Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. sends word of this via email. I’m a bit amused, but not surprised, as we know WUWT has been pushing the traditional media envelope, and we often tackle subjects they can’t or won’t. I liked this statement about skeptical blogs:
They serve as extended peer communities as put forth by post-normal science, however, blog users themselves do not see post-normal science as a desirable goal.
She’s got that right. Just wait til she sees what is coming up next. – Anthony
CSTPR Noontime Seminar
Fall 2012 Series
Thursdays 12:00 – 1:00 PM
The Communications-Policy Nexus
Media, messages, and decision making
* Tuesday September 11, 2012
THE CONTRARIAN DISCOURSE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE: WHAT ARE BLOGS GOOD FOR ANYWAY?
by Franziska Hollender, Institute for Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna
CSTPR Conference Room, 1333 Grandview Avenue
Free and open to the public
The media serve to inform, entertain, educate and provide a basis for discussion among people. While traditional media such as print newspapers are facing a slow decline, they are being outpaced by new media that add new dimensions to public communication with interactivity being the most striking one. In the context of climate change, one question has arisen from recent events: what to do with the contrarians? Some propose that the contrarian discourse is merely an annoying sideshow, while others think that it is science’s responsibility to fight them. Blogs, being fairly unrestricted and highly interactive, serve as an important platform for contrarian viewpoints, and they are increasingly permeating multiple media spheres.
Using the highly ranked blog ‘Watts up with that’ as a case study, discourse analysis of seven posts including almost 1600 user comments reveals that blogs are able to unveil components and purposes of the contrarian discourse that traditional media are not. They serve as extended peer communities as put forth by post-normal science, however, blog users themselves do not see post-normal science as a desirable goal. Furthermore, avowals of distrust can be seen as linguistic perfomances of accountability, forcing science to prove its reliability and integrity over and over again. Finally, it is concluded that the climate change discourse has been stifled by the obsession of discussing the science basis and that in order to advance the discourse, there needs to be a change in how science as an ideology is communicated and enacted.
========================================================
http://cires.colorado.edu/calendar/events/index.php?com=detail&eID=605
Can anyone go? Pielke Jr. reports he will be traveling.
tallbloke:
Thankyou for your reply to me at September 7, 2012 at 3:00 am which says
I am pleased that my views are now clear. However, I am surprised that I have added clarity in my posts you are answering: those posts consist almost entirely of my quoting statements I had made earlier in the thread.
I write to address the serious problem of corruption in the peer review process which you request me to do.
I do not know why you suggest I don’t care about this corruption of the peer review process. On the contrary, I have good reasons to care deeply. For example, my submission the the Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into ‘climategate’ was about a specific case where I had suffered from it. Also, the Team tried to put pressure on the Editor of E&E by getting her sacked from her university (she made a submission to the inquiry about it) and I am on the Editorial Board of E&E.
But caring about a problem is not a reason to do something which would make the problem worse.
I fail to see how PNS could reduce corruption of the peer review system, but I can see how it would worsen the problem. The corruption would be worsened by involving ‘stakeholders’ in peer review because few of them would have requisite expertise to assess papers but all of them would have reason to influence papers. And the IPCC demonstrates this.
The IPCC is an example of involving ‘stakeholders’ in the peer review system. The IPCC Reports are approved by representatives of all signatory governments to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Each government has scientists among its representatives because scientists are needed to understand the science. But the resulting documents are political documents because governments (i.e. the ‘stakeholders’) have a say in what the IPCC Reports contain. The resulting Reports are often asserted to be “scientific” reports but any ‘climate-savvy’ reader of them can see they are biased political documents couched in scientific language.
And the existence of the IPCC is to some degree (I think a large degree) responsible for much of the corruption of the peer review process in ‘mainstream’ scientific journals. Governments are ‘stakeholders’ so encourage people whom they employ to provide information which supports the FCCC and which, therefore, is useful input to IPCC reports. The pressure from ‘stakeholders’ has empowered the Team by giving the Team protection from accountability (e.g. all ‘climategate’ inquiries were whitewashes) while funding their work which is intended to provide the desired results. Importantly, science is a competitive activity. Ideas and information are compared and contested. The ideas which survive competition become accepted theories. Therefore, it is and always has been a proper part of science for scientists to promote their own ideas and to attack other ideas. When the Team became flooded with research funds and were protected from accountability they then began to attack opposing ideas by trying to exclude them; e.g. by usurping the peer review process and the executive committees of Institutions.
