Sorry guys, I’ve been traveling, only online sporadically, and then usually on mobile. I agree we need to consider allowing unmoderated threads, and I will bring it up with the Mods.
This is disingenuous and more than a little hypocritical. You introduced Turner’s article as the product of “an important member of the NAS” making the organisational affiliation very relevant. I can understand you being upset that said affiliation detracted from the credibility of the article - rather than enhancing it as you intended. But you were the one who made it an issu.
As for there being a pattern, looking back over the last year the only similar example I could see was about Koonin’s book. There again, you started by trying to present Koonin as credible.
There was no such pattern in the Cladistics discussion General Discussion on the Nature and Methods of Cladistics for instance.
In this thread you tried to impugn Wikipedia as a source due to alleged bias - so why should your sources be immune when you make their credibility an issue at the very start?
If you are fed up with justifiable disagreements on the credibility of your sources, perhaps you should not make it an issue in the first place. Or at least cease to choose such questionable sources.
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A reasonable request. I did not provide the text of Collins’s letter because I thought that everyone here would be familiar with it. You can see the entire text of his letter at:
From the way Collins’s note starts out, it looks as if he is not in mid-conversation with Fauci but is bringing up the subject to Fauci for the first time. So there’s nothing I could have added there. I agree that it would be interesting to see Fauci’s reply. If anyone here has it, I’d be glad to read it.
Anyhow, whatever Fauci may have said, I think it’s pretty clear what the intentions of at least one “establishment” figure, Francis Collins, were. I don’t think I distorted in what I said. I could be faulted for generalizing from Collins to “the establishment”, but of course I had in mind things other than that letter by itself when I mentioned “the establishment.”
Ask yourself why no major US network tried to organize a debate program, with scientifically trained interviewers asking questions, in which the Barrington folks and Fauci, Collins, etc. could state the facts as they saw them and give their arguments and replies regarding policy options. Ask yourself why discussion and debate were circumvented, with people like Collins and Fauci using their influence to get straight to the lawmakers. How many lawmakers do you think had even heard of the Barrington Declaration, had listened to the video interviews with the Barrington scientists? I asked many university educated friends of mine, with strong opinions about the virtue of massive lockdowns, and none of them had even heard of the Barrington declaration. All of them expressed that view that only cranks and right-wing politicians who voted for Trump etc. questioned the wisdom of COVID policy. They simply were not aware that there were Stanford, Harvard and Oxford profs (among many other highly qualified people) who disagreed with the policy route taken.
Again, I am not trying to prove that the Barrington people were right and that Fauci etc. were wrong. I’m asking about the social, political, and institutional mechanisms by which the policymakers came to be fed a single narrative, with the media (at least the mainstream traditional media) in full support of the narrative, when normally we expect the media to play a critical and analytical role regarding policy choices. As is almost always the case here, I’m protesting about unfair, unbalanced, biased, or ideological procedures rather than arguing for a specific conclusion.
I have now linked you to the whole e-mail, not “snippets” of it, and it was reported not just on “Fox News” but in many mainstream places, including the Wall Street Journal. (I don’t, by the way, watch Fox News, and if I hear about any of its stories, it is only indirectly.)
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Can you tell me where you see this in the article? Here is what I see:
"Rewards aplenty flow to those willing to jump on the “science” bandwagon, exemplified by the ongoing and dubious “climate crisis.” "
If this is the sentence you had in mind, you aren’t reading very carefully, and you’re reading into it more than is warranted from the author’s exact words. This sentence does not deny that the earth has warmed or that climate has been changing. It expresses skepticism about whether that warming or those “changes” constitute a “crisis”, that is, an event that justifies massive restructuring of the world’s economy with serious consequences for employment, national revenues, etc. in the countries that are expected to carry the burden of dealing with the “crisis” (i.e., the Western countries), while the countries that are the most flagrant emitters of CO2 will, we know, not pull their weight or make corresponding sacrifices.
If I missed a sentence where he says: “There has been no warming” or “There has been no climate change,” please point it out to me.
He didn’t deny any facts (see above), but how do you know that his motives for holding the beliefs that he does are “political”? That’s the very thing you are trying to prove, and therefore you can’t assume it. A major point of his article is that others have turned science into something political, and he thinks that’s a bad development. If you can prove that his motives are political, please present your evidence. You have wire-taps of his phone calls, or his private e-mails, where he discusses his motives with his friends or family? You know him personally, and he’s confided his motives to you? I suspect that you knew nothing about him, probably hadn’t even heard of him until I posted the article, so I don’t think you have any inside personal track on his motives. If you want to prove his motivation, you will have to prove it from things he’s said and done. So far, you’ve proved nothing, just made allegations. Allegations aren’t facts.
