Authority
PARTICIPATION
Participation
Here’s how the participation grade for this class
works.
You send me (by email, or in hardcopy) five
works of participation. Each counts for 2 marks.
2 x 5 = 10 marks!
What Counts?
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Examples
Pictures
Blog Posts
News Articles
Television Shows
Things you’ve learned in other classes
Anything at all related to what we’ve talked
about.
Examples
Consider HW1: Find an example, from your own
life and experiences, where a piece of
information was taken out of context in a
misleading way.
Examples
Consider HW3: Take a fallacy that we learned
about in class and find an instance of that fallacy
from your personal life and experience.
Other Things Related to Class
“I know one Chinese medical researcher, Dr. ShiuYing Hu, who does science based medicine. She
invented a kind of Chinese herbs tea which mixed
with ilex asprella, ilex rotunda and ilex latifolia
which helps to cure the flu. Moreover, there are
scientific facts which prove it is work. Dr. Shiu-Ying
Hu and the Chinese University of Hong Kong
conducted a study from the aspects of botany,
chemistry, pharmacology and clinical trials and
confirmed that the herbal tea is science-based
health drink.”
Holly Hu
“Over her long career, she
collected and identified as
many as 185,000 plant
specimens, published
more than 160 papers,
and was an internationally
recognized authority on
Ilex (hollies), Hemerocaulis
(daylilies), Paulownia,
Compositae (daisies), and
Orchidaceae (orchids).”
Helpful Resources
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pd3dc1Gc
Hc
AUTHORITY AND EXPERTS
Nullius in Verba
The Royal Society in
London is the oldest
scientific society in the
world. It’s motto is
“Nullius in Verba,” which
translates to: “Take
nobody’s word for it” or
“Trust no one.”
Authority
That’s impossible: we all need to trust other
people for knowledge about lots of things.
I’m not a climate scientist, I don’t have stations
that collect and analyze data about global
temperatures, so I can’t determine myself
whether global warming is happening. I have to
trust an authority to tell me if it is.
Appeal to Authority
Sometimes you’ll hear about the “fallacy of
appealing to authority.” But basing your views
off on appeals to authority is not always
fallacious. Your authority needs to be:
• An expert, or better, an agreeing group of
experts, on the subject in question.
• A proven truth-teller on the subject.
Conflicting Reports
However, sometimes there are conflicting
reports between two seeming experts or two
groups of seeming experts. How do we reconcile
such conflict? How do we know what to believe?
Appeal to Motive
It’s tempting to argue that one side is wrong
because it has a motive for its position.
Sometimes climate change deniers argue that
scientists are lying about global warming
because that brings in research dollars.
Sometimes people who are pro-evolution argue
that creationists are lying about the facts
because they want to indoctrinate people into
their religion.
Appeal to Motive
It may be true that people have motives to lie
and that they are acting on those motives and
not the evidence.
But we need to evaluate the arguments
themselves. It is not enough to point out that
someone has a motive to lie. That doesn’t mean
what they are saying is actually untrue.
CREDENTIALS
Credentials
One way society has of distinguishing genuine
authorities from other people is via credentials.
A person’s authority can be certified by their
having certain degrees, like s PhD or MD (doctor
of medicine) or even a BA. A person’s ideas can
have their authority certified by being published
in a top peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Academic Degrees
Of course, having a degree doesn’t make you an
expert on everything, only on what your degree
is in.
“Expert”: Dr. Algund Eenboom
Dr. Algund Eenboom is a
doctor. A doctor of
dentistry. He is not a
scientist or a historian.
He is described in the
program as “Author of
Aircraft of the Pharaohs”
“Expert”: Giorgio Tsoukalos
Giorgio Tsoukalos has a BA
degree in “Sports
Information and
Communication” from
Ithaca College. Worked as
a bodybuilding promoter
until 2005.
He is not a scientist,
anthropologist,
sociologist, or historian.
David Childress
Attended the University of
Montana for one year.
From his personal
website: “a recognized
expert not only on ancient
civilizations and
technology, but also on
free energy, anti-gravity
and UFOs.”
