Category: Main

Anomaly UK blog posts

Advertising Agency

This is nothing to do with the Anomaly advertising agency. It’s not my fault; I’ve been writing under this heading since 2003, and on this site since 2004. Paul Graham formed the Anomaly UK advertising agency in 2009 (Britannica). Note, that’s not the same Paul Graham that I’ve written about previously, the technologist and essayist.

I write here about politics: mostly these days about the problems of democracy itself. There’s a kind of summary here

Much more interesting than some advertising agency, which if you really want you can find here

The Hockey Stick Illusion

I’ve just finished The Hockey Stick Illusion. I bought it partly out of duty – I was doing my bit by buying Bishop Hill‘s book and adding to its circulation figures. I didn’t expect it to be so good.

One of the things that puts me off public debate generally is that, whatever the forum, it is always too shallow to reach any kind of conclusion. “I think X”. “Well, I think Y.”, “But X is true because of A”. “Ah but you’re ignoring B”. “Well, C means… oh dear, is that the time, I must be going”.

The Hockey Stick Illusion is not about climate. It is not about environmentalism. It is not about science. It is not about global warming. It is 482 pages about one paper published in 1998, criticisms of it, defences of it, attempted replications of and alternatives to it. As such, almost uniquely, it goes into sufficient detail and depth that having read it I feel that I’ve actually learned something. It’s exceptionally well-written, modest in its approach, and overwhelming in its conclusion. Halfway through, I got a little bogged down in the sheer overkill of the weight of damage the hockey stick suffers – did I really need to read any more? But then I read the Phil Jones interview. There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. That is an answer to the only question that Montfort’s book asks, and it is the right answer, and it is from one of those people who was most determinedly defending the wrong answer until last year. This is what a won argument looks like – gaze on it in wonder, for it is a rare thing indeed in the world of soundbites and opinion polls.

As to the wider debate, well, this was one small point. The hockey stick can be wrong, and every other claim of the warmists right. But it is immensely valuable, because of the context I have been describing recently. It proves we can be right, even when the warmists are at their most shrill insisting that we are utterly, insanely wrong. It is evidence that, even if we are wrong, we are playing the game, and are entitled to be taken seriously and not shouted down or excluded.

I strongly recommend this book.

Scientists' Fear

In my previous post on the future durability of the AGW scare, I mentioned the reason why scientists tend not to view climate sceptics as presenting a legitimate scientific viewpoint. I took the opportunity of a wild kick at my other favourite target, democracy:

“If scientists treat creationists and the like with respect, and argue honestly and fairly, they will be screwed by elected politicians.”

Because I was off on a tangent, and not giving the argument the separate post that it deserves, I didn’t provide any evidence that this attitude really exists among scientists.

As it happens, I picked up Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” from the library at the weekend. Imagine my smug self-satisfaction, then, when I read the following this morning on page 91

In parts of the United States, science is under attack from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all, well-financed opposition, and the teaching of evolution is in the front-line trench. Scientists could be forgiven for feeling threatened, because most research money comes ultimately from government, and elected representatives have to answer to the ignorant and the prejudiced, as well as to the well-informed, among their constituents.

Dawkins is putting that forward as an excuse for scientists to make public statements that they don’t believe – in this case for being overly sympathetic to Christianity, in order to keep moderate Christians as allies against creationists. He considers it an insufficient excuse – “The real war is between rationalism and superstition”, but he believes that some scientists are concealing their real views for tactical reasons in the war against fundamentalists and “elected representatives”. I think he is right.

The fundamental point, which I’ve touched on on a number of occasions, is that if you want to be a scientist in a democracy, where “most research money comes ultimately from the government”, as Dawkins says, then you have to be a bit of a politician. That comes through just as strongly in Phil Jones’ cri de coeur in today’s Times – “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”

I really don’t believe that more than one in ten of the warmist scientists would spin, lie and conspire in the way they have just to support their pet theory against scientific opponents – even with the stakes as high as they are in terms of funding and career opportunities. They would see that as a betrayal of science, and their consciences would not allow it.

