William James and Tom Stoppard

Sorry, if I am missing email responses. Been busy. If you all get a $100 a month subscription, I will be more responsive and actually research things. Indeed, I will buy the coffee.

I worked through much of William James' speech, which I linked to previously per Greg, and remember why I don't like reading Victorians.

They can't speak in a straight line with common words.

James began by saying people at Harvard, his audience, may still have an interest in vital subjects regardless of their general indifference, so he would broach the subject of his speech.

I suppose this is an amusing introduction one could get away with when attempting to communicate with the indifferent, self-appointed superior class from within. It is both a little jab, chuckle, and a confirmation of the audience's superiority. I suppose in those days, at least, Harvard was really a place of higher learning for the bright and wealthy, not the bright or the wealthy.

Anyway, one item of note I recommend of James is that an "hypothesis" that one presents to the intellect may be live or dead. I would say the TV volume switch is on or off....

One gets the impression that the club members are pretending to be smart for other members by using pointlessly complex, interwoven sentences dotted with words that seem colorful and intelligent, though meanings slide around and slow down the listener. I guess if someone has to stop to figure out what you are talking about, then they lose you train of thought and have to assume you are saying something. This is a variation on the King Has No Clothes. Of course, James was giving a speech and did not think his words would be read carefully.

I spend much time reading legal opinions from the era and those writings are often complex, but precise, and the logic runs in a straight line. There is no "hrupmhing" self indulgences or snide remarks to the enlightened. I should think the formality and thoroughness of thought evident in those days that had to be artfully jumbled up by those pretending to be the most clever. Seems like an English tut-tut thing. One has no trouble following Cardozo or Learned Hand:

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as

possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the

treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.

Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister

in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone

does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any

public duty to pay more than the law demands."

I am not sure we owe what the law demands, today, as in Learned Hand's day the government represented the people. So the notion of the citizen's "duty" becomes one of "avoiding jail."

Anyway, one item of note I recommend of James is that an "hypothesis" that one presents to the intellect may be live or dead. I would say the TV volume switch is on or off.

If you are told to decide something you don't care about, then the instruction and operation demanded are dead to the listener. So, if someone says, "Do you think Keefer Sutherland will die in 24?" That connects to people with a TV and who turn it on to see the show from time to time. If you don't watch and don't care, then one is actually hearing what Homer Simpson hears all the time: Bla, Bla, Bla, Beer, Bla, Beer.

This view of "liveness" means people, basically, are ass holes and not interested in trying to figure out what you are asking, if it is of no live interest; they just nod and move on. I note this when talking about UFOs. Not only is there no response, there is no interest in why you would ask.

If you ask about a live hypotheses, one that the listener is sensitive, then the whole conversation has meaning, if not interest.

As an example useful in both directions, I can offer one that gets both reactions: Obama is a socialist. Those who are sensitive to political history and theory understand the statement and can agree or not.1 Those who have the perspective and comprehension of an American in the 9th grade just stare and ask about UFOs, a valid change of direction.

An interesting conclusion, as I take it to be regardless of the elitist snide remarks:

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use... This very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use.

Literature provides much better examples and language than any hard or soft scientists can devise in their paradigm. It is too bad the mediocre show scorn for that which they do not know.

Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:

“The audience knows what to expect and that is all they are prepared to believe."

---
1. 1996 New Party publication report (Socialist):

Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).

This information was purged from some active sites last year, apparently, but archives still exist. Ask yourself why the information was purged from the active site.

The clear reference to socialism would only be of interest to the 9th grader, well college junior, to whom the concept is dead. They cannot perceive socialist action, having no perspective. We store away factoids, poorly defined, in our little school brains and few are "live."

Dr. Lindzen speaks; William James is still dead

Greg called and muttered I was obtuse without saying hello. He's got a way about him.

He said the point of a letter regarding an effort to model what happens when a roof is painted white was that one really can't do it - so how can you model the earth?

Think of all the variables that you know: humidity, absorption rates. heat sinks (I guess), moisture and content of the air, the air pressure, wind. Are there ducks? All these matter and must be blended into some some sort of model - which one? Then, what of other houses, etc. You will never model the one house, so how can one model how the earth works. See Lindzen's speech which I hope is above.

Indeed, he suggests, as the atmosphere is being sheared away by the sun, we may be worried about the wrong things. The wind shearing is new to me; it is posited that is what happened to Mars. Someday, we may want to add CO2.

Then he recommends a William James lecture given in 1896: The Will To Believe. I will read it over the weekend and tell you what it really means, unless you decide to read it yourself, which may be a good idea. I have learned that when Greg recommends something over 50 years old, it is really good.

