I've instituted a new group of links at the left: Data Hygiene, for sites providing useful clutter therapy for the brain.
The Statistical Assessment Service in Washington puts out a newsletter (print and online) that assesses the statistical basis for the latest media flaps. One snippet from the latest issue:
… While previous studies have claimed to find a connection between violent images on TV and violent behavior, this study claims a direct connection between watching TV and violence no matter the content…
… [But if] watching less TV is a by-product of greater involvement in civil society, then such involvement would cause an unusually low rate of violence, rather than TV causing a higher rate. If so, then this study has looked at things the wrong way round. …
The AFU and Urban Legends Archive is a treasure-house of mad modern myth. And some that's motivated rather than mad. This item from the Politics section could save a few of my gun-fan friends from embarrassment:
Hitler Gun Control …
"This year* will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"
--falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler …
Damn. Another smear opportunity lost.
Steven Milloy at JunkScience.com has this story in his FoxPop column currently:
Anti-fun food activists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest just delivered another junk science-fueled scare.
Pizza is the new laugh-out-loud hazard, an act of dietary terrorism apparently perpetrated to sell CSPI's new anti-restaurant book.
[… generous portions of nourishing information and then …]
… What would be more useful to consumers is something called "CSPI Confidential." Such a book might describe CSPI's 30-year history of fomenting bogus food scares including attacks on Chinese, Mexican and Italian foods, movie popcorn, caffeine, the fat-substitute Olestra, meat, fast foods, and snack foods to gain publicity for purposes of fundraising tens of millions of dollars.
Keep visiting all these sites for regular inoculations against gullibility.
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If you're sure your intellectual antibodies are up to strength, then visit:
In the summer of 1994, I became aware of a very strange phenomenon, human spontaneous involuntary invisibility, which was apparently happening to people in the U.S.
… Vera in Ventura, California, who tried to get assistance in a post office, only to be completely ignored by other customers and the postal clerk. I have kept in touch with Vera and she has had other apparent invisibility experiences in stores and other public places. Sheila in Roanoke, Texas, continues to have invisibility experiences, some of which have occurred in restaurants and at the airport.
… Jean in Tucson, Arizona, wrote me of her experiences. She has had them occur in the library when she attempted to check out books and in clothing stores. … "You wouldn't think a tall woman with red hair, high heels in a purple dress and dangle earrings would be invisible, would you?"
Then there is the case of Melanie in Ventura, California, who became invisible while sitting on her own living room sofa and staring at the wall, lost in her own thoughts. Her husband was walking around the house looking for her but could not see her sitting there, only several feet away from where he was walking.
But Donna, any wife will tell you that husbands are like that when it comes to finding things that are right under their nose ....
After writing the previous piece, I became curious to know whether Roger Scruton has compromised sufficiently with the modern age to establish a Website. Has he just. http://www.rogerscruton.com/ is a major enterprise.
If you explore it, you'll find he turns an honest bob or two from Horsell's Morsels, "Britain's fastest-growing post-modern rural consultancy." It offers no end of good stuff, including:
Log Cutting
With many mature and dying trees we have a plentiful supply of ash, elm, oak, willow and fruitwoods, which we turn into finely sculpted logs that can be used as plates, stools, weapons and garden furniture. They can also be burned. £50 a load.
and
Logic Chopping
In this day of sound-bites and hasty opinions, of instant dogma and equally instant retreat from it, there is no defence except the skilled logic chopper. Our vorpel blades go snickersnack around the heads of all opponents, and we emerge tired but victorious from conflicts which leave the world astonished, bewildered and depressed. Try us with your brief, and see your opponents’ arguments cut to pieces before your eyes.
I seem to remember RS in The Times once excoriating American practitioners of philosophy therapy as quacks, latter-day sophists. I hope all the Horsell activities are ethical products, philosophically viewed.
There's a lot of facetiousness on the site, worthy of the blogosphere. I suspect that top management needs to exercise a guiding hand on some of the enthusiastic junior staff.
The New Statesman came through the door today. It's not mine, of course. My son takes it, having been persuaded by his mother to have a subscription as a gift. The deed was done when my back was turned. I'd rather it had been Loaded or NME or The Oldie.
