures have been trending up for a little over a century and human produced CO2 is a plausible explanation. Where the respectable orthodoxy gets it wrong, in my opinion, is the net effect, focusing on the negative, ignoring or minimizing the positive effects, and so converting it from a change that makes us worse off in some ways, better off in others, to a problem that urgently requires solution.
I meant what I said -- the physics of it, the science of it, are beyond my ken in any reasonable study period. All I have to go on is the proponents. They lie about Arctic ice, about snow in general, about polar bears, about hottest year in the last 125,000, about the Roman Warming Period, about the Little Ice Age ... they are, in fact, hysterical. They don't even believe their own guff -- if I truly thought we were 6 years from an irreversible tipping point, I'd be moving heaven and earth for nuclear power, not unreliable renewables. Obama buying a beach front mansion shows he doesn't believe it.
That is what I base my opinion on. When proponents lie hysterically, the only sane reaction is to believe they are lying hysterically.
As far as the IPCC, my impression of them is that they are only marginally better. They continue to support Mann's lying hockey stick graph. They continue reporting the "business as usual" graph when it has already become out of date, and they make no attempts to shut down the hysterical liars. Far as I'm concerned, they are no more reliable than are "good" cops who don't turn in the "bad" cops.
Sleep with the bad cops and hysterical liars, you get covered in hysterical lying fleas. They have been doing this for 20-30 years. It's long past time for them to be honest and turn out the hysterical liars if they want to be treated as honest.
Global temperatures have been trending upward because we came out of the Little Ice Age. We had a century+ long cold spell begin in the 1600s. Climate varies in cycles of cycles, some of which are longer than a human lifetime.
Michael Mann famously refuses to share his data. That is especially important in non-experimental science, like climatology.
There are plenty of reasons to stop burning fossil fuels. I don’t think there is reason to panic.
Right now there is a trial taking place in DC with Michael Mann as the plaintiff. Worth tuning in to hear the audacity and craziness of his case. "Climate Change on Trial" on any podcast service.
Mann is very vindictive about criticism of him. He's good at dishing it out, but can't take the incoming. IMHO, he should lose but DC jury, so who knows.
That's the very case that Bob was referring to. Mann delayed the case for years, partly in the hope that Steyn would go broke first, but mainly because Steyn demanded that Mann reveal his data in discovery, and Mann refused to do it. If that information has been made public I haven't heard about it. The judge is limiting public access so much that even alt-media have mostly been prevented from covering the case.
By now we know from Trump's DC case that it's impossible to get a fair jury or judge in DC if you are right-leaning.
I'm following it on the podcast. They are using the trial transcripts (read by actors) along with a little commentary. It's been amazing. I am very worried about the Jury and the Judge. The attorneys for Mann are pulling some very underhanded shenanigans like knowingly presenting incorrect numbers, etc. And so far the judge is not doing anything when objections are made. This is such a bogus case that should have been thrown out years ago. One of Mann's claims is that another customer at a grocery store gave him a mean look! "Lawfare" is becoming a major problem.
The least popular answer being the most correct one resonates deeply with me. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in my time here on earth is that Feynman was right. “You are the easiest person for you to fool.” I suspect that if you value anything above honesty and truthfulness, you’ll end up believing the instrumental falsehoods you spout, and this means you’ll become disconnected from the truth and ultimately fail to advance the goal you placed as being more important than honesty and truthfulness.
Decades ago I spent some time studying deception. Among other things, I came out believing that the easiest (and frequently strongest) deception was self-deception.
For many years the Northern and Southern versions were both out there.
The Southern version, that it was a War Between States, is not totally bogus. 'Well, boys, it's Massachusetts against Virginia. I'm off to join Massachusetts', said a volunteer in Wisconsin quoted at the start of Fletcher Pratt's classic 'Trial By Fire'. Not totally bogus, but leaves out slavery.
The Northern version, that it was a crusade against slavery and for the Union, is what I want taught in K-12 and to Americans who don't care about history. It is a stirring part of Our American Saga. And secession was all about slavery, and secession and the Civil War were intimately related. I think both versions wrong, but I'd only mention that to my fellow history nuts.
