

Why Politicized Science is Dangerous - bdfh42
http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-stateoffear-whypoliticizedscienceisdangerous.html

======
dhs
Where to begin? Here, Michael Crichton links "global warming" with "eugenics",
and the fate of critics of the former with the fate of critics of the latter.
Yes, he's talking about "critics of global warming", not about "critics of the
theory that global warming is caused by humans".

To me, the dispute seems not to be to be about whether the globe is warming
up, but about whether we have caused this warming-up, about whether we can
prevent and/or reverse it, and also about whether the activities of us puny
humans can have a significant impact on the system at all. Ok, his might be
excused as some "shorthand formulation". but he's making judgments of science
and of scientists here, so I'd think that some precision would be in order.

Anyway... eugenics. Crichton describes eugenics as a form of politicized
science, which caused people to be discriminated against, sterilized, and even
killed in large numbers. It was bad.

About two thirds through his text, he cites another example of politicized
science: Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko was a Russian biologist who speculated
that aquired characteristics of plants (and presumably other organisms) could
be inherited, and that soaking wheat grains in water and burying the wet seed
in snow over the winter would improve crop yields. During the time from 1948
to 1964, criticism of Lysenko's theories was formally outlawed in the Soviet
Union; academic critics were thrown in jail. As a consequence of such foolish
behavior, many people died through famine. It was bad.

In the final quarter, then, he brings on global warming:

"Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt with."

Oh, really? What happens to them? Are they jailed, or killed? Crichton doesn't
say. Instead, he says:

"Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions."

What kind of extreme actions are taken? Are those actions comparable with
those he cites, like letting peasants starve, sterilizing "feeble-minded"
Californians, or killing Jews in concentration camps? He doesn't say. But:

"Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an
abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences."

Ah, some people are hurt. So it must be bad. But how are they hurt? Are they
starved, jailed, killed? Does he refer to the critics again, or to some other
people? Not a word about it...

I don't know whether or not human activities cause/prevent global warming. I
believe that the jury's still out on that. But if, as Crichton writes, he
really wishes that "knowledge is disinterested and honest", I think he should
refrain from drawing the kind of comparisons he draws here. This text reads
like scientizied politics. In fact, as a source of knowledge, it's
indistinguishable from politicized science to me.

~~~
william-newman
I agree that Crichton's analogy to eugenics is really inflammatory and
offensive, and even that that's likely part of his reason for choosing it. But
in his defense, it might not be the main reason. Consider: How many examples
of bogus expert consensus are still remembered today? It seems to me that in
order to be remembered, such examples need to be pretty horrific in one way or
another. For example, we still remember that doctors bled patients for
centuries. If Crichton had tried to draw an analogy between global warming and
the long history of bleeding medical patients, wouldn't that've been offensive
too?

So what about choosing less-well-known examples, then? E.g., in principle he
could have talked about the 1960-era political and academic bogus consensus
that the long-run Philips curve allowed governments to reduce unemployment in
a usefully stable and predictable way by printing more money. (short form of
the last chapter of that story: 1970s stagflation) That analogy would
probably've been less offensive than eugenics or bleeding, but it also
would've required teaching most people the whole story from scratch. That's a
pretty high practical price to pay for being able to use a less offensive
example. He might increase his audience by not giving his audience the "he's
just being offensive" excuse to ignore him, certainly. But people who disagree
with him are unlikely to want to trust him, which makes it hard to tell the
story convincingly. With the eugenics story he can keep appealing to things
that people already know independently, and so can convey his points about the
story even to people who're looking for excuses to ignore him.

~~~
Tichy
Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make
an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever.