The cover story: 'Laptop Fascists', by John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. It seemed from the title to be about the perils of the hordes of far-Rightists online. Resentful of this selectivity, I growled: "How many laptop Trotskyites are there?"
Actually it's not about the use of new technology by neo-Nazis at all: rather, it dwells on their position as 'modernizers', but ones who realize that (according to Gray) economic liberalization and prosperity can go hand in hand with political illiberalism:
Like the fascist parties of the past, the far right accepts the economic orthodoxies of its time. Today, those are the orthodoxies of the free market.
… the notion that a modernised economy is bound somehow to engender a liberal society [is] a fantasy. … The link between liberal values and economic growth is a historical accident, not a universal law.
…the Enlightenment faith that, with the growth of knowledge and wealth, human beings will shed their various, divisive identities to become members of a universal civilisation. Once the prerogative of Marxists, this fanciful rationalistic creed is now the intellectual basis of market reform throughout the world.
… in Europe today, where welfare states and trade unions are strong, persuading voters to accept open borders must be a forbiddingly difficult task.
… Europe has contrived to weaken national identities at a time when the legitimacy of its institutions has never been more widely questioned. It is a dangerous place to launch an experiment in liberal utopianism.
Interesting article. Exactly the same hand-wringing is taking place on the classical-liberal side of the fence.
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I'm surprised to find Roger Scruton doing the NS wine column. The last time I heard his name mentioned in libertarian company, a comrade snorted. But I have a lot of time for Scruton. I go out of my way to read or hear him. I'm glad he and his opinions are nowhere near power, because he's a paternalist and I don't believe that Paternalist Knows Best. But I always emerge wiser from an encounter with him. He gives the impression that his views are the product of a deep, thought-through system of values that infuse his whole life. He seems to be – as far as I can tell – one who lives as a philosopher should, reflectively.
I have to say the same about Anthony Grayling, whom I've had a go at previously. He's popped up recently on radio and in the papers on the side of the angels, defending voluntary euthanasia and drug legalization. But, although I probably overlap more with Grayling than with Scruton on most issues, it's the latter who seems to me to have depth.
But I shan't be reading Scruton's wine column. Surprisingly, this is the acme of pseudery:
The Merlot from the Languedoc is both shy and impeccable, like an endimanche peasant. Don't be deceived by the "vin de pays" label: in the Languedoc, this means nothing. After a few months in the bottle, this shy peasant may well become a jovial buffoon.
… The reservas and gran reservas have more of the sleepy vanilla flavour for which Rioja is famed. But the Crianzas have a firmer tread on the palate, and this one wound its way down the oesophagus like a sure-footed donkey on a mountain path.
I suppose there just isn't enough that is true and useful to fill a weekly wine column.
This is a nice surprise: a blast in defence of free speech from an unpromising-sounding source: the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism. This page, by Marek Kohn and dating from 1999, discusses racial theorizing, including that of the wild-eyed maverick psychologist Chris Brand. It ends:
Brand was to have discussed `Race, Intelligence and Censorship' at Edinburgh's Cyberia Café with myself and Kenan Malik. Following threats of violence from the ANL [Anti-Nazi League], the café's proprietor cancelled the event on police advice. Instead, the ANL staged a pocket rally in which various speakers congratulated themselves on having suppressed the debate. One of them was the comedian and columnist Jeremy Hardy, who dismissed talk of freedom of expression as `liberal rot'. I found this particularly nauseating from a man who makes a nice living from saying what he pleases and, in doing so, stands on the shoulders of those liberals he despises. But the shriller he and others became, the more they sounded as though they were trying to convince themselves.
Well said. Jeremy Hardy has been in the news as one of a group of pacifists who took the anti-Israeli side during the recent strikes against Palestinian towns. I fall about whenever I hear Hardy on the radio: he's some kind of comic mad genius. But his political obsessions sometimes made it hard to laugh, and reading about his role in the nasty incident described above will make it harder.
