Dr. Ravetz’s first posting on WUWT created quite a controversey. You can read it here:
Climategate: Plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age.
Answer and explanation to my critics –
Guest post by Jerome Ravetz
First, I want to apologise for my long silence. I have been overwhelmed by the volume and quality of the comments on this and other blogs, and just keeping up with them, while writing and also meeting other urgent commitments, has been a full time job. I had nearly completed this when my daytime job ran into emergency phase, and I was delayed a bit further. I am not at all afraid to put my point of view and see what happens.
The next thing to say is that I believe that my critics and I are fundamentally on the same side. The basic motivation for our design of post-normal science was to help maintain the health and integrity of science under the new conditions in which it now operates. I believe that my critics share this concern. I can learn from them how I might have expressed myself better, or even how I have been just wrong in this case as sometimes in the past, or perhaps that our disagreements on practical issues are just too deep to be bridged.
Since my history is relevant to the debate, let me make a few very brief points. I did grow up in a left-wing household in the ‘thirties, and I recall that it took about a decade, from my teens onwards, for me to make a complete sorting out of political Marxism. Remembering this process gives me perspective on disagreements that take place now; both I and my interlocutor are (hopefully) moving and learning even if we do not show it. A very big event for me was attending Swarthmore College, where I was exposed to the Quaker approach to living and discussing, and also to the way of non-violence. As with other influences, this one took decades to mature. I went to Cambridge, England and did a Ph.D in pure mathematics, settled here and later seized the chance to move to Leeds to study and teach the History and Philosophy of Science.
Even as I was getting started on that, I developed a critical stance. For me, ‘nuclear deterrence’ was not only immoral, but also crazy, as it involved calculating with the incalculable – the Theory of Games with ten-megadeath payoffs. I was pleased to learn later that after the Cuba crisis the military came to the same conclusion, and created a new doctrine Mutually Assured Destruction. Also, I wrote about the ‘Mohole scandal’, an early case of the corruption of Big Science. All those reflections, among others, led to my big book, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. I was concerned with the way that ‘academic science’ was giving way to ‘industrialised science’, and was thereby vulnerable to new corrupting influences. My solution then was a very sketchy ‘critical science’, cast very much in ’60’s terms. My radical friends were very cross that I concluded the book, not with a call to militancy, but with a prayer about cultivating truth in charity, by Francis Bacon.
I was very aware of the new currents in the philosophy of science, and knew most of the big players. As many saw it, the inherited philosophy of science as Truth could no longer be sustained. Indeed, once Einstein had (in the general interpretation) shown that Newton was wrong about space, no scientific statement could be assumed to be free of error. Popper tried to rescue Science by seeing it as essentially an activity of criticism and self-criticism, on the model of a free society. But Kuhn was the philosopher of industrialised science, and his ‘normal science’ was an activity of myopic ‘puzzle-solving’ within a dogmatically imposed paradigm. He was personally very uncomfortable with this unflattering picture, but that’s the way he saw it. I understood ‘normal science’ as a picture of what happens in science education, where almost all students learn by precept that for every problem there is just one and only one solution, expressed to several significant digits. I now realise that I have made a very big mistake in assuming that my readers on the blogs understand this about Kuhn; mainly they assume that ‘normal’ science is something that reflective, self-critical scientists like themselves do. So that is the first cause of disagreement, and also a reminder to me that the term ‘post-normal’ might itself be obsolescent. Silvio Funtowicz and I worked with titles for several years, and finally chose this one as the least problematic – possibly another mistake!
Before we started on PNS, I spent some time with Silvio on the management of uncertainty, which led to our joint book Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy. We were convinced that in spite of the universal assumption that quantitative science has solved its problems of uncertainty, in fact there is very widespread confusion and incompetence. We designed a notational system, NUSAP, whereby these qualitative aspects of quantitative information could be effectively expressed. We also pondered on the question, now that Truth is no longer effective in science (unless we accept paradoxes like ‘incorrect truths’ or ‘false facts’), what is there as a regulative principle? The answer is Quality, which itself is a very complex attribute. I confess that we did not spend much time, as I see it now not enough, in explaining this substitution of Quality for Truth. It is all too easy to see it as a betrayal of the ideals of science, and opening the door to political and other corruptions. One reason for this error is that by that time I was leaving academe, and lost the contact with students that would have tested my ideas against their experience. The issue is discussed in an article by Silvio Funtowicz, ‘Peer Review and Quality Control’ in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Science’ – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/referenceworks/0080430767. I have also done a condensed sketch of my ideas on Quality, that will be posted here.
It should be on the record that I always stayed clear of arguments in which Science in general came under attack. That happened in the ‘Science Wars’ debates, when the social-scientists seemed to be saying that science was nothing-but constructions, or negotiations, or what have you. Every now and then I see it mentioned that I took part in those debates, but that is a complete error. For me, the attack was misconceived and counterproductive. For me the biggest issue is ‘normal scientists’ doing research that is competent in its own terms, but whose ‘unintended consequences’ can be harmful or indeed total. I am also concerned with the maintenance of quality in science; this is by no means assured, and both the Credit Crunch and Climategate show what happens when quality-assurance fails.
I would be very grateful for a favour from my more severe critics. This would be to buy a copy of my inexpensive new book, A No-Nonsense Guide to Science and examine it. They will plenty of critical material there. I point to the dangers of what I call ‘mega-science’ and the new technologies that are uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable: GRAINN or genomics, robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and nanotechnology. I also cast doubt on the certitudes of science, pointing out some important errors, some famous and some suppressed from history. I cite the Quaker principle, ‘never forget that you might be wrong’. At the end I produce a questionnaire for students who are wondering whether a career in science will realise their ideals. I am sure that some more conservative people in that community find the book subversive; I wonder whether my present critics will find that it encourages malign external influences (governments, businesses or demagogues) to meddle with science.
Then came the notorious Post-Normal Science, which until now has not really attracted very much attention in the mainstream. I’ve met people who found it an inspiration and liberation, as it enabled them to recognise the deep uncertainties in their scientific work that colleagues wished to ignore. Its core is the mantram, ‘facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’. We are not saying that this is a desirable, natural or normal state for science. We place it by means of a diagram, a quadrant-rainbow with two axes. These are ‘systems uncertainties’ and ‘decision stakes’. When both are small, we have ‘applied science’, which must be the vast majority of scientific work in keeping civilisation running. When either is medium, we have ‘professional consultancy’, like the surgeon or consultant engineer. The basic insight of PNS is that there is another zone, where either attribute is large.
My favourite example for PNS is a dam, discussed in the ‘Pittsburgh’ lecture on my website. The principle of the dam, making hydro-electricity, is a matter of science. The design of the dam, coping with the uncertainties of nature and making design decisions about its operation, is a matter of professional consultancy. For PNS, I imagined that the lake as originally planned would possibly drown a part of a Civil War battlefield cemetery, a most sacred site in America. The boundaries of the cemetery were indistinct, and the loss of water storage would be costly. This was an issue where neither science, nor professions were adequate for a solution. The thought of putting Party hacks or eco-activists in charge of explaining the science of the dam or crreating its design, was very far from my intention. As it happens, dams can be intensely political indeed, as some peoples’ lands and homes are drowned so that others far away can benefit from their products; should we leave all those decisions to scientists and engineers?
Of course there was a political implication in all this, although PNS was presented as a methodology. We were sensitive to the experience of laypersons who were deemed incompetent and illegitimate by the professionals who controlled the problems and solutions. Lyme Disease is a good early example of this. The book Late Lessons from Early Warnings, published by the European Environment Agency has a whole set of examples from all over. Now ‘participation’ is enshrined as a principle of policy formation in the European Union, and in many special policy areas in the USA.
