New Scientist on “denialism”: SPECIAL REPORT / DENIAL: From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march. Why are so many people refusing to accept what the evidence is telling them? Over the next 10 pages we look at the phenomenon in depth. What is denial? What attracts people to it? How does it start, and how does it spread? And finally, how should we respond to it?
If futures markets were used against deniers, they would point to Y2Kdth and similar to support their denials. Just as AGW deniers point to early 20th century eugenics science.
Betting challenges against experts can sometimes undermine their credibility, like James Annon's challeges to Richard Lindzen on global warming.
Applying the inverse of the Kelly betting formula to the bids of person in a betting market should reveal an odds estimate that should align with what the person thinks about the future; this could be a sort of mathematical mind reader. It should reflect what they really believe as revealed in their presumed attempts to maximize their utility function. A metric for the distance between your money and your mouth.
As I was running some errands, it occurred to me that the snatches of the _New Scientist_ position presented here seem to suggest a Hansonesque blog post title observation, "denial is about being in the wrong political faction" or some such thing.
The lead sentence you quoted seems to illustrate that. "From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march." Climate change economic risks and some strategies to reduce CO2 emissions are tied to policy about genetically modified organisms, especially GM crops. And numerate technically conservative strategies for producing energy while reducing CO2 emissions are closely tied to nuclear policy. Thus opposition to GM crops and nuclear power should be a very big deal by the official mindset of the _New Scientist_. So why pick on people who stand on silly objections to vaccines in preference to, say, people who stand on technically silly objections to proposals for nuclear waste storage? Maybe I move in the wrong circles, but my impression is that the technical consensus about the tractability of the nuclear waste storage/disposal problem[*] is stronger than the technical consensus that the expected damage from climate change caused by CO2 emissions justifies imposing very large energy consumption cuts, and other very large costs involved in rejiggering energy production technologies.
[*] E.g., "resolved: that the fundamental technical risks of depositing nuclear waste in a facility comparable to Yucca Mountain are not large compared to the risks associated with using coal to generate the corresponding amount of electrical energy." (Of course, that doesn't guarantee that nuclear waste policy can't be horribly screwed up in practice, just as "resolved: 1960s-era-technology syphilis treatment is fundamentally a good idea" doesn't guarantee you can't end up with the Tuskegee experiment. But climate change policy can be horribly screwed up too...)
(And alas, I can't see how to construct a tidy "Yucca Mountain facility works as designed" bet.)
Great example because Julian Simon would be the denialist. Julian Simon even wrote some on AGW, I believe his position was watchful waiting that he did not think the likely level of warming would do enough damage to justify the interventions.
FWIW regardless of htat I do like hte betting idea at least for some context. I'd like to see politicians have to place bets on their positions nad that be recored in a easily searchable database online.
Yor bets don't get decided decicively within a reasonable period of time so a person could reasonably savely place a bet and just continue to point out hte corruption of the system or the stupidity of the majority and the odds moved around.
Possibly use those as a reason not to bet, because they might temporarily register a loss (and temporary mignt be a lifetime in some conspiracies) when they needed the money.
The Ehrlich/Simon case was a bet of model-spaces, and the losing factor was an error of timing, and not of essence, if I remember correctly.
If that's how you see it, I think you're missing the point. The problem with Ehrlich's position is that it never even occurred to him that there migth be markets that divert resources to potential shortages like the ones he wanred about. So frankly, even if Simon had been wrong about prices going down, the bet most certainly wasn't priced at the commodity future equivalent trading price, and Simon could have made a complementary bet there that guaranteed him a profit.
Ehrlich was so wrong on the issue he couldn't notice himself being Dutch booked.
I like the general idea of betting, but it's not clear to me how to routinely shoehorn scientific controversies into the betting format. E.g., how would you propose to construct clean bets about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or continental drift? Now that the battle is long over, and measurement tech has enormously improved, I think I see how to do it for continental drift. But it's not clear to me how to do it for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle even today (well enough to convince fundamental skeptics like Einstein, looking for a deterministic alternative). And it's not clear to me how to do it for either controversy ca. 1925.
