Thursday 29 December 2016

On Consensus

Yesterday I made a couple of tweets about consensus of opinion, and how various groups talk about a lack of consensus in the scientific community when the lack of consensus among their own community is orders of magnitude larger.

Now, the climate change debate is a great contemporary example of this, we have the US President Elect talking about how there isn't a scientific consensus on the subject.  But for the purposes of this argument I'm going with something less controversial as an example - the parallels with climate science opposition should be clear enough.

Let's look at creationism in its various forms.  Creationists like to talk about gaps in the fossil record, they like to talk about the things science doesn't yet know (e.g. exactly how the jump was made from chemistry to life [1]).  However, if you actually look at different schools of creationism, you see completely irreconcilable differences, usually deriving from how literally proponents interpret the bible.

Consider the question, how come the Earth looks like it's 4.5 billion years old.  Anyway you slice it, from any branch of Earth Science or Astronomy, you always come up with the same answer.  4.5 or to be exact 4.567 billion years old (easy to remember :)).  Within creationism there are at least 3 different *inconsistent* answers to the question "How come the Earth looks like it's 4.5 billion years old", and I summarise:

1. No it doesn't.  Really, there are plenty of books out there and plenty of people arguing that the science is wrong, carbon dating isn't valid, the astronomical arguments are wrong, all sorts of stuff.

2. Because god made it look like that on purpose.  Either as a test of faith or simply because mysterious ways, what can you do.  This argument is at least self-consistent, although amusingly, logically it's exactly the same as arguing that everything was created 10 seconds ago complete with fake memories. [2]

3. It is 4.5 billion years old, the bible should be taken metaphorically rather than literally, god set the wheels in motion etc. etc.

My point is not to spend time debunking these arguments, fun as that can be, but simply to point out that they are *completely inconsistent with each other*.  A creationist making argument 3 actually has a lot more common ground with the scientific view than he does with creationist making argument 1.  But, correct me if I'm wrong, I never hear creationists discussing with each other which version is correct.  They're just all lining their guns up against the scientific consensus, and even more than that, enjoy trying to exaggerate very small scientific differences of opinion, or gaps in the knowledge, that are mere cracks compared to the Grand Canyons between *each other*.

Likewise in Intelligent Design vs Evolution, there are various different evolution arguments like everything was created in situ 6000 years ago with no changes since ;  evolution has happened since Noah's Ark (to deal with the problem that a 100 foot Ark could hardly have accomodated every single species of life we have today) ; and again it actually is what we see but god started off the process, and so on.

We can also see this in climate change opposition, we can see it in conspiracy theories like 9/11 - some people argue the planes were holograms, some argue they were packed with explosives and directed by the Government, all kinds of arguments that again can't be reconciled with each other.  Some moon landing hoaxers say nothing has ever been outside the Van Allen belts, some say only the first missions were fake, etc., all the while hanging their own arguments on tiny inconsistencies in the official accounts.

So I think that's probably enough for now, I was going to expand into the scientific method but I'll leave that for another post.  In the meantime it's a big red flag when people arguing against a scientific or "official" position can't agree amongst themselves about what the "real truth" is, and even more so when they're trying to talk about a lack of consensus in the scientific community or "official account", which is often simply the fine print being discussed and debated as of course it should be.

[1] Whatever life is, the definition itself is remarkably hard to pin down.

[2] One thing with this argument is that it should take all physical evidence off the table.  If god can make anything just so, why not satan?  Or the easter bunny?  But the same people are often happy to point at a few bits of wood on Mount Ararat and say "Ha!  Physical evidence of the Ark!"

Monday 19 December 2016

Impossible Expectations

This is the first in a series of however many posts I feel like posting about the way debate is carried out on social media and in the outside world.  It frustrates the hell out of me seeing the same fallacies trotted out repeatedly and I just want to alert your attention to them.  Be very sceptical about people who use these devices, and always try to catch yourself using them before it's too late!

The Impossible Expectations argument is a simple concept - it's when someone demands a ridiculously high, perhaps even impossible, standard of proof for an argument they are against.  A standard which they invariably do not apply to sources of information that fit their existing narrative.  That's it in broad terms, but I'm going to talk about a specific variant of it that I see repeatedly.  In a nutshell "you were wrong about something once so I can disregard everything you say".  The Impossible Expectation is that the source must have always been 100% right about everything from day one!

Here are a couple of examples.  First up the internet comment section made flesh and somehow voted into the most powerful position in the world, Donald Trump.  Trump denied CIA reports that Russian hacking had influenced the election campaign with the argument, from his own Twitter and a statement released by his transition team

"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction" [1]

Often the argument is used in relation to science, another example from Trump's transition team member Anthony Scaramucci

"There was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat. And there was an overwhelming science that [...] we were the center of the world. A hundred percent, you know, we get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community. You and I both know that." [2]

Both claims are at the least debatable, but even allowing that they were true, so what?  It sounds superficially convincing, oh hey well they were wrong about this, but it's a lazy, worthless argument.  To err is human.  Have the speakers themselves ever been wrong about anything?  Can we disregard them entirely on that basis?

There are also different ways of being wrong, some much worse than others.  Making a prediction that doesn't turn out to happen is hardly a sin.  If 55% of the betting predictions I made were accurate I'd be living on a tropical island somewhere, not sitting here in the pitch dark at half past four.  Honest mistakes happen.  But how can you tell if a mistake is honest?  Largely by the person's response when it's pointed out.  An honest debator accepts it and corrects it.  A dishonest debator ignores it and even doubles down by repeating it later.  Finally there are deliberate attempts to deceive.  If a source is caught *deliberately* making false claims or statements, you'd be right not to trust it, especially if it happens repeatedly.

In the general case though, if this is one of someone's main arguments, be sceptical.  Even more so than usual.  To keep your guard up against this argument, keep it specific and keep it short.  During the election campaign, someone on the Democratic side posted something along the lines of "130 terrible things about Trump".  Opening themselves up to the counter "hey look, number 117 isn't true because X.  THEREFORE I CAN REJECT YOUR ENTIRE LIST".

I'll hopefully have a bit more to say about sources and how to evaluate them in a later post, but I'll leave it there for now.  Watch out for the fallacy of Impossible Expectations!  Do feel free to comment on Twitter or Facebook in response to the initial post.




[1] widely reported inc. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/trump-team-russia-cia-intel-election-232460

[2] https://mediamatters.org/video/2016/12/14/watch-cnn-anchor-informs-trump-transition-official-climate-change-science-isnt-matter-opinion/214816 (the anchor actually does a reasonable job debating against)