Nonsense Posing As Science

     You have to admire the brass – if nothing else – of LiveScience staff writer Rafi Letzer:

     Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already.

     That's the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across the Milky Way. Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of a famous equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake wrote in 1961. The Drake equation, popularized by physicist Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos" miniseries, relied on a number of mystery variables — like the prevalence of planets in the universe, then an open question.

     This new paper, authored by three Caltech physicists and one high school student, is much more practical. It says where and when life is most likely to occur in the Milky Way, and identifies the most important factor affecting its prevalence: intelligent creatures' tendency toward self-annihilation.

     Drake’s equation, also called the Green Bank equation, remains a formula none of whose terms can be evaluated. Its use is limited to the contemplation of those factors that might figure into the frequency of intelligent life in our galaxy and its detectability by Mankind. Have a look at it and decide for yourself whether you would put money on any value assigned to any term in that formula.

     But the last sentence in the snippet cited above is the one that really made me snort:

     ...[The Caltech paper] identifies the most important factor affecting its prevalence: intelligent creatures' tendency toward self-annihilation.

     If that isn’t the biggest laugh line ever emitted under the (entirely bogus) label of “science,” I can’t imagine what would be:

• To make use of “tendency toward self-annihilation,” we must determine the probability thereof.
• But probabilities can only be calculated from either:
  1. A well-confirmed set of known causal mechanisms and their triggers; or:
  2. The ratio of known cases of “intelligent species’ self-annihilation” to known intelligent species.
• Item 1 above is entirely a matter of conjecture.
• Item 2 above is zero: i.e., we know of one intelligent species – ours – and we have not annihilated ourselves.
• Given those factors, how could anyone make estimates that aren’t utterly ludicrous?

     “Science,” eh? There’s more science in my Newf puppy Joy’s experiments in barking and whimpering to see what responses those stimuli will evoke from me. I can only imagine to what sort of “peer review” it will be subjected.

Concepts, Conceits, And Physical Laws

     “It’s better not to know so much than to know so much that isn’t so.” – Originator unknown, but frequently attributed to humorist Kin Hubbard

     Mankind is a limited species. We are capable within those limits, but incapable outside them. People forget this rather frequently – usually when it would satisfy their most cherished fantasies if it were not so. Some of the folks most frequently guilty of imagining themselves unlimited, at least within a particular demesne, work in science or technology.

     Consider, if you will, a phrase often bandied about, sometimes in a sarcastic or humorous fashion: “Does it violate the laws of physics?” Smith might reply in this fashion to Jones, when Jones objects to a proposal of Smith’s. The implication, of course, is that if what Smith has suggested doesn’t violate the laws of physics, then it’s possible at the very least.

     (Yes, many things are possible in theory but aren’t doable in practice. But that’s not what I’m driving at here. Bear with me.)

     What is the subtext of Smith’s riposte to Jones? Only this: “You and I both know the laws of physics well enough to be aware that what I’ve proposed lies within them.” Among scientists and technologists, that subtext usually goes unchallenged. That’s a pity.

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     The suggestion that the spatiotemporal universe we inhabit is “governed” by “laws” is an assumption, a premise required for the orderly investigation of natural phenomena. It’s been a generally trustworthy assumption since Francis Bacon. However, it underpins a form of conceit that’s had as much of a retarding influence on the accumulation of human knowledge as any set of taboos.

     Breakthroughs in the hard sciences are achieved mostly by young researchers. Such persons are more willing to challenge what “everyone knows” than their elders. The elders serve the cause of scientific advancement by forcing the young upstarts to prove their contentions. I use the word prove not in the mathematical sense of establishing a truth impervious to contradiction, but in the observational sense: the demonstration that some phenomenon does not conform to the “laws of physics” as the elders imagine them.

     The universe does indeed seem to obey a set of “laws of physics.” However, the further we probe into the realms of the very large, the very small, and the very fast, the more likely it seems that we don’t really know those laws in absolute, all-encompassing, perfect-precision exactitude. As we’re too limited a species to go beyond certain magnitudes, my contention is that we never will.

     The true scientist is aware of the nature of true science: a realm of observation, inference, hypothecation, and experimental design in which a theory can be disproved but never proved beyond all possibility of subsequent contradiction. He hopes not for absolute knowledge but for confidence: an ever-increasing set of confirmations of the theories he propounds about the laws of Nature. That confidence arises from success in predicting the outcomes of relevant, well designed experiments.

     Such a scientist must remain faithful to Socrates’ Dictum: “Only one thing do I know, and that is that I know nothing.” To abandon that post is to leave off being a scientist and become a dogmatist.

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     This comes to mind today because of this article about the EmDrive:

     SINCE THE BIRTH of the space age, the dream of catching a ride to another solar system has been hobbled by the “tyranny of the rocket equation,” which sets hard limits on the speed and size of the spacecraft we sling into the cosmos. Even with today’s most powerful rocket engines, scientists estimate it would take 50,000 years to reach our closest interstellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. If humans ever hope to see an alien sunrise, transit times will have to drop significantly.

     Of the advanced propulsion concepts that could theoretically pull that off, few have generated as much excitement—and controversy—as the EmDrive. First described nearly two decades ago, the EmDrive works by converting electricity into microwaves and channeling this electromagnetic radiation through a conical chamber. In theory, the microwaves can exert force against the walls of the chamber to produce enough thrust to propel a spacecraft once it’s in space. At this point, however, the EmDrive exists only as a laboratory prototype, and it’s still unclear whether it’s able to produce thrust at all. If it does, the forces it generates aren’t strong enough to be registered by the naked eye, much less propel a spacecraft.

     I’m eager for the results of the tests proposed for the EmDrive. I hope it demonstrates thrust without reaction for two reasons. First, it’s every science-fiction writer’s dream that reactionless propulsion be possible and achievable. Without it, we’re probably stuck in this solar system. But second and more important, it would reveal that one of the “laws of physics” – the conservation of momentum – comes with a codicil that begins “except for…” and goes on to state circumstances where it doesn’t apply as we’ve understood it lo! these many moons. That would be a true advance in the science of physics.

     What are the odds? I have no idea; I’m not conversant with the mechanisms underlying the EmDrive. If I had to place a bet, it would be on the conservation of momentum. In other words, I’d say the observed thrust is probably an illusory effect. But science requires that I be open to the possibility that the EmDrive will really work as proposed.

     It really comes down to a concept – and a word – that scientists cordially detest and strive to avoid with all their might:

     Not that the count was a drone. At last reports, he had been involved in some highly esoteric tampering with the Haertel equations—that description of the space-time continuum which, by swallowing up the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction exactly as Einstein had swallowed Newton (that is, alive), had made interstellar flight possible. Ruiz-Sanchez did not understand a word of it, but, he reflected with amusement, it was doubtless perfectly simple once you understood it.
     Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category. It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction. As a Jesuit—even here, fifty light-years from Rome—Ruiz-Sanchez knew something about knowledge that Lucien le Comte des Bois-d’Averoigne had forgotten, and that Cleaver would never learn: that all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
     The residuum was faith.

     [James Blish, A Case of Conscience]

     Food for thought…and for humility.

A Deadly Allergy

     WARNING! The following piece contains not merely facts and logic, but also the correct uses of the words datum and data. (Also, persons who find the word whence offensive to their sensibilities might want to seek out some lighter reading.)

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     Once upon a time I was a scientist. Back then, one of the jokes slung around among my colleagues went roughly like this: “If the data contradict your hypothesis, discard the data! Your grant may depend on it.”

     I must emphasize that it was a joke. It cross-cuts the central tenet of all the sciences:

Hypotheses are cheap.
Data are sacred.

     This has been honored as the core of scientific thought since Francis Bacon first propounded the scientific method.

     But what is a datum? Whence does it come? What makes it sacred? Can there be legitimate differences of opinion about such things?

     A datum is not an opinion. It is not an evaluation. It is not an interpretation of something someone has written or said. It is a fact provided by objective reality: i.e., by the world outside our heads. It is some object or event that any two persons whose relevant senses are unimpaired could confront simultaneously and agree on.

