Intellectual honesty is a difficult and scarce commodity

An entertaining, and outrageous, essay. The writer is not being outrageous. The circumstances he describes are outrageous. From When a Question of Science Brooks No Dissent by Myles Weber.

As a university professor, I am best positioned to report on the widespread incompetence and malfeasance found specifically in academe. A work colleague once corrected me on a matter concerning the greenhouse effect. With no scientific training, he had recently moderated a panel discussion on climate change in an attempt to convince students to support our university president’s Green Initiative, which as far as I could tell reduced carbon dioxide emissions not at all but placed undue strain on the university’s finances, which in turn put upward pressure on tuition costs. I mentioned to my colleague in passing that, from an educational standpoint, the term greenhouse gas was an unfortunate misnomer since the architectural design of an actual greenhouse is not closely related to the physical properties of tropospheric greenhouse gases.

This has been my go-to analogy to explain how some people have confused the two phenomena: The sentence “Like Placido Domingo, Bob Dylan sings for a living” does not convey the same meaning as “Bob Dylan sings like Placido Domingo for a living.” It’s true that carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, and other gases drive the Earth’s average temperature higher than it otherwise would be, just as the design of a greenhouse makes the interior of that structure warmer than the surrounding environment. But the processes by which the warming occurs in these two instances are quite distinct, in the same sense that a troubadour’s vocals in no way resemble an operatic tenor’s. The confusion resulting from the term greenhouse gas, I suggested to my colleague, made it that much harder to explain the general workings of our climate to students, who might end up believing greenhouse gases form a solid barrier to convection or, conversely, that a greenhouse reradiates invisible light energy as heat energy at select frequencies.

My colleague assured me I was misinformed. As a bonus, he did so in front of our department chairwoman just as I was about to go up for tenure. Greenhouses, he explained, are in fact warmed primarily by extra concentrations of carbon dioxide imbedded in the glass plates of the building. Well, I conceded, a small, perhaps even measurable amount of warming might occur in a greenhouse as a result of elevated CO2 levels in the glass panels; indeed, a greenhouse’s temperature also rises when a human being steps inside and exhales warm air. But these are insignificant considerations that have nothing to do with the structure’s basic design. During the day a greenhouse will be warmer than the surrounding environment regardless of whether a human enters it and breathes or whether the clear panels contain extra CO2 or are carbon free.

My colleague—our department’s self-appointed expert on climate matters—was undeterred. “It’s just like my front porch at home,” he insisted. “In the afternoon the porch is much warmer than the rest of the house during the summer—you really bake in there—because of the carbon dioxide in the windows.”

Heh. Sometimes your rhetorical opponents are their own best self-refutation. The best way to win the debate is to give them more time to speak.

But there is something interesting behind this article, something not alluded to. Weber goes on:

I wasn’t sure how to respond politely to this new assertion. Glass is an insignificant reservoir of CO2—that much was still true. Moreover, as the sun reaches its zenith on a summer day, perpendicular windows serve as fairly ineffectual portals through which visible light energy may pass. Under these conditions an enclosed porch becomes warmer than the rest of the house due largely to a third process, called conduction, owing to the porch’s uninsulated roof and walls, which receive the brunt of the sun’s rays and pass heat into the building. (Björk sings nothing like Bob Dylan or Placido Domingo, in other words.) If you’ve ever lived in an attic apartment in the summer, even if you kept the window shades drawn, you have felt the power of conduction.

I thought I saw signs of sympathy on our chairwoman’s face as she looked on, and a sense of relief passed over me, but it turned out her sympathy was not on my behalf but, rather, my colleague’s. After I reaffirmed that carbon dioxide was an incidental consideration in these cases, the chairwoman asked: “Well, how does a greenhouse work then?”

I first inquired whether she was serious, for I didn’t want to believe that two college professors in succession both lacked a basic understanding of the simple workings of a greenhouse, but that was the reality. I therefore explained, “Visible light energy passes through the transparent panels and gets converted into heat energy when it strikes the plants, tables, and floor. This warms the surrounding air, which rises, but the convection process is impeded by the solid glass panels, trapping the heated air inside.”

My department chairwoman glanced at our colleague, then at me. “Oh,” she said. Then she turned and walked away.

Weber has some further wonderful examples of the disparity between the conviction the academics have in their nonsense assertions and the paucity of their own knowledge.

Properly, this should be a discussion of ideological faith or the capacity to think rationally, but Weber is indirectly pointing towards a different dynamic on display.

These people are, by-and-large, not stupid. Foolish or credulous perhaps, but not stupid. So why are they spouting such nonsense?

