A Pox On Both Houses?
I want to thank Roger Pielke, Jr. and Lawrence Krauss for their very worthwhile contributions to this discussion. And in the case of Pielke, who pretty clearly disagrees with me more than Krauss does, I want to especially applaud his willingness to really take the bull by the horns. It's refreshing to have intellectually serious critics. From readers here, Roger's post has been met with some very critical comments, but I know he doesn't shy away from such engagement.
Let me address Pielke's post first, move from there to talking about the work of Daniel Sarewitz (which Pielke cites), and then finally talk about the points raised by Lawrence Krauss.
Many comments have already taken issue with Pielke, and have done so using arguments quite similar to the ones that I would myself raise. So for instance, folks have pointed out that just because science is always to some extent politicized, that doesn't mean that today's Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty, or that we are therefore as powerless in the face of science abuse as we are in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. So I won't belabor these points. Similarly, because Pielke is clearly planning to develop his critique further, I will leave him room to do so and await such elaboration.
Still, let me explain why his general approach troubles me. There's a "pox on both your houses" flavor to the way he tackles this issue, both here and especially in another post he wrote criticizing my book's chapter on climate change. There, Pielke suggests that I am just as bad on this issue as Senate Environment and Public Works committee chair James Inhofe ("Mooney's argument adopts the exact same tactics of cherry picking and relying on convenient experts as does Senator Inhofe"), even though I have not misrepresented the findings of mainstream climate science in any significant way, whereas Inhofe has staggeringly suggested that the entire notion of global warming might be a "hoax." How are these things even comparable?
I'm also concerned that Pielke isn't more troubled by the misuse of science on the part of politicians. He calls opposing such misuse "futile," and yet he also writes of "holding policymakers accountable." Well, why not hold them accountable for spreading misinformation about science? Why is it wrong for a president to mislead the country about the justification for war, but not wrong for a president to mislead the country about the number of available embryonic stem cell lines?
More generally, when you argue with Pielke, you are also in a sense arguing by proxy with Daniel Sarewitz, whom Pielke cites regularly. So let me say that I have read Sarewitz's "Excess of Objectivity" essay. In my opinion, it's a very insightful piece of work, although it certainly isn't the last word when it comes debates and discussions about the political abuse of science.
I agree with Sarewitz that much more goes into policymaking than mere scientific facts, and that there's a strong incentive on all sides of the aisle to marshall convenient scientific information to support one's policy position--an incentive that often leads to the political misuse of science. So far, so good. But I also see real shortcomings to the Sarewitz essay--at least as it applies to the current crisis over the role of science in policymaking that has been occasioned by the Bush administration and the modern right, and that is the subject of The Republican War on Science.
For instance, in a rather stunning passage, Sarewitz more or less suggests that we should just shrug off the political misuse or abuse of science--it's no big deal:
Nor is it productive to blame politicians for manipulating or distorting objective science to support partisan positions. Of course politicians will look for any information or argument that they can find to advance their agendas -- that is their job. While politicians may not be above playing loose with scientific truth, more often they can and will simply search out -- and find -- a legitimate expert or two who can marshal a technical argument sympathetic to the desired political outcome. It is the job of politicians to play politics, and this -- like the second law of thermodynamics -- is not something to be regretted, but something to be lived with.
Once again, imagine for a second that we were talking about anything other than science here. Should we simply "live with" it when politicians to lie to us and mislead us about the state of the economy? Certainly not. But then why should we just put up with them misleading us about science, simply because it's science?
Furthermore, finding "a legitimate expert or two" to back your point of view is one thing--emphasis on legitimate--but the misuse of science today goes far beyond that on the political right. Consider the "intelligent design" movement, a well organized, PR-savvy crusade against evolution that masquerades as science even as it seeks to redefine science itself to include supernatural explanations within the fabric of inquiry. This goes far beyond mere "cherry picking," and becomes a more fundamental assault on the nature of scientific knowledge itself. Once again, if we care about science (and science education), are we supposed to just shrug and take this with equanimity? Just "live with" it? I don't think so.
There's much more that might be said, but for now, let me move on. I'd like to thank Dr. Krauss for also participating in this discussion, for being one of our very finest communicators of science to the general public (make sure to check out his soon-to-be published new book, Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond), and for endorsing the much needed Union of Concerned Scientists statement about the Bush administration's misuses of science. As I observe in the excerpt just published here at TPMCafé, this truly was a landmark moment for the scientific community in terms of standing up and speaking truth to power. It will long be remembered.
