Intellectual asceticism and the collapse of Western civilization

"These so-called 'holistic' approaches still focused almost entirely on natural systems, omitting from consideration the social components. Yet in many cases the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings: deforestation and fossil fuel combustion. Yet they rarely said that the cause was people and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.

"Other scholars have looked to the roots of Western natural science and religious institutions. Just as religious orders of prior centuries had demonstrated moral rigor through extreme practices asceticism in dress, lodging, behavior and food - in essence, practices of physical denial - so too did physical scientists of the 20th and 21st centuries attempt to demonstrate their intellectual rigor through practices of intellectual self-denial.

"These practices led scientists to demand an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any kind, even those involving imminent threats. In an almost childlike attempt to demarcate their practices from those of older explanatory traditions scientists felt it necessary to prove to themselves and the world how strict they were in their intellectual standards. Thus they places the burden of proof on novel claims, even empirical claims about phenomena that their theories predicted. This included claims about changes in the climate.

"Some scientists in the early 21st century, for example, had recognized that hurricanes were intensifying. This was consistent with the expectation, based on physical theory, that warmer sea surface temperatures in regions of cyclogenesis could - and likely would - drive either more hurricanes or more intense ones. However, they backed away from this conclusion under pressure from their scientific colleagues.

"Much of the argument surrounded the concept of statistical significance. Given what we now know about the dominance of nonlinear systems and the distribution of stochastic processes, the then-dominant notion of a 95 % confidence limit is hard to fathom. Yet, overwhelming evidence suggests that 20th century scientists believed that a claim could be accepted only if, by the standards of Fisherian statistics, the possibility that an observed event could have happened by chance was less than one in twenty.

"Many phenomena whose causal mechanisms were physically, chemically or biologically linked to warmer temperatures were dismissed as unproven because they did not adhere to the standards of demonstration.

"Historians have long argued about why this standard was accepted, given that it had neither epistemological nor substantive mathematical basis. We have come to understand the 95 % confidence limit as a social convention  rooted in scientists' desire to demonstrate their disciplinary severity.

"Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did. Scientists referred to these positions  respectively as type 1 and type 2 errors, and established protocols designed to avoid type 1 errors at almost all costs. One scientist wrote: 'A type 1 error is often considered to be more serious and therefore more important to avoid than a type 2 error.' Another claimed that type 2 errors were not errors at all, just missed opportunities.

"So while the pattern of weather events was clearly changing many scientists insisted that these events could not yet be attributed with certainty to anthropogenic climate change. Even as lay citizens began to accept this link, the scientists who studied it did not. More important, political leaders came to believe that they had more time to act than they really did.

"The irony of these beliefs need not be dwelt on"

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Transcribed from: Oreskes & Conway, "The Collapse of Western Civilization" (2014/2018), chapter 2 in the audio version, minutes 8-13.