And yet on scores of occasions, scientists on these origins sites have claimed (when they are lecturing IDers and YECs) that science is not a fixed, received body of truth, that science is always being tested for soundness, that even the most respected theories can potentially be overthrown, etc. At one time “the science was settled” regarding the bleeding of patients and the four humors and any number of other things. It’s dangerous to say, “We’ll allow you to argue about A, and B, but not about C, because that’s 'settled.”" That makes scientific claims something like religious truths which can’t be questioned. Very socially dangerous, as well as intellectually improper.
Again, even if we accept that there has been measurable warming over the past 150 years (which I have no trouble accepting), it does not follow that there is no room for open and fair debate on the subtleties of causation and on policy responses. You keep trying to simplify the question to: “Global warming is a fact, and therefore debate over any aspect of global warming should be banned.” That line of thinking is crude beyond measure, for reasons I’ve given several times.
This is not consistent with the fact that, in defense of the accusation that the NAS is hypocritical, your response was merely to refer to quotes from their mission statement while failing to demonstrate that their actions were consistent with those professed values.
I also remain unconvinced that scientific discourse is improved by giving false and misleading ideas undue prominence thru the provision to those who promote such ideas of massive funding from private enterprises whose financial interests would be harmed if scientific truths are acknowledged and implemented thru public policy. Would you care to provide an argument for why this would be a good thing? TIA.
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More allegations of bad motives. Are you incapable of writing a post without such personal remarks?
I did not say the pattern occurs regarding all my postings. But it’s frequent enough to be noticeable to anyone who is not incredibly unobservant.
No, I’m fed up with the substitution of ad hominem argumentation for arguments concerning the substance of what is being said. Scholars and scientists should be arguing only about whether or not claims are true, not about the alleged motivations of those who make the claims. Even if we suppose the worst that you and Faizal are strongly implying, i.e., that the NAS is a group of right-wing extremists with a dangerous political agenda, Turner’s particular claims about the funding of science research (e.g., how the percentage of funding has shifted over the years toward the government), and his expression of concern about the problems connected with that shift, should be entirely discussable in their own terms, whether Turner’s own political beliefs are far right, far left, or anything in between. But the concept of such objectivity in discussion appears alien to most of the atheist scientists (and atheist science groupies) here, who prefer to constantly impute motives rather than discuss and evaluate concrete claims.
I’ve lost track of how many times discussions here about virtually any scientific topic under the sun end up being diverted (by atheist posters, almost always) to discussions of the Wedge Document, i.e., discussions of alleged motives. Here, there is a slightly refreshing change in that at least no one has yet dragged in the Wedge Document, though I don’t doubt that if the discussion continues longer, someone will eventually drag it in, since the Pavlovian reflex here, when any individual or organization expresses a view that is disliked for any reason, is to advance social conspiracy theories, and I expect a parallel to be drawn between the alleged theocratic plot behind the Wedge Document and an alleged theocratic plot of the NAS any day now. After all, Faizal set up the atmosphere for such comparisons in his very first comment above, when he wrote:
The NAS reminds Faizal of the American College of Pediatricians, which, Faizal says, is a far right fringe group; Faizal thus invited everyone here, right at the start of the discussion (it’s called “poisoning the well”), to think of the NAS as an organization with a hidden agenda that is nothing like its stated agenda, before any of them had had any time to actually read any NAS literature. When one organization which “seems to be akin” (says Faizal) to a far right fringe organization that lies about its agenda, it’s only a matter of time until someone here draws a parallel to the Wedge Document, which also allegedly proves that Discovery lies about its agenda. That’s the mindset around here: conspiracy theories are proposed and entertained at the drop of a hat, based on two minutes of reading about an organization (in this case, the NAS) and the very superficial general impressions that come from that.