A = "eugenics is wrong"

B = "opponents of eugenics where persecuted"

There simply is no logically correct way to deduce A from B, and drawing an
analogy to

C = "global warning is wrong"

D = "opponents of global warning are being persecuted"

doesn't make it any better (you can't infer C from D, that you can't deduce A
from B doesn't make D => C any more legitimate).

~~~
william-newman
"Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make
an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever."

The only point? I think not.

One other point which Crichton makes explicitly is "The past history of human
belief is a cautionary tale." Bad science can be very expensive, people
mouthing bad science can do extremely nasty things in its name. I think he
hammers on this point too much in the essay. It seems to me that most people
are already predisposed to believe that policies based in bad science can be
really bad: bandwidth is cheap, but why waste it on flogging this dead horse
when it could be better used for porn about flogging dead horses? I also think
bringing in Lysenkoism is a bad idea because even though it is a valid
illustration of bad science being expensive, it comes with the non-parallel of
being enforced by world-class murderous repression of dissent, which is too
much of a distraction. But whether or not my criticisms are valid, I think
it's clearly a point.

Another point which I don't think Crichton makes explicitly, but which seems
to motivate various of his examples, is illustrating that a form of argument
could be used to justify horrid and stupid eugenic claims and policies. That's
both a vivid way of making the point that that form of argument is logically
invalid style, and a way of demonstrating that that form of argument dangerous
in political practice, and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Look at martythemaniak's post...

"I really don't have the ego to claim I magically know better than thousands
of scientists and decades of research, ..." Adjust that for the smaller 1920
scientific population, s/thousands/hundreds/ perhaps, and you have a right-
thinking person wisely avoiding being branded as a eugenics denier.

AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to
Darwinists and their critics to creationists. Very well, then: why stoop to
use arguments which were used to defend Sanger? Think of valid arguments like
the ones which worked to defend Darwin but not Sanger, and use them in
preference to flaky arguments which can be used to defend any old garbage.
Especially, Darwin and his followers found all sorts of extensive patterns of
species and population which, to the best of my knowledge, defy explanation
any other way. So why not use arguments like that? They can be extremely
convincing.

bad example 2: "the fact that CO2 Levels are higher today than anytime in the
last 800000 years, or the fact of the 40% increase since the 1800s, my
conclusion is pretty obvious." s/CO2/non-Aryan/, s/the last 800000 years/our
nation's history/.

Unfortunately, banging on one superficial correlation and declaring victory is
a classic pro-Sanger style of argument, not the kind of characteristically
pro-Darwin argument that I was referring to. It might seem like good clean fun
if you are a true believer and haven't thought about it, but think about it
now. Or, if you still don't realize how dysfunctional it is, start by
imagining trying to dissuade someone who thinks he has found revealed
inconvenient truth in "all our social policies are based on the fact that
their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not
really."

After that, feel free to copy the Darwinists by blasting away with all those
independent detailed observed patterns which match AGW. Or pick some other
style of argument which worked for Darwin and not for Sanger, and use that.

Or, alternatively, perhaps no such arguments exist, and instead the comparison
to Darwinists is self-flattery on such a cosmic scale that AGW does have
enormous explanatory power --- in that the gravitational effect of the vast
self-flattery cloud explains what the cosmologists call "dark matter". That's
roughly my opinion: possibly the Gore/IPCC version of AGW (only very small
non-CO2-driven global climate fluctuations, and large positive feedback in
climate response to CO2) is correct, but certainly it is not a glaringly
obvious truth about the world like Darwin's natural selection. Instead it's
like the Philips Curve question I wrote about elsewhere: the answer should
become clearer over time, and you can make valid arguments now about what it
will turn out to be, but it's not a routine matter to convince an honest
skeptic by direct appeals to observation. Darwinists could sample a near-
endless supply of independent ecosystems to determine whether a pattern holds
or not, and they delighted in charging into the details. AGWists start with a
naturally data-poor problem like the Philips Curve arguers, and then many of
them make it poorer by retreating from the details, refusing to commit
themselves to anything sharper than decadal averages over the entire globe.

~~~
Tichy
Sorry I could not follow you completely. Probably it is still too early in the
morning for me.

Refuting the theory of a random commentor on HN is just strawman
argumentation, though (sorry martythemaniak).

"AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to
Darwinists and their critics to creationists."

