In the taxonomy of English writing, E.M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Still, there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was free of many vices commonly found in novelists of his generation—what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do. He didn’t lean rightward with the years, or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the Pope or the Queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin, or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a hand-basket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum, or foreigners swamping the cities.

Just look at what Zadie has done here: she has managed to write an exceptionally interesting introduction to a man who was not particularly interesting by any of the standard measures. What comes across is Forster’s almost inhuman reasonableness and as Zadie goes on to write, this is both his deepest flaw as a writer and his saving grace. And so I link to this piece not to pursue any particular philosophical point or literary argument but simply because it is a rare joy to come across such precise and dextrous writing and, well, I wanted to share the feeling.

Addendum: Having just seen the final quarter of the match, I think Brisbane Lions supporters would have every reason to make the same point in reverse. I’ve now seen this pattern emerge many times this season. One team, usually the home team from a one- or two-team city, will get a ridiculous umpiring advantage for three quarters. Then in the last quarter, almost every decision goes against the home team. What I think is happening is that the umpires are being swayed by the home crowd. (This is a natural process and occurs in almost all team sports, but in AFL the advantage is ridiculous, often a 50% or greater advantage in free kicks, and the most contentious decisions almost always seem to take place at critical points in the match.) At the three-quarter break, I suspect the umpires check the free kick count and think “Gee, there’s a big discrepancy here, and I did give a few frees that in hindsight should perhaps have been play-on and let a few go that I really should have given the other way.” And the last quarter is full of evener-uppers.

I think the AFL should be putting a lot more into the umpiring — it seems to me to be the only aspect of the game that has not become markedly more professional over the last thirty years. One of the things they should be doing is to train umpires not to be swayed by crowds. That is, they need the help of sports psychologists. The other thing that should happen, to be fair to umpires given that AFL is one of the most difficult games in the world to referee, is to tighten up the rules and make them less subjective. I’m not talking about major experimental rule changes (which have generally failed dismally in the past), but in adopting some of the philosophy of American football and rugby and helping umps make decisions by adopting clear, concise definitions of play. For instance, in rugby and American football, whether a ball is out of bounds depends on where the feet of the player holding the ball are. In Aussie rules, it is based on the position of the ball, which means a player can be completely over the boundary line but hold the ball inside and continue play. This would be hard enough to judge on a rectangular field, but AFL fields are ovals, so a boundary umpire has to make a decision about the position of a ball relative to a curved line as it is being held aloft and often at arm’s length by a player up to 50 metres away. No wonder they make so many mistakes. It’s simply not cognitively possible to get this right.

Right now, Paul and his family are dealing with some scary shit of their own. After being diagnosed with bowel cancer, having sections of his bowel removed and enduring six months worth of chemotherapy, he has recently discovered he has spots on his liver. Paul has met this news by reloading his guns and is going to fight it with two other forms of chemotherapy for cancers like his, combined with a monoclonal antibody called Avastin. Avastin, however is not part of Medicare or the private health system’s funding at this stage. It costs $20,000 to do it.

The ART THAT SCARES YOU auction is now live at <lj user=”artscaresyou”> until 9pm AEST, 28 August 2008. We are accepting donations and pledges of art, books and auctionable goodies right up until the last day. Some auctions are ending early, so come check us out now!

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The Paul Haines fundraising tally recently hit the $16,000 mark which is fantastic, but we’re not there yet. If we should overshoot this target before the end of the ART THAT SCARES YOU auction, any extraneous donated funds will also be passed directly on to Paul and his family to help with the other costs they need to cover right now. Email artscaresyou@gmail.com with any queries about the auction.

In the meantime, if you’d like to make a general donation via Paypal click here for the link via Tansy Rayner Roberts’s LJ. (For some reason direct linking seems to fail for both Cat Sparks and myself!).

