Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
That is, you get a group of self-described experts together, and then ask them to critically analyze some aspect of a field in which they have no expertise at all, and they'll attempt to apply their expertise in the unrelated field.
For example, "I am a programmer, so I understand systems, and everything is a system..." Well, yes, but only in the most superfluous way: that a "system" is a network of causes and effects. Otherwise, programming has very little to do with, say, quantum mechanics, or with global ecology.
This even happens between sub-fields of expertise; I happen to personally know more physicists than the average person, and they have the same tendency to try to apply their expertise in one particular sub-field of physics to some other field in which they have no specific knowledge.
For yet another example, there's Zed Shaw's "Programmers need to learn statistics or I will fucking kill them" article from sometime back. There you have a field that is only slightly mathematical in nature, and because of that, many of the people with enough expertise in it believe that they know "enough" math. Except, they don't.
It seems to be terribly hard for someone who is an expert at anything to admit that they aren't an expert at everything.
Chem Engineers are right-wing, though. Just wanted to point out that it's not just them...
In the H1N1 case, there are a lot of critics claiming:
* Press about H1N1 caused a shortage of seasonal flu vaccines. [0]
* H1N1 vaccine supplies were limited during the period leading up to flu season. [1]
* H1N1 vaccine production was not ramped up quickly enough. [1]
* H1N1 vaccine was oversupplied after the 2009/10 flu season, leaving public health agencies with massive surpluses. [2]
So, given that public health agencies massively overstocked their supplies after they could do any good, it's easy to see why politicians might be angry. With oversupply in Germany alone at €53.3 million worth of vaccine [2], a valid concern might be that if there was in fact corporate influence over the WHO decision to declare H1N1 a pandemic, then that would call their credibility into question [3]. Another concern might be that given the supply issues, the world is not able to effectively respond in time to a flu pandemic.
Rather than addressing those issues, it's a lot easier to paint critics as denialists.
Or, it could just be that they're wackos.
Whatever.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/05flu.html
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-incr...
From the first paragraph of the article: "Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles."
"that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic"
>> WHO officials have always stressed that global spread, not severity of disease, defines a pandemic. [My comment: so we're not worried about risk or danger, just spread. Not to mention that this defenition was recently changed.]
"that thousands died"
>> Tens thousands of people die from the common flu (amongst other things) every year.
"that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering"
>> Really??? Canada alone (population ~ 30 million) spent several billion (I don't have the exact number) on vaccine specifically for H1N1...do the math globally.
I wonder if, according to the article's author, profiteering is actually possible, under any circumstances? How many billions have to be spent before it is considered profiteering?
"Thousands died..."
>> WOW!!!!....THOUSANDS.....killed, by flu!!! Unprecedented! (if you ignore every single year for the last how many thousand years????)
I mean, how disingenuous can you get?
I have enough education to follow most scientific arguments at some level. I don't have enough higher math to follow string theory, for instance, but I can understand pandemics, one of the prime examples in the article. When science relies on trust, is it still science? I'm also bothered that this article seems to lump anyone on the "wrong" side of a scientific debate as a "denialist".
However I think that you may be inflating the degree to which we understand other fields a bit. I have taken just enough advanced physics to know that I know absolutely nothing about physics. Similarly for chemistry, biology, climatology, etc. My major is computer science so I would wager that I have a better than average knowledge in that field, but there are even some subfields in computer science (e.g., complexity theory) where I would be completely lost.
I think the concept in play here is what I like to call the "hard science condition." That is, people who are a member of the hard sciences or technical fields have a tendency to believe that because they have a good comprehension of a difficult subject they have a good comprehension of many difficult subjects (including other technical fields). This seems to me to be a logical fallacy because very rarely have the exhibitors actually put in the many years of work that would be required to really understand the field. In this way we all have to defer to experts at some point--that is, we must trust their results. This is why I think a scientific consensus is so important. When we must defer to experts it's important to be able to figure out what the experts are saying.
