Authority and Trust

Orac's view gets it right as far as it gets it at all. Orac demonstartes that scientists who are threatened by N&M's position can't possibly be very introspective, because every communication is framed (and windowed too).

Everyone I've read on this lately seems to be missing a key point, though. It's about trust.

Scientific communication occurs in a "trust but verify" world. In principle it is necessary to allow for your work to be checked, but in practice if you check more than a tiny fraction of what you are exposed to, you get nothing done. You know people who know people. When someone says something close to your own turf that surprises you, you check it, not because you mistrust the messenger but because the matter piques your interest. Progress emerges collectively, not individually, and by a process that is more social than formal, except perhaps in pure mathematics.

When you present a new result, you are asking people to put a very considerable amount of attention and care into considering it. They must weigh your demands against those of many others. The first thing they weigh is not your argument. It is who sent you. Then, what institution are you from. Then, did you reference the right people, or are you coming in from left field? Do you dress like someone from that field, do you tell the right jokes, do you have the right friends, are you casual but not shabby....

It is far from flawless, overly clubby, and cruel to people who enter science with this particular form of social radar underdeveloped. (Some call it classism or even racism, but the fact is that Canadians play better hockey because Canadians grow up surrounded by 1) hockey enthusiasts and 2) ice, so no one needs to teach them what those things are.) But cruel or no (and I myself haven't been a beneficiary of this system) it is effective. It works. Truth emerges.

(There is a real problem of unearned and undeserved trust, but that's for another time and place. I am here discussing how the system works at its imperfect best.)

Truth emerges through a network of earned and deserved trust, and generally not through the efforts of any individual person, no matter how talented.

The matter of how truth percolates form science to society is hardly different. We make social judgements far more than we make judgements of substance, because we do not have the time to judge everything on substance. We can only operate on the basis of trust that the social network is doing enough judgements of substance.

In my youth, my generation railed against authority, against the "establishment". We had a common bumper sticker, "Question Authority". Unfortunately, the bumper sticker stuck too well. Now there is nasty gluey stuff all over the bumper of society. My wife Irene has suggested an amended bumper sticker: "Question Authority but Listen to the Answer!"

In those days when there was an establishment and it cared about science, if I were to investigate a scientific issue, I would get the best efforts of scientists to communicate to my level. I would not have been cut off at the pass by an organized posse of authority questioners, skilled in generating confusion and motivated by something other than truth.

What people who care about truth need to do first is understand that science flourishes in some social environments and not in others, that some social environments care about truth as an independent constraint and others will try to argue their way out of a hurricane. ("It's not so bad. The levee is only broken in one or two places.")

We can't allow the network of trust to get broken. It's already altogether too frayed. The costs aren't just our comfortable science jobs at nice institutes with a few nice foreign jaunts every year. The entire fate of humanity is at stake, whether or not the climate change consensus is right.

In order to save the freedom of free nations we must save our collective competence. Our competence depends on respect for evidence, and respect for evidence depends on respect for the network of people who gather the evidence.

How do we deserve that trust, and how do we go about regaining it, in the face of highly skilled malign opposition?

I am still thinking about it and I hope you are too, but I am sure one crucial step is to respect your audience, no matter how wrongheaded they may be.

We should not suffer foolishness gladly, but as for fools, I defer to Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons. Paraphrasing, he has pointed out that the world is so complicated now that everyone is an idiot about some things.

We are all fools in some context or other.

That's why, in order to survive and thrive, as individuals, groups, societies, and a world, the most important skill is knowing whom to trust.

It's also why we should treat fools with respect and consideration, while fighting their foolishness. Tomorrow you will be someone else's fool.

[This rambled a bit. I split off the opening into a separate posting. See above.]

More on the Framing Frame [updated]

Courtesy of Jim Torson who writes a lengthy diatribe to the globalchange googlegroup.

Here's Nisbet and here's Mooney.

Also Jim points to Blog around the Clock/Coturnix. I'm not sure whether Jim endorses this article, but I surely don't. Consider this:


The result of training is that scientists are uniquely trained to be poor communicators of science. Scientists - a tiny percentage of any population - are the only people in the society who even try to think and talk in a value-free way, get insulted when someone suggest they shouldn't do so, and view other people who can't do so as intellectually inferior.


I think that captures something interesting. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the substance but it's an interesting idea.

