Climate Change Denial: A Lesson from Plato Posted on 11:19, December 13th, 2009 by Guest PostGuest post by Ag. The Greek philosopher Plato (428/427-347 BC) is perhaps most famous for his suggestion in The Republic that the ideal political community ought to be ruled by philosopher-kings. This is somewhat of a shame because it obscures the fact that Plato never intended philosopher rule to be a practical political reality. The point of The Republic is really a “politics of the soul” and the long analogy between the internal structures of the community and those of the individual psyche are meant to illuminate the latter and to point the way for individuals to live a worthwhile life. As Socrates remarks at the end of the ninth book, it does not matter whether the ideal state ever comes into existence, because its primary purpose is to serve as a moral guide for individuals whatever political community they reside in (a notion taken up again in later times as the “City of God”). So the idea that Plato is promoting some sort of philosophical dictatorship is simply misguided, and the continuing promulgation of this interpretation likely has more to do with the desires of Plato’s utopian-minded readers than it does to the content of his writings (interested readers may wish to consult The Laws, where Plato offers a much more pragmatic political program). However, The Republic does have a powerful political message in its definition of civic justice. Justice, as defined by Plato is “to ta hautou prattein”, which literally means “doing one’s own things” or “doing one’s own job” and refraining from meddling in the jobs of others. The main idea behind this is a simple commitment to efficiency. Given a certain number of tasks that need to be accomplished in a society, we will all be better off if people are assigned these tasks based on their aptitude for them. People often react to this idea with horror because it seems as if people will be shoehorned into jobs that they do not like at the whim of other people. However, the market system does much the same thing in allocating labour in our society. I might wish to be a carpenter or a famous rock and roll singer, but if I am no good at it, I am unlikely to be successful and will have to find some other job. Moreover, our schooling system is in large part designed to detect the natural aptitudes of students so as to guide them into careers that suit their natural talents (full disclosure: I failed at both woodwork and music). It turns out that any society that recognizes the necessity of specialization and which is committed to efficient allocation of labour resources is going to have to find some mechanism that promotes Plato’s broad conception of civic justice. The flip side of this commitment to specialization is that it is going to be inefficient for people to meddle in the affairs of others. Specialization means that many people in society will have forms of expertise that I am in no position to make judgements about. In fact, the existence of any moderately complex society will mean that no one person will ever be in the position of being able to render judgement on most of the work of others. The existence of a massively complex society like ours means that even the best informed person will be competent to judge in only a few small areas of expertise. This is the case even in the modern academy, since the last person popularly supposed to have had the command of all western learning was Gottfried Wilhlem von Leibniz, who died nearly 300 years ago. Now it is clear that modern democratic societies do not entertain the possibility that political rule is a task in which experts should have complete authority, a supposition which if false would naturally lead to something like the philosopher-kings of Plato’s Kallipolis. If we agree with the democratic tradition, then there will obviously be no specifically political paternalism. Yet it is clearly the case that expertise is assumed in most other classes of human affairs, and that the price of wholesale rejection of it would return us to a pre-industrial society (which to be fair, some in the anarchist movement think is actually desirable). I take it as given that only a small minority of human beings would wish to return to such a pre-industrial state, and if that is the case, then all of us have to accept that we are simply going to have to trust the experts in most cases. In particular, there will be cases where it is impossible for the community at large to make an informed judgement on a non-political matter that has obvious political import. So there are going to be issues where some sort of paternalism is unavoidable. Climate change is just such an issue. People who demand a full explanation from climate scientists underestimate the amount of work and time that it takes to become a climate expert. In fact, it would take a significant amount of time and effort simply to be able to have a good grasp of the science, let alone to become a genuine expert. I freely admit in my own case, and I think most others should, that even if the science were explained to us in the most favourable terms, that we are not competent to make a judgement about it. The idea that all specialists should seek genuinely informed public consent is therefore ludicrous because it simply can’t be done without making the entire population do graduate work in climate science, and that would involve giving up on specialization, which is of course unacceptable. To ask climate scientists or any other expert to properly justify their conclusions to the laity is an act of considerable hubris, and should be seen as such, because you just can’t make it work. The obvious pitfall with the rule