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VoiceOfRa comments on Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Luboš Motl
I was going to vote this down, and ended up not doing so after reading the link. It's not what it sounds like; it's a complaint about scientists misusing their scientific credentials to make political statements.
... In which Luboš Motl, who gains any credibility he has from his scientific background, makes political statements.
In fact, very little of his complaint is about scientists misusing their scientific credentials. It's mostly about his disagreements with them about the politics. The specific bit that VoR quoted is also not about scientists misusing their scientific credentials, it's a standard-issue populist-conservative "those awful elitist liberal intellectuals in their ivory towers don't know what life is really like" complaint. Which, of course, might be right or wrong, but it really doesn't seem like a Rationality Quote.
Disagreeing with someone's politics and saying "my disagreement should be listened to because being a scientist makes me an authority" is misusing your scientific credentials.
This is very widespread in global warming debates. "I am a climate scientist, therefore my ideas about economics and politics should be immediately implemented because science".
Could you give a few examples?
Jim Hansen is the most well-known, I think. But you can also take a look e.g. here.
I was hoping for concrete examples of people saying things along the lines of "I am a climate scientist, therefore my ideas about economics and politics should be immediately implemented".
What I see plenty of is climate scientists saying "Here is what I think is the current state of scientific knowledge about the climate. Now here is what I think should be done about it." but there's nothing wrong with that. (I take it we are agreed that climate scientists aren't uniquely disqualified by their scientific expertise from holding political or economic opinions.)
But I don't see a lot of people claiming that scientific expertise gives them the right to prescribe policy. E.g., the first thing I found when looking for what Jim Hansen has said and written in connection with the policy implications of climate science was this near the start of which he says: "I do not attempt to define policy,which is up to the people and their elected representatives, and I don’t criticize policies. The climate science has policy relevance, but I let the facts speak for themselves about consequences for policy-makers." which seems exactly right. (Of course he might be being insincere there, but I don't know of any particular reason to think he is.)
It looks to me as if Hansen (1) has strong opinions about what should be done about climate change, (2) is not shy about expressing those opinions, but (3) doesn't claim that anyone should agree with those opinions because he's a climate scientist. (He does also (4) claim that people should pay attention to what he says about the science because he's a climate scientist; that seems obviously reasonable.)
But I haven't by any means read everything Hansen (or anyone else) has said and written on this theme. Again: examples?
It's rare that you have such a direct statement like you see in Ghostbusters :-) Generally there is reliance on the halo effect -- "Here is the problem and this is what should be done about it" implies that if you are an expert in the problem, you are also an expert in solutions to that problem.
Here are a couple of Hansen examples. Notice that in the first one he is very direct about what should be done, while in the second he is arguing against the Iowa coal plant explicitly as a scientist.
Of course most of these people are not stupid. No one claims "the right to prescribe policy".
Imagine that someone is an expert climate scientist, thinks that anthropogenic climate change is a big problem, and has strong opinions about what should be done about it. How, in your view, can they go about agitating for the action they think should be taken, without doing anything you would characterize as "I am a climate scientist, therefore my ideas about economics and politics should be immediately implemented because science"?
But aren't the things you're now saying "of course" no one does exactly the things that would actually be improper if done? I mean, it's obviously unobjectionable (right?) for a climate scientist who holds strong opinions on these matters to engage in the same sort of advocacy as anyone else might. The point at which what they're doing becomes improper is exactly the point at which they start going out of their way to have people believe what they say about policy because they're expert on the science.
And that's what you claimed was commonplace in discussions of climate change:
but are now saying that of course no one does. What am I missing here?
Indeed he is. And in the first one he at no point says anything remotely resembling "you should agree with me about policy because I am an expert in climate science". What do you think he has actually done wrong here?
He was asked about his scientific credentials and experience, and he answered the questions as he was legally obliged to do.
The great majority of his testimony is about strictly scientific questions: if we do X, what do we expect to happen? Most of the rest is about what you might term semi-scientific questions: If we want Y not to happen, what do we need to do? (As e.g. on page 26.) In a few places (e.g., on page 31) he goes further and just says "we should do Z". But at no point, so far as I noticed (the document is 59 pages long and I haven't read all of it carefully), did he make any attempt to say "you should agree with me about policy because I am a scientist".
It sounds as if you expect me to disagree with that, but I've no idea why.
(Did you think I was claiming that the people Motl is criticizing were making that claim but not misusing their scientific credentials? I wasn't, and in fact my opinion is almost exactly the opposite: they weren't making quite that claim -- see below -- but what they did say still amounts to misusing their scientific credentials.)
I agree that at one point in Motl's post he argues that the scientists he's disagreeing with have misused their scientific credentials. But most of his post (including the bit quoted by VoR above) is not making any such argument, it's just saying how he thinks their political position is wrong.
To expand on my parenthesis above: The open letter Motl is objecting to doesn't quite say "being a scientist makes me an authority", though it certainly leans in that direction. Its opening section says (I paraphrase): "We are scientists. We ought to be good at thinking clearly". It doesn't take the extra step and say that they are good at thinking clearly, still less that whatever they say must be right.
The quote is still true as stated. Namely, scientists by virtue of being in an ivory tower are often in a very bad position to notice things that are obvious to average people.