Something I wrote years ago, which is still relevant

The Dangers of Being Manipulative (Badly) First Written in 2017

I have a dilemma at the moment: I enjoy the Dilbert cartoon but am developing a deep, personal dislike of its creator Scott Adams.?This has rumbled on for a while but really got going from reading his blog during the recent (2016) US presidential election campaign.

Adams is a deeply misanthropic narcissist, in my opinion.?That’s not to say he is wrong in his analysis of a given situation, however his clumsiness in applying persuasion contrast with those who he advocates.?However his claim that publicly making the switch from appearing to support Clinton to genuinely supporting Trump swung the election is a little far-fetched.

Here let me add that the use of persuasion instead of facts in recent political campaigns troubles me deeply.?Adams has billed Donald Trump as a ‘master persuader’ and to an extent I agree.?For all Trump’s failed businesses and shady practices he still manages to get other people to invest in him.?I expect that he does this by appealing to some people’s basic drives.?In business that would be greed, in politics it was fear.?

However persuasion is a binary tool, you either find it credible or you don’t.?There is also a difference between persuasion and manipulation.?The primary difference is the use of deception, when you attempt to manipulate the situation it tends to be by masking your true feelings or intentions.

Adams has recently started blogging on climate change, two of which I have copied verbatim below.?So copyright him, blah, blah, blah.?I will dissect these piece by piece.

Clumsy Attempt at Manipulation #1

“Below are competing links on the credibility of climate change models. One makes the case that the models do a good job. The other makes a case that the models are not credible. See which one you find more persuasive.

?Adams offers two links , one supporting the rigor of climate change models and the other attacking them.?The question is one of credibility.?So what we have is a very manipulative starting point.?We are not offering competing climate models, we are saying that either climate models work or they don’t.?Or more precisely that they can’t work.?This is important because the evidence points one way, in the direction climate change deniers don’t like.?

As I have been saying all along, I can’t tell which argument is right. I’m not smart enough to evaluate this sort of topic. But if we are looking at the persuasion dimension alone, one of these is far stronger persuasion than the other.

This is a clumsy attempt to hide what he is doing.?Adams can’t tell you which argument is right, but he’s going to try to nudge you in the direction he wants.?The assertion is that evaluating this topic is too hard to be understood.?I fundamentally disagree, the topic can be effectively summarised but what Adams is trying to do here is manipulate us in thinking that we are not smart enough to understand the facts around climate change.?This is important; do not give up the facts so easily.

?Argument in favor of climate models being credible (video)

?Argument against climate models being credible (article)

The two sources are also a video and an article.?I would suggest that this is also deliberate, as the written article may be perceived as being more authoritative.

?By the way, I’m being attacked on Twitter for being an alleged “climate denier.” For the record, I side with the consensus of climate scientists for the sake of my career and reputation. My blogging is about the persuasiveness of the claims, not the underlying facts.

Now we come to what I think of as the ‘false flag’ position.?He often cites support for one side, but immediately undermines that position by implying that he is being coerced into that position. Early on in the US presidential campaign he used exactly the same tool to ‘support’ Clinton whilst making excuses for Trump.?He re-states the persuasion position because he knows the facts only point in one direction.

During the presidential campaign he blogged about using manipulation (under the more pleasant sounding guise of persuasion) to stop Clinton supporters from voting by appealing to apathy and complacency.?He is now attempting to use the same tools to get us to give up our intellectual rigor.

?Persuasion-wise, and based on what I have seen, the folks who say the climate models are not credible are far more persuasive than the people who believe the models are reliable. But persuasion is not always connected to truth. The truth of climate change isn’t fully available to me, given my lack of knowledge and training in the relevant fields. For now I’m siding with the consensus view of scientists, which puts me on the weak side of the persuasion game in this debate. My side really needs help.”

He states that one side has far stronger persuasion than the other.?This is an attempt to sow the seeds of doubt.?The most persuasive instrument is a fact, irrespective of what anyone will tell you.?If you don’t believe me then I challenge you to find a gravity-denier.?What we have here is naked manipulation.

The last section’s a re-hash of the position that climate change is unknowable, implying that the facts are to obscure or complicated to be understood by the author and by implication the lay-man.?By using the phrase ‘consensus view’ it legitimises the counter-argument in a way which isn’t justified, using the ‘onus probandi’ logical fallacy.

Clumsy Attempt at Manipulation #2

Let me start this post by restating that I agree with the scientific consensus on climate change. I’m not a scientist and I have no tools to evaluate the credibility of those who are. As far as I can tell, the arguments on both sides are totally credible. I can’t tell them apart. So I default to agreeing with the experts, not so much because I believe experts are likely to be right in this case, but because there are extreme social and economic penalties for being a climate “denier.” So I’m not one. I’m just a non-scientist who would like to understand this situation better.

?Here we have a use of ‘Proof by Assertion’ but no matter how many times it is stated the climate-change deniers position is not valid.?He now implies that there is coercion (possible violent) forcing him to take one side.

?And one of my ignorant questions is whether we have the causation right. On one hand, basic science tells us that more CO2 in the atmosphere should cause warming. And according to the consensus view of climate scientists, it is. The graphs of CO2 seem to match the graphs of warming. Therefore, logically, CO2 causes warming.

?This is a lie: we knew that the physical properties of CO2 caused global warming before we had the climate change data to support it.?What Adams is doing here is attempting to suggest that we don’t really know what is happening.

?A separate debate is whether the CO2 warming is enough to be a problem or it simply exists. Forget that for now. I’m just talking about the direction of causation.

