Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Science, Epistomology…

5 Comments

…and science reporting. An interesting post by Derb:

…science has more epistemic depth than most of us can cope with. That water quenches thirst and puts out fires, I can confirm by experience. That it is composed of hydrogen molecules bonded to oxygen molecules by electromagnetic forces, I take on trust. “What the deuce is it to me?” I take it on trust because water’s real useful (see above). I’d likely be skeptical about the hydrogen/oxygen business if it were detached from the thirst-quenching and fire-extinguishing. It sounds improbable on the face of it, and one can easily think up folkish objections, of the kind that creationists make against evolution. (Hydrogen’s highly flammable. If there’s hydrogen in water, why isn’t water flammable? Etc., etc.)

When unmoored from utility, abstract ideas have to appeal to the human mind on their merits; and the human mind is so structured that the only abstract ideas it regards as having merit are those that concord with the “naïve duality” that is our default metaphysic — “medium-sized dry goods” being acted on by human wills, or by invisible spirits possessed of human-like wills. That’s as much epistemic depth as most of us can handle. Abstract ideas at odds with that schema just irritate us. And of course, an abstract idea widely held among people we dislike for personal, social, or tribal reasons, is doubly unappealing.

When the science has as powerful real-world implications as climate “science” (sorry, it’s hard to say it without scare quotes at this point) does, it must be trusted much more than it currently deserves to be, based on the behavior of its ostensible practioners.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Thoughts On Judicial Supremacy

10 Comments

Ramesh discusses something that doesn’t get enough discussion:

The argument that has not been made (or at least not made often) is that the whole legislation — not just the individual mandate — exceeds the constitutional powers of the federal government. This classic conservative position has gone unvoiced. I suspect that it has done so because, again, of the influence of judicial supremacy. We have been trained to think that saying that an overhaul of American health care exceeds the legitimate powers of Congress is equivalent to calling for the judicial invalidation of health-care legislation (along with much of modern government, by implication). Since that would be absurd to call for, we don’t say it.

At the risk of being thought quixotic, let me suggest that we need to revive a dormant tradition of legislative reasoning and argument about the Constitution. In this kind of constitutional reasoning considerations that it would be improper for judges to invoke have their place.

What a concept. This is annoying, too:

…too many commentators have dwelt on the question of how the courts are likely to treat the legislation — or, at best, what they should do consistent with their precedents — rather than on the distinct question of whether the Constitution, properly interpreted, grants Congress the power to enact this legislation.

It’s partly because many of the commentariat don’t even understand the Constitution, nor care about it much, at least when it comes to the government running the economy. But it’s also a symptom of the simple-mindedness of the media. It’s like a political campaign where they report on the horse race — who’s ahead or behind — rather than what the candidates actually say about the issues, with an analysis of it. Yes, it’s not unimportant to speculate about how a court will rule, but it’s not as important as analyzing the actual legal and constitutional issues, but they’re either incapable of that, or uninterested.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Hiding The Decline

13 Comments

…is even worse than it first appeared. It would appear that tree rings are worse than useless as a proxy for temperature.

[Late afternoon update]

The data has been tortured, and it has confessed:

Continent after continent, researchers are seeing no warming in the unprocessed data (see one thorough analysis here).

For years, I have been a true skeptic on the subject. That is, I wasn’t convinced that the planet was warming, but I was willing to concede the possibility, even probability, and be convinced, though I never thought that it justified the costly and draconian, even totalitarian measures being proposed to deal with it.

I’ve reached a tipping point. Now consider me a “denier.” The burden of proof has shifted, completely. The climate scientific community has clearly been engaged in a toxic combination of groupthink, overadoration of their theories and confirmation bias, and outright fraud, not to mention hiding a lot more than the decline. Whoever finally blew the whistle on them last month is, in my opinion, an unknown hero to humanity.

I’ll have more thoughts on this, and the implications for national and global policies, at PJM in the morning.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

When Science Becomes A Casualty Of Politics

3 Comments

Cathy Young has some thoughts, but she makes the same mistake that many in the media do when discussing the issue:

I will freely admit that I don’t have enough knowledge of science or familiarity with the scientific method to be able to come to a truly informed conclusion at to which version of “ClimateGate” is right. Neither, I suspect, do some 95 percent (or, more likely, 99 percent) of people who have spoken out on the issue, on either side. That means they are likely to go with their political instincts and listen to those “experts” who reflect their own preconceived opinions. Conservatives and libertarians, who see the crusade against global warming as an attack on capitalism and freedom, are very likely to think that the hacked emails are devastating to the case for human-made global warming; liberals and leftists, who see global warming denial as an attempt to protect greed and unbridled consumption, are very likely to think that the only real scandal is the deniers’ shameless manipulation of public opinion in an attempt to discredit solid science.