Rosenbaum frames the debate as one between Consensus and Dissent—Consensus being the belief among most climate scientists that humans are causing global warming by pumping out industrial quantities of carbon dioxide, and Dissent being the belief among a much smaller number of qualified scientists that humans and carbon dioxide have very little to do with climate. The main thrust of Rosenbaum’s argument is that dissenting voices need to be heard in the mass media. I agree with that naturally, and I agree with him that the Columbia Journalism Review has not kept to its own philosophy very well on this particular matter, but Rosenbaum makes no attempt to decide what counts as reasonable Dissent, for of course the mass media are under no moral imperative to publish every voice of Dissent. But what really interested me was Rosenbaum’s flamboyant display of Thomas S. Kuhn in defence of global warming dissent.

Indeed, the century’s foremost historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, believed,…that science often proceeds by major unexpected shifts: Just when an old consensus congealed, new dissenting, contradictory reports heralded a “paradigm shift” that often ended up tossing the old “consensus” into the junk bin.

So far so good. In fact, it goes without saying that at some point every successful scientific theory started out as a minority position and every successful scientific theory consigned an older consensus theory to the dustbin. But then Rosenbaum bites off more than he can chew.

If it hadn’t been for the lone dissenting voice of that crazy guy in the Swiss patent office with his papers on “relativity,” we still might believe the “consensus” that Newtonian mechanics explained a deterministic universe. And what about Ignaz Semmelweis and his lone crusade against the “consensus” that doctors need not wash their hands before going from an infected to an uninfected patient? Or the nutty counterintuitive dissenting idea of vaccination? The consensus was wrong. In fact, science proceeds by overturning consensus.

The number of errors in this one paragraph is extraordinary. First of all, I don’t think anyone believes that we would still consider Newtonian theory the gold standard of physics. By the time Einstein wrote his paper on special relativity in 1905, classical physics was already in deep trouble. Newtonian physics was at odds with Maxwell’s equations and the Michelson-Morley experiment and thermodynamics was so at odds with the observed spectrum of black-body radiation that physicists called the problem “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe.” Special relativity would have arrived without Einstein, and Einstein agreed, saying, “There is no doubt, that the special theory of relativity, if we regard its development in retrospect, was ripe for discovery in 1905.” Rosenbaum is also incorrect in implying that special relativity undermined the determinism of Newton. For a start, relativity is actually much older than Einstein. It goes back to Galileo and is often referred to as “Galilean relativity” and this is why Einstein called his theory “special” relativity to distinguish it from the prevailing theory. Even more importantly, special relativity is just as deterministic as the Galilean relativity it replaced. Most scientists consider special relativity to be a classical theory of physics because it deals in precise points in space and time and is utterly absolutist. Einstein did not  demolish absolutism but substituted one absolute term (length of space and time) for another (the speed of light). And even then, special relativity still represents space and time in absolute objective terms. The death of naïve determinism came not from relativity but from quantum theory and chaos theory.

Now all of this goes to show that Rosenbaum is not particularly knowledgeable about the history of science. But of all his mistakes, the worst is in misrepresenting Kuhn, who never made a statement as sweeping as that science proceeds by overturning consensus. Kuhn himself was appalled that his work was continually misused by the postmodern movement to imply such a thing.

Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.

As Kuhn pointed out, “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.”

Even more importantly, what Rosenbaum fails to appreciate is that, just as in journalism, overturning consensus is not a goal in itself. What really matters is the quality of the consensus view versus the quality of the dissenting view. In Einstein’s time there were dozens of competing theories proposed to explain the increasingly glaring problems with classical mechanics; some of them were quite unfeasible, for instance the attempt to redefine the properties of the luminiferous æther which resulted in the proposition that æther was a massless, frictionless, perfectly compressible fluid that moved at different velocities to propagate different wavelengths of light. Needless to say, this view did not please many scientists. Likewise, just because there are dissenters from the global warming consensus does not mean that their views deserve widespread attention. (There are respected scientists who are informed global warming skeptics such as Freeman Dyson, but I leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why these prominent, scientifically-astute skeptics are rarely found in the company of those who generate media time for the anti-warming platform.)

