There is currently something of a dispute between Encyclopedia Britannica and science journal Nature on the accuracy of a study Nature conducted some time ago comparing information in the Encyclopedia with the information available on the internet at Wikipedia. The Nature study concluded that Wikipedia was as reliable and readable a source of information as the Britannica.
Readers of this blog may remember that I did a post on the issue quoting an article in The Australia in December, click here.
Now, according to The Register, it seems you can't trust Nature or Wikipedia, click here. Encyclopedia Britannica is claiming that the study was designed to favour Wikipedia and that information provided from the Britannica as part of the study was incomplete and as a consequence not assessed accurately.
The article concludes with the following comments:
"So why did Nature risk its reputation in such a way?
Perhaps the clue lies not in the news report, but in the evangelism of the accompanying editorial. Nature's news and features editor Jim Giles, who was responsible for the Wikipedia story, has a fondness for "collective intelligence", one critical website suggets.
"As long as enough scientists with relevant knowledge played the market, the price should reflect the latest developments in climate research," Giles concluded of one market experiment in 2002.
The idea became notorious two years ago when DARPA, under retired Admiral Poindexter, invested in an online terror casino to predict world events such as assassinations. The public didn't quite share the sunny view of this utopian experiment, and Poindexter was invited to resign.
What do these seemingly disparate projects have in common? The idea that you can vote for the truth.
We thought it pretty odd, back in December, to discover a popular science journal recommending readers support less accurate information. It's even stranger to find this institution apparently violating fundamental principles of empiricism.
But these are strange times - and high summer for supporters of junk science."
But it seems you can't trust science journal Nature either? And Nature is presumably not about "collective intelligence" or "voting for the truth".
Ian Castles has commented:
"This reminds me of a letter to The Economist from ecologist Jeff Harvey, author of Nature's review on Lomborg in 2001. Harvey quoted in all seriousness a Danish peak science figure who'd said that, to scientists, Nature, Science and Scientific American held the same place as the Bible to Christians and the Koran to Moslems.
Barrie Pittock gives references to the hostile reviews of Lomborg's book in Nature and Science in the Supplementary Notes and References to Climate Change: Turning Up the Heat. The Science review, by Michael Grubb, was fair comment, though I don't agree with it. The review in Nature, by Harvey was outrageous - he bracketed Lomborg with holocaust deniers."
This reminds me of a telephone conversation I had with a farmer some time ago. He always reads my columns in The Land newspaper and was phoning to provide me with some additional information about koalas and their feeding habits. I suggested he should read and contribute to this blog. He replied that he didn't like the internet because he didn't trust it as a source of information, he went on to tell me that he did trust what he read in The Land.
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Update 9pm
Here's a link to the actual response from Britannica, http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf.
Thanks to Benny Peiser for the link.
Tips thinski? - I've opted for the salt and pepper look.
Tee hee - that one was really worth waiting for. All may not be as it seems. (even with Rog !)
a rock-solid background in business before i retired rog, why do you need some tips? Are 'ition's allowed? check out the juxtaposition of the 2 streams in this thread, pretty funny but time to end it. Over.
Clearly thinksi's objectivity is subjective.
Have you got a job yet young thing? trust me, its not as bad as some make out and the cash is handy. Leave all this -ism stuff for the idle rich kids.
Gotcha great blog going on here.
Thanks for those comments Phil. I'm not a modeller, and in fact that has been one of my beefs about the Australian and British Governments - they've taken the view that it's for the modelling community to settle the PPP vs MER question. Its not: economic statisticians and index number theorists agreed that MER-based GDP was wrong decades ago.
There's no more reason to allow economic modellers to ignore the SNA definition of GDP as there is for climate modellers to ignore the laws of physics. If modellers weren't prepared to accept the statisticians' definition of output (GDP), they shouldn't have incorporated GDP in their models at all: they should have developed their own concept of output.
I did propose a modelling consortium in 2002, to be led by ABS and to include the main academic modelling groups. That's what led me into all my troubles. I thought that the idea stood a chance because no Australians had been involved in the SRES. However, I think the opportunity for an Australian initiative in this area has now been lost.
I'll write again to RC. I think Gavin missed my point and thought I was supporting Stern. But the 'gang of 9' was strongly critical of Stern.
Ian - It appeares to me that you have now been categorised. The IPCC have got themselves into a "defence of the realm" position. You have probably been identified by IPCC's "MI6" to be a potential subversive with unknown intent. For the IPCC to some extent it's a natural reaction to the criticism for what many would contend would be a labour of love & devotion.
But realistically there is no realm - there is simply the best science and what it tells us. There ought be no sides - simply the truth. However with imperfect knowledge one will have to make some judgement calls. On some areas the IPCC's deliberations seem very balanced e.g. see El Nino -basically they discuss the various postulations but say they don't have any solid evidence to support a link. So that's just calling it how it is. Not that there may be an eventual linkage discovered or arising - just that the current science is unable to attribute one.
I note RC gave you a print run and a response. Impertinently if you really wanted to get some exposure - ask them for an economics post on your issues.
There is a separate alternative path - to get enough resources to develop a contrary publication, peer review it and put it into the public domain. Wiki it even ! Would you be able to put together your own modelling consortium?
Thanks Phil. One does indeed get different stories from different people, but even if all participants in all working groups agreed that the process was completely free of pressure, it seems to me that you still don't have a good process - the only experts you have are those that the IPCC selected from persons nominated by governments.
I thought I'd been over all this on a previous thread. Richard Tol is a past coordinating lead author and lead author on several previous IPCC reports, but he couldn't be nominated for AR4 because 'only people with close connections to the Green Party [of Germany] have been nominated [to IPCC Working Groups II and III].'
It's bad enough that experts who'd like to be selected for IPCC writing teams must be careful about the views that they express in order to encourage the IPCC hierarchy to believe that theyre 'safe' selections, but it's worse when, as in some countries, persons hoping for nomination have to associate with a particular political party to get their names on the slate of national nominees.
Then there's the IPCC's apparent determination to exclude experts in economic statistics from the relevant writing teams. When I put to Chairman Pachauri in July 2002 (at our meeting in Canberra) that national accountants be involved in AR4, everyone present agreed that that was a good idea. Some months later I wrote to Dr. Pachauri again, mentioning by name the heads of three national statistical offices whom I knew would be glad to assist the IPCC.
Despite my best efforts, no national accounts expert has participated in any IPCC Expert Meeting since January 2003, and none was selected for any of the writing teams. Do you have any thoughts about the possible reasons for this?
I could go on. Some days after the Amsterdam meeting, David Henderson sent Dr. Pachauri a suggestion 'as to the agenda, venue and attendance for a meeting that could be held with the aim of reviewing the kinds of projections of economic change that enter into the scenarios work of the IPCC.'
Six possible speakers were mentioned by name, with a careful specification of topics that David envisaged each would cover. The proposed speakers were Nicholas Crafts, Shankar Acharya, Paul David, Angus Maddison, William Nordhaus and yours truly. I agreed reluctantly to allow my name to go forward in this list only because I could see the need to avoid raising the protocol issues and possible embarrassment that would have arisen if a serving official statistician were named instead.
Of the six speakers named in David