Unfortunately, it's stated in such an extreme, overstated and confrontational way as to thoroughly offend both scientists and nonscientists in equal measure. One could hardly come up with a way to frame the opinion that does more damage to discourse.

I thoroughly dislike the rest of the "Clock" article. It gets even worse.

Apparently anyone who doesn't agree with the author about absolutely everything is an inferior being, who has yet to progress to the level of perfection that the author has attained. Charming.

[Addendum: let me expand on this.]

Here is an approximation of the evolutionary ladder as displayed in an image on this article (sorry, I don't have time to do this up as a fancy graphic)

Coturnix (highest possible form according to Coturnix)
People who agree with Coturnix
Atheists who have some quibbles with Coturnix
Agnostics
Unitarians
Christians (lowest form attained by humans according to Coturnix)
Skunks
Maggots
Lice
Anerobic Bacteria

Notice there is nothing whatsoever about science on this chart. The purpose of public communication of science, it is revealed, is to slyly and secretly move people UP the ladder of development so they are more Coturnix-like.

Maybe all of us in some corner of our minds believe there is some ladder of correctness with our own opinions at the top, and people who thoroughly disagree at the bottom. Grownups tend to know enough to temper this with a tad of humility. On the other hand, publishing your secret arrogance is guaranteed not to win you any friends. Publishing it in an article intended to advise people on public communication is, hmmm, perhaps a tiny bit like shooting yourself in the foot to emphasize your message on firearm safety.

[end addendum]

Humorous sarcasm about bloggers you disagree with is one thing. It's fair game.

Arrogant, humorless contempt for huge swaths of humanity is another. There is hardly a worse example of framing the dialog possible than the toxic sludge of this article.

The amazing thing is that this article claims to offer advice on how scientists should approach public communication. Ironically it violates every bit of good advice it can muster and then some. If you want to know how to communicate in your area of expertise, study this article for form rather than content, and then don't do that.

Overton Window

wherein I disagree about disagreeing...

Eli has some comments disagreeing with me, but oddly, I agree with them.

I am not sure I understand what it is he thinks I am saying, but apparently I disagree with it.

It's very much worth a read anyway, if only to gain the worthwhile nomenclature of the "Overton Window".

Flipping the Question

It's often a good source of creativity to take a question and flip it around.

About when I pulled out of science, (and before I honed my political skills, at least a bit, in the private sector) I was at a meeting of paleoclimate modelers, when I kept saying "flip the question". They were trying to pull together ways to apply modeling to study paleoclimate, but I thought and think that the best approach would be to use paleoclimate data to study how to improve climate models. (I don't think anyone ever even got a clue about what I was so agitated about.)

I am now writing an article about "computer programming for everybody". Here, a clear statement of the flipped perspective is offered by Mark Guzdial: "I'd never before thought about computing for learning as opposed to learning about computing".

This site originates in a question flip. People are thinking hard enough about how to communicate science to the public, but as with the other two questions, they aren't thinking about it very well because they haven't looked at the dual, the flipped question. The flipped question is how to communicate how the public thinks to scientists and scientifically inclined people. Without some care about the flipped question, the communication of science to the public will tend to fall on deaf ears.

The way ideas prevail in science and the way they prevail in society are distinct. To some extent the way ideas prevail in society is broken and needs fixing (in that it is too emotional, and in that networks of trust are failing, and in that public opinion is too vulnerable to cynical manipulation), and to some extent the way science works is broken (mostly in that it is too clubbish and inaccessible). Anyway, given that we have matters of great importance at stake, we have to cope with the situation we have.

What about the other 11%?

Commentary on the WGII SPM on Slashdot spans the usual gamut from snarky through self-importantly clueless to insightful, and as usual for nontechnical articles the comment moderation system is not especially helpful. My impression that the balance of Slashdot opinion was moving in the wrong direction is not confirmed this time; it seems to be about 25% informed and 75% ill-informed, with the ill-informed split evenly between worried, unworried, and more or less misguided difference splitting (a.k.a. Broderism).

One presumably skeptical question seemed genuine and insightful enough, though. What does "consistent" mean? It's stated that 89% of the observational records showing significant change are "consistent" with warming. Does this imply that 11% are "inconsistent"? What does this mean for the "consistency" of the record as a whole?

I think we'll be hearing this question again.