In retrospect, it could be said that PNS, and in particular the ‘Extended Peer Community’ was conceived in a left-wing framework, enabling little people to fight scientific battles against big bad corporations (state and private) and professional elites. As I look at it from the perspective of Climategate, it’s quite possible that that particular design is less well adapted to this present case, although I found it very fruitful to imagine the blogosphere (including, especially, wattsupwiththat) as a valuable example of an Extended Peer Community. However, let me proceed a bit further. There are two other conceptions that say similar things. One is the doctrine of ‘wicked problems’, that was conceived by planners who were disillusioned with the naïve scientism of the ’60’s. The other is the theory of the ‘honest broker’ developed by Roger Pielke Jr. He starts from the assumption that what scientists do in the policy process is not simply ‘telling Truth to Power’. Rather, they are offering information or advice which must be tailored to the requirements of the client. In that sense they are acting as consultants. His target is the ‘stealth advocates’, who tell the world and perhaps themselves that they are merely stating scientific truths while they are actually arguing for a particular agenda. We should notice that in this case a naïve philosophy of science, that of the scientist as discovering and stating simple Truth, actually deprives scientists of self-understanding, and thereby makes them more vulnerable to the corruption of the good.
That brings me more or less up to date. Let me deal with the political background first, for on this there may be irreconcilable differences that are best brought out into the open. If my own political bias has led me into trouble, I have the consolation that others are not immune. Thus we can understand much of background to the Credit Crunch (which may soon destroy us all) when we learn that Alan Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and therefore believed, until it was too late, that the state is evil and the markets perfect. As to myself, my baggage is well known. The hostile historical analysis in ScientistForTruth (http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/)is excellent, really recommended reading. It also provides a compelling example of the risks of explanation of a doctrine by others. There is a quote from a colleague of mine about PNS which seems implicitly to reduce scientists to being merely one actor among many in the extended peer community. It has them throwing away Truth in favour of Quality, where this concept is not explained. I can well understand a critic interpreting this as an invitation to mob rule in science. I should really have made it emphatically clear that by ‘extended peer community’ I never meant ‘replacement peer community’ – but it’s too late now!
Again, I take for granted that ‘applied science’ is the basic, common and essential form of activity for our civilization to persist, and that PNS performs an essential regulatory function where necessary, under those special conditions. And I have thought a lot about quality and its protection. I could easily edit that text and ensure that my own meaning (which I’m sure is shared by my colleague) is conveyed. It is a cautionary tale to me, how a doctrine goes out of control when it is broadcast. The same thing has happened with Mike Hulme, and by association with him I have been denounced as a Marxist enemy of science by James Delingpole in The Spectator on 20th of February. It’s ironic that I got my real breakthrough in understanding what is going on with Climategate when I identified all the critics on their blogs (and especially this one) as the new Extended Peer Community in this post-normal science situation. For they have been doing the job of quality-assurance that, in some cases at least, was not done by the mainstream. They might have to decide now whether they really want to belong to an Extended Peer Community, and thereby validate post-normal science.
I am well familiar with the abuses of science by big government and big business; I confess that I find it difficult to imagine how environmentalists can wreak the same sort of damage. Some may believe that Al Gore is fronting for the Trilateral Commission, the UN, the Bilderburgers or the Illuminati, but that doesn’t fit with my experience of power-politics. And, quite interestingly I now more clearly see my own bias, or presumption of plausibility, towards the Green side. The evidence for that is that while I found most of Michael Crichton’s novels quite illuminating, I never bothered to read Fear. It was simply implausible to me that environmentalists would create a terror attack. And plausibility goes a long way in conditioning expectations and even perceptions. Live and learn.
Another important difference between my critics and myself, I now realise, is that for them the A(C)GW issue is not post-normal at all. They have been certain for some time that the core argument for A(C)GW is based on scientific fraud. This does not deny that much or most of climate science, recognising and coping with deep scientific uncertainties, is sound; it’s the policy-relevant core, that we might call ‘global-warming science’ that is perceived as rotten. So all of my methodologising, Mike Hulme’s sociologising, even Roger Pielke Jr.’s querying, is quite beside the point. The damning facts are in, and they are either recognised or denied. On that basis it is easy to suppose that I am a sophisticated apologist for the enemy, and that all my uncertainty-mongering effectively provides a licence for those bad people to dissemble and deceive.
Some more personal history might be useful here. I have no expertise in climate science, and so I was reluctant to meddle. But I have been involved in the critical analysis of models of all sorts, and quite early on I good reason to suspect that the GCMs offered little basis for certainty of prediction. I also became aware of the hype and over-selling. A couple of years ago I came to the conclusion that this campaign would run into trouble, and I began to think about research projects that might be useful. One of them is now up for a grant; it’s an analysis of scientific disagreement, designed to bring together opponents and open the way to nonviolent communication. But it was totally implausible to me that the leading UK scientists were either gullible or complicit in a serious fraud at the core of the enterprise. Even when I heard about M&M and the hockey stick scandal, I didn’t connect that dot with the others. There’s a confession for you! Jerry Ravetz, arch-critical-scientist, suckered by the A(C)GW con for years on end. That really shows the power of plausibility. Even now I’m not all the way with my critics; the distinction between incompetence and blundering self-protection on the one hand (plus agenda-driven hype) and self-conscious scientific conspiracy on the other, may still be dividing us.
All through my chequered political career I have lived with the fact that wherever you stand, you always have more radical colleagues. In religion, achieving inter-faith harmony is child’s play compared to intra-faith harmony, and the same holds for the politics of dissent. I was impressed and amused, when my call for courtesy and non-violence in the Guardian blog provoked the most hysterical denunciations anywhere. I can understand this; I’ve been angry at false comrades in my time. But if we all calm down, we might look together at the burden of the criticisms of PNS and see whether they are fatal.
First, there is the discovery that Steve Schneider used my 1986 paper as justification for his nefarious doctrine. On that there are several things to say. First, as Roger ‘tallbloke’ has observed (See tallbloke 23:39:23), the text where this exposure is made, is itself very flawed indeed. Bits are pasted together, and one passage seems to me to have been invented for the occasion. As to Schneider himself, one of the blogs carrying the infamous quote provides a link to a background text. (See http://www.solopassion.com/node/5841) There Schneider explains that the passage as quoted was shorn of a crucial qualifying sentence, and that in all his writings he has condemned just the sort of thing that the modified quote is supposed to justify. Finally, the passage does give a reference to my article, which was a philosophical excursion on the theme ‘Usable knowledge, usable ignorance’. This was presented at a conference intended to lay the foundations of a unified global climate science; I was concerned to remind participants that treating the global ecosystem like something on the lab bench was doomed to failure. I should say that the reactions to the essay varied from incomprehension to outrage; some felt that I was Attacking Science, as usual.
As to Schneider himself, as it happens I have never met him, although we exchanged emails once when I refereed a paper for his journal. The infamous quote can be read as a licence to cheat, but also as practical wisdom. Part of the motivation for PNS was our appreciation that science advisors must sometimes cope with extreme uncertainty, that is quite unwelcome to their clients in the policy process. The scientists could be asked to advise on how high to build future flood barriers, or how many fish of a particular stock to allow to be caught, or how many doses of vaccine to stock up for a possible epidemic. ‘Normal science’ with hard numbers and tight error-bars gets us nowhere here. Even to state the uncertainties is not a simple task, for the clients will interpret them their own way. So the task of being both honest and effective even in that technical context is not trivial; and that is what Schneider is addressing.
In that connection I must disagree with some critics on one important point. They believe that a permission for the dishonest tactics of global-warming science was made in that famous Schneider-Ravetz quote, and so we are responsible for all their sins. Regardless of how that is interpreted, it is really quite unrealistic to imagine that a single quote, that was not even diffused as guidance, could be so influential. Unfortunately, shoddy research and exaggerated claims are not restricted to global-warming science. They are recognised as a serious problem in pharmacological and biomedical fields. Do my critics suppose that somehow the word got through to all those other scientists, that two authorities had given the OK to such practices and so now we can go ahead? And that all those who perverted science before the 1980s had somehow achieved a telepathic anticipation of the Schneider-Ravetz doctrine? I have no acquaintance with the climate-warming scientists, but there is nothing in the leaked emails to indicate that they needed our supposed doctrines or anyone else’s to justify their practices. So while it is an arguable (although incorrect) point that PNS justifies corrupted science, and perhaps could encourage it in the future, to blame me and Schneider for what happened in this case rests on a serious misconception of how ideas have an influence.
