Kevin Kelly studies western sci­ence from a few dif­ferent per­spec­tives. He’s got a pretty good feel for it as an insti­tu­tion. For his reg­ular Cool Tools newsletter, he reviewed The Deniers, a book cel­e­brating sci­en­tists who dis­pute the global cli­mate change con­sensus. If I get a chance I’d like to read it, but regard­less of the book, Kelly’s review is worth a read in its own right.

“What should we do with the 1% who dis­sent about global warming? By logic, we should embrace them, but cur­rently “deniers” of global warming have become demo­nized, which is a sign that global warming has become slightly reli­gious. Which is a shame because many global warming skep­tics are not crack­pots or paid shills, but first-class pres­ti­gious sci­en­tists with a minority view.

Throughout its his­tory, sci­ence usu­ally advances from the edges. Heretics should be cher­ished for forcing edges to the center. The most respected sci­en­tific global warming heretics have been rounded up in this very read­able book, The Deniers. Significantly, many of the emi­nent sci­en­tists included here don’t call them­selves deniers at all. They say, “I believe global warming is evi­denced in all these other fields; Except in the field that I am expert in, the evi­dence is totally bogus.” One by one the field-specific heretics make their case. And a number of them are rather per­sua­sive. But at the moment there is no uni­fied alter­na­tive theory of cli­mate change, so the cri­tique of global warming amounts to exposing holes in the cur­rent sci­ence. Any good sci­en­tific theory will have holes.”

I get frus­trated when I hear people com­plain that sci­en­tists didn’t do enough to alert the world to the cli­mate change threat. According to received wisdom, sci­en­tists aren’t sup­posed to be involved in the set­ting of social pri­or­i­ties at all, they’re just sup­posed to pump objec­tive fac­tual infor­ma­tion into the mix and let civil, demo­c­ratic insti­tu­tions decide what to do or not do about it. So even if sci­en­tists hadn’t become activist around global warming, it wouldn’t seem totally fair to blame them. And the thing is, sci­en­tists were activist. For decades, when media and gov­ern­ment and even envi­ron­mental groups seemed to be drop­ping the ball on global warming, it was a cadre of research pro­fes­sionals who fum­bled it along, and if they didn’t do a better job of it, can you really blame them? If you didn’t hear about global warming during the 90’s, it wasn’t because there wasn’t a lab­coat who was trying to tell you, they just didn’t know how to do it well.

Perhaps one of the draw­backs of that breaking down of the notional fire­wall between sci­ence and pol­i­tics is that sci­en­tific insti­tu­tions sub­se­quently aren’t dealing pro­duc­tively with cli­mate change minority views, as Kevin Kelly and appar­ently the authors of this book think.

Parts one and two.

The update:

“Elliott later said that while there’s no evi­dence that Tasers kill, the fact that deaths have occurred soon after a Taser was used on indi­vid­uals sug­gests there is a dis­tinct pos­si­bility it may have con­tributed to death in some cir­cum­stances.“
– RCMP tightens the rules on Tasers, Toronto Star

We’re making progress here. Very metic­u­lous philoso­pher sci­en­tists, these RCMP. I wonder, just what kind of evi­dence would it take for them to believe that a thing had caused another thing? Like say, a taser causing the death of someone who had just been shot with a taser? From a more util­i­tarian per­spec­tive, at least they’re going to start acting as though tasers kill people. I sup­pose that’s what counts.

This snippet is interesting:

“The Mounties have also dropped the term “excited delirium” – a phrase that had no med­ical foun­da­tion, and was crit­i­cized ear­lier by the Commons com­mittee, the RCMP’s public com­plaints com­mis­sioner, inde­pen­dent con­sul­tants and civil lib­erty groups.”

So why, until yes­terday, were they using such an odd term to frame their oper­ating pro­tocol? Oh look, it’s a con­struc­tion that TASER International have long been repeating in their press releases and court cases, despite years of head-scratching per­plexity from anyone who has ever tried to figure out just what it might actu­ally mean in a bio­log­ical con­text. How does cor­po­rate unspeak from Scottsdale, Arizona get embedded in the pro­ce­dural man­uals of the Mounted Police? How does it get embedded in their mouths? I’m glad we’re making progress on get­ting it out.

Steven Chu, Obama’s pick for Secretary of Energy, hints at what I think is the most impor­tant point about cli­mate change: yes we know it’s going to happen, but we don’t know what is going to happen, and that’s not a good thing.

And he just keeps talking about impor­tant stuff. Imagine an America where sci­en­tif­i­cally grounded ideas are sat down in the same room with capable politics.

