Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Two days ago I briefly touched on the Climategate scandal in the middle of my thoughts about our society’s recently maturing caste mentality:
Scientists are to contribute studies to the IPCC…if their work has been subject to “peer review.” If not, then whatever they have to say doesn’t mean anything, even if they are real scientists. But gosh darn it, if we have to re-define what peer review is, we’ll go ahead and do that then! And, of course, you can’t participate in the peer review, if your works have not been peer reviewed. So it ends up being a cyclical, nonsensical criteria. Nothing more than a gentleman’s-club. I’m in. You’re out. I count. You don’t. We’re right. You’re wrong. Behold: the new “scientific method,” fit for a post-modern world saturated with, and drowning in, institutionalized thinking.
This has never helped the human race. It never once helped us to figure out the earth is round. To the contrary, this is precisely what kept it flat.
This championship of process-over-outcome is not by any means a failure; it achieves precisely what it is supposed to. It divides thinking people into two groups, one of which never makes any mistakes and the other of which is never right about anything. Real life very seldom actually works that way, and so through this thinking style the committee engages in a circular travel, and in so doing divorces itself from reality. This is the task that was attempted, whether anyone wants to admit that or not.
I don’t know if the Review & Outlook editors of the Wall Street Journal read my blog. I’ve always been of the mind that hardly anybody ever does…it isn’t called The Blog That Nobody Reads for nuthin’, ya know. But how else, then, do you explain this gem which popped up just a few hours ago?
This September, Mr. [Michael] Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: “Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted.” Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.
:
“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.” In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.A more thoughtful response to the emails comes from Mike Hulme, another climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, as reported by a New York Times blogger:
“This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”
The response from the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science. The proof for this is circular. It’s the best, we’re told, because it’s the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature. The public has every reason to ask why they felt the need to rig the game if their science is as indisputable as they claim. [emphasis mine]
This is the danger of process-over-outcome. Certainly, you can value outcome over process, and still have lots of rules about what you’re doing — if there are consequences to flouting the rule. Wash your car from the top down OR you’ll use up more water and your car won’t get as clean…water your Christmas tree twice a day OR it might die, dry out and catch fire…wash your hands before preparing meat OR you might make yourself sick.
There is no such consequence for this “peer review” as it is embraced by the chicken-little crowd. None that services the interests of the rest of us, anyway. Of course, if you base science on what any-ol’-Joe happens to say, you just might end up making an ass out of yourself. That’s the traditional premise for it.
But here we have a situation where the CRU scientists made asses out of themselves anyway, with their wagon circling. Granted, most of the humiliation came from the collusion about the wagon-circling rather than the wagon-circling itself. But what does that matter? It looks, to the public, like something anti-scientific…and there’s no defense against that, because in the end anti-scientific is precisely what it is.
Ultimately it all comes down to this:
These guys were not trying to stop the world from cooking. What they were trying to do to the world, was get it to buy the stuff they were selling. “Science” was reduced to nothing more than a label to affix to the sales pitch.
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