Matt Ridley is an idiot

We do not often dwell on our mistakes, here at IT. This is because I already have a full-time job. But one glaring error of a few years ago needs to be corrected:

Dr. Ridley, a former editor of the Economist (the only newsweekly in the English language worth the paper it's printed on) is no idiot, nor is the idea that things are going to get better an idiotic one. Hence, consideration of his thesis is a little OT for this blog, but we aren't going to let that stop us, especially as Mr. Ridley's thesis is a favorite canard of the most dangerous and savvy deniers, those that have given up attack the science of global warming and instead dedicate themselves to attacking the case for action. The endless adaptivity of humans figures prominently in this set of crackpot ideas.

My friends, I was wrong. Matt Ridley is a screaming idiot. The evidence of this has been piling up for a while now, but the New York Times has helpfully assembled an overwhelming case for mandatory headgear for the 5th viscount Ridley.

It's mind boggling the diversity and scale of the stupidity Ridley displays in this interview. Ignorance of science, art, and economics are all on display. (He proclaims Vernon Dursley one of his personal business heroes. It would be easier to take this as "a bit facetious" were it not that Ridley oversaw the first run on an English bank since 1878(!), culminating in a taxpayer bailout that left the bank owned by the state.)

Where does one even begin with this density of nonsense? He takes the attitude of a sullen 12-year-old to literary fiction, describing it as "like playing tennis without the net" because it is not composed of things that "actually happened." Yes, this millionaire and hereditary peer, educated at Eton and Oxford, thinks fiction is unworthy of attention because it isn't "really true."

It gets worse. He lavishes praise on "The Hockey Stick Illusion," a discredited heap of paranoia and lies that looks all the more embarrassing in 2015 as dozens of papers have replicated the "hockey stick" and record-shattering warmth over the ensuing five years as extended the sharp edge of the hockey stick even further.

And it gets even worse than that:

Which writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

Ian McEwan, Willis Eschenbach, Stewart Brand, Deirdre McCloskey, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, Richard Dawkins, David Quammen, Sam Harris, Bill Bryson. People like this are more than mere writers; they are the generators of new ideas through fine prose, the heirs to Voltaire.

Leave aside the fact that Sam Harris is a bigot, Richard Dawkins has parleyed an interesting idea he had thirty years ago into a career as a professional anti-religious whiner, and the fact that I instantly knew, before Googling the name, that Ayaan Hirsi Ali would be an angry former Muslim employed by right-wing think tanks to vilify Islam and Muslims. What touches this list into immortality is that Ridley has placed Willis Eschenbach -- Willis Eschenbach -- on his list of writers he most admires. Jesus wept.

For those lucky people who have never turned over one of Eschenbach's rocks, he is a failed massage therapist/failed cabinet maker/Watts dittohead whose writing is horrible. Not just wrong on the science (as we expect); not just irrational and paranoid: horrible in style, in usage, even in grammar and spelling. Willis Eschenbach writes like English is his second language, learned exclusively from a brain-damaged crackhead.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look:

James Hansen and others say that we owe it to our Grandchildren to get this climate question right. Hansen says “Grandchildren” with a capital G when he speaks of them so I will continue the practice. I mean, for PR purposes, Grandchildren with a capital letter outrank even Puppies with a capital letter, and I can roll with that.

In any case Hansen got me to thinking about the world of 2050. Many, likely even most people reading this in 2010 will have Grandchildren in 2050. Heck, I might have some myself. So I started to consider the world we will leave our Grandchildren in 2050.

But Hansen doesn't capitalize "grandchildren," unless the word is used in a title, as with "Storms of My Grandchildren." This is the dedication of that book:

To Sophie, Connor, Jake,

and all the world's grandchildren

Tastes differ, but I very much doubt anybody with any knowledge of the English language at all would describe the above as indicative of an "heir[] to Voltaire." It rambles. It is vague and lazy ("many, perhaps most of the people reading this . . . .") It attempts a breezy conversational tone which combined with the mistakes with which the post is riddled grammar and usage (the titular eight-tenths needs a hyphen, "grandchildren" is not a proper noun, "unajusted" is still missing its "d" five years on, you don't capitalize "Final Conclusion" and you can't even pretend to blame Hansen for that one . . . .) gives the impression not of relaxed ease, but arrogance coupled with embarrassing vacuity.

Speaking of vacuity, here's Willis trying to defend himself from Roy Spencer's complaint that he stole from 20-year-old climate papers and presented their ideas as his own:

Easy for you to say. You’re some anonymous humanoid, might be a 16-year-old Valley girl for all we know, who is totally safe from such untrue accusations because you never have to take responsibility for your words—you hide your identity behind an alias like some kid in a chat room.
Who is acting like an adult here? Me, or you, you who won’t stand behind what you say, you who are too ashamed to sign your own work? Unlike you, I have a reputation to uphold and defend, and defend it I will.

This writing sample really has it all. It rambles, the second sentence is a garbled, overlong mess, and he's larded up the whole thing with useless flourishes that make it sound even dumber than the underlying stupidity of the content requires.