These results of lack of scientific accountability are not new to science. For example, Hooke was President of the Royal Society (RS) and he archived all his scientific papers with the RS. Newton was his greatest scientific opponent. So, when Newton took over from him as as RS President then Newton destroyed all Hooke’s archived papers. This is directly analogous to the usurpation of the peer review process which has recently happened in climate science. And there are many other examples of this effect of lack of accountability in science since Newton and up to the present.
The solution is – as I keep saying – to isolate the science (including peer review processes) from ‘stakeholders’ as far as is possible. This would enable the peer review process to ensure accountability by exposing misconduct. But the peer review process will never be perfect.
Scientists desire prestige. If they wanted personal financial wealth then they would have chosen a career other than science. Therefore, exposure of their misconduct is a very severe penalty for them: it trashes their careers and reputations.
Accountability for scientists consists of exposure of misconduct. PNS provides scientists with ‘stakeholders’ who will attempt to protect them from exposure of any misconduct. There always are such ‘stakeholders’ but their power needs to be minimised’;e.g. Penn State Uni. is a ‘stakeholder’ in the reputation of Michael Mann. PNS deliberately increases the involvement of ‘stakeholders’.
Richard
tallbloke:
On reading my above post I can see that I imply Sonja was sacked from her university. She was not. The Team tried to get her sacked.
Sorry, if I misled.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
September 6, 2012 at 2:52 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/01/wuwt-is-the-focus-of-a-seminar-at-the-university-of-colorado/#comment-1072697
Richard, Why would I take it back . . . you just made another ad hominem . . . . How is what I said non sense? “”Conversation is not possible when discussion is replaced by such offensive and untrue insults.”” Richard! Neither is rational reasoning betweem two “hue-mans”.
Apparently Laurie, some people don’t understand what an ad hominem attack is. On the basis of this thread, you ought to be able to find at least one example of same.
Laurie Bowen:
I did not make an ad hom. but you did.
If you can find fault in my argument then I would be very pleased to learn it because that would tell me I need to modify my argument and/or my understanding.
Richard
Mitt Romney says:
Ultimately, the science is an input to the public policy decision; it does not dictate a particular policy response.
How very Ravetzian of him.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=obama-romney-science-debate
tallbloke;
How very Ravetzian of him.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You really and truly do not understand the difference between politics informed by science and science informed by politics.
Hoff:
A week ago I replied to this comment from Richard Courtney:
tallbloke says:
September 1, 2012 at 5:34 pm
richardscourtney says:
September 1, 2012 at 4:49 pm
No! The only valid “approach to the problem” is to let politicians decide the politics and to let the scientists “just muddle along till the truth came out”.
Politicians make decisions about uncertain issues by assessing available information – including scientific information – every day. IT IS THEIR JOB. In democracies it is what we elect them to do. Nobody elects “all stake holders”.
Richard
If the world was as it should be, I’d agree. However, we are in a situation where the scientists tell the politicians what they want to hear and the politicians pay them fat grants to do that.
Example: Margaret Thatcher telling the CRU that “there’s money on the table if you can prove this stuff. (about co2)”
I’ll add that it was also the climategate scientists own unsupported beliefs which led them to allow their politics to inform their science, not Ravetz’s. He trusted that science’s internal quality assurance mechanism would be “self-policing”.
So given that it was a collusion between politicians (wanting to bash the coal miners union in Thatcher’s case) and the scientists (who were advancing the importance of their field and the green agenda they believed in), I think it would have been a good thing if from the start, third, fourth and fifth parties had been in there at the science/policy interface asking awkward questions and opening up the debate, rather than being sidelined as ‘merchants of doubt’ by a compliant media infiltrated by the ‘society of environmental journalists’.
That way the dragon might have been slain before it turned into the multi-headed hydra we now face.
Sorry, what was it I don’t understand again?
tallbloke:
At September 7, 2012 at 11:49 pm you refer to Thatcher’s initiation of the AGW scare and say
There is so much wrong with that it would take a book to explain it.
If you want to know why and how Thatcher started the scare then read
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Firstly, ” third, fourth and fifth parties ” did not want to be involved. The coal industry was too busy dealing with the ‘acid rain’ scare to worry about another improbable scare. The nuclear industry joined in promoting the scare because it was ‘hurting’ from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and nuclear does not emit CO2. The oil industry joined the scare because it was expanding gas usage and gas produces less CO2 than coal. etc.
