Arts & Letters Daily is a useful website, sort of a proto-blog, that brings together links to all sorts of interesting articles about, you know, arts and letters. If you follow it just a little bit, a decided political bent becomes clear, as you read headlines like “Do professors indoctrinate students by expressing a political ideology in the classroom?” and “Ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single woman what she most longs for, and she likely won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waist: she wants a man and a baby…” The site’s impresario, Denis Dutton, is a right-tilting philosopher and entrepreneur, who occasionally enjoys ranting against the postmodern obscurantism of the left-tilting academy.
But Prof. Dutton has apparently discovered that a touch of relativist anything-goes-ism can be useful in certain circumstances: in particular, when science is telling you something you don’t want to hear. These days, science is telling us that we are bollixing up the planet by dumping tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The very idea that the unchecked engines of capitalism could somehow lead to something bad, rather than all-pervading and unalloyed good, offends Prof. Dutton’s free-market sensibilities. So he has launched Climate Debate Daily, where both “Calls to Action” and “Dissenting Voices” are given equal time in a different free market, this one of ideas.
Some scientists might object that giving equal credence to all possibilities is not always appropriate in a scientific context; that one position may be “right,” and one might be “wrong,” and a preponderance of evidence may convince us which is which and allow us to act accordingly. But this sort of old-fashioned objective-reality based thinking has been left behind by such advanced intellects as Prof. Dutton, who delight in overturning hierarchies, casting suspicion on metanarratives, and problematizing binary oppositions all over the place.
At least, sometimes.
The very idea that the unchecked engines of capitalism could somehow lead to something bad, rather than all-pervading and unalloyed good, offends Prof. Dutton’s free-market sensibilities.
nice knee-jerk reaction, Sean. Also, cherry-picking a couple of right-wing seeming (oh no, shudder) headlines to prove Prof. Dutton’s rightwingedness is just silly. Why not include this one to prove he is a sensible person:
“If this is to be a “change election,” how about changing America’s destructive drift into anti-rationalism and pig ignorance?..”
or this one:
“The Iraq War has been everyone’s loss, whatever side you were on. For many Iraqis it was a chance for a decent life, says George Packer. ”
or this one (which proves I know not what):
“Golf in decline: the number of people who play the game 25 times a year or more fell to 4.6 million in 2005 from 6.9 million in 2000..”
“nice knee-jerk reaction, Sean. Also, cherry-picking a couple of right-wing seeming (oh no, shudder) headlines to prove Prof. Dutton’s rightwingedness is just silly. Why not include this one to prove he is a sensible person:”
Just because Dutton wrote some reasonable pieces doesn’t mean he doesn’t also write destructive and right-leaning pieces. Sean chose the pieces that made his case: Dutton is a right-leaning voice pushing an agenda.
he doesn’t write the pieces. he is just linking to them.
You hit that one right on the head. I’ve always been amused by the irony that the same right-wing folks who used to rail against relativisim and postmodern thinking in general are now the ones who insist that we “study both sides of the issue” “teach the debate” and, in general, make their living by using “mytho-poetic thinking” to obscure scientific reality.
I think Sean makes a good point and real scientists should only read the left column of this website.
Nobody can deny that giant Burmese pythons are going to strangle the southern parts of the US.
Giant Burmese python stew, anyone?
I fail to see the problem. This site has decidedly leftwing commentary, and is also about physics, whereas if you read the Reference frame you will get conservative commentary and also read about physics.
Its rare to find a big blog that doesn’t interject individual politics in some form at some time or another, since everyone has opinions.
The silliness arises when you try to correlate politics and science in such a way that one side has it right, and the other has it wrong. It might be true in individual cases of policy, but is certainly not the case in general.
Then I will spell out the problem more explicitly. There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong about being right-wing or left-wing, nor was that implied anywhere above. The wrongness accrues to being a hypocrite — for example, by casting yourself as a defender of objectivity and truth, and then discarding those virtues when the objective truth interferes with your political preferences.
Hope that helps.
“If you follow it just a little bit, a decided political bent becomes clear, as you read headlines like “Do professors indoctrinate students by expressing a political ideology in the classroom?”…..
If you had actually taken the time to read the article behind the headline you might have discovered that this evidence of right wing political bent is a Chronicle of Higher Education piece profiling two professors from Penn State who argue that the lack of conservatives in academy is not a product of liberal bias, but rather stems from the fact that, “personal priorities of those on the left are more compatible with pursuing a Ph.D.”
I think providing a clearinghouse of opinion about climate change and what is to be done about it is a good idea. If nothing else, it provides a convenient source to find out what people I disagree with are saying about the issue. The issues are orders of magnitude more complex than some evolution vs. creationism nonsense. That being said, I am being paid handsomely by Prof Dutton (just kidding).
Sean,
Right on all accounts, but you need to agree that…
1.) The ‘Bad Writing Contest’ was a good idea
and
2.) Duttons is a great bookstore.
sokol, if you had actually taken time to become familiar with A&L Daily, you would understand that bias against conservatives in academe is a favorite topic of Dutton’s, which is why his blurb ends with “Watch this space…”
Again: there is nothing wrong with being conservative. There is nothing wrong with having a website, regardless of your political views. The claim that Dutton, or A&L daily, lists to the right is neither shocking nor controversial, even to Dutton himself. Please pay attention to the argument being made before leaping to disagree with it.
Question for Sean:
Is it possible to be critical of “postmodern obscurantism” and to view the science behind anthropogenic global warming as incomplete without being a hypocrite?
That depends on what you mean by “view as incomplete.” If you mean “admit that not every interesting question has been answered with complete certainty,” then yes. If you mean “believe that `calls to action’ and `dissenting voices’ are equally reasonable,” then no.
