Morning Scepticism: Intention

Giving explanations in terms of intentionality is something humans are really good at. Yet sometimes this goes badly wrong, and elaborate stories are constructed that sound plausible solely on the notion of intentionality. Evil shadow figures in government are a good example, the notion of a puppet government and a new world order is just absurd practically - yet it fits so well with ascribing motive. It's so easy for us to think that way that we must take extra care to see past motive and look at evidence.

Of Scepticism And Denialism

What is it about climate change that makes people think they are experts in it? I guess it doesn't matter too much, chalk one more up for Dunning-Kruger. Perhaps it's the politicising of the issue. It matters to us, so we're going to be McExperts while the few trained in the relevant sciences battle it out in academia. I'd love to be able to rip apart the claims made in "climategate" but I don't know how to address it correctly. Rather what I want to talk about is the tone of scepticism. Does the evidence warrant the conclusion?


The situation
It's important to remember what is being alleged here. That tens of thousands of scientists are colluding together in order to cook up a non-existing threat. They are subverting the general peer review process, falsifying data, and worst of all working together to lie to the public in regard to the consequences of the current lifestyle we live. Or at the very least trying to serve their own careers by getting funding.

To allege a conspiracy is a pretty big deal, especially one involving so many people. It would mean that tens of thousands of people would all have to collaborate to keep the secret. Not telling their friends or family for one, and given the public nature of this controversy would have to be lying to the public, politicians, industry groups and even to friends and family. That's a lot of people needing to keep their story straight.

But maybe there's something a little more obvious, maybe the people perpetrating the "conspiracy" are doing so unwillingly, they might all be ideologues who have reasoned to themselves that something that ain't true is - and it's something that fits with a radical political agenda that supposedly these tens of thousands of scientists all share.

It's not fair to treat it like a religion given that the people involved are the ones who have the relevant expertise to address the claims. That is to say there would be thousands of people equipped with the ability to see that the data doesn't line up. That there would be many who could see that it's fake. So there should be many with the relevant expertise who could uncover this conspiracy at any time.

This is to try and paint what the emails need to demonstrate - that they need to be significant enough to match the extraordinary nature of the narrative. It's not being alleged that the amount attributed to human activity might not be as much as before where the scientific process will correct it, but of mass fraud to hide that there's no human-induced climate change.


The smoking gun?
Now these emails are meant to be sufficient enough to demonstrate the ramifications of what's being argued. In all honesty, do these emails meet, exceed or even tend towards to the notion that there is mass fraud being perpetrated on a grand scale?

One reason I would argue against this is the nature of the scientific enterprise. It really is cut-throat and people make a name for themselves not by going with the tide but against it. They may be ridiculed and scorned by the scientific community, but ultimately if the data fits then fortune and fame beckon. It's by no means perfect, but the system has proved to work time and time again. Not to give complete trust to the process, but to recognise that on a whole the scientific endeavour has a good track record.

So the question to ask would be does the contents of the email make a sufficient case for widespread fraud? This isn't just finding damning sentences with no regard to context, but taking context into account and the significance of what is said, is there reason to suspect the entire enterprise is fraud? If someone for example said that they have doubts over AGW, is this dissenter being silenced? That is to say that such a person hasn't made such a view public through the peer review research.

This is not to try to be facetious, rather to put in perspective the level to which the evidence needs to be in order to justify the logical implications of what is being proposed. I confess, as soon as the word conspiracy is brought up, I tune out. Conspiracies beyond a few people are just so implausible. But I could be mistaken, I haven't read the emails nor do I have an intimate knowledge of the reasons for climate change beyond the basics. I await the results of the investigation. But what gets me is the denialism masquerading as scepticism, the denialists are pretending that their the sceptics and over what?


Cult of denial
I use the word cult as hyperbole, though I feel that there's something truthful in the characterisation. I say this not to offend but to explain the difference between being sceptical and labelling yourself a "sceptic". And we should be sceptical of climate change, we should be sceptical of everything. But to my mind a sceptic is one who follows the evidence where it leads them as opposed to taking an ideological position. Unfortunately my dealings with "sceptics" and seeing "sceptic" pundits in the media is that they aren't sceptical, they have an ideological position which they are adhering to.

Again I can't fault people for being ideological, they are human. What I am calling out is when the ideology is so blatant that it clouds the assessment on the issue. Now I hear you say, there are plenty of ideologues who support climate change. I agree, but it is a red herring. The question is how closely does the conjecture of ideologues match the evidence?