Then there is the more general political point, whether my ex-Marxist congenital green radicalism opens the way to new corruptions of science, be they from dictators or from demagogues. I happen to know something about radical critiques of science, be they from the conservative side (starting with Aristophanes) or from the populist side (as Marat in the French Revolution and Lysenko) or just plain authoritarian (the Church against Galileo, or Aryan or Proletarian science). And of course the great lesson of history is that it all depends. In my old book I made a caution about what I then called ‘critical science’, citing the changes that Arthur Miller made in his edition of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, in order that Dr. Stockman could be a worthy victim of McCarthyism rather than a self-deluded failed demagogue. I may have guessed wrong on occasion, but at least I knew the score about the possible corruptions of science from all sides.
I must finally make a point about style of debate. In my Guardian piece I called for courtesy in debate. To some, this might identify me as a wimp. Let me put the point more strongly, and use the concept ‘diss’. Our language has been enriched by this verb, an abbreviation of ‘disrespect’, itself new in the language as a verb. It comes from the culture of street gangs, and it means to humiliate someone and thereby to provoke rage and violence. I have already made it plain that my sharpest critic has treated me with courtesy and respect, and his arguments have been very valuable to me. The other main critic, by contrast, has argued that nearly all my productions have been either vacuous or malign, and that I am morally defective as well. I feel that he has dissed me, and although I would like to reply to his points, I believe that that would only produce more dissing. I regretfully conclude that there is no possibility of dialogue between us at present.
In conclusion, I should declare an interest. My deepest concern is with the situation of science in modern civilisation. Without something that we call ‘public trust’, it would be in big trouble. What will happen as a result of Climategate? As a philosopher, I find that to be the big question for me.
Well, there I am. Thanks again to all my critics for making me think hard about me. I hope it has been useful to you. And thanks to Anthony Watts for posting me at the outset, and for giving me so much space now.
Answer and explanation to my critics –
Jerome Ravetz
First, I want to apologise for my long silence. I have been overwhelmed by the volume and quality of the comments on this and other blogs, and just keeping up with them, while writing and also meeting other urgent commitments, has been a full time job. I had nearly completed this when my daytime job ran into emergency phase, and I was delayed a bit further. I am not at all afraid to put my point of view and see what happens.
The next thing to say is that I believe that my critics and I are fundamentally on the same side. The basic motivation for our design of post-normal science was to help maintain the health and integrity of science under the new conditions in which it now operates. I believe that my critics share this concern. I can learn from them how I might have expressed myself better, or even how I have been just wrong in this case as sometimes in the past, or perhaps that our disagreements on practical issues are just too deep to be bridged.
Since my history is relevant to the debate, let me make a few very brief points. I did grow up in a left-wing household in the ‘thirties, and I recall that it took about a decade, from my teens onwards, for me to make a complete sorting out of political Marxism. Remembering this process gives me perspective on disagreements that take place now; both I and my interlocutor are (hopefully) moving and learning even if we do not show it. A very big event for me was attending Swarthmore College, where I was exposed to the Quaker approach to living and discussing, and also to the way of non-violence. As with other influences, this one took decades to mature. I went to Cambridge, England and did a Ph.D in pure mathematics, settled here and later seized the chance to move to Leeds to study and teach the History and Philosophy of Science.
Even as I was getting started on that, I developed a critical stance. For me, ‘nuclear deterrence’ was not only immoral, but also crazy, as it involved calculating with the incalculable – the Theory of Games with ten-megadeath payoffs. I was pleased to learn later that after the Cuba crisis the military came to the same conclusion, and created a new doctrine Mutually Assured Destruction. Also, I wrote about the ‘Mohole scandal’, an early case of the corruption of Big Science. All those reflections, among others, led to my big book, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems. I was concerned with the way that ‘academic science’ was giving way to ‘industrialised science’, and was thereby vulnerable to new corrupting influences. My solution then was a very sketchy ‘critical science’, cast very much in ’60’s terms. My radical friends were very cross that I concluded the book, not with a call to militancy, but with a prayer about cultivating truth in charity, by Francis Bacon.
I was very aware of the new currents in the philosophy of science, and knew most of the big players. As many saw it, the inherited philosophy of science as Truth could no longer be sustained. Indeed, once Einstein had (in the general interpretation) shown that Newton was wrong about space, no scientific statement could be assumed to be free of error. Popper tried to rescue Science by seeing it as essentially an activity of criticism and self-criticism, on the model of a free society. But Kuhn was the philosopher of industrialised science, and his ‘normal science’ was an activity of myopic ‘puzzle-solving’ within a dogmatically imposed paradigm. He was personally very uncomfortable with this unflattering picture, but that’s the way he saw it. I understood ‘normal science’ as a picture of what happens in science education, where almost all students learn by precept that for every problem there is just one and only one solution, expressed to several significant digits. I now realise that I have made a very big mistake in assuming that my readers on the blogs understand this about Kuhn; mainly they assume that ‘normal’ science is something that reflective, self-critical scientists like themselves do. So that is the first cause of disagreement, and also a reminder to me that the term ‘post-normal’ might itself be obsolescent. Silvio Funtowicz and I worked with titles for several years, and finally chose this one as the least problematic – possibly another mistake!
Before we started on PNS, I spent some time with Silvio on the management of uncertainty, which led to our joint book Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy. We were convinced that in spite of the universal assumption that quantitative science has solved its problems of uncertainty, in fact there is very widespread confusion and incompetence. We designed a notational system, NUSAP, whereby these qualitative aspects of quantitative information could be effectively expressed. We also pondered on the question, now that Truth is no longer effective in science (unless we accept paradoxes like ‘incorrect truths’ or ‘false facts’), what is there as a regulative principle? The answer is Quality, which itself is a very complex attribute. I confess that we did not spend much time, as I see it now not enough, in explaining this substitution of Quality for Truth. It is all too easy to see it as a betrayal of the ideals of science, and opening the door to political and other corruptions. One reason for this error is that by that time I was leaving academe, and lost the contact with students that would have tested my ideas against their experience. The issue is discussed in an article by Silvio Funtowicz, ‘Peer Review and Quality Control’ in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Science’ – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/referenceworks/0080430767. I have also done a condensed sketch of my ideas on Quality, that will be posted here.
It should be on the record that I always stayed clear of arguments in which Science in general came under attack. That happened in the ‘Science Wars’ debates, when the social-scientists seemed to be saying that science was nothing-but constructions, or negotiations, or what have you. Every now and then I see it mentioned that I took part in those debates, but that is a complete error. For me, the attack was misconceived and counterproductive. For me the biggest issue is ‘normal scientists’ doing research that is competent in its own terms, but whose ‘unintended consequences’ can be harmful or indeed total. I am also concerned with the maintenance of quality in science; this is by no means assured, and both the Credit Crunch and Climategate show what happens when quality-assurance fails.
I would be very grateful for a favour from my more severe critics. This would be to buy a copy of my inexpensive new book, A No-Nonsense Guide to Science and examine it. They will plenty of critical material there. I point to the dangers of what I call ‘mega-science’ and the new technologies that are uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable: GRAINN or genomics, robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and nanotechnology. I also cast doubt on the certitudes of science, pointing out some important errors, some famous and some suppressed from history. I cite the Quaker principle, ‘never forget that you might be wrong’. At the end I produce a questionnaire for students who are wondering whether a career in science will realise their ideals. I am sure that some more conservative people in that community find the book subversive; I wonder whether my present critics will find that it encourages malign external influences (governments, businesses or demagogues) to meddle with science.
Then came the notorious Post-Normal Science, which until now has not really attracted very much attention in the mainstream. I’ve met people who found it an inspiration and liberation, as it enabled them to recognise the deep uncertainties in their scientific work that colleagues wished to ignore. Its core is the mantram, ‘facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent’. We are not saying that this is a desirable, natural or normal state for science. We place it by means of a diagram, a quadrant-rainbow with two axes. These are ‘systems uncertainties’ and ‘decision stakes’. When both are small, we have ‘applied science’, which must be the vast majority of scientific work in keeping civilisation running. When either is medium, we have ‘professional consultancy’, like the surgeon or consultant engineer. The basic insight of PNS is that there is another zone, where either attribute is large.
