A while back I wrote about The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, by James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 296 pp., $24.95).

In today’s Financial Times a regular columnist, John Kay, a British economist, discusses the wisdom of crowds, and of experts (subscription required but the essay is available free here). An excerpt:

“So the crowd is more likely to be right about things that do not matter, like guessing the weight of an ox or the number of jelly beans in a jar, and the expert is more likely to be right about things that do matter, like flying an aircraft or brain surgery. Where good judgments are important to us, we select people who are likely to be good at making these judgments and train them until they are very good at making these judgments. There are flight academies and medical schools, but no university offers a course on how to guess the weight of an ox or count the number of jelly beans in a jar… it is a mistake to place too much confidence in either great men or the market… Be sceptical: ask why you should buy what others want to sell. Discount the conventional wisdom. Be wise to conflicts of interest. There is wisdom in crowds, but more often wisdom in the wise. And you can beat the market, but not as often as the crowd would have you believe.”

Kay has a range of interesting articles on the site, including a very well-written one about uncertainty, uck, and gure.

The primary justification for public investments in climate models is that these tools will help to inform decision making related to climate. Of course, for many scientists, climate models are worth creating and studying regardless of their possible utility. But I think it is safe to say that the resources devoted to climate models would be much less if they were only of intrinsic merit.

In this light an article by Andy Revkin in today’s Science Times of The New York Times raises some difficult questions for the climate modeling community. The article carries with it the headline, “Computers Add Sophistication, but Don’t Resolve Climate Debate.” The article observes, “…advances in research on climate change do not guarantee that a consensus will soon be reached on what to do about it. Computer models of climate, particularly, have become a lightning rod in the climate debate, and are likely to remain so for years to come.”

In fact, ASU’s Dan Sarewitz makes the provocative case in a recent paper that advances in science in fact may make environmental controversies worse. It is an article of faith among many that more climate science, and in particular, predictive (or projective, or scenario generation, etc.) results from computer models, will facilitate action on climate change. But what if this assumption is wrong?

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Stephen A. Newman, a professor of law at New York Law School, has written a very interesting article titled “The Use and Abuse of Social Science in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate.” The full text is available at the Social Science Network Electronic Research Library.

The abstract describes the paper as follows: “There is no conclusive, scientific answer to the question of what children’s development and well-being will be if society permits same-sex marriages… A look back at past societal controversies, over eugenic sterilization and over interracial marriage, highlights the danger of relying on scientific theories to resolve social issues. Science in these past debates too often reinforced societal biases. The four guidelines suggested here for considering the welfare of children in the context of same-sex marriage treat social science studies as one input among others that, when fairly considered, give substantial support to allowing such marriages as a means to promote the welfare of children raised by same-sex couples.”

Within the paper Newman writes:

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John Blundell, director general of the Institute of Economic Affairs in the United Kingdom, writes a perspective in The Scotsman criticizing government investment in science and technology.

The mission of the Institute for Economic Affairs “is to improve public understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society, with particular reference to the role of markets in solving economic and social problems.” So it is not too surprising that its director is critical of government funding for science and technology. Even so, his arguments are worth a look.

Here is an excerpt:

“The official consensus, Right or Left, bright or dim, is that although the results of scientific applications can never be predicted, brainy people given leisure and resources must benefit the rest of us. The economic jargon is that science is a “public good”… The chemist Terence Kealey produced something of a jolt to all this when he published The Economic Laws of Scientific Research in 1996… One of the superstitions Dr Kealey has challenged is the amorphous assumption that state science will enhance or accelerate economic growth. It does not. Ask a few more questions and you wonder why such a mistaken view is so widespread.”

Here is a link to the opinion piece by John Blundell.

Some additional thoughts on the latest climate change flap resulting from an article in yesterday’s New York Times …

The USGCRP was developed in the late 1980s and formalized in legislation in 1990. (I have a lot of background information on this program because I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in 1994 on its attempts to structure scientific research to inform policy.) The program’s legal mandate calls for it to provide “usable information” to policy makers in response to the challenges of global change, and in particular climate change.

The program’s administrators and participants has treated issues of policy a bit like the proverbial “third rail” – stay away at all costs! It has proven politically expedient to focus instead almost exclusively on scientific research on the global earth system, which has led to a great deal of very good science, but very little information that might be considered “usable” by policy makers. In fact, the research done by the USGCRP has fed endless debate about the science of climate change — a debate that at least in the eyes of the public, has long been settled.

In an article in today’s Washington Post, following yesterday’s New York Times article, the president’s science advisor John Marburger says the USGCRP annual report has, “no implications for policy.” (Thanks to Chris Mooney for the link.)

Marburger’s statement that the USGCRP’s annual report, which reflects approximately $30 billion in public investment in the USGCRP over more than a decade, has “no implications for policy” can be interpreted as nothing other than a massive science policy failure.

