Potpourri
===> I push back against Paul Krugman’s ridicule of a Cato freedom ranking of the US states.
==> An interesting contrast between Austrian and (mainstream) macroeconomics, from Huerto de Soto.
==> I can’t remember if I mentioned this when it first came out, but FYI I helped write this pretty good–if I do say so–primer on free markets and prosperity for the Fraser Institute.
==> Gary Becker’s microeconomics exam from back in the day.
==> Glenn Greenwald bristled (as is his wont) at this New Yorker profile, but they quoted him extensively and I think he comes off like a bada$$.
==> Where I got the link for the above piece, was this Glenn Greenwald article in which he documents the lying liars at CNN. Incidentally, it’s because of stuff like this–where major US media outlets have been caught making gross mistakes in their reporting of Trump, time and again–that I couldn’t believe Pierre Lemieux at EconLog recently wrote:
But conspiracy theorists ignore individual incentives.
They also ignore credible sources—such as the mainstream media whose reputations have monetary value. Indeed, credible sources (“the media”) are presented as part of the conspiracy. Here again, conspiracy theorists ignore incentives, such as the incentives of any journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize and of any media owner to make a big money coup. If anybody had been effective at a conspiracy, it would have been Richard Nixon.
It’s as if Lemieux had written, “What the critics of McDonald’s and Burger King fail to realize is that they have incentives to serve their customers healthy food.”
==> Rob Bradley goes after Paul Krugman’s climate paranoia.
==> Richard Ebeling doesn’t care about the lying media, he cares about lying interest rates.
Rob Bradley piece is nonsense in all respects but one: the Democrats and left-leaners also have some areas where science is ignored and mis-represented, such as GMO and nuclear power. Neither “side” is guilt free. But every other attempted refutation of Krugman’s piece misses the mark by a wide margin. Particularly his link to the WUWT post about the conspiracy if scientists, which relates to the Lemieux quote.
The quote suggests that because journalists – I am widening this to scientists to cross over to the Bradley piece – have incentives to get it right they will not deliberately get it wrong. Bob’s analogy suggests that because fast food shops have an incentive to sell healthy food they will not deliberately sell unhealthy food. The latter is obviously wrong, so by implication the former is also wrong. Do these situations really stack up?
One difference is that the quote talks of individual incentives and Bob talks of corporate incentives. We should be comparing the incentive of the McDonald’s employee. It is very unlikely that they chose that job because of a strong desire to sell healthy food to people. But that aside, how do the incentives compare?
It is true that scientists have strong incentives to truth and discovering things that are new and thus overturn the existing paradigm. They also have incentives to suck up to the establishment, at least early in their careers, to obtain patronage. How could we reasonably weigh these? The purpose of science is to establish the truth. Pay is not that high and barriers to entry are high. It seems unlikely that money is the prime driver of these individuals, otherwise they would seek better paid employment for less effort. We can conclude that they are doing science because they like it and have a strong preference for the truth. Long term, science is self correcting. Falsehoods and errors occur, but they are found out and refuted. Reputations are made by getting it right. Publishing stuff you know to be wrong will predictably earn you a bad reputation. Good reputation will get you more money and allow you to do more science. Weighing these incentives, the deliberate falsehood to obtain patronage seems to be much less weight that the incentive to get it right.
Compare this to McDonald’s. The purpose of McDonald’s is to make profit by selling fast food. Whereas doing bad science is against everything science stands for, selling healthy food or unhealthy is largely indifferent to the purpose of McDonald’s. All else equal, it is probable that McDonald’s would prefer not to kill people (in so far as McDonald’s can prefer anything, not being an individual), but it is of very little consequence either way. The incentive to sell healthy food is very minor and not contradictory to its purpose. In contrast, the incentive for scientists to tell falsehoods is minor and is contradictory to their purpose.
What we see is what we would expect. McDonald’s mostly sells unhealthy food and scientists mostly tell the truth.
“The purpose of science is to establish the truth.”
Citation needed. Most scientists, like McDonalds employees, do not work for free. And most scientific research facilities, like most McDonalds franchises, cannot employ individual employees without somehow securing the financial resources to remain in operation.
For McDonalds, that means selling food (healthy or non). For Scientific Facilities, that means getting grants or other forms of patronage – some of which might go towards the pursuit of truth, and some of which might go towards telling the patrons what they want to hear.
And that’s not even taking into account the fact that I’d guess there are a non-trivial amount of scientists who, if asked the purpose of science, would not say “to establish the truth” but rather something like “to explain the truth” or “to improve human life” or some other such definition that could absolutely co-exist with “convince the ignorant rubes to do what we say”
Lets not split hairs over semantics.
Websters has it “”knowledge attained through study or practice,” or
“knowledge covering general truths of the operation of general laws, esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method [and] concerned with the physical world.”
Again the truth thing. Sufficient citation?
Science has been described thus: “Science as a collective institution aims to produce more and more accurate natural explanations of how the natural world works, what its components are, and how the world got to be the way it is now. Classically, science’s main goal has been building knowledge and understanding, regardless of its potential applications”
Accurate knowledge is truth. I am happy with “explain” rather than “establish”. It does not affect my point.
One can argue about the subtleties, but science to a large degree is about pursuit of truth. McDonald’s is not about promoting health.
“some of which might go towards the pursuit of truth, and some of which might go towards telling the patrons what they want to hear.”
My post was explaining why we expect little to go to telling patrons what they want to hear, just as we expect little of McDonald’s output to be healthy food. Each has some incentive to produce the minority output, but the major incentive is in the opposite direction.
