The alternative to anti-science is not blind pro-science

The article states …

Moreover, I’m not sure we should expect a homogeneous response to
something as diverse as science. When people use the term
“anti-science”, I want to know what definition of science they’ve
based their concept of anti on. Who’d be simplistic enough to be “pro”
the whole of science? What sort of shallow, shampoo advert “science
bit” approach to the complexities of modernity are they living by?

People clearly possess different opinions of what “science” actually is. Is it a methodology for finding truth? Or is it a set of ideologies? Our culture appears to be undergoing a transition from the former to the latter answer – a side effect of this being that as discrimination generationally declines on the basis of things like sex and race, it appears to be on the incline with regards to ideology.

When it comes to the global warming debate, a lot of confusion arises because of the way in which we’ve been educated about science. Very few of us have actually dug into the details of scientific modeling, big data and inferential statistics (etc) sufficient to get a gut-feeling for how easy it is for these ad hoc models to be wrong. Nate Silver poignantly gives a mention to a critic of the global warming models in his recent book, The Signal and the Noise, who suggests that the global warming models are probably wrong simply because the number of variables involved is just so large.

I would personally add that it seems a bit odd to me that many people would express so much confidence in the models for 50 - 100 year climate projections – and yet scientists still cannot make accurate predictions about the number of sunspots in the next solar cycle. When one digs even further into the actual solar models, it would appear that we basically do not understand many of the sun’s features. Very basic questions – like why are sunspots black, given that we’re supposed to be looking into much hotter regions of the sun? – would seem to require answers involving invisible entities like magnetic fields.

Why does the solar wind fail to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth’s orbit? Nobody knows for sure yet.

And why is the Sun’s atmosphere – its corona – apparently 100x hotter than its surface? How does that heat pass through the surface without heating it up? Again, nobody knows for sure. But, solar scientists think that magnetic fields might have something to do with it. But, is that even a falsifiable theory? Probably not, actually.

So, when climate modelers suggest that we should possess some great confidence about the future climate, based upon their models, it’s probably wise to realize that they are specialists who – like all other specialists – are accepting a great number of assumptions as facts, in order to do their highly complex computations. Those computations would not actually be possible if those assumptions were not made.

But, at the end of the day, the assumptions still exist. And for those of us who are trying to make sense of all of it, we very rightly should take into consideration that a great number of mysteries remain when we decide on our own level of confidence. These sorts of things can be decided on the basis of the limitations of the models alone, without the need to consider the influences of corporations and all of that.

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I’m just confused what being “sceptical about GM” even means.

Do otherwise science-smart people not believe that genetic modification even works? Are they concerned about patent ramifications? Irrationally afraid of it in an unscientific “man shouldn’t fiddle with life” way?

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It’s quite simple for me. GMO technology has a strong, well established scientific basis. It works. Where I am skeptical is on the non-science side, on the social/economic side. Patenting genes, labelling, agribusiness practices, etc.

To call it hypocrisy to support the climate change theories on one side, while rejecting GMOs doesn’t really jibe. It’s not skepticism about the same thing at all.

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"Sceptical about GM" means, I think, that just because the executives (and, to a much lesser extent) the shareholders who make money from it insist that it's just as safe as what your old granny ate, and won't hurt farmers or the food supply in any way, doesn't make it so. Of course it *can* be done, and certainly in some situations where the alternative is mass starvation, concerns about the integrity of the food supply and the "authenticity" of the food do seem picayune.

On the other hand, where we have a decently-functioning food supply, and malnutrition/obesity/diabetes/cancer/heart disease rather than starvation, and the only "problem" GM foods address seems to be inadequate growth in the revenue and stock value of agribusiness, then these concerns seem more important and may even prevail. I would rather eat organic, local foods that have greater ties to "authentic" old-fashioned foods, than GM crops whose main function in our society seems to be to provide steadily growing revenue streams from patents and the growth of the Western stomach.

At least, that's what I think "sceptical about GM." Though, of course, I spell skeptical with a K.

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My quick unstudied read; Science is good until it starts contradicting my friends. Then it gets really complicated and I can’t decide.

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Sort of, but I think that might miss the point. The value of a technology depends on how it is employed, and there are lots that are science suggests are safe when applied carefully and dangerous when not. In which case, their value depends on how well we trust people to take proper precautions, and so economic, social, and legal factors come into play.

For instance, I don’t think it makes sense to ask whether something like GM is safe or not in general; science shows that it can be, but it’s easy to see that it doesn’t have to be. So the real question is what level of investigation and regulation goes with using it safely. That’s something you can and should approach scientifically, but it involves looking at a lot of social context in addition to the technology itself.