But The Discovery Institute is not a scientific opponent – it is an anti-scientific opponent. Its dishonesty and ulterior motives disqualify it from participating in the normal scientific process according to the normal rules, and in dealing with it, scientists subordinate the scientific process to political tactics.

The key fact about the climate debate is that, because of where the initial scepticism came from, many scientists saw it in the same light as intelligent design. As I wrote yesterday, once they had made that assumption, they were trapped: if you believe your opponents are enemies of science, then stronger arguments from the enemy spur you not to greater doubt, but to greater determination. Also, since the more politically aware bodies in science closed ranks against climate sceptics, they found support largely among that minority more accustomed to working with the political right. The association of climate sceptics with minor right-wing think tanks and a Republican senator confirms in the mainstream scientists the view that they are dealing with a political enemy, not a scientific opponent.

I wrote in my giving-up-on-politics post, “not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments.”

The problem that causes is that the arguments most likely to persuade the public that you are right, are likely at the same time to persuade the well-informed that you are wrong.

We are seeing the knock-on effect of that situation. In order to win over the ignorant and indifferent, prominent people on both sides of the dispute are employing arguments that are weak, irrelevant, or downright dishonest. Such techniques achieve successes, but at the cost, on both sides, of convincing the opponents more strongly of their own rightness. And, both convinced of their own rightness and dismayed by their opponents’ undeserved popular successes, each side becomes more unscrupulous still in response.

The really difficult question is; does all this mean that the scientists were wrong to ‘go political’ over evolution? Once they had arrogated to themselves the right to decide that evolution was true and they needed to do whatever was necessary to keep teaching it, was an overreaching such as is happening over climate inevitable?

I don’t have to answer that question – I can just blame the problem on democracy, the only system which makes convincing the ignorant and indifferent an essential part of everything from studying the climate to putting on a museum exhibition.

Views changing?

Via JoNova, there has been a large shift in opinion against global warming in the UK.

There has been a lot of triumphalism on the sceptic side – James Delingpole talking about the “imminent death of the AGW scam”, and so on – but I think it is misplaced.

I would guess that the surge in scepticism in Britain owes a lot more to the exceptionally hard winter than to the revelations from East Anglia or the antics of Pachauri, none of which have made very much impact on the public.

The cold winter is not insignificant, of course. It may be just normal variation, but the popular presentation of AGW has mysteriously ignored the fact that the temperature changes they are talking about are barely even measurable, and nowhere near enough to actually notice compared to ordinary year-to-year variation. Therefore, while a cold winter in Britain tells us nothing about climate change as described in the journals, it is a clear falsification of global warming as it has been presented by the media since the 1990s

That is why the media has been uncharacteristically open to both sides during the present kerfuffle. Various scientists are scrambling, not for sake of the movement, but for their own jobs. The movement itself can just sit this out and wait. The IPCC isn’t going away (even if Pachauri does), nor are the politicians who have made climate concern a key part of their image. They’ll wait until summer, and if they get a warm one in the USA and Britain, they’ll crank up the machine again. They won’t bother arguing the toss about tree-rings, Indian glaciers or Chinese weather stations, they’ll just brush it all off as petty troublemaking in the face of the overwhelming threat. And the media will take sides, as they always do, on the basis of which politicians they want to gain and which they want to lose from the whole process.

The exposure of climate science’s guilty secrets, then, will not stop the process in the short term. In the long run, it may have an effect. As I discussed before, it has allowed some people who never believed the exaggerations to say so in public. This in turn may persuade a future generation of politicians that global warming is not what they want to attach their reputations to. For the Obama/Cameron/Milliband generation, it is too late. In a democracy, being indecisive is worse than being wrong, and they cannot afford to change their positions now. But the next decade’s politicians are constructing their positions now, and the choices they make will drive the media landscape of the 2020s.