Um, that is kind of turning it on the head: all this is in reply to an article
that tries to defame AGW people as advocates of eugenics. It's as if you say
"AGWs are like Creationists", then AGWs reply "no we are not" and you claim
victory by saying "see, AGWs think their opponents are creationists".

I myself am simply no expert on climate change. Some knowledge from my area of
expertise spills over to climate research, though: the so called "no free
lunch theorem". There is no such thing as a free lunch - maybe it has not been
universally proven in a mathemacially rigorous sense, but in general it seems
to hold.

Hence I personally consider it very likely that human activity influences the
climate. There are also countless examples of nature being destroyed for good
by human actions.

As for the details of CO2, it would be great if we could just trust expert and
politicians to sort it out. Apparently it is not so. I am interested enough to
ask for more information. What are good sources to read, that are not
opinionated?

~~~
william-newman
The creationist comparison shows up other places, too. I've encountered it
several times before, and you can Google "denialist creationist" to find more.

Me trying to refute martythemaniak may not impress you, but if when you first
read that topmodded post you nodded vaguely, might there be some validity in
Crichton's implication that the arguments invoked for AGW could be arguments
for eugenics if you filed off the serial numbers? It's an offensive charge,
but it's not a goofy one IMHO: it is far more true of the arguments for AGW
than of the arguments for actual "settled science" like quantum mechanics or
natural selection or antibiotics or the Big Bang.

"What are good sources to read, that are not opinionated?"

One non-opinionated source as background both for my exasperation about the
Darwinist analogy, and for my claims about the flabbiness of 10-year-old
climate predictions, which also happens to be interesting reading for hackers
interested in machine learning: _The Minimum Description Length Principle_.
Lots of math to help you think precisely about questions like "by how many
bits did this hypothesis reduce the surprisingness of the world compared to
alternative hypotheses?"

For sources more specific to the AGW controversy, good luck finding someone
unopinionated. The controversy long ago became uncivil, and all sides are
indignant about various scummy folk who have lined up on other sides. But I
can point you to sources that seem (opinionated but) sound. As far as I know,
the IPCC reports (see martythemaniak's URL) are a reasonably good presentation
of the highbrow case for crisis AGW (high CO2 climate sensitivity, low natural
variation): I've never seen an advocate claim that vital parts of the pro-
crisis case were overlooked or horribly poorly presented there. And I think
McIntyre's critiques of the IPCC reports --- mostly centered on the historical
climate record reconstruction I mentioned --- are generally sound. He has a
website, Climate Audit; he has also written the Mann critique up as at least
one traditional journal paper. Besides his Mann critique, he has also done
things like catching a Y2K bug in temperature records. (Of course that's not
impressive as virtuoso rocket science, but I think it's pretty convincing
evidence that he's a careful guy who does a lot of homework.) It is natural
for AGWists to find him irritating, but it is inexcusable to try to dismiss
him as a ignorant closedminded crank by analogy with modern disbelievers in
natural selection.

And besides the math and technical background, some academic sociology
background: McIntyre is not the only opinionated grouchy outsider who has
torpedoed a politically correct prestigious academic consensus in the last
decade or so, Cramer did too: <http://law.bepress.com/nwwps/lep/art9/> .

~~~
Tichy
"The creationist comparison shows up other places, too."

So what point are you trying to make? Do GW people as a rule compare AGW
people with creationists? And even if they would, what bearing would it have
on the debate?

I have found McIntyre's blog, he seems to be a busy individual. At the moment
he is discussing something about prehistoric buckets. That might be too much
detail for my entry level... Also, I wonder what he would dig up if he spent
the same energy on finding evidence FOR global warming.

Didn't find suitable articles at the Cramer link. Anyway, I will do my own
searching.

------
martythemaniak
The irony is overpowering here - the horrible politicization by GW opponents
is perhaps the second-best example of politicized science being overshadowed
only by the disbelief in evolution by creationists.

I really don't have the ego to claim I magically know better than thousands of
scientists and decades of research, so when I read something like the IPCC
report ([http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-
report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm...](http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-
report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf)), or the fact that CO2 Levels are higher today
than anytime in the last 800000 years
(<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm>) or the fact of the
40% increase since the 1800s
([http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Di...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png)),
my conclusion is pretty obvious.

