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Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)

we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.

WorldNetDaily regularly publishes falsehoods (e.g. about Obama's birthplace) and wild conspiracy theories (e.g. about Democratic plans to create concentration camps) that have earned the site criticism even on the right. The organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, rejected Farah's request to host a Birther panel at the annual event in 2009. That said, WND is influential. Its stories regularly find their way onto the big cable channels (Trump's "$2 million" claim is a good example) and even get picked up by members of Congress.

I wrote back to Farah with just one example, the latest, of WND's credibility problem. That would be this column by WND's Jack Cashill on "Barack Obama's missing year." The lead of the column aimed to debunk a famous photo of a young Obama flanked by his grandparents on a bench in New York City. As proof, Cashill embedded a YouTube video that purported to show that Obama had been photoshopped into the picture, and that the real image included only Obama's grandparents.

Unfortunately for Cashill the supposed "genuine" image -- the one without Obama -- was itself a sloppy photoshop job that still included part of Obama's knee between his grandparents. This was pointed out by Media Matters about eight hours after Cashill's column was published on WND.

Breaking the cultural code damages a person’s reputation, and perhaps one’s career. Britain’s Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke recently had to apologize for saying that some rapes were less serious than others, implying the need for legal discrimination. The parade of gaffes and subsequent groveling apologies has become a regular feature of public life. In his classic essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill defended free speech on the ground that free inquiry was necessary to advance knowledge. Restrictions on certain areas of historical inquiry are based on the opposite premise: the truth is known, and it is impious to question it. This is absurd; every historian knows that there is no such thing as final historical truth.

It is not the task of history to defend public order or morals, but to establish what happened. Legally protected history ensures that historians will play safe. To be sure, living by Mill’s principle often requires protecting the rights of unsavory characters. David Irving writes mendacious history, but his prosecution and imprisonment in Austria for “Holocaust denial” would have horrified Mill.

the pressure for “political correctness” rests on the argument that the truth is unknowable. Statements about the human condition are essentially matters of opinion.  Because a statement of opinion by some individuals is almost certain to offend others, and since such statements make no contribution to the discovery of truth, their degree of offensiveness becomes the sole criterion for judging their admissibility. Hence the taboo on certain words, phrases, and arguments that imply that certain individuals, groups, or practices are superior or inferior, normal or abnormal; hence the search for ever more neutral ways to label social phenomena, thereby draining language of its vigor and interest.

Another example illustrating the central dogma is the French optical telegraph.

The telegraph was an optical communication system with stations consisting of large movable pointers mounted on the tops of sixty-foot towers. Each station was manned by an operator who could read a message transmitted by a neighboring station and transmit the same message to the next station in the transmission line.

The distance between neighbors was about seven miles. Along the transmission lines, optical messages in France could travel faster than drum messages in Africa. When Napoleon took charge of the French Republic in 1799, he ordered the completion of the optical telegraph system to link all the major cities of France from Calais and Paris to Toulon and onward to Milan. The telegraph became, as Claude Chappe had intended, an important instrument of national power. Napoleon made sure that it was not available to private users.

Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners. But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.

It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.

But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed. He has been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype. Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow. "If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate," he said. "It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law." Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.

Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet. Sir Tim said that he understands the need for traffic management but any move to discriminate between different content businesses would be a step too far.

"What you lose when you do that is you lose the open market," he said. "What the companies gain is that they get complete control of you." But Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute warned that enshrining net neutrality in law had its dangers. "Once you allow the state in, you open the door to all sorts of regulation of the internet controls on content creation," he said.

There’s another  article on sex differences that appeared Sunday, published in the Guardian by Madeleine Bunting. The basic idea seems to be that there’s all this Bad Science – her term – that says that men and women are hardwired to be different, but now – yay! – there’s Good Science, which shows that men and women are both from Mars, rather than having separate metaphorical planetary origins.

I predict that you will find this review informative. If you do, you will congratulate my foresight. If you don’t, you’ll forget I was wrong.

My playful intro summarizes the main thesis of Gardner’s excellent book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway.

In Future Babble, the research area explored is the validity of expert predictions, and the primary researcher examined is Philip Tetlock. In the early 1980s, Tetlock set out to better understand the accuracy of predictions made by experts by conducting a methodologically sound large-scale experiment.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and Real Climate member based at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has claimed that Energy & Environment (E&E) has "effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor's political line." The journal denies the claim, and, according to Schmidt, has threatened to take further action unless he retracts it.