A couple of notes for concern is with the "sceptics" is how easily they'll tap onto anything that means climate change isn't real. I remember seeing the head of GM on The Daily Show / Colbert Report (can't remember which one) talking about a survey of scientists who doubt man-made climate change. I've also heard this brought up by a few "sceptics". But it's a poor survey. Creationists use a similar tactic to deny evolution.

Another similarity I see to the creationist movement is to label those who support Anthropogenic Global Warming as a religious cult. Similar to the creationists use of Darwin. It's something I see come up all the time, labelling anyone who believes in human-induced climate change as basically faith-based. Again, this isn't an issue of peoples beliefs but a scientific position. Is the science flawed? Is it wrong? The beliefs of the supporters shouldn't matter. It seems the logical steps followed equate to the faith of people (not everyone knows everything) with the article in question being a faith. It does not follow and "sceptics" do themselves a disservice by such a blatant error of thinking.


To get back to the emails, do the emails really implicate the entire scientific discipline of science? As put above, this is not quote mining to find the most damning comment, but taking the emails in context and using them to not misrepresent those in action. This to me is where the big question over the whole "controversy" lies. Does the evidence point to AGW being a conspiracy? Does it undermine the data presented by the IPCC and destroy what is the scientific consensus? I'm sceptical of the "sceptics" on this one. This is a dead give-away that many involved are showing their ideology, that they are looking for anything that might put a hole in what they don't want to be true.

It's quite sad that so many who are accusing others of being ideologues are showing themselves to be just what they are accusing others of. And for what? This is what I really can't grasp. The ferocity of those trying to deny human-induced climate change doesn't match with any particular ideology, yet there are indeed denialists.

Someone who is seeking the truth should be looking for good evidence to support their position, and they should be willing to change their minds if the evidence dictates. Seizing on bad evidence as proof is only serving to openly demonstrate pre-existing conclusions. It all might be a conspiracy, this might seriously impact on the IPCC position and the general scientific consensus surrounding climate change. I don't know, I have my doubts because that would mean conspiracy. But it may be the case. But right now, acting with certainty that this destroys all notions of AGW is not being sceptical in the least. It's finding something that fits the narrative of an implausible story, and that's one for the conspiracy theorists.

The Unlocking Of An ACTUAL Conspiracy

I was wrong, pure and simple. Here I was decrying the AGW deniers for their conspiracy-like ravings against anthropogenic climate change. That tens of thousands of scientists were all working together to promote a radical leftist agenda by silencing deniers, deleting contradicting data, colluding together and putting up a non-existent threat in order to serve their political agenda. I used to laugh at those creationist-like devotees of what looked like one big appeal to consequences...

That was until Climategate.

Unlike all other gates; watergate, crackergate, utegate, or the rusty squeaking gate at grandma's house, this gate was real... and it's implications startling! They were right, there was a conspiracy. The leaked emails prove everything that has ever been said about those ideologues in the IPCC and that evangelical arsehole Al Gore. And worst of all I knew it.

I knew it and I let my credulity get the better of me. My inner sceptic was saying "noooooooo" in a Cartmanesque fade to oblivion, but I didn't listen. I trusted science. pfft, I'm not doing that again. For a long time now they've been telling us that we are nothing but glorified monkeys, that we are just matter, and that we really don't matter because matter is just energy condensed. No more of that! Now that the tree ring data and temperature data don't overlap, we can't trust anything any more.

Yet I've brought this on myself before. I remember when I used to believe that man walked on the moon. I truly believed it. But one man had the courage to say something about it, and that conspirator Buzz Aldrin just punched him in the face! If he had nothing to hide, he would have produced the moon cheese that NASA would have found had they really gone to the moon.

And there was that whole period where I attributed alien abductions to hallucinations and false memories - culture infesting the consciousness and causing the sense of patternicity we all share to interpret strange experiences as out of this world. I even attributed my own experiences of sleep paralysis to natural causes. But then why do government reports of UFOs have so much blacked out? What are they trying to protect? I'm fearful for the human / alien hybrid invasion of 2012.

But back to the issue at hand. This is just the tip of the iceberg, which by the way did NOT break from a warming Arctic. There is now evidence of direct conspiracy to stop the free market. Why can't a mining company pollute the streams if it gets us a fuel source? The environmental implications of pollution are overstated, and in any case to reduce toxic pollutants is going to cost jobs. Just as happened a few decades ago, and what did the laws to regulate pollutants do? It destroyed the economy and brought society to its knees. And for what? So those damn evolutionists could show natural selection on the peppered moth.