Greenspan Concedes to ‘Flaw’ in His Market Ideology — Bloomberg (2^nd Term)

’”If we are right 60 per­cent of the time in fore­casting, we are doing excep­tion­ally well; that means we are wrong 40 per­cent of the time,” Greenspan said. “Forecasting never gets to the point where it is 100 per­cent accurate.“‘

Yes, that fol­lows. And when the con­se­quences of bad out­comes are cat­a­strophic and pre­dic­tion of good out­comes can’t be cer­tain, you have to have poli­cies which are robust to failure. What Greenspan seems to have been sug­gesting, and what he still seems to be defending, is that when pre­dic­tion cannot be 100%, it is accept­able or even inevitable to forge ahead as if the out­come was sure to be uni­formly positive.

‘Today, the former Fed chairman asked: “What went wrong with global eco­nomic poli­cies that had worked so effec­tively for nearly four decades?”

Greenspan reit­er­ated his “shocked dis­be­lief” that finan­cial com­pa­nies failed to exe­cute suf­fi­cient “sur­veil­lance” on their trading coun­ter­par­ties to pre­vent surging losses.’

So how many cat­a­strophic market fail­ures do we have to have before we get past shocked dis­be­lief when there’s another? Sure, each one is dif­ferent in spe­cific char­acter than the last, but the insis­tence that this time we’ve got it all fig­ured out is prac­ti­cally childish when repeated ad infinitum. Marketeers seem capable of con­vincing them­selves that, because they are per­son­ally familiar with the mech­a­nisms at play at the level of indi­vid­uals, they can there­fore know what behav­iour will emerge at the level of the system. It’s not that neolib­eral market the­o­rists don’t believe in emer­gence, by con­trast they are devoted to the ele­gant effi­cien­cies that they see when mar­kets aggre­gate infor­ma­tion and action. They just don’t seem to want to believe that com­plex sys­tems (including the ultra-complex sys­tems Wall St. financiers are capable of cooking up) are capable of neg­a­tive out­comes too.

It comes back to John Kenneth Galbraith’s posi­tion that market col­lapses don’t happen because of unpre­dictable shocks from some­where out­side of the lines that econ­o­mists draw around “the economy”, they happen because of the most fun­da­mental rules of cap­i­talist economies. And they will again, par­tic­u­larly if we don’t exer­cise cau­tious oversight.

update: See also this inter­esting and con­vincing chunk of quotes from the same testimony:

Greenspan: Bad data hurt Wall Street com­puter models — NYT

‘Business deci­sions by finan­cial ser­vices firms were based on “the best insights of math­e­mati­cians and finance experts, sup­ported by major advances in com­puter and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nology,” Greenspan told the com­mittee. “The whole intel­lec­tual edi­fice, how­ever, col­lapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk man­age­ment models gen­er­ally cov­ered only the past two decades a period of euphoria.”

He added that if the risk models also had been built to include “his­toric periods of stress, cap­ital require­ments would have been much higher and the finan­cial world would be in far better shape today, in my judgment.“‘

We live and learn. Especially about using models to make serious decisions.

“Be modest about what mil­i­tary force can accom­plish and what tech­nology can accom­plish,” Gates said.

He urged his audi­ence to have an “appre­ci­a­tion of limits” of mil­i­tary power, arguing that although the U.S. has achieved huge advances in tar­geting and intel­li­gence that have made attacks more pre­cise, war­fare is “inevitably tragic, inef­fi­cient and uncertain.”

The com­ments amounted to a cri­tique of a mil­i­tary theory called “effects-based oper­a­tions,” which argues in part that the gov­ern­ment can care­fully craft mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions to have a pre­dictable impact.

“Look askance at ide­al­ized, tri­umphalist or eth­no­cen­tric notions of future con­flict that aspire to upend the immutable prin­ci­ples of war: where the enemy is killed, but our troops and inno­cent civil­ians are spared,” he said.

The above from Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

After get­ting irri­tated at humankind’s inability to accept that some things are gen­uinely uncer­tain, I open my pod­casting device and hey presto:

Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation in Turbulent Times — A World Of Possibilities, May 6^th

It opens with Buzz Holling (who NRE 580 alumnus will remember for panarchy theory) on adap­ta­tion, uncer­tainy, ade­ter­minism, non-equilibrium, and such like in the gen­eral world. Then it moves onto Brian Walker talking about much of the same in ecosystem man­age­ment, plus con­trol fetishism. Then it moves on from there. Recorded at a Stockhlom con­fer­ence on applying biology-based resilience theory to social sys­tems. The idea of which is now creeping me out. Except that maybe, just maybe, this is a group of people that can be trusted to think ratio­nally across dis­ci­plines. Maybe. Anyhow, it’s good listening.

