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How fear of bias dominates the climate change debate
Simon Lewis, Guardian
… despite scientists and journalists doing their usual jobs, there was a clear post-climategate shift. Both groups stuctured their reporting of the research around guessing what climate sceptics would think about the results. The news reports pre-empted and commented on what the sceptics may think, while the scientists quoted all countered the view that the results may assist sceptics. The scientists and journalists had all internalised the sceptics’ narrative.
This shift is a result of the long-running sceptics’ campaign. A similar change occurred last month at the Royal Society. Two members of Lord Lawson’s sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation lobbied the Royal Society to update its short guide to climate science for the public. Their goal was not to alter the scientific conclusions, as the previous guide was accurate. Their aim was to reframe the advice. The old guide was written as short, clear answers to a series of common arguments made by climate contrarians. The new advice is no longer in such a useful form for the public. The science is the same, but Lawson’s gang have politicised its presentation. Prominent sceptics, like Lawson, say they want science free of politics, yet their campaigning has brought about exactly the opposite.
What’s to be done? First, acknowledge that many of us, especially researchers and committed science journalists who fear accusations of bias, have internalised the sceptics’ conspiracy-laden worldview. Second, we all need to avoid playing along with their agenda, by carefully explaining scientific results to avoid the inevitable contrarian wilful misinterpretations, without name-checking “the sceptics” as a group. We don’t accept vocal fringe groups such as creationists framing the reporting of evolution, and likewise, we should actively avoid letting fringe ideological convictions frame public discussions of climate change science.
(15 October 2010)
Is Social Networking Useless for Social Change?
Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, Common Dreams
An October 4 New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted” poses an important question: What if anything is the potential contribution of web-based “social networking” to social movements and social change? The article’s answer, drawing primarily on an account of the civil rights movement, is that social movements that are strong enough to impose change on powerful social forces require both strong ties among participants and hierarchical organizations — the opposite of the weak ties and unstructured equality provided by social networking websites.
Gladwell deserves credit for kicking off a discussion of this question, but that discussion needs to go far beyond the answers he provides, both in conceptual clarity and in historical perspective. This is a modest contribution to that discussion.
For starters, a bit of conceptual clarification. Social networking websites are not a form of organization at all; they are a means of communication. Comparing Twitter to the NAACP is like comparing a telephone to a PTA. They are not the same thing, they don’t perform the same kind of functions and therefore their effectiveness or lack thereof simply can’t be compared.
There are other category problems as well. “Small Change” juxtaposes “networks” and “hierarchies.” It conflates “strong ties” with “hierarchical” organizations. It denies that strong ties can occur as part of networks.These three conceptual presuppositions, which underlie the article’s concrete historical analysis, deserve some serious reconsideration.
… More recently, some interpreters have pointed out that there is a third form, which they have dubbed “networks.” Networks coordinate by means of the sharing of information and voluntary mutual adjustment among participants. They are different from markets because their planning is proactive and based on knowledge of other participants’ intentions and capabilities, rather than on feedback from past transactions. They are different from hierarchies because their decision-making is decentralized and voluntary rather than centralized and authoritative.
How do the historical experiences of the civil rights movement analyzed in “small change” look in the light of such a clarified set of categories?
… This brings us back to the role of social media. Gladwell is surely right when he says social media “are not a natural enemy of the status quo.” But that is only the beginning of the discussion. The pertinent question is whether social media can contribute to the process of forming social movements and effective social action, not whether social media can substitute for that process. (A telephone system is not a PTA, but it can sure as heck be useful for getting a few hundred people out to confront the school board or vote in the school board election.)
The evidence here is pretty clear. Social networking websites can play and are playing an important role in finding and connecting people who are beginning to think and feel similar things.They can help participants deepen their understanding and form common perspectives. They can help inform those who use them of possible courses of action.
This doesn’t in itself substitute for many of the other things movements need, and need to do. It does not in itself create the kinds of “strong ties” that help give a movement strength, although it may help people find others with whom they want to develop strong ties.
(8 October 2010)
Monbiot: The Values of Everything
George Monbiot, Guardian
… The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?
The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology. It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight that now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.
Progressives, he shows, have been suckers for a myth of human cognition he labels the enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires.
A host of psychological experiments demonstrate that it doesn’t work like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information that confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change.
… Advertisers, who employ plenty of psychologists, are well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning director for JWT: marketers “should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture; being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating cultural forces, not brand impressions”.
… Common Cause proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Progressive campaigners, it suggests, should help to foster an understanding of the psychology that informs political change and show how it has been manipulated.
(11 October 2010)
