Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, it’s a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.
Should we be mortified?
I'm sure Pinker could give a rational or rational sounding answer to the question whether he contradicted himself, but let me try to do it myself. You can wish people would favor rationality so much that they'd be mortified by reliance on anecdote and still notice, quite rationally, that as irrationality rages on in the human mind, it will, at least some of the time, drive people in the right direction.
By using climate change as his example, Pinker is assuming the reader already believes what he believes and what he believes rationally, which is that climate change is indeed an immense problem and one that the less rational people have difficulty facing. So he likes that irrational thought — reliance on "images and narratives and anecdotes" — will work on these less rational people. We already know what we need them to think and that their minds don't work right, so it's okay — it's rational — to do what's necessary to get them to think what it's good for them to think. In that sense, propaganda is rational.
I'm not agreeing with all that, just sketching it out as a sympathetic reader after I flagged a seeming contradiction.
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It’s also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends.
But not Steven Pinker!
Pinker is always a mixed bag as a news or current-events commentator. He's pretty strong within his psychological research domain, but often comes across as narrow with poor depth beyond psychology. Take him for what he is, but he's not a guru.
Pinker in the old-school biology-driven left/progressive camp along with Jordan Peterson. This group of pragmatists and center-left includes logical positivists and those very firmly grounded in data. They believe in correct versus incorrect and will point out failure. They plainly admit to limits in the potential for societal change (i.e., as human behavior follows biological universals with clearly different patterns leading to success or failure life outcomes). This group is very different from the social-construct and critical-theory left subculture, which in contrast emphasizes the validity of perspectives and personal interpretations without solid ground.
I ask Althouse: How would the critical theory crowd approach climate change/global warming differently? How can they do this without breaking their fundamental assumptions about the validity of diverse perspectives and narratives?
Definition of Logical Positivism: http://people.loyno.edu/~folse/logpos.htm
Given the paywall, I didn’t read the article, but is the gist of it, given the title, that my sense of imminent doom is wrong, but his sense of imminent doom is right?
Bullshit is and will always be bullshit. If you’re fighting irrationality with more of the same consider the possibility your assumptions are wrong…
Also- If you can’t tell who the mark is…
Pinker: Some irrationally is good if it promotes my Left-wing views.
More proof that CAGW is a total scam.
I don't think it's a given that a person who doesn't accept the catastrophic, man-made global warming theory is necessarily less rational than one who does. It depends on his/her reasoning.
If you know that, 1)"You can never attribute a particular event to a trend" and 2)you know that politically and financially motivated sources are trying to create the perception of a trend by attributing anecdotes and events to it for their own purposes. 3) you haven't seen actual evidence of the trend, only discussions of dubious computer models, is your skepticism irrational?
And by the same token, is a CGW believer's opposite conclusion, based on the same things, rational?
I think it's a testimony to how powerful anecdote and the desire to be seen as right is that even someone who says you should be embarrassed to argue by anecdote--in the very interview where he says it!--argues that anecdotes that support his positions are ok. Good even.
Ends, means. Something about justification.
...and there's also the risk people will just think you're an idiot and they'll have the evidence to back it up.
It's not like this manipulative technique of equating an event with a trend, followed by ad hominem attacks upon skeptics, is limited to the CGW debate. It's used all day every day on every issue imaginable. If it still works on you, are you "rational"?
A recent example was the death of George Floyd being portrayed as proof of a trend. Those who were persuaded went on to cause enormous destruction and some deaths. If you denied the trend, it was proof you were a racist. The actual numbers showed that no such trend existed.
Why would a person ever believe anything from the politicians and media who have pushed so many destructive and divisive lies? It's not rational.
Yes, that comment you pulled out sure stuck out to me. His presumption that it's useful to have people believe that climate change is a huge problem for us, even though a single storm (say, Ida) is not an example of climate change.
I wonder what is?
But we won't get into that here. His point seems to be that there is useful dread. It just has to be used in an approved manner. I would say that I am sure the climate is always changing, but that we have little to do with it. We can affect the pollution in the lakes and oceans, our landfills/groundwater, the air we breathe. But we are to the planet as a gnat on a cow's ass. If that is my position, Pinker is inferring that is irrational. So be it.