Every paper that is submitted to the journal is vetted by a number of experts, she said. But she did not deny that she allows her political agenda to influence which papers are published in the journal. "I'm not ashamed to say that I deliberately encourage the publication of papers that are sceptical of climate change," said Boehmer-Christiansen, who does not believe in man-made climate change.

Simon Singh, a science writer who last year won a major libel battle with the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), said: "A libel threat is potentially catastrophic. It can lead to a journalist going bankrupt or a blogger losing his house. A lot of journalists and scientists will understandably react to the threat of libel by retracting their articles, even if they are confident they are correct. So I'm delighted that Gavin Schmidt is going to stand up for what he has written." During the case with the BCA, Singh also received a libel threat in response to an article he had written about climate change, but Singh stood by what he had written and threat was not carried through.

James Delingpole criticised me in this blog ("The curious double standards of Simon Singh")

Quotes from Delingpole's blog are in blue. 1.      “Yet in the opinion of Singh, the worldwide Climate Change industry is the one area where the robust scepticism and empiricism he professes to believe in just doesn’t apply.” No – where I have said this? Climate change is an area that requires extreme skepticism, i.e., questioning and challenging. However, despite all the challenges, the climate change consensus remains solid. (By the way, I thought Professor Nurse explained this to you quite clearly and slowly.)

2.      “Apparently, the job of a journalist is just to accept the word of “the scientists” and take it as read that being as they are “scientists” their word is God and it brooks no questioning or dissent.” No – where have I said this? I have been a science journalist for almost two decades and where there are differing opinions it is important to consider the overall evidence. And, having been a scientist for a short time (PhD, particle physics), I realise that nobody should be treated as a god.

Letter sent by by my good friend Samuel C. Wee to ST on the 8th of March, quoting statistics from their Page One infographic: (Read this closely!) I read with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (“School system still ‘best way to move up’”; Monday). It is indeed heartwarming to learn that only 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university. I firmly agree with our Education Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, who declared that “education remains the great social leveller in Singaporean society”. His statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination. In recent years, there has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was greatly reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s great faith in our “unique, meritocratic Singapore system”, which ensures that good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students. I would like to commend Ms Rachel Chang on her outstanding article. On behalf of the financially disadvantaged students of Singapore, I thank the fine journalists of the Straits Times for their tireless work in bringing to Singaporeans accurate and objective reporting.

What was actually published last Friday, March 18th 2011 A reassuring experience of meritocratic system I READ with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (‘School system still ‘best way to move up”; March 8). It is indeed heartwarming to learn that almost 50 per cent of children from one- to three-room flats make it to university and polytechnics. I firmly agree with Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who said that education remains the great social leveller in Singapore society. His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort. There has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s own experience of the ‘unique, meritocratic Singapore system’: he grew up in a three-room flat with five other siblings, and his medical studies at the National University of Singapore were heavily subsidised; later, he trained as a cancer surgeon in the United States using a government scholarship. The system also ensures that good, able students from the middle- and high-income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.

To give me the byline would be an outrageous flattery and a gross injustice to the forum editors of ST, who took the liberty of taking my observations about the statistics and subtly replacing them with more politically correct (but significantly and essentially different) statistics.

The editorial remains up on the Post, "sixteen hours after its claims were shown to be false and hysterical, it's still there, with no correction or apology," according to James Fallows at The Atlantic. Fallows responded to Rubin's piece, in a blog post titled, "The Washington Post Owes the World an Apology for this Item," writing that: No, this is a sobering reminder for those who think it's too tedious to reserve judgment about horrifying events rather than instantly turning them into talking points for pre-conceived views. On a per capita basis, Norway lost twice as many people today as the U.S. did on 9/11. Imagine the political repercussions through the world if double-9/11-scale damage had been done by an al-Qaeda offshoot. The unbelievably sweeping damage is there in either case.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in another Comment at The Atlantic, echoed Fallow's comments on Rubin's piece: As for this case, my golden rule is that as terrible as it is to be wrong, it many times more terrible to pretend that wrong is right. As of this wring, Rubin has issued no correction in any form. That is shameful.

