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In grad school, at an animal behavior conference (long-time readers might recall my early history, researching the behavior of electric fish), I attended a workshop on quantitative ethology — the focal point of my own work (which might explain my ongoing fascination with business metrics).

A primatologist conducted the workshop. He was researching the social organization of an ape species. He’d tried a wide variety of statistical techniques. One after another showed a dominance hierarchy. But he persisted, and finally, using multidimensional scaling in a single dimension, was able to demonstrate the social classes he was certain existed.

I didn’t know it was valid for a researcher to shop around for analyses until one agreed with his preferred hypothesis, so I asked. The primates he studied might or might not have social classes, but ethologists definitely do: His answer was less than respectful; a fellow fish researcher came to my defense; and a free-for-all between the fish and primate social classes ensued.

Last week’s column started a discussion of a disquieting trend in American business, and in American society more generally — the rise of Intellectual Relativism. Intellectual Relativism is a democratic (as opposed to Democratic) approach to understanding. Given a choice among multiple explanations, an Intellectual Relativist equates popularity and validity.

Intellectual Relativism happens when people start with what they want to be true. From that wish they work backward. Sometimes they deliberately mislead others. Sometimes they start by fooling themselves. The story of the primatologist points out that scientists are just as human as everyone else.

Scientists are human. Because they can be seduced by what they want to be true, the scientific community has, since the Renaissance, developed a set of processes and criteria for assuring the integrity of scientific findings. They’re the benchmark. While you can’t easily apply them all in a business setting, they’re still worth understanding. Compare your confidence in the ideas and evidence available to you with how scientists achieve confidence in the theories and evidence they use.

The short version:

  • Other scientists must review the research.
  • Independent laboratories must reproduce the results.
  • Occam’s razor picks the winner. When two explanations account for all the known data, the simpler of the two — the one that assumes the fewest “entities” — is preferred.
  • Evidence isn’t fact; conclusions aren’t evidence. “The National Weather Service measured the temperature at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport on October 8, 2005 at noon,” is a fact. “The temperature was 45 degrees Fahrenheit,” is evidence. “The earth was warmer in the 1990s than the 1980s,” is a conclusion based on the evidence.Evidence is subject to sampling error, flaws in experimental design or apparatus, and the desire of the scientist to support a preferred hypothesis — sources of doubt that make evidence less reliable than fact. Conclusions are susceptible to all the problems with evidence, and to flaws in logic. That evidence isn’t fact and conclusions aren’t evidence are important reasons independent laboratories must reproduce results before they’re accepted by the scientific community.
  • Evidence can only disprove explanations — by testing predictions. It can’t prove them.To illustrate this point, attributable to the philosopher Karl Popper: Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that the bending of space-time by mass causes gravity. It makes specific predictions about what (for example) astronomers should find when observing massive objects. When astronomers observe what the theory predicts, they haven’t proved general relativity right. They’ve failed to disprove it.By now, scientists have falsified every other explanation they can think of, so they’re confident general relativity should be trusted. Confident, not certain.To the extent scientific explanations are to be trusted more than those derived from other ways of knowing, it’s because scientists deal in doubt, not certainty. The next observation could point out a hole in the theory, or someone could construct a new explanation that also accounts for what’s been observed thus far, perhaps making general relativity a special case, as Newtonian physics is to general relativity.

    No good scientist who’s being careful about phrasing ever expresses certainty about anything. It violates the protocol.

The philosophy of science is a pretty dry topic, and scientists deal with a different challenge from business managers. Scientists are paid to find the best explanations of what’s going on in the universe. Business managers are paid to make the best decisions they can and still make their deadlines. So the applicability of all this might not be clear.

We’ll get to practical techniques next week. For now: While peer review and independent reproduction of results are unrealistic in most business settings, you can certainly apply Occam’s razor. You can recognize the difference between facts, evidence, and conclusions.

Most important of all, you can take this lesson to the bank: When you have no doubt, you’re certainly misleading yourself. And if you mislead yourself, you won’t lead anyone else very well.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

This column is going to sound political, but it isn’t. It’s going to strike many readers as partisan, but it isn’t that either. Maybe it’s defensive. And it’s much longer than I usually allow for a KJR, for which I apologize. Stay with me — it’s about the rise of intellectual relativism, a subject that’s highly relevant to you as an IT leader.

The starting point is last week’s column, in which I mentioned recent climatological research reporting that hurricanes have doubled in total destructive power over the past 30 years, and that global warming is the likely cause. In response, many of you suggested, with varying degrees of emphasis, that I should keep politics out of this column.