* * *
(My fellow history nuts: When the South seceded, the abolitionists were okay with it. Horace Greely wrote in the New York Times 'Let the erring sisters go'. With the South out of the Union, abolitionists were no longer in a covenant with death and Hell and slavery. Sure, slavery still existed, but slavery always exists somewhere. My cell phone and yours contains rare earths mined by African children under labor conditions perhaps worse than antebellum slavery, and that is bad and I wish said children all the best, and I like my cell phone. President Buchanan offered one compromise after another, and Southern gentlemen who never stole the Mississippi river took him like a pawn and kept the South arming to kill Yankees.
I think the Civil War was about Southern men wanting to kill Yankees.
They still do. They do. In 1861 they really really wanted to kill Yankees. (I think) the South started the Civil War so they could kill Yankees, and the Yankees put it off as long as they could and then fought. Afterwards both sides, (if I am right,) were too embarrassed to mention the real reason. Yankees did not want to admit we are sissies who only fight when we really really have to, and Southern men did not want to admit they started a giant war that got them conquered and broke the South's economy for a hundred years just to enjoy a minor passing pleasure.)
Very clear explanation of why we should be cautious about claims of "settled science" or "to follow The Science". Several of the examples were new to me and are going to be looked into.
Number 1 can be exhausting, especially when you're trying to sort the lies put out by heavily funded NGOs who have experienced, well paid staff who obfuscate for a living.
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My experience is with the anti-nuclear lobby. You see things like "studies" claiming that the CO2 emissions of commercial nuclear electricity generation is close to that of fossil fuels. But dig into the claim and one finds that the author is ultimately referencing Mark Jacobson of Stanford. Jacobson has references in his papers, but it turns out he's referencing himself.
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The paper he's referencing? One in which he claims that commercial nuclear electricity generation leads to nuclear weapons proliferation (unfounded and actually opposite the real world data) and that weapons proliferation will lead to one city being destroyed by a nuclear weapon every 25 years.
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Jacobson then attributes the CO2 from a city burning once every 25 years to the CO2 output of commercial nuclear electricity generation.
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I kid you not. This is the line of reasoning used by the anti-nuclear lobby. And it is just one example out of dozens of its type. But every time they come up with a ridiculous claim couched in reasonable seeming studies, someone must dig through it pull out the flies (in the ointment).
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Happily, there are some very smart and reliable and reasonable people doing your second option for the rest of us in the case of anti-nuclear deception. Unhappily, the methods of lying and propaganda and weaponizing NGOs perfected over 40 years for the anti-nuclear movement seem to have been adopted for the climate deception.
The funniest development in the culture war is people combating institutional hegemony not by making arguments with merit but by inventing new fake institutions
To some degree all institutions, especially those which bestow credentials, are just made up by the same people they anoint as "experts" or whom they license to work in an occupation. They have created an attitude among many of the public to worship credentials. It is just tribalism with the tribes' names changed.
Well no. Some institutions attempt to enforce an epistemic program as well, and some epistemic programs are much better than others. You're right that there is nothing inherent of value in credentials or titles though.
I am a contrarian. As a first approximation, I have a simple rule: if it is a popular recent fad, it is most likely false. Global warming, for instance. The average person is not very well-informed and half the population is below average informed. Betting against a popular opinion is quite safe.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, in part because there are usually more than two alternatives. If the average person believes A that is weak evidence that A is true but it is even weaker evidence that B, C, D, or E, all different alternatives to A, is true.
In the climate case, if the average person believes climate change, if not stopped, is going to kill us all by the end of the century and you are pretty sure the average person is wrong, that doesn't tell you whether climate change doesn't exist, exists but is not anthropomorphic, exists and is anthropomorphic but is good or exists and is anthropomorphic and bad, but not terrible.
This is a topic I'm very concerned about, but too often feel as if the task is hopeless, and quite possibly getting worse.
You write:
"What convinced me that Boswell had a reasonable case was reading an attack on him by a prominent opponent which badly misrepresented the contents of the book I had just read. People who have good arguments do not need bad ones."