I did about ten years of graduate study involving the close reading of philosophical, theological, political and literary texts. In several of those years I was in seminars. I can’t remember a single seminar in which either a professor or a graduate student presenter, in discussing the writings of an author, appealed to alleged motivations of an author instead of to the author’s argument. Yet except for Art and one or two others (only briefly), the responses here have been entirely about alleged motivations of people and organizations, rather than about the factual claims and analysis presented in the article that my posting highlighted. It’s quite obvious that people here prefer discussing potential conspiracies over discussing factual claims about science funding and critiques of the current methods of science funding. Well, they can do so. I’m not going to respond any further to the conspiracy theory stuff, or even read any more of it. (However, if anyone actually wishes to discuss data, historical data showing how the percentage of research funding from various sources has changed over time in various states or countries, and to offer an intelligent commentary on the social and institutional ramifications of such change, I will read what they have to say, and respond if their remarks stimulate any constructive new thoughts, as time permits.)
@Eddie, does this represent your idea of “reasoned scholarship” from the NAS tagline?
How is a “quick and devastating published takedown” anything other than part of the ongoing debate? I know the answer - @Eddie (and probably Turner, and also the aggrieved authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) weren’t, and aren’t, interested in a “debate program”. A “quick and devastating published takedown” would lay bare the flaws in the arguments made by the authors of the GBC - exactly what a debate is intended to do. @Eddie does not want to hear “the other side”, nor to have opposing views widely disseminated.
I would note that the STAT article is utterly devoid of a discussion amongst those being accused - we only see one out-of-context snippet, that Prasad, like @Eddie, warp into some sort of attempt at muzzling. Having sat in the second row of the discussions, and having been amazed at the splendid work done on social media (especially Twitter), I would assert that @Eddie’s (and Prasad’s) claims when it comes to the debate are just plain wrong. They are upset because the information that confounds their politics has not been muzzled, not because there has been no debate.
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@Eddie @Art
As a test, please try setting up your own side discussion. My understanding is that should bypass the comment approval requirement.
This completely misconstrues my meaning and intention. As for Prasad, I would not claim to be such a mind-reader as to be able to tell, from reading one article, what his motives are and what “upsets” him.
But I would point out that calling someone a “fringe” scientist usually is not merely denotative, i.e., usually means more than merely that the scientist in question holds a minority view; it usually has a pejorative connotation, something along the lines of “barely deserving the name of scientist,” and that is how I read Collins’s comment, which therefore irked me, given that the people he was calling “fringe” were trained at universities every bit as good as the ones where he himself was trained, and hold positions at prestigious research institutions (Oxford, Harvard, Stanford) that typically don’t give people tenure unless they are highly competent and highly productive. If he disagrees with them, fine, but a word other than “fringe” would have been less insulting in its effect.
I have no more time for this discussion. I have my paid work to do, and deadlines to meet. But thanks again, Art, for at least trying to address the topic of the original article I linked to.
As for the moderator suggestion that we try out a “Side Discussion,” I’m game for that, down the road, on some other topic, but for this topic, I’m done.
Not quite. The description of the NAS provided by Wikipedia was very similar to the one it provides of the “American College of Pediatricians.” And since I know from my familiarity with latter organization (whose activities pertain to my profession) that Wikipedia’s description was spot on, I had no reason to doubt it was similarly on target with the NAS. A conclusion that has been abundantly confirmed by the evidence provided by other members subsequently.
Hope that helps clear up your confusion. I guess your close reading skills are a bit rusty.
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No; it was your writing that was the problem. What you have written now makes your original point much more clearly than what you originally wrote.
But by the way, there is a logical flaw in the reasoning you just presented. You inferred that because one Wikipedia article accurately described its subject, that other Wikipedia articles will do the same. But as you must know, Wikipedia articles are written by thousands of different people, of varying intellectual ability and varying levels of research skills, and of course, varying social and political prejudices. (On the latter point, almost always prejudices of the left, but still varying within that range.) Further, an article may be, and often is, a pastiche of contributions by different authors. So no conclusion can be drawn along the lines of, “If a Wikipedia article on the motives of one social organization is accurate, a Wikipedia article on the motives of another social organization will also be accurate.” The article on the ACP might be completely accurate but the article on the NAS filled with errors and unwarranted inferences. And at the time you wrote your first comment above, you certainly had not done anything like a responsible check on the contents of the Wikipedia article on the NAS. You simply adopted the Wikipedia slant uncritically – I would guess because it fits in with your general approach to any organization you deem “conservative,” i.e., such organizations are motivated by the desire to undermine rights and freedoms of minorities, to establish theocracies, etc. So even if it should turn out that your original speculation about the NAS was right, your procedure – almost instantaneously adopting a position based on superficial first impressions derived from Wikipedia articles – was unscholarly. But that’s nothing new around here.