What it all depends on is evidence and argumentation, which Rosenbaum seems not to give the slightest indication of addressing. He’s aware of the problem…

But which arguments? It’s a fascinating subject that I’ve spent some time considering. My last two books…were, in part anyway, efforts to decide which of the myriad arguments about and dissenting visions of each of these figures was worth pursuing. For instance, with Hitler, after investigating, I wanted to refute the myth (often used in a heavy-handed way by anti-Semites) that Hitler was part Jewish. The risk is that in giving attention to the argument, one can spread it even while refuting it. But to ignore it was worse.

But having decided that it’s a fascinating subject, Rosenbaum has concludes the best solution is to ignore the problem.

But I’d argue that journalists should be on the side of vigorous argument, not deciding for readers what is truth and then not exposing them to certain arguments.

Except that journalists and editors make decisions every day about what arguments to report and not report. And even if they report on an argument, they decide how much space to give and how much prominence. And I can’t see how you can be in favour of “vigorous argument” if you make no decisions about what is vigorous and what is frivolous. In the end, Rosenbaum is all about Consensus versus Dissent, not the quality of the consensus or the dissent views. And he has drawn on Kuhn (erroneously as it turns out) to promote the uncritical reporting of Dissent. I think it speaks to his blindness on this matter that he refers to vaccination as one of the Fruits of Dissent without seeming to understand that it is the anti-vaccinators who are today’s Dissenters and who thrive on the undeserved attention of the media and the courtroom.

And that prompted me to look for some more examples. Here we go…

The blog Contratimes contains a long article in favour of Dissent. It starts with Mark Twain and ends with Thomas Kuhn. This writer, one Bill Gnade, at least gets Kuhn right thank goodness. And his point is perfectly valid: consensus does not demonstrate truth. But he makes little effort to discuss the evidentiary value of consensus versus dissent and ends up using Twain and Kuhn simply to praise himself for being a dissenter as if that was a cardinal virtue. I also note in another of Gnade’s articles that he uses (without naming it) semiotics to argue that there are such things as “racist facts” and that any attempt to define racism in a way that doesn’t suit him can be dismissed because “dictionaries only list how words are used and not how they must be used.” In other words, we channel Saussare to defend “racist facts” in public discourse.

And there’s more. I stumbled upon the website for Channel 4’s provocative documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Whatever one thinks of global warming, this particular documentary is misleading and deceptive and promotes an alternative theory to anthropogenic global warming that is just not really “vigorous.” And what do you find on its website? A list of four recommended books: three anti-global warming polemics and…The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.

I will keep reporting as I find instances of postmodernism being used to undermine evidence in a way that supports powerful interests.

Now you may be wondering why I am bringing up David Hilbert. The answer is in this rather waffly piece by Peter Wood entitled “How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science.” Given that this essay is all in favour of  encouraging school students into science, you might think I would agree with it. You would be wrong. I wanted to agree with it. But then I made the mistake of reading it. Now I’m not going to punish you by following Wood’s meandering trail of unsupported assertions and blithe asides that bring nothing to the argument. I am, however, going to take issue with this statement:

A society that worries itself about which chromosomes scientists have isn’t a society that takes science education seriously. In 1900 the mathematician David Hilbert famously drew up a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics; 18 have now been solved. Hilbert has also bequeathed us a way of thinking about mathematics and the sciences as a to-do list of intellectual challenges. Notably, Hilbert didn’t write down problem No. 24: “Make sure half the preceding 23 problems are solved by female mathematicians.”

It is, I must confess, a mystery to me why a writer trying to encourage students to engage with science should make statements to the effect that women shouldn’t really bother. Given that the article is about the cultural barriers to science education, I would have thought that defending a rather, er, unnuanced view of female capability was counter-productive. Oh, I know, Wood’s point is that we should be putting more effort into teaching students to enjoy science than encouraging lots of ill-fated female applicants to join a field in which they are unlikely to excel. It’s a “let’s not waste effort” argument. Which might make sense if our mathematics and science faculties were brimming with women who were not producing much good work. I challenge Wood to support his intimation with some evidence. In fact, I’ll go one better. I hereby challenge Wood to explain his own choice of data. You see, as Wood points out,

The big problem? As of 2001, 80 percent of engineering degrees and 72 percent of computer-science degrees have gone to men.

