Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Reforming the IPCC

Alternative title: What to do when everybody ignores you?

In the wake of University of East Anglia email scandal, there has been yet another review of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This one was chaired by Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor, and concluded that “[t]he U.N. climate panel should only make predictions when it has solid evidence and should avoid policy advocacy.”

The IPCC has certainly made some mistakes: issuing some untrue statements, and evaluating some evidence imperfectly. That being said, the details they got wrong were largely of a nitpicky character. The core claims of the IPCC reports – that climate change is real, caused by humans, and dangerous – remain supremely justified. The trouble is, governments aren’t willing to take action on anything like the appropriate scale.

The situation is akin to a doctor giving a patient a diagnosis of cancer, after which the patient decides that he will try to cut down on his consumption of sugary drinks. That might improve the patient’s health a bit, but it is not an adequate response to the problem described. At that point, it would be sensible for the doctor to engage in a bit of ‘policy advocacy’ and stress how the proposed solution is dangerously inadequate.

It can be argued that the IPCC works best when it presents the bare facts and leaves others to make policy decisions. The trouble is, people don’t take the considered opinions of this huge group of scientists sufficiently seriously. They are happy to let crackpots tell them that there is no problem or that no action needs to be taken. While scientists should not be saying: “Here is what your government’s climate change policy should be” they should definitely be saying: “Here are the plausible consequences of the policy you are pursuing now, and they don’t match with the outcomes you say you want to achieve (like avoiding over 2°C of temperature increase)”. They could also very legitimately say: “If you want to avoid handing a transformed world over to future generations, here is the minimum that must be done”. James Hansen accomplishes this task rather well:

Today we are faced with the need to achieve rapid reductions in global fossil fuel emissions and to nearly phase out fossil fuel emissions by the middle of the century. Most governments are saying that they recognize these imperatives. And they say that they will meet these objectives with a Kyoto-like approach. Ladies and gentleman, your governments are lying through their teeth. You may wish to use softer language, but the truth is that they know that their planned approach will not come anywhere near achieving the intended global objectives. Moreover, they are now taking actions that, if we do not stop them, will lock in guaranteed failure to achieve the targets that they have nominally accepted.

Scientists don’t lose their integrity when they present scientific information in a way that policy-makers and citizens can understand. Indeed, it can be argued that they show a lack of integrity when they hide behind technical language that keeps people from grasping the implications of science.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Probably the most problematic thing about writing associated with Richard Feynman is repetition. Both his books and books about him tend to be at least quasi-biographical, and often feature the same stories, examples, explanations, and even bits of writing.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out certainly suffers from this flaw, at least for those who have read one or two Feynman books before. It includes, for instance, his appendix to the Challenger inquiry report, which also formed a major part of What Do You Care What Other People Think. It also features Feynman’s thoughts on ‘cargo cult science’ which have been reproduced elsewhere.

All that said, the book does contain some interesting materials that do not seem to be widely available elsewhere, particularly on the subject of nanotechnology. Going back to first principles, Feynman considers what lower size limits exist for things like motors, computer processors, and data storage systems. He concludes that there is ‘plenty of room at the bottom’ and thus enormous scope for improving our capabilities in computing and other fields by relying upon very small machinery and techniques like self-assembly.

AdBlock and Google AdSense

AdBlock Plus is an excellent Firefox plugin that automatically prevents the display of advertising on websites. This includes banner ads, as well as the sort of targeted text ads that Google has made a fortune through. When using AdBlock, the web is a much more functional, uncluttered place with fewer distractions. I highly recommend it.

At the same time, this site does have Google ads embedded in it.

If people want to use AdBlock and, by extension, not see the ads, I encourage them to do so. Indeed, I think there is a certain editorial advantage that arises from using both AdBlock and Google ads, myself. Since the ads are blocked whenever I view my site, I do not know what is being advertised here. As a result, I am not consciously or subconsciously influenced by the advertising. If newspaper and magazine editors could live in a similar state of disregard, when it comes to who is paying the bills, perhaps there might be a bit more journalistic integrity in the world.

