Scott on Slate Star Codex sometimes posts a collection of links with brief comments. I thought I would try it.———According to Bloomberg, the FBI has succeeded in recovering some of the emails on the server that was supposedly wiped before handing it over to them. The reason this is a news story is that it might provide evidence against Hilary, emails that should have been turned over and were not because they contained information she did not want to get out. But whatever is on the server, the fact that the FBI was able to recover it is relevant to Hilary's qualifications to be president. Anyone living in the modern world and using computers should know that erasing a disk does not guarantee that the contents cannot be recovered. Even if she does not know much about computer technology, she ought to have people working for her who do. If she does not, that is evidence of incompetence, not in wiping a hard drive but in hiring and managing subordinates—a large part of a president's job.———Aliens Cause Global Warming is an essay by Michael Crichton on the way in which he believes that science has become corrupted in recent decades. The obvious application is to current climate controversies but the more general problem is what he views as a shift of the enterprise from the search for truth to a way of convincing people of things you want them to believe. His best example is probably the Nuclear Winter campaign:
The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.
This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.
Part of the reason I agree with his point was an article I read at the time, written by one of the teams whose work fed into the nuclear winter conclusion. They conceded that a criticism that had been offered of their work was correct, concluded that fixing the error would reduce the length of nuclear winter from years to weeks. But they also found another mistake in their initial work with the opposite effect. Fixing that got it back to years.There is nothing surprising or disturbing about the fact that published scientific articles sometimes have mistakes. I am currently in the middle of redoing an old project, my research on Icelandic law, and have concluded that at least some details in what I published more than thirty years ago were wrong. But there is a problem with proclaiming something as scientific fact before other people have had a chance to look at your research and critique it.One interesting thing about that particular case is that it might be defended as a case of justified dishonesty. I can imagine a reasonable person deliberately misrepresenting the evidence, claiming it was much stronger than he believed it actually was, on the grounds that almost anything that reduced the risk of nuclear war, honest or dishonest, was worth doing. The counter-argument is implicit in Crichton's essay—that treating science in that way converts it from a mechanism for determining truth to a tool of partisan debate, with very bad long-term results. ———A recent piece by P.J. O'Rourke takes Ann Coulter to task for tweeting during the September 16th debate:
Cruz, Huckabee Rubio all mentioned ISRAEL in their response to: “What will AMERICA look like after you are president.” How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?
I am no fan of Coulter and enjoyed the essay, but with two reservations. The first has to do with the tweets. The reference to "f—ing Jews" is not about ethnicity. The implied point was that candidates focus on support for Israel to attract support from Jewish voters, and there aren't enough Jewish voters to make it worth doing. It is abrasively put, but it implies nothing about her view of Jews other than their numbers.The point is, however, wrong—not because there are a lot of Jewish votes but because winning Jewish votes is not the reason the candidates talk about Israel. American conservatives are mostly pro-Israel for reasons that have nothing to do with their view of Jews, just as the American left is mostly anti-Israel for similar reasons. Republican candidates are trying to appeal to conservative voters; trumpeting their support for Israel is one way of doing so.My other reservation had to do with O'Rourke's reference to Chesterton’s essay “The Problem of Zionism,” which implied that it was antisemitic. While it is possible to excerpt passages that sound antisemitic, it is also possible, perhaps easier, to find ones that make Chesterton sound like a Zionist. For instance:
"It is our whole complaint against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade; it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, 'Give me a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it.' It is our whole reason for distrusting him thathe cannot really love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seemsrather indefensible to be deaf to him if he really says, 'Give me a land and I will love it.'"
For a more detailed discussion and defense of Chesterton, see the chapter on him in the second edition of my Machinery of Freedom.———Question: Would readers prefer it if I had posted this as three short posts instead of one long one?