"Of course, there might be other critics with better arguments."
Once an opinion becomes popular, large numbers of people tend to jump on board. Many of those people are apparently incapable of either judging truth or falsehood themselves, or distinguishing good arguments from bad. (Quite often the only argument they understand appears to be "argument from authority" - so-and-so said so, therefore it's true.)
They tend to feel a need to demonstrate their agreement with whatever opinion is popular, arguing on its behalf using, at best, a random mishmash of arguments they've encountered, good or bad, and most often misrepresented besides.
Other people, perhaps themselves competent and convinced by good arguments, decide they have a duty to convince everyone, and use whatever techniques they believe will produce the most agreement with their truth. Sometimes their choice of techniques is based on competent research. But - if you want to convince the largest number of randomly chosen people, sound arguments based on good research are not the best choice.
This spew of rubbish tends to drown out anyone making good arguments. Search engines highlight whatever is most popular, modulated by whatever their maintainers have decided to treat as true/false. Net result - a quick search provides arguments from authority, arguments that aren't even coherent, and popular press articles that don't cite sources. Any reasonable person would suspect that there's nothing better available - but sometimes there is.
My heuristics for finding good arguments are dated. They don't work even as well as they used to. I'm filing a lot more possible facts as "this is an article of faith with such-and-such political group; there's little hope of uncovering the actual truth or falsity of it".
I do have decent heuristics for evaluating specific articles as not worth considering
- does the author demonstrate innumeracy and/or statistical illiteracy
- does the author demonstrate incorrect knowledge of history (usually implies the argument depends on treating a myth as a truth)
- does the author mix morals/ethics with their fact claims. The more they say "x is bad/good", the less I trust their ability to evaluate whether x is true or false.
Too often, I'm left with no relevant books, articles, etc. At least, none that I can find.
My experience has been that a lot of people, asked to justify an opinion, will advance a reason for holding it—but then, if you point to other conclusions that follow from that reason, will often reject them. There are various rhetorical justifications for this: A long popular one was to say "We don't have to go to extremes," a currently trendy one is to accuse the questioner of "whataboutism." But it basically means that they don't actually adhere to those views, or perhaps to any views; they simply pick them up when they're convenient to score points.
In the case of Cyril Burt. It doesn't even matter because his results are about the same everybody else gets. But back in the 1970s a lot of the available data was from his dataset (twins apart). And it does contain mysterious irregularities. But the point is moot these days since we have far better data on the heritability of many things from 10000s of twins and other family members.
It doesn't matter for our opinion on the heritability of intelligence, although some people may think it does. It does matter for our opinion on Burt, on how well science works, and on how well the mechanisms for discovering and correcting scientific fraud work.
A fundamental problem in the premise of democracy itself. People are relatively good at making decisions for themselves, but ask them to evaluate concepts like national debt, climate change, or vaccines and they'll echo the opinions of their tribal leaders.
In most cases that is individually rational behavior. What you say on such subjects has very little effect on what happens with regard to them but a much larger effect on your interaction with fellow members of your tribe.
I don't know about safe, but I think the evidence is pretty good that they are effective in reducing the effect of Covid, much less effective in preventing it.
For certain groups, certainly. But what about a 20 year old healthy adult? Does the risk worth the benefit. A 30 year old? A 40? A 5 year old. I honestly don't know.
I’m not a particular advocate of capital punishment, but I think it has one uncontroversial effect: a dead person is definitely not going to commit any crimes in the future. Its deterrent effect on other people is almost beside the point, although still of some interest.
Non-capital punishment is mostly irreversible in practice. Even if innocence is discovered ten years later, ten years in prison is a pretty substantial punishment. And my guess is that, in most cases where someone is convicted of something he did not do, his innocence is never discovered.