Ironically, one of the biggest causes of the original AGW error cascade, as Eric Raymond calls it, was George W Bush. For the rank and file in the world’s science departments, Bush was pretty much the most despised figure in history, because of his association with fundamentalist Christianity and the resulting policies, above all against Stem Cell research. To the typical scientist, the theory that the president was attacking climate science because he was in league with oil interests was so intrinsically likely that it wouldn’t make sense to even question it. This was the man who prohibited park rangers from denying young-earth creationism at the Grand Canyon. From that point on, any criticism at all of global warming was presumptively an attack on science itself on behalf of religion and commerce and was to be dealt with on that basis, not studied and reasoned with as if it was part of a real scientific debate. The controversy fell into the pattern of the evolution/creation controversy, rather than the pattern of arguments over Dark Matter or Psychoanalysis. That attitude still persists, and will be very hard to shift, because once it is established, then evidence which strengthens the deniers, while it might start to persuade some of the faithful, will produce in most of the faithful a renewed determination to defeat the anti-science enemy which has become more dangerous through the unfortunate developments which have increased its appeal. Thus the error cascade is perpetuated.

The difficult thing is that I sympathise with these people. I can understand why they are doing what they are doing, and I can’t see a way to shake them out of it. They have learned over the decades that if they treat creationists and the like with respect, and argue honestly and fairly, they will be screwed by elected politicians. And they are applying that lesson. If they didn’t just happen to be wrong, they would be doing the right thing.

Flat Earth News

I have just read Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies.

It’s an excellent account of the forces distorting the news as reported by mainstream newspapers and television. He covers the ideological biases of owners and journalists, and the needs of both owners and journalists to ingratiate themselves with the politically powerful. However, the biggest distortion of all is the fact that finding out the truth takes time and resources, while printing whatever lands in your inbox is quick and cheap. Under commercial pressures, even the most respectable media sources rely heavily on wire services and press releases, while the wire services themselves mostly pass on the news that is given to them.

What is frustrating about the book is that Davies doesn’t look at the demand side. His thesis is that prior to the 1980s, newspapers and journalists sought out stories and checked them, out of professional pride, and that that diligence was squeezed out of the system under commercial competitive pressure from the 1980s onwards. He seems to assume that the media could have got away with that “churnalism” at any time, but chose in the good old days to assume higher standards.

What I wonder is whether there used to be pressure from customers to do proper journalism, and only in the last 20-30 years has it become profitable to print junk instead, due to changes in the audience. Basically, I would like to answer the following questions:

Do readers care whether what they read is true?

Do they believe that what they read is true?

My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that journalism was originally targeted at a market of people who really wanted the truth, though it may have supplied other people as a by-product. Today the people who need the truth have other ways of getting it, and the key newspaper audience simply doesn’t care whether the stories they read are true or not.

Another theory would be that a textbook Market for Lemons has developed – readers want the truth, and know that they’re not getting it, but they don’t have any way of getting it. A newspaper that spent more money to do proper journalism would cost more, but the consumer wouldn’t be able to tell that it was really any better, and so the expensive option would lose in the marketplace. I don’t think this is likely, because I think it would be fairly straightforward to establish a reputation for avoiding the kinds of bad journalism that Davies describes.

A third theory is that proper journalism has suffered from Baumol’s cost disease, and become too expensive. The early-20th century journalist came from the literate lower-middle class, and provided human judgement at low cost. Human judgement has become the critical component in the modern economy, and a journalist’s time is now too expensive for him to be sent around the country sniffing for interesting stories.

Nick Davies is a leftist, but I don’t think the book suffers from that. He tries hard to be fair, and his bias comes through mostly in his examples – it is much easier to spot abuses by one’s political opponents. However, one of the key results of the process he describes is that when there is controversy, both sides will manipulate the media in the ways that have become so easy, and so the reader of his book can easily spot the examples on the other side that he has missed. His argument includes the fact that the ideological bias of media owners, while still significant, is milder than in earlier eras.

