Via The Corner, something I always knew deep down, but never had succinctly coalesced into a single paragraph.
In 1999, Cass Sunstein wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review entitled “The Law of Group Polarization.” Its thesis was simple:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.
I suppose this explains why extreme measures such as erecting thousands of expensive and sometimes operating windmills that blight the landscape, are often attractive to the global warming movement.
Imagine the howling if somebody wanted thousands of natural gas well derricks on the same plot of land in California, yet they would produce far more energy and help far more people, at a lower cost.
Oblique low-altitude aerial photo of wellpads, access roads, pipeline corridors and other natural-gas infrastructure in the Jonah Field of western Wyoming’s upper Green River valley. Photographer: Bruce Gordon, EcoFlight – Image via Flickr
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Bruce, after reading many research reports, I am here.
Wrap your mind around that for a while.
I disagree that this applies across the board to the climate debate. Yes, groups tend to polarize, but is that what we see happening in the climate debate? I submit that it only half applies.
The alarmists are, in fact, pretty much unified in their viewpoint. Dissent in the official literature (journals, etc) is actively squelched as is are opposing voices in open access forums such as blogs. That’s pretty much the polarization and groupthink that the article describes. But is that true of the skeptic community?
Certainly there are skeptic blogs which are just as much echo chambers as warmist forums. But tsake a look at the blog roll on the WUWT sidebar. There’s categories for lukewarmists, skeptics, amd transcendental rants. On this site I’ve seen raging debates with skeptics who range from the “visible light can’t heat anything” to the opinions of world reknown physicists, engineers and statisticians.
The hottest debates on this site aren’t between warmists and skeptics, they are between skeptics and other skeptics! This can site can hardly be called an echo chamber. As for the audience here being polarized, I defy anyone to come up with a description of a point of view that represents the majority here.
“A gathering of scientific men or of artists, owning to the mere fact that they form an assemblage, will not deliver judgments of general subjects sensibly different from those rendered by a gathering of masons or grocers.” – Gustave le Bon (“The Crowd” 1895)
“All the sick and sickly instinctively strive after a herd organization as a means of shaking off their dull displeasure and feeling of weakness…. The strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate; if the former unite together, it is only with the aim of an aggressive collective action and collective satisfaction of their will to power, and with much resistance from the individual conscience; the latter, on the contrary, enjoy precisely this coming together – their instinct is just as much satisfied by this as the instinct of the born “masters” (that is, the solitary, beast-of-pray species of man) is fundamentally irritated and disquieted by organization.” – Frederich Nietzsche (“On the Geneology of Morals” 1887)
“If you decide to wage a war for the total triumph of your individuality, you must begin by inexorably destroying those who have the greatest affinity with you. All alliance depersonalizes; everything that tends to the collective is your death; use the collective, therefore, as an experiment, after which strike hard, and remain alone!” – Salvador Dali (“The Secret Life of Salvador Dali” 1942)
Hummm, it is about Agenda 21 in the end, no?
The Montreal protocol set a precedent of opportunity and control.
The Kyoto protocol made it intrusive and hence, questioned.
What is the root of such desire for control that drives science to such an inverted pyramid of attempted pre-construction ?
Has anyone actually really read agenda 21 ?
I did……..
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
It would be amiss to not note that there are always two extremes: some say the world is doomed; some say CO2 is ineffectual. Both have their conspiracy theories.
We’d like to think that a site like this is where the more tempered, rational discourse happens, but an honest reflection should acknowledge that extreme positions may arise here too. Most regulars will know that they do.
Or soot.
Of course, being driven by a political agenda, a long-term plan, crony capitalism, and billions of dollars stolen from the people does not blunt the “belief” in the warmist position. Then, you have the fact that they have invested so much of their reputation and integrity in their position, they psychologically cannot admit that they are wrong and basically been lying for a living to the public.
Those who work in the UK’s NHS have the same investment. On one hand, they know that providing healthcare to everybody is noble and on the other, they know that it really is failing its goals, being the worst healthcare in the developed world. They gallantly want to fix it, but all fixes fail, but they are still thinking of themselves as noble and cannot admit it’s a total failure and should be abandoned.
Tim Minchin says:
August 18, 2012 at 7:03 pm
why is Atwood allowed to troll?
Because we all need someone to laugh at. Laughter is good !!!