     All else – i.e., all that is not data – is open to dispute. Data are sacred.

     A world in which data are not agreed to be sacred is one in which no proposition can be verified or falsified, and no argument can ever be settled. It is the world of Berkelian subjective idealism – the world of the solipsist.

     Be certain that you understand that before proceeding further.

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     Get an eyeful of Esteemed Co-Conspirator Dystopic / Thales’s latest encounter with a leftist, which I have reformatted somewhat for ease of reading:

Dystopic: Should the Left gain power again, they will surely desire revenge on the Right. They will want to punish us. And some number of them want us dead.
Leftist: Telling me that “it could happen” is not evidence that something WILL happen. We could all die tomorrow. That could happen. But something tells me you still won’t spend all your money today.

Dystopic: Poor analogy. I have historical evidence to tell me that this scenario is at least as likely as not. [Lists a series of revenge revolutions gone wrong, starting with the obvious French Revolution.] You have no likely historical scenario that all human life will be extinguished tomorrow.
Leftist: I do have historical info that all human life can go tomorrow. It happened to the dinosaurs.

Dystopic: The likelihood of humans butchering one another over political differences is hugely more likely than a meteor wiping out all life tomorrow. If you can’t see that, you’re a moron.
Leftist: Instead of calling me a name, why don’t you give me evidence supporting this contention, other than you just saying it?

Dystopic: When was the last time humans butchered each other over political differences? Probably fucking yesterday. Hell, probably as we were typing this. When was the last time a meteor caused a major extinction event? Now math that shit and get back to me. Humans killing each other over politics. More likely than a meteor wiping out all life tomorrow… yes or no? If you don’t answer this one right, we’re done.
Leftist: Who knows? You certainly don’t but you act like you do.

     Before anyone clucks at Dys’s incivility or profanity, allow me to say that I don’t think I could have maintained my gentlemanly aplomb half as long as he did. He was “arguing” with someone to whom facts – data — are irrelevant, not worth bothering one’s head over.

     There’s no profit to be had from such an exchange. Sadly, it can take a while before the nature of such an interaction becomes clear.

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     The Left is monstrously allergic to facts. The examples are beyond enumeration. A few recent cases:

• Pielke and Lomborg Accused of “Fact-mongering”
• What Tucker Carlson gets about men and women that the rest of the media do not
• Hint: It Ain’t You
• "Shut up! shutup! shutup!"
• DNA pioneer James Watson, 90, is stripped of the last of his honorary titles after doubling down on his 'reprehensible' views that genes cause a difference between black people and white people on IQ tests

     If you have the time, please read the linked articles. They’re an education all by themselves. Note in particular, in the cases where it’s observed and reported, the Left’s reaction to being confronted with facts. Dracula never retreated from a crucifix any faster, though he usually refrained from calling the crucifix-bearer a lot of insulting names. (Old World manners, don’t y’know.)

     The Left’s hypotheses / claims / narratives stand contradicted by the data. Therefore, the data must be discarded...and along with them, anyone who dares to assert them.

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     Allergies induce avoidance in the sufferer. An allergy to data is a guarantee that the allergic one will never learn anything he doesn’t already know. Worse, he’ll remain securely in the grip of “what he knows that ain’t so.” That latter observation is the key to the Left’s behavior, for why would anyone want to remain deluded about a proposition he (at least) believes to be important?

     The answer lies in Eric Hoffer’s observations about the “fact-proof screen” the Left interposes between its desperate-to-belong “true believers” and objective, verifiable data:

     A rising mass movement attract and holds a following not by its doctrine but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence....it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole....

     All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. The facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ....

     Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity, or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is.

     [Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements ]

     In that insulation lies the explanation for another pattern of note:

     There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations doubts, and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. [Ibid.]

     Something to bear in mind should you be minded to cross swords, whether rhetorically or in fact, with a Leftist on some future occasion.

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     The Left’s allergy to data is the key to defeating its lies and distortions. Therefore the prescription for us in the Right should be clear...but there’s that word again. Suffice it to say that data are much like guns: Regardless of whether you ever need them, you’re far better off for having them.

A Negative-Sum Game Part 2: Some Non-Ruminative Thoughts

     If you’ve read this earlier piece, you’re already familiar with the aggrieved puzzlement I feel over the phenomenon of the militant atheist. In light of the irrefutable conclusion (hint, hint) that firmly held atheism is just as much a religious faith as any other doctrine about the supernatural, I suppose I should be less puzzled. After all, the holders of other faiths have gone on great, often bloody campaigns to eliminate their “competitors,” so why not the atheists? Why should anyone expect them to be different?

     Having posed the question that way, I suppose this is just one more glimpse into human nature: specifically, the discomfort that afflicts those who hold a particular belief and can’t abide others that don’t share it. Just as “I was wrong” is very hard to say, “You are wrong” is very hard to hear – and for persons of incomplete maturation, “You might be wrong” is almost as hard.

     But the matter doesn’t end there.

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     Viewed broadly, faith has been the single most important force in the history of Man. Its influence on politics, economics, warfare, international relations, education, social customs and traditions, the hard sciences, the arts, and the demographics of the world cannot be overstated. Indeed, I could make a good case (Sheesh. I almost typed “god case.” Get back in your box, Sigmund!) that faith is a more important influence today than ever before in history.

     That should be a heads-up to the militant atheist, whose aim, whether express or implied, is the elimination of what he sees as irrationality. Disentangling faith from all of human enterprise and the human experience isn’t likely to be accomplished by a few thousand sour-faced evangelists for atheism.

     Remember, I said viewed broadly. For any conviction that can neither be conclusively proved nor conclusively disproved qualifies as a faith:

• Socialism is a faith.
• So is capitalism.
• Bimetallism is a faith.
• So is monometallism.
• And of course, so is Keynesianism.
• Constitutionalism – the conviction that there must be a Supreme Law that constrains all other lawmaking and government action – is a faith.
• Monarchism is a faith. Indeed, it’s still held by a fair number of persons. (Look into the Constantian Society if you disbelieve me.)
• Scientism – i.e., the conviction that all important knowledge can be established by scientific means and procedures – is most definitely a faith.

     None of the enumerated stances can be verified or falsified so conclusively that there remains room for neither doubt nor dissent. There are many other stances of that sort.

     The militant atheist, of course, isn’t aiming at the wholesale rejection of socialism, or capitalism, or bimetallism. His crosshairs settle over the face of God. To him, the belief in a Supreme Being that is beyond our senses yet is responsible for the whole of existence is unacceptable. We who maintain such a belief are equally unacceptable. Indeed, many a militant atheist regards us as not merely irrational but “stupid.” Of course, he imagines himself to occupy a higher intellectual plane.

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     A long, long time ago, back at the old Palace of Reason, I posted the following:

Private Knowledge

     I consider myself a Catholic. I also consider myself an agnostic. And while you're catching your breath from that seeming contradiction, I'm going to indulge in a little word-splitting, hopefully of the consciousness-expanding kind.

     The original Gnostic controversy propelled a great deal of the early unrest within the Church. On one side stood men, apparently sincere, who believed that knowledge of God's will came directly to each individual in the form of a private revelation, a gnosis. The most famous case of gnosis recorded in Christian history is the “road to Damascus” revelation of Paul of Tarsus, who may justly be regarded as the doctrinal founder of the Church.

     Opposed to these stood men who rejected the very idea of gnosis. They held that since not all persons had one, and that God would not be so cruel as to deny His word to anyone who desired to hear it, then these private revelations should be regarded as events of unknown significance at best, rather than reliable indicators of God's will. These were the original agnostics.

     Interestingly, the Church, though its doctrines were shaped by the most celebrated gnosis of all time, almost immediately thereafter rejected the Gnostic position, declaring it beyond the pale for any communicant to place his private revelation above the teachings approved by the Church hierarchy. Gnosticism, thus anathematized, acquired an unsavory aspect, allied itself with forms of mysticism at odds with core Christian beliefs, and after a couple of centuries ceased to be an important influence on the development of the Christian faith.

