Authority
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.
Last Time
As we saw last time,
As the probability that an event e happened gets
smaller, the less trustworthy a report of e is.
This is why, for example, Hume argued that we
should never believe reports of miracles: the
probability of a miracle is just too low.
Low Prior Probability Not Always a
Worry
But sometimes authorities are reporting very
plausible claims. It wouldn’t be miraculous to
discover that the Earth was warming, just as it
wouldn’t be miraculous to discover it was
cooling or that temperatures weren’t changing
at all.
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 a PhD or MD (doctor
of medicine). 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 PhD doesn’t make you an
expert on everything, only on what your PhD is
in.
For 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 quacks and crazies try to acquire false
authority by obtaining worthless credentials.
“Dr.” Gillian McKeith
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. This
was on the basis of her degree from the nonaccredited correspondence college Clayton
College of Natural Health.
Suspicious Claims
Ben Goldacre, a real medical doctor and science
writer suspected that McKeith’s credentials
were fake, because her work contained
rudimentary scientific errors, like the claim that
chlorophyll “oxegenates your blood.” Goldacre
points out that chlorophyll doesn’t contain
oxygen, it makes it in sunlight, but there’s no
sunlight in your stomach. Even if it could make
oxygen in your stomach, you can’t absorb
oxygen there (like in your lungs): you’d just fart.
Fake Credentials
It turns out Clayton College is not a real
academic institution. It’s non-accredited, and it
sells its degrees: USD$6800 for a PhD and a
Master’s, $12,100 for two PhD’s and a Master’s.
It’s a correspondence college, meaning you
never go to any classes. And although it has you
write a PhD thesis, it refuses to make them
available (this is very unusual– you can find my
thesis online at the Rutgers University website).
“Dr.” No More
To make matters worse, McKeith 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 $100.
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 Sokal Affair
In 1996, a physicist at NYU named Alan Sokal
submitted an article to the journal “Social Text,”
a non-peer reviewed journal about postmodern
cultural studies.
The article, entitled “Transgressing the
Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was full of
nonsense and silly mathematics jokes.
Nonsense
“[A]s Bohr noted, ‘a complete elucidation of one
and the same object may require diverse points
of view which defy a unique description’ -- this
is quite simply a fact about the world, much as
the self-proclaimed empiricists of modernist
science might prefer to deny it. In such a
situation, how can a self-perpetuating secular
priesthood of credentialed ‘scientists’ purport to
maintain a monopoly on the production of
scientific knowledge?”
Silly Math Jokes
“Just as liberal feminists are frequently content
with a minimal agenda of legal and social
equality for women and ‘pro-choice’, so liberal
(and even some socialist) mathematicians are
often content to work within the hegemonic
Zermelo–Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting
its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already
incorporates the axiom of equality)
supplemented only by the axiom of choice.”
Lax Standards
After the journal published the article, Sokal
revealed that it was a hoax, intended to prove
the lax standards in “postmodern studies.”
If the article had been appropriately peer
reviewed by experts who actually knew about
the subjects (“quantum gravity”) they would
have immediately seen that it was phony.
The Limits of Peer Review
Peer review isn’t perfect, however (of course,
nothing is perfect). 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”– some journals make
money off of fees that authors pay to publish in
them. These journals have an incentive to
publish anything, because everything they
publish makes them money.
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
For example, 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-peerreviewed 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.
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!
THE NEWS
News as an Information Source
Unfortunately, most people don’t get their
beliefs from the genuine consensus of real
scientific authorities with real credentials.
People get their beliefs from newspapers, which
at their best are horribly misleading, and full of
falsehoods and propaganda.
Editorials vs. Reporting
Newspapers contain opinion pieces called
editorials. These are written by the editorial
staff of the newspaper, and are not reports
about scientific findings or consensus, they are
opinions and (often very bad) arguments of
(very often) know-nothing journalism graduates.
So if you read The Washington Times or The
Australian, you’re likely to be told that global
warming is a hoax and is not happening.
Infotainment
Most people don’t make sharp distinctions
between what’s on the “Opinion” page of the
newspaper and what’s in the rest.
Sometimes news sources themselves stop
making the distinction. “Infotainment” is a term
that covers this fusion of information and
entertainment.