I don't think institutional or authoritative appeals are anything more than a rhetorical strategy people adopt when they think their opponents are idiots. It doesn't intrinsically reflect the strength or weakness of any argument
This forum is frequented by contrarians. What contrarians tend to miss is that their attitude favors bias against the acceptance of a consensus that has been reached by scientists who know much more about a subject matter than they do. One of the consequences is making the perfect the enemy of the good enough. Exhibit A in this case is climate change caused by human activity and its dangers. Exhibit B is COVID vaccination. Much of this occurs in a context of group membership, however. Some accepted dogma by members of tribes is patently absurd because it defies daily observation and common sense, e.g. we have to ban smoking in every nook and cranny on campus in order to keep people safe, our society is systemically biased against minorities, or Trump wasn't trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. One could go on indefinitely in showing how little truth matters. Geeking out on facts and evidence is perhaps the most respectable defense mechanism, apart from being the right thing to do.
On the other hand, most people have no good way of distinguishing "a consensus that has been reached by scientists who know much more about a subject matter than they do" from a false claim by high status people that such exists.
For one example, Obama claimed that all economists believed that increased government spending was the proper response to prevent a recession or depression and my impression was that many believed him. Thomas Sargent, who got a Nobel prize for his work in macro, commented in response that the President had been misinformed.
Obama said that economists on both the left and right say that the last thing we need during a recession is reduced spending, evidently not to have to lie and to justify the decision of his economics team. As a layman, I tend to believe they probably did the right thing. I also believe that the Biden administration very much overdid it during the pandemic. I understand that I could easily be misinformed, like Obama. In this general context, you would have to be extremely persuasive with someone like me in arguing that letting the banks fail would have been the right approach for the crisis in 2008. I suspect you of favoring that, which could be another unwarranted assumption.
For what it is worth, first Hoover and then FDR reacted to the beginning of the depression by sharply raising expenditure — and the depression lasted for over a decade.
The beginning of the 1920's looks like the beginning of the Great Depression, Harding cut spending sharply, and by 1923 the depression/recession was over.
That doesn't prove that cutting spending is the right solution but it is a reason to be less confident that it isn't.
'Contrarian' as a descriptive of a group implies that those contrarians are contrary about pretty much everything, without reasonable justification. I don't think that describes many people. US liberals tend to be quite contrary to standard economics, but accepting about for example climate change. Libertarians, generally considered contrarians, are more in line (other than a bias towards Austrianism) with standard economics, and all over the board on climate change.
David attracts a certain brand of contrarians, certainly, but the lines seem to cut in various direction on different topics.
I enjoyed reading Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian years ago and can recommend it. Hitchens was scarcely without reasonable justification in most of his arguments. I count myself among the contrarians here but I'm not a libertarian, which doesn't stop me from wanting to learn from them. My observation remains that the tendency to want to question the consensus carries its own risks, just as conformism does.
I trace my skepticism about AGW, since rebranded as Climate Change, to the fact that its main proponent refused to share his data with all and sundry.
In science, especially a non-experimental science like climatology, one must share everything; the raw data and the metadata. We should accept nothing less.
My skepticism regarding AGW stems from the fact that all of the "solutions" proposed are non-sensical and can never solve the problem without destroying human civilization.
If they were serious about reducing CO2, Gore's proposals would have been to build 500 new nuclear reactors in the USA, change the tax and subsidy structure to move freight from trucks to rail, electrify the railways as much as possible, move the navy's nuclear technology to commercial shipping. Ten years after Gore, the technology became available to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels with "capture" CO2 using nuclear energy as the source. Why not switch from extracted hydrocarbons to synthesized hydrocarbons and preserve our huge fuel distribution and vehicle infrastructure. But that's too simple, the entire infrastructure must be replaced at huge expense.
When the solutions that "must be followed" cannot work and are pushed relentlessly, how real can the problem actually be?
It’s worse if somehow the problem is real.
Regarding John Boswell and his critics, I call it the liars method: which critics take the most shortcuts with what passes for the truth? If they prefer to lie instead of rebut the arguments, my instinct is to believe they have the wrong side of the argument.
Case in point, global warming. When I first heard of it, I remember how odd it was that global cooling and imminent ice ages had reversed course and now the world was doomed to bake to death, but I mostly ignored it; global cooling had never gone anywhere, why should global warming?
