This is a long one, but it’s because it’s filled with gems that are so valuable, they can’t be cut.
As the Climategate story was breaking, I wrote a couple of pieces entitled “Climate – the prequel“, and “Climaegate the pre-prequel“. The first was about Melanie Phillips sounding the alarm bell in 2007 about chicanery at the CRU. The second was about the 1961 speech by Dwight Eisenhower, in which he warned us about the dangers of a government-science complex. This fits between those, dating from 1974.
On Dec 24, I wrote up a piece on an abysmally poor science experiment that the BBC showed, and related it to what Richard Feynman referred to as “Cargo Cult Science”. Having re-read the 1974 speech that I had linked in that article, I was struck by how many things that he said in that speech that were directly relevant and directly in contradiction to the conduct of the CRU scientists, and their apologists. Here, again, is the speech (sorry; it’s in PDF format). I will excerpt the relevant paragraph in which he defines Cargo Cult Science:
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he’s the controller – and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
That’s the description of “Cargo Cult Science”. He goes on to say:
Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they’re missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in Cargo Cult Science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school – we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation . It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty – a kind of leaning over backwards.
Keep that in mind as you read the CRUtape letters™.
For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.
Well, well. It’s almost as if Dr. Feynman read the CRUtape letters in 1974. Here’s CRUtape letter 942777075.txt:
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: ray bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxxDear Ray, Mike and Malcolm, Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.Cheers
Phil
Apologists (we all know who they are) are claiming that the “trick”, and “hiding the decline” are no big deal in the big picture, since they don’t impact the ultimate IPCC findings. That’s largely true, but misses the key point that Feynman was making – that it’s the scientist’s responsibility to be scrupulous in making sure that his personal biases don’t affect the work. In this case, it’s even worse than that – there’s an open conspiracy – yes that’s a correct usage of the word – to mislead. What this exposes about the mindset and the group dynamic flies completely in the face of the scrupulous, as Feynman puts it “leaning over backward”, openness and honesty.
Feynman continues:
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can – if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong – to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the Finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
This brings up a broader issue not really related to the work that CRU does, but the work that the modelers do – can they predict anything, including the behavior of the earth in the 20th century, with their models? To make a long story short, not without embedding prior knowledge into them. In other words, they fail this test.
Feynman continues:
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The Climategate affair was entirely about people wanting to repeat the science, and having to use FOIA requests to demand the data (which wouldn’t have been necessary if they had been behaving like good scientists as Feynman describes), and Jones et al still refusing. It’s again as if Feynman was talking about Jones, et all in 1974.
Feynman goes on:
We’ve leaned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and Find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.
Excuse me while I gloat. His prophesy does seem to be in the process of fulfillment.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of – this history – because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong – and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
Guess what? The “tricks” are back (see above Jones memo). But the deeper issue here is that even scientists are afraid to go against the social grain, and will fudge results wittingly or unwittingly, so as not to go against the “consensus” (where have we heard that word before?).
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves – of having utter scientific integrity is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.
We have learned the first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
This is less than obvious, but very important. People who go into an investigation looking for a result, will usually find what they’re looking for, whether it’s there or not. Couple that with the previous explanation of how consensuses are formed, and you have a recipe for an entire field stampeding off in the wrong direction.
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girl friend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
This directly relates to the Jones memo above, because, just as they claim that the “trick” doesn’t affect the scientific conclusions, so also it is a clear effort to deceive the lay public. Just remember this paragraph the next time someone talks about how “the science is settled”.
One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of result. For example – let’s take advertising again – suppose some particular cigarette has some particular – property, like low nicotine. It’s published widely by the company that this means it is good for you – they don’t say, for instance, that the tars are a different proportion, or that something else is the matter with the cigarette. In other words, publication probability depends upon the answer. That should not be done.
And this relates directly to the gatekeeping aspect of this. It’s not just companies who have an interest in publishing only certain conclusions, it’s also – and this is something that was only just getting started in 1974 when this was written – the pressures of political correctness. Feynman also wrote about the beginnings of PC, and its effects on academe, but it was only just beginning.
I’d say that’s also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don’t publish such a result, it seems to me you’re not giving scientific advice. You’re being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. That’s not giving scientific advice.
The problem is, certain scientists want to be used.
Nowadays there’s a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen he had to use data from someone else’s experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn’t get time on the program (because there’s so little time and it’s such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn’t be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAI, are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying – possibly – the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.
This is a subject too big to be adequately addressed in this post. Maybe I’ll do an entire post on just it. But this is another key flaw in the IPCC process, and one that doesn’t get anywhere near enough attention. Because while there seems to be no shortage of funds for proxy reconstructions and other such work that’s of more political than scientific value, a lot of really basic research in the field goes begging. Even worse, the climatati are prepared to commit to international agreements that will cost the world trillions a year, but the IPCC has no authority to fund research. Yes, you heard that right. All of this research is haphazardly funded by various government agencies, while the IPCC, the body responsible for this astronomically expensive regulatory scheme, sponsors zero – none – zip – nada research. This is no way to run a whorehouse. There is important research that can be done, but won’t, because it’s not likely to come to the desired conclusions. And those areas are starved for funds, in a field that more broadly is raining money.
Finally, the closing paragraph:
So I wish to you – I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you’ll give a talk unless you know clearly what you’re going to talk about and more or less what you’re going to say.
So, there you have relevant excepts of a speech made in 1974 to the Caltech graduating class. Why do you suppose that he decided at the time that this was an important enough subject to devote a graduation speech to? Why do you suppose that Dwight Eisenhower saw fit to devote so much of his presidential farewell speech to a warning about institutional behavior? I think they saw the tectonic forces at play in an historical perspective. Remember, Feynman was one of a very few futurists who actually got his crystal ball right, when he predicted nanotechnology and the silicon revolution in the 1950s. Maybe some people are blessed with clairvoyance. The rest of us are cursed with our ignorance.
Eisenhower warned us in 1961. Feynman warned us again in 1974. Phillips warned us in 2007. None of us has any excuse to be surprised. This was a long time in the making, but here we are. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see why these people were warning us. And a large portion of us still don’t get it.
