Neverending Audit

[A reply to Nullius in Verba, who refuses to concede that “If they’ll lie about this, what else will they lie about?” was not a rhetorical question.]

First life is kept in check. I could have posted this comment yesterday, but I only had the energy for punctual comments. So I prefered to wait another day to pick a main theme.

My main theme will be Good Science.

Talking about Good Science often leads to moral superiority.

Most appeals to Feynman are moralistic. His Cargo cult essay is moralistic. The same goes for Popper. Popper warns against certainties, justifications, big words, and often finishes off with humility. These two thinkers explicitely convey moral values, even when they talk about science.

The moral higher ground limits the number of things of interest. Scoring brownie points is a detour when one is on the path to Good Science. This might be a good tradeoff in the long run. In any case, a choice has to be made between brownie points like Mann or Jones and Good Science, if it is true that there is so much to do and so little time.

The Good Science stance does not square well with Please Do Try to Defend Mann. While the two stances are not logically incompatible, their combination hints at opportunistic self-righteousness, where Good Science is a proxy debate for political values that might have less winning chances than Good Science. Whether Mann lied or not is irrelevant to Good Science. What should matter is how to make Science Good.

As far as I’m concerned, Mann and Jones are pure brownie points, trifty futilities that waste time. Time better invested in doing things more compatible with Good Science, for exemple to build a statistical model à la Browne and Sundberg for paleos. Armwaving formal stuff is not enough for Good Science.

If what matters is “the damage made” to Good Science, one has to wonder if neverendingly raising concerns about Mann helps Good Science at all. As far as I am concerned, this is at best a personal vendetta, which can’t be excused by having made some money or having an eccentric hobby. At worse, this is scapegoating. In between, Mann serves as good whipping boy for personalization’s sake.

Projecting the MBH98/99 Hockeystick support on AGW believers more generally, and even “onto anyone who does not openly repudiate this particular work” deserves due diligence. I believe it is false on simple sociological grounds: for instance, we know that leaders do not chastize others. Nonetheless, I believe it is worse than false. It is wrong, so wrong as to undo the Good Science stance and leaves us only with self-righteous opportunism.

If Good Science really mattered, we’d raise concerns about science, and never speak about scientists. I believe this ain’t gonna happen soon. I’d gladly stand corrected on that hypothesis.

Another interesting hypothesis to test would be this other one: rehearsing the Mann story will not always be “unfavorable to believers.” After a while, people can recognize scapegoating, and when this happens the moral higher ground of Good Science is lost. For instance, reading our good Bishop’s rendition of this incident reveals Good Science as a mere rhetorical trick.

Auditors not only one needs to be able to frame minds with the whipping boys: they needs to make sure no one will pick up the “toxic assets”, in a way that only them could brandish their scalps when convenient. To that effect, more tricks can be used. For instance, once upon a time, some tried to sell that nobody wanted to condemn Jones’ askance to delete emails. A lukewarm misrepresentation, to say the least.

I believe the question I claim to be rhetorical pertains to this overall narrative. The question raises concerns that are tough to audit, inasmuch as it can only raise concerns, concerns which should be shared by every friends of Good Science. These concerns starts with a single case base. The question produces the induction step it needs to raise concerns. Concerns that are trivial to raise: who can afford to be against Good Science?

My claim is that it’s a rhetorical device whose answer can’t have an empirical basis. The usual answer is that no, we can’t know if they don’t lie about anything else. How the Hell are we supposed to decide anything about that question?

Under that interpretation, this is a rhetorical question. How can we trust these scientists? We just can’t. The rhetorical question hides this insinuation: “We should not trust them”. It also presumes that trust matters. Interestingly, Popper advised against trusting scientists, and even scientific theories in general: it is not rational to trust any of both, according to him.

Another way to see it as a rhetorical question is that, logically speaking, our trust in some scientists should not impact on the science. Science is not a matter of trust anyway. And so we fall back to what se said earlier: these questions are irrelevant to the scientific endeavour. Unless, of course, we were talking about the science of public relations.

Trying to argue that this ain’t a rhetorical question is unwinnable. I will disclose here that I spare my arguments in the hope that this won’t be conceded. More arguments can always be forthcoming to make that point clearer and clearer. If that’s not a rhetorical question, there are arguably no such things as rhetorical questions.

To recapitulate, that audit starts with some concerns. Then emerge questions about trust, spiced with some stories about dead trees. And then more concerns. More questions about trust. A bit of Good Science. Perhaps some other dead trees, for good measures.

The audit never ends.

(Source: collide-a-scape.com)