Pielke: Scientists as both experts and political myth-makers

If you are going to manage something you have to be able to predict the outcome of your actions.

Experts are outstandingly bad at predicting outcomes. link We should keep them well away from the levers of power.

… there are no silver bullets for promoting economic development and that the best hope is to support economic, political, and personal freedom worldwide … The Tyranny of Experts

Dr. Michael Mann is an expert. QED

A lab coat is the emporer’s new clothing.

Went through all of Roger’s slides, trying to understand his arguments.
While he makes some good points, and brings up interesting behavioral phenomenon (as a phenomenology)….
Seems to me he is still missing some important pieces.

– The economic factor for the many PhDs (now over-produced) is to pay off student loans, start families and play social-society keeping-up with less-educated, but better paid professionals peers. In this regard, job competition is much heightened. And here, Upton Sinclair’s line is very important:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
How can a young atmospheric scientist, newby PhD, espouse anything but consensus if he/she wants a Post-Doc or tenure track job in academia?

I think about a young Einstein who had to work as a patent clerk to support himself and his wife, but in his annus mirabilis wrote 4 physics altering papers in his spare time. Back in 1905, there weren’t the academic journal gate-keepers that exist today to pressure editors to enforce consensus views. (There were of course rampant anti-semitism at many institutions in Europe and the US then). Today editors routinely enforce consensus not just on climate, but on environmental problems, health and safety of pesticides/herbicides. There have been concerted efforts to put consensus enforcing editors in-place at many of the leading science and environment journals. This bias has become ever-more self-reinforcing on scientists, who must publish or perish.

Another point that seems missing is the factor that Nassim Taleb calls “skin in the game”, which is the title of his latest book. This is the same set of essays where Taleb lays out his “intellectual, yet can still be an idiot” descriptions, the so-called “IYI” (intellectual yet idiot). This “skin in the game” is essentially what for me exposes politicized scientists. Taleb writes, “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

When I read that, I can’t help but think of Al Gore, James Hansen, that make wild climate change predictions whose failures have never seemed to dent their ability to continue to make evermore wild climate predictions, and live large carbon-footprint lifestyles while telling others to limit theirs. Their mistakes do not seem to have come back to haunt them.

As for the political polarization and the skewing of today’s so-called academics toward the Left (that is, Democrats in the US), so much of that mirrors the academic lifestyle of universities and colleges, and the “good life” that academic tenure brings. These folks don’t have skin in the game.

Which reminds me of the old observation about how maturity develops. It goes something like this:

“If you are not a Liberal when you are 19 or 20 years old, then you have no heart.
If you are not a Conservative when you are 30 years old, then you have no brain.”
– Unknown

One huge shift that is occurring in our society is that women are having children later, men are not maturing as fast (starting careers), marriage — if at all, all being delayed. Delaying starting families allows them to remain “woke”, radicalized, and agitated to support the likes of Socialists like Senator Barry Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They don’t have to grow-up, they can remain Peter Pan’s forever, no skin in the game. They can believe the climate change lies as it gives them something to believe in, and the crooks and fools feeding on their behavior benefit.

Maybe this is just the Millennial moving back home after college, living still at home, struggling with student loans or a poor jobs economy. I don’t know. But I do know if this continues for much longer, serious, irreparable changes in our society will occur.