     There are Christian faiths that preserve some fragment of the Gnostic belief. The Church of the Latter-Day Saints, for example, explicitly teaches its adherents that God may be expected to speak directly to them on matters of critical importance to them personally. However, most mainline Christian sects, including my own, are firmly agnostic. True doctrine, they teach, is preserved and propagated by the Church itself, in keeping with the responsibility conferred upon the apostle Peter by Christ Himself.

     All of this might seem a bit abstruse to the layman with a layman's interest in matters of faith. I assure you, it's more important than most Christians realize -- not because of the possible clash between doctrine and revelation, but because of the private nature of all revelations, and the importance of that essential privacy to faith itself.

     In this world, God coerces no one. He has laid down the laws of Nature; that is all. Those laws may be denied or decried, but they cannot be broken. One aspect of those laws is that, for any given miracle -- that is, for any given observed phenomenon that's so far from the ordinary course of things that one explanation offered for it is the hand of God -- there will always be at least one other plausible explanation, such that disbelief will remain possible. I believe that this is a part of the Divine Non-Coercion package, designed to allow men's minds to be free even on the most fundamental of all subjects.

     Why does God want men's minds to be so free? A good question. It might be part of the test. It might be part of what it means to be men. And it might be that we'll all know soon enough. My own theory is that this is how God speaks directly to some men, such as Paul of Tarsus, while leaving others capable of reaching their own conclusions.

     Revelation is always private. Private events, as opposed to public events that may be witnessed by many persons simultaneously, have no evidentiary value for those who have not experienced them. Private events give rise only to private knowledge and private convictions. If a man has had such an experience, it may help him to persuade others, but even here there are stronger factors than the revelation itself: his known character, the degree of his eloquence, and his strength of will in staying true to the substance of the revelation and refraining from adulterating it with opinions of his own.

     To be a Christian agnostic is to say: Revelation is wonderful, if you've had one. It's stunning, thrilling, enlarging beyond any other experience of the mind. But it has no weight as evidence in any argument with others. Your revelation was meant for you alone, or all the rest of us would have had it too.

     The Christian agnostic position is an insistence on personal humility: self-doubt, not doubt of God. How can we doubt what He has said to all of us together, the objectively verifiable laws that govern our universe and dictate how we may use what we find in it? But how can we not politely reserve judgment in the face of a Gnostic's claim to have personal knowledge of His will? To do otherwise would be to elevate the convictions of a mere human above the actual mechanics of the cosmos, the continuously unfolding panoply of Creation itself.

     Why am I nattering on about this, you ask? Have I been accosted by self-nominated visionaries one too many times, or have I had a revelation of my own?

     Sorry, that's private.

     Ponder that for a moment while I fetch more coffee.

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     When Francis Bacon proposed what has come to be known as scientific method, he was working within a Christian framework: the conviction that a just God would not allow the laws of the universe to change out from under us. That too is, of course, a religious conviction: a faith. We have no way of knowing whether the laws of physics were at one time not those of today. (Indeed, one of the more popular cosmological theses holds that that must have been the case for the universe of matter to have its current extent.) Neither can we know that the laws of physics will always be what they are today. Both the affirmative and the negative positions are articles of faith.

     It is effectively impossible to separate faith – the willingness to believe without a requirement for conclusive proof – from the rest of the human experience. As I’ve already observed, the militant atheist isn’t concerned with what we might call quotidian faith, but with conceptions of God and the religious propositions founded on such conceptions.

     To these eyes, this is a brief for amiability, a “you go to your church and I’ll go to mine” attitude toward the militant atheist. Yes, he can be annoying. Can’t you? Can’t I? Anyone with a strong opinion about anything, regardless of the subject or his depth of inquiry into it, is capable of being a nuisance. That’s not an argument against having a strong opinion, with one exception:

No matter who you are,
Regardless of what you might believe,
You were not put here to convert the rest of us.

     I think we’d all have it a lot easier, especially at family gatherings, if that particular principle were more widely understood.

The Uses Of Simplicity

     These days there’s quite a lot of “loose talk” about “tight stuff:” that is, talk about concepts that have precise meanings and shouldn’t be batted about in a careless fashion. Some such concepts are among the most useful ideas men have ever produced...but their utility depends upon precise comprehension. If you don’t understand it as it’s meant to be understood, you won’t use it as it’s meant to be used.

     The field of heuristics incorporates several such concepts. If the term heuristics is unfamiliar to you, it’s the “applied” side of epistemology: the branch of philosophy that addresses what we think we know and how we came to believe it. Heuristics is the grab-bag into which we toss our techniques for solving problems and extending our knowledge.

     People frequently employ heuristics without knowing that they’re doing so. Of course! Any practical technique for learning something qualifies as a heuristic, so any method by which we approach a problem qualifies, informally at least, as a heuristic. If it works, that is!

     Probably the “best known” heuristic technique – those are sarcasm-quotes, not scare quotes – goes by the name of Occam’s Razor. It supposedly originated with William of Occam, a Fourteenth Century English friar, philosopher, and theologian. The “traditional” statement of his Razor was simple and evocative:

“Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

     Isn’t that an “of course” sort of statement? We don’t put unnecessary ingredients into our recipes or unnecessary parts on our machines. So why is this statement regarded as such an important breakthrough in thought?

     Well, in point of fact, the “traditional” statement says very little. It’s the way that principle is used as a heuristic – i.e., how it’s applied to problem-solving – that makes it valuable. In the problem-solving domain, most particularly the problem of explaining an observable phenomenon, it works this way:

1. Gather as much information about the phenomenon and its context as possible.
2. Now eliminate from the context all but one feature: the one that seems most likely to “produce” the phenomenon. Create a “test environment” containing only that feature.
3. TEST! Does the phenomenon occur in the test environment?
   • If so, you have a workable temporary explanation for the phenomenon.
   • If not:
     1. Add another, plausibly related feature to your test environment;
     2. Return to step 3 (TEST!) above.

     The question the student new to Occam’s Razor will normally ask at this point is “But why? Why use that procedure?” And he is right to ask.

     The reason is supremely practical: The fewer elements there are in any proposed explanation for a phenomenon, the easier it will be to test. Therefore, we’ll finish soonest if we use that order to winnow through the possible explanations.

     Note: That’s not the same as the “vulgar” statement of Occam’s Razor – i.e., that “the simplest explanation is most likely to be correct.” That is quite literally nonsense.

     Consider the following, seemingly simple situation: I have in my hand a steel ball. I stand, hold the ball out at a height of four feet, and open my hand. The ball falls. Half a second later it hits the floor. Why?

     Of course you know the answer: Gravity! Plus simple kinematics, of course. Distance traveled from a standing start under constant acceleration equals 0.5*a*t^2, right? Right! But wait just a moleskin-gloved minute there, Colonel: What’s producing that “gravity?” The ball itself? Would we get the same results if instead of a steel ball, we dropped a ball of feathers? Suppose we tried our test outside, in the wind? What then? And how about under water, or in interplanetary space?

     It develops that there are several other elements necessary to the context: elements we omitted to include in our summary of the experiment. The seeming simplicity of our original explanation was premised on an assumption: a solid object of high enough mass density to be negligibly affected by air resistance and air currents, dropped from four feet above the surface of the Earth. It’s the mass of the Earth that produces the local gravity vector. Galileo wouldn’t have got the same results under water, or on the Moon. (Fortunately, the crowd watching his famous experiment didn’t think to suggest those venues.)

     The simplest explanation – “That’s just what balls do when dropped four feet” – was incorrect. So would be any other explanation that omitted the size, shape, and density of the ball, the presence or absence of resistive media and currents within it, or the proximity of a spherical mass of 6*10²¹ tons with a diameter of approximately 7900 miles. It all counts.

     Were we utterly ignorant of the laws of gravitational attraction and determined to figure out why a steel ball dropped four feet takes half a second to hit the floor, it would be smart to test the simplest explanations first, not because they’re “likely to be correct,” but because we’ll eliminate wrong answers fastest that way.

     If you’re guilty of having misunderstood Occam’s Razor before this, don’t feel too bad. Lots of very bright people, including a number who have reason to know better, have misstated it and misused it to promote their preferred explanations for various things as “the most likely.” Some of them had axes to grind. Indeed, whenever you hear someone proclaiming a thesis that “can’t be wrong,” you’re not listening to reasoning, but to propaganda.

