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« Energy wave in the Telegraph | Main | Baling out? Probably not »
Saturday
Oct122013

Merchants of advocacy

Reiner Grundmann has written a fairly damning review of Oreskes and Conway's Merchants of Doubt. I guess it's fair to say that he is not desperately impressed.

It is disappointing to see professional historians reduce the complexity to a black and white affair where it goes without saying what the preferred colour is. The social science literature relevant to the understanding of policymaking in the face of uncertainty is largely absent. The authors mention just one study, about rational decision theory, which is probably cited because it supports the authors’ claim that scientific uncertainty helps to prevent or delay political action. They missed the opportunity to confront their historical material with approaches that have examined the same case studies but did not come to the same conclusions. Reading Merchants of Doubt gives the impression that no such work exists. This raises the question of what epistemological status it can claim. Its authors have been critical of the scientific credentials of the contrarians, quoting the lack of peer review or selective use of information. This book has all the hallmarks of science (there are many footnotes) and perhaps it was even peer-reviewed. But it is what the title and subtitle suggest: less a scholarly work than a passionate attack on a group of scientists turned lobbyists and thus itself a partial account. I wonder if it does not do a disservice to the cause it is advocating.

 I haven't troubled to read Merchants of Doubt before. I can't really see that changing in the near future.

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Reader Comments (25)

I wonder if there is anyone here able to comment on the relative volumes of sales of sceptic and credulous books?

Oct 12, 2013 at 7:44 PM | Unregistered CommenterJeff Wood

Yeah good thorough review. I have skimmed through MOD and for me I see it can be dismissed far more easily once you see them touch on any subject one knows about.
Oreskes and Conway depict themselves as dealing in a subject about misinformation, so any unsuspecting reader would think they would raise the bar on themselves to maintain good faith and balance. However when you see them describe Steve McIntyre as having "links to the mining industry" and who "attacks" Michael Mann then you should realise, for whatever reason, they are clearly happy to adopt the very techniques they claim to be exposing.

Oreskes and Conway are just hypocrite activists.

Oct 12, 2013 at 8:15 PM | Registered CommenterThe Leopard In The Basement

Am not worried by those conspiracy theorists -am troubled by the vast numbers of educated people who take them seriously

Oct 12, 2013 at 8:21 PM | Registered Commenteromnologos

I doubt, We doubt, They redoubt

Oct 12, 2013 at 8:35 PM | Unregistered CommenterAnoneumouse

I have not read and I know its rubbish with many errors, just don't ask me what they area . And clearly the authors in the pay of big something and hate children and eat kittens alive. , just slipped into alarmist style book review there.

Of course the AGW faithful will lap it up , expect and fulsome Guardian review soon , and you can bet that it will now become part of the 'dogma ' as proof of the evil of AGW sceptics. However, most people are more likley to give it a very wide pass.

Oct 12, 2013 at 8:51 PM | Unregistered CommenterKnR

We've said it before, here on BH; we are not "merchants of doubt," we are "exposers of the concealers of uncertainty."

Oct 12, 2013 at 10:54 PM | Registered CommenterSimon Hopkinson

Gotta wonder who this kind of thing actually sells. After all, it is just drum beating without any need or cause to be rational, in other words, propaganda.

Oct 12, 2013 at 11:19 PM | Unregistered CommenterBrute

"The social science literature relevant to the understanding of policymaking in the face of uncertainty is largely absent."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why do people keep repeating this canard?

All policymaking is done in the face of uncertainty, and there is a vast literature about it. I'm not just talking about academic studies, but also about history - for example, think of all the books that have been written about how decisions were made in the World Wars.

This myth, perpetuated by the post-normal science crowd, is just an attempt to claim that their issue is "special", and therefore the usual rules and accumulated wisdom don't apply to them. FGS, if there's no uncertainty then effectively there's no need to make a decision. The path ahead is clear and unambiguous.

The real dishonesty is that they try to have it both ways. On one hand, we're all gonna fry and the path to avoiding it is clear. On the other, there are high uncertainties of the catastrophic kind, so the path ahead is clear.

I have never understood how they have gottten away with this sophistry for so long.

Oct 13, 2013 at 12:20 AM | Registered Commenterjohanna

Oct 12, 2013 at 8:21 PM | omnologos
...