But the more strident they got, the more I paid attention, and came to the conclusion at least a decade ago that they were out and out liars. Michael Mann's hockey stick, the climate gate emails, and most especially all those hysterical predictions of no snow, no Arctic ice, no more coral reefs, no more polar bears or penguins ... one hysterical lie after another. By now I am absolutely convinced that whatever role humans play is too insignificant to measure, CO2 is good plant food and better for us all, and however you measure "global temperature", even a 5°C rise would be overall beneficial, although of course adjustments would have to be made.
Just look for the lies, that's my motto when the subject is too deep for the amount of time it would take to really study it.
I think you are over reacting. The hysterical predictions are not what you get from the IPCC reports or William Nordhaus's work, and the fact that some people wildly exaggerate the problem for one of several reasons doesn't mean it isn't real. There is good evidence that global temperatures have been trending up for a little over a century and human produced CO2 is a plausible explanation. Where the respectable orthodoxy gets it wrong, in my opinion, is the net effect, focusing on the negative, ignoring or minimizing the positive effects, and so converting it from a change that makes us worse off in some ways, better off in others, to a problem that urgently requires solution.
I meant what I said -- the physics of it, the science of it, are beyond my ken in any reasonable study period. All I have to go on is the proponents. They lie about Arctic ice, about snow in general, about polar bears, about hottest year in the last 125,000, about the Roman Warming Period, about the Little Ice Age ... they are, in fact, hysterical. They don't even believe their own guff -- if I truly thought we were 6 years from an irreversible tipping point, I'd be moving heaven and earth for nuclear power, not unreliable renewables. Obama buying a beach front mansion shows he doesn't believe it.
That is what I base my opinion on. When proponents lie hysterically, the only sane reaction is to believe they are lying hysterically.
As far as the IPCC, my impression of them is that they are only marginally better. They continue to support Mann's lying hockey stick graph. They continue reporting the "business as usual" graph when it has already become out of date, and they make no attempts to shut down the hysterical liars. Far as I'm concerned, they are no more reliable than are "good" cops who don't turn in the "bad" cops.
Sleep with the bad cops and hysterical liars, you get covered in hysterical lying fleas. They have been doing this for 20-30 years. It's long past time for them to be honest and turn out the hysterical liars if they want to be treated as honest.
Global temperatures have been trending upward because we came out of the Little Ice Age. We had a century+ long cold spell begin in the 1600s. Climate varies in cycles of cycles, some of which are longer than a human lifetime.
Michael Mann famously refuses to share his data. That is especially important in non-experimental science, like climatology.
There are plenty of reasons to stop burning fossil fuels. I don’t think there is reason to panic.
It turns out to be rather sketchy.
Right now there is a trial taking place in DC with Michael Mann as the plaintiff. Worth tuning in to hear the audacity and craziness of his case. "Climate Change on Trial" on any podcast service.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/climate-change-on-trial/id1713827256
Mann is very vindictive about criticism of him. He's good at dishing it out, but can't take the incoming. IMHO, he should lose but DC jury, so who knows.
That's the very case that Bob was referring to. Mann delayed the case for years, partly in the hope that Steyn would go broke first, but mainly because Steyn demanded that Mann reveal his data in discovery, and Mann refused to do it. If that information has been made public I haven't heard about it. The judge is limiting public access so much that even alt-media have mostly been prevented from covering the case.
By now we know from Trump's DC case that it's impossible to get a fair jury or judge in DC if you are right-leaning.
I'm following it on the podcast. They are using the trial transcripts (read by actors) along with a little commentary. It's been amazing. I am very worried about the Jury and the Judge. The attorneys for Mann are pulling some very underhanded shenanigans like knowingly presenting incorrect numbers, etc. And so far the judge is not doing anything when objections are made. This is such a bogus case that should have been thrown out years ago. One of Mann's claims is that another customer at a grocery store gave him a mean look! "Lawfare" is becoming a major problem.