Brian Walker’s talk reminded me of a lec­ture on con­ser­va­tion man­age­ment from my under­grad, wherein Thom Nudds announced that if you manage to get an ecosystem to not cycle you’ve flat­lined it, so con­grat­u­la­tions on that.

I have nothing to say about the finan­cial crisis, because I dis­cover that as a heavy news reader who has scraped through classes on law, eco­nomics and com­plex sys­tems, and even read some Galbraith on a bus once, I don’t have even first prin­ci­ples to judge what has just hap­pened in the US finan­cial system. The subject–the impen­e­trable inter­play of finan­cial “instruments”–is so inscrutable that any com­pre­hen­sible nar­ra­tive one tries to tease out of it by watching the shadows it casts on the wall seems to have more to do with what goes on in one’s own head than what goes on in the stock mar­kets or board­rooms or policy lairs of the world. I just have no idea about where it came from, or what it means, or what should be done, or where it will go. All I’ve learned is that the people who pre­sum­ably do have the exper­tise to deal with this, pos­sibly don’t.

But everyone is telling one story or another about it all the same. And they usu­ally boil down to public versus pri­vate, gov­ern­ment versus market. Here’s a somehow rather heart­ening thought from com­menter HH at Crooked Timber:

The left-right polar­iza­tion over and pri­vate enter­prise is over­shad­owed by the larger con­flict between truth and lies. Both free market and planned eco­nomic sys­tems can func­tion with rea­son­able effi­ciency when oper­ated with com­pe­tence and integrity. Neither can func­tion when overrun by thieves and liars.

America’s moon landing pro­gram and nuclear sub­ma­rine projects were mas­ter­pieces of cen­trally planned, gov­ern­ment spon­sored endeavors. France’s nation­ally con­trolled nuclear power pro­gram achieved great suc­cess, while America’s pri­vately man­aged nuclear power efforts stum­bled. It is the ani­mating vigor and func­tional integrity of a pro­gram that is the best pre­dictor of suc­cess, not its ide­o­log­ical grounding.

To which I think I would add that we get a some­what better chance at choosing thoughtful cri­teria for what ‘suc­cess’ means for public enter­prises than for private.

Here’s an old-hand finan­cial tech­ni­cian inter­viewed by Reason mag­a­zine people:

(Just inci­den­tally, I’m tickled to note that the Reason blog linked to this little old web­site a few days back).

I don’t under­stand how he gets from some of his premises to some of his con­clu­sions. But his cen­tral premise feels about right: nobody knows how to value these deriv­a­tives, which seem to have absorbed so much of the nations wealth and now may or may not even par­tic­u­larly exist as real enti­ties in the real uni­verse. The old bosses didn’t know how to value them, and the new bosses won’t either, once they’ve sunk so much more of the country’s trea­sure into get­ting a chance to try.

But we won’t admit to our­selves that we’re dealing with an uncer­tainty, will we? Instead we’ll talk our­selves into believing one thing or the other, and forge ahead on that basis.

A sep­a­rate but related ques­tion: how does a country that can’t afford equi­table edu­ca­tion or health care keep finding hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars lying around when there’s a country to be invaded or a bank to be bought out? Where does all this money come from? And why wasn’t it there before?

Steve Steinberg argues that human ter­rain map­ping, and in par­tic­ular emer­gent group sim­u­la­tion, may be a dam­aging tech­nology we are devel­oping without due thought to it’s consequences.

With regard to Paul Torrens’ work:

“The next example was more dis­turbing. The sce­nario this time is a public demon­stra­tion, sim­ilar to the WTO protests that occurred in Seattle a few years ago. The model includes such details as tear gas which causes civil­ians to stam­pede, extrem­ists who are trying to insti­gate vio­lence, and mounted police. Torrens shows that changing a few small ini­tial con­di­tions con­trols whether the protest spins out of con­trol or not, and sug­gests this sim­u­la­tion is a valu­able tool for policing. Indeed. Demonstrating either star­tling igno­rance or touching naïveté, Torrens argues that this sce­nario is really a public health issue, due to the pos­si­bility of injury. Well, yes – but, more impor­tantly, it’s a demo­c­ratic, human rights issue, and improving the state’s ability to squash demon­stra­tions doesn’t strike me as a desir­able development.”

NYT: Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

“But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho con­tend that sci­en­tists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the col­lider could pro­duce, among other hor­rors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out some­thing called a “strangelet” that would con­vert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of some­thing called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to pro­vide an envi­ron­mental impact state­ment as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has both­ered scholars and sci­en­tists in recent years — namely how to esti­mate the risk of new ground­breaking exper­i­ments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.”

