Some skeptical thoughts about scientific bandwagons

The more the CRU Climategate scandal unfolds, the more likely it is to do some serious damage to the Anthropogenic Global Warming scientific bandwagon.
Not only has the word “gate” been securely attached to it, it has been likened to Vietnam, and clearly it is the biggest blow the Global Warmists (yes that is a term now) have suffered yet.
I’m thinking that it might be analogous to yet another burst bubble, although it’s probably too early to tell whether it really has burst. The sort of massive collapse that characterized burst bubbles involves more than criticism and condemnation from skeptics; and a legitimate concern might be that the resultant collapse in public trust might extend beyond the global warming bandwagon.
By any standard, though AGW is a classic bandwagon. Bandwagon thinking comes and goes, but the global warming bandwagon has been one of the most relentless ones I have ever seen. I’ve seen a lot of fads, but these have usually been cultural or political; nothing quite like the strange, very forced interplay between science and politics at the heart of what is called “Global Warming.” Or the more recent term “Climate Change” (calculated to sound more palatable to skeptics, for who would not agree that climates are subject to change?)
My problem with bandwagon thinking is twofold. First, there is nothing logical about a bandwagon, whether from a scientific perspective or not:

Logical fallacies are types of arguments that are invalid. Once you know the logical fallacies, you can recognize them in arguments constantly. Knowing these can really help to decipher what is true and is what is pure baloney.
The first logical fallacy I wanted to do is a clear example of just how ridiculous these arguments can be. The argument basically says lots of people agree with what I am saying, therefore I am right. The number of people who agree with something has no bearing on whether or not it is true. For thousands of years people believed the Earth was flat; that didn’t make it true.
You hear this fallacy used in advertisements a lot. They try to convince you that because other people use their product, it works. Just think of how many times you have heard the line “the trend that is sweeping the nation.” This says nothing about the product being advertised except that it is widely used. Don’t believe in or use something just because it’s popular. Look for the evidence.

This can be said about anything. Belief in Global Warming, belief in a political platform, or belief in God. (The fact that lots of people believe in God no more proves the existence of God than the fact that lots of people believe in atheism disproves the existence of God.)
The second problem I have with bandwagons is personal. I don’t like them. Not liking them is also a logical problem, as I freely admit. Because, just as bandwagons can be wrong and misguided (like the Prohibition bandwagon), they can also be absolutely right (like the microbe bandwagon). So ideally, just as I should not allow the existence of a bandwagon to compel me to adopt an idea, nor should it deter me from adopting it. Easy to say, but harder to implement.
So, I am an admitted skeptic, and I probably err on the side of skepticism too often. But OTOH, my skeptical and contrarian outlook is fueled when I read that popularity can lead to inaccuracy. Yes, even in science, where skepticism is supposed to be built in.
Here’s an abstract from a study titled “Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research“:

Based on theoretical reasoning it has been suggested that the reliability of findings published in the scientific literature decreases with the popularity of a research field. Here we provide empirical support for this prediction. We evaluate published statements on protein interactions with data from high-throughput experiments. We find evidence for two distinctive effects. First, with increasing popularity of the interaction partners, individual statements in the literature become more erroneous. Second, the overall evidence on an interaction becomes increasingly distorted by multiple independent testing. We therefore argue that for increasing the reliability of research it is essential to assess the negative effects of popularity and develop approaches to diminish these effects.

I have seen no evidence to suggest that this was ever done in the case of Global Warming. (The Climategate evidence suggests that quite the opposite occurred.)
Fascinatingly, less controversial scientific bandwagons are subject to the vagaries of political whim, as the vaccines-cause-autism meme in the last election cycle showed:

No matter who wins in Pennsylvania today, the next President of the United States will support research into the growing evidence of some link between vaccines and autism.
Senator John McCain has already expressed his belief that vaccines and the mercury containing preservative thimerosal could be implicated in what he has rightly termed an “autism epidemic.”
Senator Hillary Clinton, in response to a questionnaire from the autism activist group A-CHAMP, wrote that she was “Committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines.” And when asked if she would support a study of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children, she said: “Yes. We don’t know what, if any, kind of link there is between vaccines and autism – but we should find out.”

