Thanks for the links. I’ll peruse your and the responder’s viewpoints after I finish the book and Peter Woit’sNot Even Wrong. I’m only half way through and haven’t encountered what you refer to as his “politicizing science in yet another direction” bent.

Given that, I do contend that “cloistered” cultures is a major problem within academia and that “tenure” and the prevalent “political correctness” and “postmodernism” movements are it main faults.

Since this is grossly off-topic, I’ll refrain from further comments on the subject until I complete my readings.

Cheers

It’s a prevalent problem within all “cloistered” cultures, especially academia. If one doesn’t embrace and espouse the consensus viewpoint, he’ll never get a position or tenure within that culture.

I would agree that this is a mechanism that sometimes plays a role. I disagree that it is universal and I disagree that this behavior is always unjustified or counterproductive. There is a lot of “consensus” in cases where the underlying opinion is indeed correct. For example, most physicists think that the people who want to revise Einstein’s relativity and return before 1905 are crackpots. I think so, too. The “alternative physicists” don’t get jobs, and I personally think that it is very correct. The fact that most people in physics departments believe that they’re wrong is not a social construct. It is a result of their independent analysis of facts. I was never brainwashed by relativity – on the contrary, learned it despite the environment that didn’t care. This is true for many physicists – all of us have to re-discover old things all the time and only sometimes we find really new important insights – and even those who learned all these things at school can have the right to view their conclusion as a legitimate conclusion of people with independent brains.

The previous paragraph explained why it’s not always a wrong thing that people happen to agree at the end – because the agreement simply has objective pillars underlying it in cases when it’s not doctored. And be sure that there are many cases in science where it’s not doctored by hysteria and intimidation – where it’s simply a state of our current knowledge. Even if you’re suspicious about the scientific statements, it’s still true that the crackpots are less intelligent and intellectually powerful, according to many objective criteria. We can learn their stuff but they can’t learn ours. The situation is not symmetric.

Finally, I also want to point out that the mechanism is not always present, and sometimes it’s working in the reverse direction. Many of the things that are dominant today used to be fringe subjects. Surely, academic feminism used to be a fringe subject in the past, and I hope that it will become one in the future, again. There are both positive as well as negative theories and ideologies and frameworks that are both dominant as well as marginal. These things are uncorrelated and they must be expected to be uncorrelated, and everyone who is building some policies on the assumption that they are correlated is politicizing science, adding irrationality to it, whatever is the sign of his or her contribution.

Lee Smolin is politicizing science in yet another direction. At a political level, it is really the same direction as in climate science. It is about artificial amplification of some “oprressed” people’s ideas. In the world of AGW, these oppressed people who are used to push some ideology are those who can’t produce too much CO2. In the world of quantum gravity, they’re people who are not intellectually powerful enough to learn modern QFT and string theory. Of course, in both cases, the usage of the “poor” people as an argument is a fraud because where the outcome is that some pretty rich biased climate scientists and their political allies earn millions or billions of dollars, and Lee Smolin earns hundreds of thousands of dollars on his unjustified alarmism, too. Once again, it is always wrong if someone starts to push political arguments as the main ones, whatever is the color of these political arguments. You can’t determine the truth in science in this way. And that’s the memo.

Incidentally, I’ve written dozens of things about Lee’s methods to “find a new Einstein”. Some of them are cited in his book, e.g.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-no-new-einstein.html
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-no-new-einstein-ii.html

The main point of these texts is the free market of ideas that decides as optimally as reality allows as long as people behave rationally.

Best
Lubos

And it shows the metamorphoris from a reasonable explanation of the science and uncertainties to name calling and ridiculous predictions. All in the same article.

There is a good explanation of chaotic processes, why weather can’t be predicted even in theory, climate models cannot model clouds, clouds are the largest uncertainty in the models, etc. The text “uncertain” is used eleven times in the article.

The money quote is below:

“Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.”

Kerry Emanuel is not a moron, he knows the climate models are nonsense, Senator Kennedy is a hypocrite, and nuclear is the only immediate solution, but he can’t come out and say it, otherwise he will end up an outcast.

Notwithstanding your opinion on the referenced book, do you disagree with this?

It’s a prevalent problem within all “cloistered” cultures, especially academia. If one doesn’t embrace and espouse the consensus viewpoint, he’ll never get a position or tenure within that culture.

you shouldn’t get confused by the postmodern book you’re just reading. The isomorphism between the two fields is just the opposite than you indicate. The author of the book you’re reading is a bubble of hot air created by the media whose influence has nothing to do with actual science.

It’s pure politics. If you read the book carefully, you will see that he’s been using and he is still planning to use the same methods as the warming alarmists, such as reliance on philosophical preconceptions, imposing language of political correctness, affirmative action for authors of convenient things etc.

You may perhaps get some philosophical message right after all but be sure that in the physics details, the book is a constant flow of nonsense that is quantitatively unjustifiable. Thanks.

All the best
Lubos

Not surprising at all. What’s surprising is that he made that comment. It’s a prevalent problem within all “cloistered” cultures, especially academia. If one doesn’t embrace and espouse the consensus viewpoint, he’ll never get a position or tenure within that culture. I’m currently perusing The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin, 2006, wherein are many references to that problem within the physics community.

The place to to start for the geological evolution of climate is still Nance, R. D., T. R. Worsley and J. B. Moody. 1988. The supercontinent cycle, Scientific American, 259(1):72-79

–which is the “greenhouse-icehouse” cycle, fueled by supercontinent creation /destruction and the long-term secular decline in atmospheric CO2.

There’s a half-decent Wikipedia summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent_cycle

and a precis of the supercontinent argument at http://scienceweek.com/2004/sa040730-5.htm

Worsley’s elegant CO2 vs. geological time plots don’t seem to be online.

Cheers — Pete Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Arizona and New Mexico (USA)

Not surprising to me. He says “shocking lack of political diversity among American academics“, not ‘American scientists’. He seems to be concerned that the average person will lump all those scientists with the dominant ideology in academia in general. Although academics in science and engineering tend to be to the right of other academic fields, they still are to the left of the average American.

If you search for ClimateAudit Cohn-Lins

http://www.google.com/search?q=climateaudit+cohn-lins

it shows “Motls” and leads you to the RC blog by Rasmus

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/12/temperatures-autocorrelation.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=228

who is negative because the climate is “stable” and the LTP could be misused by the skeptics: Cohn Lins were pitching statistics against physics, and you remember all these things. Koutsoyannis is the same thing:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=483

It was never an article where you gave the same sign as RC. I said that Kerry Emanuel was the first time when RC and CA rated a thing both by a positive sign.