I find one of the characteristics of "truthiness" as distinct from truth, is purporting to resolve issues of complex phenomena, for example economic or climatological phenomena, by talking about about "the evidence" as if evidence interprets itself without theory.

This ignores the fact that long chains of complex reasoning are necessarily involved in construing the evidence. If the process of reasoning contains even only one logical error, it is liable to invalidate the whole chain. And in such complex phenomena there is not just the ordinary human liability to logical error, and not just the extra liability from long and complex processes.

There is also the very great liability from the fact that these complex phenomena concern huge political redistributions of wealth, which create vested interests in *factually and logically false* "truthiness".

For everyone else, the cost will be a certain fraction - usually small - of their total product. But for the vested interests, the benefit will be the whole of their income. So they will, and do, form a class of proselytes devoting all their brains and energy to spreading the word of "truthiness".

What we have seen demonstrated in this forum, over and over and over again, is that belief in both global warming policy and statist economic policy fails for simple illogic, to which the statists have no answer but only to endlessly repeat their problematic appeals to problematic "evidence" consisting of nothing but the pronouncements of their own political vested interests, larded with every logical fallacy in the book.

I can not for the life of me understand why Don's head didn't explode while writing this, from the sheer Irony.

Don you have taken the Dunning–Kruger effect to a whole new level.

With just a couple of words changed, I easily imagine this piece written by someone like Tim Flannery.

Weird.

But that's postmodernism for you, people always interpreting pieces by who writes it and why...

Truthiness indeed.

What you blokes are looking for will not happen till our shores are barricaded, and then there will be skeptics as to how long it will last.

Without a base belief that mankind is responsible for the change, you will never come to any sort of belief.

As long as there is majority belief that science is doing it's best to inform of us of safeguards that need to be looked at, we can only hope for our long term future as a civilization.

It's about perspective as much a anything else Don?

As an ancient ancestor would've noted, facts are cheils that dinna whinge!

Anybody can own an opinion, but nobody can own the facts.

If one can believe in anything, it has to be the mighty irrefutable truth!
Professorial Tutti Frutti won't cut it.

Faith based belief, which has to include the theory of evolution is, however plausible; just that, theory! And a whole alphabet behind one's name will not change that!

On the balance of probability, there is a greater chance of a whirlwind whipping through a junkyard and creating a fully functioning,flyable 747; than mere chance and or serendipity creating a vastly more complex human being!?

A theory ceases to be a theory once proven, when it then enters the realm of fact.

As to climate change, opinions can and do vary, but the graphs just don't lie.

There is a solid connection between Co2 levels and ambient temperatures; and at 400 ppm, we are in unprecedented uncharted territory!

The graph that show temperature changes since we began keeping records; shows a steady rising trend line and an upward curve into the bargain.

And the one relating to solar activity, peaked in the mid seventies and has been on the wane since. (NASA)

One can argue with the interpretation but not the collected data!

Now we can adapt, and change, and in so doing, quite massively improve our economy and economic prospects; albeit those with an interest in the fossil fuel industries, may not fare very well financially? [The reason for the endless obfuscation!?]

But particularly if they just happen to be the last ones holding the (pass the parcel) parcel!

One notes in conclusion, the sheer number of so called "academics", who told us that tobacco was not harmful; or, the number of so called "scientists", who tell us that climate change is just cyclical; or due to increasing solar activity.

Apparently unable to differentiate between wax or wane.

Or should one say Sensi, wax on wax off!
Rhrosty.

reject Christ (Truth personsified) and you end up defending all sorts of fallacies such and gw, evolution and baby killing.You can even get phd's to prove your point.

Ah yes Runner, the greatest story ever told, about a man who could walk on water, raise the dead, cure the incurable, and feed thousands from his personal picnic basket; a veritable horn of plenty!

And not so much as a single eyewitness account; but hearsay and quite rampant plagiarism, coupled to endless embellishment.

