The climate change debate has been going on for so long now that I am quite sure that fatigue and boredom must be setting in on both sides. Sceptics have gained a reputation for raising the same points repeatedly, only to be told that their concerns have been answered so many times already, and the only thing that is preventing their moment of revelation is an inability to think critically, their insistence on cherry-picking favoured experts, and sheer bloody-mindedness. But sceptics have heard this all before, since these allegations are just one side of the endless game. And, sadly, it seems the fact that there can’t be anything new left to be said by either side isn’t going to lead to any form of truce in the foreseeable future. Must it therefore be the fate for both that they should plunge into the depths of the Reichenbach Falls locked in a deadly embrace? Perhaps some people were just made for each other.

Today I invite you to join me in taking one more spin on the merry-go-round of doom. And to achieve the right degree of vertigo, we will be returning to a very old topic indeed. In fact, it is a topic I covered in the very first article I wrote for Cliscep some 135 efforts ago. That article was called ‘The Scientist and the Bluebottle’ and it was written to challenge one of the oldest memes in the meme pool — the meme that we sceptics are anti-science and just don’t understand the scientific process. Back then I wasn’t challenging anyone in particular; however, today I will not be waltzing on my own. Today my dancing partner is Dr David Robert Grimes, who threw down the gauntlet by writing an article in the Guardian stating, ‘One scientist can be wrong. But deny the scientific consensus at your peril’.

So let the dance begin.

Dr Grimes started his career by researching into ultraviolet radiation physics, but it wasn’t very long before he somewhat astutely recognised that this wasn’t going to get himself known to a wider audience. So he quickly worked to establish a reputation as a public defender of The ScienceTM, bravely slaying a myriad of assailants who would variously take on the form of cranks, charlatans, conspiracy theorists, and ‘pseudo-sceptics’. It was in that role of defender of the faith that he wrote himself a book and became a fellow with the Committee for Sceptical Inquiry.

Of course, people who believe in ghosts, homeopathy and intelligent design are ready-made foils for the scientifically trained sceptic, and on that basis I wouldn’t normally pay a lot of interest to Dr Grimes’ work; I prefer instead to read things that can expand my understanding rather than simply confirm it. However, in his latest Guardian article he is taking on someone who you wouldn’t normally categorise as your average regular nut job – he’s having a pop at the former MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove. And the reason why Dearlove has got Grimes all riled up is a comment that he made regarding artificial intelligence and the prophets of doom:

Reacting to grave warnings from some scientists over potential dangers of AI, Dearlove professed scepticism, reasoning that such dire predictions cannot be taken overly seriously given the failures of scientists on Covid.

What is so wrong with that, you might ask? Plenty, according to Grimes:

Such comments betray a common and insidious confusion over what science is and how it should be interpreted, and risk emboldening scientific denialists.

How so, David?

Part of the error stems from a mistaken conflation of “science” and “scientist”. Science is not an arcane collection of dogma but an active and systematic method of inquiry. Science pivots on making testable predictions, which are updated as new findings emerge, to reflect the totality of evidence. Scientific positions are always transient, subject to revision when stronger evidence emerges. All scientific knowledge is provisional, therefore scientific advice is prone to change and can evolve at dizzying speeds during periods of intense discovery.

So it appears that the failures to which Sir Richard referred were not failures at all but gobbets of scientific advice that were prone to change and evolve at dizzying speeds during periods of intense discovery. What we saw during Covid wasn’t scientists failing in their purpose but succeeding at a dizzying pace. How could Sir Richard have missed that? The answer to Dr Grimes is obvious. It must be because he is one of those ‘scientific denialists’ who doesn’t understand the scientific method.