I’m reminded of the (var­i­ously reported, often con­tra­dic­tory) sto­ries of Fermi and others at the Trinity site laying bets on whether the atom bomb would ignite an atmos­pheric chain reac­tion con­suming the state of New Mexico. I guess the stakes are higher this time.

Dean Bavington is a prof at the School of Natural Resources. He co-teaches one of my classes this semester. I’m not sure exactly how to describe what he studies, some kind of sci­ence studies/science phi­los­ophy thing with an emphasis on cod. Interesting guy with inter­esting ideas, sure enough.

His episode is avail­able at the CBC. I haven’t heard it yet, but I started lis­tening to ear­lier episodes in antic­i­pa­tion and they’re good, espe­cially #1, with Simon Schaffer.

Seed Magazine has pub­lished the first– and second-place entries in their 2^nd annual sci­ence writing con­test.

Both entries are explic­itly not about sci­ence as fact or even sci­ence as method, but rather insist that sci­ence is about uncer­tainty and rig­orous dis­course in the con­text of phys­ical evi­dence. So I’m down with either one or both, and if chal­lenged for a man­i­festo might pro­vide a pho­to­copy of either.

1^st: Scientific Literacy and the Habit of Discourse, Thomas W. Martin.

2^nd: Camelot is Only a Model: Scientific Literacy in the 21^st Century, Steven Saus, which gets bonus points both for pumping up the pri­macy of models in thought and for ref­er­encing Python.

The media is bit by bit begin­ning to accept that the sci­en­tific con­sensus really is that serious human-induced global warming is a go. It has taken years for us to get to this point, and we’re not fully here yet anyway. One of my most grumpy moments this summer was on a day off in town, standing in a line up in a king sized gro­cery store, staring at a 3″ National Post head­line claiming that global warming skep­tics have been unfairly ignored.

Strangely enough, it hasn’t been very dif­fi­cult to figure out what the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity has actu­ally been thinking on this issue. Not for years. There is a single cred­ible and com­pre­hen­sive inter­na­tional body which coor­di­nates global warming research and goes to great lengths to assemble and sum­ma­rize find­ings on the topic. I can’t off­hand think of any other major science-related issue that has been made as trans­par­ently easy to research.

But I guess that wasn’t enough for the press. They could hardly be expected to, you know, read the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. They had sto­ries to write and dead­lines to meet. Poor bug­gers. It must be a real exis­ten­tial chal­lenge, keeping a sense of reality when you are charged to make it up without ref­er­ence to it on a daily basis.

I’m not com­plaining here about the edi­to­rial posi­tion of jour­nal­ists or jour­nalism out­fits. People are free to dis­miss the find­ings of the sci­en­tific enter­prise if they have doubts about its integrity or value. The thing is, the media haven’t been casting doubt on the value of the sci­ence, they’ve just been rou­tinely mis­stating that sci­ence, for years. For the most part it’s been to play up the uncer­tainty angle. Maybe it made for more exciting reading. You would think cer­tain impending social and envi­ron­mental dis­aster would be more inter­esting than uncer­tain impending social and envi­ron­mental dis­aster. Guess not.

So the poor folks at the IPCC who have been writing these reports every few years have, I imagine, been get­ting more and more des­perate each year at the lack of impact of their cru­cially impor­tant pub­li­ca­tions. The last one came out in 2001. The next one is due out in 2007.

Looks like the sci­en­tificos are trying some tac­tics this time round. In par­tic­ular, indi­vidual sci­en­tists are giving inter­views talking up the report as being wildly impor­tant and con­taining amazing infor­ma­tion. Which it is and does, no doubt, it’s just not like an esteemed inter­na­tional sci­en­tific body to pimp it’s pubs with teasers and interviews.

There are, for example, some great lines in this news­paper article from CanWest:

”I can tell you for sure that the state­ments in that report will be far stronger than what existed in 2001. It will be flab­ber­gast­ingly stronger.”

Holy crap, that’s a lot stronger. Let’s hope the brave new edi­tion of the report will be enough to do it. And let’s hope that if it is action-jam-packed with unequiv­ocal state­ments of flab­ber­gasting strength, that they will be inter­preted for what they are: the highly unusual result of the highly unusual sit­u­a­tion in which the level of doubt around a sci­en­tific ques­tion has drained almost com­pletely away; and not for what they aren’t: evi­dence that the sci­en­tists have lost objec­tivity and are making per­son­ally moti­vated overclaims.

