[Vision2020] 105 Responses to “Trying to shoot the messenger”

[Ted Moffett]

Great piece and discussion below on what is sometimes called "confirmation
bias filter" (my wording, not Gavin Schmidt's)  We all do this to some
degree, thus the best that can be done is to be aware of this psychology
and try to balance with critical objective thinking.  Full discussion at
website below:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/11/trying-to-shoot-the-messenger/#more-13366
Trying to shoot the messenger
Filed under:

   - Climate Science<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/climate-science/>
   - statistics<http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/statistics/>

— gavin @ 7 November 2012

Does this sound familiar? A quantitative prediction is inconvenient for
some heavily invested folks. Legitimate questions about methodology morph
quickly into accusations that the researchers have put their thumb on the
scale and that they are simply making their awkward predictions to feather
their own nest. Others loudly proclaim that the methodology could never
work and imply that anyone who knows anything knows that -it’s simply
common sense! Audit sites spring up to re-process the raw data and produce
predictions more to the liking of their audience. People who have actually
championed the methods being used, and so really should know better,
indulge in some obvious wish-casting (i.e. forecasting what you would like
to be true, despite the absence of any evidence to support it).

Contrarian attacks on climate science, right?

Actually no. This was assorted conservative punditry attacking Nate Silver
(of the 538 blog <http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/>) because his
(Bayesian) projections for Tuesday’s election didn’t accord with what they
wanted to hear. The leap from asking questions to
cherry-picking<http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/falling-prey-to-the-dangerous-temptation-to-cherry-pick-polls/>,
accusations<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/30/the-nate-silver-backlash/?tid=pm_pop>of
malfeasance and greed,
audits <http://unskewedpolls.com/>,
denial<https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/262542905615454208>,
and wish-casting <http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=6543> was quite rapid, but it
followed a very familiar pattern. People who value their personal
attachments above objective knowledge seem to spend an inordinate amount of
time finding reasons to dismiss the messenger when they don’t like the
message.

Fortunately for Nate, all it took was one day, and reality came crashing
down <http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/11/nate-silver-facts-election/>on
his critics entire imaginary world.

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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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