The politicization of GW comes solely from idealogical-opposition - people
don't like what the facts imply (ie, we need a smart energy policy) so they
simply ignore the facts using a variety of techniques. For example Inhofe and
his ilk are the usual anti-intellectuals - no way they'll let some egg-head
ivory-tower geek with his crazy computer models tell them what to do, no siree
bob. Meanwhile, Crichton is playing the ever-popular Nazi card - "gee, look at
how vaguely similar this situation is things that happened under Nazism and
Communism. You're not a Nazi or a Commie, are you?"

------
pragmatic
State of Fear is an interesting read. Chrichton lists the many ways those "in
power" have sought to keep the commoners in place. Usually fear is the most
effective tactic.

I'm agnostic when it comes to global warming.

~~~
lolb
I'm agnostic when it comes to the moon landings.

------
Tichy
No idea if global warming is real or not. I don't like that article though -
it is purely rhetoric. The historical examples are interesting, but suggesting
the analogy is not a honest style of discussion in my opinion - not facts,
only emotions. You could probably drop random subjects into that article and
make the same point.

~~~
gibsonf1
The article points out the situation with Global Warming science: _"...Under
the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they
will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken
critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are not
longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant
applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms."_

I would be very interested to see a comprehensive paper on Climate Research
funding and decision making for that funding, but I do remember seeing
articles in the past on Scientists being threatened or fired for questioning
man-made Global Warming. One of many examples:
<http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=21207> . However, I haven't heard
about any scientists being threatened/fired for advocating Global Warming.

~~~
Retric
Many old scientists don't accept new theories. Thirty years ago there was a
lot less evidence of global worming and computer models where a lot worse. My
concern with the "Non Global worming" crowd is they have no single consistent
theory. Some say it’s getting hotter but people are not involved others say
it’s not and some even say it’s getting colder. If there was a consistent set
of facts that disproved global worming there would be consist response that x,
y or z is why global worming is wrong but for a significant length of time
it's just pick a new pet theory and plaster it around and drop it as soon as
it's disprove by evidence.

Find me some 10 year model with 10 year old evidence that is validated and
consistently disproves global worming and I would look into it until then your
just ranting.

~~~
william-newman
It is true that objections to global warming are all over the map, including
some embarrassingly silly objections. E.g., it's not just anonymous trolls on
internet who claim not to believe the Earth was in a warming trend over the
20th century. Sadly, there were high profile nonanonymous people who held onto
that position for much longer than I think was reasonable. It's also true that
the anthropogenic global warming crisis camp succeeded in reaching more
consensus, converging pretty strongly on its two flagships, Gore and IPCC. But
are you really impressed with the consensus? How much do you know about it?

A lot of the CO2 climate technical controversy turn on two subcontroversies,
historical climate (how exceptional the 20th century trend was, roughly) and
theoretical climate modelling/simulation. I judge the 10-year hindsight score
on modelling to be a somewhat vague Gore 0, ranters without consistent
disproof of global warming 0. On historical climate , though, it's a much
sharper Gore -1, ranters 1.

It seems to me that by your standards of 10-year stability, the modelling
controversy is a clear stalemate today. In decades to come, as CO2 levels
continue to rise and the model predictions diverge from back-of-the-envelope
calculations, the predictions of 1998-era models should be dramatically
confirmed or falsified. Today, though, they aren't precise enough to
distinguish strongly.

Incidentally, convincing people of controversial stuff by modelling is not
easy in any field. If you become sufficiently concerned with CO2 that you
decide it's important to support nuclear power, you might find it educational
to argue reactor safety models or radwaste disposal geological models with
nuclear skeptics. And my Ph. D. work was related to modelling electron
transfer reactions, and I'm very glad that cytochromes are not politically
controversial.

