The expertise of the ignorant -- Mark Buchanan

I was just about to post something on the science of climate change -- and on how people form their opinions about it -- when I happened upon several must-read posts on a similar theme. Chris Mooney has two pieces (here and here) in the Huffington Post exploring how public opinion has "tipped" in recent years, bringing the urgency of climate change much more into mainstream thinking. And there's a wonderful post by Orac at Respectful Insolence looking at the bad arguments that get repeated interminably by climate change "skeptics" -- how can there be warming if it's so cold today?, etc. If Mooney's evidence is correct, then these skeptic red-herrings aren't standing up so well as they used to, which is a good thing.

Personally, I'd been stirred by Camille Paglia, responding to her readers. Paglia often says insightful things on any number of topics, but she seems to go off the rails when it comes to climate change. I'm not sure why. One reader, a self-proclaimed expert in nuclear design and atmospheric modeling took issue with Al Gore and the "hysteria" over climate change, and Paglia loved every word of it:

"Bravo for your invigorating deconstruction of current propaganda! I too am very concerned about the potential damage to Democrat credibility coming from the grab-bag Gore crusade, with its wild exaggerations and hypocritical sanctimony. It does make liberals look like ditzes -- the last thing the party needs in a presidential campaign where no-crap national security issues will be paramount. Environmentalism is of vital importance to our future, but it cannot be based on lies."

It's mysterious to me why concern over the Earth's future climate would make liberals "look like ditzes." Somehow it seems more likely that those who continue to deny any link between human activity and global warming, in the face of the consensus opinion of the worlds' scientists -- who've actually spent time studying the problem in great detail -- would be more deserving of ridicule.

But the skeptics clearly don't accept the idea that climate scientists might know more than the average citizen, or that their models deserve more consideration and weight than off-the-cuff observations of about local cold spells and the like. It's a peculiar view, and it raises an interesting point.

How do we make up our individual minds about any scientific issue, including climate change? Let's be honest. On almost any scientific issue, none of us has really investigated all (or even a little bit) of the evidence to the point of becoming an expert. Rather, we form our opinions by learning a limited amount, and by weighing the words and arguments and reputations of others. We're finite beings in a hugely complex world, and we really have no other choice but to learn (or attempt to learn) from others.

I've never performed careful experiments to test the principles of relativity, but I believe in it because I've worked through the logic of the mathematics, which has a beautiful coherence, and I've read the papers (or textbook discussions) documenting the important experiments that support the theory. And I've experienced the workings of the scientific process, which makes it in the interests of many others to point out any errors or mistakes in such experiments.

Suppose I were to ask Camille Paglia what she thinks about the prospects for, say, spintronics to be a commercially viable technology in the next five years (the idea is to design devices that would use the spins of electrons, not only their charges, to carry information). My guess is that she hasn't studied the latest papers in Nature or the Journal of Applied Physics describing key advances in the technology, and the hurdles that remain, and so to come to an answer she'd consult some experts. She'd call up physicists involved in the area, a range of theorists and experimentalists, and try to form some consensus of their views. She might try to read some review papers by those experts, and so on. This would be a sensible approach for anyone -- talk to some of the people who know.

I imagine that Paglia, or any other intelligent person, would use the same strategy in trying to come to an informed and accurate opinion on just about any scientific matter, ranging from the causes of deep earthquakes to the puzzle of high-temperature superconductivity. She knows that on these matters she doesn't know anything, but that there are people who've devoted their intelligence and energy for decades to building an understanding.

But then when it comes to climate change, suddenly everything changes....the scientists can't be trusted. Paglia and other skeptics don't look to the views of the IPCC, or to the vast majority of other climate scientists who express similar views (or see far more extreme outcomes as likely), but instead accept the slogans of those with obvious political interests, or the views of a very tiny minority of scientific skeptics.

Why is that? Frankly, I don't have an answer. But unfortunately, the very complexity of the climate system adds to the problem. It's easy for skeptics to make up some story about how its all the sun causing the warming, or how today's warming isn't anything special relative to the past, and so on. They offer up simple stories and explanations that stick in the mind. Meanwhile, it's not so easy for climate scientists to explain the results of computational models that for accuracy have to include a multitude of nonlinear feedbacks, and in many ways have become as complex and difficult to understand as the climate itself. There are no simple stories to tell. But that's the situation we're in, and this is the best science we currently have.

Richard Feynman had a great definition of science. "Science," he said, "is belief in the ignorance of experts." He was implying that science is not about accepting claims based on faith, or because they're proclaimed by some famous and esteemed professor, but because they're supported by evidence. Experts ought to be questioned and challenged, and they are, everyday, in the ordinary workings of science.