But as I also note both in the book and in my public talks, one thing that was very striking about that UCS statement (and the accompanying report) is that while it detailed a range of misuses of science by the Bush administration, there was little attempt to explain why these abuses might be happening now. This is also true of Dr. Krauss's post, and I think it highlights the main difference between my book and the UCS approach generally. Unlike Roger Pielke, Jr., I certainly agree with UCS (and the UCS document signers) that there's a real problem with the way science is being treated at the moment. But beyond this general agreement, I attempt to go farther in trying to get at what the ideological and political underpinnings here may be.
In trying to answer this question--the "why" question, the motive question--I think it's impossible to avoid centrally focusing on the modern conservative movement, its constituencies, its ideology, and its growing influence in the Republican Party. Reading the UCS report itself, it's clear that most of the scientific issues discussed there break down rather easily into one of two categories: Those that industry cares about, and those that religious conservatives care about. And aren't these two of the modern right's--and the Republican party's--core constituencies? I think this fact speaks volumes.
Moreover, I'm confident that most people who read my own book will be very struck by the strong similarities between the Reagan administration, the Gingrich Congress, and the current administration with respect to issues concerning the integrity of science. That historical analysis does indeed suggest that what we're observing is a modern, conservative Republican phenomenon.
In any case, thanks again to Pielke and Krauss, both for their thoughts and for challenging me. I look forward to further dialogue.
When the proverbial s**t hits the fan on, say, global warming then politicians and the public will be screaming for actual science - as in another Manhattan Project. They certainly won't be consulting soicial scientists as to how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. If we listen to the likes of Sarewitz now then there will be insufficient expertise available then ... then what happens?
October 12, 2005 5:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
What strikes me about the current Intelligent Design "debate" is that it's about neither science nor religion. It's about power, i.e., soiidifying that all-important rightwing religious base without which the moneyed corporate interests can't manage to hold onto electoral power. The neoconservatives, all of whom are well-educated and many of whom aren't really all that religious deep down, have gone along with their masters on this one. "Science" for the Bushists is just one more card in the deck. They'll play it when they think they need to. They'll discard it just as fast.
Here is the bottom line, and I think I've said it more or less in several of these threads: they have no concept of truth, be it in Nature, in policy, in dealing with the American people, or even on the spiritual level. All they know is power-brokering in all its various forms. That comes out seeming like warfare because it destroys everything else. It has to be treated as such.
October 12, 2005 5:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Should we simply "live with" it when politicians to lie to us and mislead us about the state of the economy? Certainly not. But then why should we just put up with them misleading us about science, simply because it's science?
The central point here is that we do live with poltiicians who lie to us and mislead us about the economy. They pretty much do that all the time. It is certainly true that politicians on both sides of the aisle use whatever arguments come to hand to advance their policy positions, and if distorting a scientific argument will do the trick, then they'll use it.
This has certainly happened with global warming. Well before the evidence was clear that it was happening, the models were reliable and consistent enough to feel reasonably confident that human contributions to the greenhouse effect were significant, people were using global warming to advance the argument that fossil fuels utilization should be reduced.
This has certainly happened with folks trying to stop development projects by identifying unique species threatened by the projects. The fact that those species happened to unique occupy that small a niche in an ecosystem suggested not that they desperately needed to be saved but that, either 1) someone had done too much splitting when they should have been lumping or 2) the species was on its way out anyway.
At least in the first case, people who made the argument may have believed it--that the evidence would continue to come in and would support their position--and also believed that it was a compelling reason to reduce fossil fuel usage.
In the second case, though, the loss of ,say, the spotted owl was a fake concern. Period. It was a way to stop logging that would work under the current law, and so folks opposed to logging used it.
The overall point here is that there is nothing wrong with that. You use what works in the political areana. And sometimes what you use is a little lefthanded.
Now, before you take my head off, note that there is something, I dunno, more unseemly, about embarking on a decades-long project to fund researchers willing to say that smoking might not be bad for you. There's something just plain wrong about taking work done by unbiased research scientists paid for by taxpayer dollars from reports because you don't like their conclusions.
There is something especially wrong with embarking on a program to force teachers to tell students things that are not true about how the world works because some of those students' parents believe stuff that is not true.
So there is something qualitiatively different here. But it's not as simple as an honest vs dishonest use of scientific information
October 12, 2005 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think the difference is that before, politicians had to be careful about their dishonesty because the public would be angry and hold them accountable. Now everyone slaps them on the back for a job well done.