And given so much of what we believe is founded on the exodus, i.e., the 14 commandments?

What happens when the archaeological evidence categorically proves that no such exodus occurred, and therefore, there was no great journey through an inhospitable desert; and therefore no burning bush carving words into tablets of stone; and for a population that could neither read or write?

What happens to a belief system, when its very foundations are effectively destroyed by the revealed truth?

One would have thought an all knowing everywhere present omnipotent power, would have known this shortcoming in his/her target audience and produced a different means to inform them of his/her will?

And given there was no such exodus, no promised land!?

This is the conundrum in faith based belief; it can be very easily destroyed by thorough investigation and the revealed facts!

There is a flat earth society, which has its H.Q. in London; and among its devotees surely are "people", who know the world is flat; and no amount of credible evidence, will prove otherwise?

Similarly, we have people in the M.E., who believe God (Love personified)commands them to slaughter, in the most vile, cruel inhumane means possible, anyone who doesn't believe as they do!

Faith based belief, particularly if unprovable by any means, has a lot to answer for!

It's time we just turned our eyes and ears to the mighty irrefutable truth!

If you can't prove it however credible, even with a billion PHD's, then it has to remain opinion or unproven theory; rather than a means to create unrest, quite blatant enmity or the slaughter of millions of innocents!

If there's a Paradise, then there can be no place in it for these mass murdering sub species!
Rhrosty.

runner
<<reject Christ (Truth personsified) and you end up defending all sorts of fallacies such and gw, evolution and baby killing.You can even get phd's to prove your point.>>

None of those are fallacies. Two are observed phenomena and the third is an action not a belief.

Accept Christ, but beware of the fallacy that accepting Christ is sufficient to avoid all other fallacies. Look at George W Bush if you require further proof that it is a fallacy.

'One would have thought an all knowing everywhere present omnipotent power, would have known this shortcoming in his/her target audience and produced a different means to inform them of his/her will?'

More to the point Rhrosty 'an all knowing everywhere present omnipotent power,' was able to see that people like you would choose wilful ignorance.

Hi Don,

To get back to topic: the truth doesn't have to rely on what is said or asserted, but on inconvenient things called facts.

Stories are easy: if something sounds plausible, then children think it must be true. But we watch probably thousands of crime stories on TV, most of them quite plausible and coherent, but we know that they are just stories.

Narrative theory, I think they call it.

However, out in the real world, there are such things as facts. I've been typing up primary documents in relation to Aboriginal policy and practice here in South Australia, from 1837 up to 1913, and I was surprised to find that there was only one full-time employee in the 'Aborigines Department': the Protector, whose main job was to keep up to seventy ration depots supplied. When one Protector resigned in 1857, the 'Department' vanished until another one could be appointed. South Australia is not a very big State, particularly if its western half is left out, so sixty or seventy depots across half a million square kilometres means that all Aboriginal people were within fifty or sixty kilometres of a depot. Facts. I've put it all on a web-site: www.firstsoures.info

Many of those depots were still issuing rations in the late 1940s. The amount of rations was equal to those provided in jails and in the Destitute Asylum, (with extra meat and milk for mothers and children and the sick), and free medical attendance, with the added benefit that the rights of Aboriginal people to hunt, fish and gather food was protected by legislation under the Pastoral Act, emanating from the 1837 Letters Patent, recognising their right to 'occupy and enjoy' their lands, i.e. use them as they always had. Facts.

[TBC]

[continued]

The Protector provided up to a hundred boats on most waterways, 14-15-ft 'canoes', 5-ft wide, even up on Cooper's Creek (as well as fishing gear, lines, hooks and netting twine). Guns and boats were repaired free for Aboriginal people who couldn't work. Facts.

Issuers at depots weren't paid. Fact. Many of them were coppers, and Police Commissioner Warburton complained in about 1861 that they were expected to set aside a room for rations, and didn't get paid a penny for their efforts.

