Why does the anti-intellectual lobby attack meteorology?

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 6:29 pm

I can understand attacking biology, because evolution invalidates their precious creation myths. I can understand the inevitable attack that neuroscience and the more scientific aspects of psychology are going to get, because they invalidate their precious philosophies. But meteorology? What exactly does climate change invalidate?

Gnosticism Is A Hoot · Sat Apr 17, 2010 7:37 pm

The ability of the oil industry to make absolute shitloads of money.

EDIT: As to why the anti-intellectuals are taking on this particular cause, I guess you have to look at the specific historical relationship between big business and anti-intellectual populists within the Republican Party.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 7:42 pm

the thing is, biology and evolutionary theory doesn't invalidate creation, it just makes many creation stories poetic metaphor crafted by early man to comprehend the gods setting in movement various natural methods and such.

but, well, anti-intellectuals probably don't understand the term poetic metaphor, and probably think the prodigal son was a real person.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 7:55 pm

Physics, Geology, Astronomy and Evolution are not reviled because they can not be fitted into a religious background or because the make God seem weak or irrelevant. They are reviled and attacked because they make mankind seem like nothing special. You can hardly have "chosen people" or "one true church" when this entire planet is just a tiny speck of dust in the whirlwind of the universe.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 9:24 pm

Meteorology is just another front on the battlefield of big business vs. anti-environmentalism.

While a lot of people will often go 'fuck the polar bears and the dodo birds, I want my sneakers to be on sale' when presented with most pleas for environmentalism, there's absolutely no way people can go 'fuck an unsubmerged Miami even though that's where my family lives, I want my bungle puppy'. Ultimately, they both end up towards the same conclusion but one of them can be handwaved away and the other cannot.

So can't just ignore or laugh climate change away; it needs to be attacked head-on. Hence the denialism towards it.

K · Post by K » Sat Apr 17, 2010 10:26 pm

Well, the anti-intellectual lobby is easy fodder for anyone with an agenda and the money to push it.

Climate science gets attacked because oil lobbies don't want people to switch off from using the petroleum products that are dumping CO2 into the environment. When you track the money, it always ends up that some coal or oil company is paying to promote hate for climate science.

Anti-intellectualism is all about not examining things rationally, so they they don't examine things rationally. So it's not that the anti-intellectuals have a real beef..... it's that they are easily manipulated tools.

I pity them in the same way that I pity small children and developmentally disabled adults. They can't actually help themselves.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 11:16 pm

What gets me are the anti-intellectuals who are meteorologists or geologists. They only care to know enough to perform their jobs, and then spout off gibberish about how models don't work in the near term and so how could they possibly work in the aggregate and far-term, as if statistical analysis was skipped in their degree programs.

-Crissa

Neeeek · Post by **Neeeek** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:08 am

Crissa wrote: They ... spout off gibberish about how models don't work in the near term and so how could they possibly work in the aggregate and far-term, as if statistical analysis was skipped in their degree programs.

That particular piece of insane bullshit is particularly annoying. It should be patently obvious with no education on statistics that the long-term is a lot easier to predict than the short-term. The short-term is effected by random chance that is smoothed over long-term through reducing the significance of each data point.

For example, predicting who will win an individual MLB game is a crapshoot, even when comparing the top teams and the bottom teams (okay, the Tigers a few years back were an exception. But generally no MLB team is that bad). One bad pitch, or lucky bounce, or whatever could change the outcome of the game. On the other hand, predicting who will win more games in a season before it starts is pretty simple just by looking at a few stats. You won't be right all the time, but you'll do a hell of a lot better than if you tried to pick individual games.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 1:33 am

K wrote:I pity them in the same way that I pity small children and developmentally disabled adults. They can't actually help themselves.

Well, yes and no. They can't help themselves in the same way that an addict "can't help themselves". They can, but it requires actually wanting to make a change.

Life's more comfortable for them if they refuse to consider other possibilities.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 1:34 am

Neeeek wrote:It should be patently obvious with no education on statistics that the long-term is a lot easier to predict than the short-term.

Sorry, but no. It is in no way obvious that big, distant things would be more predictable than small, nearby things. It's not even true in the general case; it's a special property that occurs only when you look at the sum of a bunch of independent events. If a system has feedback, such that early outcomes change the probability of later outcomes, then predicting the long-term can very easily become a great deal harder than predicting the short-term.

Example: It's easier to predict whether it will rain some time today than to predict whether it will rain on a particular day next week.

Another example: It's a lot easier to predict what international borders will look like in a year than to predict what they'll look like in 1000 years.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 6:35 am

Manxome: But it's easier to predict that it will rain X amount or be clear X amount over any particular month that over next year it will be so wet or so dry. Even though I don't know when it will rain, I do know that given there's enough days in the year and enough water in the sea and air that it will rain on some day.

-Crissa

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:46 am

The sciences most frequently attacked are those that are largely comprised of systems where it's almost impossible to actually isolate variables and pinpoint a single cause of some observed effect.

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:48 am

I'm not disputing that independent random events are, in fact, easier to predict in aggregate. But "long term" doesn't necessarily mean "independent random events in aggregate" in all situations, nor do I see why the relative ease of predicting independent random events in aggregate would be inherently obvious to someone with no education in statistics.

Lots of true things seem obvious after they're explained, but they're not. You can explain to a small child why balls of different sizes fall at the same speed, but it's still astonishing to most people the first time they encounter it.