Isn’t that the sole purpose of warmist trolls? to inject a sense of idiocy and stupidity.. and give us someone to laugh at ?
I doubt empirical scientists are extreme, but err on the side of scepticism instead
davidmhoffer says
” I defy anyone to come up with a description of a point of view that represents the majority here.”
Those that remain unconvinced that a doubling of CO2 necessarily results in global scale catastrophe.
@davidmhoffer says:
August 18, 2012 at 7:49 pm
.“[…] As for the audience here being polarized, I defy anyone to come up with a description of a point of view that represents the majority here.”,
The majority here like WUWT ;o)
@davidmhoffer: The majority here like that the data is presented to the best of the article writer’s abilities and strong presentation of real world data contradicting a position leads to a correction of conclusion rather than a banning of a poster. I think that is a point of view shared across the board here.
OK – so we know that groupthink produces positive feedback, reinforcing the natural direction of travel of the group (Matt Ridley’s essay gave plenty of examples in Anthony’s earlier thread “Apocalypse Not: I love the smell of skepticism in the morning”).
But are there any known findings on lapse rates – the half-life (rate of dissipation) of this kind of falsely produced groupthink? That would be really interesting too …
Group polarization is enhanced by how many become almost living in a different reality, from their very sources of news and info drastically differing. The mechanic with cults is similar: most members surround themselves with others of like mind, reinforcing their own views, steering away from and rarely even exposed to what would cause painful cognitive dissonance. Terms like deniers for the infidels serve a role, to help expel opponents or even true moderates.
I once watched a forum go from being relatively decent to finally a extremist-dominated caricature of itself over a period of a few years. Several posters who had practically unlimited spare time (with more than a hundred times the postcount of the average casual and thus disproportionately dominant) would actively and deliberately aim to punish and drive away anyone pointing out and defending a politically incorrect truth, by ensuring that doing so meant burning too much time in a multi-day continuous argument until the no-lifers had the last word by sheer repetition, whereas dishonest views on the opposite side were cheered.
Ideological tribalism is discussed well at Dr. McCarthy’s Sustainability of Human Progress site:
“I get some very quick reactions to my main page on the sustainability of material progress. Quick reactions, whether favorable or unfavorable, cannot be based on reading the 50 or so pages. They are reactions to my attitude, which is apparent in the first paragraph. […]
Let’s try to get above the battles for a while and look at human ideologies from a Martian point of view. […]
People’s attitudes on these 10 issues tend to be strongly correlated, although logically there should be little connection between a person’s attitude to abortion and his attitude to multi-culturalism.”
(Much more is at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ideology.html ).
Unlike more numerous casuals who rarely argue on the topic and often barely follow it, the small elite of the CAGW movement with much time invested tends to have been somewhat exposed to skeptical counterarguments sooner or later. But the elite is predominately immune to rational argument on climate because, despite pretenses, their motives often have little to do with the nominal climate topic alone.
Dr. Mann has explicitly referenced how Ehrlich is his hero. Ehrlich was opposed to the Green Revolution in agriculture, in the 1970s predicted mass starvation in industrialized countries by the year 2000, and illustrated his opposition to inexpensive energy in general by saying “giving society cheap abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Although an oversimplification in labeling (albeit probably deliberately made blunt enough to be memorable), Dr. Zubrin of Mars Society fame has written a good book on the “global antihuman cult.” Without a positive vision of the future such as the 1950s goal of advancement towards space colonization (which could still occur by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram or a couple other approaches), a negative vision is substituted in its place, believing stagnation and decline in material and energy terms to be inevitable and/or desirable.
http://merchantsofdespair.net/book.htm
With that said, anything so numerous and influential can not really be called a cult but rather a major enviroreligion, part penitential of human sins against animals and part letting its members feel self-righteous, while not one emphasizing honesty as an aspect of its saints or heroes; a significant portion of those leaving traditional Judeo-Christian religions have dropped into it.
What’s even more infuriating is the phenomenon of ‘belief packages’…i.e. the tendency for individuals to hold a number of associated ‘beliefs’ which of course is the foundation of all political parties. I always try to make balanced judgements on the issue in question rather than towing some party line, which on some occasions puts me to the ‘left of Bakunin’ and on others, to the ‘right’ of Ghengis Khan!
I think y’all may be missing the point.