I'm thankful for those hackers who targeted private email of a few climate scientists, because there was always that gut feeling of guilt when I left my computer on when I wasn't using it, or that I spent too long in the shower. Now I don't need to worry at all. It's all a hoax, it's all a charade, and those emails are the smoking gun that show the level of deception and fraud perpetrated by the IPCC.


But as I write this, I feel my scepticism of my scepticism resurging. Maybe I'm making mountains out of molehills (how else do mountains form except for giant moles?) and that there's not enough in there to completely discount human-induced climate change. It could just be those emails show something minor, it could be that those emails fall within the bounds of the scientific process, and that the evidence still points to us having some effect on the environment.

But then I think to myself, what is more likely. That there are tens of thousands of climate scientists in on a conspiracy. That those who have spent the time and effort to study the climate, to see how human activity affects the environment and what factors there are in how our weather system works. Those who have measured the environment at different times, trying to find patterns, work out cycles, seeing what that will do to sea levels and rain over agricultural areas. That all these people are just faking the data to push a political agenda. Or that there really is grounds to consider that human activity is having some effect on the environment.

Really it should be obvious. As Bush jr. said: "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

Dial 9.11 for truth

Right now in Australia, it's the 11th of September. It's been 7 years now since the terrorist attacks on American soil that was the catalyst of a global shift in attitudes on liberty, security and the threat of religious zealots. But this isn't about that, this is about the historical revisionism done by conspiracy theorists trying to redefine one of the most significant and tightly analysed events in recent memory as the work of their own government. There are problems for the 9/11 truthers though: a lack of evidence, a theory that defies common sense, and the tautological nature of conspiracy theories. It can never be shown to be false, because that would be evidence of a cover-up. Rather it's important to show why the narrative they have isn't remotely plausible.


The Third Tower

No-one needs a lesson in history here, tower 7 fell several hours after the twin towers that were struck by aircraft fell themselves. The reason tower 7 fell was a mystery at the time, and has thus been the weapon of choice in the 9/11 truther arsenal. It's allowed for speculation that it and the twin towers were controlled demolitions with the jets being just a decoy. It all seems quite elaborate, it all seems very incredulous, yet this story is already widely believed and becoming more widespread. It seems to defy logic how something so speculative can be so willingly believed. This isn't speculations on the supernatural at all, this is gross historical revisionism on an event that happened but a few years ago.

A cause for the fall of tower 7 is needed, that much I can agree upon with the truthers. This is why there has been investigations into just what caused the collapse of not only tower 7, but all the towers. Investigations don't happen overnight, they have to be thorough, and they have to be sure of what went wrong before doing the reports. It was only in the last month that the report came out explaining just how tower 7 collapsed: an out of control fire caused by falling debris that was left unchecked due to a failure in the sprinkler system. No need for a controlled demolition story, no evidence of a controlled demolition, just a building with weakened structural integrity burning out of control.

Once there is some thought put into the idea of the conspiracy, why would a government destroy tower 7 without giving it an obvious cause? What purpose would bringing down that building do if the government was trying to hide their activities? It seems that tower 7 rather than being a blessing to the theory is a hindrance. The idea of a government that can mastermind and cover up such an event yet blow up something seemingly inconsequential? Now that's a far-fetched story. It would seem the government is messing with people's minds; it's collapse is to the 9/11 conspiracy as dinosaur bones are to creationism. It would take quite a contortionist to try and adequately explain it. Yet the explanation is the equivalent of "God hid the fossils to test our faith", likewise with the creationist movement people are willing to eat up the explanation without putting much thought into it.

Orwell's hell
Again, no need to state the obvious in history. When looking at post-9/11 actions taken by the government, wars and legislation, there is definitely causal links back to the event itself. What the mistake of the truthers seems to be is seeing those actions as reason rather than as a reaction. There may have been members of the government who wanted to go into Iraq long before 9/11, but it would be a mistake to think that the 2003 war was cause for 9/11. It allowed for the opportunity for invasion, just like it allowed for the opportunity for draconian legislation like the PATRIOT Act to be passed in the interests of national security. The catalyst for these reactions was the terrorist attacks, there's nothing to suggest it was anything more than opportunism by a government.