This is addressed in the article right next door: "Living in denial: When a sceptic isn't a sceptic" (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.000-living-in...)
"Denialism is typically driven by ideology or religious belief, where the commitment to the belief takes precedence over the evidence. Belief comes first, reasons for belief follow, and those reasons are winnowed to ensure that the belief survives intact."
The example given in the article is a good one: we can observe antibiotics in action, so we don't need to trust anyone that they work. We can observe people get better on them. But with vaccines, the point is to not get sick in the first place. Most individuals will never have the opportunity to observe that they work since they are preventative. Again, the science itself does not rely on trust. It's the non-scientists who must trust something they will likely never observe themselves.
Science isn't perfect. Far from it. But at it's best it's a very effective way of learning about the world we live in. At its worst, it's still better than any alternatives we've found so far.
This is embarrassing.
Do vaccines cause autism? Apparently not. But, you know, it is possible and as long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens, we are probably wise to consider possible negative effects. It's not "denialist".
No they absolutely don't. And cellphone "radiation" doesn't cause cancer, also. Surprised?
> But, you know, it is possible
Facts, please.
> and as long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens,
The correct term is "as long as we're saving them from yellow fever, smallpox, dengue fever, etc., etc". Here in the 3rd world these diseases are killing millions of times more children than your imagined autism.
Oh my, why is HN such a nest for conspiracy theorists?
If a relationship between a vaccination and a negative reaction cannot be definitively confirmed, then it does not show up in the statistics...in case you actually are interested in the truth.
There is a website somewhere that tracks all of this, but my question is, why wouldn't the official people already involved track fucking everything? It costs exactly zero over and above what they are doing now, so why exclude it?
This is where the conspiracy theories come from. You have the means and budget to track everything, but you don't. My question is: why? Combine that with some weird stories I hear, and the fact that it is free for you to counter them with data, but you don't, and there you go, a conspiracy theory.
I'm not really sure who are those "official people already involved", but what I would really like to know is how you're so sure that "it costs exactly zero and above what they are doing now" to track "fucking everything"?
First, let's go with the simple thing: how this tracking is supposed to be done. I'm just extrapolating here, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I've had no doctor follow my kid around after vaccination 24/7 to monitor whether he's suddenly developed a symptom, so I suppose it's not by direct observation. Therefore, it must depend on some doctor connecting the dots ("oh, so you vaccinated your kid 3 months ago and now he has X?") and reporting it to some tracking body.
Which leads me to the next issue. To put it like you did: how the fuck do you track "fucking everything"? I can understand that the doctors would be informed about a suspected link between A and B and would therefore report any cases of A and B happening "together", where "together" is defined as a parameter of this suspected link. But for that, you need to at least suspect that there's a link between A and B.
Maybe I'm too naive, but to me it stands to reason that tracking "fucking everything" does not cost "zero", because otherwise someone would have been doing it already. Whenever someone claims that it would be easy to do something someone's not doing already, I remember Yegge's post "Have you ever legalized marijuana?": http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...
Combine that with some weird stories I hear, and the fact that it is free for you to counter them with data, but you don't, and there you go, a conspiracy theory.
Okay. Here's how that reads: "I hear stories from people and nobody seems to counter that with data, so I choose to believe in a conspiracy. Especially because I believe it would be 'free' to come up with data."
...in case you actually are interested in the truth.
In case you are, here's a dose of it: http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html
Why is this not done? Doesn't that seem a bit odd?
And yes, I was exaggerating, it wouldn't be free. But it could be done for very little cost.
For example, what tracking body would the doctors report to? Is it CDC? If so, will existing staff take on their new duties, meaning that they will now have less time for other duties? Or will they have to hire new staff for that? If not CDC, which organization? Who pays their wages? How to disseminate information (to all doctors) on what to report to the tracking body? Do doctors now have a legal duty to inform themselves? Or is it someone else's duty to inform the doctors? Can I sue for malpractice if my doctor doesn't report? Or is it voluntary for doctors to report? What channels do they have for reporting: phone, Internet, some other? Who will pay for establishing those channels? I could go on, but there should be no need to, hopefully.