So, all the interested ‘stakeholders’ were people and organisations wanting to promote the scare. People and organisations wanting to oppose the scare had little motivation and were busy doing other things.
Therefore, PNS could only have worsened the scare and would have assisted the politicians to do what they did do for purely political reasons.
Please remember that politicians want science to be on tap but not on top. And politicians can always ‘fix’ that there are involved ‘stakeholders’ of their choosing.
Richard
Richard, thanks for your additional observations. I don’t think it negates my admittedly skimpy account but amplifies it. The other interested parties you list no doubt did influence political thinking on the issue, and they don’t need official seats at official tables to do that. But we see that despite Governments continuing to say they don’t take any notice of sceptics, they do take notice of public opinion, and public opinion has become better informed by sites like WUWT and Climate Audit, or at least a good proportion of those members of the public with an open mind on the scientific issues have.
And I suppose Ravetz’ thinking has changed to accommodate the internet social media phenomenon. He now sees these unofficial but influential channels as effective parts of the ‘widened peer community’. Nothing stays still, all things change.
Ultimately, the thing we all want is for governments to make wise decisions when it comes to policy direction and the spending of vast amounts of the money it has extracted from the pockets of the public. In order for politicians to make wise decisions, they need to weigh in the balance the competing claims and interests of disparate groups in society. A lot of Ravetz’ development of PNS is centred around the representation and evaluation of risk, aimed at helping decision makers in performing those evaluations. Judy Curry took on those issues following the Lisbon conference on her blog, and a lot of argument ensued.
One of the more interesting presentations given at Lisbon in my view, was that given by Jeroen van der Sluijs.
Have a look and see what you think of this paper he wrote:
http://uu.academia.edu/JeroenPvanderSluijs/Papers/674229/Uncertainty_communication_in_environmental_assessments_views_from_the_Dutch_science-policy_interface
Here’s a taster from the intro which seems pretty uncontroversial to me:
Uncertainty communication in environmental assessments: views from the Dutch science-policy interface
1. Introduction
Scientific assessments of complex environmental risks, andpolicy responses to those risks, involve uncertainties of manysorts(FuntowiczandRavetz,1990).These uncertainties can be present in various stages of the policy cycle, ranging from theinitial detection of a (possible) problem, to policy formulation and, eventually, monitoring and adjustments to existing policies.More research will not necessarily reduce uncertainty and decisions often need to be made before conclusive evidence is available (Risbey et al., 2005; Van der Sluijs,2005; Van der Sluijs et al., 2005a,b; Wardekker and Van derSluijs, 2005). Meanwhile, the potential impacts of wrong decisions on, for instance, health, economy, environment andcredibility can be huge. Communication of uncertainties aimed at policymakers, as well as other parties involved in policymaking, is important because uncertainties can influence the policy strategy that is selected. Furthermore, it is a matter of good scientific practice, accountability and openness towards the general public.
tallbloke;
Sorry, what was it I don’t understand again?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
All of it.
Tallbloke:
Thankyou for the abstract you quote in your post to me at September 8, 2012 at 6:13 am. As you say, the abstract is fairly uncontroversial, but I read the paper which you kindly linked and – to be polite – it is naïve.
For example, it makes these statements and then evaluates them as though they had practical importance
All of that – and the subsequent study of it in the paper – ignores the two most important facts; viz.
1.
Politicians evaluate much information of many kinds and almost all of it is uncertain.
They welcome information on uncertainty and tend to distrust assertions of certainty. Indeed, when politicians ascribe undue confidence to information they often suffer resulting consequences (e.g. WMD, the Banking Crisis, etc.). Science is a minor contributor to the information used by politicians with economics, public opinion, and security issues having much more importance. All the important information is uncertain and that is why political policies are adopted. If information is certain then society (i.e. individuals, corporations and businesses) act on it without need for policy and politicians only need to define laws which prohibit misbehaviour (e.g. murder, fraud, theft, etc.).
2.
Politicians can game each of the listed definitions to suite political purposes.
‘Scientific’ information is often used by politicians as justification or excuse for political policies that are desired for other reasons (e.g. IPCC ‘scientific’ information justifies economic and energy policies).