I didn't see any answer in the SPM. Did I miss it?

Ouch!

Dr. Lubos links to an amazingly painful Larry King snippet and scores some easy points. Brace yourself.

In short, Bill Nye the science guy sputters a bit and then makes the usual blunder about the "Gulf Stream shutting down", and Lindzen makes plenty of hay from it.

If this is the story people are seeing, is it any wonder they are getting it jumbled up?

Larry King's people deserve some of the blame for this disaster, but Bill Nye should have just demurred. We don't need some bowtied Mr Rogers clone defending us, for God's sake. It may not be "a hundred thousand to one" as Nye idiotically suggests but it's pretty much "ten thousand to ten". Where were the ten thousand? Couldn't King's people have found even one competent member of the IPCC?

It's bad enough to have to debate on these terms, but it seems we have to. If we don't, they will put up the likes of Bill Nye to argue our case!

Not just Texans

Here is the president of the Czech republic making us out to be the comeback of the Stalinists, much as Lubos Motl does.

Great comment on RC

A nice summary of a typical foray into the bizarro universe

This is what a lot of people are thinking. You can't refute this stuff with references to primary literature. What's most disturbing is that the stuff sticks. More and more people think like this every day. Let's think about why, and what we can do about it.

Outside the echo chamber

I guess it's not hard to find people sitting in the skeptics' echo chamber once you look.

I am adding "Geoheresy" to the roll of "what they are thinking", by a fellow named Louis Hissink, whom I gather is Australian. Look at the August 02 posting in his archives for a fine example; it seems like he has been banging the "no such thing as global temperature" drum for a while now.

Exercise for the non-expert reader: spot the specious claims about specious reasoning. You can start by checking the last sentence in particular. There is a lot to dislike about the August 2 geoheresy, and there's a fools' gold mine of similar rantings to see here and elsewhere.

I'm considering separating out a "what are they thinking" blogroll and a "hall of shame" blogroll, the latter for people who really, really, ought to know better. Unfortunately, it's never clear who is confused and who is being deliverately misleading. My good cousin Lubos, (I gather from his name and bio that he and I may be among the few surviving members of the same tribe) for instance, really ought to know better but is almost certainly sincere.

The main issue we need to think about as citizens of the Earth isn't this sort of half-baked argument. It's how much traction such arguments get.

In science, it's the responsibility of the person making the argument to ensure that it's worth making before exposing it to criticism. In politics and jurisprudence ("prudence"?) with its inherent competition, the person making a claim has no responsibility to expose its weaknesses to the opposition.

It's impossible to refute every bit of nonsense when there are so many more people generating nonsense than there are people generating sense. This is true in science in general, even when there are no major policy controversies involved. Once there is controversy, there is a huge motivation to dig up the pseudoscience and promote it.

Here, then, is the root of the problem. Science cannot function without a certain level of trust, albeit provisional and skeptical. (I don't know of anyone claiming to be a sociologist of science that gets this right, by the way. Can anyone help?) The trust among the scientific community remains reasonably high. The problem is that the trust between science and society has broken down under the assault of people who don't understand how knowledge gets generated.

It is not our job to refute every piece of nonsense that comes along. It is our job to find the nuggets of truth among the muck. (Hmm, a gold analogy... "We can tell the queen of diamonds by the way she shines...") It's our job to deserve trust.

In a democracy, it's the society's job to determine who is deserving of trust. (In any system, it's the ruling caste's job, and the problem is remarkably similar.) That's the weak point of the whole system. People undeserving of intellectual trust can easily make the claim, and can approach the matter in a way remeniscent of litigation. "If it doesn't fit you must acquit" etc.) For society to get this wrong has huge consequences...

Many people are not only motivated but paid to ensure that society gets it wrong. How many things are there that I firmly believe are wrong? Am I a victim of propaganda efforts discrediting other fields and substituting ill-founded rantings in which I have only a casual interest?

Scientists are paid only to deserve trust; it's a full-time job and then some. Nobody is really paid to advocate for the real thing in the way that others are paid to advocate for confusion and misdirection. Maybe this needs to change.

It's 3 C

The global sensitivity to CO2 doubling appears to be pretty close to 3 C. Stop the presses.

The global equilibrium temperature sensitivity to CO2 forcing is really starting to look like we have it down. Can we move the conversation on to more appropriate questions?

No, I suppose not...