This seems like an unfair comparison. You can’t compare McDonalds to “science” in general. You have to compare McDonalds to a specific scientific laboratory or something. Or, you have to compare “science” in general to “food” in general.
If you get to say the purpose of science is the pursuit of truth, then I get to say the purpose of food is to nourish and sustain human life. And generally speaking, healthy food does a better job of that than unhealthy food (just as good science does a better job pursuing truth than fake science).
But McDonalds isn’t food. You’re right to say that McDonalds exists to turn a profit, which may lead them to serve primarily unhealthy food (although it’s worth noting that many companies who specialize in health food are also highly profitable, so it’s not the case that the pursuit of profit requires unhealthy food). But just so, I could say that any particular scientific lab is very greatly concerned with securing its own existence, which may, in some cases, lead them to primarily tell their patrons what they want to hear. And just as some companies profit from selling healthy food, some science labs boldly pursue the truth and are rewarded for doing so.
I still don’t see how these are so different.
“This seems like an unfair comparison.”
Yes, this was my point.
“You have to compare McDonalds to a specific scientific laboratory or something.”
That is not the comparison being made by others. The original point in Bradleys post and links was the claim that scientists must be in a massive conspiracy to mislead everyone. No, says Bradley and Bob, they do not need to be in a conspiracy because their incentives line up that way anyway. One might as well say McDonald’s is in a conspiracy to make the population unhealthy. It is not a conspiracy, just people following preferences and incentives.
My comment shows why this is not a good comparison (as you have also pointed out) and the incentives, absent a conspiracy, cannot lead to massive deliberate disinformation from science. Science may be wrong but it will not be deliberately wrong for decades over many disciplines because the long term incentives are all towards a self-correcting system.
By the way, I take back my “lets not split hairs over semantics” comment. It is generally worth establishing what people mean to avoid misunderstandings.
I should also point out that McDonald’s food can be healthy as part of a balanced diet. There is nothing wrong with an occasional Big Mac and fries. Occasional treats are good for us all, and sometimes you just want to grab something quick. It is our lifestyles that are unhealthy, and McDonald’s forms a part of our lifestyles.
I know CNN and McDonald’s are garbage but they’re all that’s available in this crappy airport terminal.
If you can’t see that all of scientific academia’s (and non-scientific acedimia’s for that matter) preferences are aligned in one direction, then I don’t know what to tell you. Near 50% of published scientific reports are not reproducible. Incentives are heavily weighted towards new positive results and away from negative or reproductive results. And scientific journals face heavy pressure to subvert reports that might lead readers to certain politically unpopular conclusions.
Truth is not the primary incentive of scientific journals. Shiny and interesting and supportive of the prevailing confirmation bias is the primary incentive. And that’s pretty obvious. Let me reiterate: that unpopular and controversial results are suppressed while popular and bias affirming results are amplified are not the only problems. There is also no significant mechanism to verify the reproducibility of novel results and almost no incentive to report negative results. These problems are plain and have been widely reported by outlets across the ideological spectrum.
And whether these scientists are deliberately getting things wrong is besides the point. We know confirmation bias is real. We know that some scientists will get things wrong. And we know that scientific journals will happily publish reports fit their desired criteria once they have cleared peer review. It doesn’t matter if everyone in the publication chain really hopes that the report is true. The issue is that there is a systemic bias that is tilted towards promoting certain results above others.
” all of scientific academia’s preferences are aligned in one direction,” As I said, explain the truth about the world. However, I think you mean a different direction. I am not sure what you think this is.
” Near 50% of published scientific reports are not reproducible. ”
I believe this is a made up statistic. Psychology has a particular problem and these rates may be applicable in this one field. Medicine has some very particular incentives to publish positive results, but I don’t believe there is any evidence that ts is generally the case. Try chemistry and physics journals and I doubt very much that the problem is as large as this.
“Incentives are heavily weighted towards new positive results and away from negative or reproductive results.”
There is a problem with publication bias for positive results. This means the process is not perfect, but not does not lead lead generally to false results, rather a longer time before errors are discovered but the process is always towards the truth.
“And scientific journals face heavy pressure to subvert reports that might lead readers to certain politically unpopular conclusions.”
Evidence? This is simply not the case or nearly all published papers and I doubt is the case for almost all peer reviewed papers.
“Shiny and interesting and supportive of the prevailing confirmation bias is the primary incentive”
False. All journals desire ground breaking and paradigm shifting publications.
“: that unpopular and controversial results are suppressed while popular and bias affirming results are amplified ”
How did we find out about the reproducibility crisis? By publications in peer reviewed journals. How was plate tectonics demonstrated? By publications in peer reviewed journals. If their job is to suppress new ways of thinking they are spectacularly bad at it. Relativity and QM would certainly not have got a look in if bias affirming results were amplified at the expense of new ideas.
“There is also no significant mechanism to verify the reproducibility of novel results ” Quite the opposite. New results must fit within the evidence established by all the other published research and with new results as they come in. Even without specific attempts to replicate an experiment, new results will be continually tested against new evidence to see if it stacks up. The whole endeavor is very good at verifying results.
” It doesn’t matter if everyone in the publication chain really hopes that the report is true. The issue is that there is a systemic bias that is tilted towards promoting certain results above others.”
Indeed, it does not matter if everyone in the chain hopes the report is true. If it is not it will be found out. There is no systematic bias, but there is inertia. New and interesting hypotheses take time to become accepted. Biases are short term and eventually disappear under the weight of evidence.