Progress requires messy freedom, not persnickety authoritarianism

From When the Scientific Consensus Is Corrected by a Skeptic by Abe Greenwald. Greenwald is somewhat strident in his polemical attack but the underlying facts are a great illustration of the perniciousness of a certain arrogance - that we can know what is Fake News and that we ought to censor public discourse to clear it of Fake News and false knowledge.

When you see the antics of the Westboro Baptists or the dangers of the anti-vaxers or the shady business practices of so many, it is of course tempting to want to shut off their megaphones and stop them from peddling hatred and fake news and false information. The arrogance is in failing to recognize that one man's met is another man's poison. I believe that the hatred, anti-semitism, bigotry and racism of the postmodernist critical theory left are a real menace to our society and well-being. And yet somewhere in each and every evil deceit they practice, there is always some small element of truth. It is another manifestation of Hayek's insight on the problem of knowledge. In a world of multiple complex dynamic chaotic systems generating emergent order, no one has the capacity of omniscience. No one can adjudicate fake news.

Back to Greenwald.

A group of international scientists is walking back major claims they’d made in the journal Nature about the rate at which the earth’s oceans are warming. A newly published note from the study’s co-author, Ralph Keeting, makes it plain that these researchers still believe the oceans are warming at an alarming rate, but they now acknowledge that procedural mistakes “that came to our attention” created an unacceptably large margin of error in their results.

That “came to our attention” line conceals the most important aspect of the story. These scientists work out of Princeton University, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, and various international institutions that make up the much lionized “scientific consensus” on climate change. And they had their landmark study debunked by an independent global-warming skeptic of no institutional standing named Nicholas Lewis.

Where did Lewis debunk the doomsayers? No, not in the esteemed pages of Nature but in a blog post at a website called Climate Etc., a small, dissenting dot in the vast universe of online science discussion. Lewis wrote: “The findings of the…paper were peer-reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media.” He went on: “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results. Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.”

Imagine a world in which we heard only from those pushing and applauding mainstream opinion. Or, perhaps, don’t imagine it; prepare for it. Only two days after Lewis wrote his post, the New York Times published an interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The Times’s David Gelles asked Pichai why tech companies couldn’t just ban propaganda and misinformation from social-media platforms as they’ve done with pornography and violence. Pichai explained that it could be hard to figure out what exactly constitutes propaganda and misinformation. He then offered examples to explain the challenge: “Should people be able to say that they don’t believe climate change is real? Or that vaccines don’t work? It’s just a genuinely hard problem.”

Despite the conviction of the Mandarin class that all climate change is solely attributable to CO2 emissions (they will not say this patent untruth, but it is how they behave), most people acknowledge the realities:

Climate is a affiliation of loosely coupled, multicausal, complex, dynamic, systems

That among the drivers of climate are many natural systems such as solar cycles, ocean currents, land use, etc. which likely affect climate to a much greater degree than human actions.

That our state of knowledge is inadequate to parse the sources of climate change between its known and possible contibutive sources.

That climate is subject to tipping points which render annual and decadal trends somewhat moot.

That our epistemic knowledge of the dynamics of those tipping points is vestigial.

That all our existing climate trends are well within the parameters of millennial and deca-millennial durations.

Our data sets are not sufficiently clean, clear, or complete for the degree of accuracy or precision we desire.

That our forecasting models are nascent and known to be highly sensitive to critical assumptions.

That all human emissions, including CO2, are likely contributive to potential climate change.

That climate research is big business with a host of skewed incentives.

Given these realities, the general public, in their wisdom, pay markedly little attention to the climate change debate, ranking it exceptionally low among all their concerns. There is consequently an immense chasm between the almost theological convictions of the Mandarin class and the quotidian priorities of the public. A chasm filled by shouting and over-confidence.

There is an alarmist establishment perspective on climate change which mandates coercive and negative actions by government against the current well-being of citizens on behalf of a belief system which is recent, subsidized and self-serving. That protected class of researchers generates forecasts and models which not infrequently are demonstrably wrong or faulty. That protected class has a long history of seeking to suppress dissident opinions and contrary data or interpretations.

In this instance, the research passed all the quality gatekeepers (government funding oversight, university/institutional quality controls); a multi-person, diverse team representing several cultures, countries and institutions; peer review from fellow experts in the field. All those Mandarin mechanism for ensuring accuracy and quality.

And they produced a hydrogen sulphide emitting egg of error which was identified within a week by an informed amateur working on his own with no support from anyone. The exposure of the errors occurred on an obscure website. And if the Mandarin class had their way, tech companies, at the behest of the Mandarin class would be monitoring and suppressing such "science-denying" sites.

Freedom is a mindset and we need our Mandarin class to loose themselves of their arrogance and accept that there is no perfect knowledge and that their epistemological system is as flawed as those of others. Progress only comes from many people interacting in good faith, with openness and transparency. Those seeking to police speech and ideas and control the means of information dissemination are, at heart, authoritarians wanting to strip others of their freedom.

Progress requires messy freedom, not persnickety authoritarianism.