The certainty disease

Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed Bush aide:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Jacob Bronowski, 1972:

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken'.

Is the Bush administration imminently likely to slaughter people by the millions? No, of course not; their pathologies are subtler. But Hitler was just the extreme case of a continuum of tyrants and bunglers (and the Cromwell quote is ironic, given that I'm pretty sure Cromwell was somewhere in there too). When you're no longer even interested in being part of the reality-based community, there is a fundamental sense in which you've gone off the rails and left yourself open to abuses and mistakes. And some of them can be large indeed.

I'm not the first person to make the connection.

I should add this: the opposition has to watch out as well. John Kerry's Senate career, which has been devoted more than anything else to flashy investigations, makes me think that at the very least he values finding out things about reality. I don't think he has the certainty disease, and that's a large part of the reason I'm going to vote for him. But in this overheated time I sometimes read lefties on the Internet using the word "reasonable" in scare quotes, attacking centrist allies more zealously than they do their actual ideological opponents, advocating prison for Republican-leaning journalists and whatnot. We have to be sure, not just that we win, but that winning means something, and that's not helping.

Speaking of science and (un)certainty...

So you're reading some politically contentious stuff about a scientific issue, and some of the contributors to the debate, people with whom you're not inclined to agree, are raising what seem to be serious, possibly interesting scientific objections to everything you thought you knew about the issue. And while it's tempting to just reject what they're saying on ideological grounds, being a skeptical post-Enlightenment child you figure you ought to be able to consider their claims on the merits. But everything's terribly heated, you're a busy person, and you don't have the time or mental energy to sift through all the claims and counterclaims. So it would be nice if somebody more diligent than yourself would sit down and try to figure out precisely what these people are saying and whether it makes any sense.

When it comes to the global warming debate, Tim Lambert is that guy (he also writes about gun control a lot, but I'm not as personally interested in that). Lately, he seems to have some friends.

When I first heard about Ross McKitrick's work challenging the "hockey stick" increase in global temperatures in the 20th century, I thought he might have something—or, at least, that he would raise issues worth debating about, and that everyone would come away wiser. What I didn't expect was how astoundingly bad his arguments would turn out to be. We're talking stuff like confusing degrees and radians, averaging in missing data as if it represented zero degrees, insisting that taking the root mean square of temperatures (which aren't even in an absolute temperature scale, so they can be negative) is no worse than a weighted mean because there is no such thing as average temperature, behavior like that.

This guy seems to be an intellectual heavy hitter among the Tech Central Station crowd, and one of the people largely responsible for convincing many smart conservative- and libertarian-leaning techies who really ought to know better that the entire modern science of climatology is a deliberate, politically-motivated fraud.

Oh, yeah, and Sallie Baliunas seems to find him convincing.

Time was, I thought political anti-environmentalist advocates hit the mark at least some of the time. They've written potent critiques of the kind of end-of-the-world hysteria that environmental advocacy groups use to raise funding. But they were dead wrong when they jumped on the fake 1990s ozone controversy, and in this debate I similarly see no trace of intellectual respectability.