In Bedford public library a display describes the rooftop solar-panel installation that helps out with the building's electricity needs. It says the peak output on a sunny day would be about 333 watts. A digital screen shows that on this day of hazy sunshine, the output is fluctuating around 167 watts. The caption says you can view the panels if you go up to the third floor. I go up. There it is: a rectangle of about 5 square metres, shiny, patterned, something that wouldn't be out of place in Tate Modern.
Think of it: if the Council could afford to invest in two more of these, then on very sunny days the staff would have enough solar power to boil a kettle.
Just got waylaid by a virtual man with a clipboard. The Philosophers' Magazine is doing a poll, and I thought I'd tell 'em what they wanted to know. Anyone can do it. It has 10 simple questions, and like all polls, it requires you to choose from among a few knee-jerk responses, and no shilly-shallying with nuanced positions and reasoned qualifications.
For example: do you "Strongly Disagree, Tend to Disagree, Neither Disagree nor Agree, Tend to Agree or Strongly Agree" that "abortion of an eight-week old foetus is morally wrong"? I opted for Tend to Disagree; but I can't be as whole-hearted as the majority of my libertarian acquaintance.
I can't, for instance, go along with Dan Pink (April 26; linked to by Virginia Postrel) when he says " ... if people actually knew what an embryo was, this debate [about therapeutic cloning] would be over--and the anti-therapeutic cloning crowd would have to slither away. ... To place this clump of cells [a few days old] --non-sentient, nearly invisible, and never intended to become a human being--on the same (indeed, a higher) moral plane than actual human beings suffering from grave diseases just doesn't make sense."
But his opponents aren't lacking knowledge here: they don't believe the embryo is sentient, they don't regard its visibility as relevant, and it's the fact that it's never intended to become a human being that they find repugnant. The genetic identity of a potential human being has been determined by this stage. Those hostile to cloning for research are impressed not by what this little dot of matter now is, but by what it will become if nurtured rather than used as an object of experiment.
There's an enormous amount more to say on this - I just want to stick to the point now that Dan Pink is too sanguine in blaming opposition on ignorance. A great many ethical and political disagreements do rest on disagreement about the facts of the case, but the most intractable ones rest on differences of world-view for which there is no question of a rational resolution. When we've learned all we can about the physiology of fertilization and gestation, and argued out all the ethical principles and consequences and analogies we can, there are going to be irreconcilable and irresoluble differences between people over the moral status of the embryo (at any specified stage of development).
There is no such thing as a right answer here. That's not sitting on any fence: pointing to the existence of a hundred-foot high fence isn't the same thing as sitting on it.
So chew on that, objectivists. It means that in a free society, people are going to divide into communities of divergent moralities, and the anti-abortionist ones are just going to have to live alongside communities of people whom they regard as murderers. As they already have to do, of course - but they're not reconciled to the fact.
Following up the fuller debate between Lomborg and Scientific American, I find the bias of SA more egregious than I'd realized. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who formed the magazine's lynch party included John P. Holdren. I mentioned earlier Julian Simon's bet as to whether certain metals would fall or rise in price in the ten years to 1990.One of the three environmentalists who lost their money to Simon was Holdren - who, naturally, had been criticized in Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist.
Another was Stephen Schneider, who once made this infamous plea for lying in the environmentalist cause:
"So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have."
The intellectual world seems prepared to forgive Schneider for this little peccadillo: he is currently "professor in the department of biological sciences and senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, is editor of Climatic Change and the Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather and lead author of several IPCC chapters and the IPCC guidance paper on uncertainties."
Scientific American: tribune of the liberal-Democrat-voting people
When Bjørn Lomborg published his Skeptical Environmentalist, Scientific American felt it had a duty to defend the public from the heretic. So it published an eleven-page rebuttal. Now it's allowed Lomborg a one-page reply - with even this capped with a rejoinder from John Rennie, editor-in-chief. The text is below.
I don't find Rennie's piece convincing. His view of the debate is revealed in such phrases as: "it is the scientists who are having a harder time getting equal space for their side"; "sowing distrust of the environmental science community". So it's environmental scientists versus the rest. Lomborg is an economist, and there are supposed to be no dissenting environmental scientists to speak of.
Scientific American has done this kind of lynching before, with Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve. Chief would-be executioner that time was Stephen Jay Gould.