Unlike Dr Grimes, I don’t see any reason to be so presumptuous regarding Sir Richard, because I am inclined to agree that some of the wildly changing advice wasn’t anything to do with evidence-driven success propelled at dizzying speeds, but the outcome of bickering between scientists who were too keen to formulate firm opinions based upon evidence that couldn’t possibly support them. Scientists are human, after all, and even Dr Grimes himself seems keen to make that point:

By stark contrast, scientists are people, susceptible to the same human flaws, biases and dishonest conduct as anyone else.

Which might lead you to suspect that Dr Grimes does understand after all. But alas no, because he follows up with this:

Such failures were brought into sharp focus throughout the pandemic, when a small but vocal cohort of fringe figures with scientific or medical qualifications peddled demonstrably false assertions, encompassing everything from Covid conspiracy theories to anti-vaccine propaganda. These positions were profoundly unscientific and readily debunked.

The conclusion is clear here. Human frailties can result in individuals drawing incorrect conclusions but the scientific method ensures that an authorised position based upon consensus cannot be wrong. Or, at the very least, it can be relied upon to the extent that current evidence and understanding supports it. It is only those who challenge the consensus that need to be treated with disdain, because, by implication, they are ignoring the evidence.

To see how Dr Grimes’ thesis works in practice let’s go back to the start of the pandemic, when Jenny Harries, then Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England (but not yet a Dame), came to the podium every night to answer questions from the press. On the subject of mask wearing, her message was clear: the science tells us that wearing a mask would not help and would probably increase the risk. And then one day, completely out of the blue, she came to the podium and declared that we must all wear masks as a matter of the highest importance – the science says so. Prior to that announcement, anyone proclaiming the importance of face coverings was being anti-scientific. After the announcement it was those who continued to oppose masks who carried that stigma. Dr Grimes would have you believe that this is completely okay. It was all evidence-driven and to not join Harries in her U-turn would be to fail to understand how science works. As he puts it:

While a cynical reading of seeming volte-faces like this might be that science “got it wrong”, such interpretations fail to comprehend that science does not profess to offer inerrant truths, but rather continuously adapts with best evidence.

Of course, evidence is often not that binary. The science behind the wearing of a face covering was, and remains, highly speculative with a great deal of controversy and a plethora of disputed studies. The same goes for so much more regarding the Covid pandemic and the various interventions. The truly scientific approach in many instances would be to simply admit our levels of ignorance and not lean too much upon a consensus that is, at best, influenced by evidence though hardly driven by it. Yes, I agree that all scientific conclusions are subject to uncertainty, but there comes a point when the uncertainty should preclude the drawing of conclusions; yet too often it doesn’t. In this instance, Harries wasn’t saying there isn’t enough evidence to support mask wearing; she was saying that the evidence is against it. The next day the situation was reversed.

When I wrote my first Cliscep article I reflected upon my decision to forgo a glittering but largely fantasised scientific career. I describe my prospects this way:

In reality, I was destined to become nothing more than a fact-sniffing bluebottle, seeking out the truth by joining the swarm of scientists buzzing above whichever epistemic turd had the most compelling aroma.

That, I suspect, is the fate for most of those who ply their scientific trade; the swarming instinct is very strong. This human tendency to collect around popular ideas that receive official backing is something to be wary of, and I’m not at all sure that Dr Grimes is. I find his trust in the ability of the scientific method to create a reliable consensus to be naive. And yet he is only saying exactly what I used to say when I was his age. In his case I suspect it is because he has spent too much time focussing upon the human frailty of contrarians and how that has led them astray, rather than reflecting upon how human frailty can also operate socially, to the point of creating consensus that is anything but evidence-led.

But it isn’t as though history hasn’t provided him with plenty of examples. Was the erstwhile dominance of the frequentist paradigm over Bayesianism within statistics evidence-led? Is the fact that Bayesianism now holds sway the result of new information coming to light? Is the now almost total dominance of string theory within the institutes of foundational physics due to it being evidence-led? After all, there isn’t a single scientific experimental result available to support the theory. Was the emergence of a dominant Deutsche Physik in the early 1930’s evidence-led? Was there any reliable rationale behind the supposed inferiority of ‘Jewish physics’? Did data cause Lysenkoism to thrive? There couldn’t possibly be a better example of an anti-scientific dogma than Lysenkoism, and yet it came to be the consensus view as far as the scientific authorities in the USSR were concerned.