The least popular answer being the most correct one resonates deeply with me. One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in my time here on earth is that Feynman was right. “You are the easiest person for you to fool.” I suspect that if you value anything above honesty and truthfulness, you’ll end up believing the instrumental falsehoods you spout, and this means you’ll become disconnected from the truth and ultimately fail to advance the goal you placed as being more important than honesty and truthfulness.
Decades ago I spent some time studying deception. Among other things, I came out believing that the easiest (and frequently strongest) deception was self-deception.
How to learn the true cause of the US Civil War?
For many years the Northern and Southern versions were both out there.
The Southern version, that it was a War Between States, is not totally bogus. 'Well, boys, it's Massachusetts against Virginia. I'm off to join Massachusetts', said a volunteer in Wisconsin quoted at the start of Fletcher Pratt's classic 'Trial By Fire'. Not totally bogus, but leaves out slavery.
The Northern version, that it was a crusade against slavery and for the Union, is what I want taught in K-12 and to Americans who don't care about history. It is a stirring part of Our American Saga. And secession was all about slavery, and secession and the Civil War were intimately related. I think both versions wrong, but I'd only mention that to my fellow history nuts.
* * *
(My fellow history nuts: When the South seceded, the abolitionists were okay with it. Horace Greely wrote in the New York Times 'Let the erring sisters go'. With the South out of the Union, abolitionists were no longer in a covenant with death and Hell and slavery. Sure, slavery still existed, but slavery always exists somewhere. My cell phone and yours contains rare earths mined by African children under labor conditions perhaps worse than antebellum slavery, and that is bad and I wish said children all the best, and I like my cell phone. President Buchanan offered one compromise after another, and Southern gentlemen who never stole the Mississippi river took him like a pawn and kept the South arming to kill Yankees.
I think the Civil War was about Southern men wanting to kill Yankees.
They still do. They do. In 1861 they really really wanted to kill Yankees. (I think) the South started the Civil War so they could kill Yankees, and the Yankees put it off as long as they could and then fought. Afterwards both sides, (if I am right,) were too embarrassed to mention the real reason. Yankees did not want to admit we are sissies who only fight when we really really have to, and Southern men did not want to admit they started a giant war that got them conquered and broke the South's economy for a hundred years just to enjoy a minor passing pleasure.)
* * *
I will never be sure.
Very clear explanation of why we should be cautious about claims of "settled science" or "to follow The Science". Several of the examples were new to me and are going to be looked into.
Number 1 can be exhausting, especially when you're trying to sort the lies put out by heavily funded NGOs who have experienced, well paid staff who obfuscate for a living.
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My experience is with the anti-nuclear lobby. You see things like "studies" claiming that the CO2 emissions of commercial nuclear electricity generation is close to that of fossil fuels. But dig into the claim and one finds that the author is ultimately referencing Mark Jacobson of Stanford. Jacobson has references in his papers, but it turns out he's referencing himself.
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The paper he's referencing? One in which he claims that commercial nuclear electricity generation leads to nuclear weapons proliferation (unfounded and actually opposite the real world data) and that weapons proliferation will lead to one city being destroyed by a nuclear weapon every 25 years.
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Jacobson then attributes the CO2 from a city burning once every 25 years to the CO2 output of commercial nuclear electricity generation.
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I kid you not. This is the line of reasoning used by the anti-nuclear lobby. And it is just one example out of dozens of its type. But every time they come up with a ridiculous claim couched in reasonable seeming studies, someone must dig through it pull out the flies (in the ointment).
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Happily, there are some very smart and reliable and reasonable people doing your second option for the rest of us in the case of anti-nuclear deception. Unhappily, the methods of lying and propaganda and weaponizing NGOs perfected over 40 years for the anti-nuclear movement seem to have been adopted for the climate deception.
The funniest development in the culture war is people combating institutional hegemony not by making arguments with merit but by inventing new fake institutions
To some degree all institutions, especially those which bestow credentials, are just made up by the same people they anoint as "experts" or whom they license to work in an occupation. They have created an attitude among many of the public to worship credentials. It is just tribalism with the tribes' names changed.
Well no. Some institutions attempt to enforce an epistemic program as well, and some epistemic programs are much better than others. You're right that there is nothing inherent of value in credentials or titles though.