Or you could do what the medical establishment has already done. Start with the ailment, and look at the statistics of who has the ailment versus the suspected cause. In this case there's no difference in the rates of autism between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
www.jennymccarthybodycount.com
You can debate whether those statistics are perfectly accurate or not, but even a single death that was purely preventable is too much.
I'm really not sure what you mean by this. I would agree that some of the scientists in the East Anglia behaved very unprofessionally. However, there was no proof of improper scientific conduct (e.g., data alteration) in this case. The point of the peer review process is that you don't have to trust an individual scientist (or human) to not succumb to competitiveness, greed, and deception, only that the vast majority of them wont. Given that it is highly unlikely that they will be corrupt in the first place, it is even less likely that they will be corrupt towards the same result. That is, given that scientists are practicing in completely different environments and countries all over the world it is highly unlikely that the incentives and disincentives will align perfectly for everyone. Therefore, when you see a scientific "consensus," the most likely result you should get from that is that there is supporting data, not that there is a massive conspiracy.
They're clearly not. If you wish to make a claim I suggest you cite sources. Here are some[1][2][3].
[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/latest-climate-h...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/02/no-formal-charge...
[3] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7273/full/462545a...
A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the
denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial
exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two
papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming
(S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003
and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003)
and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming
Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one
another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they
acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the
IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published
in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.
Global warming will be passed as absolute truth.
It seems similar to the ages when priests would silence people rather than address their scientific assertions. If the global warming deniers are wrong, it would seem to me to encourage their writings, and if the global warming advocates are confidently correct, it would seem, from a traditional scientific method perspective, they would welcome any and all discussion of their topic. Yet, they try to use government agencies to limit freedom of speech of their adversaries, and to hide the discussions they have amongst them selves? This is science?
I don't proclaim to know what is right or wrong when it comes to global warming, but I have a sense of when someone is telling the truth or not. When someone uses the government to stop someone from talking, for reasons of "expediency", I get suspicious. And they don't even seem to care about that. Believe what we tell you, our cause is so important we can skip the traditional scientific process, all evidence to the contrary is conspiracy theories, end of discussion. Or, you'll be talking to our (taxpayer funded) lawyer.
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
To give you one example with which I'm familiar, several research groups have attempted to measure the number of fatalities associated with the Iraq War. One of the standard techniques for doing so involves cluster sampling, i.e., picking a small number of locations and conducting multiple interviews near each cluster site. One research group doing this noticed that the mortality rate from their Fallujah cluster was much much much higher than any of the other clusters. So they purposefully excluded it from their analysis although they kept it as part of their raw data and explained why they removed it. As a result, their total death toll was much lower than it would have been. Denialists immediately criticized them for manipulating data so as to inflate the death toll. How did they do that? Very simply: if you omit the outlier, then the spread of the probability distribution shrinks dramatically. If you include the outlier, then the width of the distribution expands so far out that it encompasses zero excess deaths.
Now in either case, the distribution was screaming that there were many excess deaths, but these denialists claimed that scientists were reducing the average fatality count just so they could exclude the minute possibility that the war decreased death rates. Obviously, there is no way these scientists could win: if they include the outlier, then they're deliberately inflating the death toll, but if they exclude the outlier, then they're manipulating data to obscure the possibility that the war saved lives. If the scientists had just quietly dropped their Falujah data, this controversy never would have happened. In this case, releasing data just gave denialists fodor for crazy attacks.
Research groups do spot interviews for fatalities in the iraq war. This data is submitted to the central repository. The government analyzes it, removes outliers emits report A. The ACLU analyzes it with the outliers, emits report B.
Some people throw a fit about A, some people throw a fit about B. If the data were available, independent third parties could analyze it and say - hey ok, Fallujah was actually a valid data point so we present report B or whatever.
