“If someone writes an article arguing for a conclusion, does it offer and respond to all the arguments against that conclusion that you can think of? Does it qualify its conclusions where arguments and data provide only limited support for them? Does it use emotive writing to cover weak points in its argument? Is the author willing to reject parts of what his allies support because the arguments for it are weak?”
I write legal briefs for a living, so I do all of these things to some extent. So my primary test for evaluating information on the basis of internal evidence is “does this read like something I would’ve written on behalf of a client?”
It’s amazing how many journalists, scientists, and bureaucrats have become lawyers over the course of the past several years. And not even particularly good ones at that.
I don't think I understand you. Are you saying that a legal brief does qualify its conclusions and offer and respond to all arguments against it or that it uses emotive writing to cover weak points? Does calling something a legal brief mean that it does sound as though it was written by an honest man or that it doesn't?
Sorry, I just reread my post and realize why it was confusing. Lawyers generally do not qualify their conclusions, do use emotive argument to cover up weak points, do not “steelman” their opponents, and do not reject parts of what their allies (clients) seek or support.
The main thing I do that distinguishes it from what a journalist or scientist should ideally do is that I begin with the conclusion and work my way backwards. In this process, most if not all lawyers resort to some or all of the things that you’ve listed as internal evidence of bias. In short, there are tells when someone is engaged in advocacy rather than truth seeking. Lawyers don’t pretend to be anything other than advocates. But when people pretending to be truth seekers are engaging in what looks like lawyering, that’s a big red flag. And those red flags seem to be proliferating these days.
Sorry for my lack of clarity in the original response.
I personally read your posts with interest. My focus is more spiritual, and I find climate change to be besides the point, but the desire for truth appeals to me.
I find myself sceptical about the Covid response pretty much for the reasons you give. It seems obvious to me that a mask with a gap round the sides is obvious nonsense. The authorities are pushing these so I heavily discount their advice. Similarly on global warming. If this were really the threat they say nuclear power stations would be everywhere.
But I worry I am just finding reasons to be contrarian. The at risk really do seem to have been made much safer by the vaccines and surely not all the climate scientists are unreliable. So I am back at square one.
But how is an "unbiased" science even possible? Ultimately, we have to decide on a point of view - whom to follow or whether we lead someone in a direction that is determined by our interests, fears, expectations, our will. What is "science" at all? Looking for "laws". What are laws? Repetions of identical or "similar" cases. Similarity depends on a point of view of what we think is "essential". We have to choose. It is ultimately an aesthetic decision.
Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery:
"Generally, similarity, and with it repetition, always presuppose the adoption of a point of view: some similarities or repetitions will strike us if we are interested in one problem, and others if we are interested in another problem. But if similarity and repetition presuppose the adaption of a point of view, or an interest, or an expectation, it is logically necessary that points of view, or interests, or expectations, are logically prior, as well as temporally (or causally or psychologically) prior, to repetion. But this result destroys both the doctrines of the logical and of the temproal primacy of repetitions.
[...] for any given finite group or set of things, however variously they may be chosen, we can, with a little ingenuity, find always points of view such that all the things belonging to that set are similar (or partially equal) if considered from one of these points of view; which means that anything can be said to be a 'repetition' of anything, if only we adopt the appropriate point of view. This shows how naive it is to look upon repetion as something ultimate, or given."
Was the consensus about dangers of rising population similar to today's consensus regarding climate change? I couldn't find how many scientists actually believed in Ehrlichs predictions back then.
I think Ehrlich represented the extreme version of the consensus. I don't think most of the people involved thought it would be that bad that fast, but the general view was that population increase would cause serious problems, especially for third world countries.
A couple interesting observations I have made, that maybe are relevant to the post would be that, a large percentage of people including two of my friends actually believe that Paul Ehrlich was right or is going to be roughly right in the near future, Our World in Data has decent evidence to the contrary but my guess is that even when shown such evidence most people would not update accordingly. The second is that lots of people concerned about climate change basically regard Nordhaus and especially Tol and some others as being crazy right wing hacks, which in the case of Nordhaus from our perspective seems like a bizarre characterisation for the reasons you mentioned. I think Noah Smith would be a good example of someone who doesn't have a very high opinion opinion of Nordhaus, and from his perspective Nordhaus would be clearly biased in favour of climate change not being bad.
How do your friends explain the fact that the Ehrlichs made their prediction for the 1970's, which are already in the past?
