Tag Archive for 'truth'

What is truth?

The other day, I mentioned Clive Hamilton’s series of posts on climate change denialism at The Drum. In today’s edition, Hamilton comments:

Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ’science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ’skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Continue reading ‘What is truth?’

Of media narratives, truth and narratologies

It would be interesting to study the role of the economics editor. In Australia, at least, those papers and media outlets which employ such a person appear to see the role as enforcing the BCA line on liberal economics, even if sometimes the actually existing BCA companies have their hands well and truly out for the largesse of the state. There’s a bit of a story about ideology here, and the neo-liberal whip gig only really works if one is not too partisan about it – so Paul Kelly’s portentous ponderings fit the bill exactly. At The Australian (and here, the broader tale is one of the trajectory of that paper overall), Michael Stutchbury has taken the commentary in a more openly pro-Coalition direction. Witness, as they say on the op/ed pages, his latest rather unfocused piece – decrying Labor governments (and social democrats, and Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton) for mixing politics with economics. Magically, of course, blatant political fixes by conservative administrations never seem to attract the same opprobrium. It’s as if the “reform test” constantly being applied to Kevin Rudd (despite what he himself has said about his own views on economics, and perhaps it were better had he been taken at his word) were one of complete purity in adherence to the gospel according to the Productivity Commission, or whoever represents the yardstick for this stuff at any particular point in time.

It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.

But there’s a broader point here.

We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Continue reading ‘Of media narratives, truth and narratologies’

Truthiness versus Truth

The fiercely independent thinking RWDBs of the Australian media and blogosphere have been out and about reciting talking points from the discredited Republican Noise machine ever since Barack Obama won the Presidency last week. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Antipodean wingnuts take their wingnutty duties so seriously, but I’m sure that many are still firmly in the faith-based alternative universe, and thus allergic to facts. But for anyone who’s been wondering about some of the most egregious memes around the joint, here are some links to set the record straight.

Myth #1: The Obama turnout meant that Prop 8 won in California.

But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters — the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) — voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin

- Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com

Myth #2: The Democrats’ victory wasn’t comprehensive.

What happened? Overall, the Democrats gained a bit in 2004, a lot in 2006, and some in 2008. But we knew that (see the time series plot in the blog entry linked above). We also see a bit of scatter. Beyond this, yes, there are some patterns. In 2006, the Democrats particularly gained in Republican areas–see how those dots in the lower left of the second graph are way above the 45-degree line? In 2008, the swing is more uniform… Returning to the “How well did the Democrats actually do in 2008″ question, I think that one problem is that people are comparing Obama’s vote to Kerry’s vote but then comparing the congressional Democrats in 2008 to the congressional Democrats in 2006. I think it’s more appropriate to compare 2008 to 2004 in both cases. As Paul Krugman put it, “Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections.”

- Andrew Gelman.

Myth #3: Obama would be politically sensible to govern as a moderate gradualist.

So a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn’t listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself.

- Paul Krugman.