You can't argue with data, not and maintain the appearance of sanity. Here's the data. Here's the interpretation. Even laypeople can understand this.
"Imagine that if you took 32 water samples in your child's school and found that arsenic samples were 60% higher than the national standards, and you were 98% sure that you were above the standard. Then you took one more sample that was ten times higher than the standard. The logic endorsed by Michael Fumento is that we do nothing about the water supply because this outlier broadened our statistical confidence interval and we are not sure that we are above the national standard."
If the data were available, independent third parties could analyze it and say - hey ok, Fallujah was actually a valid data point so we present report B or whatever.
So, in the example above, do you really think that anyone claiming "oh, there's no reason to believe the school's water supply is dangerous since the confidence interval has been pushed out far enough that there is a minute possibility that the water is safe" is acting in good faith? I am curious: do you believe that any professional can make such claims in good faith and in accordance with their professional obligations?
If the data were available, independent third parties could analyze it and say - hey ok, Fallujah was actually a valid data point so we present report B or whatever.
This is obviously false. I understand the idea of the confidence interval, I'd say the interpretation is : credible evidence for arsenic levels above standards, high variance in data requires further testing.
Here is how I am saying it should work : All 33 samples are in a public database D. The R script that generates the statistical analysis is in that same database. Company C says because of results from R based on D I conclude X. Similarly for other companies.
The bottom line is if the data is public and competent, unbiased observers exist (many of them do exist) then it becomes much harder to lie with stats.
They are fitting data to expectations, and worse you are telling them to conceal the fact that they do so, just so no one can argue with them.
That is pretty much as far away as you can possibly get from true science.
What they should do is put massive error bars on the numbers and say "We can't." We can't tell you the true number, it's not possible to calculate it.
Eh? This is a war zone that has seen very intense fighting. It is not unreasonable to assume that data from this one site is unreliable for any of a million different reasons, especially given just how far it was from the other sites. Do you generally insist that scientists must never eliminate any outlier data points, no matter how suspect?
you are telling them to conceal the fact that they do so
I'm not telling them to conceal anything. I think they did the correct thing: they published all their data, and they disclosed exactly what data points they removed and why they did so. My point is that because they published their data and disclosed what they did and why they did it, they faced criticisms that never would have seen the light of day otherwise. And to me that suggests that it is unreasonable to believe that deniers are going to become less prevalent in a world where more data is published openly.
What they should do is put massive error bars on the numbers and say "We can't." We can't tell you the true number, it's not possible to calculate it.
I don't understand this at all. "Massive" doesn't mean anything. They calculated appropriate confidence intervals and included them in their analysis. What exactly do you think they did wrong?
this is almost a tautology. if data isn't published, there's nothing to deny. are you suggesting... everybody just shut the data up behind closed doors so people can say whatever they want and at least none of those pesky dissenters can stir up trouble? If the data is out there, more people will see the truth. You really can't argue with #s - if I include studies X,Y,Z the mean is M and if I exclude Z it's N. You may argue about Z but people should make those decisions for themselves.
Absolutely not. And I think you should know that. Do you know why I think you should know that? Because I wrote "I'm not telling them to conceal anything. I think they did the correct thing: they published all their data, and they disclosed exactly what data points they removed and why they did so" in the comment you're replying to. So, why exactly do you think I'm suggesting that any data be hidden? How many times do I have to explicitly write that I think no data should be hidden before you believe me?
You really can't argue with #s - if I include studies X,Y,Z the mean is M and if I exclude Z it's N. You may argue about Z but people should make those decisions for themselves.
You certainly can argue with numbers. Numbers do not burst forth from the head of Zeus; they are always produced in a particular context and that context provides fertile grounds for argument. Here's an example: is the mean temperature of the earth changing? We have datasets from weather stations all over the globe going back centuries. But there are people who claim that many of these weather stations used to be located in rural areas that have become more developed over time and that this development can introduce heat islands that create the illusion of global warming. This is not an obviously false claim. These people can and do argue with the numbers. Later research by scientists has shown that this claim is wrong anyway, but lay people lack the time and training to figure that out on their own. And it seems bizarre to expect them to.