Recommended.

The Scientific Mind

I’ve always – at least as far back as I can remember – considered myself a scientifically oriented person. When I was a child, the highlights of TV were the scientific and mathematical programmes or segments presented by David Bellamy, Patrick Moore, and, most of all, Johnny Ball.

These presenters made science seem, not just a collection of facts, but as connections and patterns that made sense. Their science you could see for yourself, and not just copy down out of a textbook. That’s also what drew me to computers – the stuff I know about computers I know not because I read it in a book or learned it on a course, but because I’ve done it and seen it for myself. That was as true of the 12-year-old me with his ZX-81 and his Think of a Number as it is today.

Science was about what could be demonstrated. I can’t imagine any science programme in the 1980s that talked about “consensus opinion” holding the same interest for me. And so I just wonder, is it a coincidence that all three of these people who led me into science are on record as not believing in global warming?

Climate and Democracy

The theory has been going around recently that dealing effectively with climate change is impossible due to democracy. I think it may have been triggered by an article in Der Spiegel, published in a translated form at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.

As a sceptic of both global warming and democracy, I have no dog in this fight. If Climate Change means we have to ditch democracy, that’s OK with me; on the other hand, if democracy means we can’t do anything about climate change, that’s just fine too. Nevertheless, the intersection of the two obsessions that this blog seems to have settled on demands my attention.

So let’s take the argument, attributed to David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, that democracy is incapable of taking the collective action made necessary by the threat of climate change. I haven’t read their book, so I am dealing with a summary of their ideas, for instance from these articles by Shearman.

The weakness of the global warming argument doesn’t necessarily invalidate the claim that democracy is unequal to the challenge it presents. To defeat it on that basis, you would have to show either that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is not just untrue, but impossible, or else that the determination of democratic governments to take any measures necessary short of action is primarily the result of well-founded doubts about the science.

Take these in order: first, is it possible that some such threat as global warming is claimed to be could actually be true? I would say that it is much less likely that some such threat would materialize than that a false threat would be promoted by opportunists, but I cannot say that it is impossible. The global warming scare itself cannot be dismissed out of hand (despite the attempts of some sceptics to to so), but can only be ruled out on the basis of a close look at the evidence.

So we can go on to ask the second question: if AGW or something like it were actually true, would the political structures that we have make it impossible for the necessary collective action to be taken?

It’s plausible, but, at least in the brief articles if not in his book, Shearman does not make that case. He relies on the fact that meaningful action has not, in fact, been taken by democratic governments. That might be, as he says, because they’re not capable of it, but it might equally be that the stalemate is the result of opposition from those who, in my view correctly, believe on the basis of the evidence that such meaningful action is not in fact warranted.

Assessment of this issue is complicated by a feature that global warming alarmism shares with other religions: many people even at an individual level say they believe it but act as if they don’t. I’m not sure it makes much sense, descending into familiar arguments about cheap talk versus revealed preferences, to ask what such people “really” believe, but I think one has to say that to some degree they are unpersuaded by the evidence, even if they say otherwise. Given that, there is still the possibility that the doubt which they have but deny is not reasonable doubt, but is founded on a psychological unwillingness to internalise inconvenient truths.

If this contradiction were limited to the common people, it would be a point in Shearman’s favour. The plebs are not fit to govern, therefore the wise must rule them. However, the inconsistency seems to me to be just as widespread among the powerful as among the mob – I have previously observed, for instance, that investors do not rate sea level rises as significant in their valuations of commercial property.

So for me, Shearman’s argument fails, unfortunately. I suspect that, despite its faults, our democratic governments (in the sense of old democracy, of course) would be able to take sufficient action on climate change, were it really necessary. The reason they are not taking such action is that it is not necessary. The reason they say it is necessary, while not actually taking it, is that they are are lying as usual.

