[william-newman]

I agree that Crichton's analogy to eugenics is really inflammatory and offensive, and even that that's likely part of his reason for choosing it. But in his defense, it might not be the main reason. Consider: How many examples of bogus expert consensus are still remembered today? It seems to me that in order to be remembered, such examples need to be pretty horrific in one way or another. For example, we still remember that doctors bled patients for centuries. If Crichton had tried to draw an analogy between global warming and the long history of bleeding medical patients, wouldn't that've been offensive too?

So what about choosing less-well-known examples, then? E.g., in principle he could have talked about the 1960-era political and academic bogus consensus that the long-run Philips curve allowed governments to reduce unemployment in a usefully stable and predictable way by printing more money. (short form of the last chapter of that story: 1970s stagflation) That analogy would probably've been less offensive than eugenics or bleeding, but it also would've required teaching most people the whole story from scratch. That's a pretty high practical price to pay for being able to use a less offensive example. He might increase his audience by not giving his audience the "he's just being offensive" excuse to ignore him, certainly. But people who disagree with him are unlikely to want to trust him, which makes it hard to tell the story convincingly. With the eugenics story he can keep appealing to things that people already know independently, and so can convey his points about the story even to people who're looking for excuses to ignore him.

[Tichy]

Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever.

A = "eugenics is wrong"

B = "opponents of eugenics where persecuted"

There simply is no logically correct way to deduce A from B, and drawing an analogy to

C = "global warning is wrong"

D = "opponents of global warning are being persecuted"

doesn't make it any better (you can't infer C from D, that you can't deduce A from B doesn't make D => C any more legitimate).

[william-newman]

"Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever."

The only point? I think not.

One other point which Crichton makes explicitly is "The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale." Bad science can be very expensive, people mouthing bad science can do extremely nasty things in its name. I think he hammers on this point too much in the essay. It seems to me that most people are already predisposed to believe that policies based in bad science can be really bad: bandwidth is cheap, but why waste it on flogging this dead horse when it could be better used for porn about flogging dead horses? I also think bringing in Lysenkoism is a bad idea because even though it is a valid illustration of bad science being expensive, it comes with the non-parallel of being enforced by world-class murderous repression of dissent, which is too much of a distraction. But whether or not my criticisms are valid, I think it's clearly a point.

Another point which I don't think Crichton makes explicitly, but which seems to motivate various of his examples, is illustrating that a form of argument could be used to justify horrid and stupid eugenic claims and policies. That's both a vivid way of making the point that that form of argument is logically invalid style, and a way of demonstrating that that form of argument dangerous in political practice, and shouldn't be taken lightly.

Look at martythemaniak's post...

"I really don't have the ego to claim I magically know better than thousands of scientists and decades of research, ..." Adjust that for the smaller 1920 scientific population, s/thousands/hundreds/ perhaps, and you have a right-thinking person wisely avoiding being branded as a eugenics denier.

AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to Darwinists and their critics to creationists. Very well, then: why stoop to use arguments which were used to defend Sanger? Think of valid arguments like the ones which worked to defend Darwin but not Sanger, and use them in preference to flaky arguments which can be used to defend any old garbage. Especially, Darwin and his followers found all sorts of extensive patterns of species and population which, to the best of my knowledge, defy explanation any other way. So why not use arguments like that? They can be extremely convincing.

bad example 2: "the fact that CO2 Levels are higher today than anytime in the last 800000 years, or the fact of the 40% increase since the 1800s, my conclusion is pretty obvious." s/CO2/non-Aryan/, s/the last 800000 years/our nation's history/.

Unfortunately, banging on one superficial correlation and declaring victory is a classic pro-Sanger style of argument, not the kind of characteristically pro-Darwin argument that I was referring to. It might seem like good clean fun if you are a true believer and haven't thought about it, but think about it now. Or, if you still don't realize how dysfunctional it is, start by imagining trying to dissuade someone who thinks he has found revealed inconvenient truth in "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

After that, feel free to copy the Darwinists by blasting away with all those independent detailed observed patterns which match AGW. Or pick some other style of argument which worked for Darwin and not for Sanger, and use that.

Or, alternatively, perhaps no such arguments exist, and instead the comparison to Darwinists is self-flattery on such a cosmic scale that AGW does have enormous explanatory power --- in that the gravitational effect of the vast self-flattery cloud explains what the cosmologists call "dark matter". That's roughly my opinion: possibly the Gore/IPCC version of AGW (only very small non-CO2-driven global climate fluctuations, and large positive feedback in climate response to CO2) is correct, but certainly it is not a glaringly obvious truth about the world like Darwin's natural selection. Instead it's like the Philips Curve question I wrote about elsewhere: the answer should become clearer over time, and you can make valid arguments now about what it will turn out to be, but it's not a routine matter to convince an honest skeptic by direct appeals to observation. Darwinists could sample a near-endless supply of independent ecosystems to determine whether a pattern holds or not, and they delighted in charging into the details. AGWists start with a naturally data-poor problem like the Philips Curve arguers, and then many of them make it poorer by retreating from the details, refusing to commit themselves to anything sharper than decadal averages over the entire globe.