I think you have a better chance of addressing the general problem by backing off to (modern generalizations of) Occam's Razor. A really undeniable theory should in some suitable technical sense compress the data far more than its rivals, and with modern measurement tech continental drift easily qualifies. And this gives me some logical handle on why it's still hard to convince Einstein-like skeptics about uncertainty. The only way I see how to express the uncertainty principle in formal compression terms (or at least in definitions careful enough to address the objections of people like Lakatos to the informal formulations of Popper) gives something like "supplying the the uncertainty principle as a free-of-cost subroutine for use in the theory will reduce the lower bound on the length of the fully-elaborated theory which describes the data." I believe that's a true claim, but I can see that it's not all that much compression, merely by about the length of the uncertainty principle, compared to slightly twistier theories that match the data and still rank high in people's priors. I think the small amount of compression is what makes modern Einstein-ish uncertainty denial more reasonable than continental drift denial (damning with faint praise, yes), and I think the compression-oriented definition gives some idea why it's hard to construct bets.
Evolution has been around for more than one hundred years and has been refined considerably. I find it a very useful framework.
I also had my children vaccinated, but I can sympathise with those whose children are not strong enough to live through the vaccination process.
I suspect that all the noise about cigarette smoking is guaranteed to cause cancer is wide of the mark and I have nothing but contempt for the pushers of the second hand smoking nonsense. I have never smoked by the way.
I find that there is no good evidence for the proposition that human production of CO2 (and there is no question that we are producing CO2) has had any effect on world average temperatures, and even if it did help to increase temperatures by a degree or two, it is nothing the Earth has not experienced before, and warmer temperatures are better for us that colder temperatures, and I think there is a great deal of evidence that the atmosphere/hydrosphere/biosphere maintains temperatures within reasonably narrow margins.
I've suggested several times that people who entirely reject evolution should stick with Penicillin if their kids get MRSA infections. Strangely, no matter what they believe about evolution, people tend to demand drugs especially developed to kill organisms which have somehow changed so that they are no longer controlled using first-generation anitbiotics. Since penicillin is a whole lot cheaper than the latest and greatest, this is a gamble - money versus your child's life. There are clearly a lot of evolution-deniers who are unwilling to place this bet that life was created and remain static.....
Never in history has the expert consensus been right on everything. I’m not saying aliens built the pyramids, but indubitably some of our ’standard theories’ are wrong and it isn’t clear which.
Wrong is relative. I think it's a bit of an error to refer to Newtonian mechanics as "wrong" when it gives the same predictions as General Relativity to within one part in a zillion in most situations.
Sometimes those in the "scientific consensus" are the denalists (something New Scientist seems to ignore). When Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that doctors were killing newborns by not washing their hands, he was called a fool and was eventually committed to a mental asylum.
I prepared a (too) long argument for Your propositions:So I have to make it short:
"Science is a (the) method of verification"
Inverting this would e.g. say:"Nonscience is the (non)method of non-verification"
So it is NOT about being right, but about having the right method.
There is logical proof that if You incorporate a contradiction in Your beliefs/set of axioms, You basically can believe/prove anything.
So You have two possible 'positions':a) believing in Logic (everything else follows, with some bifurcations, i.e. undecidables, think Cantor, Goedel, which unfortunately killed them.)b) believing anything
(b) is not a position at all. It is at best 'fragmented mind' (in Bob Altemeyer's sense) versus 'coherent mind'.
What Robin seems to propose is betting the incoherents (b) into the ground.
Which to me is a very dangerous proposition, if I understand him correctly.
Why will making evolution a 100-year bet help? In 100 years the scientists will say that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming and the creationists will say it isn't, so the bet can't be settled.
Or, if you go for "scientific consensus" as what counts as the result then in 100 years, just like today, scientists say the scientific consensus is that evolution is true, and creationists will say there is real disagreement among scientists.
Sometimes the deniers are right:
http://ideosphere.com/fx-bi...