And therein lies another fault in the 9/11 truth movement reasoning. The same people who believe it was the work of the government are the same people who think Dubya and his administration are the most incompetent administration in American history. It does seem as if the movement of 9/11 conspiracies has risen as voter dissatisfaction with the war has also risen. So on the one hand, he and his administration are criminal masterminds, on the other blundering idiots who can scarcely run a military operation. Talk about having your theory and eating it too...

It's a mistake to take the consequences of 9/11 as the cause, it's important to be able to recognise action and reaction, cause and effect. The terrorists attacking was the catalyst for many subsequent reactions. To think the US government was behind it without any evidence to suggest they are is to reject the truth of so much evidence, but that's the nature of the conspiracy theory.


A game of mathematical improbability
Quite simply, this comes down to numbers. You have about 3,000 people who died that day: people who worked in the WTC, in the Pentagon, and who were on those flights. Now that is 3,000 people who are unaccounted for, and there is no indication that any of them are alive at all. There's no-one who has come forward and demanded protection in exchange for information, no-one who is trying to reconcile with their loved ones, no-one who has any moral sense to report the truth. Now why is that?

Now take all the people who work in the 3 different buildings of the WTC. How did no-one recognise the explosives that would have lined the buildings? There were fire-fighters who ran into building 7 to save it. How is it that none of them reported any explosives? Not to mention the workers who normally inhabit the building. We live in an age where everyone is just a press of a button away from instant communication. For there to be no evidence whatsoever is incredibly damning to the credulity of the narrative. And what of all the people in the government, in security, in the military who would have to be involved to pull off a stunt like that? The sheer number of people to pull off such a cover-up would be astounding, and the fact that not one has come forward is again damning.

The amount of people who would have to be involved in a cover-up makes it too incredible to believe it could happen. It's a blight on human behaviour to think that not a single person of the many thousands who would have to be involved that not one has come forward. To think that none of the supposed dead have tried to reconcile with their families. That no-one in the government would speak out against the crime against humanity. 3000 people died and this is the memory that is honoured for them?!? It's movements like this that destroy human dignity, it cheapens disastrous events and brings misdirected anger. There are two wars going on now, thousands of people dying as a result, families suffering unspeakable losses, yet the anti-war movement is using a conspiracy theory in order to display their anger? This is not right, something is very wrong in the thinking of a population when an idea like this can become so widespread. What happened in 2001 was a tragedy, the aftermath was a tragedy, but the greatest tragedy is how cheaply it's exploited by an anti-government movement with no regard for truth.

Conspiracy Theologists

Where there is an event, there's someone to give an explanation on what happened. As the way we perceive and store information from the world around us is imperfect, the process of recollection and rationalisation is imperfect too. That's why to write history we look for empirical evidence and check for independent eyewitnesses. Yet despite all this more often than not we don't know the full story, not even in the age of media saturation and recording devices in everyone's pocket. In the movie Cloverfield when everything starts going to hell, people pulled out their phones and recorded it. Snapshots of the time, and that is very indicative of the information age we live in. But there are still gaps, and in those gaps we create narratives to explain them. In the past people used to put religion in those gaps. These days some still do but others who have since abandoned the supernatural aspect but kept the same ethos and come up with something just as implausible: the conspiracy theory.

Taunts and Tautologies
The similarities between religion and conspiracy theories are astounding, they work in the same basic way. It takes the unknown and applies something sensational to fill in that unknown, the narrative that works on a largely emotional level that somehow makes the implausible seem favourable. Like religion it plays on fears, a whole malevolent and nefarious contraption by those in power to control the population. Like religion there is no direct evidence, it's all hearsay and indirect links pieced together. Like religion it relies heavily on community support for it to spread and be maintained. And like religion it is quite tautological in that the absence of evidence is evidence.

There is a certain distrust of the government that helps fuel the fires that are conspiracy theories. And this distrust can easily be manipulated as the theories themselves more often than not play on the basic idea of control. It's an indirect play on one's basic fear for security, where the government who controls the population is much more malicious than they would like you to believe. There is no evidence to support this of course, but it's believable. The people who have the power want to hurt you, they don't regard your life at all other than a tool to further their own interests... Well not really but that's basically what it amounts to. If someone yells out fire in a theatre, people by nature will act on fear and get out of there regardless of whether their really is a fire.