[Tichy]

Sorry I could not follow you completely. Probably it is still too early in the morning for me.

Refuting the theory of a random commentor on HN is just strawman argumentation, though (sorry martythemaniak).

"AGW advocates like martythemaniak delight in comparing themselves to Darwinists and their critics to creationists."

Um, that is kind of turning it on the head: all this is in reply to an article that tries to defame AGW people as advocates of eugenics. It's as if you say "AGWs are like Creationists", then AGWs reply "no we are not" and you claim victory by saying "see, AGWs think their opponents are creationists".

I myself am simply no expert on climate change. Some knowledge from my area of expertise spills over to climate research, though: the so called "no free lunch theorem". There is no such thing as a free lunch - maybe it has not been universally proven in a mathemacially rigorous sense, but in general it seems to hold.

Hence I personally consider it very likely that human activity influences the climate. There are also countless examples of nature being destroyed for good by human actions.

As for the details of CO2, it would be great if we could just trust expert and politicians to sort it out. Apparently it is not so. I am interested enough to ask for more information. What are good sources to read, that are not opinionated?

[william-newman]

The creationist comparison shows up other places, too. I've encountered it several times before, and you can Google "denialist creationist" to find more.

Me trying to refute martythemaniak may not impress you, but if when you first read that topmodded post you nodded vaguely, might there be some validity in Crichton's implication that the arguments invoked for AGW could be arguments for eugenics if you filed off the serial numbers? It's an offensive charge, but it's not a goofy one IMHO: it is far more true of the arguments for AGW than of the arguments for actual "settled science" like quantum mechanics or natural selection or antibiotics or the Big Bang.

"What are good sources to read, that are not opinionated?"

One non-opinionated source as background both for my exasperation about the Darwinist analogy, and for my claims about the flabbiness of 10-year-old climate predictions, which also happens to be interesting reading for hackers interested in machine learning: _The Minimum Description Length Principle_. Lots of math to help you think precisely about questions like "by how many bits did this hypothesis reduce the surprisingness of the world compared to alternative hypotheses?"

For sources more specific to the AGW controversy, good luck finding someone unopinionated. The controversy long ago became uncivil, and all sides are indignant about various scummy folk who have lined up on other sides. But I can point you to sources that seem (opinionated but) sound. As far as I know, the IPCC reports (see martythemaniak's URL) are a reasonably good presentation of the highbrow case for crisis AGW (high CO2 climate sensitivity, low natural variation): I've never seen an advocate claim that vital parts of the pro-crisis case were overlooked or horribly poorly presented there. And I think McIntyre's critiques of the IPCC reports --- mostly centered on the historical climate record reconstruction I mentioned --- are generally sound. He has a website, Climate Audit; he has also written the Mann critique up as at least one traditional journal paper. Besides his Mann critique, he has also done things like catching a Y2K bug in temperature records. (Of course that's not impressive as virtuoso rocket science, but I think it's pretty convincing evidence that he's a careful guy who does a lot of homework.) It is natural for AGWists to find him irritating, but it is inexcusable to try to dismiss him as a ignorant closedminded crank by analogy with modern disbelievers in natural selection.

And besides the math and technical background, some academic sociology background: McIntyre is not the only opinionated grouchy outsider who has torpedoed a politically correct prestigious academic consensus in the last decade or so, Cramer did too: http://law.bepress.com/nwwps/lep/art9/ .

[Tichy]

"The creationist comparison shows up other places, too."

So what point are you trying to make? Do GW people as a rule compare AGW people with creationists? And even if they would, what bearing would it have on the debate?

I have found McIntyre's blog, he seems to be a busy individual. At the moment he is discussing something about prehistoric buckets. That might be too much detail for my entry level... Also, I wonder what he would dig up if he spent the same energy on finding evidence FOR global warming.

Didn't find suitable articles at the Cramer link. Anyway, I will do my own searching.

[william-newman]

Here's a nice example of equating AGW skeptics to creationists, one that I vaguely remembered, but had trouble digging up: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/hello_stan_palmer... .

As I said, the controversy long ago became uncivil.

Besides illustrating the creationist comparison, I think it illustrates my point about AGW advocacy resembling eugenics advocacy. If a lazy screenwriter wanted rhetoric for a 1920s eugenicist scorning a prominent critic, he could do worse than "the myopic little nitpickers, people who scurry about seeking little bits of garbage in the fabric of science (and of course, there are such flaws everywhere), and when they find some scrap of rot, they squeak triumphantly and hold it high and declare that the science everywhere is similarly corrupt." But wouldn't those words sound out of place in a defense of a successful theory like quantum mechanics or of the germ theory of disease?

Admittedly, those words are here in the mouth of a defender of the successful theory of natural selection. But he seems to be a sadly devolved specimen of the breed. Some years ago I read Darwin's reaction to Lord Kelvin's criticisms (in some webbed version of Origin of Species). Darwin just didn't declare victory because Darwin had assembled a "rational synthesis" and Kelvin had not: Darwin reacted as though addressing criticism on the details was important in and of itself.