I guess we’ll see. If any­body pays attention.

I haven’t been trying very hard to find out what’s going on in Iraq. I don’t have TV and wouldn’t have the time to watch it anyway, the news­pa­pers are heavy on unhelpful analysis and light on reli­able facts, and unfor­tu­nateley Enemy Combatant Radio hasn’t set up a Basra satel­lite van.

(note to self: is ECR still casting these days?)

It’s also a ques­tion­able under­taking. Do I really want to try and find out the details of the war? What would it ben­efit me? Is half truth or even 3/4 truth better than no truth at all? Do any of the details have any par­tic­ular bearing on my life?

If an average person did want to find out what was hap­pening on the ground in Iraq, could it be done? This is, after all, the infor­ma­tion age. The internet and an asso­ci­ated suite of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies indis­putably changed the process and quality of the antiwar move­ment in a way that has been alledged/predicted since the anti-globalization “battle of Seattle”. If you stay very quiet and listen to the aca­d­e­mics mut­tering to them­selves in their closets, you will learn that infor­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion is now really, really pending a rev­o­lu­tion cour­tesy of audio blog­ging, photo blog­ging, plain ‘old’ blog­ging, text mes­saging, wikis and CMSs (gra­cias Chiron), blue­Pods and their inevitable ilk, news.google.com–esque infor­ma­tion fil­tering algo­rithms and other things I’m not quiet enough to be aware of.

But can it be done now? Can you or I, given a PC and an internet account, get a gen­uine sense of what’s hap­pening? I cer­tainly don’t know, mostly because I haven’t tried. A few pos­sible resources for someone who was trying:

globalsecurity.org offers a truck stop break­fast sized serving of oper­a­tional details. Or it did, I don’t know if they’ve been able to keep up with troop move­ments and whatnot since the combat proper began. Interestingly, they also offer a serious point-counterpoint on the strate­gical ben­e­fits of the inva­sion, and a decent library of anti-war graphics. If you’re really bored, you could just play “guess their per­sonal opinion”.

Iraqwar.Ru offers daily exec­u­tive sum­maries of the bat­tles. I am told third-hand that the “This center was cre­ated recently by a group of jour­nal­ists and mil­i­tary experts from Russia to pro­vide accu­rate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. Daily english-language trans­la­tions are being offered by Venik’s Aviation. A brief scan of the reports sug­gest that they are either markedly unfriendly to the US/British forces, or the bat­tles are going much more poorly than we are being led to believe be CNN.

Several inter­cepted reports by the US field com­man­ders stated that their troops are unable to advance due to their sol­diers being demor­al­ized by the enemy’s fierce resis­tance and high losses.

Kevin Site’s war blog used to pro­vide a dra­matic example of the power of direct pub­lishing. As a CNN war cor­re­spon­dant on the ground in the middle east, Kevin was well set up to pro­vide very inter­esting cov­erage. His own remarks that “This expe­ri­ence has really made me rethink my rather orthodox views of reaching folks via mass media.… Blogging is an incred­ible tool, with amazing poten­tial. ” are indica­tive of at least the poten­tial for real infor­ma­tion flow from places from which infor­ma­tion is a hotly con­tested mate­rial. Unfortunatley, CNN requested that he stop blog­ging. Much has been said of this, in chat-room dis­cus­sion and publications.

Iraq Body Count goes the other way, offering con­text­less aggre­gate sta­tis­tics fil­tered from the ceas­less tor­rent of mass media, rather than inde­pen­danly ver­i­fied on-site details. The method­ology is based on past work to doc­u­ment the cit­izen death toll in Afghanistan. It doesn’t count actual death tolls, only reported cit­izen fatal­i­ties. But it is infor­ma­tion that oth­er­wise isn’t being com­piled. This is the site that powers the banner-counter on this blog.

news.google.com is a way to dip a net of one’s own into the river of mass-media reporting. Google uses a purely-automated algo­rithm, pre­sum­ably related to their famous page-ranking system, to mon­itor many news sources in real­time and sum­ma­rize the most “sig­nif­i­cant” sto­ries in fre­quenly updated lists.

Then of course, there’s this.

Of these links, only the second two seem to be using tech­no­log­ical changes to make more directly-sourced infor­ma­tion avail­able. There may well be other methods. There cer­tainly will be in the future. The pos­sible impli­ca­tions of these maybe-existing sources of fact-distribution would seem to include the ability for cit­i­zens to stay better informed of the dis­tant actions of their gov­ern­ments, as well as pro­viding a much larger heap of data for ana­lysts and his­to­rians to process in after-the-fact attempts to dis­sect what really happened.