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Good thing you can use empirical observations to check and refine different models, see to what extent the results depend on the particulars of the assumptions, and see whether predictions are being corroborated. Which shows the objection “we don’t understand sunspots so how can we trust modeling the planet we live on” is really and completely beside the point.

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An interesting article. I gather he’s attacking the age-old appeal to some meaningful boundary between science and unscience. There’s this notion that science should be Science; a religious ideal; a Shining Beacon on a Hill; a perfect abstraction ever-sought and never attained.

There is actually good in that conceptualization of science, but it must be tempered with a world-weary realization that we’ll always fail. If we get caught up in the principle and philosophy of science and lose sight of the fact that we imperfect humans are the ones doing the thinking then we’ll fall into the same arrogant pedestalizing traps which swallowed up traditional religions.

Truth-claims need justification in the physical world because we ourselves are physical, yes? Our thoughts and minds are distinct configurations of particles, as are the photons which constitute the words you’re currently reading. What else could they be whilst being identifiable by and communicable between localized individuals?

In that sense, science and religion are playing the same game (trying to explain the whys and hows of our existence) and science is doing much better. I think this has led some irreligious people to want to cling to old emotion-centered ways of investigating the world, and they do so by attempting to neatly cleave morality and science into separate spheres (morality then becomes the “new” religion).

That way they can comfortably assume their morality as they previously assumed their religion (it seems people need a bit of easy “I just believe it” stuff in their lives) and they can then use those assumed biases to attack whatever they don’t happen to like. The problem is that both endeavors clearly use the same physical criteria to derive confidence; they’re the same thing. It’s a blatant double standard arrived at by inventing a nonsensical competing standard out of whole cloth.

“But there’s non-science stuff, see? All this meta-this and super-that. I seen it; it’s out there, in the ether. But it’s meaningful to physical creatures because, uh… well, because it just is, you see? Something something Platonic Forms something something Souls something something Be Nice to Each Other.”

Ugh.

There’s the physical world and there are varying degrees of confidence in how to describe it. There are modern-day Pythagoreans who think physical reality is neatly reducible to kiddy-maths – that the world around us is just so many twos plus twos equaling fours. However, even if reality is thus reducible, it’s only reducible that way conceptually because we’re not omniscient. We’d need the full account of particle positions in the universe to perfectly predict the future, and I really doubt that’ll ever happen (although pondering the ramifications of QM is mind-blowing). So we’re left to hedge and refine and asymptotically approach “truth” as opposed to having a neat little equation for “life” or “love” or whatever.

I think a good way though all that is simply accepting the inherent absurdities which are beyond one’s interests and/or power to change whilst drilling down into the absurdities one finds neat and/or malleable all while retaining a strong aversion to overconfidence (especially one’s own). If we must, then, we could say skepticism > science, or perhaps rather that proper science emerges from skepticism (skepticism being a general rejection of appeals to authority, hasty generalizations, calls to tradition, and so on).

If you’re out to neatly categorize and define all things you’ll fail. Every answer you arrive at will come with questions and assumptions of its own, and you’ll eat yourself up tumbling down the rabbit hole. I think it’s better to conceive of science as making innately-incomplete answers continually less-incomplete, because that way we see both sides of the coin at once: we see that the physical world really does point to truth, but we also see that the “truths” we arrive at are never perfect, absolute, universal truths. Both the idealism and the skepticism of science all in one short phrase.

Anyway, thanks for the link. It was a provocative article.

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Except that vaccines are a precautionary measure against known and well-documented risks. Unless there is actual evidence of risk from the vaccinations themselves, “precautionary principle” actually supports the pro-vaccination side of the debate.

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Re: “Good thing you can use empirical observations to check and refine different models, see to what extent the results depend on the particulars of the assumptions, and see whether predictions are being corroborated. Which shows the objection “we don’t understand sunspots so how can we trust modeling the planet we live on” is really and completely beside the point.”

Yes, but let’s not oversimplify what is actually happening with ad hoc modeling today, in practice. Unfortunately, when it comes to phenomena like the Sun, the empirical approach can become constrained by our observational capabilities. And more often than not, what happens in practice is that scientists look to the scientific framework – the paradigm itself – in order to create additional techniques for measurement. And so, what one person who accepts the assumptions and claims might call “empirical” evidence, in truth, now becomes a form of ideology for somebody else who doesn’t, since in due time, more and more systems of measurement which necessarily depend upon the original assumptions build upon this already speculative structure.

We can now see this pattern in many of our most speculative sciences – in particular, cosmology and astrophysics. Notice that even though parallax only works to 1% the diameter of the Milky Way, that rarely stops people from speaking – with confidence – of distances many orders of magnitude further than this.

Humans did not mirror nature when they broke the sciences into specialties. Specialization can actually interfere with the comprehension of whole systems (aka interdisciplinary synthesis). It is a feature of professionalism – a concept which science has borrowed from the corporate world. Specialization is popular today for the very reason that scientists are expected to work for large institutions like governments, universities and corporations.

