by Judith Curry
John Beddington, Chief Science Advisor to the UK government, goes to war against bad science (h/t BishopHill, dated Feb 14):
We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.
One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense. That we don’t kind of shrug it off. We don’t say: ‘oh, it’s the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community—and this is a very important scientific community—to think about how we do it.
John Stirling responds to Beddington’s statement (h/t Roger Pielke Jr) in an essay dated Feb 18:
T]he basic aspirational principles of science offer the best means to challenge the ubiquitously human distorting pressures of self-serving privilege, hubris, prejudice and power. Among these principles are exactly the scepticism and tolerance against which Beddington is railing (ironically) so emotionally! Of course, scientific practices like peer review, open publication and acknowledgement of uncertainty all help reinforce the positive impacts of these underlying qualities. But, in the real world, any rational observer has to note that these practices are themselves imperfect. Although rarely achieved, it is inspirational ideals of universal, communitarian scepticism—guided by progressive principles of reasoned argument, integrity, pluralism, openness and, of course, empirical experiment—that best embody the great civilising potential of science itself. As the motto of none other than the Royal Society loosely enjoins (also sometimes somewhat ironically) “take nothing on authority”. In this colourful instance of straight talking then, John Beddington is himself coming uncomfortably close to a particularly unsettling form of unscientific—even (in a deep sense) anti-scientific—’double speak’.
Anyone who really values the progressive civilising potential of science should argue (in a qualified way as here) against Beddington’s intemperate call for “complete intolerance” of scepticism. It is the social and human realities shared by politicians, non-government organisations, journalists and scientists themselves, that make tolerance of scepticism so important. The priorities pursued in scientific research and the directions taken by technology are all as fundamentally political as other areas of policy. No matter how uncomfortable and messy the resulting debates may sometimes become, we should never be cowed by any special interest—including that of scientific institutions—away from debating these issues in open, rational, democratic ways. To allow this to happen would be to undermine science itself in the most profound sense. It is the upholding of an often imperfect pursuit of scepticism and tolerance that offer the best way to respect and promote science. Such a position is, indeed, much more in keeping with the otherwise-exemplary work of John Beddington himself.
An article by Beddington in the New Scientist (h/t BishopHill) also dated Feb 18 reflects a substantially different tone, entitled “We need both skepticism and consensus:”
What concerns me is not that uncertainties are scrutinised, for uncertainties will always exist. What concerns me is our inability, and often, fear of communicating, and admitting, this fact. Indeed, as scientists we must be more transparent, more open to describing the gaps in our knowledge. Scepticism is the driving force for further discovery and better evidence. But often there is a thin line between healthy scepticism and a cynical approach which ignores or distorts inconvenient evidence.
It is human nature to find evidence more convincing when it backs up our own preconceptions, but when we allow that impulse to influence how society acts on important issues, it is irresponsible and dangerous.
Let’s return to what science actually is: the testing and retesting of hypotheses by experiment and scrutiny to create an evidence base. Where the evidence falls primarily on one side of an argument, a consensus is formed. Whether in policy advice, news reports or documentaries, to misrepresent the balance of evidence, whether explicitly or implicitly, is a dereliction of duty.
So I would issue the following challenges:
It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence. We must make evidence, and associated uncertainties, accessible and explicable. In a world of global communication, we cannot afford to only speak to ourselves. We must also be confident in challenging the misrepresentation or exaggeration of evidence and the conclusions it leads to. Where significant consensus exists, it must be made obvious.
In the Civil Service and other organisations with a stake in policy, we must guard against ideology, and consider the whole body of evidence, not just that which supports our own views. I will continue to carry this message across government in my role as chief scientific adviser. Scientific evidence is only one factor in politicians’ decisions but its integrity must be preserved if poor decisions are to be avoided.
We all have a stake in this. The pursuit of truth is not just for the scientific elite, nor Fleet Street, nor the corridors of Whitehall. This is a call to all of us – follow the evidence, and challenge those who seek to distort it.
I wonder exactly what Beddington regards as misuse of scientific evidence, and where he draws the line between pseudoscience and skepticism. The problem even with Beddington’s more moderate statement is that there is an assumption that evidence about a topic like climate change is unambiguous and ignorance doesn’t own a big part of the evidence space.
Bishop Hill particularly likes this statement:
It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence. We must make evidence, and associated uncertainties, accessible and explicable. In a world of global communication, we cannot afford to only speak to ourselves. We must also be confident in challenging the misrepresentation or exaggeration of evidence and the conclusions it leads to. Where significant consensus exists, it must be made obvious.
From BishopHill: I have left a comment challenging him to condemn “hide the decline” in unequivocal terms. I’m not holding my breath though.
Wikipedia on pseudoscience
The wikipedia page on pseudoscience is very good:
3 Identifying pseudoscience
3.1 Use of vague, exaggerated or untestable claims
3.2 Over-reliance on confirmation rather than refutation
3.3 Lack of openness to testing by other experts
3.4 Absence of progress
3.5 Personalization of issues
3.6 Use of misleading language
The boundary lines between the science and pseudoscience are disputed and difficult to determine analytically, even after more than a century of dialogue among philosophers of science and scientists in varied fields, and despite some basic agreements on the fundaments of scientific methodology.[22][60] The concept of pseudoscience rests on an understanding that scientific methodology has been misrepresented or misapplied with respect to a given theory, but many philosophers of science maintain that different kinds of methods are held as appropriate across different fields and different eras of human history. Paul Feyerabend, for example, disputes whether any meaningful boundaries can be drawn between pseudoscience, “real” science, and what he calls “protoscience”, especially where there is a significant cultural or historical distance.
There are well-known cases of fields that were originally considered pseudoscientific but which are now accepted scientific effects or valid hypotheses, for example, continental drift, cosmology, ball lightning, and radiation hormesis. As another example, osteopathy has, according to Kimball Atwood, “for the most part, repudiated its pseudoscientific beginnings and joined the world of rational healthcare” for lower back pain although it is not particularly effective.
Larry Laudan has suggested that pseudoscience has no scientific meaning and is mostly used to describe our emotions: “If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘unscientific’ from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us”. Likewise, Richard McNally states that “The term ‘pseudoscience’ has become little more than an inflammatory buzzword for quickly dismissing one’s opponents in media sound-bites” and that “When therapeutic entrepreneurs make claims on behalf of their interventions, we should not waste our time trying to determine whether their interventions qualify as pseudoscientific. Rather, we should ask them: How do you know that your intervention works? What is your evidence?”
The term pseudoscience can also have political implications that eclipse any scientific issues. Imre Lakatos, for instance, points out that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at one point declared that Mendelian genetics was pseudoscientific and had its advocates, including well-established scientists such as Nikolai Vavilov, sent to Gulag,and that the “liberal Establishment of the West” denies freedom of speech to topics it regards as pseudoscience, particularly where they run up against social mores.
JC’s summary: I agree with Laudan and McNally that pseudoscience is not a useful term. However, for anyone using this word in the context of the climate science debate, I would ask them to look in the mirror while reading that list of identifying characteristics of pseudoscience, before declaring the other “side” to be pseudoscience.