of expertise is that the experts may collude in their own interests against the community at large, and, as we are all aware, this is what climate scientists are regularly being accused of when it comes to the issue of climate change. Fortunately, we have long known how to minimize such risks without having to do PhDs ourselves. The universally favoured solution is to institute a competition and reward system among the experts to prevent such collusion. In other words, we set them at each others’ throats so they won’t suck at ours. That is why in science there are always great rewards available to the scientist who manages to disprove the current orthodoxy. Academic freedom and peer review are part of this, but there is of course no perfect system. So it is always remotely possible for a group of experts to collude and that is simply a risk we must take in order to secure the public benefits of specialist expertise. Now I want to take an example from popular media in order to show how our current culture is ill-suited to dealing with problems like climate change. I am sure that everyone is familiar with stories that pit a “scientific rebel” against the “establishment consensus”. In fact, it is hard to think of a movie about science that does not involve this hackneyed plot device. The rebel has some “hunch” that the establishment is wrong, and after many years of struggle is eventually vindicated. Usually the vindication is (implausibly) accompanied by the (male) protagonist winning the affections of a spectacularly well-endowed and submissive female, which of course serves to reinforce the desirability of questioning authority and consensus in our male-dominated culture, as well as to (justifiably) raise the ire of feminists. I do not wish to suggest that scientific progress does not sometimes or even often proceed like this (although I am sceptical of the implied sexual rewards having met many scientists’ wives). The problem with this story is of course that it is a story of exceptions. Most challenges to scientific orthodoxy fail, yet our society is so enamoured of individual success stories that it ignores this fact and tends to glorify dissident views purely because they involve dissent. The same plot device occurs in movies about successful business people. For example, the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” tells the more or less true story of the role of the founders of the Microsoft and Apple corporations in the origin of personal computing. Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs made a fortune simply by hoping that ordinary people would want to use computers (a memorable scene in the movie occurs when Wozniak presents his prototype PC to his employers at Hewlett-Packard, only for it to be ridiculed because ordinary people would “never” have a use for computers). What we don’t see in the movie are the hundreds of computer companies with different schemes that failed, even though they were also “innovative rebels” who challenged the “IBM monolith” in various ways. Hindsight is 20/20 and most people who had money to invest in 1977 had no way of knowing which of these rebel companies would succeed and which would fail, or indeed if any of them would succeed. So when Hewlett-Packard rejects personal computing, we are supposed to take them as having been stupid and shortsighted. But they were not, because it was entirely reasonable for Hewlett-Packard to reject the idea of personal computing given the state of the industry at the time. Technology companies like HP are constantly being offered many radical ideas and the vast majority of them are non-starters. When one of these bad ideas gets adopted, we all laugh at the spectcular failure and condemn the company involved. We forget that if Hewlett-Packard had taken up all the ideas it was offered, it would have bankrupted the company in very little time. HP simply had no way of knowing which of these radical ideas were going to work in the long run, and that is quite normal. In short, the rational decision is in some cases ultimately the wrong one, but that does not mean that irrationality is good practice. Similarly, those who ask us to be sceptical of the scientific consensus on climate change because it may be wrong, are asking us to do something irrational. The consensus on climate change may well be wrong, but most of us are in no position to make such a judgement and never will be. All we can do is trust the consensus among those who we have employed to research the issue. If the consensus is overturned, it will be very likely because of work done by some other expert, yet the vast majority of us will not be in a position to judge that either. Even other scientists are not in a much better position to judge than the rest of us, since science is itself heavily specialized (hence the inherent silliness of many “I have a degree in physics and I think the climate consensus is wrong” posts – you might as well get the world’s greengrocers to unite against it). In the end, climate change denial is nothing more than a conspiracy theory implicating the majority of the world’s climate scientists. Yet when was the last time you saw a movie about a conspiracy theory where the conspiracy turned out not to exist? Compare that with how many conspiracy theories turn out to be true, and you will have your answer. So while it goes against almost everything that popular culture tells us, most of us are better off simply trusting the expert consensus. All we can do is make sure that a working structure of incentives is set up to encourage the experts to be critical of each others’ work. This in the end is why amateur climate sceptics are silly, and our cultural indulgence of