That’s an important point to realize, because in the world of science, a misunderstanding within the solar sciences or in astrophysics can indeed have an incredible impact upon the climate models. There is no barrier which separates these two types of models, in terms of the physics. After all, our planet exists within the Sun’s atmosphere. It is not at all some abstract exercise to say that a failure to understand what is accelerating the solar wind should affect our confidence within the climate models – reason being that that failure represents an unknown which envelopes our own planet. It takes an enormous amount of energy to accelerate those particles, and our planet rests within that unknown energy. So, what is the cause? If you can’t answer that, then you can no more put a box around it, and declare that it cannot possibly be influencing the planet’s climate in either a direct or even incredibly indirect manner, through some far larger misunderstanding about how the universe works.

Mistakes in models trickle through the artificial walls of our disciplines in ways which we cannot foresee.

How about skeptical that Monsanto is thorough and ethical in testing?

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Sorry, no. When a model based on known principles matches known observations about heating that applies to the troposphere more than the stratosphere, it more or less confirms mysterious effects in space as not important. I know you really like to bring up the coronal inversion and other plasma physics favorites, but we don’t actually have to put all terrestrial science on hold for them, because it doesn’t change our observations of what applies here.

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All belief requires denial. To believe in Jesus, you’re supposed to deny Vishnu, Odin, Zeus, and Ah-Puch. To be a nativist conservative, you need to deny the existence of racism, evolution, that slavery caused the American Civil War etc etc.

Where things have gotten weird is that the anti-GMO movement seems to becoming part of the conspiracy subculture that believes in “chemtrails,” vaccines cause autism (and now so do GMOs), and Morgellons “disease.”:

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As as oft been said, we’re not rational creatures, we’re rationalizing creatures.

Science is all well and good, but let’s be honest, it’s simply a tool to advance my preferred policies, which are based on my ethics and my morality.

Now, I like to think of myself as rational, so on those issues where I disagree with science, I’ll simply say we haven’t collected enough data, or I’ll question the scientists motives based on their employer or I’ll invoke the precautionary principle, which can almost always be used to support either side.

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Actually, not everything can be scientific, while the scientific method is simple enough, being rigorous is hard, that’s why peer review is important. And the idea of “laboratories filled with vats and lab coats” is, I suspect you know, a parody at best.
So what you boil the argument down to is, also at best, a straw man.

Very silly indeed.

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Re: “Sorry, no. When a model based on known principles matches known observations about heating that applies to the troposphere more than the stratosphere, it more or less confirms mysterious effects in space as not important.”

You seem to be attempting to minimize the fact that new important questions are increasingly being asked with regards to Earth’s interaction with space. Processes which have traditionally been assumed to simply be mostly terrestrial or subterranean in origin – like lightning and earthquakes – are currently under investigation as having cosmic origins. We’ve only recently, for instance, conclusively observed lightning to space (sprites), and we can already see evidence for some sort of connection between the Van Allen radiation belts and lightning. There’s a book up on Amazon now titled Ionospheric Precursors of Earthquakes, and the summary reads:

The book aims to explain the variations of near-Earth plasma observed
over seismically active areas several days/hours before strong seismic
shocks. It demonstrates how seismo-ionospheric coupling is part of
the global electric circuit and shows that the anomalous electric
field appearing in active seismic areas is the main carrier of
information from the earth into the ionosphere.

Rather than pretend we already know where this train is heading, we’d be very, very wise to encourage scientists to explore the Earth-space connections.

I know that Democrats and environmentally-conscious folk desperately want to align on this issue, but there exists a very real threat that over just one or two decades, these groups could find themselves arguing positions which defy new scientific findings, in order to justify a prior, premature commitment to extraordinarily unprecedented expenditures. If our markets are indeed transformed to accommodate the existing models, then dramatic changes to these models in light of new findings will not just upend the old models, but also millions of peoples’ livelihoods. Every single one of those people will feel inclined and even justified in arguing against the new data, and as easy as that, Democrats can become the new “anti-science” party.

From a 2011 conference, reviewed at http://www.thegwpf.org/the-sun-weather-relationship-is-becoming-increasingly-important/

Dr Hari Om Vats of the Physical Research Laboratory in India said at
the conference, “The Sun-weather relationship is becoming increasingly
important. It is true that our understanding of the Sun and solar
processes has increased dramatically during recent years, however, it
is realised that the Sun affects the Earth’s environment [in] a much
more complicated manner than we had imagined
.”