If futures markets were used against deniers, they would point to Y2Kdth and similar to support their denials. Just as AGW deniers point to early 20th century eugenics science.
Betting challenges against experts can sometimes undermine their credibility, like James Annon's challeges to Richard Lindzen on global warming.
Applying the inverse of the Kelly betting formula to the bids of person in a betting market should reveal an odds estimate that should align with what the person thinks about the future; this could be a sort of mathematical mind reader. It should reflect what they really believe as revealed in their presumed attempts to maximize their utility function. A metric for the distance between your money and your mouth.
As I was running some errands, it occurred to me that the snatches of the _New Scientist_ position presented here seem to suggest a Hansonesque blog post title observation, "denial is about being in the wrong political faction" or some such thing.
The lead sentence you quoted seems to illustrate that. "From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march." Climate change economic risks and some strategies to reduce CO2 emissions are tied to policy about genetically modified organisms, especially GM crops. And numerate technically conservative strategies for producing energy while reducing CO2 emissions are closely tied to nuclear policy. Thus opposition to GM crops and nuclear power should be a very big deal by the official mindset of the _New Scientist_. So why pick on people who stand on silly objections to vaccines in preference to, say, people who stand on technically silly objections to proposals for nuclear waste storage? Maybe I move in the wrong circles, but my impression is that the technical consensus about the tractability of the nuclear waste storage/disposal problem[*] is stronger than the technical consensus that the expected damage from climate change caused by CO2 emissions justifies imposing very large energy consumption cuts, and other very large costs involved in rejiggering energy production technologies.
[*] E.g., "resolved: that the fundamental technical risks of depositing nuclear waste in a facility comparable to Yucca Mountain are not large compared to the risks associated with using coal to generate the corresponding amount of electrical energy." (Of course, that doesn't guarantee that nuclear waste policy can't be horribly screwed up in practice, just as "resolved: 1960s-era-technology syphilis treatment is fundamentally a good idea" doesn't guarantee you can't end up with the Tuskegee experiment. But climate change policy can be horribly screwed up too...)
(And alas, I can't see how to construct a tidy "Yucca Mountain facility works as designed" bet.)
If you think this solution just didn’t occur to them, do you think they’ll embrace it with enthusiasm if they are told? Me neither.
I for one, think that they might embrace it with enthusiasm if they are told.
Great example because Julian Simon would be the denialist. Julian Simon even wrote some on AGW, I believe his position was watchful waiting that he did not think the likely level of warming would do enough damage to justify the interventions.
FWIW regardless of htat I do like hte betting idea at least for some context. I'd like to see politicians have to place bets on their positions nad that be recored in a easily searchable database online.
Yor bets don't get decided decicively within a reasonable period of time so a person could reasonably savely place a bet and just continue to point out hte corruption of the system or the stupidity of the majority and the odds moved around.
Possibly use those as a reason not to bet, because they might temporarily register a loss (and temporary mignt be a lifetime in some conspiracies) when they needed the money.
The Ehrlich/Simon case was a bet of model-spaces, and the losing factor was an error of timing, and not of essence, if I remember correctly.
If that's how you see it, I think you're missing the point. The problem with Ehrlich's position is that it never even occurred to him that there migth be markets that divert resources to potential shortages like the ones he wanred about. So frankly, even if Simon had been wrong about prices going down, the bet most certainly wasn't priced at the commodity future equivalent trading price, and Simon could have made a complementary bet there that guaranteed him a profit.
Ehrlich was so wrong on the issue he couldn't notice himself being Dutch booked.
I like the general idea of betting, but it's not clear to me how to routinely shoehorn scientific controversies into the betting format. E.g., how would you propose to construct clean bets about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, or continental drift? Now that the battle is long over, and measurement tech has enormously improved, I think I see how to do it for continental drift. But it's not clear to me how to do it for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle even today (well enough to convince fundamental skeptics like Einstein, looking for a deterministic alternative). And it's not clear to me how to do it for either controversy ca. 1925.
