Month: June 2019

Nature and Environment selection. We had a good discussion about it—generally we thought that it was somewhat of a slog to read because the details were inherently dry, but that it explained a lot about the sources of the media and public opinion problems we have with scientific information.

I didn’t realize how early the dangers of tobacco were recognized: “German scientists had shown in the 1930s that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, and the Nazi government had run major antismoking campaigns; Adolf Hitler forbade smoking in his presence. However, the German scientific work was tainted by its Nazi associations, and to some extent ignored, if not actually suppressed, after the war.” Or that the discovery of ozone depletion by CFCs was accidental—the original concern was that super-sonic flights would disrupt the troposphere.

Here’s an early ID of the “just asking questions” strategy: “you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case.” The authors highlight the problem with the Fairness Doctrine (1949) and journalistic balance: “Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.” And the consistent pattern of “scientific claims” (or retractions/corrections) “being published in scientific journals, where only scientists would read them, but unscientific claims were being published in the mass media.”

I didn’t know how unbalanced the money was! “The American Cancer Society and American Lung Association in 1981 devoted just under $300,000 to research; that same year, the tobacco industry gave $6.3 million.”

The biggest shocker for me was how much distortion was driven by just a couple of men (Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer), and the personal reasons (grudges, slighted feelings, rabid anti-communism, and of course greed and ego) that primed them to lead the charge against public heath and safety. Zinger on Singer: “For a man who worried enormously about scientific uncertainties, he was remarkably untroubled by economic ones.” And “his skepticism also gained him a huge amount of attention—far more than most scientists ever get for their research, quietly published in academic journals. So if scientists should be discredited for getting money for their research, or for enjoying the limelight, the same argument would logically apply to Singer.”

I didn’t know that “since nuclear weapon cores decay over time and lose their explosive capacity, any agreement to stop building new ones was, in effect, an agreement to disarm.” Or that the tobacco industry investigated avoiding the second-hand smoke issue by making the smoke “simply less visible“!

Useful term I’ve learned before but forgotten: hormesis (low dose good, high dose bad), but in a weird context: critics claiming that maybe small amounts of second-hand smoke or radiation were good.

Well-researched non-fiction books typically collect interesting quotes from other sources that are often the highlights for me—even from books I’ve read myself. For example, I’m pretty sure I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves—if not, I want to—but don’t remember this great analysis of conspiracy-theory argument: “the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.” Similarly, a funny anecdote about Lord Harris, the architect of Thatcherism who venerated Adam Smith: “he declined a coat of arms on the grounds that the invisible hand could not be blazoned.” And Isaiah Berlin saying “liberty for wolves means death to lambs.” (Given that he’s the hedgehog/fox person, I wonder how many other mammal analogies he made?)

Describing the global warming that’s already committed: “‘sentenced’ might be a better word.” Arguments against trying to fix climate change: “It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad.”

I’m looking forward to reading Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet; the same philosophical contrast is described here as that between Cornucopians and neo-Malthusians.

Free market fundamentalism:

 The idea that free markets produce optimum allocation of resources depends on participants having perfect information. But one of several ironies of our story is that our protagonists did everything in their power to ensure that the American people did not have good (much less perfect) information on crucial issues. Our protagonists, while ostensibly defending free markets, distorted the marketplace of ideas in the service of political goals and commercial interests. The American belief in fairness and the importance of hearing “both sides” was used and abused by people who didn’t want to admit the truth about the impacts of industrial capitalism.

One leading scientist said about the 1983 report, Changing Climate, “We knew it was garbage, so we just ignored it.” Unfortunately, garbage doesn’t just go away. Someone has to deal with it, and that someone is all of us: journalists who report scientific findings, specialist professional bodies who represent the scientific fields, and all of us as citizens.

It especially does not make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of a group with an obvious ideological agenda or vested political or economic interest. Or in some cases, all of the above.

Or an opinionated amateur!