One must be sceptical of the quality of that 'education' and the environment within which it was aggregated.

Oct 13, 2013 at 1:49 AM | Unregistered CommenterStreetcred

"I haven't troubled to read Merchants of Doubt before. I can't really see that changing in the near future."

I know that time is always limited, but I find the best and most productive use of that time is spent reading those that I disagree with.

I'm actually a bit disappointed that you haven't read it as it's quite influential. It's important to know what other people are thinking. I'm sure your interventions in the climate debate are less effective for not having done so.

Oct 13, 2013 at 2:12 AM | Unregistered CommenterJK

I have read some of it, despite (or perhaps because of) my perception that Naomi Oreskes is the vilest of the pseudoscience clingers-on, the leader of the Cook/Lewandowsky tribe of crackpot 'social scientists' who've leeched themselves onto the climate-science money sack.

Yes, it's bad.

Oct 13, 2013 at 2:24 AM | Unregistered CommenterJEM

Johanna,
Thanks for your observations on policy making under uncertainty. Ten years of retirement have isolated me from a lot of what appears now to be all the rage. I thought that this bit was one of those "all the rage" things despite seeming to me to be utter nonsense. I had assumed I didn't understand it.

I guess I did.

I hate the term "policy maker." It has an authoritarian ring to it.

Oct 13, 2013 at 2:36 AM | Registered Commenterjferguson

MOD entirely depends upon the genetic fallacy. In other words, the fact that Hitler was an anti-smoking vegetarian who was also for a cleaner environment discredits all of these things because he arranged the Holocaust. The source himself, the personification discredits all evidence for these things.

This mode of 'argumentation' has consumed the Left since George Bush's war in Iraq.


The genetic fallacy creates a fallacious argument that is accepted or rejected based on the source of the evidence, rather than on the quality or applicability of the evidence. It is also a line of reasoning in which a perceived defect in the origin of a claim or thing is taken to be evidence that discredits the claim or thing itself. The fallacy is committed when an idea is either accepted or rejected because of its source, rather than its merit.
SOURCE

This rhetorical device is entirely wrong and disreputable to people who actually think about it. But not the US Left. Ironically, given the regularity with which the AGW-alarmist Left thinks 'deniers' are unscientific boobs, the first published source identifying this fallacy is an early textbook in the philosophy of science from 1934, according to the Oxford Companion To Philosophy.

Oct 13, 2013 at 2:36 AM | Unregistered CommenterOrson

I wonder, is it considered to be correct to be against (the WMD arguments of) the Iraq war which supposed to be a leftish (In US liberal) ánd being sceptic about (C)AGW at the same time?

Oct 13, 2013 at 4:12 AM | Unregistered CommenterHoi Polloi

One of my favorite courses in 1972 in grad school was "welfare economics". No, it had nothing to do with entitlements, but rather it was a study of how policy makers could make optimal decisions while lacking complete information. The "father" of that science was Vilfredo Paredo, an economist, whose legacy lives on in the 80-20 rule. But IMHO his more important contribution was to lay the framework for the science of how make decisions involving tradeoffs between dollars and non financial impacts.
For only one of many alternatives, Pareto suggested his "bribe" solution:
If you were to identify a physically risky situation (e.g. in modern terms, a dangerous traffic intersection), what is the range you would you be prepared to hypothetically "bribe" an official to get it corrected with a traffic light? One dollar? A hundred million $?; A hundred $?, One million$?; a thousand $, 500 thousand? By successively "bounding" those limits you could reduce your limits to a finite range of reasonable expenditures. (Note that this is a better formulation than the precautionary principle where the upper limit is ignored.)
In my public and corporate responsibilities in the last 45 years, Pareto's wisdom has served me well.
The claim that "The social science literature relevant to the understanding of policy making in the face of uncertainty is largely absent." is absurd and reinforces the notion that the authors based their report on pre-formed opinion rather than data.

Oct 13, 2013 at 4:15 AM | Unregistered CommenterGeorge Daddis

I did read MOD and it was not worth the effort. There are some interesting and very informative negative reviews of MOD at amazon.com. There is one by an ethicist, Leon Higley, on their statements about dose makes the poison not to mention Nicolas Nierenberg's spirited and fact filled defense of his father. The comments after these reviews show CAGW proponents at their most unpleasant.

