Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Vidoe isn't up yet, but here is a link.
Fist, I have to say, Crichton is just
as big of a pompous ass as he was when I saw him in person in 1990.
Really, I watched his presentation before the neocon homestead of the
AEI and expected to hear a little bit more about climate policy,
which he has staked a relatively controversial position on. There
wasn't much there, really. I want to address it, expecially in the
context of where I think he is confusing himself and those who
listent to him. Next, I would like to address his views on science
and politics, almost all of which I still see dead-on eye to eye with
him, and have written about over and over and over and over. Finally,
I want to make fun of the AEI.
First, lets get the climate change
issue out of the way. The way I see it, he has 3 main issues: The
quality of research is not on a par with where he thinks it should
be. To that end, the review and verification infrastructure is
incomplete. Finally, he touches on nature as a complex system.
That last point is really the
fundamental idea to grasp. But I will start with his first point.
There has, most certainly, been some bad science done in the name of
environmental science. He cited himself almost twelve-thousand
studies done in the last 15 years. I personally have the NASA Earth
Observatory newsfeed on my personal home page. I get news on 2 or 3
new studies every week. Is all of this science good? Of course not.
However, there has always been a lot of crappy science. Even crappy
science from prominent scientists of their day *
cough-Lord-Kelvin-cough *. To
pretend that the same crap doesn't come out of other fields is simply
naive. The FDA model is great, as is the three lab model. The fact of
the matter is, doing all science at that level is impractical.
Science has always been a shotgun of grad students here and there and
verification when someone plans on building on previous results. To
say that all science that might in some way affect policy meet this
level of quality is bordering on silly. We can barely get science
that affects personal safety to meet that requirement, and that is at
a huge cost.
Secondly, review
and verification is important. He and I completely agree on opening
science. However, contrary to the crap that the AEI questioners were
spewing, science doesn't need the “market revolution”
that “manufacturing” has seen (do you believe that
crap?). In fact, that is exactly the information market that has led
to the kind of crappy media that gives us Fox News and MSNBC and
leads Crichton says we need product liability for. Indeed, what
science needs is a return to Open Source Science. We need, certainly
the science the public has paid for, available publicly and
immediately. Next we need a stratification of publication. The
journals are now an impediment to the community they are there to
serve. They publish for the sake of sales, the publish early and they
lock away intellectual property that rightfully belongs to the
public. Moreover, now that everything from JAMA to Nature is sold as
a newstand publication, seeking popular readership, they are making
the same downward slide that SciAm has already completed. If they are
not going to take their responsibility seriously, then lets turn to
Archive.org or Wikimedia or a new government publishing entity to
handle this. Certainly we need a last-stage publication source where
only science that has been adequately peer reviewed makes it. To
apply “independent verification” to that qualifier,
though, is a bit unrealistic.
Crichton's problem
with verification of so much of published environmental science,
however, goes directly to the nature of the problem: complex systems.
Much of environmental science is complex systems modeling. I goes
directly to his pompous-asinine nature that he can deride environment
computer modeling at the beginning of his talk, and close by citing
Dietrich Dorner, a damned psychologist and his complex system
computer modeling in his closing. The fact of the matter is, 7 of the
15 largest computers in the word are dedicated to environmental
modeling. These models are being tweaked all the time, and no, they
don't agree and yes you could ask all 7 groups what the weather would
be like in the year 2100 and get 7 difference answers. Where all the
models agree, however, is where the trend line is heading. While
citing some old and easily dismissed bad environmental studies, he
brushes over the truth of the matter. Even in those 928 climate
studies, while they may not say absolutely that human action is the
cause of global warming, it is certainly the most likely direct
cause, certainly a contributing factor and tracking remarkably well
with the trendlines. The models vary in timelines and other
variables. Even now we are learning about CO2 absorption into the
oceans and the mitigating and possibly rebounding or wall-hitting
affect that will have in the future. We are looking at the possibly
of CO2 burial in the soil. There is not, however, any fundamental
disagreement on where the models are going. That is the nature of
complex systems modeling. We will not have absolute data until the
tipping points have been crossed. He speaks of people watching for
unexpected behavior and responding to things on the edge in Dorner's
experiments, well this is exactly what environmental science
is urging today.
Now, going along
with is misused argument on this third point is a whole slew of
arguments I would love to have. U.S. (prove it harms someone) Vs
European (prove it is safe) regulatory environments. I would love to
take his “children as a complex system” argument and go
through the James Dobson childrearing theories. I would love to point
how his mocking the “balance” of nature while noting that
it was radical changes in the administration of nature, the
abandonment of wildlife coexistence and true forestry that has lead
to our curring problems with deer pestilence in the south and
fire-trap forests in the west. I would love to talk about small
farming and responsible land burns on the prairie vs corporate
farming and exploitative agriculture in South America. Frankly,
though, I would be writing for days if I did that.
In stead, I would
like to talk about where Crichton and I agree, though I think he
might have been muddled. First, science and politics need to be
protected from each other at nearly the same level that religion and
politics do. The politicization of science is far, FAR beyond climate
change now. It affects the FDA, the EPA, OSHA, NASA, NOAA and nearly
every government agency that does science. The science should come
first, then informed policy. This however means science isolated from
politics and policy separated from ideology. These are two things we
most certainly haven't seen in the last four years.
I also agree with
him on science as the business of creating testable hypotheses. This
is, of course, the main area where Intelligent Design falls flat on
its face – the only prediction it is capable of making is the
second coming of Christ. He is also quite within his right to note
that String Theory has yet to yield an honest to god prediction. It
is, as yet, just an interesting mathematical theory adapted to
observations. However, we because there hasn't been anyone to break
the field open like an Einstein, Hawking, or Watson and Crick doesn't
mean that the long hard slog to get there isn't worth it. And
certainly the “spin-off” mathematical applications have
already proven valuable in quantum computing and number theory.
Next I would like
to make a few points on his “Promoting Desirable Technologies”
heading. He is quite incorrect to say that aside from the Manhattan
and Apollo projects that every other government action in technology
has been a failure. First, he is passing over the areas where
regulatory action and government involvement has changed the way we
live. Rural electrification, metropolitan sewage, universal telephone
service, the interstate highway system and the birth of the original
FCC and the spectrum allocation all represent huge successes in
government involvement. I would certainly argue that given the
intransigence of the telecom sector in spite of the Bush and Clinton
administrations giving them about everything they wanted, government
telecom services like Marietta Fibernet in my neck of the woods or
the Philadelphia Muni-WIFI are excellent continuations in this
tradition of technology infrastructure. Secondly, the fact that the
government funds non-directed research leads to desirable
technologies. Need it be pointed out that HTTP/HTML came from
non-directed research at CERN, Mosaic came from non-directed research
at NCSA. In fact, with the notable exceptions of Bell Labs and PARC,
both of which were products of large government regulated monopolies
in the first place, you would be hard pressed to cite a significant
technological advance in the last 25 years that didn't spawn from
government research. To pontificate magnanimously before the neocon
intelligentsia about “what if the government ran Silicon
Valley”, I just want to state that the government gave birth to
Silicon Valley, and raised it like that complex system child. The
previous administration protecting it from the “Darth Vaders”
of the John Malones of the world while the Reagan deregulation of
telecom infrastructure and the gutting of the “real” FCC
gave us WorldCom, GlobalCrossing and Adelphias.
By the way, your
jackass sagehood, your 1984 tome Electronic Life was
cribbed entirely from Al Gore's SciAm article on the Internet of that
same year and was about as original as a Creed album. If you want to
look at someone who actually got it right, and inspired the Blade
Runner image you cite as so
accurate, perhaps you should credit that other 1984 book:
Neuromancer. Please, don't take your abominable writing about
technology from Congo
to Disclosure and
try and sell yourself as a prophet of the electron.

Finally, let's make fun of the Q&A. It was obvious that nobody
got him. The neocons tried to hammer home that big government is the
problem, however, in almost every area, Crichton was arguing for
BIGGER and BETTER government. Government where science is understood
as an investment in the future and protected from the political as
almost a fourth branch of government. A health care system that puts
us on the level with the rest of the industrial world. Putting a
reasonable value on National Parks and hey did I mention that the
Reagan library got $25 million for the Air Force One exhibit while
the King Center that sees 5x the visitors can't get $10 for repairs?
Market forces are great for the right except where the Gipper is
involved. Regulation, for lack of a better word, is good. We need
policy, and we need informed, not idealogical policy. It is a choice
between litigation and regulation, and in general regulation is a
much better way to go. The “Small Government” zealots
like Norquist can talk about “private property rights”
encompassing all these issues, but they always leave out that those
rights have to be litigated to be asserted. Speaking out the other
side of their mouth, however, they complain about tort reform and our
litigiousness in society. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Treatment vs
adaptation is a valid point, and while his cell phone joke was funny,
it misses a larger point: cell phones are a personal health hazard.
When you start talking about complex systems, where we can't clearly
lay out a risk analysis or ROI we have to respond to the small things
as they appear, as Dietrich taught us. We already know that according
to the OMB, we are saving WAY more money on pulmonary ailments that
we are spending regulating ozone and particulates in metro air.
Perhaps that is just lucky, but we can't wait for the problems to
reach a tipping point before we respond. We must act with policy.

Again, aside from Crichton being a jackass, I generally agree with
him on philosophical issues. I think he is mixing metaphors when it
comes to assessment of climate science, partially because he is stuck
in that “this is the way and I am right” doctor mentality
to all things. Expecting Newtonian science in a chaos and complex
theory system is just foolish. Maybe he should spend just a little
more time on these concepts that just enough to add some flavor to
Jurassic Park. Then again, if he was smart enough to do math,
he never would have gone to med school.