Scientists are deluded if they think assertions of degrees of ‘uncertainty’ or interaction with politicians can – or will – benefit their science. Such assertions and interaction can only result in politicians interfering in the conduct of the science and blaming scientists for any unfortunate outcomes of political decisions which are never made predominantly on the basis of science.
However, it should be noted that science can enable important political decisions. For example, if radar had not been invented then politicians could not have provided the policy of funding the radar system which was essential to winning the Battle Of Britain. But the decision to do that was based on much wider considerations than the scientific fact that such a system could be constructed.
Richard
tallbloke:
I have been thinking about my last response to you.
Earlier, you cited as example Thatcher starting the AGW-scare and I said that PNS would have made the problem worse. I pointed you to my account of that subject at
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
If you remove all reference to science from Figure 2 in that link then the AGW issue takes off and is unaffected.
Richard
Great education Richard.
I liken the PNS argument to the “if it will save even one life” argument. Over the years, I’ve frequently seen promoters of some community improvement or another trying to get some pet project funded, and when they run into questions about affordability, they pull out the “if it saves even one life, isn’t it worth it?” argument. We’re could be talking about anything from a pedestrian overpass at a busy intersection to a new hospital. Anything can be justified to save one life, can it not?
The trick here is the same one that PNS plays. If our financial resources were infinite, the answer of course would be “yes”. But the point is that our financial resources are NOT infinite. So the response is twofold:
1. How much money do we have available?
2. What are ALL the things that money could be spent on and what are their benefits?
This is where the “it is will save even one life” argument falls apart. If we only have $1 million to spend, and there are a dozen things that could save dozens of lives each, then obviously those things should be done first. If there is no money left…. then there is no money left. It would be absurd to spend money on something that would save a single life if the same money spent on something else would save hundreds of lives.
Thus the fallacy of PNS is twofold. It fails because the argument about including non science “stakeholders” to have input to science in an “urgent” situation, just defies logic. The more urgent the situation, the less time there is to consult an expanded list of “stakeholders”. But on top of that, PNS doesn’t survive the “if it only saves one life” argument. Just as the “if it only saves one life” argument seeks to focus us on the issue at hand and at the same time exclude all the other options for the use of a given resource, so does PNS focus us on a single issue (climate change) to the exclusion of all the other options. Were PNS applied to all the issues that PNS could be applied to, the absurdity would quickly become apparent as the resources available would quickly be exhausted, and the only situations they would be applied to would quickly become apparent as not being urgent in the first place, or there would have been no time to apply the resources!
davidmhoffer:
Thankyou for your post at September 8, 2012 at 2:23 pm which I agree.
I write to make clear that I agree with you that PNS is impractical, but I am also concerned that any attempt to adopt PNS does actual harm for all the several reasons I have tried to explain in this thread.
Additionally, and very importantly, I am sincerely convinced that PNS is a retreat from the Enlightenment and a stepping-stone towards totalitarianism.
Richard
Additionally, and very importantly, I am sincerely convinced that PNS is a retreat from the Enlightenment and a stepping-stone towards totalitarianism.
Richard
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I never thought about it in terms of the Enlightenment until you brought pointed it out upthread. After considerable thought, I’ve concluded that you are correct. PNS simply opens the door for a belief system to impose itz will upon facts and to displace them with belief systems that are not founded upon fact. This can serve no purpose but to aid those who grasp for power and care not how they attain it. Ravetz is simply an enabler who believes that his enablement of them will confer upon him some special place amongst the “new order”. If he were to review history with the oft repeated words about repitition and what happens to those who don’t learn from it, he’d know that it is people like him that the new order makes “disappear” as rapidly as possible, lest his talents be used against them.
richardscourtney says:
September 8, 2012 at 1:22 pm
tallbloke:
I have been thinking about my last response to you.
Earlier, you cited as example Thatcher starting the AGW-scare and I said that PNS would have made the problem worse. I pointed you to my account of that subject at
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
If you remove all reference to science from Figure 2 in that link then the AGW issue takes off and is unaffected.
Richard, thank you for pointing me to your article, which is excellent. I’d like to give it a new airing with your permission. If we remove reference to science from fig 2, then it’s hard to explain media interest. Journalists are reluctant to take politicians at their word on matters which are beyond both their competences, and so they would naturally have sought confirmation from scientific sources.