Initial Studies
Scientific studies cost money, so often scientists
conduct “initial” or “pilot” studies. These are
studies that are too small to prove any real
effect (reject the null hypothesis, that there is
no effect). Still, if a correlational claim is
confirmed in a small study, that might suggest
it’s worth pursuing in a good, big study.
Most Research Findings are False
Most effects, however, will turn out not to be
real in subsequent research (there are lots more
correlations that are NOT there than there are
correlations that ARE there).
That’s why we shouldn’t trust just any old
research: we want systematic meta-analyses of
large, statistically significant double-blind
randomized controlled trials.
Ioannidis (2005)
“The probability that a research claim is true
may depend on study power and bias, the
number of other studies on the same question,
and, importantly, the ratio of true to no
relationships among the relationships probed in
each scientific field…Simulations show that for
most study designs and settings, it is more likely
for a research claim to be false than true.”
Reader$
However, newspapers are most likely to publish
interesting positive results, and they don’t tend
to care if those results are just in a pilot study
and will probably later be shown to be wrong.
Newspapers care about attracting readers, and if
they can say truly, “New scientific research finds
correlation between video games and eyeball
cancer,” they will, even if it’s misleading.
Hacks and Flacks
Newspapers don’t make a lot of money anymore
(there’s free news on the internet). So they
employ fewer reporters who are expected to
generate more stories.
This has led to a symbiosis between many
journalists and public relations firms. The PR
firm will write a “news” story that the
newspaper will simply reprint.
Churnalism
This is known as “churnalism”: According to
Wikipedia (I couldn’t find the original source)
“Justin Lewis at Cardiff University and a team of
researchers found that 80% of the stories in
Britain's quality press were not original and that
only 12% of stories were generated by
reporters.”
A lot of these “news stories” are intended to
make you buy products or accept propaganda.
Free Advertising
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article2232056/Gardeners-florists-named-UKshappiest-workers-90-horticulturalists-enjoygoing-work.html
Here’s an example: the entire article is mostly an
advertisement for the vocational education
company City & Guilds.
Propaganda
Frequently as well, anonymous government
sources will intentionally “leak” classified
information to the press, so that on the basis of
no evidence (besides the “leak”) newspapers
will report the government’s side of a story.
Other citizens and journalists cannot check and
make sure the story is true, because there is no
evidence, only the “leaked” report, from an
unidentified source.
Journalistic Embargoes
Even scientists are not above manipulating
newspapers for undeserved fame and
sometimes even money.
There is a practice whereby a scientist(s) will
release a forthcoming article to the press, but
not allow them to talk about it with anyone
before it is published, and there is a press
conference. This is called an “embargo.”
The Point of Embargoes
The idea is that when the press conference
happens, the story will be big news: everyone
will want to publish newspaper articles about it.
So before the press conference, journalists will
use the academic paper or study to write an
article. But they can’t get quotes or other
information from other experts, because they
can’t talk about it. They can only present one
side of the story, the researcher’s side.
The Link
One famous case involved
researchers who had a
fossil they wanted to
present as “the Missing
Link,” even though that
makes no sense in
evolutionary theory. They
had a book deal and a TV
special all lined up!
Not a Link
Of course, that sounds really exciting: “They
discovered the missing link!!!”
But when other scientists actually had a chance
to read the academic article, they found that the
evidence that the fossil was a direct ancestor of
humans not supported at all.
He-Said She-Said Reporting
Newspapers are supposed to be objective, but
this can lead them to a type of balance that is
really “false equivalence.”
To be objective, reporters think they have to
present both sides of an issue equally, even
when they can actually determine who is
speaking the truth.
Truth is not Bias
For example, one side might say “There was a
lot of vote fraud in the last election, we need a
strict voter ID law to prevent this,” and the other
side might say, “There’s no evidence of vote
fraud, voter ID laws disenfranchise legitimate
voters.”
There’s a fact here: is there any evidence of vote
fraud? Reporters often think that reporting the
truth is the same as being biased.
Good Reporting: NPR Guidelines
“At all times, we report for our readers and
listeners, not our sources. So our primary
consideration when presenting the news is that
we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to
mislead us or put a false spin on the information
they give us, we tell our audience…”
Good Reporting: NPR Guidelines
“…If the balance of evidence in a matter of
controversy weighs heavily on one side, we
acknowledge it in our reports. We strive to give
our audience confidence that all sides have been
considered and represented fairly.”