[Osx-nutters] Denial

[Stefano Mori]

On 2007-Aug-16, at 06:15, David Cake wrote:

>> Curious. You accept that individuals can be severely biased by such a
>> strong ideology that their their scientific opinion is rendered
>> worthless, and meanwhile a large group of people are immune to  
>> ideology?
>
> 	Immune? No, just somewhat biased against it *as a group* by
> social mechanisms.

Like the Church?



> 	I don't think individual scientists are biased against
> ideological bias, though they aren't biased *for* it in the same ways
> as, say, politicians are. But I think the social mechanisms of
> science do not reward decision making for ideological reasons - in
> fact, they reward making a supportable statement that challenges the
> orthodoxy.

See my previous post about the guy being shouted all the way back to  
his car, "YOU CAN'T SAY THAT! YOU CAN'T SAY THAT!"

Sober medical researchers, them. You read examples of this in any  
field. It only has to happen to one person and everyone else gets it  
in their gut that it's not a good idea to step out of line too far.


> 	The distinction between individuals and social mechanisms
> that act on a group is a straight forward one.
> 	Do I believe that all soldiers are nationalistic? No, there
> are plenty that aren't. Do I believe the social mechanisms of the
> military strongly encourage them to be so, and make it unlikely that
> military groups will be otherwise? Sure. And so on.

That's the power of the group, of the culture. So far you're  
supporting my point.

An individual may be rational and love the scientific method. But if  
they join a group that encourages a moral imperative to save the  
planet, then their critical thinking can be swayed.



> 	I don't object to you claiming that SOME scientists are
> driven by an ideological bias. Of course some are, and while we'd
> probably pick out different examples, we both agree on that. I
> disagree with you that the vast majority of climate scientists are
> driven more by ideology than science, or that the social mechanisms
> of science ridigly enforce adherence to an orthodoxy - and that is a
> untested hypothesis of dubious methodology about science that I find
> unconvincing.

It's an inter-subjective judgement which I am making, and culture is  
in itself inter-subjective. It's pretty hard to objectively measure  
culture, to objectively measure unconscious motivations, and such,  
because the only way you can observe a motivation is that, you tend  
to have to do this by interpretation. It's all subjective.

So both sides can quibble with each other's interpretations. The key  
insight for dealing with this kind of cultural bias, if it exists, is  
for the people inside the culture to begin to question themselves  
introspectively. Nobody can prove to you that you are a bigoted  
racist, the whites of South Africa can just sit there and claim, as  
they did, that the world doesn't understand. So they have to start  
looking inside themselves, and that's the start of a healthy process.

You don't have to be convinced by my interpretation of their bias,  
but you also don't necessarily convince me that the cultural bias  
isn't there, so the usual wise way to handle cultural bias is to  
assume that we are all biased, we all have cultural stuff in us that  
we don't realise, and so we start by looking inside ourselves.

Imagine if the police said, "we are CERTAIN that we are NOT racists".

Why should we doubt them? Their jobs are to uphold law and order and  
justice, after all.

Stefano