The media’s culpability for swallowing whole and regurgitating press releases which made claims which went well beyond the data is crucial to an understanding of how the scare took off IMO. They bear much responsibility for the positive feedback between public opinion and policy formation. I think the prevalence of arts degrees amongst the media professionals coupled with the social trend within the ‘intelligentsia’ or ‘chattering classes’ towards environmental concern generally probably partly explains the journalistic failure to properly investigate global warming hype pushed by advocate scientists. There are also some overly cosy relationships between media moguls, national broadcasters and politicans as revealed by recent developments in the phone hacking scandal too.
Andrew Montford’s work on revealing the links between members of the ‘society of environmental journalists’ and the advocacy groups with political influence highlights important factors too. I recommend a read of his low cost recent publication for an in depth account.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/conspiracy-in-green/
richardscourtney says:
September 8, 2012 at 1:22 pm
tallbloke:
I have been thinking about my last response to you.
Earlier, you cited as example Thatcher starting the AGW-scare and I said that PNS would have made the problem worse. I pointed you to my account of that subject at
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
If you remove all reference to science from Figure 2 in that link then the AGW issue takes off and is unaffected.
Richard, thank you for pointing me to your article, which is excellent. I’d like to give it a new airing with your permission. If we remove reference to science from fig 2, then it’s hard to explain media interest. Journalists are reluctant to take politicians at their word on matters which are beyond both their competences, and so they would naturally have sought confirmation from scientific sources.
The media’s culpability for swallowing whole and regurgitating press releases which made claims which went well beyond the data is crucial to an understanding of how the scare took off IMO. They bear much responsibility for the positive feedback between public opinion and policy formation. I think the prevalence of arts degrees amongst the media professionals coupled with the social trend within the ‘intelligentsia’ or ‘chattering classes’ towards environmental concern generally probably partly explains the journalistic failure to properly investigate global warming hype pushed by advocate scientists. There are also some overly cosy relationships between media moguls, national broadcasters and politicans as revealed by recent developments in the phone hacking scandal too.
Andrew Montford’s work on revealing the links between members of the ‘society of environmental journalists’ and the advocacy groups with political influence highlights important factors too. I recommend a read of his low cost recent publication for an in depth account.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/conspiracy-in-green/
Thanks for your comments, nice to be able to have a clear conversation amongst the confusion and conflation of ideas which has dogged this thread.
richardscourtney says:
September 8, 2012 at 3:53 pm
Additionally, and very importantly, I am sincerely convinced that PNS is a retreat from the Enlightenment and a stepping-stone towards totalitarianism.
Not everything about the enlightenment was enlightening, and some of the science produced under it aegis constituted stepping stones to forms of totalitarianism which actually occurred.
Examples:
IQ tests for immigrants containing questions about provincial football teams
Phrenology
Lamarckian heredity theory
Eugenics
In fact, it contained as much politically motivated pseudoscience as any other period in the development of science.
Partly due to the nature of the organised opposition it faced, it invested too strongly in the hierarchical structure of it’s governing institutions too.
Of course, it’s easy to argue that the Enlightenment’s founders were honestly driven by the goal of improving society’s understanding of reality. That part of society they deemed to be ‘worthy’ and capable of rationality anyway. A product of its time, it was pretty unashamedly elitist. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_absolutism
While I was doing my degree course in the Development of European Science I actually read a lot of the source material.
IMO the post-internet era requires more open democratic structures, open peer review and open data access complete with agreed and monitored standards for data collation, verification, and presentation including media relations. Many areas of science such as medecine and food have made good progress in these items, usually following legislation enacted following scandals. It’s about time climatology grew up and followed suit.
tallbloke:
At September 9, 2012 at 1:19 am you ask me
OK, no problem, but I need to give you some background.
In 1980 the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) commissioned me to determine if there were environmental issues which could affect the coal industry as the ‘acid rain’ issue was then doing. I searched literature (scientific, environmental and journalistic) to identify possible issues and persons interested in possible ‘environmental’ issues. I then interviewed as many of the identified people as possible and – on the basis of the literature search and interviews – I constructed influence diagrams of the identified potential issues.
The influence diagrams indicated two potential problems which my report needed to inform to BACM; viz. ‘global warming’ (as it was then called) and microdust.
