I don’t know. I try not to get drawn on motivations, unless there is direct evidence for them.

“If the person—the would-be author—is convinced they’ve got their math and arguments right, while the majority number of others (editors, “established scientists”,etc) disagree, one of the two sides of the argument must be in error.”

That is an excellent point. Unfortunately it is not relevant to the example he was discussing. In that case, the editors were discussing that the mathematics was right, not wrong and looking for a way to keep the paper out regardless of correctness. This is not talking about the normal rejection of bad papers. Even good papers get rejected because of space requirements and such. There are many types of rejections. Just not liking them is not a real strong justification.

“If the editors and establishment scientists think they got the math right too, why would it still be the right thing to do to oppose publication?”

It seems to stem from an idea that “This work is too urgent to be subject to the usual rigors of science. They are just trying to slow us down and we *have* to avert the coming disaster.” This sense of mission casts everyone who says anything contradictory or even agreeing but not totally convinced as “the enemy”.

It also seems that they collectively feel that the work they are doing is so urgent that it justifies shortcuts. If anyone wants to double check their results, they are “just stalling” because the work is “obviously right.” They dress up the predictions to make them appear more dire because they feel that if they don’t, people will just not find them compelling enough and not take their recommendations. They see the history of things that could have been done better in the past (dioxin, ddt, etc) and don’t want to have this end up taking as long to get action.

They are also overly defensive because they are drawing from areas of science that are not their specialty. They quickly throw out “You are not a Climate Scientist and therefore unqualified.” but somehow they are themselves the select few who are masters of every other branch of science and “above such petty detractors”. Watch how vehemently they even attack even a field as closely related as Meteorology and try to cast them all as news weathermen and not *real scientists”.

Then there is the numbers game. If every paper that is published gives agreement, it somehow makes it more compelling. If anything that gets through that contradicts anything in the slightest, it creates a chink in their collective armor and it will give detractors a foothold.

It really is a fascinating ideology from the perspective of Philosophy of science.

Shouldn’t we all? As aspirations go, this seems like a worthy one. Better, surely, than to aspire to emulate their suppressors?

But if that is so, there is something I still don’t understand. Why would the “smackdown” take the form of a “your paper is too long to fit our arbitrary word-count limit” letter? In what way does that count as getting it wrong?

If the editors and establishment scientists think they got the math right too, why would it still be the right thing to do to oppose publication?

“Hordes of scientists can tell these horror stories, and many more.”
Thank you for agreeing with my point. Thank you for confirming that it’s common for journals to reject corrections for spurious reasons. Case proved, I think.

I wasn’t talking about scientists making corrections, I was talking about trying to get published in general. Its no easy street even if you are in the “mainstream”.

Have you any idea where you’re going with this idea that mathematics and science is a matter of opinion?

Truely, modern science owes much of it success to measurement and quantification and the mathematical rigor which accompanied it, and the subsequent mathematical descriptions of nature, but this is what I’m getting at…

If people are not convinced, it’s far more likely to be the people at fault.

If the person—the would-be author—is convinced they’ve got their math and arguments right, while the majority number of others (editors, “established scientists”,etc) disagree, one of the two sides of the argument must be in error. (Granted, it may not be 100% black-and-white true-or-false, there can be degrees and subtle nuances). Everyone loves to champion those cases in history where a bright revolutionary mind overturned the conventional paradigm. Many even aspire to be like them or think of themselves as such. However, there are a lot more cases where the aspiring revolutionary got it wrong and their smack-down is another instance of the scientific institutions functioning as they were intended, weeding out the mistakes. In the latter cases, its easy for those rejected to feel that they are victims of suppression by the corrupt establishment.

Wrong.

“You’ve probably never even dug up a fossil.”

Wrong.

“All of the evidence you’ve ever seen for evolution has been just as thoroughly filtered through the peer-review and publication process as has anything for AGW.”

Wrong.

I will give you that I wasn’t around during the Mesozoic. Well done!

“People who do enough of their own homework on AGW can reliably be expected to see it as real once they understand the basics of atmospheric chemistry and the fact that there have been absolute net additions to the amount of carbon dioxide in the biosphere in the last few centuries.”

Possibly. But I was talking about all those people who haven’t done their homework, don’t know any atmospheric chemistry, and yet still believe.

Yes, I will accept evidence collected by other people, if they explain how they collected it, what precautions they took, and so on. (At least – up until I’m given reason to doubt.) I will look for independent checks, to see if the observations have been replicated. I will try to check it’s consistency. I pay no attention at all to peer-review, but I will consider whether it is reasonable to expect good data from a particular source. However, when it comes to the validity of the methods or what the implications of the evidence are – those can be checked.

“Nobody says “I believe in global warming because famous experts do.””

Well, that is really contrary to what I have personally observed.

” Everybody examines the question and the evidence on their own, just as they do (and you did) with evolution.”

If they file enough FOI requests.

” But the very ability to draw evidence-based conclusions relies upon the validation of those pieces of evidence”

How can the validate those pieces of evidence if they can’t get access to them?

“People who do enough of their own homework on AGW can reliably be expected to see it as real once they understand the basics of atmospheric chemistry and the fact that there have been absolute net additions to the amount of carbon dioxide in the biosphere in the last few centuries.”

That is unless they are unable to examine the evidence.

” But all of that understanding came from data points and correlations collected and identified by other people”

And sometimes identified in different locations simultaneously with the same site designation…

The thing is, on an intellectual level, you are absolutely right. But when our trust has been abused, you expect us to overlook it. Sorry.

You weren’t around during the Mesozoic. You’ve never directly witnessed evolution. You’ve probably never even dug up a fossil. All of the evidence you’ve ever seen for evolution has been just as thoroughly filtered through the peer-review and publication process as has anything for AGW. Even tallying up the number of pieces of evidence supporting various assertions could just as easily and snarkily be caricatured as “taking some expert’s word for it,” because all of the evidence came from others and not from you.

Nobody says “I believe in global warming because famous experts do.” Everybody examines the question and the evidence on their own, just as they do (and you did) with evolution. But the very ability to draw evidence-based conclusions relies upon the validation of those pieces of evidence–all of which at some point had to be learned. People who do enough of their own homework on AGW can reliably be expected to see it as real once they understand the basics of atmospheric chemistry and the fact that there have been absolute net additions to the amount of carbon dioxide in the biosphere in the last few centuries. But all of that understanding came from data points and correlations collected and identified by other people, which is absolutely no different from how you yourself learned what radiocarbon dating was and why it matters. That is how education works.

Let’s hear it for the Dark Ages!

That’s ok, I was really reacting to the overall articles myself. The whole point of it is trying to discredit Bachmann as a candidate by putting an anti-intellectual spin and trying to drum up opposition to her by the New Yorker and LA Times.

This just goes beyond what I believe the press should do in so many ways. I see it as just unreported campaign contributions and abuse of the power of the press. And to top it off, it isn’t even labeled as political: Its in the “Arts” section of the LA Times.