Weber notes:

When I was a college undergraduate, incidents like the following would happen with some frequency: Noticing how haphazardly fellow students punctuated their essays or how flustered they became attempting to compute simple mathematical equations in an introductory statistics course, I would wonder whether I had been the one member of my generation who paid attention in high school. Nowadays a different thought hits me: Perhaps I alone did not sleep through fourth-grade science class. It’s bad enough that an academic can be so thoroughly misled by the term greenhouse gas that he becomes confused about a physical process he probably understood correctly at one point (say, at age ten). But I don’t think my department chairwoman had been misled by that unfortunate term. I believe she had simply been going through life with only a vague notion of how a greenhouse works. Even decades of global-warming alarmism had not impelled her to give the pertinent physics much thought before now. Still, she understood precisely what beliefs were expected of an academic—that greenhouse gas emissions are dangerous, catastrophically so, and the science regarding such matters is settled—and these marching orders were good enough for her.

Weber asks the pertinent question.

How are educated and credentialed people able to get things so wrong?

His answer is, I think, incomplete.

By remaining ignorant about technical matters.

As far as it goes, certainly that has to be an element. But I do not think this is really a domain knowledge issue. The implication is that were we to teach them some more facts, they would be able to provide better answers. Up to a point that seems obvious, but I would argue that it is more complex than that. It includes at the least an answer Weber has already provided. The underlying issue is the old adage.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

In academia, permeated as it is by postmodernism and particularly critical theory and social justice theory, it does not pay to know facts and to seek truth. It pays to regurgitate ideological platitudes.

I would argue that this underlying truism is furthered by something deeper, our tendency to think in mental models rather than empirically, logically, rationally.

Empiricism, logic and rationality are cognitively taxing. It takes a lot of time and energy to think critically. Consequently, we cut corners. We work through a problem and then apply that answer to anything that looks like that problem (cognitive recycling). We apply that same answer to anything that looks similar enough to that already solved problem (cognitive extension.) We defer to those we trust (cognitive outsourcing.) We transfer concepts from one domain to another (cognitive parallelism.)

By doing so, we save ourselves a lot of time and energy and it usually works well enough as long as we are in a cognitively consistent and trustworthy environment. But the more rapidly changing is the environment, the more complex, the more unfamiliar or uncertain, the more the impetus is on taking advantage rather than seeking truth, the less useful are these strategies.

From these cognitive conservation strategies, we create normative mental models which work reasonably well. They work. They are efficient. But the knowledge of the models is not the same thing as knowledge itself.

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That's a mental model we take for granted. Were someone to ask why, most of us could get to an answer after a bit of reflection. "It has something to do with the earth's rotation around the sun. Or is it that the earth rotates on its axis. Hmm." We can get there with a little thinking but not smoothly and not easily. And an indeterminate number might not get there at all.

There are innumerable mental models we invoke on a daily basis with little refection on the domain knowledge underneath. Supply and Demand; Normal Distribution; Balance of Power; Black Swan; Economic Cycles; Weather is not Climate; Correlation is not Causation; Power and influence; Second Law of Thermodynamics; Process production versus Discrete Production; Feedback Loops - all are mental models which are exceptionally useful but which cannot be explained in a simple fashion. Or accurately. Or at all. Depending on the individual.

How are educated and credentialed people able to get things so wrong?

I think they can get things so wrong because the world is more complex than we acknowledge. Because academics are rewarded for narrow domain knowledge and rarely trial things in a cognitively heterogenous environment and with heterogenous belief systems, they become accustomed to working with abstract ideas which they don't necessarily understand themselves. By not ever facing challenges, they fall into the indulgence of extravagant overconfidence. It is no surprise that the chair of an English Department has little or no domain knowledge about complex systems or climate or physics or chemistry.

The only surprise is that she should deliver statements with conviction which are based on nothing more than trust in others from within her circumscribed world of beliefs (academia). I guess there is also an especial surprise since rhetoric usually belongs within the English Department and rhetoric usually involves a domain knowledge pertinent to logic.

I think Weber is wrong to focus primarily on addressing domain knowledge. It would help but I think is by no means sufficient. But his more basic recommendation is spot on.

Here’s my point: Intellectuals who brainlessly push climate-change alarmism need to wise up for their own good. By making disingenuous arguments in an echo chamber, university instructors undercut support for their own political agendas and facilitate the electoral success of politicians they abhor. I fully recognize Donald Trump’s unattractive qualities—his gauche demeanor, inflammatory rhetoric, and appalling braggadocio—but Obama’s successor has never suggested that educators must engage in demeaning forms of playacting so as to leave unchallenged a questionable scientific consensus. Nor has he implied that the unrelated slaughter of schoolchildren adds urgency to such a task. Condescension and bullying by the environmentalists may have worked for a while, but most voters are not children anymore. It’s time for the academic and especially the scientific communities to reembrace Enlightenment principles, the most important of which is intellectual honesty.