That’s all fine during an election, but now that we have a media-annointed president and a burgeoning flu epidemic, the people kvetching publicly about vaccines and autism now tend to be right wing kooks. What are the implications for science?
I can well remember how slow the AIDS bandwagon was to develop. Many activists on the left and the right were skeptical, and many continued to be skeptical, because there are some unexplained holes in the theory. (There are always holes in theories.) This ultimately led to officially implemented, government-sponsored AIDS skepticism in certain countries, and (so the mainstream AIDS bandwagon community argues) to many deaths:

…from 2000 to 2005 South Africa implemented policies based on the belief that HIV does not cause Aids, and declined to roll out adequate antiretroviral therapy. It has been estimated in two separate studies that around 350,000 people died unnecessarily in South African during this period.

Let me add that I think that it’s a shame people had to die. I guess that puts me on the side of the AIDS bandwagon community, but I lost a lot of friends — way before the current AIDS drugs were developed — and I sincerely believe that HIV was the culprit. I don’t care whether my views are in accord with the scientific majority, whether it’s an “overwhelming scientific consensus” or not.
Similarly, notwithstanding the skeptics, I suspect there must be some relationship between cholesterol and heart disease, because I find it hard to believe that the world’s cardiology community is driven by a bogus bandwagon at the behest of Big Pharma. I may be wrong, but if that were to turn out to be the case, I don’t know whether I would ever trust a medical doctor again. (But what bandwagon could I join? Some homeopathic/natural herbalist bandwagon?)
For better or for worse, bandwagons seem to be an inescapable part of science, probably because scientists are people, and bandwagon thinking is an inescapable part of human behavior.
And much as I might not like it, a good argument can be made that bandwagons actually help advance science:

This paper analyzes the development of a scientific bandwagon in cancer research using a social worlds perspective and qualitative methods. It shows that a “standardized” package of oncogene theory and recombinant DNA technologies served as a highly transportable interface among many different laboratories and lines of research. That is, the package promoted intersections among different social worlds which, in turn, facilitated the rapid development of oncogene research and the larger molecular biological cancer research bandwagon. The paper proposes the bandwagon as one process by which conceptual shifts in science occur and shows that the process of such change is inseparable from both the local and broad scale organization of work and technical infrastructures.

Why would anyone oppose a mechanism that works, especially when it works?
I say this in full awareness of medicine’s tonsillectomy bandwagon in the earlier 20th Century. Or the even more egregious lobotomy bandwagon in the 1950s. But if a doctor scrubs before surgery in obeisance to the microbe theory bandwagon, I would argue that’s a good thing.
Who would want to be operated on by a contrarian doctor who refused to wash his hands?
And while this may reflect my anti-bandwagon bias, I’m not entirely sure I would trust a doctor who belonged to the green “sustainable healthcare” bandwagon that’s catching on. I’m not even sure I would trust my heathcare to a doctor who belonged to the outdoor clothesline bandwagon, for example.

…the original reason clothes lines fell into disfavor: they connote poverty.
Many subdivisions and home associations ban outdoor clotheslines for the same reason they ban sofas on the front porch and Dodge Chargers on cinder blocks. Who can forget the maze of clotheslines blotting the landscape in turn of the century immigrant ghettos in the US–none with clothes you would wear or steal?
But with new awareness of carbon footprints, the clothes drier is now seen as a juice guzzler like big freezers and refrigerators. Especially because clothes will dry by themselves if you are only patient.
So as clotheslines are destigmatized more families will be hanging their clean laundry in public. And it won’t always be possible to tell if the reasons are environmental or economic. Especially with college kids, who also tend to have the sofa on the porch.

Maybe it’s just me being selfish, but I don’t want a doctor who worries about my carbon footprint, OK? I’d worry that such a doctor might believe in other goofy ideas. Like the anti-diaper bandwagon or some equally “scientific” back-to-nature meme. If I knew that a doctor who didn’t want to waste water was letting his kids do number two on the floor at home, I might question his judgment in other areas (maybe even handwashing).
But maybe shouldn’t be such a bandwagon skeptic. I’m probably at risk of becoming a crank.


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13 responses to “Some skeptical thoughts about scientific bandwagons”

  1. OregonGuy Avatar

    Climategate? or Climate-quiddick?
    What happens when an enormous fraud is uncovered and all the “right-thinking” people ignore it?
    There won’t be hearings about this fraud.
    There will be “moving on”.
    .

