You Ought to Have a Look is a regular feature from the Center for the Study of Science.  While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic.  Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary. 

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We highlight this week a collection of items which have a common thread—poorly informed beliefs lead to poorly formulated policy. And poorly formulated policy is worse than no policy at all.

For starters, consider this article by Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg, in support of his new book, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Writing in CapX, Norberg looks at the reasons “Why are we determined to deny that things are getting better?” He points to how the media, in combination with our own psychological tendencies, lead us to the false assumption that the state of the world is declining, when in fact, trends are overwhelmingly in the other direction. Norberg points out that there is a danger in our misperception, “People led by fear risk curtailing the freedom that progress depends on.”

Here are some expects from his article:

A couple of years ago, I commissioned a study in which 1,000 Swedes were asked eight questions about global development. On average, every age group and every income group was wrong on all eight questions – because they all thought the world was in bad shape and getting worse. Large majorities, for example, thought that hunger and extreme poverty have been increasing, when they have in fact been reduced faster than at any other point in world history. And those who had been through higher education actually had less knowledge than the rest.

It’s not just Sweden. In Britain, only 10 per cent of people thought that world poverty had decreased in the past 30 years. More than half thought it had increased. In the United States, only 5 per cent answered (correctly) that world poverty had been almost halved in the last 20 years: 66 per cent thought it had almost doubled.

Why do we make these false assumptions? Many of them are formed by the media, which reinforces a particular way of looking at the world – a tendency to focus on the dramatic and surprising, which is almost always bad news, like war, murder and natural disasters.

…[P]eople led by fear might curtail the freedom and the openness that progress depends on. When Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, is asked what he is worried about, he usually responds “superstition and bureaucracy”, because superstition can obstruct the accumulation of knowledge, and bureaucracy can stop us from applying that knowledge in new technologies and businesses.

Johan’s full article, along with his new book, are well worth the taking the time to explore. A good place to start is this Cato book series event, where you can listen to Johan talk about his viewpoint and describe his findings.

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You Ought to Have a Look is a regular feature from the Center for the Study of Science.  While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic.  Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.

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This week we feature a few smart pieces by some smart folks.

First up is an excellent post “Climate Modeling: Settled Science or Fool’s Errand?” by Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Bill Frezza in which he discusses the development of climate models and the reliability of the future that they project. But Bill’s post is really just to provide some background for his Real Clear Radio Hour interview with Arizona State University’s Dr. Daniel Sarewitz, who is the co-director of ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes. Sarewitz has a lot of interesting things to say about “Big Science” and the problems that result. Frezza summarizes his interview:

Sarewitz, who was trained as an earth scientist, is terrified that “science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex” that is endangering both science and democracy. In his blockbuster analysis mentioned above, he nails his thesis to the laboratory door, challenging Big Science to get its act together. Politicizing science, he argues, leads to debates about science being substituted for debates about politics. So we end up fighting over unverifiable forecasts about what might happen in the future, rather than wrestling with the complex tradeoffs that attend political decisions on what we should – or could – do about carbon emissions under all the potential future scenarios.

But rather than get discouraged, Sarewitz believes there is a way out of this conundrum. His advice is, “Technology unites while science divides.” He recommends that science “abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.” Despite calling long-range climate forecasting “a fool’s errand,” he thinks dumping too much CO2 in the atmosphere will make anthropogenic global warming a long term problem that will eventually require the decarbonization of our energy industries. But he sees this as a process taking many decades, one that can be best addressed not with politicized science, but by letting adaptation, innovation, wealth creation, and economic growth lead the way.

If you have a free 20 minutes or so and are interested in how the quest for policy has derailed the pursuit of science, listening to Frezza’s full Sarewitz interview will be time well spent.

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You Ought to Have a Look is a regular feature from the Center for the Study of Science.  While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic.  Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary. 

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With last week’s news dominated by the debates—both in front of the American people (Trump v. Clinton) and in front of the American courts (West Virginia v. EPA)—we figured we’d highlight a couple of other stories that may have not have gotten the attention that they deserved. 

First up is a piece that left us slack-jawed. “How the FDA Manipulates the Media” is an investigative journalism article Charles Seife of Scientific American that reveals a seamy world of backroom press manipulation by scientific bodies (in this case, the federal Food and Drug Administration) through a practice known as a close-hold embargo. While some organizations, including major scientific journals like Science and Nature, employ an embargo system that allows some members of the press access to articles before they are officially “published” so that they can prepare news stories, the only condition is that no one releases the story before a set date. This is why a bunch of news stories, all covering the same piece of scientific information, all hit the airwaves/intertubes at the same time.  While this type of embargo is a bit unfair to anyone who perhaps wants to comment on the story but is blindsided by it – the procedure only biased by the well-known predilections of the mainstream press.  However, the close-hold embargo is an (almost mythical) horse of a different color. Its intent is to generate loads of press, but only good press. 

Here’s a taste from Scientific American:

The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR’s reporter could and couldn’t interview.

…This kind of deal offered by the FDA—known as a close-hold embargo—is an increasingly important tool used by scientific and government agencies to control the behavior of the science press. Or so it seems. It is impossible to tell for sure because it is happening almost entirely behind the scenes. We only know about the FDA deal because of a wayward sentence inserted by an editor at the New York Times. But for that breach of secrecy, nobody outside the small clique of government officials and trusted reporters would have known that the journalists covering the agency had given up their right to do independent reporting.

Documents obtained by Scientific American through Freedom of Information Act requests now paint a disturbing picture of the tactics that are used to control the science press. For example, the FDA assures the public that it is committed to transparency, but the documents show that, privately, the agency denies many reporters access—including ones from major outlets such as Fox News—and even deceives them with half-truths to handicap them in their pursuit of a story. At the same time, the FDA cultivates a coterie of journalists whom it keeps in line with threats. And the agency has made it a practice to demand total control over whom reporters can and can’t talk to until after the news has broken, deaf to protests by journalistic associations and media ethicists and in violation of its own written policies.

By using close-hold embargoes and other methods, the FDA, like other sources of scientific information, are gaining control of journalists who are supposed to keep an eye on those institutions. The watchdogs are being turned into lapdogs. “Journalists have ceded the power to the scientific establishment,” says Vincent Kiernan, a science journalist and dean at George Mason University.

And if you think this taste is bad, the whole article will make you ill. Sickening, but eye-opening. Perhaps take an alka seltzer first, but you really ought to have a look.

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