Grammar query: punctuation and quotation marks

I remember being taught – ages ago – that the proper way to combine punctuation with quotation marks is to put the former inside the latter, like so:

I remember what he said: “The Trojans cannot be trusted.”

rather than

I remember what he said: “The Trojans cannot be trusted”.

or

“I don’t see why not,” the general mused, “they are fine masons.”

rather than

“I don’t see why not”, the general mused, “they are fine masons”.

Now, I find myself wondering whether this is one of those dated conventions that older people cling to because they were once taught this way, despite how the world has moved on. Putting two spaces after a period is a prime example of this phenomenon.

Does anybody know what the current and correct rule is?

Rights: inherent or chartered?

Reading one of the lengthy historical discussions of anti-Semitism in Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I came across a section on how Jews made an agreement with Louis the Pious, the son of Charlemagne, to be granted legal protections in exchange for becoming the ruler’s property. Rhodes says that: “Their rights were thus no longer inherent but chartered.” (p.177 paperback)

This made me think about the distinction between how constitutional rights are described in Canada and in the United States.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” It also describes such things as freedom of conscience and religion as “fundamental freedoms,” though it does not directly describe where ‘fundamental’ freedoms come from. Arguably, the preamble to the Charter, which says that Canada is “founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law” provides a clue about where the drafters think rights could come from, though it is ambiguous and unclear.

By contrast, the American Declaration of Independence states that it is a self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It seems clear what the drafters of this document thought about the origin of rights, though this raises the question of what their status and origin are taken to be within a secular state.

I have written before about how I don’t think there is anything inherent to human rights. They are not built into the structure of the universe, and they do not make themselves evident, whole and fully formed, when sensible people think about how human societies should be structured. Furthermore, they are often in conflict with one another, and a simple rights-based philosophy doesn’t provide much guidance on how to deal with situations where different rights-based claims are in competition.

Is it better, then, to have inherent rights or chartered ones? With chartered rights, there is a clear sense of what they are and where they came from. Potentially, there can also be explanation for why they are granted. We could, for instance, explain that freedom of speech exists in our society because we recognize the benefits it creates, and the harms associated with denying it. Inherent rights may, in a certain sense, be more robust. If we pretend that certain human rights really are part of the structure of the universe – or unambiguously derived from thought and logic – then we have a certain defence against the suppression of minority rights by the majority.

Of course, if we are worried about the masses being insufficiently cautious about the rights of minorities, we can express those concerns in a chartered framework. We can underline the value of protecting minority rights, and explain how only granting effective protections against majority bullying can those benefits be maintained.

The history of anti-Semitism

In the course of reading Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I have learned more about the history of anti-Semitism than from any other source I can recall. I wasn’t exposed to it in literature until recently and I don’t remember hearing anything much about it before high school. There, I recall it being treated as basically an exclusively Nazi phenomenon that arose in the interwar years and was basically crushed after the Nuremburg Trials (though there are worrisome re-emergences in the European far right).

As such, it was surprising to read a history going back to the 6th century. Rhodes describes the experience of Jews in the Roman Empire; a protection deal some made with the son of Charlemagne; massacres when Jews were blamed for the bubonic plague; the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and France in 1392; their harsh treatment by Catherine the Great and the Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia; the forcing of Jewish children into 31 years of military service by Czar Nicholas I in 1825; and various other outrages extending into the 20th century. Reading Rhodes’ book was also the first time I had been exposed to the actual contents of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion – an anti-Semetic text that describes a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and which apparently had a large effect on the thinking of Adolf Hitler.

The longest passage included, which was plagiarized from a novel called Biarritz, reads a lot like J.K. Rowling:

At eleven o’clock, the gates of the cemetery creak softly and the rustling of velvety coats is heard. A vague, white figure passes like a shadow through the cemetery until it reaches a certain tombstone; here it kneels down, touches the tombstone three times with its forehead and whispers a prayer. Another figure approaches; it is that of an old man, bent and limping. It coughs and sighs as it moves. The figure takes its place next to its predecessor and it too kneels down and whispers a prayer. A third figure appears, and then a fourth and so on until thirteen figures have finally appeared, each one having repeated the aforementioned procedure.