Expert: Neil Degrasse Tyson
Neil Degrasse Tyson, real
astonomer.
Q: What do you think
about Ancient Aliens:
“It’s what people say
when they can’t figure out
how ancient humans
accomplished something.”
Expert: Neil Degrasse Tyson
“Rather than say, ‘I’m too
stupid to figure this one
out on my own,’ they say,
‘I am smarter than these
ancient humans, and since
I can’t figure out what’s
going on here, they must
have had help from
aliens.’”
The Oregon Petition
For a more serious example, global warming
skeptics have made a big deal about the Oregon
Petition, a petition to have the U.S. government
not base its policies on the supposition that
global warming is happening.
The Oregon Petition
Supporters of the petition point out that it is
signed by over 31,000 people.
However, only about 9,000 of them have PhD’s.
Furthermore, only about 1,400 of the PhD
holders have PhD’s in climate science and
related fields.
The Oregon Petition
The journal Scientific American polled the 1,400
who worked in climate science and found that
many of them hadn’t ever heard of the petition,
or said that though they had signed it, they
would not sign a similar statement today.
Scientific American estimated that the petition
represented only about 200 genuine authorities.
The Climate Science Consensus: 97.4%
Worthless Credentials
Some “PhDs” aren’t real degrees awarded by
serious institutions. Real universities are
“accredited” meaning that an independent body
has judged that they meet widely held academic
standards.
Many people try to acquire false authority by
obtaining worthless credentials.
“Universities of Wild Chickens”
(野鸡大学)
Apparently there are fake universities in Beijing
that have names that are very close to real
university names, with offices located nearby,
with photos of real universities on their
websites. They sell degrees to people who can’t
get into university.
“Dr.” Gillian McKieth
Gillian McKeith is a
popular nutritionist in the
UK. For a while she had a
TV show where she
represented herself as “Dr.
McKeith,” and she also did
this in books and on her
website.
“Dr.” Gillian McKieth
Her “Dr.” credentials were
on the basis of her degree
from the non-accredited
correspondence college
Clayton College of Natural
Health.
“Dr.” Gillian McKieth
Claims: chlorophyll
“oxygenates your blood.”
• Chlorophyll doesn’t
contain oxygen, it
makes it in sunlight.
• You can’t absorb oxygen
in your stomach (like in
your lungs).
Suspicious Claims
Ben Goldacre, a real medical doctor and science
writer suspected that McKeith’s credentials
were fake.
Fake Credentials
It turns out Clayton College is not a real
academic institution. It’s non-accredited, and it
sells its degrees: HKD$52,700 for a PhD and a
Master’s, $93,800 for two PhD’s and a Master’s.
It’s a correspondence college, meaning you
never go to any classes.
“Dr.” No More
McKeith also trumpeted her membership in the
American Association of Nutritional Consultants.
To prove that this was not a real credential,
Goldacre signed his dead cat up for membership
for $60.
After receiving complaints, the UK’s Advertising
Standards Authority required her to stop using
the title “Dr.” because it was misleading.
Degree Mills
A “degree mill” is a university that is not
accredited by official accrediting organizations.
Many creationists have “doctorates” from
degree mills.
For example, prominent creationist Kent Hovind
has a PhD from Patriot University, a degree mill.
Patriot University is accredited by an unofficial
accreditation mill, which accredits any university
for USD$100.
EXPERT CLAIMS
Legal Context
The law obviously has to
decide what counts as
expert opinion.
If you’re on trial, you don’t
want just anyone
testifying that the
evidence says you did it!
US Legal Standard
In the US, for expert testimony to be admissible,
the methods used have to:
•
•
•
•
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Have undergone peer review.
Be falsifiable.
Have been scientifically tested.
Be replicable/ has been replicated.
Have their error rates known.
Peer Review
Peer review is the accepted method of research
approval among scientists and other academics.
If you write a scientific or academic article, typically
you send it to a “peer reviewed journal.” Your
submission is “blinded” so that no one can tell who
wrote the article. The editor of the journal then
sends the article to “peer reviewers”: other people
who have expertise in the subject.