My favourite example for PNS is a dam, discussed in the ‘Pittsburgh’ lecture on my website. The principle of the dam, making hydro-electricity, is a matter of science. The design of the dam, coping with the uncertainties of nature and making design decisions about its operation, is a matter of professional consultancy. For PNS, I imagined that the lake as originally planned would possibly drown a part of a Civil War battlefield cemetery, a most sacred site in America. The boundaries of the cemetery were indistinct, and the loss of water storage would be costly. This was an issue where neither science, nor professions were adequate for a solution. The thought of putting Party hacks or eco-activists in charge of explaining the science of the dam or crreating its design, was very far from my intention. As it happens, dams can be intensely political indeed, as some peoples’ lands and homes are drowned so that others far away can benefit from their products; should we leave all those decisions to scientists and engineers?
Of course there was a political implication in all this, although PNS was presented as a methodology. We were sensitive to the experience of laypersons who were deemed incompetent and illegitimate by the professionals who controlled the problems and solutions. Lyme Disease is a good early example of this. The book Late Lessons from Early Warnings, published by the European Environment Agency has a whole set of examples from all over. Now ‘participation’ is enshrined as a principle of policy formation in the European Union, and in many special policy areas in the USA.
In retrospect, it could be said that PNS, and in particular the ‘Extended Peer Community’ was conceived in a left-wing framework, enabling little people to fight scientific battles against big bad corporations (state and private) and professional elites. As I look at it from the perspective of Climategate, it’s quite possible that that particular design is less well adapted to this present case, although I found it very fruitful to imagine the blogosphere (including, especially, wattsupwiththat) as a valuable example of an Extended Peer Community. However, let me proceed a bit further. There are two other conceptions that say similar things. One is the doctrine of ‘wicked problems’, that was conceived by planners who were disillusioned with the naïve scientism of the ’60’s. The other is the theory of the ‘honest broker’ developed by Roger Pielke Jr. He starts from the assumption that what scientists do in the policy process is not simply ‘telling Truth to Power’. Rather, they are offering information or advice which must be tailored to the requirements of the client. In that sense they are acting as consultants. His target is the ‘stealth advocates’, who tell the world and perhaps themselves that they are merely stating scientific truths while they are actually arguing for a particular agenda. We should notice that in this case a naïve philosophy of science, that of the scientist as discovering and stating simple Truth, actually deprives scientists of self-understanding, and thereby makes them more vulnerable to the corruption of the good.
That brings me more or less up to date. Let me deal with the political background first, for on this there may be irreconcilable differences that are best brought out into the open. If my own political bias has led me into trouble, I have the consolation that others are not immune. Thus we can understand much of background to the Credit Crunch (which may soon destroy us all) when we learn that Alan Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and therefore believed, until it was too late, that the state is evil and the markets perfect. As to myself, my baggage is well known. The hostile historical analysis in ScientistForTruth (http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/)is excellent, really recommended reading. It also provides a compelling example of the risks of explanation of a doctrine by others. There is a quote from a colleague of mine about PNS which seems implicitly to reduce scientists to being merely one actor among many in the extended peer community. It has them throwing away Truth in favour of Quality, where this concept is not explained. I can well understand a critic interpreting this as an invitation to mob rule in science. I should really have made it emphatically clear that by ‘extended peer community’ I never meant ‘replacement peer community’ – but it’s too late now!
Again, I take for granted that ‘applied science’ is the basic, common and essential form of activity for our civilization to persist, and that PNS performs an essential regulatory function where necessary, under those special conditions. And I have thought a lot about quality and its protection. I could easily edit that text and ensure that my own meaning (which I’m sure is shared by my colleague) is conveyed. It is a cautionary tale to me, how a doctrine goes out of control when it is broadcast. The same thing has happened with Mike Hulme, and by association with him I have been denounced as a Marxist enemy of science by James Delingpole in The Spectator on 20th of February. It’s ironic that I got my real breakthrough in understanding what is going on with Climategate when I identified all the critics on their blogs (and especially this one) as the new Extended Peer Community in this post-normal science situation. For they have been doing the job of quality-assurance that, in some cases at least, was not done by the mainstream. They might have to decide now whether they really want to belong to an Extended Peer Community, and thereby validate post-normal science.
I am well familiar with the abuses of science by big government and big business; I confess that I find it difficult to imagine how environmentalists can wreak the same sort of damage. Some may believe that Al Gore is fronting for the Trilateral Commission, the UN, the Bilderburgers or the Illuminati, but that doesn’t fit with my experience of power-politics. And, quite interestingly I now more clearly see my own bias, or presumption of plausibility, towards the Green side. The evidence for that is that while I found most of Michael Crichton’s novels quite illuminating, I never bothered to read Fear. It was simply implausible to me that environmentalists would create a terror attack. And plausibility goes a long way in conditioning expectations and even perceptions. Live and learn.
Another important difference between my critics and myself, I now realise, is that for them the A(C)GW issue is not post-normal at all. They have been certain for some time that the core argument for A(C)GW is based on scientific fraud. This does not deny that much or most of climate science, recognising and coping with deep scientific uncertainties, is sound; it’s the policy-relevant core, that we might call ‘global-warming science’ that is perceived as rotten. So all of my methodologising, Mike Hulme’s sociologising, even Roger Pielke Jr.’s querying, is quite beside the point. The damning facts are in, and they are either recognised or denied. On that basis it is easy to suppose that I am a sophisticated apologist for the enemy, and that all my uncertainty-mongering effectively provides a licence for those bad people to dissemble and deceive.
Some more personal history might be useful here. I have no expertise in climate science, and so I was reluctant to meddle. But I have been involved in the critical analysis of models of all sorts, and quite early on I good reason to suspect that the GCMs offered little basis for certainty of prediction. I also became aware of the hype and over-selling. A couple of years ago I came to the conclusion that this campaign would run into trouble, and I began to think about research projects that might be useful. One of them is now up for a grant; it’s an analysis of scientific disagreement, designed to bring together opponents and open the way to nonviolent communication. But it was totally implausible to me that the leading UK scientists were either gullible or complicit in a serious fraud at the core of the enterprise. Even when I heard about M&M and the hockey stick scandal, I didn’t connect that dot with the others. There’s a confession for you! Jerry Ravetz, arch-critical-scientist, suckered by the A(C)GW con for years on end. That really shows the power of plausibility. Even now I’m not all the way with my critics; the distinction between incompetence and blundering self-protection on the one hand (plus agenda-driven hype) and self-conscious scientific conspiracy on the other, may still be dividing us.
All through my chequered political career I have lived with the fact that wherever you stand, you always have more radical colleagues. In religion, achieving inter-faith harmony is child’s play compared to intra-faith harmony, and the same holds for the politics of dissent. I was impressed and amused, when my call for courtesy and non-violence in the Guardian blog provoked the most hysterical denunciations anywhere. I can understand this; I’ve been angry at false comrades in my time. But if we all calm down, we might look together at the burden of the criticisms of PNS and see whether they are fatal.
First, there is the discovery that Steve Schneider used my 1986 paper as justification for his nefarious doctrine. On that there are several things to say. First, as Roger ‘tallbloke’ has observed (See tallbloke 23:39:23), the text where this exposure is made, is itself very flawed indeed. Bits are pasted together, and one passage seems to me to have been invented for the occasion. As to Schneider himself, one of the blogs carrying the infamous quote provides a link to a background text. (See http://www.solopassion.com/node/5841) There Schneider explains that the passage as quoted was shorn of a crucial qualifying sentence, and that in all his writings he has condemned just the sort of thing that the modified quote is supposed to justify. Finally, the passage does give a reference to my article, which was a philosophical excursion on the theme ‘Usable knowledge, usable ignorance’. This was presented at a conference intended to lay the foundations of a unified global climate science; I was concerned to remind participants that treating the global ecosystem like something on the lab bench was doomed to failure. I should say that the reactions to the essay varied from incomprehension to outrage; some felt that I was Attacking Science, as usual.