On the historical climate argument, I think the crisis camp did achieve a
medium-term political victory by the way that they achieved and rhapsodized
about consensus on the famous Mann "hockey stick" graph, showing stable
centuries of natural climate followed by a zoom upward somewhat correlated
with global rise in CO2. But because their 2000-era consensus turned out to be
technically bogus, I judge their political victory to be a long-term
embarrassment for them, in part because it makes it harder to maintain a
straight face while solemnly refuting analyses like Crichton's.

"Technically bogus?" I hear some of you say. Chiefly I mean that Mann's
statistical methods were screwed up. For the mathematically-minded among you,
one noteworthy point is that they were shown to reconstruct the temperature as
a hockey stick even when the experimental temperature proxy data were replaced
with purely random red noise. For those whose tastes run more to sociology
more than math, in the spirit of the Crichton essay, two noteworthy points are
first that this analysis reaching a politically convenient but technically
surprising conclusion was widely accepted by insiders despite such technical
flaws, and second that when it was eventually shot down, it was by a pretty
extreme example of "outsider".

(And "technically surprising?" Well, I appreciate the mathematical
tractability of nice long uninterrupted time series. And I realize that famous
historical extreme data points like the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm
period aren't so easy to accommodate in the same formal statistical analysis
with uninterrupted time series. But when your formal analysis based on long
continuous time series of proxies for temperature gives results that sit
uneasily with the grab bag of well-known datapoints on historical extremes of
temperature itself, it should be surprising and call for some checks (of the
statistical analysis, of the actual temperature dependence of the proxies, on
the grotty realities of how the data were collected, on whether the proxies
have tracked temperature since then, etc.). It seems that this first occurred
to an outsider named McIntyre.:-)

(There are still arguments about whether Mann's general conclusion of stable
stable ever-so stable global climate might turn out to be correct after all:
there are lots of ways to choose from the available temperature proxy data and
lots of ways to analyze them, and with some modern choices people have arrived
at conclusions similar to those of the approximately-10-year-old papers. But
even if the politically correct conclusion somehow turns out to follow from a
more modern technically correct analysis, it'll be a sort of happy accident:
not a vindication of the 1999ish published work, but at most a vindication of
Mann's unpublished intuition or simple luck.)

"until then your just ranting" Hey, I love you too, but only conditionally. I
will love you if you have any 10 year model with 10 year evidence that is
validated and consistently proves the crisis variant of anthropogenic global
warming. Not just that we've warmed over the past century or more, which is
now completely uncontroversial (and about time). Not just that the expected
CO2 sensitivity is likely to be about what we'd expect from a back of the
envelope calculation, which is not terribly controversial. Instead, the
Gore/IPCC version: that we can be pretty confident that the CO2 sensititivity
is several times greater than the back of the envelope value, enough to be the
main explanation of the warming trend in the 20th century and enough to have
more dramatic effects in this century.)

~~~
Retric
I think your confusing the "Global Worming Model" with the symptoms of global
worming. Burning fossil fuels > increase in atmospheric CO2 > Increase in
average global temperature.

There is extremely good evidence that global CO2 levels are increasing and so
is global temperature is the model seems to be working. However, trying to
calculate the changes in weather patterns, sea level, etc from global worming
is a separate debate. Finding a refined model that tells us how much of an
increase we are going to see and how soon it's going to happen is based on
several other assumptions. There are a wide range new ideas and a lot of
research into them but there is little evidence the basic Global Warming model
is wrong.

PS: The reason for the 10 year old model request is science is based on
testing ideas with new data not altering the model to fit the data and
assuming it’s correct.

------
sdfasdfasdf
Science is not more dangerous then a stick. It can be used to get a banana or
to kill a man.

Correctness of a theory != good-natured usage of that theory.

Example: It does not matter whether one man could or could not be genetically
inferior than another one. It is wrong to kill a man in both cases regardless.

------
anamax
It's "interesting" that many of the folks pushing AGW "solutions" were pushing
those solutions before they heard of AGW.

------
jsterce
State of Fear is a very interesting read.

Certainly, Crichton is not always fair in his use of statistics or analogies,
but an argument for or against global warming is not the point.

He does make some incredibly important points in the process.