Oct 13, 2013 at 4:24 AM | Unregistered Commenterbernie1815

I read half of it and found it easy to put it down. It is merely another ideological hatchet job. As for Oreskes, an "historian of science" or State-sponsored terrorist with words? You decide.

Oct 13, 2013 at 4:26 AM | Unregistered CommenterNoblesse Oblige

MOD is a fundamentally deceptive book that is designed to do in fact what its authors falsely claim AGW skeptics of doing: cynically misleading people.

Oct 13, 2013 at 4:58 AM | Unregistered Commenterhunter

It's recursive. The book itself is evidence of its own thesis: that some people lie.

Oct 13, 2013 at 7:24 AM | Unregistered CommenterJack Hughes

The book's not worth the effort. The authors first sections are on the ozone layer, acid rain, DDT and tobacco. Was there ever any great dispute about the first two, merely a rather brief exploration by scientists and engineers of cause and effect followed by action? But they're dressed up to suit the meme of Merchants of Doubt that they were malicious plots by big business.

I'm not sure either way on what they say about DDT, and the tobacco story is covered far better than this elsewhere.

Anyway, these sections are only there as a 'foundation' for their thesis that there's lots of badies out there, with vested interests, motivated solely by the profit motive (unlike the authors). The climate change sections are the main thrust of the book, and they tediously follow those tramlines.

The GWPF was linking recently to a swipe the lovely Oreskes has taken concerning the development of the Continental Drift theory, reviewed (trashed) rather well here:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/naomis-fantasy-consensus
Does the woman ever do anything else?

It's interesting to survey the Merchants of Doubt web site (oh yes, there is one, the book's so terribly important, you see). I rather liked their errata list, from which:
"P. 67 - Neutral pH is listed as 6; it should be 7.
. . .
•P. 266 - We attribute the quote “There is no such thing as a free lunch” to John Maynard Keynes. Evidently, the actual source of this quote is unknown.
. . .
•P. 29 - Beryllium is described as a “heavy metal”. It is, in fact, the second lightest metal."

Draw your own conclusions.

Oct 13, 2013 at 9:33 AM | Unregistered CommenterCapell

Sadly, I see that Oreskes has left the University of California at San Diego to become Professor of the History of Science at the most prestigious department in that subject in the US, Harvard University.

This includes a post at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, where her research interests are listed as "Earth and environmental sciences, with a particular interest in understanding scientific consensus and dissent."

Same shilling advocacy, different ocean front.

Oct 13, 2013 at 12:27 PM | Unregistered CommenterOrson

@Capell That is a brilliant piece of info that you can tell the quality of Oreskes scientific understanding by the fundamental simple errors that they list in their own MOD errata after the book was published.
- BTW that page hides another error at the bottom "P.138, due to a typographic error the number of women in the Hirayama study is incorrectly given as 540. The correct number is 91,540 women"

Oct 13, 2013 at 1:37 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

- Oreskes sales ? Almost every local library has a shelf "Green-Reality reading" sponsored by Big Oil , and every university ecology/enviropment dept buys lots of skeptic books (NOT)
- In the real world due to the power of Big Green the reverse is the case, so they'll be maybe more Naomi Oreskes books bought than read.
Actually I did notice our library has 1 copy of Christopher Bookers's book "The Real Global Warming Disaster"
- You might like to put in a request that your local library buy one of the Bishop's books : Andrew Montford's books.

Oct 13, 2013 at 1:49 PM | Registered Commenterstewgreen

Policy based Social science is largely based on uncertainty?

Oct 14, 2013 at 6:34 AM | Unregistered CommenterJon

The AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population was founded in 2001. Since that moment I have seen it as a moral imperative to continue the work I’ve been doing for many years now: getting the message out and explaining to as many people as possible that human overpopulation of the Earth is occurring on our watch, that it poses profound existential risks for future human well being, life as we know it and environmental health, and that robust action is required starting here, starting now to honestly acknowledge, humanely address and eventually overcome.

Oct 18, 2013 at 6:47 PM | Unregistered CommenterSteven Earl Salmony

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