I'm currently working on the 1934 Moseley Commission in western Australia, looking closely for any evidence of the rabbit-proof fence story, but so far nothing.

Stories are very satisfying, they tie up all the loose ends, they make sense, they contain powerful messages that one may want to hear, and so provide 'evidence' for one's point of view. But they may not be 'true', i.e. not only may there be no evidence for them but there may be glaring impossibilities and contradictions.

For example, there is one lovely story down this way of an Aboriginal woman taken over to Kangaroo Island by sealers, but swimming back to the mainland with a baby on her back. Nobody has ever done that, mainly because of the currents which would take a swimmer a couple of hundred kilometres away. Nice story, but.

[TBC]

[continued]

Of course, 'facts' can be fabricated, but not all of them. And that fabrication works both ways. In the Hindmarsh island scam, there was talk of a peaceful 'meeting of the waters', of the Murray River and the sea, meeting at Goolwa. But there are such things as tides. With two tides a day, and a narrow river mouth, there is no peaceful meeting of the waters, as many ship's captains have learnt too late: king tides and low river-levels mean the sea used to surge fifty, even a hundred, miles up the river, while low tides and a river in flood meant that the waters 'met' well out to sea. Sturt could see that back in 1829 and advised not to build a capital city at the mouth.

I was very surprised to learn that Aboriginal people were not, at least in South Australia, driven off their lands: time and time again, the Protector reminds police and other issuers to try 'to keep people in their own districts'. Pastoralists needed labour, after all. In 1876, a missionary wrote complaining about a new pastoralist who wanted to expel Aborigines from his lease, but was reminded that he would be in breach of the lease conditions.

Yes, there are such things as records, documents, 'facts', but if we don't have much of a grasp of them, we will continue to infer and suspect and come to all sorts of wrong conclusions.

God knows what is being taught in Indigenous Studies these days: I talked to one lecturer about the early Protectors and their roles, and a growing horror came over her face as she quickly realised that it could not be squared with what she had been teaching for twenty years, and finally she put her hands over her ears, turned away and said "I don't want to hear any more !" One friend fewer :(

But what should count ? What should we base our perceptions of history on ? Nice stories ? Or inconvenient 'facts' ?

Joe

runner: Posse ad esse aposterori a priori, ad hoc, a caoite ad calcem, sub judice lis est!
absit invidia!
Rhrosty.

Oops ! That website should read: www.firstsources.info

Fat fingers and bung eyes, not a good combination.

BTT: when someone holds fiercely to a paradigm, a version of Truth, it is bound to be traumatic when some inconvenient 'fact' cuts right across it. Thirty-odd years ago, I did an income study of a community where we had lived, and found, to my horror (like my ex-friend's above) that the average weekly income there was equal to the Australian average. Rents were only a fifth of usual rents and housing repayments.

That sort of discovery can turn your world upside down. Ultimately of course, the underlying premise, the reason to hold to a particular paradigm in the first place, is a basic principle, in this case that all whites were b@stards, 'therefore' ......

But paradigms can collapse once some major component is found not to be true. What to replace it with ? How to maintain, with friends, what one now suspects is not actually true, and retain those friendships ? Is truth worth losing friends over ? But how can one live with untruths ? How to be happy though human, with integrity ? Very traumatising.

Joe

Cobber the hound wrote:

>>Don you have taken the Dunning–Kruger effect to a whole new level.>>

For those who don't know I can't improve on the Wikipedia definition so I'll just quote it:

>>The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

As David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".[1]>>

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

This explains why clueless people often sound so much more credible than people who know what they're talking about.

The clueless really are clueless about the extent of their ignorance so they never put in any qualification or allowance for their own fallibility. As a result climate deniers usually sound more credible than actual climate scientists.

Well posted Cobber

:-)

stevenlmeyer

Trying to gauge temperature changes by ad hominem argument and appeal to authority only proves you are a fool and don't understand what you're are talking about.