But belief in the ignorance of experts isn't the same as belief in the expertise of the ignorant, which is what the skeptics often seem to embrace.

Complex Networks, 2-6 July, Sardinia, Italy

Even at 8 a.m., the sun is blazing hot outside, although it's cool and calm here in the Edificio II of Sardegna Ricerche, a hulking Soviet-style research building in the beautiful mountains near Cagliari, Sardinia. I'm at a satellite meeting of the yearly meeting on Statistical Physics. This satellite (graciously organized and hosted by Alessandro Chessa of the University of Cagliari and Guido Caldarelli of the University of Rome) is focussing on complex networks -- things like social networks, the Internet, food webs, and so on. This is a hot topic in physics, indeed, all of science, and something on which I wrote a book several years ago.

If you look at the physical layout of the Internet (computer linked by telephone lines or satellite links), or the wiring pattern of neurons in the human brain, or the tangled web of social bonds that links together a community (in the image to which I've linked, these are friendships between high school students), you'll see in each case what looks like an unintelligable mess. You'd see the same bewildering complexity in the network of predator-prey relationships in any ecosystem, and in many other settings -- in networks of economic trade, for example. But in fact these and many other natural networks, despite their apparent complexity, possess a hidden order and share deep architectural similarities.

Physicists and mathematicians over the past decade have begun learning how to understand the architecture of such networks, and to build up a real science that explains how and why they have the structures they do. In my book Nexus (or Small World, in the UK) I tried to offer a snapshot of this recent explosion of research.

But lots of work has happened since then, and its seems this exploding field attracts more attention every year, mainly because computers have made it possible to gather and analyze the huge amounts of data that make it possible to map out real world networks. Research on social networks is particularly important, and is showing that the human world often follows precise mathematical patterns that were unsuspected only a few years ago. Over the next few days, I'll try to report on some of the major interesting developments in this field.

Recently in this blog, I've tended to focus on the psychologial side of the social atom -- on the behavior of people as individuals and what influences it. This conference represents work on the other side -- looking at the mathematical patterns that emerge at the larger scale.

Does God do anything?

No more Stanley Fish after this, but you've got to read his latest outburst on religion to believe it. He's essentially recycling and twisting around the old argument of St. Anselm that God, if you define Him as that thing "than which nothing greater can be conceived," simply must exist. Here's the logic: If He didn't exist, then we could quickly conceive of something greater -- namely an identical He that does exist. That's a contradiction. Therefore God must exist.

If that seems like a swindle, it is. There is, to begin with, the arbitrary judgement that something that exists is greater than something that does not. But also, take the loaded word "God" out of the equation. Can you really prove that "the greatest thing that can possibly be conceived" must exist? Very possibly there just is no sense to the very notion of the "the greatest thing that can possibly be conceived". After all, how about two or four of those things put together, wouldn't they be still greater, meaning there can be no greatest thing we can conceive? In fact, we could use the same kind of argument to disprove God. If He's the greatest thing that can be conceived, then He cannot exist, because there can be no greatest thing that can be conceived.

Fish's argument isn't quite the same, but he takes the view that maybe there are some things that just lie beyond any possibility of scientific investigation. And maybe that's where God resides. The trouble is, if God really does lie (safely) beyond any conceivable scientific investigation, this also implies that whatever He does can have absolutely no effect in our world, and can leave no traces within it (for otherwise we could detect and measure them). He can have no effect. The consequence of pushing Him off the physical stage (so as to salvage your belief, despite the lack of any evidence) is also to acquiesce in the conclusion that God can have no influence on anything in our world whatsoever. Some God.

But actually, I think all this arguing over religious belief is rather ridiculous. People don't believe in God or in gods for reasons. I suspect that we'll eventually understand that belief has clear social and psychological functions, as many scientists already suggest, here, for example, or here.

The latter paper, in particular, offers a nice review of several popular hypotheses, such as that religion plays a role in 1) helping communities to interact successfully with their environments (and to avoid ecological catastrophes), 2) that committing oneself to clearly irrational beliefs is a form of what biologists call "costly signalling," and can enable people within a community to establish cooperative interactions more successfully (in fact, some studies show that religious groups do tend to have higher levels of cooperation than non-religious groups), or 3) that the belief in unseen powers and forces is the hangover from ways of thinking about the world and looking for causal relations that were adaptive for our ancestors.

Rather than trying to banish religion, or argue people out of it, we should try to understand the deeper function of belief. Yet I somehow suspect this idea holds little attraction for Stanley Fish.