A decent ninth-grade composition teacher should have cured Willis of referring to "untrue accusations" or unnecessarily explaining that the purpose of an alias is to "hide your identity." He makes the classic neophyte writer's mistake of deploying useless adjectives ("totally safe," "untrue accusations") and seems to be unwilling or unable to hold a coherent thought from one end of a sentence to the other: "Unlike you, I have a reputation to uphold and defend, and defend it I will." What happened to upholding it?

Matt Ridley compared this hot mess to Voltaire. He, like Willis Eschenbach, is an idiot. I deeply regret my error.

The trouble with Pollyannaism

The NYTimes brings us word of a well-intended balm for our fears of the future, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley.

The gist of Ridley's argument is that naysayers have been wrong in the past, that humans are endlessly adaptable, and we can look forward to a century in which:

Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.

Dr. Ridley, a former editor of the Economist (the only newsweekly in the English language worth the paper it's printed on) is no idiot, nor is the idea that things are going to get better an idiotic one. Hence, consideration of his thesis is a little OT for this blog, but we aren't going to let that stop us, especially as Mr. Ridley's thesis is a favorite canard of the most dangerous and savvy deniers, those that have given up attack the science of global warming and instead dedicate themselves to attacking the case for action. The endless adaptivity of humans figures prominently in this set of crackpot ideas.

While acknowledging the challenges posed by "politics, wars, plagues or climate change," Ridley proposes what is essentially one meta-argument -- one comeback to rule them all, as it were. And this is that people have always predicted the fall of civilization in the past, and have always been wrong: instead, things have gotten better and better. From the review:

The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. . . .

Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.

Arguing that the future is going to resemble the past is the cornerstone of rational thought. There's many a slip bitwixt the cup and the lip, however, and Ridley's thesis falls afoul of most of them.

The first problem is the straw man fallacy -- the idea that the discourse is monopolized by doomsayers who are always wrong. In fact, Utopian predictions are just as ubiquitous as catastrophic ones, and equally unreliable. Contrary to the reviewer's assertion, you most certainly can get on the bestseller list with predictions that the Dow will soon be at 30,000, or that we are on the verge of curing cancer, or that America will be the benign despot of the world for decades to come. Here in 2010 we have no flying cars, no sentient computers, and only an anemic little space station hardly worthy of the name. None of those predictions have come true in the past either. So rather than an unblemished record of failure by the opposing side, a more realistic picture of the history of populist prediction is that bold predictions get you on the bestseller list -- especially when they echo the zeitgeist, optimistic or pessimistic as the case may be.

It's also part of the straw man error to treat people who warn of disaster as generic prophets of doom. There are such people, as we have discussed on this blog before, who are unhappy with Western civilization and enjoy prophesying its demise. Yet the recognition of severe problems and the tireless campaigning for their redress are, just as much as the exchange of technology and resources which Ridley praises, a part of the power and resilience of open societies. It was doomsayers that ended slavery, that struggled unsuccessfully to avert the Holocaust, that pushed governments to act on acid rain.

If you are diving in a car, and your passenger screams at you to hit the brakes, it would be better not to turn to them and explain that you've never had a serious accident. And you probably would know better, anyway: part of staying out of accidents is slamming on the brakes when you need to. If you want to believe things will all come right in the end, more power to you. But for that to happen we as a society must listen to specific warnings of problems ahead and not lump them in with professional peddlers of gloom.

And bad things may come, despite Ridley's argument that in the past things have gotten better and better for our society. In fact, Ridley's reassurance is no reassurance at all, really. Consider some of the things that fall under Ridley's heading of constant progress. The Great Depression. World War II with its 50 million dead. The Black Plague, which killed a third of the population of Europe. Did society come back from those things? Yes, eventually. Does that mean we want to march straight into the jaws of comparable disasters, secure in the (supposed) knowledge that all will come right in the end? No, we do not. Many things that do not end our civilization are nevertheless better avoided, if one can.

We cannot even be assured on the narrow point that our civilization will not collapse, despite Ridley's assurances that it has survived every challenge to date. Bright man that he no doubt is, he has formulated a classic friendly dolphin paradox:

There are many anecdotal reports of dolphins finding sailors in the water and nudging them towards land and safety. Can we conclude that dolphins are friendly because they saved those sailors?

Give it a second, if you haven't been exposed to this thought experiment before, then read on:

No. Suppose the dolphins are merely playful, and pushing sailors in random directions. Those that randomly find land praise the dolphins' helpfulness. The others drown and are never heard from again.

In medicine this is called a reporting bias, and it decapitates any conclusions you might want to draw from the data. Here, it defeats Ridley. He argues All past predictions of the collapse of our civilization have been wrong. But of course they MUST be wrong, or there would be no civilization and Ridley would not be writing his book. To have a valid sample, Ridley needs to look at the predictions of societies that have collapsed: to see if the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders did or did not predict the collapse of their civilizations before it happened.

It's a tall order, but there's no escape from it: we can't conclude anything from the non-collapse of a civilization that could not be collapsed, or the argument would not exist. A favorite novelist of mine once set a scene between a young man driving aggressively and carelessly and a matronly women who told him to shape up. "Don't worry!" the young man says, "I've never had a serious accident!"

"You won't have but one," the women replied.