[Osx-nutters] Denial

[David Cake]

At 12:09 AM +0100 15/8/07, Stefano Mori wrote:
>On 2007-Aug-14, at 23:43, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>
>>>  I doubt it because they say the debate is over.
>>>
>>>  Virtual certainly about forecasts of big complex systems only leads
>>>  me to suspicion.
>>
>>  It's one thing to say  'the debate  is over because all the
>>  conceivable evidence is in and it is unambiguous': It is quite
>>  another to say 'the debate is over because you lied for money and got
>>  caught.' It's just silly to continue a discussion with someone who is
>>  acting in bad faith.
>>
>>  I think the point is that some people have forfeited their right to
>>  be part of the debate.
>
>OK, some people, but do you agree there are legitimate people with 
>legitimate criticisms and contributions?

	Some, but not many left active in the debate at this point.
	And some even start out OK, and turn nuts.


>If not then you're assuming that every criticism was from liars and
>cheats.

	I've never assumed that all contributions are from liars and 
cheats - even at my most dismissive, I've said that there are shills 
AND cranks. And crank isn't always as dismissive as it sounds. Plenty 
of people can be respected researchers in their primary field, and 
cranks in another [1], or just get old and out of touch, or have deep 
and personal, but ultimately subjective and not rationally 
justifiable, reasons for holding the position they do (religion being 
the most common, obviously, but ideology and commitment to a cause 
play their part). Cranks can be reasonable people who just keep 
passionately holding an opinion that appears wrong. Ans sure, 
sometimes the only difference between a crank and a brilliant 
revolutionary is that the latter, in retrospect, turns out to be 
right. But until then, they are probably just cranks.

	There are, of course, legitimate contributors to the debate 
who have taken a sceptical position in the past. My original 'debate 
is over' post was, if you'll recall, sparked by noting that some of 
the last of the credible skeptics, those who were neither paid 
commentators or cranks, had publicly changed their side - leaving the 
field of skeptics somewhat fallow, sprouting only bitter and 
unproductive crops. But there was an implicit position there that the 
anti-AWG debate had some credible people on its side once. I'm sure 
we can both agree that there comes such a cross over point where the 
opposition to a theory becomes so dominated by liars and cranks that 
the arguments can be written off despite obvious active supporters of 
the alternative point of view - creationism, for example, obviously 
passed this point a long time ago, as did homeopathy, both have 
active supporters with money and influence, and are part of political 
debate, but no supporters respected enough to really support the idea 
that there is any active *scientific* debate. The issue with the 
anti-AWG debate is whether this point has already occurred or not. I 
think your position on this boils down to you only being willing to 
admit that point has passed with the justification of year of 
hindsight (ie you might be willing to admit that that point was 
passed in 2005 in 2015, but you aren't willing to do so now).

	There is also, as previously mentioned, the PR works 
argument. Legitimate smart commentators who are NOT experts in the 
field can easily get hoodwinked by well prepared biased arguments, 
honed over years of debate. Because it looks convincing until you 
check to see what has been superceded by later work, what is taken 
out of context, what is unsourced, what is a quote from a book by an 
astrologer, etc. so smart, but busy or gullible, people sometimes get 
drawn into backing them. But few such people remain in the debate for 
long - most, like Bellamy, for example, pop their head up, make a few 
comments, get their reputation savaged, and slink off in 
embarrassment. And such people hardly count - for a start, they 
usually make only brief appearances, and for another, they generally 
just echo arguments made by others (if they were involved in the 
debate enough to make original contributions, they seem to end up on 
the other side...).

	And while I chose the example of Millroy as one of the bad 
guys to make the point very forcibly (because Millroy really is a 
horrible human being - the whole recent kerfuffle where he used the 
occasion of a (widely respected) opponents death to heap abuse on 
their reputation gives you an idea), there are others I'm much more 
positively inclined towards, but not in a way that inclines me to 
give huge credence to their arguments.
	Ian Plimer, for example, is an Australian AWG denier and 
geologist. I actually really liked one of his earlier books, in which 
his argument style was aggressive, dismissive, and very one-sided, 
and I never really thought he seriously considered for a moment that 
his opponents arguments were true. That book, Telling Lies For God, 
was about Creationism, and I don't think creationism deserves to be 
considered seriously as a scientific theory either, so his aggressive 
one-sided scorn was fine by me on that occasion. Yet, even though I 
liked the book, his personality and style of argument, so clear in 
that book, is enough to make me not take his criticisms of AWG 
terribly seriously, especially when its obvious to me that he is 
applying arguments from one field of science (geology) to make wild 
claims in another (climate science). Which was, you know, fine by me 
when he was making arguments from arithmetic and biology to demolish 
creationist claims about Noahs Ark, but just kind of annoying and 
pointless in the AWG debate. Plimer gets filed under crank (yes, his 
association with the mining industry makes the source of his bias 
clear, but I think its bias rather than selling his opinion), and I 
still like his previous book, but I'm not convinced that he counts as 
a genuine scientific contributor (especially as, despite being an 
academic, his contributions to the AWG debate are confined to 
fulminating in newspaper opinion columns, not making serious 
scientific argument - he apparently sees his opponents as just a 
bunch of crazy greeny hippies).

	Cheers
		David

[1]  Roger Penrose, for example, is, in his original field of 
mathematics, regarded as a major respectable figure, but in the field 
that I have most expertise in, cognitive science, is regarded as more 
or less a pop sci crank, cranking out hoary old ideas as if they are 
new, and making wild claims entirely unsupported by evidence (his 
major argument basically runs 'consciousness is very mysterious, 
quantum physics in very mysterious, so consciousness is probably due 
to quantum effects').