I think you have a better chance of addressing the general problem by backing off to (modern generalizations of) Occam's Razor. A really undeniable theory should in some suitable technical sense compress the data far more than its rivals, and with modern measurement tech continental drift easily qualifies. And this gives me some logical handle on why it's still hard to convince Einstein-like skeptics about uncertainty. The only way I see how to express the uncertainty principle in formal compression terms (or at least in definitions careful enough to address the objections of people like Lakatos to the informal formulations of Popper) gives something like "supplying the the uncertainty principle as a free-of-cost subroutine for use in the theory will reduce the lower bound on the length of the fully-elaborated theory which describes the data." I believe that's a true claim, but I can see that it's not all that much compression, merely by about the length of the uncertainty principle, compared to slightly twistier theories that match the data and still rank high in people's priors. I think the small amount of compression is what makes modern Einstein-ish uncertainty denial more reasonable than continental drift denial (damning with faint praise, yes), and I think the compression-oriented definition gives some idea why it's hard to construct bets.
Evolution has been around for more than one hundred years and has been refined considerably. I find it a very useful framework.
I also had my children vaccinated, but I can sympathise with those whose children are not strong enough to live through the vaccination process.
I suspect that all the noise about cigarette smoking is guaranteed to cause cancer is wide of the mark and I have nothing but contempt for the pushers of the second hand smoking nonsense. I have never smoked by the way.
I find that there is no good evidence for the proposition that human production of CO2 (and there is no question that we are producing CO2) has had any effect on world average temperatures, and even if it did help to increase temperatures by a degree or two, it is nothing the Earth has not experienced before, and warmer temperatures are better for us that colder temperatures, and I think there is a great deal of evidence that the atmosphere/hydrosphere/biosphere maintains temperatures within reasonably narrow margins.
So, a denialist? Nope. A sceptic. Yes.
I've suggested several times that people who entirely reject evolution should stick with Penicillin if their kids get MRSA infections. Strangely, no matter what they believe about evolution, people tend to demand drugs especially developed to kill organisms which have somehow changed so that they are no longer controlled using first-generation anitbiotics. Since penicillin is a whole lot cheaper than the latest and greatest, this is a gamble - money versus your child's life. There are clearly a lot of evolution-deniers who are unwilling to place this bet that life was created and remain static.....
Sorry, I screwed up the link.
Never in history has the expert consensus been right on everything. I’m not saying aliens built the pyramids, but indubitably some of our ’standard theories’ are wrong and it isn’t clear which.
Wrong is relative. I think it's a bit of an error to refer to Newtonian mechanics as "wrong" when it gives the same predictions as General Relativity to within one part in a zillion in most situations.
Sometimes those in the "scientific consensus" are the denalists (something New Scientist seems to ignore). When Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that doctors were killing newborns by not washing their hands, he was called a fool and was eventually committed to a mental asylum.
Khoth,
I prepared a (too) long argument for Your propositions:So I have to make it short:
"Science is a (the) method of verification"
Inverting this would e.g. say:"Nonscience is the (non)method of non-verification"
So it is NOT about being right, but about having the right method.
There is logical proof that if You incorporate a contradiction in Your beliefs/set of axioms, You basically can believe/prove anything.
So You have two possible 'positions':a) believing in Logic (everything else follows, with some bifurcations, i.e. undecidables, think Cantor, Goedel, which unfortunately killed them.)b) believing anything
(b) is not a position at all. It is at best 'fragmented mind' (in Bob Altemeyer's sense) versus 'coherent mind'.
What Robin seems to propose is betting the incoherents (b) into the ground.
Which to me is a very dangerous proposition, if I understand him correctly.
Ehrlich subsequently proposed a bet tailored to win even if Simon was right about increasing welfare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
Why will making evolution a 100-year bet help? In 100 years the scientists will say that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming and the creationists will say it isn't, so the bet can't be settled.
Or, if you go for "scientific consensus" as what counts as the result then in 100 years, just like today, scientists say the scientific consensus is that evolution is true, and creationists will say there is real disagreement among scientists.