To quote Richard Feynman in “What is Science?”: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.

So someone highly trained in one field – say economics – with a pre-conceived bias against anthropogenic climate change, is more likely to be willing to pit his/her expertise against that of a climatologist, even though the economist’s expertise in economics means little when discussing issues of climate.

All scientists are sceptics. The term ‘denier’ is just name-calling.

Science recognises that scientists are biased, and therefore as a matter of principle applies methodological scepticism – the position that everything is open to question, everything is subject to challenge, and that as scientific confidence can only be gained through surviving challenge, contention rather than agreement is the engine at the heart of scientific progress.

The process is sometimes subverted when humans’ natural instinct for hierarchy, career, and the bureaucratic nature of much of today’s science funding, leads to one position dominating by political means. Science always wins in the end, but sometimes has to progress one funeral at a time.

However, if by scientists you mean those who adhere most closely to the ideal, rather than the human actuality, then the more expert you become in scientific reasoning, the more you see consensus as dangerous (even if it happens to be correct) and the more you are inclined to look for ways to disrupt it. Thus, all scientists are natural sceptics.

The idea that scientists should follow the herd, that accumulated expertise is to be relied upon, and that one position, one group, has the more direct access to the truth, and can reason towards it unaided – that is to fall back into precisely the intellectual trap that methodological scepticism once dug us out of. That is to give our biases free rein, to shield them from critical examination with ipse dixit and authority, while fervently denying that any such biases exist. That’s not science.

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that this has happened many times before, it will do again, and is not so remarkable. But every time it happens it is something to be taken seriously. Every now and then we have to swallow one of Joseph Goldberger’s unpleasant little pills, and think the unthinkable once again.

“As the level of expertise in scientific reasoning decreases you are more likely to become a denier.”

Chris Mooney: “that’s just wrong. how do you explain all the scientists who are skeptics and deniers?”

What part of ‘more likely’ do you not understand, Chris?

And ‘all the scientists’ is a double error – first, it’s not true that ‘all the scientists’ skeptics and deniers, and if you mean ‘all those scientists who are…’, you need to show a significant amount. The climate fraud groups can rustle up a bunch o’ guys, but that’s nothing compared to the population of scientists.

The hard science types in here always seem caught up in the works of the enlightenment and “The Age of Reason” -> something we study as “Foundations of Modern Thought”, realizing it’s all wrong but required work to get to where we are in our understandings today (as in the *current* understandings of how all this works…). It’s like only studying Newton and thinking you understand Einstein…

Perhaps you’d all be less confused if you worked through the last 150 years of philosophy instead of stopping in the simplistic, still “categorical” thoughts of 200 years ago… You might discover we’ve not only already been working with that wheel for a while now, but we’ve even made progress in laying out how to understand it as it was “discovered” quite a long time ago… In fact it is so well understood it has a whole school of work behind understanding it (as much in philosophy you may have to translate the word usage into normal parlance, but such should be easy enough for anyone educated…).

But, (Sigh! Moan! even Groan!) the fact that you are asking me this @32 now means that my “What would George say?” question a ways back http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/04/27/more-polling-data-on-the-politics-of-vaccine-resistance/ #4 had little or no memorable impact.

That comment, is essentially the same in nature as my comment on what I feel was your sharp (and overly simplistic) delineation between Democrats and Republicans, as I expressed @17 here.

Maybe questioning this balance of your ability to exercise your obviously real intellectual analysis skills in different venues belongs in your latest post, the one on blogging encouraging motivated reasoning? What would Chris Mooney say?

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/george_lakoff_enlightenments_old_and_new/

He praises Westen….

I made a book title slip here. Drew Weston’s book is “The Political Brain The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” The book ” The Political Mind, Why you can’t Understand 21st century American Politics with a 18th century Brain” is by George Lakoff. In a more recent version, George Lakoff’s subtitle is: “A Cognative Scientists Guide to Your Brain and it’s Politics” I haven’t read this, but I’m hoping he’s backing off the anti Age of Reason sentiment a bit.

I’ve always been curious about the personal dynamics between these authors and their books.

I think that this quote from the conclusion of Drew Weston’s book, the Political Mind, encompasses this: “The liberal philosophers of the Enlightenment used reason as a sword against those who would rule by religious dogma. But ultimately, it was their passion for liberty, and for the liberty to take reason wherever it would go, that inspired the founding of this nation and the liberal democracies around the world, which seem as “natural” to us as the kingdoms justified by divine right did to most people at the dawn of the Enlightenment.
It is time, now, for reason, and the science that it has inspired, to lead us to a better understanding of the passions that provide its sustenance, and to help those who want to lead our country int he spirit of the Enlightenment to recapture the imagination of the American people.”

I believe that Sputnik offered the military industrial complex a route into buying into space exploration as a means of developing technologies useful in the cold war. And we have to acknowledge that many of the actual drivers of our political process are economic. But in terms of the public, I think that the motivations of Sputnik elicited some amount of American competitiveness, but that most of the actual public support for space exploration came more out of awe than fear. People can be inspired.