Peer Review
The reviewers read the article and write up
criticism and a publication judgment (“yes it
should be published,” or “no there are too many
errors, not high enough quality,” etc.).
The editor then makes a judgment to publish or
not based on the reviews. Peer reviewed articles
in leading journals are the “gold standard” of
academic achievement.
Climate Change Consensus
Lots of work has been published arguing that
global warming is not happening. But what
about the peer-reviewed literature?
A study by Oreskes (2004) of the previous 10
years (1993 to 2003) showed that of the 928
peer-reviewed studies that used the phrase
“climate change” in the abstract, 0% of them
said that global warming was not happening.
Oreskes 2004
75% of the papers either explicitly endorsed the
consensus view that global warming was
happening or implicitly endorsed it, by for
example, making recommendations for how to
slow down or stop warming trends.
The other 25% made no commitment, often
because they were about climate change long
ago, now climate change today.
0% disagreed with global warming.
Non Peer-Reviewed Literature
The public often doesn’t understand the
distinction between peer-reviewed scientific
research and other types of publications.
Climate skeptics use such misunderstandings to
mislead and manipulate the public. There is
scientific literature that is against global
warming– but this literature is not peerreviewed: it consists of editorials, letters, or
reviews with no original research in them.
The Limits of Peer Review
Peer review isn’t perfect, however.
Academic journals can be poorly peer reviewed:
the review process might not be “blind,” it might
not involve real experts, and it might be “too
easy.”
Bohannon’s Paper from Before
• Submitted to 304 journals.
• Journals were published by top publishers:
Elsevier, Kluwer, Sage, Wolters
• Accepted by 157 (52%)
• Rejected by 98 (32%)
• No decision by 49 (16%)
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Students at MIT created a computer program
that randomly generates nonsense Computer
Science papers. Various people have used the
program to submit nonsense papers to
conferences and non-peer-reviewed journals.
One group of students actually had a nonsense
paper accepted at a peer reviewed conference
in Wuhan, China.
Impact Factor
One way of distinguishing good peer-reviewed
academic journals from lousy ones is by a
measure called the “impact factor.”
Journals that publish papers that are cited by
further scientific or academic research have
higher impact factors. Impact factor is thus a
measure of how much influence a journal has.
TRICKING EXPERTS
Sometimes the people promoting crazy views,
instead of trying to fake credentials, trick people
with real credentials into appearing to endorse
their views.
Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment
JZ Knight is a charlatan who claims to “channel”
(i.e. speak for) Ramtha, a 35,000 year old
spiritual entity from the fictional land of Lemuria
who once conquered the fictional land of
Atlantis. She runs Ramtha’s School of
Enlightenment, where rich stupid people pay
thousands of dollars to hear new age spiritual
nonsense married with quantum physics
mumbo jumbo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3
QlZ5O8_bGk
Some of “Ramtha’s” views are outlined in the
2004 film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” a
combination of interviews and a fictional story
about a deaf woman using the power of positive
thinking to influence the events in her life.
Several legitimate scholars show up in the film,
including one of my former teachers, David
Albert.
Creative Editing
Albert says, “I was edited in such a way as to
completely suppress my actual views about the
matters the movie discusses. I am, indeed,
profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking
quantum mechanics with consciousness.
Moreover, I explained all that, at great length,
on camera, to the producers of the film… Had I
known that I would have been so radically
misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly
not have agreed to be filmed.”
Creative Editing
This is a common trick: you tell people you are
working on a film about X, when really you are
working on a different film about Y. You
interview them for many hours, and then you
edit the interview so it seems to be agreeing
with you. Now you have expert testimony about
Y.
(Second example: the documentary “Expelled!”)
Expelled from ‘Expelled!’
“Expelled!” had many prominent scientists like
Richard Dawkins in it. Those scientists were told
that they were being interviewed for a proDarwin movie called “Crossroads,” when the
movie was actually an anti-Darwin movie
arguing that the scientific establishment
“expelled” dissent, and didn’t allow criticism. At
the movie’s screening, the producers actually
threw out one of the scientists in the movie,
because they knew he was critical of it!