I can see that interpretation of Nordhaus by someone who looks at his numbers instead of his rhetoric. It's occurred to me that perhaps Nordhaus is a skeptic who uses the alarmist rhetoric to get people to believe his numbers, but I don't think it likely.
I have a low opinion of Noah Smith because he wrote a piece on Adam Smith that was wildly wrong, trying to represent Smith as a modern progressive. I put an explanation of the errors on his comment thread, he responded to other things in the comment thread but not mine, so I concluded that he did not care whether what he wrote was true. For some details see:http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Economics/Adam%20Smith.pdf
Roughly the same way Ehrlich has continued to defend his past claims, I should also add that both have a background in biology and environmental sciences, and In talking to them some of the things they mention are interesting but they nevertheless have many of the macro level details wrong, I also think given their educational background there is a certain high status culture surrounding issues of the environment and sustainability etc that lead them to take it for granted that many of the high status environmentalists are right.
I think its funny that Noah liked your other favourable comment but ignored your critical one, Matthew Barnett also wrote a comment pointing out another serious error which Noah seemed to ignore. I'm not sure what the worst thing I have seen Noah Smith do is, but the interaction involving Random Critical Analysis was pretty bad and Noah's piece attacking Robin Hanson and the following twitter interactions were quite telling.
I find it hard to judge, in the case of people like Noah, or the authors of Rennert et. al. 2022, whether they are deliberately dishonest for what they see as good reasons, not bright enough to see what is wrong with what they write, or just have very strong priors that let them ignore contrary evidence.
Are most of them in favor of free trade? Legalizing drugs, gambling and prostitution? Unschooling? If so, that's progress. The Early Anthropogenic Theory? Cardinal utility?
If you are limiting your data to my substack posts, you might want to look at my books, mostly readable from my web page.
Given that most conservative well-off white males are not in favor of anarcho-capitalism, and David Friedman is - and enough so that he's written a book about it - I feel compelled to question the premise.
Even if I accepted that premise, I wouldn't be able to consider it without also noticing people who always come to conclusions -not- favored by conservative well-off white males. I would also notice that there appear to be many more of the latter. How worried are they, in this sense?
“If someone writes an article arguing for a conclusion, does it offer and respond to all the arguments against that conclusion that you can think of? Does it qualify its conclusions where arguments and data provide only limited support for them? Does it use emotive writing to cover weak points in its argument? Is the author willing to reject parts of what his allies support because the arguments for it are weak?”
I write legal briefs for a living, so I do all of these things to some extent. So my primary test for evaluating information on the basis of internal evidence is “does this read like something I would’ve written on behalf of a client?”
It’s amazing how many journalists, scientists, and bureaucrats have become lawyers over the course of the past several years. And not even particularly good ones at that.
I don't think I understand you. Are you saying that a legal brief does qualify its conclusions and offer and respond to all arguments against it or that it uses emotive writing to cover weak points? Does calling something a legal brief mean that it does sound as though it was written by an honest man or that it doesn't?
Sorry, I just reread my post and realize why it was confusing. Lawyers generally do not qualify their conclusions, do use emotive argument to cover up weak points, do not “steelman” their opponents, and do not reject parts of what their allies (clients) seek or support.
The main thing I do that distinguishes it from what a journalist or scientist should ideally do is that I begin with the conclusion and work my way backwards. In this process, most if not all lawyers resort to some or all of the things that you’ve listed as internal evidence of bias. In short, there are tells when someone is engaged in advocacy rather than truth seeking. Lawyers don’t pretend to be anything other than advocates. But when people pretending to be truth seekers are engaging in what looks like lawyering, that’s a big red flag. And those red flags seem to be proliferating these days.
Sorry for my lack of clarity in the original response.
Humility is the way to wisdom.
I personally read your posts with interest. My focus is more spiritual, and I find climate change to be besides the point, but the desire for truth appeals to me.
@david - you have a few misspellings of "Cavanaugh" in this post.
I find myself sceptical about the Covid response pretty much for the reasons you give. It seems obvious to me that a mask with a gap round the sides is obvious nonsense. The authorities are pushing these so I heavily discount their advice. Similarly on global warming. If this were really the threat they say nuclear power stations would be everywhere.
But I worry I am just finding reasons to be contrarian. The at risk really do seem to have been made much safer by the vaccines and surely not all the climate scientists are unreliable. So I am back at square one.
But how is an "unbiased" science even possible? Ultimately, we have to decide on a point of view - whom to follow or whether we lead someone in a direction that is determined by our interests, fears, expectations, our will. What is "science" at all? Looking for "laws". What are laws? Repetions of identical or "similar" cases. Similarity depends on a point of view of what we think is "essential". We have to choose. It is ultimately an aesthetic decision.
Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery:
"Generally, similarity, and with it repetition, always presuppose the adoption of a point of view: some similarities or repetitions will strike us if we are interested in one problem, and others if we are interested in another problem. But if similarity and repetition presuppose the adaption of a point of view, or an interest, or an expectation, it is logically necessary that points of view, or interests, or expectations, are logically prior, as well as temporally (or causally or psychologically) prior, to repetion. But this result destroys both the doctrines of the logical and of the temproal primacy of repetitions.
[...] for any given finite group or set of things, however variously they may be chosen, we can, with a little ingenuity, find always points of view such that all the things belonging to that set are similar (or partially equal) if considered from one of these points of view; which means that anything can be said to be a 'repetition' of anything, if only we adopt the appropriate point of view. This shows how naive it is to look upon repetion as something ultimate, or given."
Was the consensus about dangers of rising population similar to today's consensus regarding climate change? I couldn't find how many scientists actually believed in Ehrlichs predictions back then.
I think Ehrlich represented the extreme version of the consensus. I don't think most of the people involved thought it would be that bad that fast, but the general view was that population increase would cause serious problems, especially for third world countries.
Could you point to some writings on this topic from that time? Thank you in advance.
You might look at the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation. Starting with the subhead "Contemporary hypothesis" there is discussion of some of the writing.
A couple interesting observations I have made, that maybe are relevant to the post would be that, a large percentage of people including two of my friends actually believe that Paul Ehrlich was right or is going to be roughly right in the near future, Our World in Data has decent evidence to the contrary but my guess is that even when shown such evidence most people would not update accordingly. The second is that lots of people concerned about climate change basically regard Nordhaus and especially Tol and some others as being crazy right wing hacks, which in the case of Nordhaus from our perspective seems like a bizarre characterisation for the reasons you mentioned. I think Noah Smith would be a good example of someone who doesn't have a very high opinion opinion of Nordhaus, and from his perspective Nordhaus would be clearly biased in favour of climate change not being bad.
How do your friends explain the fact that the Ehrlichs made their prediction for the 1970's, which are already in the past?
I can see that interpretation of Nordhaus by someone who looks at his numbers instead of his rhetoric. It's occurred to me that perhaps Nordhaus is a skeptic who uses the alarmist rhetoric to get people to believe his numbers, but I don't think it likely.
I have a low opinion of Noah Smith because he wrote a piece on Adam Smith that was wildly wrong, trying to represent Smith as a modern progressive. I put an explanation of the errors on his comment thread, he responded to other things in the comment thread but not mine, so I concluded that he did not care whether what he wrote was true. For some details see:http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Economics/Adam%20Smith.pdf
Roughly the same way Ehrlich has continued to defend his past claims, I should also add that both have a background in biology and environmental sciences, and In talking to them some of the things they mention are interesting but they nevertheless have many of the macro level details wrong, I also think given their educational background there is a certain high status culture surrounding issues of the environment and sustainability etc that lead them to take it for granted that many of the high status environmentalists are right.
I think its funny that Noah liked your other favourable comment but ignored your critical one, Matthew Barnett also wrote a comment pointing out another serious error which Noah seemed to ignore. I'm not sure what the worst thing I have seen Noah Smith do is, but the interaction involving Random Critical Analysis was pretty bad and Noah's piece attacking Robin Hanson and the following twitter interactions were quite telling.
I find it hard to judge, in the case of people like Noah, or the authors of Rennert et. al. 2022, whether they are deliberately dishonest for what they see as good reasons, not bright enough to see what is wrong with what they write, or just have very strong priors that let them ignore contrary evidence.
Does it worry you at all that you are always coming to the conclusion favored by conservative well-off white males?
Are most of them in favor of free trade? Legalizing drugs, gambling and prostitution? Unschooling? If so, that's progress. The Early Anthropogenic Theory? Cardinal utility?
If you are limiting your data to my substack posts, you might want to look at my books, mostly readable from my web page.
Why should that worry anyone?
Of course.
The racist patriarchy.
Given that most conservative well-off white males are not in favor of anarcho-capitalism, and David Friedman is - and enough so that he's written a book about it - I feel compelled to question the premise.
Even if I accepted that premise, I wouldn't be able to consider it without also noticing people who always come to conclusions -not- favored by conservative well-off white males. I would also notice that there appear to be many more of the latter. How worried are they, in this sense?