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Epistemic Ethics

Ethics and Economics

The failing of economics have been widely discussed in the last few years, and now Professors Kim and Yoon have suggested in the Financial Times that ‘an eminent philosopher…should be appointed to take charge of economics’ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/32c10a50-a8c3-11df-86dd-00144feabdc0.html. Don’t all rush at once. I doubt they really mean it. And even if they do, we mustn’t fall for our own propaganda: philosophers don’t exactly have a good track record on practical matters.

 

The grounds for their suggestion is that economics is ‘not a science that only describes, measures, explains and predicts human interests, values and policies – it also evaluates, promotes, endorses or rejects them’ and for these kinds of reasons ‘economics is a dimension of ethics’ and ethics should be ‘organically incorporated into economic discourse’. This all sounds very exciting but I fear it is misleading.

 

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Numeracy vs feel-good

Most people would agree that increasing energy efficiency is a sensible thing to do, both as a cost-saving measure, to conserve limited fossil fuels and to lower climate impacts. But being willing to save energy does not mean one is efficient in doing so: a new study shows that people are bad at estimating how large energy savings are (or, as The Register put it more forcefully, "People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy"). People tended to think that curtailment (e.g. turning off lights, driving less) was more effective than efficiency improvements (e.g. installing better light bulbs or appliances). They tended to overestimate the benefits of small savings like removing cellphone chargers and underestimate the benefits of large savings such as reducing heating. The study authors somewhat predictably concluded that well-designed efforts to improve public understanding of energy savings would be useful. But would they?

Read More »Numeracy vs feel-good

How wrong may we be?

By Nicholas Shackel

Consider these propositions:

  1. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.
  2. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago
  3. Rent control leads to housing shortages.
  4. Third World workers working for American companies overseas are not exploited.
  5. Free trade does not lead to unemployment
  6.  Minimum wage laws raise unemployment

Do you think they are true or false?

Read More »How wrong may we be?

Chillin’ with the Texas Board of Education

The Texas Board of Education recently approved changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum. The Board also has responsibility for reviewing and approving textbooks for use in Texas schools according to whether they meet its curriculum standards, so its move will effectively force textbook publishers to revise their presentation of American history. The curriculum revisions are controversial because many observers believe that they are motivated by, and reflect, an extreme conservative view of American history.

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Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 6: Conclusion

One of the consequences of the epistemic corruption of the climate issue is that by criticising the failings in epistemic duty of these scientists I will be seen as having taken a side. But there are no sides on factual issues: there are just the facts. Once we see a factual question in terms of sides to belong to, as if it were a matter of politics or war, we have allowed our vision to be distorted—usually by an ideological approach to value.

 

On the first order issue of the facts of the climate I do not feel obliged to take a position. Both hawks and skeptics offer evidence and arguments. The evidence is sometimes murky and the inferences subtle. Both sides can exploit our ignorance of the complex statistical techniques needed for analysing the data; either may use them to reveal the truth or torture the evidence till it says what they want, and we can’t tell the difference. Even where methodology is not complex, it is very hard for us laymen to weigh the relative significance of the points and counterpoints. For example, we have records of increasing temperature readings from measuring stations, significant numbers of which are poorly maintained and sited, such as being sited next to air conditioning outlets. Clearly there is a problem with that data, but it is a further empirical question to determine to what extent the data is degraded by the faults and whether that degrading merely weakens or substantially defeats the claim of warming based on it. And this is about the simplest example. The whole issue is riddled with such imponderables for anyone who is not going to learn a great deal more about climate science than most of us can or should. For these reasons, laymen should not hold strong opinions about the first order facts at issue. Insofar as we must have some opinion, we must. attend not only to the first order claims and counterclaims but also to the epistemic character of those making the claims, to the epistemic character of the environs within which they are working, to question of the reliability of expert testimony and finally, to the epistemic character of the public debate. Here I have been concerned with epistemic character, but I note before moving on that expert testimony is considerably less reliable than we might hope, and especially unreliable about complex systems (see Tetlock  Expert Political Judgement).

 

The evidence I have summarised is, I believe, sufficient to conclude that climate science has fallen prey to a corruption of its epistemic character. Not only did the individuals fail in various epistemic duties; they did not regard their faults as vices, but rather, as virtues, and knew that their activities were quite acceptable with the field. The individuals concerned are eminent in the field and the institution is a central one within climate science. The same faults have been manifested by other climate scientists in other circumstances. So this is not a matter of individual human foible and weakness. The epistemic virtues of science, when practised, are sufficient to protect science from those. No. The defects are sufficiently severe and pervasive to have resulted in epistemic corruption.


