All-Embracing But Underwhelming…

My nose is to the grindstone at the moment, and whilst, every so often, I look up to see what is happening, I’m hard pressed to find the time to blog about (or even put in hyphens where they are necessary). If I had the time, I’d be talking about the vapid conspiracy theories being put forward to discredit the cadré of climate scientists who, using our best inferential practices based upon the evidence and well-accepted scientific principles, have shown that anthropogenic climate change is occurring.

I’ve noted the histrionics of Poneke before, who appears to be leading a one-person brigade against the Science Media Centre. He’s at it again, now essentially arguing scientists can’t have political views that are based upon their research, which resurrects that strange notion that the Sciences are not just politically neutral, but that we also shouldn’t expect policy makers to take heed of what the Sciences tell us.

Poneke’s central problem in this debate is that he doesn’t seem to be able to:

a) see the ‘problem’ in perspective, and

b) identify appropriate authorities.

The first issue has to do with his, and other journalists, contention that the Himalaya glacier error is an egregious mistake in the IPCC report. People like Poneke think that individual mistakes like these show evidence that someone or some body is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. What they fail to realise is that mistakes like these will occur in large reports like the fourth assessment; if these errors are common, then we have a problem, but the evidence indicates that this is one a very small number of mistakes. The IPCC’s response to this has been entirely appropriate; people are embarrassed and are working to ensure such mistakes don’t creep in again.

Of course, for a conspiracy theorist about anthropogenic climate change, like Poneke, this admission that it won’t happen again is probably proof positive that ‘they’ will ensure similar mistakes are never spotted.

The second issue is the more crucial, I think. Poneke and others in the media sometimes mistake people who present themselves as authorities in a discussion as being appropriately qualified authorities in a field relevant to the discussion. Let me say this straight out: Christopher Monckton is not an appropriately qualified authority when it comes to the discussion of climate change. He is merely someone who presents himself as an appropriately qualified authority.

How can we tell. Well, a legitimate appeal to authority requires that all of the following three conditions be met:

1. The person appealed to is a genuine authority in a field relevant to the discussion,
2. There is substantial agreement among experts in that field that the view endorsed is correct, and
3. The expert is testifying honestly.

Monckton fails on condition one; he is not a genuine authority in a field relevant to the discussion. Rather, he is, at best, a talent amateur with a gift for self-promotion.

Now, I’ve chosen Monckton here because he seems to be the golden boy of many a climate change denier; Poneke relies more on the utterances of our own New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, which is made up of industrial chemists and the like. Poneke is, at least, mistaking scientists in one field for being experts in some other, which is better than the Peter Cresswells of this world who put Monckton on a pedestal and also claim to be big fans of Science.

Naughty naughty.

Humans are quite bad at recognising appropriate authorities, and even the ’saints’ of critical thinking in the world of Skeptics have a hard time of it; James ‘The Amazing’ Randi recently mistook the Oregon Petition as denoting a set of genuine authorities in a field relevant to the discussion rather than what is actually represents, which is mostly TV weather forecasters¹, for example. It’s a difficult business appraising whether someone has a qualified opinion on a subject (and it certainly doesn’t help that there is a growing movement of anti-intellectualism in grassroots skepticism; in some of these debates you either need to be an expert to contribute or you need to know who the actual experts are). Common sense won’t get you very far, especially when you are dealing with systems that are so complex that they defy our facile intuitions about how we think the world works.

Which is all I’m going to say about the vapid AGW conspiracy theories for the time being. PhD theses don’t complete themselves, you know.

Notes

1. Although ‘TV weather forecaster’ probably suggests someone who forecasts weather on TV, I’m now reading it as suggesting ‘people who forecast TV weather…’ “Over on ‘Lost’ it looks like it’ll be a windy day for the survivors, with scattered rain and hail towards the afternoon…”

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I’ve just read a rather interesting paper by Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule; Sunstein, to quote one critique, is a:

confidante of Obama, Harvard Law professor, current head of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, potential Supreme Court nominee – and the latest crusader against those dastardly conspiracy theories.

In ‘Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cure’ he and Vermeule cover the epistemological basics of conspiracy theories and then, quite naturally and controversially, suggest some policy directions as to how governments might deal with the threat of conspiracy theories that counter official theories. This blogger, for example, thinks this is a bad thing.

I’m not so sure, though. Sunstein and Vermeule go out of their way to ensure that the kind of conspiracy theories they are dealing with are the unwarranted kind, suggest malign activity and could have disastrous consequences if they were believed. They even admit that they are talking about government in an abstract ‘Of course they’re only there to help’ way and that the political reality is sometimes quite perverse.

Be that as it may, the critics have said; it is a bad article because Sunstein and Vermeule recommend the infiltration the ranks of Conspiracy Theorists and this is a bad thing, seeing that it threatens civil liberties, suggests the Orwellian state, et cetera, etc. &c.

Except that what Sunstein and Vermeule want is to merely sow the seeds of doubt in regard to unwarranted conspiracy theories. They think that governments and their agencies should engage with the arguments put forward to such theories and simply point out where they fail, as well as putting forward additional evidence and different takes on how the inferences might run¹; not exactly terrible stuff. Indeed, the kind of stuff that conspiracy theorists continually advocate when they deal with official theories.

The problem, for opponents of this paper, is twofold: Sunstein and Vermeule assume that governments are good (which, as they say, you need to when you are recommending policies for said governments), and that drives their subsequent analysis and justification of how governments should act towards rivals to official theories. However this is problematic because the second point plays into it; Sunstein is a Washington insider. He is treated with suspicion because he, presumably, should know that, actually, governments are, if not bad, at the very least not-good.

As I often say in the critical thinking classes I teach, the ad hominem, as an argument, is often fallacious but can be, in very special cases, legitimate; given that Sunstein has put forward an argument we really should deal with what he says, rather than worry about from where he speaks it, but, at the same time, you might argue that he is in the perfect position to justify the actions of a regime he supports with a well-placed paper or two. Even though I don’t think this is the case here (the authors go out of their way to talk about how this is a model for an ideal situation) I can see how this would be alarming; imagine that you’re part of a group that runs a different line to that of the government and are afraid that they will want to shut your discourse down. If you know that your government actively sends out agents to infiltrate and take over your discussions for the purposes of ‘keeping it real,’ you probably are going to not trust your fellow correspondents. In other words, what turns out to be a solution to troublesome unwarranted theories might also be get used to stifle debate o topics the government would rather you didn’t entertain.

Which leaves me feeling a bit like a Conspiracy Theorist rather than a Conspiracy Theory Theorist.

Anyway. I would, very happily, use this paper as a first reading in any postgraduate course I was teaching on the epistemology of conspiracy theories. It contains a good summary of the epistemological issues and the second half provides a good rationale as to why we need to analyse conspiracy theories philosophically, as well as touching on the sociological and political issues to do with their transmission.

Meanwhile, in crank-ville, Daniel Pipes is recommending that Barack Obama should bomb Iran to save his presidency.

Notes

1. Sunstein and Vermeule think that the chief fault of conspiracy theorising is limited information on the part of Conspiracy Theorists and thus the use of what they call a ‘crippled epistemology’

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