That’s all I have time for. Someday, perhaps, you will decide to actually offer an analysis of the description of science research funding found in the Turner article, which is what I asked for. But by that date, I expect sometime around the time of Armageddon, I won’t be reading this column any longer. Have a nice summer.
And yet I said nothing about your motives or even directly against your person, I restricted myself to commenting on your words. And since this comes after you made nasty and false claims about my beliefs I can only point out that this is another example of hypocrisy.
Odd then that a careful scan of the forum reveals only one other case in the last year.
And yet in both cases you chose to try to present the authors as credible, therefore inviting such criticisms. The one-sidedness is rather obvious. Odd then, that you choose to ignore my advice.
Indeed Turner says little of substance - most of it is vague allegations with very little evidence or reasoning. And you don’t seem very interested in comments dealing with the substance either.
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Maybe you should go on to read it in context. Which should not be hard as I already provided a filler quote.
Describing climate change research a “political activism masquerading as science” is hardly consistent with accepting climate change as reality.
And yet you agree that the question of climate change is settled. I think we can agree that the Earth is not a flat disc and there is no reasonable prospect of that being overthrown. That the climate is changing now seems to be a very clear fact.
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Yes, such as the fact that Turner completely ignored the indirect cost scandal from the early 90s, which is very illuminating. It’s so significant that it has its own Wikipedia page.
Huh. So was that your standard retort in those seminars you bragged about attending? Whenever you failed to understand an article it was the fault of the author?
Perhaps that explains how you managed to stay in school for 10 years without obtaining a degree that you will tell us about.
Yes, and that is a perfectly valid inference. It is no different than treating the Encyclopedia Britannica as a reliable source even though it is a compendium of articles by thousands of contributors. Not that I deny that Wikipedia does have its issues.
But, in this case, Wikipedia turned out to be 100% accurate in its description of the NAS as shill group for the extreme right. So I’m not sure what you are still complaining about.
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Calling my statements “disingenuous” and “hypocritical” does imply something about my motives and my person, because it suggests dishonesty on my part. If you say that you find my discussion “apparently internally inconsistent” or the like, you are avoiding discussions of motive or character. If you call me (or my statements) disingenuous or hypocritical you are not. If you cannot see the difference here, there is little point in our conversing about anything.
If you had actually offered any such comments, we could have tested that claim. But you didn’t.
Where did he say that all climate change research is political activism masquerading as science? I doubt very much that he would assert that there is no objective, properly scientific study of things like sea level changes, air and water temperatures, changes in the Arctic and Antarctic ice cover, the frequency of hurricanes over time, etc. What he was pointing out is that there are rewards – both in terms of professional and academic career advancement, and in terms of lucrative research funds – for those who frame their climate change research in terms of a “climate crisis”. The phrase “climate crisis” already goes beyond mere empirical description into the realm of the rhetorical. And of course governments are more likely to give billions of dollars to climate change research if they are convinced that there is a “crisis” justifying the expenditure.
What he said was dubious was not the existence of climate change, but the characterization of that change as a “crisis”.
Not unless you state exactly what you mean by the phrase. If by the phrase you mean only that climate has been changing over the past 150 years, I think that is settled. But in the heated rhetorical atmosphere of today, when most people say that the question of climate change is settled, they mean not merely that the existence of change has been empirically verified, but (i) that the causality of the change is completely (or virtually completely) understood so that it is intolerable that any scientist should offer any different account of causality (and we should professionally punish, or at least savagely belittle, any who do), and (ii) that the policies to be adopted must be along certain heavily interventionist lines. I do not regard those last two things as “settled.” And as I already made clear, I think it’s the last two things that Turner does not regard as settled. If he had wanted to say that there has been no climate change, he could easily have said that, but he didn’t. He said only that the notion of a “climate crisis” was dubious and suggested that it was a notion that was distorting research funding allocations.
I’ve tried to make this point a few times now, but it doesn’t seem to be getting through, since you keep repeating the same mantra, as if the distinctions I’ve tried very hard to make have not registered with you at all. I don’t think another repetition will make any difference, so I regard myself as absolved from the responsibility of explaining myself again.
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You are ignoring the sleazy word games that Eddie and his idols and heroes in the Climate Denial Movement employ.
Eddie has said he and his fellow ideologues fully accept that climate exists, and that it changes.
And that is pretty much the full extent of what they admit to accepting about climate science.
They then think it is political oppression that their silly ideas are ignored by mainstream scientists and competent policy makers. However, they ARE very influential with far-right politicians, and that is all that counts to them.