  2. guy on internet Avatar
    guy on internet

    Thousands of times, people have said “For thousands of years people believed the Earth was flat.” That doesn’t make it true.
    Unironic flat-earthism was a very short-lived Dark Age political-religious weirdness, a lot like GW/CC. “Thousands of years” ago, the ancient Greeks knew the size of the obviously round world, and so has everyone ever since then, if they wanted to know. You can figure it out yourself by tracking a shadow. It was never not known. The knowledge was politically suppressed, for a much shorter time than is usually assumed.
    The flat-earth/GW analogy is actually great. But no one makes it the right way. One of my crank peeves.

  3. Hugh Avatar
    Hugh

    Governments never made billions of dollars in funds available to flat earthers, GW ism grew rapidly when the managers of these research groups found it produced funding.

  4. Eric Scheie Avatar

    While I quoted from another post which stated that “for thousands of years people believed the Earth was flat,” it certainly seems true enough. While the Greeks and Romans didn’t believe it (nor did educated medieval Christians), many other peoples and cultures did, and the periods involved cover thousands of years.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
    Interestingly, at least one relatively modern Western leader (South Africa’s Paul Kruger) seems to have believed as recently as 1897 that the earth was flat:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kruger
    There are probably some isolated people today who still do, but flat earthism hasn’t been a part of serious Western thought since late antiquity.

  5. John S. Avatar
    John S.

    This is a bizarre coincidence, but I was just reading about “flat-earthism” on Wikipedia earlier this morning!!

  6. K Avatar
    K

    The “tonsillectomy bandwagon.” rolled during my childhood.
    Children missed a few days of school and then returned somehow less vulnerable to one or more perils.
    Children only knew that something was clipped from the throat. It sounded gruesome even before they knew “gruesome” was a word. It never happened to me or my sisters.
    Then the bandwagon departed. It was spoken of no more. I suspect doctors preferred to forget the matter.

  7. K Avatar
    K

    Flat Earth?
    It is a mistake is to think earlier men reasoned as we do today. The evidence is otherwise.
    Early man had no difficulty believing the Earth could be flat and spherical at the same time.
    And why not? The Gods decided such matters and sometimes acted on whim. Nature was incomprehensible.
    Compared to what the God’s could decree man’s experiences, his puny senses, and his scratching geometric shapes in sand, could prove nothing.
    That inability to generalize beyond right now and immediate experience seems laughable to us. But it was never-the-less true.
    Gathering two eggs here and three there might give you five eggs today. But maybe two eggs and three eggs would not equal five eggs next time.

  8. Gregory Avatar

    Hang on a minute. You do *not* support the right to air-dry your clothes in public? What kind of fascist fashion Nazi are you? ๐Ÿ™‚
    And with that I invoke Godwin on this thread…

  9. M. Simon Avatar

    To coming critiques of scientific research:
    “It’s Climate Science”
    “It’s Global Warming”
    “Hide the decline”
    And it is not just climate science. It is everywhere:
    http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

  10. M. Simon Avatar

    I have seen a bandwagon develop in the medical community on the nature of addiction. Back when I was doing my original work on the subject I posted where it was likely doctors would see the material. Of course it was hard to make headway. Every one “knew” drugs cause addiction and people who take them are morally weak.
    I started around 2001. It is now 2008. The medical community is on the bandwagon. Including to some extent the NIDA. They fail to connect ALL the dots. But they do connect some. And the reason for that? The research is pretty solid.
    BTW the title of my above link?
    Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
    Hide the decline.

  11. Eric Scheie Avatar

    Wow, a fashionist I may be, but did I really call for a ban on clotheslines?
    I wouldn’t want to get on the “banned” wagon, would I?
    ๐Ÿ™‚

  12. M. Simon Avatar

    I dunno. When laying out the foundation for a house I have never heard of doing corrections for the curvature of the earth.
    We don’t deal in arcs of chords. We deal in straight lines.
    So at least for some tasks it is a flat earth. Euclid rules.
    For larger buildings round earth comes into play. For smaller objects – not so much.

  13. Donna B. Avatar

    “That’s all fine during an election, but now that we have a media-annointed president and a burgeoning flu epidemic, the people kvetching publicly about vaccines and autism now tend to be right wing kooks. What are the implications for science?”
    ummm… I think most of the kvetching about vaccines and autism are leftists nuts who don’t trust “Big Pharma”. Kooks from the right kvetch about psychoactive drugs and antidepressants.
    Or something. It really is difficult to tell the difference between left wing nuts and right wing nuts ๐Ÿ™‚