Archive for October, 2007
Every time Dawkins opens his mouth, I dislike him more
“What is ethically wrong is the hounding [of Watson], by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant “thought police”, of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation”
That Watson’s remarks have pleased the BNP no end (rel=nofollow btw), and may have serious political consequences is no concern to Dawkins. Obviously, we’re all “thought police.” Whilst Dawkins universalism demands that we be intolerant of Muslim protests against the West, he believes we should be tolerant of the unjustifiably racist remarks of a member of his white, male, scientific, elitist community. If the general public’s intolerance of his remarks is illiberal to Dawkins, then damn right we are.
It’s a cosmopolitan intolerance for Watson’s remarks that requires that he should be ostracised.
Science in an age of quackery
Yesterday, Professor David Colquhoun gave a stirring lecture on the corporatisation of academia, and the rise of non-science. It was great to see an esteemed professor call university performance metrics a load of “meaningless bollocks”.
He attacked, and rightly so, the growth of homeopathy degrees in the universities. For me, there is only one reason why you would need professional homoeopathists. That is to lull those turning to alternative medicine into hospitals and then get them on normal treatment. But, that’s a marketing exercise, and a poor and expensive one at that, which detracts from what should be the real work of universities.
There are doubtless some hard left sociologists who did see the task in hand of destroying science. But, let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water of constructivism. As Latour says in Reassembling the Social, when we think about “construction”, we should think about how like a building (which is real and exists) is constructed – “how is it constructed?”, “how well is it constructed?”, “what were the materials used to construct it?”, etc… That should be the task of sociology applied to the sciences. Also, the actors in a sociological study of the sciences should be able to read an account of their construction of facts, and learn how to better construct them.
Some sociologists and theorists need to stop trying to destroy the sciences with obtuse language, and deal with the practicalities of assembling our collective. However, the sciences must be willing to learn from the sociological studies, in order to improve themselves.
Here’s an extreme case in point – Evolution. When experts claimed that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in the classroom, it is not to say that creationism should be put on an equal footing with science. It should be taught alongside evolution so children can learn how each of these theories are constructed. To use a building analogy, one is made of straw, and the other is made of bricks. Unfortunately, and perhaps this is what the “experts” are missing, without the teachers being taught about the construction of knowledge, we cannot expect for one minute for them to teach evolution and creationism properly in the classroom without making a botch of it. On a side note, this is precisely why universities should be running the academies, not businesses.
On the issue of climate change, I have said many times that on some levels, the climate scientists are doing the job of the denialists for them. This may be an odd statement, but bear with me. For decades, we have taught children, and adults have learnt about the scientific method. However, the sociology of scientific knowledge revealed that the sciences are a whole lot more complicated. Funding disputes were discovered. It was discovered that the sciences are heavily influenced by the political status quo – right now, it’s insipid managerialism. However, it does not necessarily follow that the sciences reality doesn’t really exist. It simply adds to the explanation.
However, the denialists had a look at the open process of climate scientists and saw pretty much the same thing as the sociologists. However, their trick is to assert that the mythological pure scientific method is the “one true science”. As a result, they can dismiss the climate sciences of falsehood, and claim their scepticism to be superior.
Had the science wars been averted and the natural and social sciences had a conversation, then perhaps collectively we wouldn’t find ourselves in an age of endarkenment. The sciences armed with the reflexivity of constructivism would have been able to shield itself from the creeping marketisation it finds itself in.
I look forward to the day when scientists and sociologists can meet without the words “microfascist” and “Sokal” being exchanged.
Blog Action Day 2007 - My position on environmental issues
I haven’t really had time to prepare this post, but I thought it might be good to summarise my position on environmental issues:
We are facing unprecedented levels of risk with regards to the collapse of ecosystem services
Following the reports from the IPCC and UNEP, it is clear that many of our ecosystem services are heavily degraded, anthropogenic global warming and the nitrogen cycle being the main worries.
Dogmatically sticking to ideology has serious side effects
For a start, I completely reject anarchoprimitivism. The idea that all cities should be destroyed and form primitive communes across the world is absurd and dangerous.
Human population is so large that urbanization is a necessary condition to support that population. Cities can be highly efficient, even without sustainable planning. Optimal densities seem to be around 10 million.
Poverty reduction and ecosystem degradation mitigation and adaptation are highly inter-related
Considering most poor urban populations are located in areas liable to flooding and landslides, ecosystem degradation and millennium development goals need to pursued together.
This will require a limitation on the power of fragmented NGOs operating as fiefdoms that feed off the international banking system. The work of building strong institutions will require a lot of work from both national governments and cosmopolitan transnational actors.
Don’t be alarmist
There is no need to talk about tipping points or rapid rising of sea levels. We simply don’t know. What we do know is already of such gross concern for the majority of the global population that to simply deny the scale of the problem should be treated with derision.
Don’t recourse to Malthus
I have little time for people who claim that there is too many people on this planet. Distribution of resources is far more important than absolute numbers of people.
Areas of interest
It would be interesting to investigate the climate change issues in forms of performativity. To what extent do climate change denialists perform postmodernist critiques of science? How can we evaluate different policies in the face of the pervasiveness of the neoliberal frame? Do the New Atheists have the ability to balkanise opinion over climate change as well as religion?
Recommended books
Assessment, M. E. (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being. Island Press.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage Pubns.
Beck, U. (1995). Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Polity Press Cambridge.
Beck, U. (2006). The Cosmopolitan Vision. Blackwell Publishing.
Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. Blackwell Synergy.
Latour, B. (2004). Politics of Nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Harvard University Press.
Chatting with denialists: unstoppable bull
I got myself into an annoying conversation with climate denialists on the overground train when a couple were pointing excitedly at Singer’s “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years“. I found myself having to justify and defend the entire discipline of climate science against claims of lying to get research funding and secret edits made to IPCC AR2. Whenever I attempted to reason with physics they just argued “well, I don’t know physics, but I do know what this guy says…”
CO2 is transparent to visible light, opaque to infrared. How hard can that be?
They trotted out the usual nonsense about the medieval warm period and confused the global mean with local effects.
They argued about the use of the words “very likely“, so I had to explain how the UN assign probability in summary reports as well as confidence intervals. That fell on deaf ears.
They thought it was amusing that the UN produces executive summaries for policymakers, as if there’s something sinister going on there.
They didn’t like me arguing for doing something about climate change on libertarian grounds of an insurance.
Worst of all, they argued that the “consensus” wants to turn the clock back, and wants poor countries to suffer - completely ignoring the focus on supporting developing nations in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
They suggested that global warming would be great!
When I suggested multiple times that the poorest countries would be affected worst by climate change, they changed the subject each time until I pushed the issue - at which point I had to get off.
I had to defend an entire range of disciplines from crude attacks, but I didn’t once ask where Singer got his funding.