Read More »Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 6: Conclusion

Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 5: virtue in testimony.

We now consider a couple of testimonial virtues.

Sincerity of testimony

There has been reason to be worried about the sincerity of public testimony by climate scientists for twenty years, ever since Professor Schneider of Stanford (now a senior member of the UN’s IPCC) said that scientists should ‘offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have’. So the recommendation is to give us distorted presentations of the science aimed at achieving the political effects the scientists deem best. For scientists to testify thus is a serious derogation of their epistemic duty towards us. On the contrary, we should be able to rely on scientists to tell us the true state of the science on an issue irrespective of the political import. Furthermore, to offer testimony distorted in this manner is to make an illicit power grab, based in an abuse of their role as experts, in which they seek to substitute their judgement of what should be done for ours.

Read More »Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 5: virtue in testimony.

Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 4: what is owed to other enquirers.

Now we move on to what is owed to other enquirers

keep records of original data  and methods and make such records freely available.

The global temperature record produced by the CRU is one of the four sets of data on which the IPCC has relied, and in the opinion of many commentators it has been the most influential record and for that reason the most important one.  It is therefore a matter of very grave concern that raw data on which it is based no longer exists. It means that no one can check whether the CRU global temperature record is well founded. The fact that it is in line with other records is not the help it appears when we remember that the tuning of the data manipulation underlying those records, and hence the claims for their veracity, has depended significantly on taking the CRU global temperature record as correct. Consequently our acceptance of it depends entirely on the epistemic integrity of the CRU, an integrity which has now been significantly impugned, and is further impugned by the loss of this raw data.

 

What, then, is their attitude to the obligation to share data? This quotation is illuminating ‘The two MMs [critics of Mann’s statistical techniques] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…..We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.’.[1]

Read More »Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 4: what is owed to other enquirers.

Shame on Bioedge

It may be naïve to hope for better, but the world cannot afford sly pandering to lying propaganda. Failures of epistemic integrity have real practical consequences, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the middle east. Consider this: ‘In August Sweden’s leading daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, alleged that Palestinians were being killed for their organs.… Read More »Shame on Bioedge

Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 3: the conduct of enquiry.

Part 1

Part 2  

 

Now we move on to virtue in the conduct of enquiry.

honest dealing in the conduct of enquiry

There is some evidence giving cause for concern

·        There is evidence of dogmatism: ‘The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.’[1] Now it is indeed possible that the data is wrong, but the lack of a continued warming trend (since 1998?) is contrary to the predictions of the models on which IPCC predictions are based, and a common variety of dogmatism is to deny evidence that doesn’t fit your preconceived beliefs.

·        There is evidence of arbitrary data manipulation: ‘Another serious issue to be considered relates to the fact that the PC1 time series in the Mann et al. analysis was adjusted to reduce the positive slope in the last 150 years … At this point, it is fair to say that this adjustment was arbitrary.’[2]

·        In the computer code there is evidence of data manipulation conducted in order to get a pre-conceived result.

·        Remarks from a programmer writing code indicate serious problems with collection and recording of original data ‘another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases’[3]

·        For some time there has been controversy over the selective use of data. For a recent example from a Russian institute commenting on the CRU use of Russian data (report here ): the continuous data records from Russia which taken in their entirety show warming of 1.4 C since 1860 versus CRU use of only 25% of that data to show 2.06C rise since 1860; the use by CRU of stations with incomplete and interrupted data where such data shows warming versus the omission of stations with complete and continuous data which doesn't.  

·        More broadly, local scientists in Australia and New Zealand have found broadly constant original temperature data on which a rising official temperature record has been based through the use of methods of data manipulation originating in or influenced by CRU practices. See this discussion of the problems in raw data and controversy over claims of inhomogeneity in that data  and adjustments made to produce estimates of historical temperatures from weather stations in Northern Australia: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

None of these examples demonstrate straightforward dishonesty. For example, all sorts of junk gets left in computer code. People put bits in that they call ‘fudge factors’ because they think they know the broad shape of some other correction process which is not yet coded, so in early drafts a ‘fudge factor’ procedure stands as a proxy for some real adjusting factor. They are, however, evidence that more subtle vices may yet be in play.

Read More »Climate scientists behaving badly? Part 3: the conduct of enquiry.