This is the problem liberals have is that they haven't figured out that the public expects politics to be scrupples free. Take the Swift Boat Vets. Why hasn't the left done something comparable, such as taking Kitty Kelley's poorly sourced account of Bush's abortion? We could have spent all of August blanketing the airwaves with commercials paid for by an unaffliated group that Kerry could have condemned. The fact is that sort of thing just doesn't sit as well with our voters, and therefore our politicians. You've all seen the debates on the liberal boards over the years, where someone calls for fighting fire. The response is always, "But then we'd be just as bad! You're no better than they are!"
Now what will the response be to what I've said above? It will be Pielke's response: you ARE just as bad - here's examples. Yet even knowing we'll be painted as being just as bad, we're still not running with the abortion story. Why aren't we making as concertive an effort to abuse science, if that's our jobs? Why haven't any of you given money to groups for the express purpose of creating research to contradict consensus? Why do the thinkers and opinion makers we seek out not engage in deliberate distortion in the way Ann Coulter does?
Because we don't WANT to abuse science. We don't WANT to falsely smear Bush - there are plenty of facts to smear him with without having to resort to that. We don't WANT to have policy that can only be justified by falsifying results. We don't WANT someone to lie to us.
But that's good politics. So when are you guys going to wake up and start making shit up?
October 12, 2005 7:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is the classic dichotomy in the face of the true accusation in the modern age of spin doctory and issue laundering. First, the suggestion that someone is doing exactly what they are doing is dismissed as exaggeration, 'conspiracy theory', excessive partisanship etc.
Then there is the second prong. In addition to saying you must be locked up and shot up with thorazine for suggesting such things, there is the second layer of defense -- yes, Virginia, so we DO cook the scientific books. So what? This fits in with the idea that 'everybody does it'. The notion is that partisan politics does not have limits or parameters on it, that everything is like what I call a 'slam' vision of the world, including a 'poetry slam' (the latter an innocent venue for fun, in and of itself).
This idea of defining the nature of everything as of course merely a power struggle, with the implicit notion that people should accept the idea that a more powerful person can expropriate my alibi proving my innocence of a crime he committed, or a freemarketplace economics that allows one to buy juries, is much more of a danger than would seem to some.
This notion of truth as a plaything is explored in another post, at http://www.tpmcafe.com/comments/2005/10/10/576/27110/37?mode=alon
e;showrate=1#37
As for the current situation, it would seem that Pielke is solidly in the 'so what', "yes Virginia" camp. Part of what this approach is boils down to several factors -- understating what kind of distortion of science is taking place (as in merely looking for a few scientists that support your position); overstating the degree of complicity by Democrats at the same time, and understating the importance of science and the expectations that we have about it.
When you punish scientists -- as with others in government -- for coming up with truthful information, or for their scientific findings, you have truly entered a slippery slope. This isn't like a Senator trying to push an ethanol bill and citing those studies that found it most energy efficient. This is the doctoring and preloading of scientific panels paid by taxpayer money, requiring them to answer questions about their position on abortion (on a panel not contemplating abortion, or even if they were), or who they voted for. That should be simply illegal. There needs to be a structure of laws to make it simply illegal for the president to tamper with the results or input into scientific commissions in this way. It is worse than consumer fraud -- and you could argue, 'consumer fraud ye will always have with ye -- of the worst kind.
When you consider the consequences of pooh poohing global warming, given what we know now, it makes Unsafe at Any Speed seem like a dispute over a checkers game.
October 12, 2005 7:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you have unwittingly hit on something that is problematic in the topic of Mr. Mooney's book.
It is by no means a given that the age of Atwater politics with the attendant spin/war rooms will extend for an eternity. I actually tend to the opinion that the current incarnation of blogging has extended its life a bit when it was on its last legs. (What are most individual blogs--not community sites like this one--but personal spin on everything from soup to nuts? They're "here's my spin on it," that's basically what most of them are.)
But it's just a style of politics and media. Styles come and go, especially when they are voted on via 'ratings,' i.e., paid for by advertising. If someone comes up with something new that really works, then we will move into a new political age with a whole new set of rules.
This is quite different from the much grander tension between religion and science.
I suppose you could say that religion is much grander spin, if you like; most sophisticated religions admit they have to spin from time to time, and ask for your faith in that.
But Atwater politics and the media results? That will change--it will eventually go out of style when some, and it will come back, just like pointed toes on shoes. (I already see TV producers feeling out what will come next, trying stuff out, probably because of the popularity of Jon Stewart's show. Examples: On MSNBC, during the last election, they didn't hide the fact that they were reporting from a spin room, they called it that, and they 'deconstructed' right after--that was new; now they are trying this goofy show with Tucker Carlsen where the conservative sits at a table with the liberal and they chat pleasantly with each other, like a wierd doppelganger of 'Crossfire.')