As to Schneider himself, as it happens I have never met him, although we exchanged emails once when I refereed a paper for his journal. The infamous quote can be read as a licence to cheat, but also as practical wisdom. Part of the motivation for PNS was our appreciation that science advisors must sometimes cope with extreme uncertainty, that is quite unwelcome to their clients in the policy process. The scientists could be asked to advise on how high to build future flood barriers, or how many fish of a particular stock to allow to be caught, or how many doses of vaccine to stock up for a possible epidemic. ‘Normal science’ with hard numbers and tight error-bars gets us nowhere here. Even to state the uncertainties is not a simple task, for the clients will interpret them their own way. So the task of being both honest and effective even in that technical context is not trivial; and that is what Schneider is addressing.
In that connection I must disagree with some critics on one important point. They believe that a permission for the dishonest tactics of global-warming science was made in that famous Schneider-Ravetz quote, and so we are responsible for all their sins. Regardless of how that is interpreted, it is really quite unrealistic to imagine that a single quote, that was not even diffused as guidance, could be so influential. Unfortunately, shoddy research and exaggerated claims are not restricted to global-warming science. They are recognised as a serious problem in pharmacological and biomedical fields. Do my critics suppose that somehow the word got through to all those other scientists, that two authorities had given the OK to such practices and so now we can go ahead? And that all those who perverted science before the 1980s had somehow achieved a telepathic anticipation of the Schneider-Ravetz doctrine? I have no acquaintance with the climate-warming scientists, but there is nothing in the leaked emails to indicate that they needed our supposed doctrines or anyone else’s to justify their practices. So while it is an arguable (although incorrect) point that PNS justifies corrupted science, and perhaps could encourage it in the future, to blame me and Schneider for what happened in this case rests on a serious misconception of how ideas have an influence.
Then there is the more general political point, whether my ex-Marxist congenital green radicalism opens the way to new corruptions of science, be they from dictators or from demagogues. I happen to know something about radical critiques of science, be they from the conservative side (starting with Aristophanes) or from the populist side (as Marat in the French Revolution and Lysenko) or just plain authoritarian (the Church against Galileo, or Aryan or Proletarian science). And of course the great lesson of history is that it all depends. In my old book I made a caution about what I then called ‘critical science’, citing the changes that Arthur Miller made in his edition of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, in order that Dr. Stockman could be a worthy victim of McCarthyism rather than a self-deluded failed demagogue. I may have guessed wrong on occasion, but at least I knew the score about the possible corruptions of science from all sides.
I must finally make a point about style of debate. In my Guardian piece I called for courtesy in debate. To some, this might identify me as a wimp. Let me put the point more strongly, and use the concept ‘diss’. Our language has been enriched by this verb, an abbreviation of ‘disrespect’, itself new in the language as a verb. It comes from the culture of street gangs, and it means to humiliate someone and thereby to provoke rage and violence. I have already made it plain that my sharpest critic has treated me with courtesy and respect, and his arguments have been very valuable to me. The other main critic, by contrast, has argued that nearly all my productions have been either vacuous or malign, and that I am morally defective as well. I feel that he has dissed me, and although I would like to reply to his points, I believe that that would only produce more dissing. I regretfully conclude that there is no possibility of dialogue between us at present.
In conclusion, I should declare an interest. My deepest concern is with the situation of science in modern civilisation. Without something that we call ‘public trust’, it would be in big trouble. What will happen as a result of Climategate? As a philosopher, I find that to be the big question for me.
Well, there I am. Thanks again to all my critics for making me think hard about me. I hope it has been useful to you. And thanks to Anthony Watts for posting me at the outset, and for giving me so much space now.
Dr Ravetz, I am sure I didn’t read the word ‘worldview’ a single time in your article. I humbly suggest that everything you have written here could be condensed into that single word.
You cite a Quaker principle ‘never forget that you might be wrong’ without citing a reference. Would you please? Thanks.
Although undoubtedly a Friend tenet, it predates George Fox as a general Protestant ideal.
Perhaps the philosphy of the Puritan’s chronicler is also appropriate to this discussion:
D.T.
“Mike Lorrey (11:54:50) :
So according to Prof. Ravetz, the speed of light isn’t always 300k kph, the gravitational constant, plank length, pi, e, and other objectively true ‘facts’ as we were previously taught simply aren’t so and that what we have deceived ourselves to be science is really just a game of guesstimation colored by political agendas?”
No Mike, without reading Ravetz’ work in depth I’ll offer up a view of these things that hopefully would make sense to you. Lets just take the Speed of Light. You might recognize that 2+2=4 is a truth of a certain order. That is you might say that “you can’t imagine, that it would be otherwise.” It’s impossible to imagine it otherwise. Likewise, you might say that the sentence ” all unmarried men are unmarried” is also true in this certain way. ( I’d argue both of those but not here) In any case, you would be hard pressed to argue that the “velocity of light = 300K kph” is true in the same kind of way. We have an explanation of the world that posits a thing called light. We also posit a property we call “velocity” The idea that the speed of light is a “constant” was a hypothesis. That is why people try to confirm this hypothesis with experiments. It’s simply not “true” on its face or true by terms of definition. And the value of the constant is only known to a certain accuracy, although that accuracy is quite good. That the speed of light is approximately 300K kph, always retains its hypothetical status. That is, we can imagine that it is not so To be sure, for this hypothesis to change would require a huge amount of rewriting of the laws of physics. It’s not impossible in a mathematical or logical sense, it’s just very difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light
But such a rewriting is logically POSSIBLE. What does this mean practically.
It means this. The speed of light, for example, is one of those hypothesis of science that are accepted as “fact” because they work really well to explain other things. They are central to our web of understanding. Accepting the “truth” of the hypothesis allows us to predict and do many other things. Replacing this central tenet would require a lot of work. So it is accepted.
It’s not accepted because it is mathematically certain. Its not accepted because its logically certain. Its accepted because humans engaged in certain behaviors ( experiments) and manipulations of other symbols in “physical laws” and these behaviors were successful. When these behaviors were successful, they explained that by calling the proposition in question
“true” but what they really meant was that accepting the sentence allowed them to engage in successful behavior.
Its accepted Not because it “corresponds” to reality. Not because there is a “thing” called light and “property” called velocity, but because over the course of scientific behavior it has been demonstrated to be useful and work. Postulating a thing called “light” and a property called “velocity” has proven to be a powerful, useful thing.
The other way to look at this is as follows. I’ll bet ravetz is closer to camp #2. It’s a vastly different camp than the “relativist” school. But lets see what he says
1. the speed of light = 300K kph, . and it works because it
is true. And there is no point questioning it because it is true. and it will
be true forever and ever and in every imaginable universe, and since
man’s imagination is limited, it’s true in universes that are beyond our imagination.
2. The speed of light = 300K kph is a high quality statement. It is supported by experiments to a very high quality. If you want to build things that work, you should use that value in your equations. If you try to question it youre are probably wasting your time. It could have been otherwise. It works, saying that its “true” adds nothing. Truth as “correspondence” adds nothing to our understanding of the world or our ability to do things.
1) I didn’t know that anyone was permitted to do philosophy of science any more. I just assumed that it was now all “science studies” and PoMo political/deconstructive rap about what scientists allegedly do.
2) One reason that philosophy of science seems to have declined in favor of political academics is precisely because issues like uncertainty and the ontological status of modeled science are often inconvenient to people with clear agendas. The goal appears to be to denigrate the uniqueness and validity of scientific method except when it serves a selected cause, in which case it is highly privileged and co-equal with the political message it serves. Worse, if science creates examples and models of standards of quality and validity that might carry over into a sharper understanding of which academic undertakings are important and which are utterly bogus.