I first came across the notion that ‘there is science and then there are scientists’ many years ago when I read Bart Kosko’s book on the development of fuzzy logic (‘Fuzzy Thinking — The New Science of Fuzzy Logic’). He even dedicated a chapter to the distinction. Fuzzy logic, in its early days, met with much opposition from traditional statisticians brought up on binary logic. And yes, there was much human frailty on show within the scientific community. But it wasn’t those few cranks and contrarians who proposed fuzzy logic that were at fault. It was the scientific majority that Kosko was complaining about. Science said that fuzzy logic was a valid idea, but the scientists were saying no. This is the way it can be sometimes. Scientists are indeed just people, susceptible to the same human flaws, biases and dishonest conduct as anyone else. But the idea that this can lead to some individuals going off the rails, whilst the railroad can always be trusted to be headed in the right direction, simply underestimates the capacity of human frailty. Maybe Dr Grimes will come around to my way of thinking when he too grows older and more cynical. Maybe he too will join the ranks of his ‘scientific denialists’. However, I somehow doubt that. It would be like the Pope becoming an atheist.

15 Comments

  1. John,

    Thanks for the link to the article in the Guardian (which I had missed) and for your observations on it, which you won’t be surprised to learn, I agree with. 😉

    The appeal to consensus is a bit of a struggle, to my way of thinking:

    …There is a world of difference between the sometimes unsupported opinions of individual scientists and the collective consensus of scientific authorities like the World Health Organization or the National Health Service. Scientific bodies carefully assess all available evidence, debating and weighing it to arrive at an informed position. The resultant scientific consensus is far more robust than individual positions, and typically the basis for policy decisions….

    The use of the words “sometimes unsupported” (by what/whom? Evidence? Facts? Other scientists?) implies that individual scientists might also express views that are supported. If so, are they still always wrong? Appealing to the collective consensus of the NHS arriving at an informed position might not be the wisest move in the wake of the Lucy Letby scandal. Whether he said it or not is disputed, it’s always bearing in mind the wisdom associated with the possibly apocryphal story regarding Einstein’s comment on being shown a German newspaper that claimed “One hundred German physicists claim Einsteins theory of relativity is wrong.” “If I were wrong, it would only take one.”

    Liked by 4 people

  2. I wonder if we doubt the power of consensus only because we are outnumbered? My answer is no, but I think I can justify that. As with the face-coverings debacle, the evidence around climate change is still weak. I do not mean that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, which is true. I mean that the evidence for catastrophe is thin. In the same way, it could be valid to argue that face coverings must intercept some foreign particles, but to leap from there to saying that it will intercept our friend the coronavirus is not valid. In both cases the consensus is actually about a weak effect, but is zealously enforced as if it was a binary.

    I have always had faith in science – and I still do. Reality is what it is. Science as properly practiced is the way to find out what reality is. The problem is that it gets hard. People overplay their hands. And we get the erroneous notion that a computer model is science, and that a consensus proves what reality is.

    Maybe the hubristic would be wise to wonder, why are prominent sceptics often drawn from the ranks of those who no longer have anything to lose? Just how free is the consensus?

    Final question that occurred to me just now. Can sceptics ever be a majority?

    Liked by 4 people

  3. Grimes is an irrational oaf; I would not dignify him with the title of irrational ape. I can’t even begin to point out the litany of logical fallacies and misinformation that he spews out in that Guardian article; there are so many and they are so grievous. He is the ultimate anti-Feynman; a supposed physical scientist so far removed from the core principles of physical science that he has become the embodiment of the New Religion of Consensus Pseudoscience.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. A couple of further thoughts:

    1. Dr Grimes says:

    While a cynical reading of seeming volte-faces like this might be that science “got it wrong”, such interpretations fail to comprehend that science does not profess to offer inerrant truths, but rather continuously adapts with best evidence.