Note the very careful choice of departments. Wood is only quoting figures for engineering and comp. sci. fields, which have traditionally borne a heavy masculine bias. But if Wood is correct, then women have not taken over these fields and therefore cannot be blamed for any dumbing down or lack of student interest. Wood is, of course, fretting about contemporary attempts to redress the gender balance. We should not, he argues, fritter away our energies trying to encourage women to become engineers or computer gurus because they just aren’t all that interested or good at it. This might be a sound argument if he could show that the influx of women into other more welcoming fields, such as the biomedical sciences, had caused disruption to research and teaching quality. I dare say Wood is going to find it hard to make that demonstration stick.

So back to David Hilbert, whom Wood misrepresents woefully. For one thing, Wood’s “24th” conjecture is rubbish. The reason why Hilbert would never have asked how to make half his problems be solved by women is that this is not a mathematical question. But even if we allow Wood his clumsy rhetorical device, it ought to be said that Hilbert would have been devastated to see this frippery attributed to him even in jest.

Back in the early twentieth century, a young mathematician of Bavarian stock came to the attention of David Hilbert. Her name was Emmy Noether. She went on to revolutionise algebra, field theory, and topology. Her first theorem, published in 1918, remains one of the pillars of modern physics. Whenever you hear physicists talking about symmetry, they are drawing on Noether’s First Theorem. If it had not been for Hilbert, she would probably never have found work in the German university system. Hilbert could not protect her completely and Noether suffered discrimination despite his constant support. Her outstanding mathematical publications were never rewarded with a senior position let alone tenure, and much of her work at Göttingen was in unpaid honorary positions (although in this case it was the university that was honored by her rather than vice versa).

So, you know, Mr Wood, if you want to change the culture of science to make it more attractive to school students, I have to wonder why you would spend such a large chunk of your essay telling the female half of the cohort that they are neurologically unsuited to maths and hard science and that efforts to encourage them will prove fruitless. You should not have put words in Hilbert’s mouth, especially words so antagonistic to Hilbert’s real beliefs. I would rather you had used Hilbert as an example of a great mathematician reaching out to support another great mathematician despite the many barriers that were placed in her way. (As well as suffering for the lack of a Y chromosome, Noether was a Jew and was cast out of the University of Göttingen during the Nazi sweep of academia—a dismissal that Hilbert fought against once more, this time unsuccessfully.) Instead of hijacking Hilbert’s 23 problems for a cheap jibe, you could have used Hilbert as an example of the sort of scientist we should be looking to put in positions of influence: one who will recognise and foster great talent wherever it lies, regardless of sex or race, and in the face of grave political and cultural discouragement. That’s the sort of culture change that would help science.

The best thing Hilbert ever said on the subject of women in science was this: When Noether’s appointment to the University of Göttingen was being blocked by stubborn faculty members, one of them complained to Hilbert that the students would resent learning “at the feet of a woman.” Hilbert replied that it should not matter. “We are a university, not a bath-house.”

Adjunct: It is one of my favourite quirks of history that Emmy Noether came to prominence around the same time that Einstein showed that her surname was a literal description of the structure of space and time.

Others have already performed the necessary takedowns. I heartily recommend Ed Brayton’s exposé of Card’s faulty legal logic and John Scalzi’s dissection of the dishonesty at the heart of activists opposed to gay marriage (which is also, by the way, whence this post’s irresistible title comes).

But I would just like to transpose two of Card’s statements, separated in Card’s op-ed by some 1,500 words:

Please remember that for the mildest of comments critical of the political agenda of homosexual activists, I have been called a “homophobe” for years.

This is a term that was invented to describe people with a pathological fear of homosexuals — the kind of people who engage in acts of violence against gays.

…followed by a chapter’s worth of blather, after which comes…

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

That’s right, folks. Card is not homophobic, merely sympathetic towards violent uprising against that “mortal enemy,” the US government, to prevent same-sex marriage. But, no, no, it’s not homophobia. And it’s not a call to extralegal violence, either. It would be entirely unfair of anyone to accuse Card of inciting violence because such things just don’t happen all that often. It’s just, um, constitutional conservatism, that’s what, just like the constitutional conservatism of, erm, South Carolina in, say, 1860, give or take.