I provided my report to BACM near the end of 1980 and they considered it in early 1981 (it is often referred to as my “1980” and my “1981” report, but that is the same report). It concluded that positive feedbacks in the political system would cause ‘global warming’ to become a serious environmental issue whether or not any scientific evidence to support it were to be obtained. Indeed, the political feedbacks were so severe that the issue would become more important than any other ‘environmental’ issue and was likely to supplant most ‘environmental’ issues.
BACM rejected that report saying it was “extreme” and “implausible”. Since then ‘global warming’ has failed to obtain any supporting evidence but has become the major ‘environmental’ issue such that all other ‘environmental’ issues have become subordinated to it.
In the 1990s I became much involved with the late John Daly. He needed photocopies of documents archived by the Royal Society (RS) for his “Isle of the Dead” study and he could not get the RS to provide them: I asked the RS to send me the required photocopies and I forwarded them to him.
John was interested in why I had been involved with ‘global warming’ from the start of the scare and I answered him by explaining about how my 1980 BACM report had been rejected, and I sent him an extract from it including two diagrams. He asked me to update that extract so he could post it on his blog. The article on his blog is the update which he posted in (I think) 1999.
Please note that the diagrams in the article were constructed before the AGW-scare existed and they indicated that the scare would occur. But this indication was so extreme that only I accepted it.
Additionally, I strongly agree that Montford’s work is good and I commend it.
Richard
davidmhoffer:
re your post at September 8, 2012 at 4:30 pm.
So, you have seen that tainting yourself by associating with socialists like me can have its uses.
(joke)
Richard
tallbloke:
I write to apologise for omitting an important fact from my last post to you.
Please observe that the diagrams do not mention environmentalists. That is because they had no interest in ‘global warming’ at the time the diagrams were constructed. Indeed, the initial reaction of Greenpeace to Thatcher having raised the scare was to oppose ‘global warming’ because they saw it as a distraction from the ‘acid rain’ scare.
But all environmentalists jumped on the AGW bandwagon when they saw its usefulness. As my article says;
“Contrary to common belief, environmentalists did not raise awareness of global warming, they responded to it. Simply, environmentalist organisations were part of the general public and decided to use the issue when it became useful to them.”
Richard
tallbloke:
It seems clear to me that you and I will not agree about PNS so I write to point out that I agree with a comment you have made in this discussion.
At September 9, 2012 at 2:58 am you say
Yes, I agree.
You provide the example of eugenics where science has been severely misused as an excuse for political policies. Several have made that point before and have compered the near universal adoption of eugenics to the similar adoption of CAGW (I was among the first – if not the first – to make that comparison). And other examples exist (e.g. Darwinism as an excuse for ultra-right politics in 1930s Germany).
However, I think few would argue that on balance the Enlightenment has been a great benefit. And I oppose retreat from it. As I explained earlier in this thread, I see the debate about PNS as a “war” between opposing philosophies pertaining to the Enlightenment.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
September 9, 2012 at 5:04 am
tallbloke:
I think few would argue that on balance the Enlightenment has been a great benefit. And I oppose retreat from it.
Richard, thanks for your replies and permission, I have reposted your article and used material from here for the introduction.
I agree with you in broad terms. Having read his book ‘Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems I don’t doubt Ravetz agrees too.
You provide the example of eugenics where science has been severely misused as an excuse for political policies.
I think the same is true of PNS. So maybe here we can lay this to rest and say that most ideas in themselves are not dangerous, just various misuses of them. Perhaps this is why Ravetz concluded his essay on quality at my blog with this:
“I explored this topic in my old book, and there came to the paradoxical conclusion that the achievement of objective knowledge about the external world depends on the strength of the ethical commitments of the leaders of a community.”
I’m going to leave it there for now, thanks again for your insights.
richardscourtney;
So, you have seen that tainting yourself by associating with socialists like me can have its uses.
(joke)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There’s two kinds of socialists Richard. Ones who believe in their positions and can logicaly articulate why, and those that simply believe. I have much respect for the former, none for the latter, and the same goes for the opposite end of the political spectrum. I find little value in discussing important issues with a large number of people from both right and left who simply regurgitate the position of their peers. I gain much from discussion with people who are knowledgable on a given topic and draw conclusions from their knowledge, regardless of those conclusions being left or right. I’m honoured to have made your acquaintance, and suspect that we likely agree on far more than we disagree in matters of science, religion, and politics, despite coming from “opposite ends fo the spectrum” on the latter two categories.