The Thomas Lovejoy guy mentioned in the exchange below sounds worth watching - the species-loss equivalent of the egregious Paul Ehrlich, who was so humiliated in his famous bet with Julian Simon.
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The Skeptical Environmentalist Replies
Recently Scientific American published "Misleading Math about the Earth," a series of essays that critized Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Here Lomborg offers his rebuttal.
After Scientific American published an 11-page critique of my book The Skeptical Environmentalist in January, I’ve now been allowed a one-page reply. Naturally, this leaves little space to comment on particulars, and I refer to my 32-page article-for-article, point-for-point reply at http://www.lomborg.org/ and on the Scientific American Web site (http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2002/041502lomborg/).
I believe many readers will have shared my surprise at the choice of four reviewers so closely identified with environmental advocacy. The Economist summarized their pieces as “strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance.”
The book was fundamentally misrepresented to the readers of Scientific American. I would therefore like to use this opportunity to stake out some of the basic arguments.
I take the best information on the state of the world that we have from the top international organizations and document that generally things are getting better. This does not mean that there are no problems and that this is the best of all possible worlds, but rather that we should not act on myths of gloom and doom. Indeed, if we want to leave the best possible world for our children, we must make sure we first handle the problems where we can do the most good.
Take global warming, where Stephen Schneider berates me for neglecting and misunderstanding science and failing to support the Kyoto Protocol. But in my book I clearly use the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as key documentation, and all the uncertainties notwithstanding, I accept that science points to anthropogenic global warming. (This is in contrast to the contrarians who deny global warming or indeed to early work of Schneider, who suggested that we could be heading for a new ice age.)
Schneider claims that I don’t understand the research in studies by Richard S. Lindzen and by the Danish solar scientists. Yet Lindzen replies: “... at one fell swoop, Schneider misrepresents both the book he is attacking and the science that he is allegedly representing.” And the solar scientists: “It is ironic that Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of not reading the original literature, when in his own arguments against Lomborg he becomes liable to similar criticism.”
With global warming our intuition says we should do something about it. While this intuition is laudable, it is not necessarily correct—it depends on comparing the cost of action to the cost of inaction and the alternative good we could do with our resources. We should not pay for cures that cost us more than the original ailment.
The Kyoto Protocol will do very little good—it will postpone warming for six years in 2100. Yet the cost will be $150 billion to $350 billion annually. Because global warming will primarily hurt Third World countries, we have to ask if Kyoto is the best way to help them. The answer is no. For the cost of Kyoto in just 2010, we could once and for all solve the single biggest problem on earth: We could give clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on the planet. This would save two million lives and avoid half a billion severe illnesses every year. And for every following year we could then do something equally good.
Schneider tells us that we need to do much more than Kyoto but does not tell us that this will be phenomenally more expensive. His attitude is the sympathetic reaction of a traditional environmentalist: solve the problem, no matter the cost. But using resources to solve one problem means fewer resources for all the others. We still need the best information on science, costs and benefits.
Take biodiversity. Thomas Lovejoy scolds me for ignoring loss of species. But no. I refer to the best possible U.N. data, and I accept that we are causing species extinction at probably about 1,500 times the natural rate. But unlike the traditional environmentalist who feels we have to do whatever is needed to stop it, I also ask how big this means the problem is. Answer: Over the next 50 years we might lose 0.7 percent of all species. (This contrasts both to contrarians who deny species extinction and to Lovejoy’s wildly excessive warning from 1979 of a 20 percent species loss from 1980 to 2000.) By the end of this century the U.N. expects we will have more forests, simply because even inhabitants in the developing countries will be much richer than we are now. Thus, the species loss caused by the real reduction in tropical forest (which I acknowledge in the book) will probably not continue beyond 2100.
Take all the issues the critics did not even mention (about half my book). We have a world in which we live longer and are healthier, with more food, fewer starving, better education, higher standards of living, less poverty, less inequality, more leisure time and fewer risks. And this is true for both the developed and the developing world (although getting better, some regions start off with very little, and in my book I draw special attention to the relatively poorer situation in Africa). Moreover, the best models predict that trends will continue.