It’s always the “hacked” (as opposed to released by a whistleblower) “emails,” which while quite disturbing enough, are not the smoking cannon that has shown what these people are doing as non science. It’s the bogus models and made-up data, and the inside look at them provided by Harry_Read_Me.txt.

Jim Lindgren has a useful challenge to the defenders of these people:

…if I were Professor Mann’s dean at Penn State, I would try to determine whether he has fully shared his data, metadata, and computer code. To the extent that he hasn’t already, I would try to make him do so – at least for his most important or most controversial articles in recent years. And, for reason #3 above, I wouldn’t take Mann’s word for it. I’d call his critics and ask them to name the few most important Mann papers for which the data and computer code are needed for replication.

If Mann is still withholding the data and code necessary for replication, I’d ask him to replicate his most important or most controversial recent work (certainly not everything) and to release the data and code so that others might do so. If Mann couldn’t replicate his own work, I would ask him to announce that fact to the scientific community, so that serious scientists would know whether his work is replicable.

Thus, if I were Professor Mann’s dean, probably the only power I’d use would be to further the scientific enterprise. And even that would not be necessary if ethical standards were higher in the subfield of paleoclimatology.

Unfortunately, the subfield seems to have devolved into a religious cult, attracting second raters.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Why Not Just Fund The Program Of Record?

19 Comments

Chris Kraft weighs in with a “common sense approach”:

NASA should essentially stay the course that has been pursued for the past several years. It makes good common sense to preserve and continue the use of the present NASA assets. Specifically, NASA should:

* Continue to operate the space shuttle until a suitable replacement is available, and initiate a study to consider a modernization program aimed primarily at reducing the operating costs.
* Operate and maintain the international space station until it ceases to be economically reasonable and scientifically productive.
* Continue to push forward with orderly haste to accomplish the goals set forth by the Constellation program.
* Initiate an aggressive research and development program aimed at the technology required to make space exploration to Mars and other deep-space objectives rational and affordable.
* Estimate a realistic set of budget requirements for the total NASA program based on the above goals and the other elements and goals of the agency.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain how much this would cost (it would cost billions to get the lines started again to keep Shuttle flying alone, even ignoring the orbiter-aging issues), or where the money would come from. Without doing any analysis, I’m guessing that it would require a doubling of the current HSF budget, or on the order of an additional ten billion dollars per year, for a system that will continue to cost billions per mission.

Jon Goff, on the other hand, explains why Kraft’s proposal is a non-starter, and fiscally insane:

Where I come from, we tend to think that getting a heck of a lot less while paying a heck of a lot more is usually the sign of a sucker. I just wish that a few space pundits and public figures didn’t keep enabling Senator Shelby and his ilk from hijacking NASA’s budget to enrich his campaign contributors at the rest of our expense.

Unfortunately, it’s more than a few. He also has a good question for Chris Kraft and other America bashers:

Why does Congress trust Russian commercial space more than American commercial space, btw?

Obviously, Russians are much better than American entrepreneurs and businesses. The latter can’t be entrusted with the vital duty of spending billions of dollars per flight on unsafe vehicles to protect jobs in key states and congressional districts.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Common Sense

3 Comments

…backed up by real math and science, instead of ideology. Thoughts on Kyopenhagen and Climaquiddick from Bjorn Lomborg:

…let’s say we index 1990 global emissions at 100. If there were no Kyoto at all, the 2010 level would have been 142.7.

With full Kyoto implementation, it would have been 133. In fact, the actual outcome of Kyoto is likely to be a 2010 level of 142.2 ― virtually the same as if we had done nothing at all. Given 12 years of continuous talks and praise for Kyoto, this is not much of an accomplishment.

The Kyoto Protocol did not fail because any one nation let the rest of the world down. It failed because making quick, drastic cuts in carbon emissions is extremely expensive.

Whether or not Copenhagen is declared a political victory, that inescapable fact of economic life will once again prevail ― and grand promises will once again go unfulfilled.

