Making Up Our Minds: Truth is a Conversation

Part of being a writer in this day and age is the fact that you have to market yourself. And that invariable means that you have to engage in social media. To that end, I have Twitter, Quora, MeWe, Instagram, Linked In, FaceBook, and, Reddit accounts. One of the many things I hate about doing this is the fact that I routinely meet people who seem to be mortally offended whenever I try to get them to "engage" with ideas. That is to say, that many folks get quite upset if you question something they write on these boards. For them, it's simply enough to espouse an opinion, and profoundly rude (or "troll-like") to ask for some evidence for that point of view, or, offer an argument in opposition.

This isn't surprising. Many folks simply don't have much experience in having to justify the ideas that they hold. It might simply be the case that all the people they meet hold roughly the same opinions, so different points of view simply never arise. It might also be the case that most folks they meet just want to be "polite" and "get along" with them, so they've learned to "bite their tongues". (Anyone who knows me might be surprised to hear that I can actually do this, and indeed I often find myself doing this at family get-togethers.)

I can remember the class in my first year of university where I realized what is going on in these sorts of situations. I was taking an intro philosophy course and the professor was asking people what they thought about a specific notion. He would get them to say, then he'd ask a simple question in response "Why do you believe that?" A significant proportion of the class tried to weasel out of answering by saying "well, that's just my opinion". But the prof would have nothing of that, "but surely there's a reason why you believe that, isn't there?"

What he was trying to do was get us to learn about the importance of conversation and argument in finding the truth.

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That first course at university was based on reading a translation of Plato's

Thrasymachus of Athens.
Image from The Great Thoughts Treasury.
Used under the Fair Use provision.

Republic. In it the historical character, Thrasymachus, espoused the idea that we express today as "might makes right" or "victor's justice". This is the idea that there not only is there no objective thing as "right or wrong", but that people don't even really believe in it anyway. Instead, what we call "right" is what the powerful want, and, what they don't want is what we call "wrong". Anything else is just "window dressing".

This is a very extreme position to support, because to prove it correct someone would have to poll every human being on the earth and decide that they too all believe that "might makes right".

Plato, copy of a portrait by Silanion.
Image c/o Wiki Commons.

The "might is right" argument is obviously not true simply because there are countless individuals who do right simply because they think it is right. As the prof all those years ago said "It simply is demonstrably true that lots of people do selfless things just because they think it's the right thing to do---not because the powerful coerce them. For example, in war some people actually jump on grenades to save their fellow soldiers." It might be true that the powerful trick other members of their society into believing moral truths that actually aren't true. But that's not what Plato has Thrasymachus arguing in the Republic.

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I am mentioning this anecdote from my past to illustrate an important point about scholarship. Scholars don't simply assert that such-and-such an idea is "true" and justify it because it's their "opinion" and "everyone's entitled to their way of looking at the world". Instead, what they do is bring forward potential ideas---"hypotheses"---and enter into a conversation with other people who study the same subject. If a consensus emerges among the experts in the field that a specific hypothesis is in accordance with all the evidence and logical analysis that people can bring to bear on the subject, they eventually describe it as a "theory". And once the experts accept the value of a theory, they then use it as the foundation for further exploration.

People who haven't studied epistemology---the study of how we know what we know---might find this somewhat disturbing. That's because most people naively believe that we live in a world of "hard facts". It's kinda scary for them to think that something as nebulous as "building a consensus" is involved in defining "truth".

But if you know anything about how science operates, this is exactly how it does. A fellow who is an acknowledged expert in the field---because of his Master's or Doctorate---submits an article in a peer-reviewed journal that offers a suggested hypothesis. The "peers" are other experts in the same field, who are able to exert some "quality control" over what gets published in that particular journal. They keep out the obvious nonsense and authors who aren't really qualified to enter into the discussion because they lack the credentials.

Once the article has been published, it is then read and discussed by other people with relevant expertise in the field. They then enter into a conversation with one another about the ideas put forward. If it's a paper in the sciences, people might do things like recreate an experiment described in the paper. They might also put forward suggestions about how this hypothesis could be tested in other experiments. If it's in the humanities---like philosophy---it might spur future papers that will discuss the points raised in the original paper. In both cases, the essential issue is the conversation and how it furthers human understanding. If enough people agree that this hypothesis makes sense, eventually it starts being called a "theory" and people just assume it's true and build upon it.

This is how the theories of evolution, gravitation, electricity, vaccination, etc, all came into being. It is the process that led to the creation of the computer, modern medicine, space travel, etc. It's also how the scientific method that I've described above became accepted among modern scholars.

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Please note in the above that nowhere have I made room for the "lone genius" who toiled away in obscurity and who was right even though everyone else thought he was wrong. Instead, I'm suggesting that this is a co-operative process where lots of different people work together and everyone has at least some connection with the "establishment" that allows for their acceptance in a club with a strictly limited membership.

Galileo Galilei.
Image c/o Wiki Commons.

One of the tropes that people learn from the popular media is that there were persecuted, reviled figures who turned out to be "right" after a lifetime of isolation. One of the stock figures in this was Galileo Galilei. As the story goes, he supported the heliocentric worldview even though everyone was against him and he ended up spending years in house arrest for struggling against the church. The truth is far different. Galileo was no outsider. In fact, he was a respected academic who held the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Pisa, and, taught geometry, mechanics, and, astronomy at the University of Padua. Everyone with the same level of education as him agreed with his basic ideas about physics and astronomy. What he was, however, was an extremely abrasive person who took great delight in insulting high church officials---who were outside of his academic circles. If he'd been just a little more "politic" and not been so antagonistic, they would probably have ignored him instead of putting him on trial for heresy and sentencing to many years of house arrest. He was certainly no "lone genius" who was "at odds with the scientific establishment".