Thanks for the post, David.
I am a contrarian. As a first approximation, I have a simple rule: if it is a popular recent fad, it is most likely false. Global warming, for instance. The average person is not very well-informed and half the population is below average informed. Betting against a popular opinion is quite safe.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, in part because there are usually more than two alternatives. If the average person believes A that is weak evidence that A is true but it is even weaker evidence that B, C, D, or E, all different alternatives to A, is true.
In the climate case, if the average person believes climate change, if not stopped, is going to kill us all by the end of the century and you are pretty sure the average person is wrong, that doesn't tell you whether climate change doesn't exist, exists but is not anthropomorphic, exists and is anthropomorphic but is good or exists and is anthropomorphic and bad, but not terrible.
This is a topic I'm very concerned about, but too often feel as if the task is hopeless, and quite possibly getting worse.
You write:
"What convinced me that Boswell had a reasonable case was reading an attack on him by a prominent opponent which badly misrepresented the contents of the book I had just read. People who have good arguments do not need bad ones."
"Of course, there might be other critics with better arguments."
Once an opinion becomes popular, large numbers of people tend to jump on board. Many of those people are apparently incapable of either judging truth or falsehood themselves, or distinguishing good arguments from bad. (Quite often the only argument they understand appears to be "argument from authority" - so-and-so said so, therefore it's true.)
They tend to feel a need to demonstrate their agreement with whatever opinion is popular, arguing on its behalf using, at best, a random mishmash of arguments they've encountered, good or bad, and most often misrepresented besides.
Other people, perhaps themselves competent and convinced by good arguments, decide they have a duty to convince everyone, and use whatever techniques they believe will produce the most agreement with their truth. Sometimes their choice of techniques is based on competent research. But - if you want to convince the largest number of randomly chosen people, sound arguments based on good research are not the best choice.
This spew of rubbish tends to drown out anyone making good arguments. Search engines highlight whatever is most popular, modulated by whatever their maintainers have decided to treat as true/false. Net result - a quick search provides arguments from authority, arguments that aren't even coherent, and popular press articles that don't cite sources. Any reasonable person would suspect that there's nothing better available - but sometimes there is.
My heuristics for finding good arguments are dated. They don't work even as well as they used to. I'm filing a lot more possible facts as "this is an article of faith with such-and-such political group; there's little hope of uncovering the actual truth or falsity of it".
I do have decent heuristics for evaluating specific articles as not worth considering
- does the author demonstrate innumeracy and/or statistical illiteracy
- does the author demonstrate incorrect knowledge of history (usually implies the argument depends on treating a myth as a truth)
- does the author mix morals/ethics with their fact claims. The more they say "x is bad/good", the less I trust their ability to evaluate whether x is true or false.
Too often, I'm left with no relevant books, articles, etc. At least, none that I can find.
My experience has been that a lot of people, asked to justify an opinion, will advance a reason for holding it—but then, if you point to other conclusions that follow from that reason, will often reject them. There are various rhetorical justifications for this: A long popular one was to say "We don't have to go to extremes," a currently trendy one is to accuse the questioner of "whataboutism." But it basically means that they don't actually adhere to those views, or perhaps to any views; they simply pick them up when they're convenient to score points.
Search engine bias and AI bias are already problematic when trying to determine what is true.
In the case of Cyril Burt. It doesn't even matter because his results are about the same everybody else gets. But back in the 1970s a lot of the available data was from his dataset (twins apart). And it does contain mysterious irregularities. But the point is moot these days since we have far better data on the heritability of many things from 10000s of twins and other family members.
It doesn't matter for our opinion on the heritability of intelligence, although some people may think it does. It does matter for our opinion on Burt, on how well science works, and on how well the mechanisms for discovering and correcting scientific fraud work.
A fundamental problem in the premise of democracy itself. People are relatively good at making decisions for themselves, but ask them to evaluate concepts like national debt, climate change, or vaccines and they'll echo the opinions of their tribal leaders.
In most cases that is individually rational behavior. What you say on such subjects has very little effect on what happens with regard to them but a much larger effect on your interaction with fellow members of your tribe.
