Because my sister knows me well, she bought me the new Cosmos on DVD for Christmas. I had seen much of it before, but I’m glad to have it. For one thing, it has allowed me to share it with my father who likes such things. But I have to admit that it bothers for a few reasons. The most minor of these is simply that I’m an old curmudgeon. I know far too much science and I bristle at every statement that isn’t quite right. I found that to be especially true in the fifth episode because it dealt with relativity and that’s a subject that people seem to be unable to discuss with any degree of clarity. And then there was some mixing up of special relativity and general relativity and I was fit to be tied. But that really is minor.

What most bothers me about it is the politics of it. The first several episode were filled with scientific hubris. This is an issue that causes me no end of problems in my relationships with fellow atheists. It’s kind of weird. The scientific process is an amazingly powerful thing that I greatly admire. But there is a tendency among people to think that it is the end all of knowledge. And it just isn’t. It is the ultimate in the old joke about the drunk guy looking for his keys under the lamp even though he dropped the keys in a different location, “The light is better here!” Science is a great way to answer certain kinds of questions. But there are questions that science just can’t parse. So those questions are just avoided or defined as non-questions.

So it is great that we have science around to pound away at our knowledge. But it is generally not the case that what we want for is a scientific approach to solving problems. In the 13th century, for example, the Dominican Theodoric of Freiberg managed to figure out the rainbow. The biggest problem is not how we will go about answering questions. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t even occur to us that questions ought to be answered. To me, the best example of this today is found in the field of economics. It seems like a science. The same process is used with data and models and all that. But fundamental questions are simply not acceptable. Where in the world of mainstream economics are there people asking how property — a commonly held resource — can be privately owned? That’s just an illegitimate question. The best we get is an analysis of income inequality, which the profession has denied to generations and now shoves aside with various arguments — most notably with the idea that inequality is great because we have iPhones.

And this gets to my primary problem with Cosmos. The takeaway from the original series really wasn’t scientific. Rather, it was that science is a powerful means of understanding the universe and so it must be used to counter bad ideas in the lives of humans. In particular, Carl Sagan was interested in nuclear arms. But what is the new series interested in? Perhaps it is a sign of the times that the big fight now is just against ignorant theists who want to teach Creationism in science classes. But I think it is a major mistake to even step down to that level. So what great policy is Tyson willing to tackle? Nothing really. He doesn’t say much more about global warming than Carl Sagan said three and half decades earlier.

Add to this the fact that the producers of the series made the terrible decision to put the show on commercial television. The original series provided a whole hour to deal with a subject. But here, the narrative is interrupted every ten minutes for everyone to be reminded what really matters: commerce. And that’s what I mean about the questions we don’t ask. Is science a common good that should be shared with all of humanity? Or is it just a way of delivering eyeballs for commercials about soft drinks and erectile dysfunction medications? I think the former, but our society clearly thinks the latter. Sadly, the new Cosmos does not have an opinion on such matters. That means that the producers of the series are doing just what those who ran the Library of Alexandria did: nothing. And Carl Sagan pointed out the problem with this kind of disinterested science in the original Cosmos.

I’ve long been a fan of sorts of James Flynn. He is a moral philosopher and psychologist who is best known for his work on intelligence. He is responsible for the Flynn Effect, which is this bizarre tendencies for IQ scores to go up over time. In fact, if you compared people from a century ago to people today, they would come out with an average IQ of 70 rather than the 100 of people today. Given that we can read the work of Mark Twain and James Clerk Maxwell, we know they weren’t dullards. So there must be something wrong with the tests; it isn’t that people today are just super brilliant compared to people a century or more ago.

The big problem, from my perspective, is that IQ tests don’t demonstrate what people think they do. They test specific kinds of thinking. And what makes the human brain unbelievably amazing compared to a computer is that brains think in countless different ways. What’s more, Richard Feynman supposedly had an IQ of 125 — higher than average, but not even “gifted,” much less “genius.” Yet Feynman was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. You really have to wonder about the utility of a test that doesn’t find someone like Feynman gifted.

But the Flynn Effect is still perplexing. I spent a lot of time several years ago studying it. And I do mean “study”: I was reading actual scientific papers about it, including Flynn’s own. And I never got to the bottom of it. Now that might have been because scientific papers don’t tend to speculate. They make modest claims that they can back up. Thus, I was very excited to see that Flynn had recently given a TED Talk, Why Our IQ Levels Are Higher Than Our Grandparents’. Check it out:

In the talk, Flynn argues that the issue is abstract thought. A hundred years ago, people didn’t need to use abstract thought and so they weren’t good at it. In the talk, he notes that a century ago, about 3% of jobs were “cognitively demanding.” Today, the number is 35%. This is very interesting, because what it shows is that the IQ score is highly dependent upon environmental factors. And this is exactly the opposite of the ways that IQ test have been sold. We’ve been told that they are age independent (they aren’t) and that they test “intelligence” and not “knowledge.” But clearly that is not the case.

This has huge political implications. Both Jason Richwine and Charles Murray push racial differences in IQ tests as a reason to ignore social and economic inequality. But what Flynn is discussing shows that any effect there may be between different races surely moves in the opposite direction: poor children with few opportunities will not get as much practice learning the cognitive skills that are reflected on IQ tests. Last year, without this knowledge, I noted about the two men:

What I think all this means is that IQ tests could be used for a good purpose. We could use them to determine if our schools are providing a good learning environment that is opening up children’s minds. (It would certainly be better than the current testing regime we have.) But used to make arguments about how some groups are hopeless and others are not is morally dubious and scientifically invalid. Yet neither Richwine nor Murray (who has been a guest on The Colbert Report) are social outcasts. Can anyone really argue that we live in a post-racial society?