3) The nastiness surrounding this issue is built in. ‘Deniers’ are aware that the science is used pretextually to advance an explicit political agenda and often target even the the hard science in addition to the agenda. ‘Believers’ exhibit the issue-identification that seems especially characteristic of the political left–an all-encompassing belief that validates the intellectual and moral worthiness of the adherent, and ascribes malice and stupidity to non-believers.
4) The ‘extended peer community’ concept only works if everybody knows their limitations. Community concerns don’t change the atomic weight of calcium. And with respect to values decisions, scientists only get one vote like everybody else. They do not get to disproportionately decide policy. But if they think they do get to do so and craft the science to increase their influence, then it all goes bad, like climate science right now (post-Mann).
Re: EdB (12:02:52) :
I cannot be other than amazed at how Steve Mcintyre is logical, lucid, and brief, while Jerry Ravetz is wordy and convoluted.
Ten thousand Jerrys would not debunk the hockey stick, and that is the truth of it.
—
But that’s PNS for you. May not explain why the hockey stick is broken, but explain why it was broken. Having had a somewhat chequered career involving engineering, intelligence and business Dr Ravetz’s thoughts ring true to me.
If I commission work from a scientist, it’s because I want to know the truth. I want hard, verifiable, provable, reproduceable facts. The basic stuff that the scientific method is all about. I may not like, agree with or even understand the results, but that’s the way the die rolls.
If I commission work from a consultancy, it’s also because I want to know the truth. This time, it’ll involve probably more pre-engagement meetings to scope out the consultancy. Part of that may be to elicit the result I’m looking for because if I’m happy with the result, the consultancy may get more business.
It’s not the same rules of engagement I’d expect if I were commissioning from a science lab. I’d still ask the scientist for their opinions, because they’re still human and have opinions to. The proof though is more important.
PNS seems to have scientists as consultants or advocates. Maybe this is because of the way academic funding works and the pressures on HoD’s to bring in the cash. This creates the risk of then giving the client what they want rather than what can be proven to keep the money flowing. For climate science, the money is very much in the hands of those that want to profit from it.
” Philosophy of science, the most valuable intellectual property the western civilization has ever produced. ‘
Next to the Bach B-Minor Mass, perhaps.
Dr. Ravetz,
This monologue of yours is a perfect example of what is wrong with Academia today:
– Your allocution is incredibly poor and ineffectual (not to mention the poor grammar in areas),
– Your stunning display of self reverencing is boarding upon self apotheosis,
– Your understanding of the basic human characteristics of, lying, truth, constructive disagreement, and just plain scientific analysis and learning, are so intricate and convoluted, you make life sound like some tortuous academic existential exercise. I find you sir, in a word, delusional.
– Your understanding of the science and how you mix it with the socio-politico-economic arena, illustrates more of philosophical paranoia than with meaningful earthly understanding.
God help this planet if people like you have any say in its management!
What a lot of drivel!
sumpnado (13:12:32) : Not at all!, it is but a sophism, a vacuum discourse full of words to pseudo intellectually justify what is unjustifiable: The post normal science of climate change about how to inflate a gigantic financial bubble, which like those also invented “black holes” will suck all the money from our wallets and turn us into new impoverished people, the “gamma” beggars of their “Brave New World” order.
“His post is thick with ideas…far too many to digest in one sitting.” Far too many to digest EVER.
But that would put Ravetz in the realm of the esoteric. It would mean he is cleverer than any individual here, or all of us collectively.
Given that the man’s contribution to this crisis in science has been minimal (the first sight of him here on the skeptic blogs is beating a very public, ass-covering retreat), perhaps you are being a little generous.
‘Post-normal’ sounds like the kind of vacuous terminology Alan Sokal used, fifteen or so years ago, in his gloriously succesful send-up of ‘science studies’ in a deservedly forgotten po-mo journal called–Social Text__, which published his satire as straight truth.
Just a quick observation.
I think you are simply re-naming old and well establish principles that our education system has been ignoring (failing to teach) for quite a long time.
There are three key principles in science and engineering (applied science) that cover what I believe you are trying to express with your post normal science.
There is the technical science which is what most people really mean when they talk about “the science”.
This is the current state of the art with regard to a technical subject. This is the “known facts” (to our best ability to know them).
If you ask a carpenter to cut you a 2×4 that is 14 inches long, you assume he will use a piece of wood that meets the current state of the art regarding home construction and the piece of wood will be typical of lumber sold as a “2×4”, you also expect him to use good practice in measuring and performing the cut so that the ends of the wood are square to the sides and the length is with in the assumed precision needed for the intended application. This assumed accuracy in a carpenters work would be the smallest division on a common tape measure, or about +/- 16th of an inch in the U.S. Likewise he would assume that if you needed a higher precision you would express that need up front, so he does not need to cut a second piece of wood.
If you ask a Machinist to turn a shaft 2 inches in diameter and 14 inches long, he will very likely ask you for some additional information, because in his line of work the state of the art assumes much higher precision of measurement, perhaps to a 10/1000 of an inch or better in diameter of the shaft, and length of perhaps +/- 1/100.
In the case of climate science, the general public expected a far higher of precision and quality than they were given, and at first took the scientists at their word that they had certain “facts” sorted out.
This brings us to the other two important values, ethics and good practice and professional judgment.
Everything I see in your discussion of post-normal science is already covered under ethics and good practice (judgment).
We expect all three from practicing scientists and engineers.
The engineer first designs the plane using the technical sciences. He figures loads and lift, vibration limits etc. Using the best state of the art techniques available to him. He then applies good professional judgment and rules of thumb for acceptable safety factors, knowing full well that he cannot know every factor involved, and may be wrong in some part of the evaluation. This is inherent in both good science and good engineering.
Your not a scientist or an engineer if you do not accept the possibility that you do not have perfect knowledge.
Then the engineer applies practical factors and uses his judgment regarding the soft aspects of the problem like cost, ease of repair, availability of materials, seasonal issues, and with those considerations in mind comes up with a design that in his best judgment is the best compromise between the soft factors and the hard technical facts as he knows them.
Last he uses his ethical compass and fully discloses the soft factors, the safety factors, and the technical processes he used in calculating the design.
He also expects and encourages others to verify his work, as it is bad professional practice to have his planes fall out of the air. He wants the answers to be right, and welcomes verification from others.
Likewise the ethical scientist, accepts up front that he cannot have prefect knowledge, and clearly describes his methods, measurements and raw data so others can verify his work.
The Dam designer (project lead) combines the raw technical calculations that went into the dam design with the soft factors like suitability of location for the intended purpose of the dam etc. and “recommends a solution”, knowing full well it is a compromise of many factors but to the best of his knowledge the technical calculations the design depends on, are accurate to the limit of his ability, and all approximations, assumptions and judgments used in the final design are fully disclosed and available on request. To do otherwise is unethical and unprofessional.
With respects, the entire concept of post-normal science is unnecessary if good ethics and full disclosure of professional judgment is used.
There would be no question about the science of global warming if the scientists involved had just used those three practices.
1) Make the scientific calculations to the limits of their talent and equipment.
2) Fully disclose the uncertainties, and assumptions they based their output on (presumption that they are not infallible, and full disclosure of biases).
3) Fully disclose the raw data so others could check their work (by definition good practice in science).
I see with in what you have written, a desire to reach what already exists in good practice.
Good scientific and engineering practice will automatically accomplish your intent as I understand it.
A good scientist says. “I believe x is true, and this is how I came to that conclusion.”
A bad (incompetent) scientist says. “X is a proven fact, and no further discussion is necessary.”
Larry
‘Who is John Galt?’
Who really cares? Reading Ayn Rand’s prose is like watching two people play tennis in diving flippers.
“”” Leif Svalgaard (12:59:28) :
Very few scientists are concerned about philosophy and very few philosophers are concerned about science. Science is a human activity and has always had societal importance [from presaging Nile flooding to GPS-enabled devices]. So society supports science, but always with an eye on ‘what’s in it for us’. This bargain is understood. I don’t think there is such a thing as PNS in the eyes of scientists. For us, today is just business as usual. “””
Well I think you hit the nail on the head Dr Svalgaard.