them is dangerous. So what does this have to do with Plato? Well, Plato was the first to demonstrate how any economically sophisticated society relies on expertise. While he has been condemned for his musings on political expertise, it is ridiculous to think, for the reasons given above, that he is not correct about other kinds of expertise. Therefore, since other kinds of expertise will on some occasions spill over into the political realm, it follows that a condition of living in a modern society is that we have to accept a great deal of paternalism in matters concerning specialist expertise. But that isn’t so bad, because everyone is in the same boat. Climate scientists may be the authorities on the climate, but they have to submit to authorities on medicine, and so on. So should we abandon democracy? Of course not. But what we should do is recognize the only kind of democracy that is plausible. A wholly anti-paternalist democracy, based on the idea of majority informed consent is silly, because most of us will never be sufficiently informed to make competent decisions. A democracy based on majority informed consent will be a democracy of mud hut dwellers. There will of course be many expert rulings that people can happily ignore whilst harming only themselves (like smoking in private), but climate change is obviously not like that, since it is an issue of global concern, and in cases like these (and a wide variety of others, including vaccination programs) paternalism is not only justifiable, but it would be difficult to see how we could do without it. We literally have no choice but to allow various experts to make choices on our behalf in many areas of our lives. The correct role of democracy is to ensure openness and protect against conspiracies of experts by ensuring that systems are in place that prevent expert collusion as much as possible. In the end that is all that democracy can do and all that it should do. But this is, of necessity, a democracy that does not usurp the consensus of experts, rather it simply regulates the social system in which scientific expertise is channeled for the public good. This is especially important when we think what would happen if some people had their way and every important decision a society faced was decided by popular referendum. In the end, Plato was correct. Paternalism is a necessary feature of an advanced society and one that we all benefit from. Childish anti-paternalism will get us absolutely nowhere, but in the end that is all that most climate change denial boils down to, and the only reason it gets airtime is that our popular culture has been obsessed with it for the last 50 years. 16 Responses to “Climate Change Denial: A Lesson from Plato”Leave a Reply |
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Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. How many ways are thee wrong. Many.
We should trust the experts because they know best! Who is qualified to vote. How informed must you be to appoint a specialist to govern on your behalf? Who decides how qualified.
What right does a climate change believer have to inflict their “certainties” on me. None. Democracy may choose politicians who believe and their actions will impact me but that is the price I pay for living in a democracy. I empower politicians to exercise JUDGEMENT on my behalf. That is democracy
You align the climate change sceptics with the worst of Hollywood movie plots and the believers with Plato.
Which is strange because what is obvious from Climategate is that the believers did not feel they could rely on the science itself but felt compelled to meddle and change the message. When they did that they stopped being scientific experts and simply became politicians spinning a view.
You do not need to be a climate change expert to have an opinion. In no other sphere except a fascist state would you expect the elite to make all determinations on behalf of the people.
read your 1984 again and consider groupthink.
Read this link and wonder whether you should trust the experts or maintain a healthy scepticism.(Even if you dont get the girl with big tits)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
Ag: So would you be prepared to accept the recommendations of professional, trained economists on what’s the best method of financial regulation?
Less aggressively, I’m also interested in what measures you think democracies can take to prevent the collusion of experts. You haven’t really addressed that, but it seems absolutely crucial to your point – not least because many anti-environmentalists would wholly agree with you and say that the problem as it exists is that there is a collusion of experts and that it’s not being prevented.
An entirely sensible post which is finally becoming more commonplace in the wider debate, like this one from the Economist a couple of weeks ago:
This newspaper believes that global warming is a serious threat, and that the world needs to take steps to try to avert it. That is the job of the politicians. But we do not believe that climate change is a certainty. There are no certainties in science. Prevailing theories must be constantly tested against evidence, and refined, and more evidence collected, and the theories tested again. That is the job of the scientists.
Full version here:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14966227
When I’ve completed my PhD in climate science in about 364 years, I may venture a learned opinion, but until then, I see my role as nothing other than holding our political leaders to account for how they intepret the science and wider consensus.
PB.
Perhaps more a case of not necessarily trusting the experts, but a case of respecting their expertise.
