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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
Jacobson then attributes the CO2 from a city burning once every 25 years to the CO2 output of commercial nuclear electricity generation.
|
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).
|
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.