Bishop Hill Confirmation bias
Jun 8, 2011 Books Climate: Sceptics This is a guest post by Matt Ridley
Dan Gardner’s superb book `Future Babble’ examines why expert predictions so frequently fail, and why we believe them anyway. I strongly recommend it. Gardner devotes very little of the book to climate change, and makes clear that he does not want to be thought too sceptical about it. This is standard procedure in the world of non-fiction these days: Tim Harford in Adapt likewise avoids pursuing the logic of his argument as far into the climate debate as he might. You can, of course, kiss good bye to good reviews, or even reviews, if you stray too far from the true faith on this subject these days. Even lukewarmers like me regularly get called `deniers’.
None the less, Gardner’s argument does apply very clearly to the climate debate. Below is a list of quotations from the book that apply to pretty well any polarised scientific debate – nature versus nurture, dietary fat, and of course scepticism versus alarm. Honest readers will admit that they fall into all the traps Gardner describes, whether they are sceptics or alarmists. (At the end of the lists are a few quotes, about the value of doubt, that will be more uncomfortable for the alarmists.)
Here is my question: can we each read these quotes and admit that they apply to each of us as well as to the people we disagree with? It’s a question for sceptics and alarmists alike. Or does each of us think we are more self-aware about confirmation bias than our opponents are?
Here are the quotes:
Once we form a belief, for any reason, good or bad, rational or bonkers, we will eagerly seek out information that supports it, while not bothering to look for information that doesn’t – and if we are unavoidably confronted with information that does not fit, we will be hyper-critical of it, looking for any excuse to dismiss it as worthless. P84
We all enjoy having our beliefs confirmed after all. And it shows that we too are informed people. But dispute that belief and the same psychology works against you. You are risking saying goodbye to your client and your reputation. Following the herd is usually the safer bet. P 109.
Contrarians ... are almost always outsiders, which is not a coincidence. They don’t have a seat at the table so they aren’t subject to the social pressures identified by Asch and other psychologists. P 109.
Genuinely imaginary attempts to portray change – including scenario planning – may help pull us out of that rut but they may also cause to us to develop an unrealistic sense of how likely those imaginative futures really are. And all the while, no matter what happens, we are convinced we are right. P 115
Having settled on a belief, we naturally subject evidence that contradicts the belief to harsh critical scrutiny or ignore such evidence altogether. At the same time we lower our standards when we examine supportive evidence so that even weak evidence is accepted as powerful proof. P 204.
It should be obvious that being skeptical about a prediction does not render people unable to make a decision, it just makes them cautious. This is not a bad thing, and, indeed, in some circumstances, it can be a very good thing. P 247
Doubt is the hallmark of the fox. P 254 [foxes, who are open to wider sources of evidence, are more accurate forecasters than hedgehogs, who adhere to one big idea.]
"Foxes"’... are modest about their ability forecast the future, comfortable with uncertainty, and very self-critical. P 255.
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Reader Comments (58)
I'm a believer - in natural climate change.
I'm agnostic - because the more I learn, I realise there is more I don't know.
My background is undergraduate in Geophysics and Oceanography followed by postgrad in meteorology (climate models) at Reading in the early nineties (dropped out of). I remember an air of controversy then, like when Lindzen came to give a talk, but paid no real attention as that wasn't my work. After that I drifted off into what I do now, IT, and never really paid attention until the IPCC hockey stick which stood out as so wrong to me I wondered where it came from. I then ignored it until getting a chance to hunt down all the blogs, climate audit, watts. the bishop, climategate etc.. (and real climate, which I can't believe is written by 'scientists' as it is so non-scientific, political, vitriolic, childish it is my first recommendation to try and turn people off of the AGW argument).
By choice I do hunt down the sceptical blogs I think mainly because they are scientific and don't spout opinion from authority. To me the warming arguments are so weak scientifically I don't feel I need to chase up marginal pieces on them. As a scientist I do feel my mind can be changed by the appropriate evidence though. To me everything just seems corrupted by public money and then need from people wanting to keep the money being thrown at them (I doubt if I would have done different if I was 20 years in my Meteorology career after postgrad - though I don't think I would have comprised by scientific principles, being the stubborn person I am, which many of the main players really do show up as having done. I hope the time is near where politics will give up on the whole CAGW thing and then we can see where we can get back to more measured scientific reality. Everything these days seems corrupted by money these days, especially in the public sector, and I really think that Academia in things like computer modelling has no real place in society (It doesn't need an expensive lab or anything and anyone can login into computer supercomputer or not) and the blogs prove that 'the citizens' are just as capable if not more so than academics 'for free' so why are we paying (billions) for all this.
Academia definitely at least needs an injection of reality/competence from industry has having worked in both and seeing that current climate/meteorology IT is the same as I did 20 years ago when I didn't know what I was doing, Academia could at least learn basic version control and the like. I know fellow IT folk will grimace when I mention that what they really seem to need is a decent project manager (ignorant of the research details, and probably hard to find) who can control what is done and delivered in the correct amount of time and on budget. Though I'm fully aware from my former academic days that the majority would hate to work under something like a project manager it would really help academia along with things like phd students working together with senior researchers on a combined project rather than everyone duplicating a years work of someone else's time on a lone 3 year phd. From my experience there is so much that industry and teach to academia, especially in IT where it is leap years behind - Some really good stuff happens in computing research but the stuff we use everyday is funded directly from Google and the like (even open source is funded largely by the corporate giants like IBM).
In summary I will appraise any scientific evidence to challenge my viewpoint but guess I discount a lot of it because I'm very convinced right now that it is wrong. I'm very keen to find out any news on Svensmark's work because that together with long term ocean cycles sounds intuitively correct to me in describing the a large amount of the Earth's climate over the last few billion years.