For the most part we already do, although in most cases the issues are rather mundane and nobody notices, often because there is little dispute involved.
However, economics is not really a science in the same way that climatology is, and for that reason there is a lot less consensus among economists than there is in the genuine sciences. Where there is no overwhelming agreement among the experts, my argument doesn’t apply. But in those cases where there is consensus over some difficult, technical matter, I think it would be insane not to listen to them.
I do notice that none of the other critical commenters has addressed my actual argument. Please try to read more carefully.
I did try to address it, but I guess I assumed some familiarity with academic practice. The only solution I know of is to put scientists in competition with each other, and institute a reward scheme (promotion, tenure) for those who are successful. That’s what the academic system does. If you prove an accepted theory wrong, it improves your personal “score” within the scientific community, leads to research grants, promotion, etc.
It’s really the same as the regulations we have to prevent market collusion and price fixing. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well in practice.
The problem is that many of the issues ( climate change, paving/farming of the planet, pollution etc., ) are complex and multi-faceted, and there are “experts” for and against. Playing the “number of experts on my side” game, and waiting for definitive data, isn’t sensible when waste is obvious.
In other words, we’ve suffered from an overabundance of experts because of the diverse nature of the problems, as well as the implications – hence the presence of three IPCC major Working Groups:-
I = Science ( climate scientists and friends );
II = Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability ( ecologists, economists, sociologists and friends);
III = Mitigation ( alternative energy, engineers, accountants and friends ).
Ideally, once everybody agrees WG I has shown the magnitude of the issue, then WG II provides the information to encourage change, and WG III provides the options for those needing to change. Clearly that ideal is custard.
The better solution is to use the experts as miners’ canaries, and use common sense to plan the way forward. However, because various parties ( on both sides ) have polarised the debate, the car has stalled.
Common sense should tell us we don’t need engines with the power of 100+ horses to move us around. We don’t need all of the packaging around goods we buy, and we don’t need to have every nation agree on future action before any action starts.
At the personal, regional, and national levels we should make changes that minimise waste without waiting for others. It’s sensible, and should be economic, to conserve energy and minimise environmental degradation. Polluters should always pay true costs, even if some industries have to disappear.
Once enough people are seeking solutions, they create opportunities for innovators to produce viable options.
What all forms of conservation and sensible use require is to be seen as socially-responsible. If we wait for consensus leadership from global politicians, we’ll fail.
Ag, right, I thought you might answer that way, although I think in restricting your argument for deferrence to experts to actual scientists, by which I presume you mean physical scientists rather than social scientists, you are making the argument considerably more narrow than Plato was, to the point where I think you can’t really rely on his authority anymore.
Similarly, you say that economics is not a real science because of the lack of consensus among economists, but then you go on to say that the way to prevent collusion is to set up competition – which means less consensus. So you’re effectively saying the way to prevent scientists from forming an oligarchy is to make them less scientific – to which I can only say ‘huh’?
As an aside, I like to think I am familiar with ‘the academic system’, at least to the extent that I hold a teaching position within it, but it didn’t occur to me as an obvious answer for your point – particularly since there’s no sign that the incentives you’ve identified as key are harder for academics to achieve in competition than collusion. Quite the reverse, actually.
It seems clear enough to me – the scientist who could refute AGW theory would not only be famous among scientists, they’d be world famous. Politicians would fete them. They’d not only be looking at a Nobel, but probably a Congressional Medal of Honor to go with it. Given that to compete for, the idea that scientists are colluding on AGW theory for a few million in research grants is ridiculous.
Plato’s point is sound, if not to the extent he may have thought it was (since he seems willing to have extended it to political expertise in some dialogues). But if we say that Plato was wrong about what there could be genuine expertise about, that does not prevent him from being right about expertise in general.
I do not mean that economics is not a real science because of the lack of consensus among economists. I don’t think it is a science for other reasons (and it is unlike some of the social sciences in this respect). These other reasons produce the lack of consensus in many cases. It’s still useful as a field of expertise.
However, the obvious lack of consensus among economists over certain issues makes them useless as authorities to which the public can appeal. But there are loads of things that most economists agree on, even if we don’t notice them, and we ought to listen to the community of economists in those cases. Given that climate scientists are almost universally supportive of the AGW theory, this is not the case with them.