When the thirteenth and final figure has at last taken its place, a clock strikes midnight. From out of the grave there comes a sharp, metallic sound. Suddenly, a blue flame appears and lights up the thirteen figures. A hollow voice says, “I greet you heads of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.” And the figures dutifully reply, “We greet you, Son of the Accursed.”

It is easy to imagine Harry Potter and his wand-wielding friends being added to the scene.

In a sense, it is laughable that this sort of text influenced how politically influential people thought about members of an ethnic group. At the same time, that is frightening. The whole text is a bunch of cobbled-together plagiarized nonsense, and yet it was apparently one of only three books owned by the last Czarina of Russia. I think that shows just how poor quality evidence people are willing to accept, when it confirms something they already believe, as well as just how quick human beings are to demonize one another.

It also suggests that Jewish people have plenty of historical reason to worry about what the governments of both their own states and those of their neighbours might do to them, if the present climate of relative tolerance that exists in most of the world is disrupted. Several contemporary Middle Eastern leaders have apparently expressed their view that the Protocols are a legitimate document, including Presidents Nasser and Saddat in Egypt, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Qaddafi of Libya. Similarly, textbooks in Saudi Arabia apparently describe the Protocols as factual.

Sign you’re living badly

Paul Graham was written an interesting piece, on addictiveness. He argues that people are vulnerable to getting addicted to all sorts of things, and that avoiding this requires you to behave in an abnormal way: “You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.”

This strikes me as an interesting and possibly truthful observation, and an extension of our prior discussion of the nature of addiction.

Democracy and minority rights

Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s ruling on California’s Proposition 8 is a good demonstration of how it is possible for the serious expert consideration of ethics and law to produce better policy-making than direct or representative democracy does:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Gay marriage is restricted around the world not for any rational reason whatsoever, but because large numbers of voters are prejudiced and uncomfortable with the idea.

While it is encouraging when gay marriage is legalized by legislation or popular referendum, I think it is ethically preferable when courts assert its necessity. That is because the power to determine the scope of minority rights should not rest with the will of the general public. Establishing minority rights on that basis is precarious and unjust. Rather, societies that aspire to be ethical have to acknowledge the fact that the majority cannot be allowed to strip minorities of fundamental rights, and that laws that do so ought to be struck down, regardless of how popular they are.

Blog Out Loud Ottawa 2010

Blog Out Loud Ottawa 2010, which I mentioned before, went very well. My thanks go out to Lynn from TurtleHead for organizing it, bringing together twenty four readers and dozens of audience members.

All the night’s readings were good, but some of my favourites were:

I had heard Evey’s entertaining Bus People on the radio a few days before.

I was the only one who presented a political post written in an editorial style – Why conservatives should love carbon taxes. Perhaps next year I will have some company. After all, blogs can be turned to serve many purposes, including advocating changes in public policy.

Spaces after a period

Why did anybody ever put two spaces after a period, when typing?

Because of typewriters. Indeed, one name for this approach to sentence spacing is ‘typewriter spacing.’ Typewriters tended to use fixed-width fonts, in which each character takes up as much space on the line as every other. Each character is in its own little rectangle, like on a piece of graph paper. When text is presented in such a way, it arguably makes reading easier to have two spaces after periods.

Computers rarely use fixed-width fonts. The most common example (Courier New) is often used for purposes where seeing spacing is very important, such as when writing computer code. For text meant to be used by human beings, proportional fonts are superior. In these, letters take up different amounts of space, with narrow letters like ‘i’ taking up fewer pixels of width than wide letters like ‘w.’

In this situation, there is no reason to put two spaces after periods. The practice is obsolete.

So, why does it endure like a virus continually making the rounds? I would guess that institutional conservatism is the answer. Organizations like government departments adopted typewriter spacing decades ago, and never changed over. Similarly, typing classes in the world’s elementary schools may well be taught by people who originally learned to type on a typewriter, or who were themselves taught by someone who did.

Personally, I hope typewriter spacing eventually manages to fade away. It is especially annoying when you have to incorporate text from a typewriter spacer into a document mostly written using modern spacing. You have to do a find and replace operation to substitute single spaces for double ones, then manually scan through the altered text to verify that nothing barbarous has resulted.