But that constant drumming of the imminent doom of climate change is part of the reason so many of our young live in dread. We've created their dread out of whole cloth and turned it into a multi-billion dollar industry. Why lessen the impact? It pays too well to stop. I suspect there is something of that in all of the dread that is pumped out at us daily.
In the meantime, the solar cycles of the sun continue to ignore our conversations down here and go on affecting our climate. And it never stops, and it's always been changing.
He seems like another good illustration of how, if you're a leftist, there is no principle or value that you are unwilling to compromise in order to advance your political agenda. For "Catholic" politicians like Pelosi, your supposed religious faith takes a back seat to abortion. "Feminists" provide cover for Dem politicians who are rapists. To the ACLU, civil liberties are expendable if it's conservatives whose free speech are under attack. I could go on, but you get the picture.
To paraphrase, propaganda as journalism is wrong but not when we use it against wrongthink, then it’s useful because we are experts and must have the specter of irrational fear in our arsenal for goodthink to prevail.
I’ve always found Steve Pinker to be interestingly obtuse. How is it that you reach such heights as a public intellectual, a star academic, and a libertarian Reason-mag Mega-Bro while being utterly disinterested in peering beyond abstractions to face the canards in your own closet?
In his case, the more interesting story isn’t how he’s a target of cancel culture, but how in the heck he became such an esteemed “rationalist” in the first place. Sometimes he gobbles down all the lies of a bureaucratic system without blinking; other times he presents himself as the only person in the room who can see the emperor has no clothes. It’s all the same to him.
There are many social scientists, statisticians, and public intellectuals whose better, braver, and more consistent confrontations with reality have brought them nothing but grief. How does some hack like Pinker get tenured and famous while, decades after his death, Daniel Patrick Moynihan continues to be ritualistically denounced in academia for telling the truth about crime and the effects of the welfare state on black families — despite taking responsibility for being one of the people who participated in destroying said families AND staying in the ring trying like hell to reverse the damage? Maybe Pinker contradicts himself so casually because the echo chamber allows him to be every bit as irresponsible as the leftists he occasionally challenges.
The problem is that both libertarians and leftists are so comfortable — and handsomely remunerated — in their respective bubbles. Once the Kochs started imitating Soros by buying up academic departments to spew out one-dimensional agitprop, there literally wasn’t a shred of truth coming out of academia anymore. And those Reason Boyos have a lot more in common with the Maoists they pretend to battle than either side has with the rest of us. They’re all sipping the same Brawndo.
Climate change has no adult peer review. The papers ought to be peer reviewed by experts in the tools they use (hydrodynamics, statistics of time series e.g.) and not by other climate scientists. The latter only formalize the mistakes made by previous papers.
Geophysics papers used to be marked by curiosity, which is always a tell for actual science. It makes no claim of being rational, it just curious.
e.g., from 1968, before climate science, A Nonlinear Mechanism for the Growth of Sea Waves would be typical.
The boy who cried trend.
The Climate Change cult is so far from science at this point ,most of them do not even know what a hypothesis is much less what the hypothesis of Climate Change is.
They do not even know why the Hypothesis was changed from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change."
The Climate is changing. Has been for over 4 billion years.
They are constantly clinging to ghosts as almost every prediction they have made over 40 years now turns out false. Anyone even passively attached to the scientific process would have chucked this stupidity after the second time they were caught fudging the data.
In sales we were taught, "When stories are told, products get sold."
In the bible they're called parables.
There used to be ice a mile thick where I am sitting--and not so long ago--and now there is a big, big lake outside my window. Something changed. I detect evidence of a trend. It must have been those darn mastodons and their SUVs that did it. Well, if they did, I am glad they did.
I wonder what else could have happened? It must have gotten really warm for a long, long time--unexpectedly!
You know, I wonder if that ice might come back--it has before. I think I'll worry about that. The return of the ice seems worse than putting a vineyard on my fire escape.
