

Pseudoscience and environmentalists - bcl
http://www.ttgnet.com/daynotes/2009/2009-21.html#Wed

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dmlorenzetti
It's ironic that the author complains about a contempt for science on the part
of "environmentalists," but then goes on to recommend the following rule for
setting safe levels of some toxic substance: Wait for a major kill-off of a
marker species, such as fish, in response to some level of that substance,
then set the limit "an order of magnitude or so" lower.

The author correctly points out that it's unethical to perform controlled
experiments with suspected toxins. However, his response seems to be to give
up any attempt to gather evidence (short of watching for massive die-offs of
fish). For instance, he complains about the impossibility of conducting
experiments to learn about arsenic poisoning, and concludes that one therefore
cannot "obtain valid data" about the effects of arsenic.

To make this argument, he mis-characterizes the Bayesian position as,
effectively, "perform controlled experiments." He evidently never heard of
epidemiology, which attempts to make sense, statistically, of all the millions
of experiments that nature and chance play on people all the time
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology>).

While epidemiological evidence does, in fact, require careful analysis,
ultimately one can back out valid inferences, given enough data. Sadly in the
case of arsenic there are no end of data, provided by people drinking from
contaminated wells.

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bradford
I saw this link, and hoped that it would be something other than a
'environmentalists are biased because they hate capitalism' Ayn Rand style
rant. After reading it, I unfortunately found that that's exactly what it was.

The author starts with a rant about the local weather show. It quickly
switches gears, accusing environmentalists of making 'correlation implies
causation' logical fallacies. I don't mean to defend environmentalists,
because I often agree that they make this fallacy. Unfortunately, the author
offers no single point of evidence to back his claim. If he could cite just
one case of an environmentalist making this fallacy (c'mon, there's got to be
one, right?), then I'd take the article more seriously.

the article concludes: "[environmentalists] have contempt for science. Nor are
they concerned about human wellbeing or even the environment itself.
Environmentalism is not a scientific movement; it's a political movement.
Environmentalists hate capitalism. Their goal is to destroy capitalism and all
of its benefits. They'd like to see all of us living in mud huts and starving
to death before we could have more children."

~~~
Tamerlin
I agree, he's full of it. I know some environmentalists who are not scientists
themselves, but work closely with scientists to make sure that they are
pushing to do the right thing (these folks are members of the Sierra Club, and
they're very clearly not against the species...).

I've also met a fair number of environmentalists who are environmental
scientists. They actually go to the trouble of doing exactly the research that
this author claims that they don't, but they also go quite a bit farther; the
author's cop-out 80/20 rule fails on a number of levels, one big one being
that the stuff accumulates. One example is mercury; once that's in the water,
it's there. Fish absorb it through vegetation, and then predation. They can't
get rid of it naturally, so it just accumulates in their bodies. As the upper-
level predators like salmon and tuna feed, they ingest more mercury, and since
they can't get rid of it, the amount in their bodies accumulates.

The pseudo-science this author puts forth ignores that sort of actual science.

There's not much in that article that's worth taking seriously.

That said, there ARE environmentalists who don't have a clue about science and
hide behind lots of rhetoric. They probably don't understand the science, and
don't want to admit it. They're not an asset to the cause, unfortunately.

Fortunately, in spite of their noise, they're actually doing some good simply
by generating awareness that the issues exist, and they're not clever enough
to get in the way of the folks who are actually trying to DO things to address
environmental issues that matter.

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pfisch
So if environmentalists hate capitalism is the opposite true as well. Do
capitalists hate the environment?

I'm not serious of course, but the idea that people could seriously think
either of these things is the same kind of black and white logic that leads to
everything wrong with the world.

~~~
lutorm
"Environmentalists" probably think "capitalists" hate the environment just
about as often as "capitalists" think "environmentalists" hate capitalism...

I guess there are no "capitalists" (whatever that means) that care about the
environment?

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lutorm
About the only thing that made sense out of that was the fact that
"environmentalism", if by that you mean a certain value system saying that
it's worth preserving the environment, is more like religion than science.

I freely acknowledge that whether we should try to avoid global warming is not
a scientific question, it's a question of self-preservation and moral values.
Whether we should avoid arsenic in the water because people get sick from it
is also a moral question, not a scientific one. To claim that this means
research on whether arsenic makes people sick is not science is ridiculous.

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dkarl
Who is this idiot? Why do we care about a random stupid blog rant?

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abefortas
So condescending. We don't need to be told that correlation implies causality.