Finally: a little piece about the notion that there is "consensus." Note Dr. Lindzen's name. He was the guy I previously mentioned who worked with the UN group and was misquoted as saying he supported the group think. He flipped out and have been annoying true believers ever since. Since people like to talk about scientists' training and, hence, credibility, he is the king of global warming gurus.


Global Warming Consensus Melts
by: Evan Sumortin, June 10, 2009

In Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, he assures the public that the “[global warming] debate in the scientific community is over.” The Heartland Institute disagrees. On June 2nd, 2009 the Institute hosted its Third International Conference on Climate Change, touting an impressive speakers list that included scientists, economists, and politicians. Their stated mission was to challenge the “consensus” on global warming.

Dr. Richard Lindzen, a Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spoken at the conference since its inception. Each time, he confronted the alleged scientific consensus by exposing the fundamental reason why many scientists support global warming despite so much evidence to the contrary. “Endorsing global warming just makes their life easier,” Lindzen argued.

According to Dr. Lindzen, scientists that are able to relate their work to global warming are more likely to receive instant recognition with politicians and the media. Often times, this recognition leads to government funding. “Most of the atmospheric scientists and oceanographers who I respect do endorse global warming,” he readily admitted. “The important point, however, is that the science that they do that I respect is not about global warming.”

To exemplify this point Lindzen mentioned Wally Broecker, a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. “[His] work clearly shows that sudden climate change occurs without anthropogenic influence, and is a property of cold rather than warm climates. However,” Lindzen notes, “[Broecker] staunchly beats the drums for alarm and is richly rewarded for doing so.” For example, in September 2008 Broecker was the recipient of the Balzan Prize for “his extraordinary contributions to the understanding of climate change.”

Lindzen further asserted, “Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public, authority will generally win since they do not wish to deal with science…thus, for over twenty years the National Academy had a temporary nominating group designed to facilitate the election of environmental activists. The current president of the academy is one of these. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been headed by James McCarthy and John Holdren in recent years, and these have been public advocates for global warming alarm…There are numerous other examples.”

The scientists who are willing to stand up to alarmism have seen their grants disappear and their work dismissed as junk-science. “James Holdren was long on the board of the MacArthur Foundation which has awarded ‘genius’ grants to numerous environmental activists” and “Science and Nature have both publicly taken positions against publishing anything that opposes the notion of dangerous anthropogenic warming, while publishing highly dubious science endorsing the notion,” stated Lindzen.

In the case of Science magazine, the controversy followed a study by Dr. Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, in December of 2004. Her research consisted of analyzing 1,000 papers on the subject of global warming, published since the early 1990s. She concluded that 75% of them backed the theory of man-made global warming and none dissented from it.

Dr. Benny Peiser, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, was one of many scientists to disagree with Dr. Oreskes’s unequivocal conclusions. Dr. Peiser decided to conduct his own analysis with the same documents and found the following: “Of all 1117 [papers], only 13 (or 1%) explicitly endorse the ‘consensus view’. 322 [papers] (or 29%) implicitly accept the ‘consensus view’ but mainly focus on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change. 470 (or 42%) [papers]… do not include any direct or indirect link or reference to human activities, CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions, let alone anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.”

Dr. Peiser submitted his findings in order to be published in Science but was rejected on the grounds that “basic points” of his research had been “widely dispersed over the internet.” Dr. Peiser challenged the legitimacy of this statement stating, “It is simply not true that they have appeared elsewhere.” Later, he wrote back to them, “As the results from my analysis refuted the original claims, I believe Science has a duty to publish them.” They did not.

Lindzen argued that proponents of global warming “fail to note that there are many sources of climate change, and that climate change occurred many times both before and after man appeared on earth. Given the ubiquity of climate change, it is implausible that all change is for the worse. Moreover, the coincidence of increasing carbon dioxide and the small warming over the past century hardly establishes causality.”

Despite these doubts, mainstream reporters continue to insist on a consensus.

In a recent debate on MSNBC’s Hardball between the host, Chris Matthews, and U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-California), Matthews claimed, “There is a huge consensus on global warming in the country right now and man’s contribution to it.” He continued to openly criticize Rohrabacher’s skepticism about global warming by calling him names without actually confronting several scientific arguments that Rohrabacher presented. Rohrabacher was condescendingly asked, “Are you a Luddite…are you a part of the Planet of the Apes that doesn’t want science?” To this he responded, “[I’m] someone willing to speak the truth…in my lifetime I have never seen an effort with more pressure to try to cut off debate than this issue… you have just demonstrated to your audience by calling names…how do you discuss science with those types of terms?” At the conference, Rohrabacher challenged “believers” of global warming by boldly stating, “The case is not closed…the tide is turning.”

Although mainstream reporting continues to exaggerate the consensus among the scientific community, the tide is indeed turning. In a recent Gallup Poll, a record high 41% say that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated. That is a 6% increase from the 2008 poll.

Evan Sumortin is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.