Soom boomer craziness was pretty much inherited: Marcuse, an elderly German professor, trying to combine Marx and Freud and incite the young to rebel; Tim Leary, much older than the boomers, selling LSD as a way to be healthier and happier, and maybe simply from these results, make the world a better place. Young people are always a bit crazy, so boomers were a bit crazy when they were young. The religion of climate change is something else. The use of the best marketing tools to sell an extreme and misleading story, when the true story is much more manageable without "changing our entire economy"; this has become a real disgrace, with Gore at the middle of it. I don't know if any "slide" or any major proposition of his first famous presentation is still considered in any way valid. Greenland ice cores: temperature increase always follows increase in CO2? False, the correlation is the other way around. (And it's only a correlation). Kilimanjaro losing ice? False. Antarctic losing ice, increase in sea level or extreme storms, so that it is at least somewhat reasonable to look at extreme weather and say "that's the kind of thing we're talking about"? Up to a point, Lord Copper. And this means peer-reviewed literature is marbled with bullshit. Maybe behavioural psych is the absolute worst, but climate science probably flushed itself down the toilet bowl before other "real" sciences.
"We already know what we need them to think and that their minds don't work right, so it's okay — it's rational — to do what's necessary to get them to think what it's good for them to think."
And that's how appeals to rationality quickly devolve into coercion.
At least in this excerpt, Pinker does not recognize that rationality cannot settle the choice of values--at some level, those cannot be defended any further. So whether climate change represents a "crisis" depends not just on rational analysis but also on assigning a certain weight to particular kinds of outcomes.
If smart people can fool dumb people into doing the right thing (as smart people define right), then deceit is okay. Got it.
Pinker's thesis is wrong for two reasons:
Sure, lots of people will buy-into the idea that this or that bad weather event is tied to global warming. But these kinds of people tend to either already want to believe in it or are simpletons. The rest of us will not be able to avoid noticing that droughts and floods, heatwaves and cold snaps are all attributed to global warming. The only thing they have in common, is that they're bad. A rational person will automatically dismiss anyone who calls any weather event "proof" of global warming. In the long-term, this destroys the credibility of global warming alarmists--even if there really is a harmful trend in the making.
The second thing is the question of, is there really a harmful trend in the making? If there is, I've yet to see any strong evidence for it. There is strong evidence for benefits though. The increase in CO2 is improving crop yields. The theory behind global warming is that CO2 is reflecting heat back down to Earth--essentially acting as an insulator. This should have three salutatory effects: It should even-out temperatures to make cold places more pleasant, decrease extreme weather since that is driven by differences in temperature and make more moisture available for precipitation.
It is possible that places which are too wet now, will be come wetter and places which are too dry now, will become drier. It is also possible that the opposite will happen. I don't put it outside the realm of Human capacity to either now or someday, make good predictions about the net benefit of net loss from climate change. What I doubt is, having destroyed their credibility with doom-mongering, that they will be able to provide convincing proof that they're right.
In the end, we'll probably waste a lot of money on useless mitigation measures and will end up adapting to whatever changes emerge.
A good follow up to Pinker’s response would be to ask him if he ever reads the Bible.
Shorter version: fake but accurate is good for the deplorables.
Lem said...
A good follow up to Pinker’s response would be to ask him if he ever reads the Bible.
The Bible has too much true information and historical accuracy in it.
He is a NYT's reporter.
He just makes shit up.
"The return of the ice seems worse than putting a vineyard on my fire escape."
Just nuke it. Not a problem.
Ann Althouse said...
"The return of the ice seems worse than putting a vineyard on my fire escape."
Just nuke it. Not a problem.
You'd be surprized how little a dent that would make in a mile of ice
Start out by demanding absolute freedom and you end up imposing rigid controls. Start out seeking equality and you end up imposing rigid hierarchies. Start out wanting only rational and proven truth and you end up with noble lies.
I'm not saying that this circular movement is inevitable, but it happens a lot of the time. When conviction in the righteousness of the end goal is strong it justifies any number of what others would regard as compromises and contradictions. I don't know if Plato addressed this phenomenon, but Dostoevsky did. So did Orwell.
"How many nukes would it take to melt all the ice in Antarctica?" That's at Quora, where somebody calculates that it would take over 30 billion "average size" nuclear bombs.