     The “global warming” crowd is especially culpable in this regard. Much of the time they don’t even bother with observable phenomena, but restrict themselves to simulations of nonexistent conditions and then claim that “this is what’s happening to the Earth.” When they do address observed phenomena, they almost never include all the relevant conditions in their proposed explanations of events – but they always claim they need more money and power. Were we to apply Occam’s Razor in their fashion to their behavior, we would surely conclude that the simplest explanation – i.e., that they want more money and power regardless of what the climate of the Earth is doing and why – is the most likely to be correct. And upon that note I retire from the field.

The PDOOMA Series

     [Owing to the return of the global warming evangelists and their claims that President Trump has doomed us all by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords, I’ve decided to reissue these four essays, which first appeared at Eternity Road in late 2009 and 2010. Some of the links are dead, but as they were links to other Eternity Road essays, you shouldn’t let it trouble you. -- FWP]

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1. PDOOMA!

     The government is extremely fond of amassing great quantities of statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case, the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down anything he damn well pleases. -- Sir Josiah Stamp

     If it cannot be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion. -- Robert A. Heinlein

     43.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot. – Author unknown

     Among the eternal verities of the engineering trade is this:

What matters most about any figure injected into a technical discussion is its error bar.

     The size of the error bar -- in layman’s terms, the amount by which the figure cited could be high or low -- determines whether the figure is worthy of consideration, as evidence or as support for some proposed solution to a problem.

• A small error bar, which indicates high confidence in the figure, enhances the authority of the figure.
• A large error bar, which indicates low confidence in the figure, renders the figure suspect and unreliable.
• An unknown or undisclosed error bar indicates that the figure is a PDOOMA.

     PDOOMA, one of engineering’s most beloved acronyms, stands for “Pulled Directly Out Of My Ass.” The figure is almost certainly guesswork or worse -- in extreme cases, pure fiction. The best giveaway to a PDOOMA figure is the absence of an error bar.

     The PDOOMA figure is becoming a major player in political rhetoric. Conservatives have had to cope with quite a few of them in recent years. Because we prefer not to fight too many duels -- ammunition has gotten quite expensive, y’know -- we usually refrain from calling the PDOOMA's proponent a liar. The usual conservative response to a PDOOMA from a left-liberal is simply to dispute the figure's accuracy, or perhaps its relevance. But the unprecedented proliferation of political PDOOMAs has made that approach counterproductive. As Ann Coulter said in her book Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right, we find ourselves passing over quite a lot of leftist fiction so we can concentrate on the lies of earth-shaking magnitude.

     Here are a few PDOOMAs of recent vintage:

• Al Gore's claim that, if nothing is done about "global warming," Earth will experience a sea level rise of twenty feet.
• Marian Wright Edelman's claim that every extra dollar devoted to Head Start funding would ultimately save $3.35 in federal and state welfare expenditures.
• Congressional Democrats claim that $500 billion can be squeezed out of Medicare expenditures over the next ten years by "eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse."
• Barack Hussein Obama's "47 million Americans can't get health insurance."
• Barack Hussein Obama's "650,000 jobs created or saved" by the $787 billion stimulus bill.

     ...and not an error bar in the lot.

     The most annoying aspect of these PDOOMAs is how hard it is to get their promulgators to stand their ground and defend it. When challenged, they immediately change the subject, or attack the objector -- and subsequently act as if the PDOOMA went unchallenged, and should be taken as authoritative and trustworthy. But left-liberalism being inherently fraudulent and treacherous, perhaps this is only to be expected.

     The proliferation of PDOOMAs on the subject of health care has slowed down somewhat in recent weeks, but there remain a couple that animate the Democrats' drive for the nationalization of American medicine. One is the "47 million uninsured" canard. No responsible analyst would propound such a figure without also stating how he'd arrived at it, what the error bar is, and whether factors other than the politically potent implication of unaffordability play a part in a significant fraction of the total. The last of those is a particularly important question at a time when among America's most important social ills is our problem with illegal immigration.

     But no field beats "global warming / climate change" for reliance on the PDOOMA. The whole "discipline" is PDOOMAs from first to last. Global temperature assessment is inherently fraught with major uncertainties. Measurements of global temperature have error bars of several Centigrade degrees. The recent revelations of wholesale distortion and data-dredging at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, apparently carried on shamelessly by hundreds, if not thousands, of the best known "global warming" flacksters in the world, should be a lesson to us about the probity of "scientific measurements" advanced to serve a political cause. Self-nominated "scientists" are just as capable of deception, including self-deception, as any other human being...especially when vast quantities of money are at stake.

     If there's an irony over this originating from the Right, it would be that, since left-liberals are generally aware that their own "statistics" and "projections" are PDOOMAs, they instinctively reject figures that countervail their contentions. For example, it will do you no good in a conversation with a gun-control advocate to cite Florida's impressive decrease in violent crimes after it became a shall-issue state -- very nearly 80% over the first two years. He'll assume you made it up. Nor will he bother to check it for himself; it violates Holy Leftist Writ about the evil of firearms, and that's all he needs to know. Neither can you make any headway with a rabid welfarist by pointing out that the Reagan-era tax rate cuts correlated with federal revenue increases of over $390 billion per year by 1989. "Tax cut" is profanity to a statist of any stripe; you simply have to be lying.

     In other words, you can't persuade a left-liberal by using facts.

     Indeed, it might not be possible to persuade a left-liberal by any means available to Man. Left-liberal Causes, being quasi-religious in nature, receive devotion of religious intensity from their devotees. That's why they're unabashed about their use of PDOOMAs. The end justifies the means; no deception is out of bounds if it serves Ultimate Truth.

     Depressing, especially to one who respects the connection between numbers and reality.

---

2. PDOOMA! Part 2: The Trouble With Temperature

     There's already been a lot of discussion of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit document leak. The documents have been authenticated by persons at the institution and pored over by thousands of readers. The implications of the statements therein are utterly damning for the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) thesis. Perhaps worst of all is the annotated FORTRAN 90 source code for one of the CRU's key climate models, which clearly attempts to turn sow's-ear temperature data into a silk purse of AGW confirmation by a range of manipulations too sordid for a serious scientist to bear. Though we cannot expect AGW's political backers to run up a white flag just yet -- there's too much money and power at stake -- nevertheless, it's clear that we have the warmistas on the run.

     Yet, in all the Sturm und Drang that's flown over the AGW issue, there's a question your Curmudgeon has been waiting for someone to ask, but which has unaccountably never been raised in any forum:

What is the current temperature of the Earth?

     "Global warming" must surely refer to the temperature of the globe, no? Or at least, to the temperature of that part of the globe that's relevant to its resident organisms: the upper crust, the oceans, and the atmosphere. So what is it? If the Earth is getting warmer, then its temperature today must be higher than what it was at some relevant past moment, right? Right?

     The Earth doesn't have a convenient orifice into which to stick a thermometer, does it? Worse, if it did, it wouldn't tell us anything particularly useful.

     Of course, a dedicated warmista would wave the question aside as "naive," no doubt with a considerable display of irritation. He'd be equally likely to dismiss its reductionist versions: what's the current temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, or of the Atlantic Ocean, or of the Gulf of Mexico, et cetera. But that doesn't mean that the questions are meaningless or irrelevant to the subject. Indeed, they're the most important questions of all.

     Their importance lies in this: They cannot be answered satisfactorily, now or ever.

     The temperature of a large body is inherently unknowable. Temperature, like simultaneity, is a local phenomenon: the larger the locale, the less certain one's determinations will be. Your Curmudgeon could fairly assume that the air temperature over the Fortress of Crankitude will be about the same as that over its next-door neighbor at any given instant, but he'd guarantee that it will differ from the temperature over a house a mile or two away. Since the two key thermal aspects of life on Earth, the atmosphere and the oceans, are chaotic systems characterized by continuous fluctuations of unknown magnitude, their temperatures are as unknowable as the length of the coastline of Norway.