    But how does science “continuously adapt” unless someone first breaks with the consensus and suggests that the best evidence now suggests that the current consensus might be incorrect?

    2. I assume, given the position he seems to have adopted with regard to the correctness of the “consensus” around the response to covid, that Dr Grimes would disagree with much that Professor Carl Heneghan says. Yet, according to the Oxford University website:

    https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/professor-carl-heneghan

    Professor Henghan is the :

    Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and a practising GP. A clinical epidemiologist, he studies patients receiving care from clinicians, especially those with common problems, with the aim of improving the evidence base used in clinical practice.

    His research interests include non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, and he currently chairs WHO guidelines on self-care and cardiovascular disease risk. He is also interested in the treatment of communicable diseases in primary care.

    Professor Heneghan also investigates the evidence base for publication bias and drug and device regulation, and he is an international expert, advising governments, on the regulatory and evidence requirements for devices and drugs as well as evidence-based projects in the public interest. He is also a founder of the AllTrials campaign.

    We sceptics tend to deprecate appeals to authority, but it strikes me, given his job, experience and research interests, that Professor Heneghan is unlikely to fall into this category set up by Dr Grimes:

    …a small but vocal cohort of fringe figures with scientific or medical qualifications peddled demonstrably false assertions, encompassing everything from Covid conspiracy theories to anti-vaccine propaganda. These positions were profoundly unscientific and readily debunked.

    And yet many have pretty much accused Professor Heneghan of being such a person. His Wikipedia entry:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Heneghan

    notes that:

    On 19 November 2020, he wrote an article with Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist, in which he criticised the science behind wearing face masks to reduce transmissions of COVID-19. In the article he stated that; “Now we have properly rigorous scientific research that we can rely on, the evidence shows that wearing masks in the community does not significantly reduce the rates of infection.” His claim was met with criticism. Sonia Sodha of The Guardian argued that Heneghan had made scientific errors because he had misrepresented a Danish randomized controlled trial which studied infection transmission rates on people who wore face masks. This was because the Danish mask study was only focused on infection transmissions for those wearing masks, rather than on the overall community, so could not be used to make judgements on the effects of face masks on community wide transmission rates.

    Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), also criticised Heneghan’s claims about face masks because he believed his interpretation of the Danish study was inaccurate. However, Abbasi stressed that he believed it was wrong that Heneghan’s opinion be marked as “false information” on Facebook because, as he wrote in the BMJ, “disagreement among experts, especially about interpretation of a study, is a common occurrence. It is the usual business of science.”

    [No mention of the subsequent Cochrane review, which it seems to me rather vindicates Professor Heneghan’s (and Tom Jefferson’s) criticism of the face mask advice.]

    That criticism in the Guardian would be in the same Guardian for which Dr Grimes writes. I assume that Dr Grimes agrees with the Guardian criticism, though I don’t know for sure and it would be good to establish his position on Professor Heneghan’s criticism of the consensus and on the consensus criticism of Professor Heneghan.

    Liked by 3 people

  8. Mark,

    Anybody who uses the phrase ‘demonstrably false’ in relation to Covid is probably just pushing someone’s dogma. In fact, there is very little that can be said about it that is demonstrably false. Besides which, it isn’t as though Harries had a good track record of saying things that turned out to be demonstrably true:

    “In early March 2020, Harries stated ‘the virus will not survive very long outside,’ and ‘many outdoor events, particularly, are relatively safe,’ and warned that it was ‘not a good idea’ for members of the public to wear a mask in which the virus could get trapped, thus increasing the risk of infection. Cheltenham Festival, a four-day event started weeks later and attended by about 150,000 people, was referred to in the following month by Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, as ‘the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus’.

