Scott Adams is a tosser [Stoat]

Preceded by Boris “the clown” Johnson, SA wins his coveted slightly damp biscuit¹ for The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science. TL;DR: it’s a pile of dingoes kidneys. But before we get down to the insightful analysis, here’s a barely relevant cartoon.

Notice the use of the words “weasel” and “expert”, and the dig at ethics. Anyway, if you want someone slowly patiently and sorrowfully taking SA’s junk to pieces, then you want Victor Venema². Sou didn’t like it either, but deferred the analysis to VV. Via a comment at Sou’s I discover that PZ Myers has had some complaints about SA over the years. It is quite instructive to go back to one of the earliest (and it is now hard to do so due to link rot, so I’ve archived some internet archive links for you): Scott Adams is a Wally discussing SA’s Intelligent Design, Part 1. Which is much the same stuff: SA trying to look clever by doing “looking down” on something he doesn’t really understand.

Again it is much the same as his analysis of the US election, although he is on safer ground there since it isn’t science. He wrote numerous blog posts on the subject; some of them were actually quite good and insightful; some were poor; many were propaganda disguised as analysis. The most obviously analogous one to the present case is My Endorsement for President of the United States where he endorses Hillary for president, for his “personal safety”. The “reasoning” behind this need not detain us.

So, onto analysing his present post. We start with “I agree with the scientific consensus on climate change” which is nice, but of course that’s only up there as a loss-leader; because without much delay he’s into I realize that science can change its mind, of course and then Something can be “true” according to science while simultaneously being completely wrong at which point he has crossed over into Tosser land. The fundamental question he poses, How the heck can you – a non-expert – judge who is right? – remains a good one; but his answer is worthless. The question has, of course, been oft times discussed before; for example On the Limits of Expert Credibility: Theory and an Application to Climate Change? (don’t miss the link to Krugman on Ricardo, all those oh-yes-of-course-we-believe-the experts people out there).

I can’t see, though, a useful summary of my response to the question, so it is quicker to just re-answer than to find it.

1. You, the public, cannot meaningfully evaluate complex science.
2. There is no quick-n-easy way to discover which one of two, to-you-superficially-equally-credible, texts is correct⁶
3. You are inevitably going to have to rely on some authority, or combination of authorities.
4. With a moderate degree of diligence you can discover what is a reasonable authority.
5. It is not sensible to conclude that the scientific consensus, as shown by that authority, is wrong⁷.

Point 1 is perhaps more strongly phrased than is entirely fair, but points 4 and 5 are the most important ones. Taking them in reverse:

5: You can (see 4) discover the scientific consensus. SA has done so. At that point, you need to re-read points 1, 2 and 3 and realise that the only reasonable conclusion you can come to is to agree with the consensus. You should do this even if you are aware that “experts have been wrong before³” because although this is true, it offers you no useful information in evaluating .

4: It won’t take you⁴ much reading to notice that all the “official” side information leads you back to the IPCC; and it won’t take you much reading to notice that the IPCC reports are nicely written though a careful process and link back to a wide variety of good scientific sources. It won’t take you much reading to notice that the “denialist” side is largely a self-linking echo chamber that very rarely publishes anything in the scientific literature.

It is tempting to attempt to circumvent point 2 by “meta analysis”, perhaps of the form

(a) Person A has told me to respect authority – the IPCC, let us say. I know that simply accepting authority is wrong, therefore person A is wrong, and the denialists are right!

This is wrong, obviously. So is

(b) Nullius in Verba used as a way of telling who is correct⁵.

Notes

1. Old English public school joke. Don’t ask.

2. I have suppressed various pointless musing about national character that I felt tempted to insert here.

3. A nice example is Continental drift but my statement is still true; if you’d been around then, your best-guess should still have been to assume that the consensus was true.

4. I am, of course, assuming a moderately intelligent and informed reader who knows, for example, of the existence of the scientific literature.

5. As a slogan or motto it is cute; but don’t forget, they weren’t talking to peasants like you.

6. Any individual criterion or collection (“carefully referenced”; “links to what look like good sources”; “uses (or avoids) equations”; “never swears at fools”; “has a credible looking website”; “has a credible looking qualification”) will inevitably prove to lead you astray in some situation.

7. Perhaps a useful analogy is with Hume’s argument against miracles; or (somewhat less directly relevant, but I love his words so I shall quote them regardless) Hobbes on direct revelation: For if a man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him supernaturally, and immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it.

Refs

* Dumb America
* Talking to the layfolk