If the data is out there, more people will see the truth.
I don't think this is true at all. People do not generally scrutinize raw data. And if they do, they lack the skilled needed to decipher them.
You're talking about arguing about whether certain experiments were valid and you can do that. Once you agree on a dataset, the mean is the mean and that's it. My point is that if ALL the data is released then some group will analyze it with all the outliers in and publish that.
I don't deny that the climate has gotten warmer on trend for the last 150 years.
I don't deny that humans have increased the c02 concentration through the activities of forestry clearing and fossil fuel burning.
I am skeptical of the proven link between c02 and large temperature rises.
I am extremely skeptical of the climate models developed.
I am extremely skeptical of the climate alarmism promoted through science and quasi-science publications, and on through the regular media. People have made these predictions for 30 years, and not one has come close to being true.
I am extremely skeptical that the current costs associated with ineffective present-day solutions (cap & trade, carbon tax, wind power etc) are going to be less than long-term adaption if climate change proves to be a problem.
Yet, for most of the climate change cheer squad, I am filthy denier who probably believes that cigarettes don't cause cancer and who probably doesn't believe in evolution.
The blanket 'with us or against us' attitude developed by many is the worst thing : denying criticism or outright rejection of alternative views is the worst kind of denial.
Solid scientific concepts don't need to be packaged, managed and sold to the public.
Many people understandably belive that they do need that when such concepts are opposed by well funded industry lobby groups and everyone's preference for not having to change their lifestyle.
There is no evidence, none, that there is a well funded industry lobby group in operation. The large mass of skeptical enquiry into climate science is done by amateurs and/or people with tenure in universities. It is done on low-rent blogs and in pay-per-visit speaking tours, and all done on a comparative shoestring. I remember reading an article somewhere that breathlessly revealed that a climate skeptic had been paid $100,000 for a speaking tour to spread the no global warming line. $100,000 is a drop in the bucket, an absolutely meaningless figure. This was the best they could come up with, when it's quite simple to see, say, $1.4 million dollars being spent to explore the link between malaria and climate change when there have been plenty of scientific papers to say there's no link at all, or such a small link it is drowned out by the noise.
Compared against the billions spent by governments, NGOs, lobby groups, and yes, oil companies, to promote climate alarmism, it is an ocean compared to the bits and pieces of fuding that well known sceptics. You've only got to compare the heartland institute's climate seminar in chicago - a two bit affair, to the grandiose climate-alarmism conferences in Indonesia, Copenhagen, and later this year, Cancun to really see the difference.
I will agree with you that nobody wants to change their lifestyle, and that is a major problem for the adoption of policies. But then, in democracies, the burden of proof lies with the person proposing the changes, and they should be self evident. This is a sup-optimal solution, no doubt, by the inertia involved means that it prevents making too many mistakes. If all of the various scare campaigns of the last 100 years were all enacted straight away, we'd have seen millions of human lives, and billions of man-years of effort wasted making the planet a worse-off place.
By all means continue to argue to your passion, but I would advise coming up with a new meme over the 'industry funded lobby groups' one.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-e...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore%27s_Penguin_Army_video_...
http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/local_govtpolit...
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2247933/gre...
Your links contain: -6 forged letters to a congressman -a youtube spoof of Al Gore -lobby group organizing political rallies (up to 1100 people!) -$24 million from Koch's company (link to the greenpeace site, really?)
Again, against the tide of NGO and Government money spent to promote alarmism, it's like a water pistol against a firehose.
If this is the best evidence available, it's a very weak case. If the industry funded lobby groups have managed to sway the opinion of the voting public against climate charge alarmism, then they have gotten very good value for money.
How much money was spend on pure PR to "promote alarmism"?
And yes, industry lobbyism is widely known to give extremely good value for money (especially when, as mentioned before, its aims line up with what the voting public wants to believe out of convenience). That's why there is so much of it.