In the Fall of 1980, PBS broadcast the series Cosmos. After being largely disappointed with the recent remake of the series, I decided to revisit the original. Or at least part of it: the fourth episode, “Heaven and Hell.” It is about Earth and Venus and it was probably the first time I had ever been introduced to the idea of the greenhouse effect. I was interested to see if Sagan discussed global warming at that time. It was, after all, three and a half decades ago. Yet I knew people were actively studying it, and only ten years later, I would be in graduate school studying greenhouse gases in permafrost and their effect as a climate feedback.

I was not disappointed. Not only did Sagan deal with the issue, he dealt with it well. And the episode itself is excellent. But looking at it now, it seems so naive. He said, “The study of the global climate, the suns’ influence, the comparison of earth to other worlds — these are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are funded poorly and grudgingly. And meanwhile we continue to load the earth’s atmosphere with materials about the long-term influence we are almost entirely ignorant.” I guess a scientist can be forgiven for assuming that more information would change our behavior. I wonder what Sagan would have thought if he had known that almost twenty years after his own death we would still be doing nothing about global warming, even though the science is as clear on this subject as it ever is on any subject.

Last night, a phrase came into my mind, “Too early to tell; too late to do anything.” I was just playing with words: I liked the apparent paradox of it. But this is exactly the argument that we get from the global warming deniers. They tell us that we need more research because there is still disagreement based upon the fact that Fred Singer is still alive and some hermit with a BS in chemistry who lives outside Barrow hasn’t yet been convinced. At the same time, there is nothing we can do about global warming. And thanks to the deniers themselves, they may well be right on this second point.

In the episode, Sagan focuses on Venus. And it does serve as a warning that things do not have to stay the way they are. In fact, atmospheres composed mostly of carbon-dioxide seem to be much more the norm. But we humans are biased to think that the way our world is is somehow normal. In fact, Sagan started the subject with an amusing look at early speculation about what the Venusian environment must be like:

Instead, we now know that Venus has a surface temperature that is hotter than those commercial pizza ovens and that its clouds are made up of sulfuric acid. It’s interesting that no one goes around saying this is just a hoax designed by greedy scientists who are trying to hold onto their high paying NASA jobs. But we now know that if conditions on Venus implied some kind of policy back here on earth that would cost billionaires a few cents or made Christians question the literal truth of the Bible, there would be a whole infrastructure of think tanks with people arguing for dinosaurs on Venus.

I really am beginning to despair for humanity. The same brilliance that has allowed us to measure the temperature of the surface of Venus from tens of millions of miles away, also allows us to manipulate the emotions of other humans in mass. And so now humans are smart enough to see catastrophe before it comes, but also “smart” enough to stop themselves from doing anything about it.

Paul Krugman announced some good news this morning, Keynes Is Slowly Winning. It seems that the OECD has changed course from its devastating focus on fiscal austerity toward stimulus. In fact, it has appointed one of Krugman’s old students, Catherine Mann, as its chief economist. But I was struck by one line in Krugman’s article. After noting that “the ground is shifting,” he said, “It has taken a while.” Indeed, it has. And it highlights something that has been on my mind: economics is no kind of science.

I think most people understand very well that economics is not like physics. Physics allows scientists to run experiments and really break down the world into discrete parts for study. So generally, economics is seen more like climate science. They are both fields where the phenomena are very complex and one must depend upon macroscopic observation and computer models. Yet economics doesn’t behave much like climate science. And it doesn’t even have the excuse of running into the practical world with political ramifications — they both do.

At its best, science makes marginal progress. The idea of anthropogenic global warming was first suggested long before there was much empirical evidence for it. And the scientific community did not latch onto it. But as the evidence got stronger, the scientific consensus got stronger. There may be politically motivated hacks like Fred Singer, but that isn’t the field; there are similarly inclined deniers of evolution, but no one suggests that there isn’t a scientific consensus.

But what has happened in economics? In the 1970s, stagflation caused the economics profession to go crazy — throwing out the demand-side thinking of Keynes and adopting a radical new approach to macroeconomics. It’s only fairly recently that economists (on the “left”) have started to realize that stagflation was not cause for a radical new theory but for minor changes to the Keynesian model. And in the end, this period of scientific psychosis seems to have been caused by a kind of insecurity on the part of the economists. They wanted a field that was built on first principles, like the real scientific field of physics. They seemed not to notice that physics has never solved the many-body problem. Complexity requires different tools.

Similarly, after the financial crisis of 2008, it seemed to be open season on loony ideas. I think that it was the ultimate proof that the profession had totally messed up in the 1970s. So I guess it was understandable that the profession would be in crisis. But in general, it didn’t see it that way. Even people as reasonable as Noah Smith seemed to think there was only minor disruption and in the end it turned out that economists had a good bead on The Truth™. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain how economists on the right (The very idea ought to stop people from referring to economics as a science!) lapsed into what can only be called apologetics. “How can we justify our ideology?!”

In addition to this, the economics profession has quite respectable and clearly smart people like Greg Mankiw who are big believers in Keynesian stimulus — as long as a Republican is in the White House. And what is so aggravating is that the economists who are most inclined to think of themselves as “hard scientists” are the ones who operate most as apologists. I understand, for example, that Ken Rogoff is a serious scientist and his papers are careful. But that doesn’t stop him running around the world making broad — And wrong! — political statements.

Economics first developed out of the field of moral philosophy. And it still is moral philosophy. The fact that people use math doesn’t change that. And I think it’s perfectly fine that economics is part of moral philosophy. The problem is that modern economists — especially on the right — want to claim the mantle of objective science, even while they are pushing a philosophy — and one that even many liberal economists believe shows that the power status quo is just great.