Underpaid Genius

That Indescribable Pink of The Financial Times - Christine Haughney via NYTimes.com

But color experts politely disagree about the actual color of The Financial Times. Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, said The Financial Times is actually “bisque.” She said it was a wise choice because its shade is considered a “ ‘tactile’ color — one that invites touch” and “a warm, welcoming, nurturing color.”

She added, “From a marketing perspective, the color is a great idea as it does catch the eye on the newsstand.”

Pink or not, looks like it will be sold soon, since Pearson — the owner — has announced that Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino is on the way out, after serving in that role since 1997. She was the first female CEO of a FTSE 100 company. Scardino will be replaced by John Fallon, the head of the company’s education division.

I have a deep-seated desire for novelty, and I am happy to learn that it’s not all bad:

John Tierney via  NYTimes.com

“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.

“It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”

Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia” and pointing to genetic evidence of its importance as humans migrated throughout the world. In her survey of the recent research, “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,” the journalist Winifred Gallagher argues that neophilia has always been the quintessential human survival skill, whether adapting to climate change on the ancestral African savanna or coping with the latest digital toy from Silicon Valley.

“Nothing reveals your personality more succinctly than your characteristic emotional reaction to novelty and change over time and across many situations,” Ms. Gallagher says. “It’s also the most important behavioral difference among individuals.” Drawing on the work of Dr. Cloninger and other personality researchers, she classifies people as neophobes, neophiles and, at the most extreme, neophiliacs. (To classify yourself, you can take a quiz on the Well blog.)

“Although we’re a neophilic species,” Ms. Gallagher says, “as individuals we differ in our reactions to novelty, because a population’s survival is enhanced by some adventurers who explore for new resources and worriers who are attuned to the risks involved.”

Good character traits for a world exploding with new, new, new. However, they warn about falling into the vortex (like Tumblr?):

“We now consume about 100,000 words each day from various media, which is a whopping 350 percent increase, measured in bytes, over what we handled back in 1980,” Ms. Gallagher says. “Neophilia spurs us to adjust and explore and create technology and art, but at the extreme it can fuel a chronic restlessness and distraction.”

She and Dr. Cloninger both advise neophiles to be selective in their targets. “Don’t go wide and shallow into useless trivia,” Ms. Gallagher says. “Use your neophilia to go deep into subjects that are important to you.” That’s a traditional bit of advice, but to some dopamine-charged neophiliacs, it may qualify as news.

In these circumstances, with so many ways to go wrong, I am tempted to suggest that McLuhan now be ignored — to argue that his greatest long-term value has been his ability to provoke people who are, if not simply smarter than he was, then more patient, methodical, and scholarly. McLuhan’s attempts to account for the general landscape of media are fragmentary and inconsistent; those of his friend Neil Postman, who in following McLuhan’s example virtually created the field of “media ecology,” are far superior in evidential detail and conceptual clarity. McLuhan’s interest in literary modernism, and especially in Joyce and Pound, yielded a few memorable apothegms; but his student and friend Hugh Kenner, inspired and directed by him, produced major, field-transforming work on both writers. McLuhan’s thoughts about oral and literate cultures, dependent largely on his reading of a few scholars of ancient oral poetry, lack historical grounding and intellectual rigor; but another of his students, Walter Ong, would make a great scholarly career specifying the lineaments of that historical transformation. The work of each of those scholars is far superior to anything that McLuhan ever wrote.

The point isn’t what he wrote, but the impact he had on the world.

Which is, of course, exactly the meaning of ‘the medium is the message’.

You can’t judge McLuhan through the lens of literary theory or the history of science: he was a hand grenade at a garden party, and no one that tried to bend their minds around his twisted and self-referential pronouncements would every be the same. He wasn’t a TV science show: he was an oracle in a cave casting runes and reading the entrails of animals.

(Source: movimentos, via wildcat2030)

Stephan Lewandowsky and Michael Ashley via

A tacit presumption of many in the media and the public is that climate science is a brittle house of cards that can be brought down by a single new finding or the discovery of a single error.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Climate science is a cumulative enterprise built upon hundreds of years of research. The heat-trapping properties of CO₂ were discovered in the middle of the 19th century, pre-dating even Sherlock Holmes and Queen Victoria.

The resulting robust knowledge will not be overturned by a single new finding.

A further false presumption of the media is that scientific opinions must somehow be balanced by an opposing view. While balance is an appropriate conversational frame for the political sphere, it is wholly inappropriate for scientific issues, where what matters is the balance of evidence, not opinion.

At first glance, one might be tempted to forgive the media’s inappropriate inclusion of unfounded contrarian opinions, given that its function is to stimulate broad debate in which, ideally, even exotic opinions are given a voice.

But the media by and large do not report the opinions of 9/11 “truthers” who think that the attacks were an “inside job” of the Bush administration. The media also do not report the opinion of people who believe Prince Phillip runs the world’s drug trade. The fact that equally outlandish pseudo-scientific nonsense about climate science can be sprouted on TV by a cat palmist is evidence not of an obsession with balance but of a striking and selective failure of editorial responsibility.

What is needed instead of the false symmetry implied by “balance” is what the BBC calls impartiality – fact-based reporting that evaluates the evidence and comes to a reality-based conclusion.

The dangerously ill-formed

An example of a dangerously ill-informed opinion on how science works is the widely propagated myth that scientists somehow have a “vested interest”, presumably financial, in climate change. This myth has been carefully crafted by deniers to create a chimerical symmetry between their own ties to political and economic interests and the alleged “vested interests” of scientists.

In actual fact, climate scientists have as much vested interest in the existence of climate change as cancer researchers do in the existence of the human papilloma virus (HPV).

Cancer researchers are motivated by the fact that cervical cancer kills, and the scientists who developed the HPV vaccine did so to save lives, not to get their grants renewed.

Climate scientists are likewise motivated by the fact that climate change kills 140,000 people per year right at this very moment, according to the World Health Organization.

The scientists who have been alerting the public of this risk for nearly 20 years did so to save lives, not to get their grants renewed.

Climate scientists are being motivated by the realisation that humanity has got itself into serious trouble with climate change, and it will need the best scientific advice to navigate a solution.

As scientists, we ask not for special consideration by the media, but simply for the same editorial responsibility and quality control that is routinely applied to all other arenas of public discourse.

Selective failure of quality control and editorial responsibility when it comes to climate change presents a grave public disservice.

The climate change debate is the rotten fish to pull out and wave around any time one of the pious priests of journalism starts spouting about the imminent loss to Western civilization after we all switch to the unfact-checked, crowdsourced ‘echo chamber’ online. All that hard reporting by the wayside, journalistic integrity, blah de blah de blah. Total bullshit.

Journalists’ smug obsession with ‘balanced reporting’ is a cop out: it’s just laziness to call up a crackpot with no scientific credentials to ‘balance’ the nearly unanimous agreement of tens of thousands of climate scientists.

As Daniel Moynihan said, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”. Journalists seem to think they are getting at the facts by finding two sides of every story, but that’s willful nonsense in cases like climate change. Or worse, it’s outright capitulation to the wiles of power, those forces in society that seek to gain from obstructionism. And, yes, there are trillions to be made by allowing the world to spin into climate disaster.

The world’s newspapers should run climate change as the lead headline every day for a year and it would still not be enough to make up for the damage they have caused with their weaselly and capricious application of the rules of journalistic objectivism. Self-centered solipsists.