Take air pollution, the most important social environmental indicator. In the developed world, the air has been getting cleaner throughout the century—in London, the air is cleaner today than at any time since 1585! And for the developing countries, where urban air pollution undeniably is a problem, air pollution will likewise decline when they (as we did) get sufficiently rich to stop worrying about hunger and start caring for the environment.
While I understand the traditional environmentalist’s intuitive abhorrence of prioritization, I believe that the cause of environmentalism is not well served by the Scientific American feature, clearly trying to rubbish the whole project. If we want to build an even better tomorrow, we need to know both the actual state of the world and where we can do the most good. I have made an honest effort to provide such an overview, based on science and with all the references clearly cited.
John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, replies:
Disappointingly, Lomborg has chosen to fill his print response with half-truths and misdirection. Perhaps in this brief space he felt that he could do no better, but critics of The Skeptical Environmentalist also find such tactics to be common in his book. He implies that he has been wronged in getting so little space; our 11-page set of articles is a response to the 515-page volume in which he made his case, and which was widely and uncritically touted in the popular media. (Long before our article, for instance, The Economist gave him four unanswered pages for an essay.) So far it is the scientists who are having a harder time getting equal space for their side. Anyone still interested in this controversy will find on http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2002/041502lomborg/ our original articles and Lomborg’s detailed rebuttal of them, along with refutations to his rebuttal.
Lomborg and The Economist may call them “weak on substance,” but our pieces echo identical criticisms that have been made in reviews published by Nature, Science, American Scientist, and a wide variety of other scientific sources—not venues where insubstantial criticisms would hold up.
Lomborg’s stated proof that he understands the climate science is that he relies on the IPCC’s report, but the argument of Schneider (and other climatologists) is of course that Lomborg picks and chooses aspects of that report that he wants to embrace and disregards the rest. Lomborg boasts that he isn’t a global-warming denier, but how is that relevant? The criticism against him is not that he denies global warming but that he oversimplifies the case for it and minimizes what its consequences could be. The reference to Schneider’s theories about global cooling reaches back three decades; all good researchers change their views as new facts emerge. How does this bear on the current debate except as personal innuendo?
As in his book, Lomborg repeats that the Kyoto Protocol would postpone global warming for only six years. This is an empty, deceptive argument because the Kyoto Protocol isn’t meant to solve the problem by itself; it is a first step that establishes a framework for getting countries to cooperate on additional measures over time. The cost projections Lomborg uses represent one set of estimates, but far more favorable ones exist, too. Given that the additional antiwarming steps that might be taken aren’t yet known—and so their net costs are impossible to state—it is premature to dismiss them as “phenomenally more expensive.”
As Lovejoy’s article and others have noted, Lomborg’s simplistic treatments of biodiversity loss and deforestation are inappropriately dismissive of well-grounded concerns that those numbers could range far higher. (And why resurrect a claim in a paper that Lovejoy wrote 23 years ago when he and others have far more recent estimates?) Moreover, one problem of Lomborg’s statistical methodology is that it tends to equate all items within a category regardless of how valuable or different the individual elements are. For example, there may be more forest in 2100 than there is today, but much of that will be newly planted forest, which is ecologically different (and less biodiverse) than old forest.
When Lomborg restates the number of lost species as a percentage of total species, is he simply showing the true size of the problem or is he perhaps also trying to trivialize it? By analogy, in 2001 AIDS killed three million people, with devastating effects on societies in Africa and elsewhere. But that was only 0.05 percent of all humans. Which number is more helpful in setting a public health agenda for AIDS? The answer is neither, because numbers must be understood in context; Lomborg creates a context for belittling extinction problems.
Lomborg is being disingenuous when he protests that our authors did not even mention half his book. As our preface to the feature stated, we asked the authors to comment specifically on just four chapters. The flaws in those sections alone discredit his argument.
Environmental scientists are all in favor of setting priorities for action; Lomborg pretends otherwise because he disagrees with the priorities they set. Even if his effort to describe the “actual state of the world” (a naive goal, given the world’s complexity and the ambiguity of even the best evidence) is honest, his argument is not credible. And by sowing distrust of the environmental science community with his rhetoric, Lomborg has done a severe disservice not only to those scientists but also to the public he has misinformed.