I think you may be misconstruing what many skeptics believe. No skeptics believe there is a vast conspiracy of scientists working together to pull a fast one on the public even though they know that global warming does not exist. Instead, some skeptics believe a small culture of well meaning scientists have fallen victim to a host of well-known and self-reinforcing biases that make their analysis, and especially their extrapolations, suspect.
uh, isn't that a suspect extrapolation? Just Google what Sen. Inhofe has to say on the subject. Just like the article said, there is a significant overlap between those who deny AGW and those who deny evolution. And if over a century of empirical evidence is not enough to convince them that they're wrong, what good is a few decades worth of data?
This "implausible" (are you fucking kidding?) idea is certainly not without precedent.
But so what? If these scientists have a theory, present it, and deal with critical review. If you are correct, the science will prevail, correct?
The pink elephant in the room is, funding for your scientific theory. If they were truly independent legitimate scientists, they would welcome critical analysis of their theories, that's what real science is all about. But modern science is not so much about "science", it is about funding.
Doing "science" is an enjoyable pursuit, and if you can find someone to fund it for you for say 10 or 20 years, it can be a nice ride.
This is unfortunate, because it means that independent scrutiny of science is extremely difficult. Virtually no-one outside a particular scientific community is competent to evaluate the quality of the work within that community. An argument that seems obviously flawed to an outsider can seem compelling to someone who has the relevant background knowledge.
It would be nice if there were some kind of solution to this problem, but I doubt that there is.
Even those working most closely with the data sometimes seem somehow unable to present anything beyond the oversimplified model, but are dying to even take further than one dimensional and draw a line so they have a false dichotomy so they can paint things black and white.
This is practiced on both sides making results inherently useless despite scientific techniques and credentials of the researchers.
And so, for example, neither side in the climate change debate provides the public with anything remotely resembling a model they can develop faith in by subjecting it to reasonable scrutiny or trying to decide whether it smells right based upon ongoing critical analysis.
Many [most?] smart people work 9 to 5 even though this clogs the roads at those times, so is optimally bad resource usage.
Even more so for religion or political affiliations, due to social circle.
It might be a rational response - the cost associated with overcoming these environmental factors is high, they are at a local minimum ?
If one has been born as a laboratory rat, it's a really good idea to find oneself in the control group. Likewise, while it might be dandy to be the misunderstood genius, the odds are that one is instead the deluded fool. Don't be the deluded fool.
Education tends to mitigate this.
One thing that seems strange to me - whenever there's one of these pan-denier arguments, the arguer tends to choose topics that the Starbucks crowd would agree with, and nothing that the Starbucks crowd might deny in the face of evidence.
For instance, we know really firmly that there's a larger standard deviation in intelligence and success in men than women - men are overrepresented at the top and the bottom. That is, men reach the highest levels of business, science, and leadership more often than women, but also are victims of homicide, suicide, and are incarcerated more often than women. This is thoroughly proven, but even at Harvard the university president lost his job for saying something like this!
So how come these "look at these idiot deniers!" arguments never look at denial of the fact that men and women have a different hormonal mix, different cognitive mix, and that leads to different patterns of behavior and results. I mean, that's so bloody obvious just from a casual observation of the world, but it's now also proven, at least to a much higher standard than global warming is.
Or hell, the New Scientist article uses evolution/creationism - yet a lot of people who believe in evolution reject the fact that natural selection and sexual selection would make groups evolving in different circumstances evolve differently... that comes hand-in-hand with evolution, but people are often deniers about that, thinking that everyone evolved to be the same in all meaningful ways, and any differences in wealth, aggression, preferred behavior, even musical ability must be due to culture. Which is obviously nonsense - but this kind of denial of something obvious is never mentioned in a pan-denier argument, it's always a bunch of mostly proven things with a vocal, ignorant minority, plus global warming.
B: "No, I'm not"
A: "Told you"