This topic worries me a great deal.
In many cases I fallback on my priors, but
I can't do that in areas where I lack expertise, or any good intuition.
For example, I still can't tell to what degree COVID vaccines are "safe and effective".
I don't know about safe, but I think the evidence is pretty good that they are effective in reducing the effect of Covid, much less effective in preventing it.
For certain groups, certainly. But what about a 20 year old healthy adult? Does the risk worth the benefit. A 30 year old? A 40? A 5 year old. I honestly don't know.
I’m not a particular advocate of capital punishment, but I think it has one uncontroversial effect: a dead person is definitely not going to commit any crimes in the future. Its deterrent effect on other people is almost beside the point, although still of some interest.
Yep. Name one instance in which a person on whom capital punishment was successfully executed, went on to commit another atrocity.
The difficulty is in being certain that hte person convicted actually committed the crime. Capital punishment is irreversible.
Non-capital punishment is mostly irreversible in practice. Even if innocence is discovered ten years later, ten years in prison is a pretty substantial punishment. And my guess is that, in most cases where someone is convicted of something he did not do, his innocence is never discovered.
I don't think institutional or authoritative appeals are anything more than a rhetorical strategy people adopt when they think their opponents are idiots. It doesn't intrinsically reflect the strength or weakness of any argument
This forum is frequented by contrarians. What contrarians tend to miss is that their attitude favors bias against the acceptance of a consensus that has been reached by scientists who know much more about a subject matter than they do. One of the consequences is making the perfect the enemy of the good enough. Exhibit A in this case is climate change caused by human activity and its dangers. Exhibit B is COVID vaccination. Much of this occurs in a context of group membership, however. Some accepted dogma by members of tribes is patently absurd because it defies daily observation and common sense, e.g. we have to ban smoking in every nook and cranny on campus in order to keep people safe, our society is systemically biased against minorities, or Trump wasn't trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. One could go on indefinitely in showing how little truth matters. Geeking out on facts and evidence is perhaps the most respectable defense mechanism, apart from being the right thing to do.
On the other hand, most people have no good way of distinguishing "a consensus that has been reached by scientists who know much more about a subject matter than they do" from a false claim by high status people that such exists.
For one example, Obama claimed that all economists believed that increased government spending was the proper response to prevent a recession or depression and my impression was that many believed him. Thomas Sargent, who got a Nobel prize for his work in macro, commented in response that the President had been misinformed.
Obama said that economists on both the left and right say that the last thing we need during a recession is reduced spending, evidently not to have to lie and to justify the decision of his economics team. As a layman, I tend to believe they probably did the right thing. I also believe that the Biden administration very much overdid it during the pandemic. I understand that I could easily be misinformed, like Obama. In this general context, you would have to be extremely persuasive with someone like me in arguing that letting the banks fail would have been the right approach for the crisis in 2008. I suspect you of favoring that, which could be another unwarranted assumption.
For what it is worth, first Hoover and then FDR reacted to the beginning of the depression by sharply raising expenditure — and the depression lasted for over a decade.
The beginning of the 1920's looks like the beginning of the Great Depression, Harding cut spending sharply, and by 1923 the depression/recession was over.
That doesn't prove that cutting spending is the right solution but it is a reason to be less confident that it isn't.
https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2009/05/two-great-depressions.html
'Contrarian' as a descriptive of a group implies that those contrarians are contrary about pretty much everything, without reasonable justification. I don't think that describes many people. US liberals tend to be quite contrary to standard economics, but accepting about for example climate change. Libertarians, generally considered contrarians, are more in line (other than a bias towards Austrianism) with standard economics, and all over the board on climate change.
David attracts a certain brand of contrarians, certainly, but the lines seem to cut in various direction on different topics.
I enjoyed reading Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian years ago and can recommend it. Hitchens was scarcely without reasonable justification in most of his arguments. I count myself among the contrarians here but I'm not a libertarian, which doesn't stop me from wanting to learn from them. My observation remains that the tendency to want to question the consensus carries its own risks, just as conformism does.