The real link between democracy and global warming is quite different, and is adequately summarised by my guru Mencius Moldbug. In short, the global warming scare and its associated bureaucratic outgrowths are the sort of thing you would expect a democracy to produce – indeed, the kind of thing they always have produced.

The scare originated in democratic countries, spread through democratic countries, and has only been accepted by non-democratic countries after they were pressured or bribed to do so by democracies.

Proof of the Impossibility of Democracy

There’s nothing new here, but I think I can put it more simply and clearly than I’ve managed to do before.

Obviously many “democratic” governments exist, and when we normally talk about democracies, these are what we mean. What I’m talking about here is the theoretical idea of democracy, where policy is controlled by the voters. This is the distinction I made previously in Two kinds of democracy.

Political systems can be changed, either by invasion, overthrow from within the territory but outside the government, or subversion from within the structure of the government itself.

All governments devote a large part of their effort and resources to protecting themselves against being changed. It can be assumed that any governments which do not do so, get changed.

To protect the political system, the government needs to correctly identify the threats that exist to it, and devote sufficient resources and attention to resisting them. The chief premiss on which I base my argument here is that this is hard.

If those inside the government structures do not have the freedom of policy to protect the system, they will be unable to do so and the system will be changed. Most commonly, it is subverted from within, until those within the system do have the ability to hold onto power.

If the system is truly democratic, office-holders within the system do not have freedom of policy. Policy is dictated by voters. This is the line I am drawing: I am not attacking some straw-man “perfect” democracy, but any in which the voters can overrule the elite on matters of policy. If they cannot, then it is an “old democracy” and potentially stable.

Voters do not have sufficient inside knowledge of the political situation to choose the policies that will preserve their democratic power. Further, they do not have sufficient interest in doing so – the value of having a vote is in being able to influence policy according to one’s preferences, and that is always likely to take priority over preserving the present system.

There are many examples of democracies voting to get rid of democracy – 1930s Germany and Italy being the best known. What I say is that democracies always vote to get rid of democracy, if not directly, then by not voting to prevent the system being subverted from within. That produces the “old democracy” I wrote about previously, in which the influence of voters is minor, and real power lies in institutions which are capable of perpetuating themselves

There could be an important exception to all this. If the franchise is limited in some way to a distinct minority of the population, then the chief threat to the system is from the disenfranchised. The voters will be well aware of this, and will have a clear and obvious interest in preserving the system which keeps power for their class. Such a system will be more stable than a true democracy with a universal or near-universal franchise.

This breaks down if there is no clear distinction between the ruling class and the disenfranchised. In that case, one faction or other within the ruling class can always benefit by a small extension of the franchise. The result is a ratchet causing the restricted franchise to eventually become universal.

Thus classical and 19th-century democracies were somewhat more stable than new democracies created today. The voters were aware that the current system was what kept them in a privileged position, and were very aware of threats to the system. From the point of view of a voter in a universal-suffrage “young” democracy, democracy just isn’t worth voting to defend.

This doesn’t mean that the fact of there being elections doesn’t have an effect – just that the actual opinions of the voters don’t.

Major threat to your email

I just came across this story, from a few months ago. I’m surprised it didn’t get more play, because it’s much more serious than the run-of-the-mill software vulnerability story.

PC’s are not secure, and never have been. For most of us, that hasn’t been a big concern. We try to keep viruses and bots off our systems, either by avoiding Windows or by more iffy and difficult methods. But that’s mostly due to a desire to keep our systems running and be good network citizens. But the risk of a personal attack on your system has always been a long shot, because, despite the fact there are many people who could read your email, there’s little reason any of them would want to. The sets of people who know how, and people who would care to, are small enough that their intersection is probably zero.

That calculation has now changed. If there is someone who has a grudge against you, or some other motive to want to read your email or impersonate you, and that person knows how to buy stuff on the internet, you are now at serious risk.

I’ve talked before about how to make your email secure, but it’s difficult to do reliably, and the advice in the article is probably best. If you want to keep stuff secret, don’t put it on a computer, unless you’re an expert.