?Let’s not forget this; it is the important point of climate change i.e. bad things will happen.?This is an attempt at minimising the consequence of the outcome.

?As a non-scientist, I assume human beings have some sort of temperature range that is optimal for energy and economics. I also assume that there are natural cycles of warming or cooling independent from CO2, at least historically. So we’re probably always warming or cooling. We’re never staying the same. And that means sometimes we are heading toward optimal human temperatures and sometimes away.

?This assumes that the conditions are currently homogenous.?This is not so, much of the planet is less than ideal for human activities.?It is another attempt at minimising the consequences by implying that climate change is like seasonal change.

?Now suppose the Earth’s temperature was already in the good range for humans, but it was getting even better according to a natural cycle. That better temperature would – I assume – increase human activity in ways that (wait for it) contribute to CO2. If the economy is good, we build more industry and create more CO2. If the causation works in that direction, the heat of the world and the CO2 levels would be correlated. But the cause in this scenario is the warmth, not the CO2.

?This also relies of homogenous conditions, I’m sure that in California where Adams is based a little warming looks like it would increase human activity.?However his compatriots in Las Vegas would probably differ.?

?None of this means we shouldn’t be worried about rising CO2. The science says more CO2 means more warming. That’s just physics. And at some point we have to assume the planet gets TOO warm, and economic activity will suffer.

?‘Just physics’, another way of minimising the opposing view.?We are also assuming that economic activity does not include pretty vital stuff like food production and the volume of fresh water available for consumption.?This also assumes that the change will be proportional and smooth, an understanding of the definition of catastrophic is required.

?And when the economy suffers, CO2 could drop, assuming the economy goes into decline. At the very least I think you have to agree that the causation is two-way.

?What we have here is a confusing flip-flop.?If the CO2 isn’t causing the warming why should it matter if it drops when human activity drops??This also takes no account of the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere implying that is will decline as readily as it increases, which in not true.?However for an argument which is implying that the presence of CO2 is inconsequential a lot of time is being spent on why it might drop.

?When people tell me to “do my own research” on climate change and reach my own conclusions, I think those people have no understanding of how the human mind works. No matter how much research I do on my own, a real climate scientist will still know things that I don’t know I don’t know. If I do my own research on climate science, all I will know in the end is what I do know. And that’s not enough for any kind of credible evaluation. The stuff I don’t know could easily be more important than the things I do know. One would need to live in a particular industry, the way a climate scientist does, to have any confidence that all the important variables are being considered.

?What a layered knot of obfuscation this is.?Here Adams is saying that persistence ignorance prevents him from ever being able to draw a conclusion.?So he then says we should rely on the experts, the same experts who he is attempting to discredit.

Consider how basic my question is today. As a non-scientist, I can’t even tell if scientists have the causation right. My layperson’s brain says correlation is not causation, and humans have a long history of confusing the two. And while climate scientists might have perfectly good explanations for why the causation is primarily one-directional, it isn’t obvious to me. (You can explain it to me in the comments.)

Here we have a veiled use of post hoc ergo propter hoc.?Yes in many cases correlation is not causation, but in other cases it is.?What he is implying here is that the climate scientists are making this mistake, whilst offering no evidence as to why this is the case.

?I realize that people want to know which “side” I’m on. But apparently I’m on my own side. My view is that climate scientists are more likely right than not, but the quality of their persuasion is worse than that of the skeptics on this topic. I don’t know the underlying facts. But persuasion-wise, the skeptics have a big advantage.

?Here greater emphasis is placed on persuasion than the facts.?In truth facts don’t care if they are believed or not however persuading someone to ignore the facts does not alter the facts.

?Remember how I taught you that Trump’s linguistic kill shots had a special quality that allowed them to strengthen over time thanks to confirmation bias? Every time Ted Cruz said something that didn’t pass the fact-checking you remembered his Lyin’ Ted nickname. And every time someone accused Clinton of crooked dealings you were reminded of her Crooked Hillary nickname. Climate change has the same dynamic. Every time it snows the non-scientists of the world look out the window and experience confirmation bias that global “warming” isn’t happening. Sure, it’s usually called climate “change” now, and most people know that. But to the under-informed that change in preferred wording just looks suspicious.

?This is a classic ‘flat earth’ argument.?Climate isn’t the same as weather and, previously, as it became apparent that some parts of the earth may cool due to shifting patterns a more accurate name for the phenomena was adopted.?This is not suspicious.

?Climate scientists might be right that CO2 will cause catastrophic warming. And fear is a great persuader. But this particular fear is a bit abstract. It isn’t like a nuclear bomb that can kill us all instantly. Climate worries are in the unpredictable future and won’t affect everyone the same way. Persuasion-wise, the climate scientists only have facts and prediction models to make their case. And what are the weakest forms of persuasion known to humankind?

?Facts and prediction models.

?As I have stated before; if facts are so weak bring me a gravity denier.?Here is a fundamental selfish conclusion, which is the true heart of the climate change denier: this won’t affect me.?Just because the effects are over longer terms they are no less real.?Prediction models are acknowledged to be inaccurate, but that does not mean they are wrong.

?And how are climate scientists trying to solve this problem? Mostly by providing more facts and more prediction models. And by demonizing the critics. The net effect of all that is to systematically reduce their own credibility over time, even if they are right about everything.

?I think you see the problem.

?I certainly do.?The climate change deniers offer no alternative explanations or models, and as such the only possible target is them personally.?This lack of counter arguments by climate change deniers is their primary weakness, they have no case to prove.