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Yesterday we commented on a New York Times story that claimed to have identified a “striking shift” in the Bush Administration’s position on climate change. Today’s New York Time’s contains the President’s reaction to this claim:

“On environmental issues, Mr. Bush appeared unfamiliar with an administration report delivered to Congress on Wednesday that indicated that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases were the only likely explanation for global warming over the last three decades. Previously, Mr. Bush and other officials had emphasized uncertainties in understanding the causes and consequences of global warming. The new report was signed by Mr. Bush’s secretaries of energy and commerce and his science adviser. Asked why the administration had changed its position on what causes global warming, Mr. Bush replied, “Ah, we did? I don’t think so.” Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, said later that the administration was not changing its position on global warming and that Mr. Bush continued to be guided by continuing research at the National Academy of Sciences.”

I think that our interpretation of events on this issue holds up pretty well.

Every year since 1989 the U.S. Global Change Research Program has released a report titled “Our Changing Planet” which provides a concise overview of research conducted under the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) as well as a summary of program activities and agency budgets. (The reports from 1995 are available online here.)

Yesterday the USGCRP released its 2005 “Our Changing Planet” report. Somewhat surprisingly the New York Times today, in an article by Andy Revkin, sought to portray this report as a “striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change.”

This is a surprise because the 2003 edition of “Our Changing Planet”, while perhaps somewhat more staid in comparison to the 2005 report, nonetheless contains numerous references to human-caused climate change and predictions of its future, negative impacts. The USGCRP is after all a multi-billion research program motivated by evidence that humans are causing climate change and the desire to develop policy responses. It is hard to see what the news here is. The fact that the 2005 report echoes much of the language of earlier reports does not seem to me to be a striking change or motivated by any possible “shift in focus” of the Bush Administration.

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In an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, James E. McWilliams, an assistant professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos, lays into the academic enterprise. He writes,

“The few history PhDs who manage to land full-time academic jobs quickly learn that the easiest way to become distinguished in the profession is through a lifetime of scholarly dedication to a single, defining and often very small idea — one that usually has no bearing on contemporary events. That’s precisely how to “make a contribution” — the be-all and end-all for a serious academic. More often than not, though, that contribution is to our own job security and status within a small club rather than to a public debate badly in need of a broader historical perspective.”

Although I empathize with his frustrations, I don’t think that all of academia is as bleak an enterprise as McWilliams suggests. In particular, academia diverges from McWilliams’ characterization with the growth of interdisciplinary, policy-focused graduate programs that are educating a new cadre of graduate students on how to be a specialist in the integration of knowledge as a contribution to real-world concerns. One such program is the University of Colorado’s now-3-year-old experiemnt in its interdisciplinary graduate Environmental Studies Program. But there many others as well.

It is almost a matter of faith among U.S. policy makers and scientists that the United States should dominate the global scientific enterprise. Concerns are frequently expressed about the U.S. losing it dominance. In a commentary in yesterday’s Financial Times Caroline Wagner, of the Rand Corp and the University of Amsterdam, and Yee-Cheong Lee, president of the World Federation of Engineering Organisations, challenge this perspective. They write:

“…some still see the quest for scientific advancement and technological innovation as a race between nations. A recent report by the National Science Board of the US raised questions about whether America is at risk of losing its role as the world’s centre of science and technology innovation.

This is the wrong question to ask in the 21st century. Today science has become a global phenomenon. Nations are part of an expanding knowledge network that has no borders. In the 21st century, security requires sharing rather than protecting knowledge. No country can work at the frontiers of all fields of science. The expanding knowledge frontier means that co-operation is the means of knowledge creation…

The US needs to break out of the “dominance” box of the last century and think beyond a national model of scientific or technological capacity… America stands to benefit more from knowledge and ideas flowing through a networked world than from a world in which countries are competing against each other.”

This op-ed will no doubt be warmly received by those who think that too often science and technology policy is portrayed as a competition – for more funding, for more publications, for more citations, for more prestige, etc., rather than as a means to organize the scientific enterprise to better achieve society’s goals. Wagner and Lee raise some important questions worth thinking about. Their commentary can be found here.

We often hear calls for society to become more informed about science. A letter in Nature this week turns this around and calls for scientists to become more informed about society. An excerpt:

“Recent calls by the United Nations (Nature 430, 5; 2004) for stronger science input to support aid policy, in particular for feeding the hungry, are welcome. In the United Kingdom, organizations such as the Department for International Development (DFID) need to improve their use of the science base. But there is also scope for the scientific community to improve its understanding of development issues surrounding agricultural policy, if scientists are to be productively engaged in fighting world hunger and poverty.”

Thanks to SciDev.net for the link.