Note that measurements which might exclude electric joule heating have yet to even be taken. Mr Wizard demonstrated the principle when he cooked a hot dog by plugging it into the wall. To what extent does this form of energy play a role in heating the Earth? We do not yet actually know. Why does it matter? Because, despite the misleading label, the “solar wind” is not a “wind” at all – but rather a flow of charged particles which continues to accelerate far from the source (very much unlike the mechanical idea of wind).

See the paper titled “Possible reasons for underestimating Joule heating in global models: E-field variability, spatial resolution and vertical velocity”, which states …

It is important to understand Joule heating because it can
significantly change the temperature structure, atmosphere composition
and electron density … It is thought that many coupled
ionosphere-thermosphere models underestimate Joule heating because the
spatial and temporal variability of the ionospheric electric field is
not totally captured within global models.

Re: “I know you really like to bring up the coronal inversion and other plasma physics favorites, but we don’t actually have to put all terrestrial science on hold for them, because it doesn’t change our observations of what applies here.”

Let’s get real here: We’re talking about the expenditure of many trillions of dollars. Why in the world would somebody argue against rigor within the context of the most expensive scientific endeavor in the history of mankind?

Space is pretty much plasma in every direction. The charge density changes from the heliosphere to interstellar space, but everywhere we’ve sent probes, they’ve run into charged particles. The reason this matters is because this presents a philosophical challenge to the notion that the objects in space are necessarily electrically disconnected. The models which are currently in fashion (MHD) propose that the plasma basically behaves as a fluid or gas, but that distinguishes those models from our observations of laboratory plasmas and even consumer products (like fluorescent bulbs and neon signs) – which can also and alternatively exhibit dynamic and electromagnetic properties. We don’t have to go very far from the surface of the Earth to observe regions of space where these idealistic MHD models are not applicable. And yet, we see astrophysicists liberally applying them to just about everything they see in space. There has been a scientific debate for more than four decades now about how these plasmas are being modeled.

See “Why Space Physics Need to Go Beyond the MHD Box” and “Importance of Electric Fields in Modeling Space Plasmas” by George K Parks.

The implications of these approximations extend far beyond the narrow discipline of plasma physics. Given that 99%+ of what we observe with our telescopes is actually matter in the plasma state, it’s easy to see how entire disciplines of study – like climatology and cosmology – can actually hinge on how plasmas are modeled. What we are all being told to accept – without questions – is that cosmic plasmas behave in ways which fundamentally differ from our observations of laboratory plasmas. The consistent refusal to acknowledge the arguments against that ideology within the astrophysical discipline defies the “scientific attitude” which the public imagines is in play. From “Science Education and Scientific Attitudes” …

The current set of scientific attitudes of objectivity,
open-mindedness, unbiassedness, curiosity, suspended judgement,
critical mindedness, and rationality has evolved from a systematic
identification of scientific norms and values … Is it not possible
that these scientific attitudes have been popularised and then reified
as a set of ideal attitudes but in reality is not often found in
actual scientific practices? The following studies raise serious
doubts about the scientists’ adherence to institutional imperatives

The climate models do not escape this debate over the plasma physics models and the Earth-space connection, because plasmas represent a physical mechanism which are already known to routinely pump energy from the magnetosphere into the ionosphere-thermosphere system. From the electric joule paper …

During the January 1997 magnetic cloud event, 47% of the solar wind
energy was deposited in the form of Joule heating, while 22% was in
the form of particle heating.

Be careful what you wish for. If you get your consensus, you may in very short order find that your consensus subsequently defies observations. After all, not everybody at NASA is on board with AGW.

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I think this is the most important omission in the article. The first response to any claim of hypocrisy is to determine whether the two equivalents are indeed equivalent. In this case, no. One is a realm of technological development, and another is a realm of discovering and defining a phenomenon. These are very different parts of the big umbrella of “Science”. One can see the false equivalence here without even invoking the more complex and murky social and economic considerations. In this case, making the defense against the hypocrisy label rest on such a difficult-to-encapsulate argument actually weakens it and distracts from the more concrete response.

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Where things have gotten weird is that [a small, fringe, loud, decidedly un-dedicated-to-scientific-rigour element that nonetheless serves as a convenient strawman to weaken some real and reasonable concerns that have been raised about a new technology, but I guess could be considered part of] the anti-GMO movement seems to becoming part of the conspiracy subculture that believes in…

FTFY

Pretty much the same theme applies with climate change.

Science can tell us that the world is warming. Science can offer some fairly well documented and tested reasons why.

But what science cannot do is decide what should be done about it, whose lifestyles are going to have to change, and who is going to foot the bill.

Like it or not these are all political decisions, and get decided by politicians and those who (in some countries) get to elect them.

“We need to enact policy X because … science!!!” is not going to be very successful until a majority of those affected are convinced they will be better off with policy X than without it.

A lot of people who don’t like Exxon don’t much like Pfizer or Monsanto either. Is this a surprise in some way??