(I myself tend to dismiss modern creationists, but certainly not because I think that details are unimportant compared to one's "coherent picture on a scientific issue." Details are very important, and one of my beefs with creationists is that they tend to be stubbornly spectacularly wrong on the details. E.g., ICR continues to misstate the second law of thermodynamics http://www.icr.org/article/456/ . It is easy for evolution to be consistent with the second law, because so much entropy is carried by food and O2 and CO2, or by sunlight and IR. In that particular article, the main sleight of hand seems to be ignoring the outgoing IR.)

[Tichy]

Well that is somebody's blog post who admits in the beginning that he is very cranky right now - a major strawman. If you show that off as a proof against GW, then it is VERY weak evidence.

You are doing the same thing as Crichton: trying to make an emotional argument, rather than a scientific one.

I suppose you could also find lots of quotes against quantum mechanics, even of famous physicists of the day. Why else would there be that quote about new scientifc discoveres not being accepted by the existing elite - rather, the old people die and the young ones embrace it.

Your last quote about creationists: details are important, but I have also seen that kind of thing: they find some ancient bone that somehow doesn't fit into the exact THEORY on the history of that specific bone (like whatever some animal has not lived 20000 years ago, but only 10000 years), and then claim they have thereby refuted evolution theory. That's ridiculous, and too much detail indeed.

[william-newman]

If I had misrepresented Myers as making the most best arguments the AGW folk have, and knocked his arguments down and proclaimed victory, you could honestly say "major strawman." But I am not playing that rhetorical trick. I already acknowledge more level-headed arguments for AGW, when I acknowledged martythemaniak's cite of IPCC as the highbrow case for AGW, and nominated McIntyre as a critic that I think makes solid criticisms. (And I note you aren't impressed with historical buckets, fine, they don't float my boat either. Try bristlecone pines, taking note of how heavily they were weighted in the famous hockey stick temperature reconstruction, and how prominently that reconstruction figured in the Gore/IPCC case for global warming. McIntyre is also a persistent critic of data not being archived, and of records like tree rings ending decades ago and not being brought up to date, and IMHO he's dead right on those things, and the relative incuriosity of the pro-AGW people is curious.)

I didn't knock down Myers to dishonestly imply that that shows I can refute the most valid arguments that AGW has to offer. I used Myers' post as an example to support two of my previous claims about AGW arguments. (1) The way martythemaniak casually compared AGW critics to creationists is not, as you argued, just an isolated instance provoked by Crichton's use of a point-by-point analogy to eugenics. (2) The controversy is uncivil. Crichton's choice of an emotionally-charged historical examples may not be a good thing, but it is not a case of AGW critics dragging a previously high-minded discussion into the emotional mud.

(And once I reread the article, I noticed that passage which seemed so ripely reminiscent of the emotional arguments of a B-movie eugenicist, making it a dramatic example of my other point, the tendency to defend AGW with arguments suitable to defend pseudoscience. You may say picking on a grouchy professor with a well-read blog is unsuitable. Do you suppose the "very cranky right now" professor thought better of his words a few days later, and qualified them and/or apologized for them? I doubt it: usually that's done by adding some kind of text on the web page itself, like "UPDATE: foo," and I didn't see anything like that. So I think you're trying to hold me to an unreasonable standard: most people would agree that a professor of science with a well-read blog is a pretty solid choice as an example of argument tactics used by AGW supporters.)

You wrote "they find some ancient bone ... ridiculous, and too much detail indeed." It's true that an actual important failing of creationists is blowing up some irrelevant detail, often exaggerating or outright misrepresenting it. It's also true that Myers might have been trying, in a dimwitted but virtuously vigorously partisan way, to allude to an important failing of Intelligent Design: unfalsifiability. Either failing could be used as a starting point for a complete rewrite, building something intellectually honest over the rubble of Myers' indignation at creationists for too stubbornly criticizing one of his favorite theories. But would the resulting valid criticism of creationists be applicable as a valid criticism of McIntyre? McIntyre is obviously guilty of what Myers accuses the creationists of, stubbornly criticizing one of Myers' favorite theories. But I don't consider that a sin, and it doesn't seem to me that McIntyre is guilty of the actual sins of the creationists, like being vastly sloppier with details than those they criticize, or claiming a vacuous theory is an improvement over a theory with considerable predictive power.

(And why are you comparing the AGW defenders to people making remarks against QM? My point was that an awful lot of AGW arguments don't look like the arguments characteristic of correct theories. If AGW advocates make remarks that resemble QM skeptics, that doesn't weaken my point, it sorta strengthens it. It is true that in politically charged controversies like Darwinism, flaky arguments were made both on the correct side and on the incorrect side. But that doesn't excuse invalid arguments "on the correct side." I don't know the intellectual history, but I'd guess that Darwin supporters who honored the flaky arguments for Darwinism might have been a contributing factor to the rise of politicized pseudoscientific knockoffs like social Darwinism and eugenics.)