Post & Ramirez (2018): Scientists’ (mis)perceptions of press bias induce advocacy in response

In my overarching project Unilateral Disarmament in the “War on Science” I claim that (4) cognitive biases lead scientists to faulty perceptions of attacks on science, and that (3) in response, scientists adopt communication strategies which, far from alleviating, tend to exacerbate the “war.”

This study by Post & Ramirez of German climate scientists provides some intriguing evidence for these two claims.

Some communication principles for an e-salon

There are going to be a thousand diverse ways to run a worthwhile blog on a controversial topic.  As long as the blog community is willing to try things out, reflect on their experiences and then enforce their own standards through modeling and (civil) correction, I think they’re likely to come up a with their own workable practices.

Judith Curry in 1688?

Still, it’s not like the online world is completely separate from the world of face-to-face communication, and the blogosphere can draw from communication skills already well-developed and understood in “meat-space” contexts.  I’ve done a series of posts, for example, on how debate can work online (here and here).

Similarly, in a very interesting post, Judith Curry has identified her objective on her own blog as translating an old communication activity into a new setting:

I am striving for something different, sort of an e-salon where we discuss interesting topics at the knowledge frontier.

Three hundred plus years ago, another prominent woman wrote extensively about salon communication;  let’s see what we can learn from her.

citizens push back against authority

Here’s foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead explaining the point I was trying to say yesterday, better than I probably managed to.  If the press had been doing its job, he explains in a recent blog post:

Climate scientists would have realized long ago that if they hope to convince a skeptical world they need to be ultra-careful, ultra-cautious and even ultra-conservative in their public statements and recommendations. They would have understood long ago that because their science is important, they have to do it more carefully and more publicly than other people. That may be harsh and it may be ‘unfair’ in some sense, but when you are dealing with the interests of billions of people you have to expect a little bit of scrutiny.

And expands in a recent television interview (starting at 25:05) with an example from the IPCC’s recent troubles:

Morano Analysis #7: Scientific consensus

This mini-debate between  Maslin and Morano first caught my attention because of Morano’s “accusation” that Maslin was using an “appeal to authority,” and Maslin’s assertion of something like a scientific consensus in reply. Claims that the IPCC represents an authoritative “consensus” have been prominent in representations of the IPCC’s reports since the very beginning, and in one of my current projects I’m trying to figure out how consensus claims  work (or don’t).  The example here, though small, is worth examining closely.