     The situation is actually worse than that. Temperature is supposed to correspond to the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the substance whose temperature one is taking. It's an empirical sort of metric, since we can't actually measure the kinetic energy of all those little particles and take their average; instead, we use a correlation to the expansion of some substance, such as mercury or alcohol. If, when exposed to the thing whose temperature is to be taken, a fixed mass of our chosen metrical substance expands by so much, we say its temperature is thus-and-such...which completely ignores the prior mechanical and thermodynamic state of the metrical substance itself.

     In short, the state variable called temperature is one of the least precise of all the measures known to physics, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Any good physicist will tell you this, Sunday-supplement gee-whiz references to such things as the temperature of the Earth's core or the surface of the Sun notwithstanding.

     This makes "investigations" such as AGW a fool's errand.

     We have a natural sense, direct from our nerve endings, for "hotter" and "cooler" as those conceptions apply to small objects and local conditions. That shouldn't be allowed to fool us into thinking we can know the temperature of a large region or a large body with arbitrary precision -- and the precision required to invest any credibility in the representations of the warmistas is unbelievably fine, measured in tenths of a Centigrade degree. But that level of precision is what the warmistas have sought to sell us.

     The AGW thesis has been a con job from first to last, a castle of power-seeking lies built on a foundation of fantasy-precision sand. That it should have come tumbling down at the slightest of temblors was only to be expected. As we in the software trade like to say:

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

     Perhaps we don't say it often enough.

---

3. PDOOMA! Part 3: Clarity About "The Environment"

     The East Anglia CRU document leak and its sequels are proving to be everything a freedom-minded man could have wished. The entire edifice of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) promoters has collapsed as its leading lights proffer ever less credible explanations for the materials revealed. The FORTRAN 90 source code to the CRU's principal climate model is particularly valuable for the embedded comments, which make it plain that massive data fudging was performed to produce even a semblance of AGW hazard.

     Which makes this a nearly perfect time to talk about environmental issues in general.

***

     Back in the Sixties, Americans became receptive to suggestions that air pollution was a problem to be addressed. The air in our major cities was admittedly less than pleasant, owing in part to industrial emissions, in part to automobile exhaust, and in part to the unavoidable consequences of packing large numbers of people into a small space. Political will was marshaled; Washington emitted laws and regulations concerning effluent control, of which the best known are those pertaining to car exhausts. Automakers and manufacturers resisted at first, but eventually submitted to the new dictates.

     Urban air got steadily cleaner and clearer. At least some of the credit does belong to the pollution control laws. In particular, what comes out of a modern car's exhaust pipe is far less noxious than the emissions of its Sixties forebears. That the cost of these measures was considerable is undeniable. That a federal solution was optimal is open to dispute.

     A "vertical" city with a high population density, such as New York or Chicago, has a number of alternative approaches to the problem of automobile-generated air pollution. Granted that one of these is literally forbidding cars to emit noxious fumes. But there are others, some of which address the air-quality problem simultaneously with other matters that are arguably as important: taxing industrial effluents by weight; closing the core of the city to personal motor vehicles; instituting high-quality mass transit. All of those approaches, being localized, could be locally adjusted to changes in the situation without involving the federal government.

     A "horizontal" city, such as Milwaukee or Indianapolis, will have a harder time instituting good, city-wide mass transit, but by the same token its geographical dispersion will render its air pollution problems less intense. If it has any Manhattan-like dense zones, those could be closed to personal vehicles, provided municipal transit is made available. The value of local control of the relevant ordinances is the same as it would be to a "vertical" town.

     Had America's cities adopted such local approaches to local air quality, in all probability they would have achieved as satisfactory a reduction of their air pollution problems as has federal intervention -- and without surrendering more control over their affairs to a federal government already well beyond its Constitutional sphere. But the era was excessively favorable to the federalization of just about everything.

***

     The other objective environmental problem of note is fresh-water pollution. There has never been much of a "personal" component to this; most pollution of fresh water sources is caused by industrial effluents and the rain-driven runoff of agrochemicals. Robert A. Heinlein noted in his book Expanded Universe that the easy way to deal with industrial effluents into fresh-water rivers and streams is to compel factories to put their water input immediately downstream from their effluent output. The negative feedback that would provide would be sufficient by itself -- and once again, the matter could be left to local ordinances, rather than having to federalize it.

     Agrochemicals present a stiffer problem, as they're vitally necessary to modern agriculture and no one can stop the rain from falling. Technological approaches are possible; for example, many important fertilizers and pesticides are susceptible to being "fixed" into the soil, or made mechanically adhesive to the leaves of plants. However, there doesn't seem to be a perfect answer, though perfection isn't something mere humans should expect to achieve, however hard we might strive toward it.

     The great chimera of the day is the pollution of subterranean fresh-water aquifers. Barring the excavation of deep-shaft mines in residential neighborhoods, this is flatly impossible. The soil is itself a cleansing mechanism; as water seeps through it, the soil leaches away virtually anything it might have carried on the surface. Indeed, Man has not yet produced a water-sanitizing system nearly as effective or efficient as a hundred feet of good old mother Earth.

***

     Thus we dispose of the two objective environmental problems of modern technological society. All else, regardless of the motivations or protests of the source, is froth and gas:

• Clear-cutting the Amazon Basin? Not to worry; the world's oxygen supply is more than adequate, nor are the ocean plankton or the rest of the planet's green biomass about to go on strike.
• Holes in the ozone layer? Another of the classic bug-bears. The holes over the poles have been there for centuries; they're an effect of the high-altitude radiation belts and their interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. They wax; they wane, and then they do it all over again.
• Animal species disappearing? Which animals, please? Few of the world's macroscopic species are endangered by anything but superstition. None of the animals most prominently cited as endangered are critical to any aspect of any regional ecology. In addition, many of the claims are fraudulent, contrived by treating a local population of some species as an independent species in its own right. That's the case with the spotted owl, on whose behalf anti-lumber-industry agitators nearly shut down logging operations in the Pacific Northwest for several years.
• Auto-immune disease induced by chemical exposure? This is rot. The various "experts" paid to testify to it by plaintiffs' lawyers are entirely unable to provide scientific support for their notions.
• Loss of "wetlands?" "Wetland" is merely a more attractive word for "swamp." Draining swamps reduces communicable diseases and saves lives. There is no ecological requirement for the mosquito.

     There are other fashionable environmental causes, but none known to your Curmudgeon are any better grounded than those above. The above are sufficiently representative to assert that the point has been made.

***

     Needless to say, what your Curmudgeon has written here is blasphemy to the environmentally correct. But then, these "green bigots" (Thomas Sowell) put anything and everything ahead of human freedom and human flourishing. They disguise their true agendas well...until something like the East Anglia CRU document leak occurs, and we see them scramble for another justification for their demands.

     An incident from some years ago has much point. Your Curmudgeon was visiting a friend who lived at that time in the Mojave Desert, a large stretch of sand essentially devoid of life and useless for anything but dune-buggy racing and weapons testing. On one occasion when driving through the desert on the way to one of its few tourist attractions, we passed some obvious dune-buggy tracks, causing your Curmudgeon's friend's wife, a rather extreme environmentalist, to say that "when you scar the desert, it doesn't heal."

     Being a guest, your Curmudgeon forbore to comment, but he was thinking furiously. What "scar?" What would constitute "healing?" If disturbing the distribution of the sand in a barren stretch of desert should be forbidden, what human impacts on the environment should be permitted?

     In the view of the true-green environmentalist, that last question is too dangerous to answer candidly. It leads to places he wants no one to go who isn't already sworn to the cause.

     Food for thought.

---

4. PDOOMA! Part 4: The Masks Are Now ALL The Way Off!

     It has been said, and truly, that "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." Well, there might be more than three up to their eyelashes in the anthropogenic-global-warming mire, but not a lot more:

     The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was“only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

     “Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

     Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

     Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

     So more than just the temperature data was faked, fudged, and massaged into a warm glow, eh? As a certain Vulcan second officer might say, "Fascinating."