My initial doubt crept in when I glanced at the IPPC 2001 version with Dr. Mann's initial hockey stick graph. Being a bit of a history nut, the disappearing MWP and the LIA, so contrary to all accounts of local and contemporary writers, put a grave doubt in my mind as to the veracity of all these "reconstructions". Naturally one can slough this off as another nut case on the taxpayer gravy train having a particular axe to grind. Which is what I did. When it starts to cost me money however, another look was warranted. To my surprise AR4 still contained the graph. Why did not one historian complain? A scientist, of whatever tangentially appropriate discipline could and should have said something in the intervening years. Where were they and why were they cowed? It turns out that a lot of people in the science community are no different than anyone else in a large human organization. In other words, the long held mental picture of a lone scientist working in a dark office and all of a sudden yelling: “Eureka!” no longer applies. The world grew up, I guess.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Probably too late, but here goes:
There is another rather interesting aspect to all this. When I first read the Bishop’s extracts my immediate reaction was “Guilty as charged”. However, when I looked into matters in more detail (June 8, 4.53PM) I concluded I was not so guilty after all.
Are not general reproofs of the type relayed by the Bishop the stuff of every evangelist’s message? As with me in this case, are they not intended to induce a little guilt, to encourage the listener to think he could have done better? Come, you are a sinner – accept my message or religion as the only way out!
So it was with the Christianity. Dad’s injunction to ‘Come on lad, try harder’ is morphed into ‘it’s a sin not to try harder’ and that is morphed into ‘all mankind is beset by Original Sin’. Then it’s ‘I offer the only effective answer to save you from just being human – only believe’.
And so with the green religion. Mum’s injunction to ‘waste not - want not’ is morphed into ‘you are being greedy’ and then to ‘You are consuming too much of this world’s resources’ which is then morphed into ‘global warming’ which in turn is morphed into ‘the end of civilized life as we know it is nigh’, and guess what - he green religion offers the world the way out.
But, of course, when you look into the initial message in detail, there is much less foundation to it than you thought. and maybe none at all.
Beware the generalizations of evangelists of all sorts!
Bart V, glad to bring a smile to your face. Note that Turning Tide later (3:11 PM) pointed out that I had misrepresented her view, and indeed I had. That being said, there are lots of other people who do believe that CO2-induced AGW is a scam and only a scam - I was pointing out that many sceptics/lukewarmers are in fact more nuanced and accept e.g. that increased CO2 levels are of anthropogenic origin, and that they are likely to induce some warming - but go on to say that the evidence for CO2 leading to a lot of warming is very weak, and that even if it does, we may be able to deal with that in ways other than by all reverting to living in caves now.
You didn't reply to my comment, by the way, about the fact that people do seem to display considerable psychological commitment to doom-and-gloom thinking. Without necessarily asking you to concede that that is a factor for many warmists, would you at least consider that it is not as ludicrous to believe it might be as you said it was? For many sceptics, it appears pretty obvious that some leading spokespersons for the catastrophic end of global warming do suffer from confirmation bias arising from an idealogical commitment to believing that everything is getting worse and it is mankind's fault.
“doom-and-gloom”
You’re a climate researcher/modeller and you need funds to carry on. Do you say,
a) I need to investigate the current warming trend, which may be catastrophic,
or
b) I need to investigate the current warming trend, which may be trivial?
There are two interesting things about most CO2-bedwetters for me.
One is that regardless of what they may claim, the actual basis of their acceptance of the dogma is always that they completely accept the argument from authority.
It boils down to the fact that bedwetters simply cannot believe that that Sting, Bono, Osama bin Laden, the Mafia, Enron, VAT fraudsters, cybercriminals and senior Tory politicians could possibly all be wrong. And that's to say nothing of such August bodies as the Network of African Science Academies, the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, the Society of American Foresters, the American College of Preventive Medicine and the International Association for Great Lakes Research.
It is not at all obvious with what authority any of those people actually speak. It seems unlikely that the American College of Preventive Medicine has studied cloud formation and concluded that it's the CO2 wot done it. All they have done, if that, is read what others have written and assume it to be correct.
In many cases, these supposedly rigorous adherents to the scientific method explicitly admit that's all they've done and that's why they're doing it. That well-known centre of climate research expertise the American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, supports the consensus not because there's a team there that studies solar activity, but "there is broad scientific consensus that Earth's climate is warming rapidly" and that "fundamental, potentially irreversible, ecological changes may occur in the coming decades".
That brings me to the second odd feature of the bedwetters, which is that they base their alarmism wholly on things that are going to happen in the future. They're 100% confident, as sure as they are that the square root of four is two, that in 100 years' time New York will be under 30 feet of water. They are a lot less confident about things that are just about to happen and of what has happened in the past they have no idea. In that respect they are exactly totalitarian - never mind what we're going to do in the future, first we need to sort out what we'll say has happened in the past.
Bedwetters cannot point to a single instance of an unequivocally human-caused increase in CO2, nor to any unambiguously correlated temperature change from it, nor to any real-world event attributable to climate change. It's all about the future, about which they have far more certainty, although they'll accept and use lies for as long as they're useful (then deny they ever did).
Essentially what they have is a condition, rather than a disease, of the mind. You can cure someone of a disease, but a condition is something, like being pregnant, where it is what it is, and there's no treatment possible.
A CO2 bedwetter is someone who simply cannot imagine Osama bin Laden being wrong, and like his other followers they tend to have little patience with those who can and who think he probably is.
J4R
I don't suppose Osama believed it either, but he probably thought it was worth helping the infidels beat themselves up!