Fortunately, reality will still prevail, despite the speechifying and bloviating.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space

Emily Bazelon’s Problem

125 Comments

Emily Bazelon isn’t aware of the depth of the irony of her piece at Slate, that describes her apathy to space (which she defines as “astronomy”):

The other night, my boys curled up on the couch with my husband and went to the moon. They were enthralled by a grainy video of Neil Armstrong’s 1969 shaky descent onto the pitted lunar sand. “Mom, the Eagle has landed!” they shouted in unison. “Come watch!” I was in the kitchen, reading Elizabeth Weil’s New York Times Magazine story on the perils of trying to improve a companionate marriage.

She and Liz Weil are soulmates. Liz spent many months hanging around Rotary Rocket in the late 1990s (I had dinner with her once in Tehachapi), doing research for a book that was roundly panned by everyone actually involved. For instance, see Tom Brosz’ review. It was quite clear that she had little interest in space herself, but was treating the thing as more of an anthropological expedition — a Diane Fosse “space engineers in the mist” sort of deal. Emily goes on:

I sat down, put the magazine aside, and tried to care about the moon, the planets, the stars, the galaxy. I concentrated on the astronauts and Sputnik and the race with the Soviet Union from JFK to Nixon. But I was interrupted by a stingy voice in my head: Just think what we could do on this planet with all the time and energy we spend trying to reach other ones. I know, I know: It’s anti-science, anti-American, anti-imagination. But I am incorrigibly, constitutionally earthbound. I have never willingly studied a single page of astronomy. My knowledge of the planets begins and ends with My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pillows (except, no more P, as Simon has informed me). I relish stories about NASA boondoggles for confirming my suspicion that the agency is a budget sinkhole.

Well, the agency (at least the human spaceflight part of it) is largely a budget sinkhole. We certainly don’t get value commensurate with the costs. It doesn’t have to be, but because most people are, like Emily, not that interested in space, at least as done by NASA, politicians are free to do whatever they want with its budget, so much of it ends up being simple pork. That’s just Public Choice 101. If Emily and others actually cared, perhaps NASA might have to do more useful things with the money.

But her ignorance extends far beyond simple astronomy. For someone who seems to revel in the fact that NASA wastes its money, like much of the public, she is profoundly unaware of how much (or relatively, little) money it actually is:

Simon has been asking for a periscope. He also says that when he grows up, he’s going to be an astronomer and an astronaut. I mentioned biologist as an alternative a few times. But then I stopped. Now I tell him that I can’t wait for him to teach me all about the solar system. Maybe he’ll be a rebel astronomer, and someday reform NASA, or call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.

If she thinks that ending human spaceflight would be more than spitting in a hurricane with regard to the Social Security budget, she is innumerate beyond belief. You could either double, or zero, the NASA budget, and either way it would barely be a rounding error in SS, or the rest of the federal budget in general. I wish that more people thought that space was important, and that it was about more than astronomy. I also wish that people would think and care more about how, not whether NASA was spending the money. But as long as they’re so ignorant as to think that NASA, wasteful or not, has anything to do with the deficit, or the failure to solve intractable social problems (we saw an excellent example of this during the presidential campaign, when candidate Obama’s first space policy was written by an education staffer who thought that we could use the NASA budget for more education funding), we’re unlikely to get better space policy, or policy in general.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Hiding The Decline At Google?

97 Comments

I got this email (I’ll keep the emailer anonymous unless (s)he notifies me otherwise):

It’s very disturbing how Google is behaving with regard to Climategate/Climaquiddick. I put both of those in my custom news page. For a while, it steadfastly refused to update Climaquiddick, and then it began to update Climategate only with stories attacking climate change skeptics. I could find many more stories on Yahoo, most of which were alarmed at the fraud which seems to be occurring.

Then when I logged in today, Google News had deleted those two categories from my custom section. When I reestablished them, they brought up only a few of the old, outdated original stories plus a few newer attack stories.

Web searches on Climaquiddick yielded only 72,600 hits on Google and 84,300 on Bing, but 565,000 on Yahoo. None of them will autocomplete the word “Climaquiddick.” They won’t autocomplete “Climategate” either, but Yahoo alone will suggest “climate gate.”

Does everyone in Silicon Valley think that pretending information doesn’t exist will make it so? If so, how much can we trust the technology they produce?

I think that there are going to be huge reverberations of untrust throughout many areas of authority resulting from this. As was pointed out early on, it’s not just a scientific scandal, it’s a journalistic one.