I would also note that while Card may believe that marriage has only One True definition, he belongs to a church that changed its One True definition of marriage back in 1876, and belongs to a nation in which several states used different One True definitions of marriage up until 1967. I would also note that Card’s objections to same-sex marriage could, with a few keyword subsitutions, read almost exactly the same as the objections to interracial marriage that succeeded in several Alabama Supreme Court cases in the late 1870s. And those Alabama anti-miscegenation laws were supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. All of which just goes to show that things change, even for conservative churches and political parties.

Go suck on the facts, Mr Card. Even a Jehoshaphat claqueur like yourself should understand that it’s better than having people suck on a gun barrel just because they can see through your personal cognitive dissonances.

“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next…”

Now I have nothing against the WSJ printing or Arts and Letters Daily recommending well-researched and argued articles that express doubt in current global warming models, but this piece was by any reasonable definition, an utter load of cobblers. Kieran states that global warming is the scientific equivalent of the “yellow journalism” that epitomised the editorial policies of Hearst’s shock-and-bile tabloids of the 1920s and 1930s.

Just as it is far easier to publish stories without verifying the sources; so is it much more convenient to practice yellow science than the real thing.

Now, what made me laugh at this accusation was that it was appeared in an op-ed that contains not a single verified source. Not one. Not a single reference. Not a single named source. Not a damn thing. (And besides, Kieran is simply wrong. I would challenge him—or anyone else—to find a single published scientific research paper on climate change that lists fewer than twenty references.) Not that it stops Kieran from, well, pulling stuff out of his own fundament.

Hearst made only a fraction of his estimated $140 million in net worth from yellow journalism. Global warming, on the other hand, has provided an estimated $50 billion in research grants to those willing to practice yellow science.

Note the bizarre comparison (Hearst’s personal profits from journalism in presumably 1920-1930 dollars compared to an “estimated” number of research grants over an unspecified time frame and distributed to an unspecified number of researchers; it’s the sort of comparison that only makes sense if you have a severe cognitive deficit—although it would explain the number of climate scientists who, like Hearst’s descendants, have appeared on the Forbes 400 List). And where exactly does he get the $50 billion from? Who knows? He’s not telling. This is, by his own definition, “irreparably disgraced journalism” and the sort of thing that has meant “[j]ournalists have lost the respectability of their profession, and the public has lost real journalism.” Apparently Kieran’s rule of yellow journalism is non-recursive.

Thus it was clear to me that the WSJ had lost all semblance of self-respect when it published Kieran’s superhuman chutzpah; now it turns out that the WSJ has not just lost its self-respect but its sanity. The WSJ this week published an editorial about the new Batman movie and how the heroic character of Batman demonstrates all the exemplary moral qualities of…you won’t believe this, so take a deep breath now… President George W. Bush. Here’s a taste:

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like “300,” “Lord of the Rings,” “Narnia,” “Spiderman 3″ and now “The Dark Knight”?

That’s right, folks, the editorial committee of the Wall Street Journal thinks that Spartan morality (like, you know, leaving weak babies outside overnight to die of exposure) is a laudable conservative value. It also strikes me that self-sacrifice has hardly been a defining feature of the Bush administration. Sacrificing soldiers and prisoners and foreigners, sure, but self-sacrifice? That’s for chumps, boy. Just ask Scooter Libby.

I can’t write this up any better than Michael Cohen did, so please follow the link for Cohen’s glorious and oft-times hilarious takedown. However, I cannot resist quoting this:

You know what’s odd about this, I had this crazy, wacky, left-wing notion that we prosecute violent soldiers and cruel interrogators because they are . . . you know, violent and cruel. But reading the WSJ has diabused me of this notion; in fact I hate these cruel and violent people to cover up for some terrible inadequacy in my own life, like my silly notion that people should abide by the rule of law and treat everyone with respect and dignity. There it is again, the left wing media brainwashing me again . . . damn you Phil Donahue!