I do. I don’t, however, keep scientific research out of this column. That most of my correspondents equated the reporting of scientific consensus with inclusion of political bias reflects the growth of intellectual relativism — an epistemological position that says all explanations are equally valid — and the attendant fog of persuasive disinformation it depends on. Intellectual relativism isn’t restricted to discussions of public policy. It’s alive and well, residing in the halls and boardrooms of many corporations in America, which is why it matters to you.

Global warming got this discussion started in KJR, though, and it makes an excellent case study for the problem of intellectual relativism. So with some misgivings for spending most of a column on a scientific, as opposed to IT-related topic, here goes:

George Will, on ABC’s 9/25 edition of This Week, made some points on the subject, as covered in a story posted on NewsMax:

Environmentalists who claim global warming has caused an increase in U.S. hurricane activity obviously haven’t checked with the National Hurricane Center, which has kept statistics on major storms over the last 150 years.

That’s probably because those statistics yield one inescapable conclusion: If global warming has had any impact at all on hurricane activity, it’s lessened – not increased – the frequency of major hurricanes. From 1901 until 1950 – when the U.S. economy was a fraction of its current size and fossil fuel consumption was next to nil – there were 34 hurricanes rated at Catagory 3, 4 or 5 in size on the Saffir Simpson scale.

In the latter half of the twentieth century – when U.S. manufacturing exploded, automobile use skyrocketed and rampant consumerism was the order of the day, hurricane activity actually decreased by nearly 20 percent, declining to 28 Catagory 3-5 hurricanes from 1951 to 2000.

That’s almost as low as the last five decades of the 19th century – when the overwhelming majority of Americans lived on farms, manual power was generated by watermills and cars had yet to be invented. From 1851 to 1900 there were 27 major hurricanes in the U.S.

The scientific source of the above is The Deadliest, Costliest, And Most Intense United States Hurricanes From 1900 To 2000. As is clear from the title, it tabulated only hurricanes that hit the United States — a fact Will glossed over and NewsMax failed to mention.

A different NHC article, Tropical Cyclone Climatology, provided a graph with complete counts of Category 3 and higher hurricanes. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that if you’re interested in a link between global warming and hurricane activity you should look at the world, not U.S. landfalls. That’s why it’s called “global” warming, not “United States” warming. These numbers tell quite a different tale:

1850 — 1899: 61, or 1.22 per year

1900 — 1949: 79, or 1.58 per year

1950 — 1999: 125, or 2.50 per year

2000 — 2004: 18, or 3.60 per year

(For the 2000 — 2004 data, straight-line extrapolation from just four years has a big error bar, but I decided to save you the time. Also to save statisticians some effort, simple linear regression of the underlying annual data yields a slope of 1.3% and a correlation coefficient of 0.12 with p = 0.93. Eyeballing the data strongly suggests a straight-line trend pushing up on an underlying cyclical phenomenon — a bit like the path your yo-yo might take as you climb a ramp — but I’m not enough of a statistician to perform the necessary analysis.)

Again: The questions surrounding global warming — whether it’s real or a measurement artifact; its magnitude; its causes; and its likely consequences — are matters of scientific research, not political debate. They’re resolvable through careful observation, measurement, experimentation, and mathematical modeling. At this juncture, here’s the state of consensus in the research community, as best I can assess:

  • CO2’s status as a “greenhouse gas” is basic physics, not up for debate.
  • Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have increased 25% since the industrial revolution began — a conclusion reached through analysis of “fossilized” atmosphere recovered from polar ice cores, which no reputable researcher disputes.
  • Global temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations are strongly correlated in the paleontological record — a generally accepted conclusion.
  • Global average temperatures, while difficult to measure accurately, appear to have risen (by roughly one degree Fahrenheit, distributed unevenly across the earth’s surface). The scientific debate over the amount of warming and how best to measure it is active and ongoing.

That’s the state of scientific consensus. The political consensus has no more value than that of the legendary kindergarten class that decided the gender of a stray cat by voting (the result: “Ben” gave birth to a litter of kittens a few weeks later).

Which, at last, brings us back to the issue behind the issue: Intellectual relativism. It’s on the increase. In corporations its primary manifestation is decision-making driven by politics — by weighing the biases and relative influence of decision-makers, tailoring and shading the evidence to fit. Its impact on you as a working IT manager is immense, if for no other reason than that businesses that allow it to fester won’t last. Rooting it out is a huge challenge.

And this column is already way too long, so techniques for applying the lessons drawn from the global warming controversy to dealing with intellectual relativism in the workplace will have to wait until next week.

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