In an op-ed at Jadaliyya, Shiva Balaghi calls the events a "Tragic Day for Norway; Shameful Day for Journalism." She summarizes her own view of the reports: I read a story in the New York Times that squarely pointed to jihadi groups angered at the war in Afghanistan...The Financial Times was no better. From the start, it reported allegations of Islamic terrorism, continuing with this view well into its evening reporting by which time an arrest had already been made in the case... Judy Woodruff’s interview with a Norwegian journalist that aired on PBS’s Newshour followed a similar scenario. In this 24/7 news cycle driven even more mad by terror experts who conduct research using google and tweet a mile a minute, journalists should exercise caution... Perhaps today the neo-Nazis in Europe count Muslims among the problems that drive their madness. But to a large degree, these right wing extremist views shaped twentieth century Europe.

TOC, Mr Brown, Leong Sze Hian and other bloggers received the information from Tan’s office yesterday and honoured the embargo on the news.

As the presumptive government-endorsed candidate, Tan's move can be seen as a landmark in relations between the state and Singapore’s intrepid and often unruly alternative online media. Until now, the government has refused to treat any of these sites as engaging in bona fide journalism. Bloggers have long complained that government departments do not respond to requests for information. When The Online Citizen organised a pre-election forum for all political parties to share their ideas last December, the People’s Action Party would have nothing to do with it. TOC highlighted the ruling party’s conspicuous absence by leaving an empty chair on stage. The election regulations’ ban on campaigning on the “cooling off” day and polling day also discriminate against citizen journalism: only licenced news organisations are exempted.

The sudden change of heart is undoubtedly one result of May’s groundbreaking general election. Online media were obviously influential, and the government may have decided that it has no choice but to do business with them.

a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

I have a paper in this week’s issue of Science on the cloud feedback

clouds are important regulators of the amount of energy in and out of the climate system. Clouds both reflect sunlight back to space and trap infrared radiation and keep it from escaping to space. Changes in clouds can therefore have profound impacts on our climate.

A positive cloud feedback loop posits a scenario whereby an initial warming of the planet, caused, for example, by increases in greenhouse gases, causes clouds to trap more energy and lead to further warming. Such a process amplifies the direct heating by greenhouse gases. Models have been long predicted this, but testing the models has proved difficult.

Jones said in a statement, in which he called the cancellation "a dangerous affront to the rights of performing artists and their audiences." Jones particularly criticized the NAACP for endorsing the cancellation. "I'm a life member of the NAACP and proud of it," he said. "Denying an artist an opportunity to entertain an audience because of somebody's wrongheaded political viewpoint is just plain un-American. I have fought for equal rights all of my life, and that is why I am speaking out on this."

Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet's temperature.

Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming. In no other field would Muller's dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naive.

"We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious," Muller says, over a cup of tea. "We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find." Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? "We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close," he says.

Lovelock, creator of the controversial Gaia hypothesis, is certainly still capable of original thinking, and it was his verdict on recent environmental controversies—such as the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia—that his audience wanted to hear.

The Gaia hypothesis, which made Lovelock the darling of the emerging green movement of the 1960s, proposes that life on earth is closely coupled with the surface, ocean and atmosphere. Each element co-operates to keep conditions relatively constant—at least in the absence of exceptional external forces. Initially, he was ridiculed: the idea that inanimate objects such as rocks are active participants in a super-organism was understandably controversial, and rejected by most scientists. But the idea that life exerts a strong influence on the environment has come to be widely accepted.

Lovelock has tended to be at the apocalyptic end of the climate change spectrum. He predicted in 2006 that average temperatures would rise by 8°C in temperate regions by the end of the 21st century, leading to billions of deaths and leaving only the polar regions habitable.

Although it may be a form of arrogance to attempt the management of one’s own death, is it better to surrender that management to the arrogance of someone else? We know we can’t avoid dying, but perhaps we can avoid dying badly.

Dodging a bad death has become more complicated over the past 30 or 40 years. Before the advent of technological creations that permit vital functions to be sustained so well artificially, medical ethics were less obstructed by abstract definitions of death.

generally agreed upon criteria for brain death have simplified some of these confusions, but they have not solved them. The broad middle ground between our usual health and consciousness as the expected norm on the one hand, and clear death of the brain on the other, lacks certainty.

What can Darwin teach us about morality?At least to some extent, we are a species with an evolved psychology. Like other animals, we have inherited behavioural tendencies from our ancestors, since these were adaptive for them in the sense that they tended to lead to reproductive success in past environments.

But what follows from this?

we are not evolution's slaves. All other things being equal, we should act in accordance with the desires that we actually have