The value of ambiguity: a response to Charles Thorington

The following was written as a response to the blogger who writes at www.adividedworld.com. Please see the comment section of the following page for the background to this post.

http://www.adividedworld.com/scientific-issues/clouds-and-global-warming/

Hello again Charles. I have been thinking about the things we disagree on over the past few months, and trying to figure out a way to respond to one of them without putting the rest of my life on hold. You've altered the way I think about climate change on an emotional or intuitive level, if not a logical one. I have long been aware of the lack of predictive validity of climate simulations, an ambiguity that naturally accompanies any simulation of sufficient complexity. Call it chaos theory or simply bad science, the result is that the margins of error in the field are unfortunately huge. I had previously been unmoved on an emotional level by any non-AGW theory due to their seeming to me to be reactions against pro-AGW theories that simply exploit this unfortunate lack of statistical certainty. However, the bodies of research that you showed me and that I subsequently discovered on my own has shown me that there are new, interesting anti-AGW ideas that are not just reactionist.

In response to my invocation of the "wisdom of the crowd", you suggested that minority position status is irrelevant in science. I disagree with that statement. It may be irrelevant to the scientist herself, after she has chosen her specialization, after having already studied each competing theory in depth, once she believes herself to understand her own tiny corner of the universe as well as anyone else in the world, but this is an unlikely scenario given the level of specialization that has been achieved in modern academia. As a physicist, when one picks one's area of research, one must make an imperfect decision based on imperfect knowledge of the cutting edge world of physics. The same is true for any established scientific field, especially for a heavily politicized field like climate science, where one’s personal biases are likely to guide one’s learning far more than in physics. Given the high chances of making an imperfect decision, the choice of specialization and the validity of one’s work is something of a tossup. Therefore, in science, it pays quite disproportionately to the real world to be a maverick, to take a risk and pursue what is likely to be a dead end. In other words, in the world of science, different competing theories are artificially equalized by this high-risk high-reward paradigm. Within the paradigm of grant-writing, tax and committee funded research, etc, the wisdom of the crowd is artificially underweighted in favor of novelty. However, for the consumer of science, for the compiler, philosopher, steward, etc, whatever terms suit the generally inferior category adjacent to practitioner, which I think that you and I both fall into when it comes to climate science, the wisdom of people who know more than us is dismissed at great peril. Focusing on theories that predict an outcome which aligns with one's own idealogical preconceptions multiplies the risk of overconfidence.

There is an impetus to judge climate change theories on qualities other than personal satisfaction; to look for other data that may give us a clue into the nature of something that at this point indisputably uncertain. For me, the wisdom of the crowd is such a source. However, the uncertainty of climate is an opportunity to invoke a neglected field of science: risk management. As a reader I would love to see you discuss the risk management aspect of climate change, which is, given the uncertainty of prediction, of prime importance as a tool to help shape policy. There is risk to artificially disturbing the economy through mismanagement, and also through lack of management, for example due to possible AGW. I’d like to hear more about the complex calculus of weighing these risks, rather than attempting to do the impossible and predict the climate perfectly. Such an argument could be extended to economics as a whole, in the form of a plea to focus more on risk analysis of competing models rather than myopically focusing on finding empirical support for theories that are, given their complexity, inherently uncertain. This is particularly relevant as economic science merges with big data; we are liable to lose the forest for the trees more and more as new tools for data analysis emerge. Instead of using these tools to look for ways to optimize, we could focus on interventions that minimize harm. This is, it seems to me, a conservative principal, in that it respects the wholeness and self-organizing nature of ecosystems, rather than seeing them as needing to be fixed by the government, whether economic or climatic.

Your mission statement for your blog is to investigate why people see the world in such different ways. I think that the AGW controversy is a great window into the phenomenon of diverse ideologies. My intuition is that most people are far less certain about things than you are. Ideologies are not developed in the hyperbolic atmosphere of internet comment boards where ambiguity is seen as weakness, nor are they developed in the only slightly less ambiguity-intolerant publish-or-perish world of academia. They develop over lifetimes or generations based on imperfect information gathered over long periods. And there is a wisdom in this uncertainty that I think you are missing as a physicist and a person of extraordinary intellectual and informational resources. There is value in being able to work with ambiguous data, whether it pertains to the likely outcomes of a shifting climate or the value of government intervention in the economy in general. I hope that I see a bit more tolerance for ambiguity in the world as we move forward in this century, and I would especially like to see it coming from intellectual elites like you.