    Also:

    “In December 2021, The Telegraph reported that it was understood that Harries was the source of a contested figure that there was an average 17-day delay between infection and hospitalisation for COVID-19, used by Health Secretary Sajid Javid. Former Treasury statistician Simon Briscoe was quoted as saying that the figure seemed like either a ‘deliberate statistical sleight of hand designed to deceive, or incompetence’ and that if deliberate, officials were ‘in effect trying to buy time, as officials realise that data of rising hospitalisations is needed to justify lockdown’.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Harries

    That’s how I remember it. Lots of opinions and confusion rather than successes delivered at a dizzying pace.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. An enjoyable read. I particularly like how you picked up on the fallacy that anti-evidential bias is always the province of lone individuals; when some decades ago the sophisticated stance was to point out that whole institutions could fall under such a spell: the “scientific paradigms” of Kuhn and yesteryear’s sociology of science, all but forgotten now.

    It occurred to me as I was reading you, that Grimes has a mental image of a smooth, frictionless process that as each new piece of evidence comes to light, myriad clerks immediately update the scientific consensus, bringing all theories immediately into line with the new factoid. Whereas the reality is a much lumpier process, which ought to be obvious.

    A nice metaphor (or a behavioural simulation) is Per Bak’s sandpile-on-a- saucer experiment (circa 1990), where (once the pile has become big enough to reach the edge of the plate) one sand grain dripped on top of the pile does not result in one sand grain falling off the plate edge, but a 1/f distribution of landslides. It was his way to illustrate the concept of phase transition under the idea of self-organised criticality. Plenty have played around since with models of human society on this basis. So, looking at scientific process, new factoids can drip on one by one, but there’s no corollary smooth adjustment of the scientific models. Instead there’s phase transition where one scientific framing is replaced by another, in a non-linear way where part of the current paradigm collapses and the structure is continually dealing with epistemic crises, usually small but sometimes large. In social terms, it’s all invested positions, funding, egos, crushed idealism, pecking orders and the whole dirty human scene, until weight of ignored evidence builds up to a point a new group can capitalise on it and sweep to power. The incumbents do their best to prevent anything but the most incremental scientific development, and so preserve their own status.

    But rather than engaging with any of that, Grimes is obviously more content mocking strawmen, because moral righteousness, condescension, and airs of superiority fit much better with the cocktail scene in polite circles these days. And of course, helps secure his own incumbent status from outsiders.

    Liked by 3 people

  10. One learns something new here every day. I had not heard of the sand pile on a saucer analogy before, but it seems to be such a good one. Thank you for sharing.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. Ianalexs,

    I am sorry that you had to post your comment twice. I have no idea why the first attempt went in to spam, but thank you for persevering.

    Like

  12. John, I must admit to a momentary disappointment as I realised that your article wasn’t going to be about my favourite character from the Goon Show. So long ago but remembered still.

    Liked by 2 people

  14. For the past 24 hours I have been under the illusion that I might be able to concoct an up to date script for a new episode of the Goon Show for Cliscep. It would deal with climate -something along the lines of Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty getting Neddie Seagoon to invest in an up to date, but very expensive heat pump or a wind turbine in his back garden. But I’m no Spike Milligan and the task I quickly realised would be well beyond my capabilities, but I can almost hear parts of it.

    Like

  15. As it happens, I was in Waterstones yesterday and I came across Dr Grimes’ book, The Irrational Ape. I was tempted, but two things put me off. Firstly, when I did my usual thing of picking out a page at random, it started with a sentence that used the phrase ‘demonstrably false’. He seems to use that a lot. Next, although there is no chapter on climate change, it does have a large entry in the index. Knowing his thesis, that suggests that he must be finding a lot in climate scepticism that is demonstrably false. No surprises there. But I don’t need to pay to read such stuff. I can get it for free at ATTP.

    Like

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