Rules for Contrarians: Don’t whine

This is fantastic advice:

If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies.
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If you’re writing a contrarian piece properly, you ought to be well aware of what point it looks like you’re making, because the entire point is to make a defensible argument which strongly resembles a controversial one.

So having done this intentionally, you don’t get to complain that people have “misinterpreted” your piece by taking you to be saying exactly what you carefully constructed the argument to look like you were saying. Fair enough, you might not care to defend the controversial point it looked like you were making, but a degree of diffidence is appropriate here, because the confusion is entirely and intentionally your fault.

The chapter on global warming in SuperFreakonomics is set up to read as a debunking of the  relationship between carbon dioxide and rising global temperatures. The authors compare current worries about climate change with a flashpan global cooling scare in the 1970s that turned out to be a false alarm. They point out that natural processes produce a lot of greenhouse gases (without mentioning that those processes are part of a cycle in which the gases are reabsorbed). They pull out the “little-discussed fact” that the earth has cooled over the past decade.

The actual point of all this handwaving isn’t controversial: the relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperatures isn’t simple. But the tone of the piece leaves little doubt as to what one should conclude: people who worry about global warming are making a big deal of a problem that could be nothing, and is anyway very easy to fix.

It’s no wonder they found themselves in a fight.

via Brad DeLong.

My earlier takes here and here.