     Not that the "research data" put forward in support of the AGW thesis was ever trustworthy or compelling. Various inherent difficulties about the matter from an analytical perspective alone would have guaranteed a great deal of skepticism from honest scientists even if we'd never learned of the East Anglia frauds. Now we know that it wasn't just us hoi polloi who smelled something corrupt in it. Given the amounts of money and pressure national governments and the UN have mobilized to get the scientific community onto the AGW bandwagon, there can be little doubt that many geophysicists were approached about signing on to the IPCC's deceits, and turned them down.

     We appear to have dodged a bullet. We must take care not to allow our political class to shove us back into its path.

A Bit More Blinding By “Science”

     The devotees of "global warming" are at it again. These idiots – and I use the term according to its dictionary meaning: persons of intellect so severely degraded that they shouldn’t be allowed out of the house alone – are crowing and having innumerable ecstasies over this supposed success by a climate model:

     Scott Adams, who’s a hell of a lot smarter than most folks would imagine a “professional cartoonist” to be, is probably holding his sides in by main force over this:

     I will bet anyone $1 million dollars that I can come up with a climate forecast model that ignores C02 and still predicts the temperature 30 years from now to within half a degree. Does anyone want to take that bet?
     Obviously there is a trick involved, so I won’t accept your bet for ethical reasons. But let’s see if you can figure out how I could win that bet every time.
     I am 100% confident I can build a climate prediction model, using my current skill set, that will predict the measured temperature in 30 years to within half a degree.
     Furthermore, you can pick whatever measurement type and place you want for the bet. My trick does not depend on doing anything clever with the measurement itself.

     The trick – which is actually a demonstration of a core principle of science – is called survivorship bias:

     Survivorship bias, or survival bias, is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that "survived" some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may be actual people, as in a medical study, or could be companies or research subjects or applicants for a job, or anything that must make it past some selection process to be considered further.

     Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence (Correlation proves Causation). For example, if three of the five students with the best college grades went to the same high school, that can lead one to believe that the high school must offer an excellent education. This could be true, but the question cannot be answered without looking at the grades of all the other students from that high school, not just the ones who "survived" the top-five selection process.

     Exactly. This sort of criterion for claiming knowledge is a classic logical fallacy. As Thomas Sowell wrote in The Vision of the Anointed, by using this sort of “logic,” one could “prove” that no one died in World War II, simply by interviewing only survivors.

     Trust only – and always with reservations – the predictions of a man who’s successfully predicted not one but many outcomes, always before the occurrence of the event and always by using the same causal model. As I wrote in one of my better short stories:

     "Are you a scientist in name only, Dr. Culloden, or in fact?"
     The researcher stiffened. "What do you think, my unwilling guest?"
     "I think you have evaded the question."
     "I am a scientist." He hurled the words at the Dark Angel, a return of service of the glove Uriel had hurled into his face.
     "What is the first rule of science?"
     "Prediction is knowledge."
     "How many counterexamples are required to disprove a theory?"
     Culloden could see the end of the syllogism. "One."
     "Then let us return whence you found me."

     Prediction is knowledge. By corollary, if one makes N “predictions” (where N is “enough to cover all the possible outcomes”), each of which differs from the others by no more than the previously agreed-upon acceptable margin of error, and afterward suppresses mention of the N-1 that fell outside that margin, one is not practicing science or demonstrating knowledge, but playing a confidence game, a sort of probabilistic Three-Card Monte.

     Even real, scrupulous scientists can fall afoul of survivorship bias. Sir Fred Hoyle knew that, too:

     "It looks to me as if those perturbations of the rockets must have been deliberately engineered," began Weichart.
     "Why do you say that, Dave?" asked Marlowe.
     "Well, the probability of three cities being hit by a hundred-odd rockets moving at random is obviously very small. Therefore I conclude that the rockets were not perturbed at random. I think they must have been deliberately guided to give direct hits."
     "There's something of an objection to that," argued McNeil. "If the rockets were deliberately guided, how is it that only three of 'em found their targets?"
     "Maybe only three were guided, or maybe the guiding wasn't all that good. I wouldn't know."
     There was a derisive laugh from Alexandrov.
     "Bloody argument," he asserted.
     "What d'you mean, 'bloody' argument?"
     "Invent bloody argument, like this. Golfer hits ball. Ball lands on tuft of grass -- so. Probability ball landed on tuft very small, very very small. Million other tufts for ball to land on. Probability very small, very, very very small. So golfer did not hit ball, ball deliberately guided onto tuft. Is bloody argument, yes? Like Weichart's argument....Must say what damn target is before shoot, not after shoot. Put shirt on before, not after event."

     Quite a few “investment gurus” have staked their reputations on having been right...once. Some of them are wearing orange jumpsuits and eating substandard meals today. Don’t stake your money on their supposed foresight.

     Or on mine.

Scientism, The One True Faith

     [NB: The title of this piece is shamelessly stolen from Helmut Schoeck’s book of a similar name.]

---

     First, a little “morning maniac music:”

     And as my pastor would say, with that as our theme let’s proceed to the meat of the matter.

---

     SCIENCE! The word has a compelling sound, doesn’t it? Americans have come to venerate it as a fount of marvels and wonders, an overflowing cup of knowledge and the bounties thereof. Scientists “know” things – things the rest of us don’t know. That’s what makes them scientists, don’t y’know. When they orate, no matter on what subject or to what effect, we hoi polloi are expected – required, really – to accept their pronouncements as articles of faith. I mean, mustn’t we? They gave us the Internet, after all, so how could they be wrong?

     Not since the decline and fall of the cults of Ba’al and Ormuzd has such completely specious, utterly laughable bullshit commanded so many minds.

     A tangential but illuminating question is useful here. I’ll post it in big type, for the perceptually challenged:

What Is “The Internet?”

     (Now, now, let’s not always see the same hands.)

     I’ll cut directly to the chase:
     “The Internet” is not a bunch of computers.
     It’s not a collection of routers or modems.
     It’s not a huge web of cables, either.
     It’s a set of definitions for digital communications protocols that specify how devices on an internet are to pass packets to one another.

     Any conflation of some array of physical devices with “The Internet” is inherently incorrect and badly misleading. It is entirely and exclusively a method: the group of protocol specifications that define how computers on what we call “The Internet” are to exchange data.

     Thus also with science:
     It isn’t a bunch of people with doctorates who spend several hours a day wearing white lab coats.
     It isn’t a laboratory filled with glassware, chemicals, electronics, and experimental subjects;
     And it most certainly isn’t “settled,” no matter what subject or persons declaim on it.

     Science is a methodology for the investigation of reproducible phenomena. Science is the scientific method, more or less as Francis Bacon originally prescribed it.

     Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to deceive you for purposes of his own. He is dangerous to you and others. He means to take something from you, most likely your money and freedom. When confronted by such a person, put one hand on your wallet, the other over your genitals, and back slowly away.

     But they’re getting very thick on the ground.

---

     Examples of how the word science has been turned into a bludgeon are many and varied. Courtesy of Mike Hendrix, we have this example from Scott Adams:

     Believer: Climate scientists are correct because the scientific method is reliable over time, thanks to peer review. The experts are overwhelmingly on the same side.
     Skeptic: The prediction models are not credible because prediction models with that much complexity are rarely correct.
     Believer: You troglodyte! You know nothing of science! The scientific method is credible!

     See what happened? The believer was discussing science and the skeptic was NOT discussing science. These are different conversations. The prediction models are designed by scientists, but they are not “science” per se, any more than a microscope is “science.” Both are just tools that scientists use.

     Indeed, the deceptions proffered by Believer are even worse than Adams has said. Note Believer’s citation of “experts.” An expert, more or less by definition, is one who possesses expertise: i.e., specialized knowledge. In point of fact, expert is a word properly applicable only to persons who possess a skill: a talent for dealing with particular problems of a similar sort. Science admits no experts.

     The late, great Richard Feynman once described “science” as the unwillingness to concede the infallibility of “experts.” Feynman, a brilliant physicist who shared a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, understood science far better than many of today...including many self-styled “scientists.”