IIRC, Denis Dutton is the brother of Doug Dutton the bookstore owner. Also, Dutton’s is apparently finally finally closing in a few months. I don’t know how the relatives of the Vromans (http://www.vromansbookstore.com/) feel about climate change.
Denis Dutton’s new climate website is a clearinghouse (aka edited link dump), like A&L Daily. That’s fine, but one of the things that made A&L Daily interesting (no matter what your politics) is that it mostly separates wheat from chaff. Denis Dutton can do this for arts and letters because he is a knowledgeable literate person with an editor’s eye. I’m not confident that he can do it for climate science, especially since there is so much chaff, he’s not a scientist or a science editor, and what’s on the web tends more towards summaries and polemics – the actual science is getting done away from the internet, or takes long enough that it doesn’t feed the blog posting cycle.
I have been to a few of Prof Dutton’s lectures here at the University of Canterbury. I have no problem with the things he says, apart from the climate change stuff. He teaches about Popper, UFOs, religion, logical fallacies, limitations of human memory, conspiracy theories, etc. All good stuff; he was a prominent critic of the so-called recovered memory movement back in the day.
As to the climate change stuff, he makes it clear that he’s not a climate scientist. I have heard him bring up points like ‘why did it cool in the middle part of the 20th century’ and ‘scientists in the 70s predicted a ice age’, among others. He is firmly in the ‘maybe it’s happening, but if it is we should wait until we can afford to adapt’ – he says that the world’s economy in a few decades time will be much richer than today’s and will be able to pay for any mitigation/adaption.
“Ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single woman what she most longs for, and she likely won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waist: she wants a man and a baby…”
What a riot! I definitely want the better career and smaller waist. Who do these people talk to? Thanks for the laugh.
“Ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single woman what she most longs for, and she likely won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waist: she wants a man and a baby…”
I think the point here is that with women increasingly opting for careers rather than housewifery, many of them are getting to 40 and wishing they had children. Conversely those who have kids etc often wish they’d tried out the career thing. For men it’s easier to have both – that’s where the inequality lies, and that’s what our society needs to address.
In addition, I think there is a strong biological imperative in both sexes, but particularly in women, to have children and it doesn’t pay to ignore this.
Don’t worry – with advances in genetic engineering, it will soon be possible to grow artificial uteruses and implant them into men so that they can gestate their own offspring!
Yes, I’m being sarcastic – men don’t have children, they get women to have children for them; it’s going to be difficult to come up with a societal fix for this fundamentally biological inequality.
hehe, I was thinking more along the lines of arranging working practices to offset the biological inequality. Nobody’s implanting anything into me…
Which argument in your post should I be paying attention to Sean?
1) That Denis Dutton is a climate change skeptic who’s starting up what appears to be a mendacious website devoted to the topic? Ok, I’ll go with that.
2) That his other endeavour, A&L Daily, is an ideologically conservative hothouse—a townhall.com for the smart set, if you will? As a regular reader of A&L Daily I find this claim laughable as the vast majority of the articles highlighted there have no explicit political axe to grind. As for coverage of debates over bias toward conservatives in academia: I am shocked, shocked! that a site owned by the Chronicle for Higher Education would take interest in this topic.
3) That opposition to ‘postmodern obscurantism’ necessarily entails a rejection of ‘relativism’ if one doesn’t wish to be a hypocrite? Bollocks. There is no logical relationship between obscurantism and relativism.
And since when does a critique of ‘postmodern obscurantism’ equate a right-wing attack on the left? Or did I miss the memo that Martha Nussbaum is now a neo-con?
Sean Carrol politics do not match Denis Dutton politics – and that’s fine with me.
As far as I can tell Dutton is consistent – in going after fashionable baloney. He has a rationalistic bent and dislikes pompous fools – that’s why Dr. Carroll is so upset.
Contrary to Dr. Caroll would like everyone to believe, there is no real consensus about the major causes of the global climate changes and its extent. The debate tone is shrill: again we have political corectioneers chastising their oponents for saying appaling things. That’s certainly something in which D.Dutton had plenty of experience.
(From my past participation in enviro movement, I can tell you the worst diletantes, scaremongers and media whores are the enviromental activists like Greenpeace. Their independent experts are neither independent nor expert. They are just a crazy pressure group akin to animal activist and anti-abortion nuts.)
The prolem with climate modeling is that you can get from it any answer that you like – and that producing catastrofic prediction is profitable. Until the methodology improves and we have a better understanding one should not be burned on stake for questioning the global warming activism.
I should add that Freeman Dyson has a dim view of our knowledge about the climate change. As a Jason he was closely involved in climate modeling and advising the government – among others on the impact of all-out thermonuclear war.
Well, it turned out that the “nuclear winter” everybody heard about probably would not happen, because the extent of the dust + smoke effect was terribly over-dramatised and the whole modeling of the atmosphere cooling was an incredibly shaby science. Some of Dyson’s colleagues started talking about “nuclear Fall” instead but they were shushed by progressives.The problem is that no-one is willing to demolish a fake argument against the nuclear holocaust.
so, do i understand this correctly: since global warming caused by greenhouse gases is now an established fact as recognized by the un, any discussion of the correctness of this statement is now strictly unscientific?
wow. another unspeakable. like the scientifically established iq difference that nobody may mention lest he be fired from all offices.
It’s interesting to conmpare the scientific consensus on manmade global warming and the dissent about this to dark matter and the dissent there (e.g. MOND). I think that the consensus about manmade global warming is far stronger than dark matter. There are very few (perhaps non at all?)peer reviewed publications in the leading journals that dispute manmade global warming.
So, unlike alternative models to explain away dark matter, the dissent on manmade global warming is largely pseudoscientific in nature.