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Clive James on scepticism

Yes, it was good, wasn't it. I started listening by chance but quickly paid much closer attention.
 
Ah, Saturday Night Clive!

My favorite show to watch on BBC when I was living in the NL.


I recall him mocking US home shopping channels. He pretty much just played some normal ones, and the audiences burst out laughing all over the place from the hokey, transparent sales pitches.

12 years later when I went back, actual infomercials were all over the place. They had spread.

I'm sorry. :(
 
I think its changed, it has him on the postal strike, and labour now. Have I missed it? I always liked his dry humour, havnt seen him for a while.
 
shandyjan said:
I think its changed, it has him on the postal strike, and labour now. Have I missed it? I always liked his dry humour, havnt seen him for a while.
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Yes, as I said, it was only up for another day or so after I posted. The podcast is the latest episode of a weekly programme.

You can hear the section that caused a lot of comments, which was about global warming, in the latest podcast of Feedback, about halfway through. I think that some may take his comments as being in support of AGW deniers, but I think it was more carefully worded than that.


Ah, I've just found that a written version of the episode is online here.

Clive James said:
In fact the number of scientists who voice scepticism has lately been increasing. But there were always some, and that's the only thing I know about the subject. I know next to nothing about climate science. All I know is that many of the commentators in newspapers who are busy predicting catastrophe don't know much about it either, because they keep saying that the science is settled and it isn't.

Speaking as one who lives at sea level, I don't relish the prospect of my granddaughter spending her life on a raft 30 feet above where she now plays in the garden, but I still can't see that there is a scientific consensus. There are those for, and those against. Either side might well be right, but I think that if you have a division on that scale, you can't call it a consensus.
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zooterkin said:
YesI think that some may take his comments as being in support of AGW deniers, but I think it was more carefully worded than that.
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No. He was just denouncing the people who refer to skeptics as AGW deniers.

It's a nasty word to be called, denialist, because it calls up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust. In my homeland, Australia, there are some prominent intellectuals who are quite ready to say that any sceptic about man-made global warming is doing even worse than denying the Holocaust, because this time the whole of the human race stands to be obliterated.
Really they should know better, because the two events are not remotely comparable. The Holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn't happened yet, and there are plenty of highly qualified scientists ready to say that the whole idea is a case of too many of their colleagues relying on models provided by the same computers that can't even predict what will happen to the weather next week.
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Clive James stated "I know next to nothing about climate science" and then adopted the position of non-belief and equated that with skepticism.

That's not my understanding of what skepticism is!

I think we need to be aware of the difference between being sceptical (doubtful) and skepticism (the process of inquiry) otherwise we're in danger of allowing arguments like James's as being perceived as representing what skepticism is all about when it's quite the opposite.

His argument/reasoning is appallingly bad and merely advocates the position of doubt/non-acceptance/non-belief for non-smart reasons. That is not skepticism.
 
Some Thoughts on Skepticism

Breach of rule 4 removed.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles
 
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More On Clive James

I would like to say a few things about Clive James’ new book Cultural Amnesia. James’s book is prompted, to some extent, by the suspicion that a new age of barbarism is indeed descending. He has lots of company in this view. My recent memoir(5 volumes in 2500 pages) is also prompted by a similar intuition. But like the barbarism of the late Roman Empire in the West in the second and third century A.D., I take the view that a new religion is growing in our midst. Like Christianity which crept, half-hidden, along the foundations and against the background of an Augustan empire, the Baha’i Faith seems, thusfar, too insignificant to be noticed by history for it, too, is growing slowly, obscurely, insensibly in our modern and postmodern world.
I have removed most of this post for rule 4. While it appears that it is a mixture of his own work and word-for-word quotes from this article, It must be clearly labeled when you are using words that are not your own.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Tricky
 
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John Jackson said:
Clive James stated "I know next to nothing about climate science" and then adopted the position of non-belief and equated that with skepticism.

That's not my understanding of what skepticism is!

I think we need to be aware of the difference between being sceptical (doubtful) and skepticism (the process of inquiry) otherwise we're in danger of allowing arguments like James's as being perceived as representing what skepticism is all about when it's quite the opposite.

His argument/reasoning is appallingly bad and merely advocates the position of doubt/non-acceptance/non-belief for non-smart reasons. That is not skepticism.
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If it's not skepticism, then what is it?
 
Sounds like real scepticism to me.

I prefer to call what we do here “critical thinking” or “objective thinking” – for most people, “scepticism” seems to have negative connotations.
 
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