House of Eratosthenes

Paul Krugman is a dinosaur. Get a load of his latest (link requires registration). Go on, try to find me one single well-reasoned argument in the entire piece. Just one. Underlying, undisputed, concrete fact…sound opinion based on one or several plausible inferences derived from those facts. Is there anything like that in there, anything at all?

I’m afraid the highest-profile editorialist at the nation’s most prestigious newspaper, has a style of writing quite out of place in our current age, in which we differentiate between facts and opinions. In the Jurassic period of editorialism from which Krugman comes, facts are invisible accessories within large packages of opinion given to us unwashed masses by the elites. Facts are like computer chips inside a highly modernized automobile — take it in for servicing by a qualified mechanic, this part is not built to be serviced by the customer. Think this; don’t think that. Trust these scientists but not those. What is the theme of his column today?

Corporations [subsidized]…think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of “scholars” whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.

Krugman is instructing us that we should disregard an entire universe of research, any research that can be tied to the private sector. It’s not peer-reviewed after all. I suppose if a scientist’s pants were on fire and I said “Hey, your pants are on fire” but my thesis on his pants had no peer review, the guy’s pants wouldn’t be on fire. One wonders what a fire drill at the New York times must be like. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Poor Paul, he just doesn’t get it. If you “peer-review” research that says, to take his example, there is such a thing as global warming and it is caused by human activity, what in the hell does that tell me? That it’s proven? No, it tells me you found some peers who agree with the conclusion, and if they were diligent, they found the report carried no facts that were provably false, and there were no outright lies. But Paul wants to strip the research clean of any infestation from that awful, evil private sector. So his kind of peer review tells me a bunch of government & academic types were found who happen to agree with each other about something.

Now, I wasn’t alive when Krugman’s contemporaries roamed the earth, before their bones were smashed underneath tons of sand and silt to form the fossils we can excavate today. But I understand how this used to work. Facts were hard to come by, and we relied on professionals to not only glean the facts, but to digest them as well. Consequently, it was quite acceptable for Joe Six-Pack to clone between his own two ears, as an example, Walter Cronkite’s opinion that the war in Vietnam wasn’t going so hot, or the progressive intelligentsia’s verdict that Joe McCarthy was doing more harm than good, or that Watergate was a lot worse than Whitewatergate. Upon which facts did these opinions depend? Well that was the wonderful thing about professionals; who in the world cared? The professionals spouted off to us opinions that were good. If the opinions weren’t good, then the spouters wouldn’t be professionals, would they?

As I have said before, this is the Age of Google. We don’t have any requirement for this service anymore, although Krugman desperately wants to be in that line of work. I can sit down in front of a search engine — for free! — and watch the pro-global-warming camp inflict their intellectual assaults on the evidence presented by the anti-global-warming camp, and vice-versa.

In the twenty-first century, we not only have the capability of doing this, we also have a need. One scientist might report that the ocean temperatures have gone up 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1961. Another scientist might say, hey, those measurements weren’t taken the same way in 1961 as they are today and this taints the evidence. Now the first scientist might say excuse me, the second scientist is not addressing the data that went into my report…that would be a reasonable counterargument. Or the first scientist might say hey, if you believe everything the second scientist says, the global warming is worse than I stated. That would be reasonable too.

But Paul would rather say “ignore that second scientist, his work is not peer reviewed.” What the hell is that?

I’ll tell you what it is; it is Petitio Qu�siti. Krugman carefully recuses himself from telling us why a certain statement is true, only that — trust him — it is. Seeking foundation for global warming, he lays the foundation in an informal vote, purportedly a unanimous one, among the scientists he likes. His argument is: Everyone agrees that that global warming is real. Except when I say “everyone” I’m disregarding everything in the private sector, which is what you should be doing too. Therefore, we may have a situation where every single scientist who doesn’t depend on a government teat, agrees global warming is not real, but within my little jurassic world I’d still be on good foundation to say “everyone agrees that that global warming is real.” It’s a unanimous decision…among the people that I, Krugmasaurus, have decreed you should be paying attention to.

I’m nominally familiar with Paul Krugman’s work. Now and then a liberal will demand that I take a look at this Krugman piece or that Krugman piece, and tell me how I can maintain my opinions about this-or-that in the face of such clear-cut and irresistible offense. Very seldom can I form an adequate response. What evidence is Krugman presenting to me, what is he telling me I should conclude from it? I need to know the answer to those two questions, in order to divine the answer to a third: How solidly do Krugman facts support Krugman opinions? But with Krugmasaurus, these things are never clear. Fact and opinion are poured into the same blender like water and oil, and the motor is turned on high so they’re all churned together. Perhaps if I set the resulting mixture aside and let it separate, we could see how the argument was formed, but the Krugman blades churn on relentlessly.

Based on what I have observed of Krugman, he doesn’t understand any more about the difference between fact & opinion, than a cold-blooded reptile understands how to sweat. Pontificators that belong to his species have no reason to understand this. They come from an ancient steaming jungle where this isn’t required; there is only a vast, vertical hierarchy of thinkers, each level telling the level beneath it what to think, just like the “food chain” of the carnivores and herbivores. He is simply playing his part in this hierarchy.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn’t have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

Ouch! There is a lot of flesh missing from that self-inflicted dripping wound belonging to Krugman. Read that last sentence one more time…”That…may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.” What reason have you to think this, Krugmasaurus Rex? It just sounds really ominous and spooky to say so, and therefore, it’s a fitting climax to your self-gratifying treatise?

It would appear “banishing Darwin from the classroom” is a dire enough consequence, that in Krugman’s mind no hard evidence or solid reasoning should be needed in order to sound the alarm. If that’s the case, is it not reasonable to posit that this is what’s supporting the whole global warming theory to begin with? That the consequences are grave enough that no threshold of proof should be imposed?

I expect this would probably stand up to what Krugman calls “peer review.”

Sorry, but as a warm-blooded homo sapiens, I find it difficult to accept that I’d be forming more responsible opinions by simply dismissing any & all scientists in the parallel universe. Why should I? If the parallel universe comes up with something that can be proven wrong…just prove it wrong. Come up with something that reasonably points out the mistakes. Your public-sector scientists have the same access to mass communication as everybody else, Paul.

Just have them make sure the rebuttal is peer reviewed first.

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KrugmasaurusSaturday, August 6th, 2005

Krugmasaurus
Saturday, August 6th, 2005