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Any inference about your motives would be tenuous at best. Let us note that you seem unwilling to admit to an obvious error - an error you would doubtless leap upon if another made it.
And again, let us note that you have no difficulty in making stronger statements against your opponents here.
I did in fact opine that the 50% figure for direct costs seemed not obviously unreasonable and the 10% cap amazingly low. No response from you. And why restrict it to points I made? Why no response to John Mercer’s mention of past reforms to indirect spending rules, for instance?
Since you demand explicit statements, then it is only fair that you should provide them. Where does he actually say this? Where does he admit that the global temperature is increasing? Where does he admit that we are already seeing serious consequences of this increase?
Really? This seems somewhat implausible. However the causality of the change is sufficiently understood to know that CO2 levels are an important factor and intervention would seem desirable to prevent things getting worse. Even if you don’t consider the current situation a crisis, leaving things to get worse seems to invite crisis.
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Another example of your lack of logic, that you would draw a generalization about my reading habits regarding serious scholars and philosophers from my reaction to a particular piece of writing by you. It’s also a sign of your lack of self-critical attitude that you don’t compare what you originally wrote with you recent restatement, and say to yourself: “He’s right. I was more explicit and precise in my restatement of my meaning than in what I originally wrote. I see now how I could have averted misunderstanding from the start.”
You seem unaware of the length of time it takes to complete a PhD in the humanities subjects. But I know you will not take my word for it, as you reflexively say no to everything I affirm. You will want sources. Among many statements I found on a quick lookup is the following:
“According to Joseph Berger of the [New York Times], the average length of a dissertation program today is 8.2 years (2). Terminal degrees in the hard sciences typically take a slightly shorter time to complete than do degrees in education and the humanities. The field of physics has a current average of five years. The psychology field averages five to seven years. New doctoral students in the fields of history or english can expect to spend eight years completing the degree. Some fields of study require a significantly longer degree process. For example, in the field of education, the current average is 13 years.”
Religion and philosophy are closer to the high end of the given range. And in most humanities subjects (unlike most science subjects in the USA) students have to acquire an MA before starting the PhD program, which is anywhere from 1 to 3 years (on average 2, if it’s a thesis MA rather than a coursework-only MA). So add 2 years to the 8.2 average and you’re already over 10. The vast majority of grad students in the philosophy and religion departments at my school had run out of graduate funding (which only lasted four years from the start of the PhD) several years before completing their dissertations. So you were supposed to be writing a very difficult piece of work on the thought of very difficult writers while worrying about where your rent money and food were coming from for the next few years. Of course, if you were lucky enough to be married and your spouse was subsidizing the completion of your dissertation, you could carry on full-time until you finished; if not, it would take even longer, because you’d be working 20 hours a week or so, probably at minimum-wage jobs, while trying to concentrate on high-level theoretical work. In contrast, I was friends with many science graduate students at my school, including several physics students, and they were all shocked at long it took someone to get an Arts PhD; most of them were “four years and out” (not counting any Master’s they had previously done). They saw what we were going through as a form of medieval torture, and were very glad they chose the sciences rather than the arts.
It’s very different. The Britannica articles are assigned, by editors of great competence, to specialist scholars of great competence (proved by both training and publications) in the field the article is about. Wikipedia articles – especially those touching on social and political topics – are written for the most part by dilettantes and amateurs and ideologues, and the “editors” (the cabal of young males with infinite time on their hands to police articles and change what they don’t like) are pseudonymous, unqualified cranks, with no training whatsoever in the fields the article is about. Sometimes a Wikipedia article is pretty good, and sometimes a Wikipedia article is lousy. It depends on luck; if it happens to have been largely written by someone who knows what he’s talking about, and nobody interferes with “edits” motivated by a political agenda, it might well be roughly accurate; but if it is written by someone who hasn’t a clue about the field, and is motivated by the desire to attack ideas he doesn’t like, it will be biased, unscholarly, etc., especially since anyone who tries to correct his biases will find his corrective “edits” removed within about about 20 minutes by the author or other ideologues. I find it amusing that you, who have so loudly said that regarding COVID and climate change and other matters, politicians should not listen to the masses or to people who know nothing, but only to experts in epidemiology or climatology etc., but then equate Wikipedia, an enterprise produced largely (with a few exceptions) by the masses and dilettantes who know nothing, with the Britannica, a reference source which follows the very “expert” model you endorse. Very inconsistent on your part.