One lesson from the Gulag Archipelago is that honesty in public discourse is essential, and it's important to acknowledge dishonesty, even if the lie is in service of the preferences and desires of otherwise good people. As Solzhenitsyn recounted, small lies, particularly if they are widespread and told for the common good, can snowball into corruption, enslavement and mass murder. Short-sighted people think a similar outcome is impossible here and now. We all have a responsibility, if not to keep others honest, at least not to contribute to dishonesty. But it takes courage, the absence of which is glaring in a feminized society where empathy is more highly valued.
I think Jordan Peterson would have a better answer to that question than does Pinker, whose answer is short-sighted.
Passing the issue of whether the availability heuristic can be manipulated to benign ends, what evidence is there supporting the proposition that we should repose any trust or confidence in the entities in a position to do the manipulating?
The WaPo’s database reveals that about one in two million black people in the US are shot dead by police annually when unarmed; but you wouldn’t know that by reading the WaPo.
One thing I notice is that Pinker accepted the use of propaganda in an area where he had no expertise, in climate change. It would have been more interesting if he had said that psychological theories can and should be promoted and or attacked by anecdote, that it would be perfectly acceptable for his own theories to be challenged by persons who have heard something from Fred the plumber. Then too, it isn't really true that people can't understand arguments from universal truths. We say "All men are created equal" and we know we mean "you aren't the boss of me" and we know that this is so even if at the moment we speak we have a teacher or boss to whom we listen. Big Tech can push us around because it can, not because it's OK, and one day they'll find that out. We can all make fine-tuned and correct distinctions about universal statements if we talking about basic, significant issues.
The problem with progressives is they don't think progressively, i.e., they always seem to operate from the premise that whatever the state of things are now is the way they will always be because their thinking is bounded by paradigms. They believe the Earth will be 2 degrees warmer in 2121 because they can't envision the universe of mitigation options that will be available by the turn of the next century anymore than Alexander Graham Bell could have envisioned the iphone in 1900 or race hustlers could ever get past the Jim Crow situation that existed in 1965. This is why AOC (talk about irrational thinking!) has to step in and save they world by spending 5 or 10 trillion dollars on a forced, non solution that will be likely be OBE one way or another in 20 or 30 years and why CRT has to be implemented for...Why? Climate change really is all about political power and graft opportunities just like race hustling is about social justice. They think we're suckers.
No reason to insult Prof Pinker by calling him a NYT reporter, Achilles. You lose some of your own credibility that way.
Anyway, I'll ask the experts here--what's the most scientifically informative version of The Bible? How do you know?
The real problem began when they started drinking their own Kool Aide and policing the narrative among the scientists themselves. At this point we go off the rails and discover that making corrections is impossible. We make decisions along the lines of mandating mercury contaminated twisty fluorescent bulbs a couple years before LEDs obsolete most incandescent bulbs anyway, and the twisty bulbs to boot.
They lied about the longevity of the twisty bulbs and just further eroded their credibility in the bargain. Now it looks like we are doing things on a far less recoverable scale with "renewable energy," and nobody is allowed to rigorously investigate alternatives or to question the value of "renewables" and keep their university funding or right to publish.
"...it would take over 30 billion "average size" nuclear bombs."
See, now that's a problem--and that is just the Antarctic ice sheet. What about all the glaciers in Europe, Asia, and North America? And what about nuclear winter? Yeah, I know that nuclear winter theory was largely politically motivated from the beginning, but that is a lot of bombs. It could happen. So, I guess nuking 'em probably won't work.
I don't worry about the climate too much, but if I were going to worry, it would be about the return of the ice. Keep driving those petrol-powered SUVs! The mastodons can't help us.
BarrySanders20 said, "Ends, means. Something about justification."
Yes.
From yesterday's post by the academics who favored the bureaucracy:
"The robust defense of rational, reasonable public health measures to fight COVID-19 can play a useful role in pushing back against patrimonialism, in the U.S. and globally."
Most of the comments, including mine, were pretty hard on those guys. But at least they stayed at the level of rational persuasion. They want the bureaucracy to impose mandates but they want people to comply based on rationality. This is amusing (why have mandates if reason can rule the day) but not very threatening.