---

     The great cleavage to be emphasized here is the one between science and knowledge. We – and this includes scientists – actually know very little. Our hard knowledge consists almost entirely of data: the facts anyone with the necessary perceptions (and the properly calibrated instruments) can acquire for himself. Strictly speaking, “scientific knowledge” is a contradiction in terms, for science is overwhelmingly more about what we don’t know. It is unable to give firm answers except in the negative.

     The scientific method can only say with assurance that a particular experiment, performed to test the accuracy of a particular prediction, failed to produce the predicted results. What we know is what we observed; all else remains speculation. We can have confidence in certain predictions, because a great deal of experience has repeatedly borne them out, but until the results are in, confidence, not certainty, is all we can have.

     Nearly all human action proceeds not from knowledge but from confidence. Yes, the Sun has risen in the East for as long as we’ve been watching. Yes, it seems likely that it will rise in the East tomorrow morning; we can be confident about it. But it hasn’t happened yet...and someday it might not. Indeed, if the stellar physics I learned as a lad may be relied upon, someday it won’t.

     However, there are some whose political agenda isn’t satisfied with that: they who constantly repeat that “the science is settled” and “no reasonable person can disagree.”

---

     The “global warming / climate change” foofaurauw is an example of how the Left has turned “science” into a kind of cargo cult. Leftists have promoted white coats, glassware, computers, impressive-sounding institutions, and (above all) research grants as “science,” completely omitting (and often deliberately obscuring) the true nature of science and the principles of the scientific method. They demand that we not question the pronouncements of those it has venerated as scientific authorities, even by citing legitimate, highly accomplished scientists who hold other opinions. Helmut Schoeck coined a term for this: scientism. It’s a quasi-religious belief system, a church implacably hostile to heretics, founded upon the dead trappings of a discipline in no way connected to those beliefs.

     Too many ordinary Americans accept scientism while remaining ignorant of science. It has cost us heavily and will continue to do so.

The "Science" Trap

     At the age of twenty-seven, Dr. Robert Stadler had written a treatise on cosmic rays, which demolished most of the theories held by the scientists who preceded him. Those who followed, found his achievement somewhere at the base of any line of inquiry they undertook. At the age of thirty, he was recognized as the greatest physicist of his time. At thirty-two, he became the head of the Department of Physics at Patrick Henry University, in the days when the great university still deserved its glory. It was of Dr. Robert Stadler that a writer had said: “Perhaps, among the phenomena of the universe which he is studying, none is so miraculous as the brain of Dr. Robert Stadler himself.” It was Dr. Robert Stadler who had once corrected a student: “Free scientific inquiry? The first adjective is redundant.”
     At the age of forty, Dr. Robert Stadler addressed the nation, endorsing the establishment of a State Science Institute. “Set science free from the rule of the dollar,” he pleaded. The issue had hung in the balance; an obscure group of scientists had quietly forced a bill through its long way to the floor of the Legislature; there had been some public hesitation about the bill, some doubt, an uneasiness no one could define. The name of Dr. Robert Stadler acted upon the country like the cosmic rays he studied: it pierced any barrier. The nation built the white marble edifice as a personal present to one of its greatest men.

     [From Atlas Shrugged.]

     There are days I find myself wondering if Ayn Rand had a device that allowed her to view the future. I have a few differences with her, of course, but on subject after subject she seems incontestably prescient. Government funded, government managed “science” is one such.

     Governments are not altruists. Neither are those that vie for control of their powers. A government that funds anything – the sciences included – will eventually develop an agenda for it. That agenda will have little to do with “scientific inquiry.”

     In all probability, my Gentle Readers being bright and well informed sorts, you’ve already read about climate-science whistleblower Dr. John Bates:

     In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’.

     Dr Bates was one of two Principal Scientists at NCEI, based in Asheville, North Carolina.

     A good scientist – a good man – would have nothing to do with such a scheme, or with any organization that would countenance it. Apparently Dr. Bates’s conscience led him to such a conclusion, as his career is in jeopardy for having “spilled the beans.” I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s received death threats.

     But soft! What counterstroke through yonder Internet breaks?

     Australia’s chief scientist has slammed Donald Trump’s attempt to censor environmental data, saying the US president’s behaviour was comparable to the manipulation of science by the Soviet Union.

     Speaking at a scientific roundtable in Canberra on Monday, Alan Finkel warned science was “literally under attack” in the United States and urged his colleagues to keep giving “frank and fearless” advice despite the political opposition.

     “The Trump administration has mandated that scientific data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from last week going forward has to undergo review by political appointees before that data can be published on the EPA website or elsewhere,” he said.

     Mind you, of the largest scientific and environmental scandals of the past century, a healthy fraction have involved the EPA – as a perpetrator. It’s overstepped its statutory authority on too many occasions to enumerate here. But demanding that the administration that funds and oversees that agency have the privilege of reviewing its publications before they’re foisted upon the public with the authority of “science” is a step too far for those...persons, including their government-funded allies in the Land Down Under.

     [And while we’re here, three cheers for the indispensable Joanne Nova for her fearless and relentless reporting on these subjects. If I weren’t old and long married, and didn’t resemble something left over from a mortuary fire...but perhaps we shouldn’t go there.]

     The irony of Finkel’s diatribe is overwhelming. The man holds a position whose very title is absurd. His salary, and no doubt the funding for whatever activities he oversees, come from a government. Governments have blatantly used environmental scare propaganda as a vehicle with which to pursue absolute control of their nations’ economies...and some have largely gained what they sought. But for the government of another nation – one on the other side of the world – to do what a government can only be expected to do with the opinions of an agency it funds strikes him as beyond the pale.

     I know, I know: it’s only the cumulative effect of a set of incentives over time. But today, with human freedom endangered everywhere, the moral must be drawn.

     Allow me to be maximally plain about the matter:

“Government science” is NOT LEGITIMATE SCIENCE.

     Scientists whose livelihoods and researches depend upon the blessing of the State are beholden to that State. They can be coerced into supporting the State’s agenda more easily than any other species of creature. Therefore, their pronouncements cannot be trusted until entirely private researchers provide peer review and confirmation of their results.

     We would be far better off had the notion of government funded science never been conceived. It should have been treated as a hybrid between propaganda and witchcraft. The trap it provides for potentially honest, potentially productive scientists is attractive beyond belief. Worse yet, it snares the beliefs and attitudes of non-scientists with its veneer of “scientific authority” – yet another internally contradictory idea – more effectively with every passing year.

     It’s one of the most lethal weapons in the arsenal of the State. It must be brought to a halt before it destroys everything we hold dear.

From Hypothesis To Premise To Piety

     The mystery of where the milk went to was soon cleared up. It was mixed every day into the pigs' mash. The early apples were now ripening, and the grass of the orchard was littered with windfalls. The animals had assumed as a matter of course that these would be shared out equally; one day, however, the order went forth that all the windfalls were to be collected and brought to the harness-room for the use of the pigs. At this some of the other animals murmured, but it was no use. All the pigs were in full agreement on this point, even Snowball and Napoleon. Squealer was sent to make the necessary explanations to the others.
     "Comrades!" he cried. "You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades," cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?"
     Now if there was one thing that the animals were completely certain of, it was that they did not want Jones back. When it was put to them in this light, they had no more to say. The importance of keeping the pigs in good health was all too obvious. So it was agreed without further argument that the milk and the windfall apples (and also the main crop of apples when they ripened) should be reserved for the pigs alone.

     [George Orwell, Animal Farm]

     If there’s a mandatory-reading article anywhere on the Web this morning, it would be John Tierney’s excellent, nearly encyclopedic survey of the Left’s exploitation of “science.” The Left’s “war on science” claims about the Right have been a critical part of the American political discourse for several decades. Yet – surprise, surprise – virtually no media attention has gone to the identities and tactics of the real perpetrators of the attack on science and scientific thought.

     To unearth those identities and tactics, it’s mandatory that we first be absolutely clear about what we’re talking about when we discuss “science.” It’s been long enough since I was in school that I cannot say whether the nature of the scientific method is still taught there:

1. Note a pattern in observable natural phenomena.
2. Formulate a hypothesis that might explain that pattern.
3. Examine the hypothesis for its causal implications.
4. Design experiments to test all those implications.
5. Perform experiments:
   • Under carefully controlled initial conditions;
   • With safeguards against “experimenter interactions” and “confirmation bias;”
   • And full attention to the time intervals involved.
6. Match the observed results of the experiments to the causal implications of the hypothesis:
   1. If the results conform to what the implications predict, the hypothesis survives. (alternately, “is confirmed.”)
   2. If the results fail to conform to those predictions, the hypothesis is disproved.

