Catallaxy Files

There was a good article the other day about Stephen Conroy aka the Dalek. It called for his dismissal.

He has been involved in a litany of disasters and poor public administration.

He has failed to serve the people of Australia in his present position - squandering billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.

While there is no evidence that Conroy’s meeting with Kerry Stokes in a United States ski resort and subsequent granting of a $250 million gift of taxpayers’ money was corruption, the fact of the meeting itself is sufficient for Conroy to lose his job.

For we expect our Ministers to exercise good judgement. The fact that he thought it reasonable to meet a media mogul in an overseas resort shows extremely poor judgement. Even if, as stated, there is no corruption, the appearance of the meeting is sufficiently bad to reflect on his position.

Caesar famously divorced his wife Pompeia, declaring that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

Ministers too must be above suspicion.

Conroy must resign.

I have a book chapter coming out in the next few weeks where I write about the original ClimateGate email scandal. The chapter was written in late November, early December and the scandal has moved on considerably. Here is a section of the chapter where I talk about peer-review.

In a society characterised by the division of labour and specialisation mechanisms must be developed or evolved that facilitate trade. This is the classic ‘lemons problem’ in economics; how does anyone know that the person they are trading with is any good? The same problem applies to academic research; how can anyone know that any piece of work is competent and high quality research? The mechanism that has evolved in academic circles is the peer-review process. Academic freedom combined with the peer-review process is an evolved mechanism that ensures that research produces, over time, scientific results are more likely to be correct with error and falsehood being eliminated.

George Stigler (1988: 174) has described academic freedom as being the argument for ‘free speech and free inquiry’. If an argument is trivially true, then having that argument challenged by madmen causes no harm. Of course, the difficulty is that most arguments (and perhaps facts) are less certain. Then Stigler tells us having the argument challenged helps to remove error, or helps to improve understanding of the initial argument. This is the common understanding of academic freedom and the peer-review process.

It is apparent, however, that the scientists involved in the ClimateGate scandal had a very different understanding of academic freedom and peer-review.* When they didn’t agree with a particular author or work they would describe it as being ‘crap science’. An email between Tom Wigley and Timothy Carter (copied to Phil Jones and Mike Hulme) contained this extraordinary comment.

Hans von Storch is partly to blame — he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work.
…
Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc.

Stimulating debate is precisely what academic journals are meant to do. It is simply astonishing that a scientist could imagine that he was publishing to last word in any topic and that any disagreements were ‘crap science’ and that the editor needed to be gotten rid of and the editorial board be stacked with sympathetic voices – as opposed to unsympathetic voices.

As Adam Smith foretold in 1776, ‘the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick’. That conspiracy against the public is evidenced by this comment from Phil Jones (emphasis added).

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board, but papers get dealt with by the editor assigned by Hans von Storch.

Phil Jones is the head of the CRU; in other words he wants to have his own work and that of his colleagues refereed by one of his own subordinates.

Of course it is a comment in an email between Phil Jones and Michael Mann that has generated a lot of media coverage; ‘Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ This email refers to the corruption of the IPCC process. Those same academics who are attempting to undermine the position of journal editors and editorial boards are in turn involved in establishing what the peer-reviewed literature is for external consumption and they arbitrarily exclude some or other papers that they do not approve of.

* more evidence of this today.

Q: You’re a widely published scientist and with a lot more prestige than your critics. Why then were you reticent to share the data with these outsiders?

P.J.: I was pointing them to where they could get the same data and they could do their own analysis. They are intent on repeating the analyses of others. They are of course entitled to do whatever they want to, it’s a free world, but they just don’t seem intent on wanting to do their own work. They just seem intent on wanting to repeat what others have done. They’re trying to slow us down, and waste time.

(HT: Bishop Hill)

Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner in the Updated Economic and Fiscal Outlook February 3, 2009

These jobs require limited retraining and so the benefits to the community can be realised quickly.

Monique Pridmore February 15, 2010

There was no safety training, no warning that it could be dangerous, absolutely nothing.

Lindsay Tanner February 10, 2010

I don’t think it’s right to say we should have sat back … dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s because we were in a crisis situation

We often hear that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt, and that we should, as Malcolm Turnbull said:

… given the basic common sense of taking out insurance for the sake of all humanity, why is it that we are seeing this surge in climate change denial?

That is, warmists ask us to suspend our doubt, and take action “against climate change” and to view this as a form of insurance.

This is like joining a religion and being pious as an insurance policy just in case there is a God that will punish you if you continue to deny His existence. This is Pascal’s Wager named because Blaise Pascal reasoned that a person should wager that God exists because he or she has everything to gain from doing so but nothing to lose.

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