October 12, 2005 8:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK, here's another challenge to more liberal points of view.
A just-released UN study says that deforestation was not a major contributor to Hurricane Stan flooding in Guatamala and is not a major contributor to flooding in general in many areas.
Assuming the study holds up with follow-up, it certainly undercuts (so to speak) a major argument against clear-cutting. (Not that I don't consider aesthetic arguments worthy ones by themselves.)
October 12, 2005 11:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
In fact, I think you shouldn't do this kind of thing. I think you should really try to figure out what is really true, and then base your policies on what is really true.
I avoided talking about the fake science on the left that I think showed this administration the way, out of for lack of better word, cowardice. In fact, the global warning Cassandras turned out to be right, and while I doubt the sincerity of people who wrote up snail darter protest signs, those were uniquely identified species and killing them off did violate the law.
I think the use of fake science that showed the republicans how to do this was the risk of heterosexual AIDS. Early in the 80s, as AIDS became identified, the concern arose that it would be ghettoized, viewed as a disease of gay men and IV drug users. If it had been, funding for research would have been difficult to come by, in part because these are not people who command big voting blocs and, in part, because avoiding the disease entailed not engaging in activity that is either illegal or stigmatized. That would have made it easy to blame the victims, and would have inhibited funding.
So a substantial campaign was mounted to warn everybody about the risk of AIDS. That campaign worked; getting tested together became a rite of courtship among young people, substantial funding for AIDS research took place and treatments were found. Public health campaigns among the risk groups were also funded and were successful to some degree.
But there was never any such risk to the broad population. If you looked at the CDC data, AIDS remained confined to the risk groups. It never did cross over, and, looking at the rates of other STD transmisson (other than syphillis, which has crashed for some reason I don't understand), that was not because the safe sex campaign actually prevented people from engaging in unprotected intercourse. Vaginal transmission of AIDS among Americans was not a significant risk.
A generation of young people were frightened into fearing a deadly disease that actually did not pose a significant risk to them in order to serve the noble purpose of helping those who were at risk.
I believe that this became a template for those on the right; they saw that a concerted effort directed at misinformation could move social policy. Then they found out, when they embarked on these efforts, that all you really need to do was raise doubt. If the moneyed interest could cloud the issue, that was enough.*
There are interesting side issues here. The first is that the Clinton administration was among the least likely to engage in this kind of thing. When, for example [and I think this meme is around because of Chris's book] studies showed that providing clean needles clearly reduced AIDS transmissions rates, the H&HS head when saying they would not press for funding such programs, did not deny that they worked. She made it clear that the politics were too difficult.
The Bush administration, on the other hand, is not interested in facts, at all. This lack of interest is not limited to science or public health issues. They have routinely lied about the facts on the ground on any issue that interfered with their proximate goals (as far as I can tell, their time horizon is about 8 months out)--ranging from the effect of tax cuts on the federal deficit to the situation on the ground in Iraq. Their "war on science" is part of this overall effort; providing verbal support to ID is useful politically, so they do so. Deleting material that indicates a particular instance of energy policy would violate the endangered species act is routine. Instructing EPA lawyers to accept outright violations of the law is policy.
For me, two things are clear. The price we pay for people misusing scientific results in pursuit of what they see as a "good cause" is too high a price to pay. Fact-based policy-making becomes impossible if interest groups pursue tactics that distort the underlying facts. It happens all the time, but we should resist it. We should especially resist it when we are tempted to distort in a good cause.
Second, there are degrees of dishonesty. This administration is beyond the pale wrt science, yes. But it is also beyond the pale on a host of other issues wrt basing policy on facts. The issue here is not primarily science. It is a wide-ranging attack on the use of real data to inform policy decision-making. That issue doesn't show up explicitly on ballots. The media has turned out to be hamstrung by their "he said, she said" model, as Chris has described it. Complete nonsense is presented side by side with factual information because influential or large numbers of people hold the nonsensical view.
IMO, that's what Chris is really writing about--the need to base policy on what's real. I think the AIDS campaign was something of an aberration, but I also think it was a template. It made fighting this battle harder.
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*Another candidate for the wingers figuing out how to do this is the way corporations that damage the environment or expose consumers to harm justify their behavior. Neal Stephenson's novel Zodiac does as good a job as any in showing how this works. The central idea is to have people with white coats pooh-pooh the risk as trivial and raised by tree-hugging nut jobs.
