Conflicts of Interest

Rajendra Pachauri has been getting a fair bit of heat recently for alleged conflicts of interest. He has coyly denied any such allegation. There are many strong political reasons to avoid conflicts of interest, of course, and those are specified by the NAS rules that Roger cites over at his blog. Among them, the rules are in place to protect a person from giving the impression that his/her objectivity has been compromised.

There is, in principle, nothing wrong with having a conflict of interest. We’re not determined by our circumstances, after all. It’s entirely possible to conduct research, or to argue on behalf of a position, while contemporaneously being employed by, or funded by, some entity that shares your interests. In fact, it would be near impossible not to do so. We all ride on waves of normativity (whatever the hell that means).

What strikes me as interesting about reactions to the recent COI flap are the kinds of arguments that support it.

For one, someone might say that we have strong political reasons to avoid conflicts of interest. The lumpen masses might well misunderstand our conclusions, or falsely challenge our claims, if we are conflicted. That political line of reasoning is different than the claim that most existing institutions have COI rules, so therefore the IPCC ought to have binding COI rules. That is also a different line of reasoning than the line that suggests, as the NAS COI rules suggest, that one ought not to have conflicts of interest to “protect oneself” from defamation.

So there you have at least three lines of argument: the political, the conventional, and the prudential. But there are more.

The NAS also offers the justification that COI rules are objective (meaning procedurally impartial, I’d guess) and that they are prophylactic. They are in place, it appears, to steer a practitioner (any practitioner) away from temptation. That’s yet a fourth line of argument.

Seems to me that there are other important lines of argument too, and maybe these need quite a bit more attention.

One reason to have COI rules is to ensure that the procedure by which information is introduced and validated is immune from scrutiny, independently of whether the fickle individuals, or the fickle facts, caught up in that procedure are. It’s not that procedures themselves necessarily need to be cleansed of all normative pollutants, but rather that that’s what would make a conclusion (arrived at through such a procedure) valid. The validity doesn’t hang on the conclusion’s correspondence with the world, but rather on the extent to which the means of arriving at the conclusion are subject to an appropriately wide scrutiny.

And that’s where it gets damned tricky.

An “appropriately wide scrutiny” is a sufficiently vague notion. Calls to make the scrutiny wider than is appropriate, as some are charging, may equally undermine the authority of the critics. More on this in a bit. Right now? I’m off to class.

More Fodder

People seem to love tales of philosophers who make laughing-stocks of themselves, so here’s a brand new one. Looks like Barnard-Herni Lévy has really stepped in it this time.

When France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant in his latest book, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”, his observations were greeted with the usual adulation. To support his attack, Bernard-Henri Lévy — a showman-penseur known simply by his initials, BHL — cited the little-known 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.

There was one problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank.

There were clues. One supposed work by Botul — from which BHL quoted — was entitled The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant. The philosopher’s school is known as Botulism and subscribes to his theory of “La Metaphysique du Mou” — the Metaphysics of the Flabby. Botul even has a Wikipedia entry that explains that he is a “fictional French philosopher”.

But Mr Lévy, a leader among the nouveaux philosophes school of the 1970s, was unaware. In On War in Philosophy, he writes that Botul had proved once and for all “just after the Second World War, in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay, that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance”.

I’m not about to defend Lévy, as I haven’t seen the text in question and it does sound fantastically ridiculous, but there is something to be said about the method of citation in philosophy. Generally speaking, we cite not because we want to conjure the great wisdom of a given hot-shot philosopher, but rather because we want to refer our readers to a given line of argument.

Again, Lévy’s position strikes me as manifestly stupid — I’ve got a strain of Kant running through me, fwiw — but I think there’s a general difference in approach. Citations should be understood more like hot-links to interesting side-notes than as page references to the book of knowledge.

At any rate, harde-har-har. Philosophers are idiots.

Dancy with the Wolves

Claire Danes talks about the exceptionally prolific moral philosopher Jonathan Dancy on the Craig Ferguson show. Daines is married to Jon Dancy’s son, actor Hugh Dancy.

FWIW, I rarely wear cardigans, I do not smoke a pipe, I do not indulge in tweed, I do not sport a beret, and leather pants? I’m strictly a leather long-johns kinda guy.

Incidentally, what the hell is up with the camera shot? Why so much headroom?

At Your Service

Looks like the Obama administration will announce today the formation of a National Climate Service. At this point, it’s only hearsay, as there are plans to announce a ‘major climate initiative’, but many little birdies lead this particular observer to conclude that the rumors are correct.

The concept of a “National Climate Service” dates back decades, but it found new life in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration and has been embraced by the Obama White House. The idea is to create a central federal source of information on everything from projections of sea level rise to maps of the nation’s best sites for wind and solar power.

Six Months to Live

Kill Your Children (Part II)

Taking a cue from our dear saint Glenn Beck, a nearby state legislator, Mike Noel (R-Utah), has set wheels in motion to explore the possibility that concern over global warming is a clever ruse to eradicate the earth of the hideous blood-bags we euphemistically refer to as ‘people’.

The House Natural Resources Committee then approved a resolution that expresses the Utah Legislature’s belief that “climate alarmists’ carbon dioxide-related global warming hypothesis is unable to account for the current downturn in global temperatures.”

The resolution, sent to the House on a 10-1 vote, would urge the Environmental Protection Agency to drop plans to regulate the pollution blamed for climate change “until a full and independent investigation of the climate data conspiracy and global warming science can be substantiated.”

But here’s Mike Noel’s winning justification:

“Now, if you can’t see a connection [of a conspiracy] to that,” the legislator said, “you’re absolutely blind to what is going on. This is absolutely — in my mind, this is in fact a conspiracy to limit population not only in this country but across the globe.”

Curses!

I’ve been a little slow to comment on the so-called Himalaya 2035 curse in the IPCC  AR4, WG II; and that’s partly because I haven’t been particularly keen to spend my time figuring out what happened. As far as I’ve been concerned, it was sloppy science, done by appealing to the grey literature.

Looks like there’s a little more to it than that, as this nice overview from the Yale Forum points out. Seems as though it was a case of plagiarism; and if not plagiarism, then near plagiarism.

And that’s sorta what makes this interesting. Here’s a case where cribbing a sentence and adding one or two modifiers to that sentence isn’t really a major incident of plagiarism, but at the same time, this is arguably one of the biggest incidents of plagiarism and its repercussions that one can imagine.

Think of all of the attention now directed at these few sentences. It’s astonishing. This could well have been avoided not only by citing good studies, but also by compiling and interpreting the scientific reports rather than lifting them straight out of their source.

Physicalists Unite

Researchers have discovered that if they install a magnetic demon in your brain-damaged head they can peer into your deepest and dirtiest thoughts. Or, at least, they’re partway there. Instead, they’ve got some other interesting news. All those people in a permanent vegetative state? Yeah. Not so much.

Holy hell.

Nothing to See Here

Looks like Michael Mann and the climatology community at Penn State got an all (a mostly, largely, nearly, ninety-nine percent, practically) clear from the panel investigating them. [Props to JimR for keeping me accurate.] Read the report from Penn State here.

Actually, if you’re not associated with a university that pays a university subscription to climate wire, you may not be able to read that. Even still, I’m fairly sure I can quote this without copyright infringement:

An internal inquiry has largely cleared Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann of scientific misconduct, but the university said yesterday that it will continue to probe whether the researcher undermined public trust in science.

Disaster Signal

Here’s Roger at the BBC table defending his research on a climate signal in the disaster data. Need background? Yulsman gives us the full skinny.