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I notice that there's a new "indie media" source in Guelph. I won't mention it by name, but I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed. I can't figure out what it is trying to do other than recreate all the flaws that exist in the already existing corporate world. As near as I can tell, most of the articles are just rewrites of other people's stories, press releases, stuff gleaned from social media, and, the odd quick phone interview. What's the point? 

I started the "Back-Grounder" because I got sick of reading shallow, "he-said/she-said" stories where the reporter obviously hadn't done any research. It takes time and effort to even write these weekend editorials (as I hope that this example shows.) Moreover, I'm trying to get people to used to the idea that they should pay for news. That's really important, because if you don't pay for the stories the money comes from somewhere else---like advertising and data scraping. And both of those funding mechanisms have profound effect on editorial content. I don't just mean that advertisers will pick up a phone and kill a story (although I suppose that does happen occasionally), but rather that editors routinely tell journalists to "hype up" stories to encourage clicks.

If you don't want to read stupid, shallow, over-hyped stories then you have to be willing to pay for well-researched, objective news. It's really no great secret---. 

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I'm mentioning these issues because I meet a fair number of people who have read some obscure crud on the Internet and believe that they know more about things like climate change than the overwhelming majority of experts in the field. It's important to understand that what counts is the discussion among the experts not just one particular voice.

I recently watched a YouTube clip from a Fox News program. In it a Dr. Patrick Michaels, who is described as "director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute", talks about climate change. Please note, this is not an academic or scholarly body. Instead, it's a political organization funded by the Koch brothers, who's job is to create libertarian talking points to disseminate through the media. It's main job is to create propaganda, not search for the truth.

At about 3:15 in the video, a graph comes up that Michaels says shows that the computer models that every other scientist (except the Russians????) uses to predict global warming---are fatally flawed.

The "Christy Graph", from the Website "Skeptical Science".
Image used under the "Fair Use" provision of the Copy Right Act.

Being the silly fool that I am, when I saw this on my tv (which plays YouTube videos too), I paused the program, jumped up, and, instantly looked for it using a Google search.

What I was doing was trying to find some of the conversation that surrounds the graph. I'm not a climate scientist, so I know that I don't know enough to even begin to have an informed opinion about what this guy was saying in this interview. But I am a Master of Philosophy, so I understand how science is supposed to work, so I went out and sniffed on the Web to look for what I could find.

I found several websites that identified this image as being quite famous. It is the "Christy Graph" (named after the man who created it:  Dr. John Christy.) Fortunately, the Guardian has an excellent article that neatly brings together a great many of the problems that people have identified with it, I would strongly recommend reading it. But if you don't have the time, here's the case in point form:

• Baseline alignment. Not having studied statistics, I simply don't understand this point. But that's not a problem, as the conversation is supposed to be taking place between experts---and all we non-experts can do is watch from the sidelines
• The uncertainty ranges are ignored. Statistical graphs generally shouldn't consist of lines, but rather individual brackets that show the range of potential values. That's because when you deal with the real world most measurements come with significant margins of error. For example, we wouldn't say "3", but rather "between 1 and 5". This is just an artifact of the tools we use to gather information. And once you do this, a lot of the divergence between what was predicted and what we see in the Christy graph disappears.
• The chart just averages together different sets of raw data. Some of people who collected the raw data that is brought together in the graph are disputed for one reason or another. If you think that some data is not as good as others, then you might want to find some way of weighing the better data more heavily than the stuff you feel kinda "hinky" about. It might be that there are differences of opinion about this, but then that discussion should be part of the presented information. 
• The chart wasn't peer reviewed!!!!! This should be a deal-breaker. Only experts will know enough to be able to tell if this graph makes any sense or not. And to be honest, no journalist should waste any time on anyone who is trotting out something that hasn't passed the basic scholarly "smell test" of peer review.
• The average temperature measurement is taken at 25,000 feet, whereas we live on the surface of the planet. What???
• There is lots of other evidence---besides what the Christy graph is based on---that suggests that the computer models are working just fine. 

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Please remember that I'm not trying to settle a claim about a specific graph or climate change in general. What I am trying to do is point out is that any specific isolated claim is pretty much irrelevant. People shouldn't listen to a YouTube video or read one statement on line, and come to a conclusion. Truth doesn't arise from one source, but rather from a conversation among the community of experts. It's unfortunate that most journalists don't understand this fact. It's even more unfortunate that there are well-funded organizations (like the Cato Institute) that exist just to create well-crafted, talking points designed to confuse the public. 

In a real conversation people pick an argument to pieces, the original author tries to answer those concerns, and, if a real problem is discovered, she modifies her hypothesis to accommodate these issues. Journalism and the Web don't work that way. News and opinion makers almost never pay attention to the conversation. Instead, what they do is look for a "good quote" and then move on.

If you do want to learn about an issue, use the wonderful resources that we have through search engines to look at the conversation between different people. And always look at the credentials of both the person making a claim, and, the source that is publishing what they have to say. Don't just read one article and decide based on that!

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!