In other words, if there is a scientific consensus, then the rest of us ought to follow it. If not, then, until there is, it’s a political decision.
On your last point: competition does not mean less consensus. It simply means that any consensus that emerges will have endured trial by fire, and that will give us more confidence that it is an accurate consensus.
I see that PM already made that point.
PM,
Much as I dislike making the nutters’ case for them, they’d argue that the real scientists are trying, but their progress is being hampered by all the second-hander scientists who are colluding to suck in a few million in research grants because they don’t have the godlike vision or character of those few True Scotsmen.
L
Patrons and funding bodies employ those whose objectives are aligned with the funders’ goals. It takes an exceptional scientist to prosper whilst outside the consensus, especially in a contentious field with major economic implications.
The best-known skeptic ( Richard S. Lindzen ) has superb credentials, and participated in the 3rd IPCC report, but was concerned that the agreed scientific perception was modified ( made human influence more definite ) by others before publication. IPCC protocols allow such final “refinements”.
The trend over the last few decades has been to starve
the renegades of funding, or besmitch their work because of their funder – eg how some scientists treat chemical toxicity studies from the well-regarded industry-funded toxicity centre, CITT.
There will no Nobel prize for an individual scientist refuting AGW, because the theory now has more heads than the Lernaean Hydra, and the IPCC already has the Nobel. The contrary Nobel would have a higher hurdle than usual.
The next Nobel associated with CC will probably be given to scientists/engineers/economists etc. who identify effective mitigation or management of AGW or one the harmful consequences.
What reason do you have to believe him rather than the others?
Like me, I doubt you are competent to make the decision. You’re talking about one person, who may well have an honest difference of opinion with the others, and opposing them to the majority consensus.
That is irrational. You have no reason to believe that he is right. On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely that there is a genuine conspiracy of scientists. That’s no better than the nuts who think that “the Jews” run the world banking system.
All I can see people doing is complaining that scientists “might” be corrupt. This is pointless, because if we treated every case the same, we would be living in mud huts.
The deniers seem to think that a scientific grant is like winning a lottery; you get millions of dollars to go and spend on whatever you want. The depressing reality is you have to give most of the grant to your research institution and the rest of the money goes on fixing all the lab equipment that your grad students break. You don’t really take up a career in science for the huge dollars.
Where did I say I believed him?, merely that he’s one of the more credible. When I last looked, a few years ago, my understanding of his position was that global warming was currently happening, but the contribution of humanity was not clear. That’s not my position, but ( to me ) it’s not an irrational position either.
With regard to the changing of the IPCC report, Lindzen raised the issue whilst serving on the US National Academy Of Sciences panel on Climate Science a few years ago, but the majority of the members felt that it was acceptable for policymakers to modify scientific opinion for emphasis, as the final summary was intended for policymakers.
Your last two paragraphs appear totally dissociated from what I’ve written, so I’ll leave them. Windmills have slowly-rotating sails, ask Sancho.
This needs qualification.
What exactly is expertise – what is expertise consensus, and of course an imposed consensus is, lacking the attainment of perfect knowledge, the end of (peer reviewed and subject to challenge) continuing expertise (true science).
Men are not of the “city of god” and thus our way of rule must necessarily reflect this lack of perfect knowledge and need for continuing improvement – which means openness to challenge to the established expertise/order of rule.
Needless to say some disciplines, such as economics, are creatures of ideology and identity politics more than science.
PS Scientists have been looking at their need for transparency and accountability to the public when their science becomes an issue in the political life of the nation.
… a three-fold revolution in the demands that are placed on scientific knowledge claims as they apply to investigations such as climate change:
· To be warranted, knowledge must emerge from a respectful process in which science’s own internal social norms and practices are adhered to
· To be validated, knowledge must also be subject to the scrutiny of an extended community of citizens who have legitimate stakes in the significance of what is being claimed
· And to be empowered for use in public deliberation and policy-making, knowledge must be fully exposed to the proliferating new communication media by which such extended peer scrutiny takes place.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8388485.stm