Personally, I get the most satisfaction out of “discovering” whatever is the truth (to the extent that is possible). There is no joy in any emotional attachment to an idea (scientific); however weird (or simple) the truth turns out to be; that goal is where the satisfaction lies.
There is a certain beauty in theories like Planck’s theory of Blackbody radiation; which introduces no new “gizmos”, unless it is Planck’s Constant (h); and that arguably is independently available from Einstein’t Nobel Prize winning theory of the Photo-Electric effect.
To think that a theoretical concept that can actually be implemented in the laboratory with a respectable degree of accuracy, can be described as to its theoretical behavior to almost 8 significant digits, and only in terms of fundamental physical constants, that are widely accepted, is quite remarkable. No empiricism required.
Einstein’s theories of Special, and General Relativity, have a similar beauty; which is not shared with the newer ideas of strings and 10 or 11 dimensional spaces, and other gobbledegook, that has to be “tuned” to follow observed reality.
In contrast to that neatness, we who now try to follow some “Climate theory”, have to contend with stuff like Steven Schneider’s concept of “Climate Sensitivity”; with its implied Logarithmic relationship; despite the fact that we have no measured data sets that follow that logarithmic relationship with any more degree of certainty than a perfectly straight line linear relationship; or amy other mathematical function.
Yet multi trillion dollar global decisions are being made on the basis of such wild hipshoot notions, as “Climate Sensitivity”. There isn’t even any physical process basis for expecting a linear relationship between global mean surface temperatures, and the logarithm of CO2 atmospheric abundance; and plenty of physical reasons why it simply can’t be that simple a relationship. There’s nothing in that relationship, that is aware of clouds for example.
I thank Dr Ravetz for his post and Anthony for posting. I am someone who grtew up in the war torn streets of east london and fought my way though uni to obtain qualifications in Engineering and Physics. My background his ‘streetwise’ and pragmatic. I have seen thie type of waffle spilled onto paper all my life and find it patronising and insulting. However, once you have waded through the religious niavity, the lack of understanding of the ‘common’ people, Dr Ravetz message is generally a useful contribution to the debate between the three sides of the climate change argument. Corruption and advocacy have become an integral part of climate science that’s for sure and it does not need to be understood or forgiven at this stage merely rooted out and burned like the weeds in the border.
sumpnado (13:12:32) :
Dr Ravetz cannot reply in any other way and thereby lies the problem. Communnication is a two way street and if you wish to communicate then you must find the knowledge and intelect to do so in a way that your chosen audience will understand otherwise your communnication could be viewed as patronising and inappropriate. It is the responsibility of the communnicator to communicate not the listener?.
@ur momisugly Bret (12:34:53)
You beat me to it.
The giant flaw in drawing 2 by 2’s (a horrible device beloved of management consultants everywhere) to divide something into 4 sectors is there may be no testing to ensure it is logically consistent. The axes in the Prof’s 2 by 2 are ’systems uncertainties’ and ‘decision stakes’. Yet it is clear that if systems uncertainties are high, we do not know whether the decision stakes are high or not. As such, we cannot prospectively place anything in the quadrant the good Prof places PNS into. It is a logical fail.
There are quite a few flaws and mistaken assertions in this essay, possibly because of its length. Here are a few things I object to:
“Indeed, once Einstein had (in the general interpretation) shown that Newton was wrong about space, no scientific statement could be assumed to be free of error.” – well this has always been a feature of science. Any great scientist knows his Nobel prize-winning insights will be proved wrong before long.
” I understood ‘normal science’ as a picture of what happens in science education, where almost all students learn by precept that for every problem there is just one and only one solution, expressed to several significant digits.” – this is just wildly wrong. Scientists had been grappling with the wave/ particle dual nature of light for some time. What I learnt at school (including through experiments on the dual nature of light) was that science advanced by careful observations, experimentation and hypotheses-formulation and nothing could be assumed. There was no presumption that ‘there is only just one solution’.
“We were convinced that in spite of the universal assumption that quantitative science has solved its problems of uncertainty, in fact there is very widespread confusion and incompetence. We designed a notational system, NUSAP, whereby these qualitative aspects of quantitative information could be effectively expressed.” We have several branches of mathematics including probability theory. We know about chaotic systems. And we know about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle relating to quantum mechanics. We would welcome more information on NUSAP, but the circumstantial evidence is that owing to its failure to gain widespread adoption, it is a failure in terms of what you intended for it. I would be delighted to be proved wrong on this – what is the ‘very widespread confusion and incompetence’ you refer to??
The ‘Dam’ problem is a straightforward political problem. Politicians routinely deal with uncertainty, including where the science is unknown. How does PNS improve decision-making over the normal political process?
Finally:
“Thus we can understand much of background to the Credit Crunch (which may soon destroy us all) when we learn that Alan Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and therefore believed, until it was too late, that the state is evil and the markets perfect. ”
He may have been but the credit boom and crunch that followed does not follow a simple Randian cause. What happened in part was the market became concentrated and its biggest players (the big investment and retail banks) were able to buy influence in Western Governments through the lobby system, and did so to first profit, and then save themselves from bankruptcy. There is something of the evil deregulated market here, but also the corrupt influence of some market competitors on the state, followed by the evil actions of the state in supporting those competitors with our money. The state did wrong too. Central banks played a giant role too – they are positively anti-Randian in concept (not that Greenspan would agree!)
Actually, “disrespect” as a verb dates from the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries.
http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/search/results.cfm
It fell into disuse almost three hundred years ago, and was only fairly recently revived, unintentionally, by illiterate street gangs. It is always a bad word choice. “Diss” is the shortened form of “disrespect” or “dismiss,” and is even worse.
Thank you for your contribution Mr Ravetz.
My initial visceral reaction to PNS was borne from a misunderstanding. PNS is not post-normal science but post-normal science as in what we do when we think science isn’t enough.
“The basic motivation for our design of post-normal science was to help maintain the health and integrity of science under the new conditions in which it now operates.”
There are no ‘new conditions’ under which science operates. A fact is still a fact. Observable evidence is still observable evidence. Even the most accepted of theories can be disproven by one contradictary observation backed up with independent verification. PNS as practised in the real world is at best the wisdom of crowds (and in the case of AGW a very narrow and select crowd) and at worst a means for politicians, advocates and ‘scientists’ who have abandoned the scientific process (ie Phil Jones) to convince themselves that they are right regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
If the science is uncertain (and it certainly is) the correct way forward is to make no changes based on the science. The scientists at the heart of the AGW alarmism should be prepared to admit what they don’t know and politicians should stop looking for a patsy for their political decisions. By offloading the responsibility onto ‘science’ they are then capable of making the most irresponsible of decisions. There are still plenty of scientists out there who are cautious with their claims and mindful of confirmation bias, it’s just they have been excluded from the consensus building process.
The case for cutting carbon dioxide emissions can and should have be made without any contentious science, perhaps even without any science at all – The development of the world is limited by it’s reliance on fossil fuels. We don’t like some of the regimes that provide us with energy. As more nations become developed the demand for oil has risen. High energy prices adversely impact the quality of life and wealth of people across the globe. You can make wholly political cases for encouraging investment in sensible cleaner energy sources, funding research into more efficient processes etc though personally I would rather it wasn’t done with taxpayer’s money.
The more narrow the consensus the less relevancy it has to the rest of us. The more vociferous it’s nature in excluding contrarian views the less appropriate and accurate it can be when compared to reality. Leave science to scientists and politics to politicians. The AGW alarmism begins with the conclusion – that something must be done and then sets about building a very flimsy case for that ‘something’.
“But if we all calm down, we might look together at the burden of the criticisms of PNS and see whether they are fatal.”
PNS has at it’s heart a paradox – to build a consensus agreeable to all all must have their view fairly represented and incorporated into that consensus. Whoever oversees the process of building that consensus will likely weigh up contributions in relation to their own views. There is no geuninely impartial way to assess the quality of a contributing view so the outcome will always be skewed. The same error is an ever present danger with any other kind of meta-analysis. The reason for this is that everything is relative. If you are well to the left of the spectrum someone in the centre looks right-wing. If you are in the middle of the spectrum everyone else looks partisan. The centre is wherever we are as individuals.