     Note that according to step 6.2 in the above, one nonconforming result is sufficient to disprove a hypothesis. There are no exceptions to this rule. In contrast, though the hypothesis survives any number of conforming results, no accumulation of conforming results is sufficient to prove the hypothesis for all time. In shorter and much more imperative terms:

The Science Is Never Settled.

     That is the foundation of all scientific inquiry.

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     My years in the sciences acquainted me intimately with the problem of faith as a substitute for science. Faith is relevant only to propositions that can never be either proved or disproved. Yet faith has been critically important to the flacksters of the “anthropogenic global warming” hypothesis. Those...persons, frustrated with their lack of success at getting sufficient “buy-in” from the general public to support their political ambitions, are the ones best known for the use of the phrase “The science is settled.”

     In this connection, refer back to the previous segment. “Anthropogenic global warming” is a hypothesis. It has several clear causal implications. However, the predictions founded on those implications have been contradicted by real-world observations. By the rules of real science, that’s sufficient to disprove the hypothesis. That’s why the warmistas harp on the results emitted by their beloved “models.”

     But that hypothesis is too precious for the Left to allow it to be discarded. It supports their fondest aspiration: accession to total control of the world economy...and therefore, of the world. So they repeat that “The science is settled” in every available venue, hoping to win the day for their cause by exploiting the widespread ignorance about the nature of science through repetitious browbeating.

     This is the first step: the recasting of what started as a scientific hypothesis – a proposition with causal implications to be tested through experimentation – into an unchallengeable premise.

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     In a number of cases, no amount nor intensity of repetitious browbeating will suffice to “close the deal.” The hypothesis cannot be made into a premise for a simple reason: the evidence of its falsity is too widely available and is too easily observed and comprehended. If the proposition is to survive, more will be required of those who insist upon it. The faith must be “established:” i.e., made into a social piety of which no discussion will be tolerated.

     Social pieties are dangerous things to question. As I wrote in that earlier essay:

     One cannot challenge the pieties of a society without provoking condemnation or ostracism. To question a piety, even along its margins, is to ask to be thrown out of the church. This is an absolute that applies to all peoples and times.

     Pieties have their dangers. The unquestioned belief, in late 17th Century France, that Catholics were morally superior to Huguenots allowed Louis XIV to revoke the Edict of Nantes, the decree of religious tolerance for the Protestant minority. The resulting mass emigration of Huguenots to Belgium weakened France severely, as the Huguenots were among the most industrious and educated persons of northern France. Indeed, part of the Catholic animosity toward them was that they worked on Sundays, and thus had a competitive edge over Catholics in business and commerce.

     If we are in thrall to a piety contrary to the actual facts of our society, we are in danger too. The question is only of degree.

     Thus the Left sees the elevation of a cherished hypothesis to a social piety as a supreme achievement – a supreme political achievement. It’s a close parallel to the creation of an established church in which membership is mandatory for all subjects. No one wants to be thrown out of such a church; the foreseeable consequences are too dreadful to contemplate. Heretics have all too often been burned at the stake.

     The transformation of hypothesis into a piety requires two steps:

• The association of dissent with something near-unanimously regarded as shameful;
• The placement of any contradicting facts, no matter how widely available and easily comprehended, beyond polite examination or discussion (i.e., “tabooing” the subject).

     Note how the Left has achieved this in its promotion of “racial equality” – and note how complete is the contrast with the observable facts.

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     I could go on about this for many pages, but I’ll spare you. For most Americans, the essential part is to be aware of the process that converts a hypothesis to a premise and / or to a piety, the reasons for it, and the steps the Left and its fellow travelers take to achieve it.

     At this time, the Left is in retreat politically. However, its aims will not permit it to back away; therefore, it has “doubled down” on the methods above, and has chosen to treat new subjects to those methods. Consider in this light the Left’s treatment of particular figures in the incoming Trump Administration as “fascists” or “Nazis.”

     But to return to John Tierney’s core thesis, the greatest of ironies can be found in this: The Left alleges that it’s the Right that’s conducting a “war on science.” It’s attempted by repetition to make that proposition as unchallengeable a premise as “anthropogenic global warming.” The campaign has largely failed, for which reason we may expect the Left to attempt to make “the Right’s war on science” into a piety, for example by associating conservatives’ observations about differences in academic performance among the races, sexes, and ethnicities with “a desire to bring back slavery.”

     You might want to bookmark this essay. Forewarned is forearmed. The weapons are your keenness of observation and willingness to dispute Leftists’ assertions with sharp, evidence-based questions. I hope I’ve provided a sufficiency of ammunition.

Science and the Shepherd

The topic -- Bill Nye “The Science Guy.”  Why Nye?   Frequent flyer miles.  I didn’t have enough miles with one particular airline for a plane ticket, so I used them for magazine subscriptions.  It was an interview with Nye in my “complimentary” Time magazine that inspired this column.  

Reading secular publications like Time reminds me something retired USMC Lt. Col. Oliver North said, “Every morning I get up and read two things, the Washington Post and the Bible, just so I can know what both sides are up to.” 

The article about Nye starts with this:  “Bill Nye The Science Guy follows Undeniable, his defense of evolution, with his new book, Unstoppable, a call to action on climate change.”  The first thing that grabbed my attention was the seeming misapplication of the titles.  I thought “denier” was a moniker reserved for climate change non-believers, not those who might believe that, “In the beginning, God…”  Moreover, if evolution has to be defended, how exactly is it undeniable?   

Perhaps the explanation to Nye’s evangelism for the theory of evolution is best understood in light of a piece about Paul Karl Feyerabend, a German renowned for his work on the Philosophy of Science.  

According to Feyerabend, new theories came to be accepted not because of their accord with scientific method, but because their supporters made use of any trick – rational, rhetorical or ribald – in order to advance their cause.  Without a fixed ideology, or the introduction of religious tendencies, the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is "anything goes": "'anything goes' is not a 'principle' I hold... but the terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history."

The second thing in the interview that disturbed my Spidey-senses was Nye’s response to this question: “How do you make the average person understand science?”  Nye:  “You have to have learning objectives – things you want to get across.  You want to make a point:  Humans and dinosaurs did not live concurrently.  If you get the adjacent carbon dating of volcanic soil, that’s cool.  But what I want you to get is that ancient dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time.  The rest is gravy.”   

I get that Nye has an ideology he wants to get across.  What through me for a loop was the need to dogmatically convince his intended target that, “Humans and dinosaurs did not live concurrently.”  Whether they did, or didn’t, has no bearing on whether or not Nye evolved from a monkey.

Nye’s book defending the “undeniable” gives an interesting summation of the unique position he contends human’s hold on the hierarchy of evolutionary development.  Nye says, “We are all so much alike, because we are all human.  But it goes deeper than that.  Every species you’ll encounter on Earth is, near as we can tell, chemically the same inside.  We are all descended from a common ancestor.  We are shaped by the same forces and factors that influence every other living thing, and yet we emerged as something unique.  Among the estimated 16 million species on Earth, we alone have the ability to comprehend the process that brought us here.” 

It is perhaps the height of haughtiness that Nye thinks he’s smarter than all the other animals.  I’m not sure how Nye can know with scientific certainty that we alone are the only species with, “the ability to comprehend the process that brought us here.”  The oldest book of the Bible (Job 12:7-10) has this to say about animals and their knowledge of the process, “But ask the animals, and they will teach you,  or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;  or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,  or let the fish in the sea inform you.  Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?  In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”

I do agree with Mr. Nye on one point, we do have “the ability to comprehend the process that brought us here.”  I simply disagree with Mr. Nye on what that process is.

I’m quite content to be as smart as the sheep mentioned in Psalm 103, “Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.”  

What Nye really needs is to know the Good Shepherd.