However, I'd argue that the Republicans tried that under Reagan with Watt, and it proved to be ineffective in the public policy arena. The central problem turned out to be that people really do have concerns about the enviroment and really do support the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, having seen palpable benefits stemming from that legislation ("Cuyahoga River: No longer a fire risk!!). So the disinformation campaign had to be carried to a higher and stealthier level.
October 13, 2005 3:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting.
I don't think this one will have any real effect. The clear cutting case will continue to primarily focus on habitat degradation and it's impact on diversity, which have the virtue of being true.
But this does raise a different issue. I spent some time a year or so ago, talking with the Wildlife Conservation Society. They actually work pretty hard to figure out what actually works. In particular, say we're talking about preserving tigers. It's easy to fight to preserve some chunk of undeveloped area from human utilization. But what they've been doing is tracking where the tigers actually go, what their ranges are like and how they are affected by human contact. Not all environmental organization focus on the efficacy of what they do.
As you'd expect if you've looked at this kind of stuff, they've found out that people have made some errroneous assumptions. You do have to look and see whether what you think is reasonable is in fact true. The recent award of the Nobel in Medicine to the guys who proved that ulcers are caused by a bacterium is an illustration of this.
October 13, 2005 3:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
As a scientist, I've watched scientists do what Pilkey seems to be doing. I suspect it stems from a dichotomy they've developed in their thinking between science and politics that misunderstands politics significantly.
The dichotomy comes down to
science = facts
politics = manipulation
So the politicians are doing something else in another universe, and in some sense it doesn't matter if they mess with the facts. I suspect there's a bit of elitism that sneaks in too: politicians can't be expected to understand and be as careful with the facts as us scientists.
The trouble with this point of view is that we all, scientists or not, have to live with the consequences of what politicians do. (I'll leave out the fact that by any reasonable definition of politics, we're all politicians to some degree.)
Policies based on fact tend to work better than those that are not. There are lucky exceptions, but I'm rational enough to believe that we're better off pressing for fact.
October 13, 2005 4:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Part of your quote from Sarewitz sums up the fundamental problem with his position:
Here, Sarewitz is essentially assigning politicians the role of lawyers--advocates for a set of positions or constituencies. Politics is simply litigation by another name. Litigation, of course, is a zero-sum game in which an attorney's duty is to maximize what her client gets (and thus minimize what her opponent's client gets).
The role of science in litigation is particularly dishonorable. Expert witnesses are--not to put too fine a point on it--whores. They are paid to come up with scientific opinions that support the client. (I have my own ideas about how to reform this system, but that's a topic for another post.)
The problem is that politicians are not merely advocates; their job also entails governing. Governing is not a matter of optimizing one constituency's result at the expense of all the others; it is, ideally, about achieving the best for the most. The best government tries to balance interest in a way that makes things better for all of them. To do that, the politicians who are running things need not information that supports their preconceptions, but information that is accurate--information that will help them form solutions that work, as opposed to solutions that conform to ideology.
So Sarewitz's point does not apply to politicians who are serious about governing. It does, however, apply to the Republicans. The Republican party in its current state approaches politics as if it were litigation (as a zero-sum game in which their role is to advocate their ideological positions, and maximize what their constituencies get at the expense of everyone else), and they approach science as if it had the role it has in litigation. Which of course is the mindset that allows them to think it's okay to distort science as they do.
October 13, 2005 8:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think Delia has it absolutely right here -- there's a difference of kind, not degree, between people who distort and cherry-pick and reorganize facts, and those for whom "fact" is simply not an interesting category. You can see this difference in issues such as Intelligent Design, or the "condoms don't work" garbage in abstinence-only disinformation campaigns, or in the "abortion causes breast cancer" lies. Debunking doesn't really make a difference to the true believers.
Ironically, at least some cases where members of the fact-based community have been accused of distortion and overhyping are actually cases of the leading-indicator "fallacy" that bedevils economic policymakers (and yes, it's common for administrations to choose their favorite schools among those too). It's a famous line that economists have correctly predicted 9 of the past 5 recession (or 11 of 6 or whatever similar number you may prefer). What goes unsaid is that leading indicators no longer predict expansion or recession, what they predict is action by the Federal Reserve and other branches of government (ahem) to head off recession or inflation. The same is true in spades for environmental and epidemiological issues.
October 13, 2005 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm amazed that you have the stomach to call Roger Pielke "intellectually serious" without puking all over your keyboard.
October 13, 2005 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
It'll go out of style when it stops working, artappraiser. And there is no sign of that yet that I can see.
October 13, 2005 10:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I just read a story in Seed magazine that notes a significant percentage of people with H. pylori in their stomachs never get ulcers.
We still know so little about microbiology.
October 27, 2005 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink