Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Good Science is Hard to Do
Megan McArdle’s evisceration of the idea that government subsidies for contraception have been proven to reduce abortion rates is something every conservative should study and take notes on. I commend the whole piece, especially her conclusion on one of the most-cited studies in favor of the more-contraceptives-less-abortions argument:
[The researchers] tell you that Colorado gave out LARCs [long-acting reversible contraceptives]; they tell you that birthrates and abortions fell. They don’t dwell on the simultaneous fall in these areas at the national level, which is somewhat mysterious but may be fallout from the financial crisis. They have no way to establish causality except for an inadequate control group that doesn’t even show a substantial difference in teen abortion rates, a fact that they appear to have forgotten in other sections of the paper. (They also mention that the overall decline in Colorado’s birthrates was concentrated among low-income women in the studied counties, but that’s not actually very interesting, because early motherhood and unintended pregnancy are also concentrated among low-income women.)
The authors basically concede that they cannot come close to establishing causality, because the summary conclusion is a weasel: LARCs may contribute to a decline in fertility and abortion among high-risk women. How much? We don’t know, but look at the pretty graphs!
A lack for appreciation for just how difficult it is to produce good research is among the most dangerous aspects of the study-loving, “Science!” boosters on the left. Conducting a rigorous, well-researched, falsifiable experiment that holds up to scrutiny and offers anything approaching a meaningful addition to human knowledge is devilishly difficult under the best of circumstances. It’s massively more complicated when one’s subjects are thinking, adaptable, stubborn, difficult-to-control human beings.
Conservatives should — indeed, as truth-seekers, must — put a high premium on scientific method and follow the evidence wherever it leads. But we should always remind ourselves and others not to jump to conclusions, or to mistake the (honest, well-intended) trappings of empiricism for the real thing.
Published in General
See here.
Not particularly. Unless you consider contributing to Bill Clinton’s Legal Defense Fund and considering Obama a moderate makes one a leftist?
OK, you’ve piqued my curiosity.
What do you think of the evidence supporting the claims of anthropogenic global warming?
Not just “global warming”, as I think it’s pretty clear that that has occurred, if you pick the right start date.
True. Moreover, honest people reach different conclusions about data depending on what their prior assumptions are, but it can be difficult for human hearts to accept that divergent conclusions from the same data aren’t evidence of bad faith somewhere.
For example, when Megan McArdle looks at all minimum-wage studies, she concludes that we still know so little about what’s going on that we cannot say with confidence that raising the minimum wage causes substantial disemployment. Bryan Caplan, though, believes that these studies aren’t the only relevant data: because labor is just one good among many, all studies demonstrating that raising the price of any good decreases demand are relevant, hence he is much more confident that raising the minimum wage causes substantial disemployment.
Which is the better approach, concentrating just on labor data, so that if labor is substantially unlike other goods, we don’t confuse ourselves by unduly likening it to other goods? Or trusting that labor is enough like other goods that we can exploit our knowledge of other goods to answer questions about minimum-wage laws? Neither approach is necessarily dishonest, but the difference in assumptions is real.
If you read the IPCC report, it actually does a pretty good job of describing the state of the science. Not the ‘summary for policymakers’, which is a political document and makes unjustified assumptions and claims, but the actual source documents.
In fact, a lot of AGW activists are now shying away from the IPCC report because it’s not ‘extreme’ enough for them, and doesn’t provide enough certainty. For example, the IPCC report makes no bones about the fact that the contribution of clouds to the global climate system is largely unknown and possibly quite important. None of their conclusions are stated in black and white terms, but as probabilities with uncertainties and the level of consensus explicitly shown.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the science strongly indicates that A) the earth has warmed, and likely by more than what you would expect from natural factors, B) CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and C) the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. I’d say that this is a consensus opinion of scientists, and that the consensus is based on pretty strong observational evidence.
Where it starts to get murky is when they try to use this to predict what the climate will be 50 years from now. Where it goes completely off the rails is where they try to predict what the economy will look like 50 years from now and what effect any warming will have on that future economy. And where they have no answers whatsoever is in the area of what can be reasonably done about it.
With my PhD in a scientific field, I think I am the person in this discussion who is most qualified to say:
I have no effin’ clue.
I have heard about a fair amount of the research from my wife, who teaches AP-level Geography, and it hasn’t brought me any closer to having an educated, reasonably certain opinion on the topic.
I generally agree with Dan Hanson: the evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that its levels have increased over the last century seem convincing. As to the effects of this increase on global temperature, and the role of human activity in this or any other changes, I am truly not qualified to even speculate on the data available – except to say I have also seen my share of unconvincing data, which only reinforces my uncertainty.
This reminds me of a bit of wisdom one of my old colleagues shared with me.
A great advantage in knowledge is not necessarily an advantage in a debate.
The corollary is that one can be too stupid to lose an argument.
True, but there is a difference in degree. When politics is at the center of your world view, it colors everything: check the political implications of everything and make sure whatever you say comports with the party line.
Politics is far more central in the lives of Leftists; it’s simply less so on the Right. Why? Because all problems and issues are seen to be within the purview of the government for Leftists. Since the scope of government action is larger, so more is encompassed by political considerations.
An eminently reasonable position to take. Clearly you should be burned at the stake as a denier. ;)
I also agree with Dan Hanson’s take. But I’ll add one other data point: the AGW proponents made a prediction: that the increasing levels of CO2 would cause global temperatures to increase. They haven’t, of late, so that prediction failed. There’s clearly some other mechanism at work that is counteracting CO2’s role as a greenhouse gas.