This whole thing can be summarized in “Never let an opportunity go to waste”.
It is as simple as that.
The controllers here are not interested in the science, the skepticism or any of the rest of it.
They are interested in the turmoil, and the opportunities to take control of society.
Arguments from science are a waste of time.
In the context of my prior comment, I might add that, if one wanted to find someone who could be convinced by rational argument and is honest but merely misled into believing in CAGW, find someone who is pro-geoengineering in its context*, pro-nuclear, technophilic, and for the advancement of industrial civilization including space colonization, while not belonging to a political party (or source of income) which would be weakened if CAGW was exposed as false.
Unsurprisingly, though, one does not often see someone like that who is not already a skeptic.
* (Geoengineering cooler temperatures is undesirable in reality, but, if CAGW dooming the world by extreme heat was actually true instead of false, it would beat burning orders of magnitude more money ineffectually except as religious penance; thus it is revealing whenever someone believes in CAGW doom — or wants others to believe in it — but yet simultaneously does not even want geoengineering to work).
It explains why you use Distance-compressed shot of antique wind chargers to misreport the ones erected today.
TimC says:
August 18, 2012 at 8:51 pm
But are there any known findings on lapse rates – the half-life (rate of dissipation) of this kind of falsely produced groupthink? That would be really interesting too …
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
— Max Planck
It is called preaching to the choir. Something “true believers” do very well. If I recall most of this was identified and discussed by Eric Hoffer about 50 years ago.
DaveA says, “It would be amiss to not note that there are always two extremes: some say the world is doomed; some say CO2 is ineffectual.”
Do you think those are the two “extremes,” DaveA? Really? Then, where does that leave those of us who think that additional atmospheric CO2 is not merely ineffectual, but beneficial? If “CO2 is ineffectual” is the extreme right end of the spectrum of opinion, what do you make of the more than 30,000 scientists (and engineers in relevant disciplines) whose stated views are beyond the extreme-right end of that spectrum of opinion?
I don’t think I’m an extremist on climate issues. I’m a “lukewarm-ist.” I do think that it’s warmer now than it was in the 1700s, and I do think human activity affects climate, so If I’d taken the Zimmerman/Doran survey, I’d have been counted among the 97.5% whom Doran characterized as agreeing with what he called “the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”
Here’s another reason for polarization: propaganda. If one side has a disproportionately large ability to propagandize for their point of view, then the opinions of large numbers of people may thereby be caused to diverge further and further from evidence-based reality. That’s what’s happening in climatology. The Left is using the authority of the state to relentlessly propagandize for climate alarmism by every means possible, from the endless stream of climate alarmism on PBS, to (most destructively!) the intensive indoctrination of children through government-run schools; e.g.:
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-08-15/features/bs-gr-climate-change-teaching-20120815_1_climate-change-climate-change-bill-reinhard
Dave
“higley7 says:
August 18, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Of course, being driven by a political agenda, a long-term plan, crony capitalism, and billions of dollars stolen from the people does not blunt the “belief” in the warmist position. Then, you have the fact that they have invested so much of their reputation and integrity in their position, they psychologically cannot admit that they are wrong and basically been lying for a living to the public.
Those who work in the UK’s NHS have the same investment. On one hand, they know that providing healthcare to everybody is noble and on the other, they know that it really is failing its goals, being the worst healthcare in the developed world. They gallantly want to fix it, but all fixes fail, but they are still thinking of themselves as noble and cannot admit it’s a total failure and should be abandoned.”
======================================================================
…but …but …but …. The olympics told me it was great!!!
“””””…..Bruce Atwood says:
August 18, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Yup. That’s why deniers should read some of the actual research reports, instead of simply believing Fox……”””””
Who the hell is Fox ? I thought I had heard or read of virtually all of the big name players on both sides of the CO2 arthropogenicmanmadeglobalwarmingclimatechange discussion, and I never heard of anybody named Fox on any side of the issue. Where did he suddenly come from ?
Why all of a sudden does WUWT want me to sign in every time now ?
“We see that over the next few weeks if Arctic ice falls below certain levels. No allowance will be given for the fact that it is being measured using different systems to last year ”
Could beesaman or someone give me more information on that please ?
An excellent post by Henry Clark @ur momisugly 8:58. The TLDR summary is: People prefer answers to questions. People that like producing answers dislike the people that produce questions.