The view of the consensus will always tend towards the view of those trying to build the consensus. It shrinks to a narrow consensus with little legitimacy rather than growing. Then, as we have seen with the IPCC, the only means to enlarge the consensus is to convince other people that you are right and they are wrong, at which point the consensus can admit people who have changed their minds. The IPCC attempted to do this by misrepresenting the science of climate change, by misrepresenting the sceptical views, by slurring anyone who did not fall into line as being in the pay of big oil and so on and so forth, including bribery with our money. They wanted the consensus to be larger without the added people having any influence on the direction the consensus points.
By promoting eco-advocates to the position of building that consensus (as the CRU file hot-proposal.doc sets out) the outcome was always going to be skewed in that direction. The consensus will always be skewed in some direction or other and thanks to Governments doing the funding and supporting of the IPCC that consensus was always going to be skewed in favour of ‘Government’.
PNS is nice on paper but impractical in the real world. Something akin to a Penrose triangle.
“I developed a critical stance. For me, ‘nuclear deterrence’ was not only immoral, but also crazy”
Enough said…………he is a CND unilateralist. Unfortunately his science now manifests itself within the ethos of the European Union.
Stalin would be proud.
“My deepest concern is with the situation of science in modern civilisation. Without something that we call ‘public trust’, it would be in big trouble.”
I’d say it’s in big trouble then.
Ok I get the distinction between “normal” and “post-normal” science now. Back in my pre-New Math days of being educated, we called that distinction that of the Hard vs the Soft Sciences. “post-normal” implies that the “normal” hard sciences are obsolescent, and that we live in some sort of special historical time that where our existence is in such dire straits that we cannot rely on the hard sciences for answers, but unstead must turn to the mushy headed, subjective, indefinitive soft sciences to tell us what to think.
I’m sorry, but my existence will never be in such desperate circumstances.
All things are political. All things are to be politicized. Not Quaker, but Marxist is Dr. Ravetz.
Science requires only one assumption: there is a real world. After this, science is about creating models of the real world which are understood to be imperfect, but which account for what is known, and successfully predict future events. Science does not fully reveal “Truth”, it only can approximate truth. Science is properly skeptical. Science’s “laws” are understood not to be divine—they will be changed if the facts derived of experiment warrant change.
Einstein did not refute Newton, he refined Newton, showing that Newton’s model cannot explain the interactions of huge masses and great energies at high velocities. Newton’s laws remain highly useful for medium-sized masses, energies, velocities, and so on—-namely most of the things germane to our daily lives. Einstein’s model is necessary for great masses, speeds near lightspeed, energies astronomical. Similarly, Quantum Mechanics, so valuable in the realm of the very small, is unnecessary for the realm of medium size wherein Newtonian physics works just fine.
Dr Ravetz, so trapped in the morally delusional world of Marxism, cannot separate Science, in its role of ever bettering our models of the real world, from Politics, which is not scientific, but instead is about organizing the power structures of groups of people and implementing their collective decisions. When Dr Ravetz corrupts Science with his Politics he comes to foolish conclusions about both.
Dr Ravetz gives the game away when he says he did not read Crichton’s book, Fear, because he could not imagine eco-terrorism. His family religion, Marxism, still deludes him. He cannot see that the “idealistic” environmentalists, as are all “idealists”, are motivated at the root by a hatred of the real world they must live in, such that they devalue the real world by wishing it were replaced by their ideal world, inchoate as it may be. The Warmist extreme, like all apocalyptic thinkers, claim the “end of the world” is nigh, because of the immoral behavior of man. This is psychopathology, and most definitely not science. Ravetz cannot see this, because he is immersed in it.
The thing I learned was that the most ardent proponents of AGW honestly believe it is Unthinkable that the science might have errors. This will be a grief process for some.
I like this article. It asks the best questions.
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/02/19/how-al-gore-wrecked-planet-earth/
Dr. Jerome Ravetz:
We share many common experiences, but arrived at opposing conclusions.
a.) For me too ‘nuclear deterrence’ was not only immoral, but also crazy!
b.) If not for the ‘Mohole scandal’, I would have received samples from that drill through the Earth’s crust.
c.) I was also active in science, and knew many of the so-called big players – Glenn Seaborg, Hannes Alfven, Willie Fowler, Al Cameron, Harold Urey, Gerry Wasserburg, etc.
If the basic motivation for your “design of post-normal science was to help maintain the health and integrity of science”, then you failed miserably.
Exhibit A: Climategate
Exhibit B: NASA-gate
Exhibit C: DOE-gate
You say that “PNS, and in particular the ‘Extended Peer Community’ was conceived in a left-wing framework, enabling little people to fight scientific battles against big bad corporations (state and private) and professional elites.”
The ‘Extended Peer Community’ has in fact destroyed the integrity of science by limiting funds and publications to points of view that are endorsed by ~ 99% of the reviewers, i.e., to consensus science.
You ask “a favour from my more severe critics. This would be to buy a copy of my inexpensive new book, A No-Nonsense Guide to Science and examine it.”
I ask an even less expensive favor from you:
Read and then tell us your opinion of two small paragraphs from Dr. Michael Crichton’s lecture on 17 January 2003:
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
–Michael Crichton, The Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Emeritus Professor of
Nuclear & Space Sciences
Former NASA PI for Apollo
I think the idea of a need for a “post-normal science” is linked to the philosophical theory that there is no empirical truth, instead there is merely an evolution of theories by falsification. IMHO this two theories of the scientific process are not distinguishable and therefore it doesn’t really make any observable difference whether you favour one or the other.
In a similar way I don’t think it is helpful to knock over our terminology and declare the spectrum of scientists, politicians, and activists as the broader community of post-normal science. Maybe one could even do this without getting into disagreement with our current understanding of science. But in the end we still won’t have solved the problems of superstition, bias, and corruption. If we can’t model climate, how can we expect to model society?
Jerry Ravetz
In conclusion, I should declare an interest. My deepest concern is with the situation of science in modern civilisation. Without something that we call ‘public trust’, it would be in big trouble. What will happen as a result of Climategate? >>
I think you’ve asked the wrong question. Climategate has an obvious, large, and negative impact on the “public trust”. As individuals, we buy science all the time. We don’t call it science, we call it “products” which in the modern day have a remarkable amount of science in even the simplest devices. If they don’t work as expected, we want a refund. We’ll punish the supplier by not buying from them anymore. If their product does harm, we’ll sue them. But when governments consider destroying world economies on the basis of faulty or fraudulent science, the only impact on “public trust” is to destroy it.
The question to be asked is not what the impact is. The question is how did our public institutions become so corrupted that they could boldly state to the public that 2+2 is 5, and to say this to a public incapable of instantly seeing the falsehood. I don’t know how the first part came to be, but I believe I do the second.
Our education system fears to ascribe failure to the students it is charged with educating. Passing grades are granted to students who can neither read nor write (or in my case, spell). They may not even be able to do math. I have new hires with university degrees who can’t compute gross profit on a sale. I present the person at the till with a twenty dollar bill and two pennies to pay for a $10.02 expense and they become confused. I tell the pit boss at the local poker room that we’d like to have the top four places pay in the tournament instead of the top three, and he tells me its not possible because the computer doesn’t have that option for a tournament our sized and so “there’s no way to calculate what the prizes should be”. I explain that the earth’s orbit is elliptical and that the earth is a bit closer to the sun in NH winter than in NH summer to a bunch of grade 10 students and someone calls me an idiot because obviously winter is caused by being farther away from the sun, not closer (GRADE 10!). A teacher tells students in grade 12 that the IMF is controlled by large American oil companies and the school makes me produce evidence that it isn’t (!!!) before they make him retract the statement.
Ask not what the reaction to breach of trust by the public is. Ask why in the information age we produce students who, when told 2+2 is 5, accept it, and can’t even be bothered to disengage themselves from their cell phone for long enough to use the calculator in it to see if that is true or not. I fear that one may actually do so only to annouce that they got 4, there must be something wrong with their phone.