As there is no-one who denies that that there is a climate, and as you have been repeatedly proved wrong on this topic, you are a dishonest fool as well.

You are not entitled to assert otherwise unless and until you refute the arguments proving you wrong here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16680&page=0
here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16726
here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16753&page=0
and here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16757&page=0

"The clueless really are clueless about the extent of their ignorance so they never put in any qualification or allowance for their own fallibility."

Like you and your positive prognostications about catastrophic man-made global warming based on computer models that have ALL proved flatly incorrect?

Case in point. My poor old mum died on Saturday and at one of the wakes, a friend was talking about an Aboriginal massacre that was supposed to have happened around Dubbo in which two hundred people were poisoned by a white woman (a new twist) with strychnine. Horrible. How evil whites are.

I asked him if there was any evidence that this had happened. he dismissed this, suggesting that of course there wasn't, it happened a long time ago and the woman had probably buried the bodies. I suggested that two hundred bodies was a lot to bury, and surely there would be some evidence of it. He suggested that she might have burnt the bodies. Each body takes a ton of wood to burn. I helpfully suggested that she must have worked pretty hard to collect one or two hundred tons of wood. Even so, bits of bone would be around. Such a crime would leave evidence.

So what do you go by ? that an incident sounds plausible because it fits in with a pre-formed paradigm, and thereby doesn't actually need evidence - in fact, such declaration reinforce a paradigm and are therefore correct; or do you ask for some evidence, forensic reports, doctor's reports, and just some physical evidence. As well, in this case, which was rumoured to have occurred around 1900, when there were already established reserves all around Dubbo, Wellington, Warren, etc., at which names of people would have been recorded, children would have been going to reserve or Mission schools, so their sudden absence from any ration or school records, etc., would have been noticed, recorded.

There are many more aspects which constitute evidence than people airily believe. Hearsay is not evidence. Reports of evidence - such as, say, pushing people off cliffs, i.e. that cannot actually be substantiated with evidence - are just that, reports without evidence, rumours, hearsay. Yes, they may have occurred but how can one say yes or no, how can one distinguish between bullsh!t and truth without something substantial ?

[TBC]

[continued]

So what should count as evidence, sufficient for us to believe something ? What is the relationship between Truth and Belief ? My ex-friend was pretty pissed off that I raised any queries: after all, if one has the One True Paradigm, all else is racist carping. We parted without any undue violence.

But Paradigm-holders, in this sense, work from Paradigm to assertion, not from evidence to assertion, you might say from top-down, not from bottom-up: Paradigm-holders don't construct a case, they 'confirm' a case. The Paradigm makes complete sense, therefore is correct, all of it, chapter and verse. And if course it has to be.

Watch the next episode of NCIS or Midsomer Murders: is the story plausible ? Yes, of course, otherwise you wouldn't watch it. Is it 'true', 'real', a depiction of an actual event ? No, of course not, we know that. Plausibility is not 'evidence'.

Joe

I respect Don. (As a nerdy teenager, reading the old National Times, I wrote to him out of the blue as I was interested in political culture. He wrote back a very generous letter. I went on to study mathematics and law, but as a law prof I find myself specialising in the law of politics as so much of the rest of law is tinder dry).

But this article had me scratching my head. By all means, in all disciplines, we must have a skeptical mindset (yet allow for human passion). But Don is not an epistemologist: he's a political scientist. The question is how to act when the risk is great even if there is can be no certainty. It is not about having your own facts VERSUS endlessly debating them.

AGW is established at a level of theoretical, empirical and statistical certainty beyond that we expect for any other public, health or environmental risk. Heck, even the law & economics folk worked this out a century ago. Look at Learned Hand's formula for judging when inaction is negligent.

Perhaps that's another way to state the precautionary principle; doubly so when we act, whether we like it or not, on behalf of future generations (with even more interest in this than today's generations); and triply so when we have to move beyond fossil fuels because of their finiteness.