Pinkner's attitude is, fake but accurate, if that's what it takes. Sounds like patrimonialism to me.
somebody calculates that it would take over 30 billion "average size" nuclear bombs
Bring on the Nuclear Winter. Might as well, I'm never going to have a summer body again.
Just sprinkle the ice with coal dust and let albedo do the work. Industrial and wildfire particulates are already melting Arctic ice.
Anecdotal evidence inflation by progressive nannies leads directly to GW denial, anti-vaccine, pro-ivermectin, voter suppression, extreme abortion restrictions and Trump.
All of the problems that piss off libtards are self inflicted.
Relying on an anectode, arguing ad hominem - at least these are a form of argument, however weak. Stating something as fact, without providing any argument or evidence, is even less convincing than these forms.
"Just sprinkle the ice with coal dust and let albedo do the work. Industrial and wildfire particulates are already melting Arctic ice."
Or, we could all just buy big SUVs with big V-8s. It would be more fun for most people. Good old Jeremy Bentham--"It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong."
"...leads directly to GW denial..."
I'm not denying that it is getting warmer--and has been, more or less, since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 (one degree C in the past 170 years per the IPCC). I question whether anthropogenic causation has been demonstrated and whether the remedies offered are either effective or necessary, as opposed to adaptation and mitigation of effects.
I am appropriately skeptical.
Climate change is not an "immense problem," and so using anecdote to scare people about it is not only irrational as a form of argument it is irrational as a way of motivating policy action. The non-anecdotal science, the actual IPCC science reports (not the biased policy summaries the media relies on), and all the other research in fact is far too complex and unresolved to conclude climate change is an immense problem. (In fact, science does not even identify "problems" as such, a human bias, it identifies actual trends.) Anecdote (the latest being flooding on the NYC subways) is useless, but systemic thinking of the sort Pinker endorses does not justify any of the hysteria either. A systematic mode of thinking would note the likely sea level rise of a foot or so in a century (maybe even a bit more) and approach the problem as the Dutch have quite successfully for 500 years by building walls, dikes, better flood control (for billions) instead of the unattainable pipe dream of shutting down fossil fuels (in the US, but of course not China), which will cost trillions.
Lying is corruption, and lying also corrupts. Pinker seems to not get this in that small excerpt.
George Carlin's Pinkerian view of excess possessions.
Ann Althouse wrote,"How many nukes would it take to melt all the ice in Antarctica?" That's at Quora, where somebody calculates that it would take over 30 billion "average size" nuclear bombs.
30 billion! Shows how powerful Global Warming is.
My sense of imminent doom is sharpened by influential people like Pinker thinking that lying to people is good thing if it advances the right causes. You know there is a reason the prohibition of bearing of false witness is up there with prohibiting murder, covetousness and disrespect for God and your ancestors in the top ten.
Thinking further, lying to people to convince them to think or do something is a violation of the Golden Rule. I'd bet Mr. Pinker would be super annoyed at people manipulating him by lying. I seem to recall it was his major objection to Trump.
"The return of the ice seems worse than putting a vineyard on my fire escape."
Just nuke it. Not a problem.
You'd be surprized how little a dent that would make in a mile of ice
... that depressed the North American craton, the tectonically stable landmass that forms the north-central US and central Canada, to the point where, today, the post-glacial rebound in Wisconsin is still around half a centimeter a year (and that's not the fastest rebound the craton is experiencing). While this may not sound impressive, consider that the fastest rate of tectonic uplift in the Himalayas, where tectonic plates are still in the process of crashing together, forming the highest land-based mountain range on earth, is only twice as much - about 1cm.
Continental ice sheets are no joke.
And by the way - if I'm remembering my lessons correctly, the normal state of things on earth, on a time basis, is no ice. We just happened to evolve into H. sapiens during a pretty mild interglacial, so we think that a global climate that includes natural ice is normal - but it's not. It's just nice for us.
But we made our bones being the all-time champs at adaptation. I feel confident we retain that ability.
It might also be said that the more overblown the climate change rhetoric becomes, the more rational people tend to dismiss it. That might be what Pinker meant.
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