The primary difference between someone yelling out fire in a theatre and convincing someone the government is out to get them and that is time. The fire is an immediate threat, there is no chance to assess it's validity, while a conspiracy is not. So when there is an absence of primary evidence, there needs to be secondary evidence to fill in the gaps. How conspiracy gets around it is by using a tautology. The absence of evidence is evidence, of course this doesn't stand on it's own. The main trick used is bombarding you with anecdotal evidence, stories that add the illusion of plausibility to the veracity of the claim. It's building little support structures, hopefully enough to hold their main argument up. But because people are so willing to believe anecdotally that really isn't as hard as one might think it would be.

Anecdotal evidence is vital to the success of propagation of the idea. If it's done really well, it's often becomes memetic, and creeps into the greater social conscience. By this stage the amount of evidence to support it is really irrelevant and thanks to the instant global media network ideas can spread quicker than ever without anything more than anecdotal evidence. Chain emails are the perfect example of how misinformation spreads, people see what is written, take it as fact then propagate it further. Honestly it's not hard to double check, but how many people do? Obviously not enough for it to clutter up my mail box. It's the same principle here but on a grander scale. Pass it on, and hope the other person is so taken in that they refuse to check for themselves.

Above all else, the most alarming exhibition of cult-like behaviour is the absolute mentality exhibited towards those who aren't part of the "truth movement". Where I see the division is that they feel they are on the side of the sceptics, after all they are questioning as a sceptic would. But because they are so willing to believe the absurd without subjecting that new belief to the same intense scrutiny they are laughed at by the greater sceptical population. Again the parallel with creationism is obvious. Yes, question the official story. But no, your beliefs are subject to that same questioning. That's why there is a strong focus on evidence to back up the claims in the sceptical field. I've been taunted about towing the governments line, just because I didn't think there was any evidence to suggest what they were saying happened. That absolutist mentality prevails to the point where the average punter wouldn't be able to oppose them. And that is the danger of movements like 9/11 truth, if there was strong backing I'd be all for it. But it doesn't spread through rational discourse, it spreads through fear and misinformation.

The Mundane and the Magic
Penn and Teller did it all before me, and better. When you have decades of experience in exposing bullshit, rank amateurs like me can only sit back in awe and hope one day that we we've got the skills to rival that of professional charlatans but on the side of truth. People like Penn Jillette, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins and James Randi are all heroes of mine. And they are that way because not only are they able to see the frauds for what they are with evidence to boot, they are able to expose those frauds and provide a voice of empiricism in an anecdotal society. In the end, it could be anyone writing books or making TV shows. The person authoring doesn't matter. What is important is the empirical evidence behind it, and with that evidence we can determine reality in as close to an unbiased manner as possible. That's why I have such opposition to them, like religion they are fascinating stories. They make for entertaining television, The X-Files is still my favourite show of all time. But is it so hard to recognise they are just that - stories?

The narrative is very fascinating, the truthiness really shines out. It's very much like religion in that one person has "discovered" something more to life than there really is. It makes that person feel special, feel important. And you don't have to be an expert in that field with conspiracy theories, it's all about individual empowerment. While scientists, historians, etc have years of training to be able to be qualified to talk, these authorities are ignored for the sake of anecdotal titbits by people who's training is nothing more than a personal curiosity. I've talked before about confirmation bias and again it applies here.

Why do we need to mix reality with the extraordinary? We as a species seem to allow ourselves to get bogged down in the trivialities of life far too easily, it gets to the point where reality is a cruel place for some to inhabit. We are moving more and more towards an impersonal world as we become more and more a global community, as John Doe said in Se7en: "Wanting people to listen...you can't just...tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. Then you'll notice you've got their strict attention." That is a sad reflection on our current state of affairs. Maybe people aren't being noticed when they ask for more information about say 9/11, so they make up a story that is the metaphorical equivalent to using that sledgehammer. Maybe there are things the government isn't telling us, though I'm willing to bet if there is, it's not going to be as the conspiracy theorists say.

Maybe it would be more pertinent to make time for others, to treat them with respect and actually listen to them. It should not take a fanciful story to get your attention, whether that story be about god, government conspiracies or even celebrity gossip. Humans crave contact and validation from others, it's part of the human condition. That contact and validation is how we've been able to thrive as a species. Life is magic as it is, sometimes we forget that and instead of working towards finding that magic in each other, we are pandering to magical tales as if they were reality. We need to make people feel special in the here and now, but I fear that in a world where television sells us the lie that we are all destined for something great it would be too little too late.