An anecdote from the UK, autumn 2013

With polls opening tomorrow for Scottish independence, I feel like sharing a little story. Last fall, A. and I were in Scotland and England for a couple of weeks*. In Scotland, there was more or less incessant discussion of independence: it was discussed constantly on BBC Scotland; there were leaflets, posters, and newspaper headlines; one cab driver gave us a long disquisition, during a short ride to the train station, on the evils of Blair's capitulation in Iraq and how an independent Scotland was nae goan tae be dragged intae wars over Israel and oil any longer by the U.S.

Now, if you travel through Scotland and then England as a tourist, there is a good chance that you will pull some money out of an ATM in Scotland and want to spend it in England. And although the UK shares a single currency, bills printed in Scotland look different from bills printed in England, and the Scottish variants are rare enough in England that paying with a Scottish £10 note in London elicits a moment of surprise. (Apparently it is not even technically legal tender in England, although everyone accepts it anyway.)

So, I was buying a sandwich at a Pret a Manger in London, and as the cashier was eyeballing both sides of the note, I remarked, "Got it in Scotland. Still a part of the UK, for now."

The cashier looked at me and laughed, saying instantly, "Oh, that's not going to change anytime soon."

"Really? It's all they can talk about up there. It's on the radio all the time..."

"Nah, it's not going to happen."

Her tone was casually amused, not so much Scotland shouldn't secede, that would be terrible and more Ha ha, this Yank, thinks that silliness up north is going to amount to something.

Her accent was English, of course; being American, I don't have the ear to pare it down more finely than that, but she was dark-skinned, of African or South Asian descent, and she sounded to me like any other working class London girl. I would venture to guess that this wasn't really your classic upper-class English snobbery about Northerners at work, at least not directly. I think, rather, that the English and Scottish, despite sharing a government, a currency, a language, and a relatively small island, amply interconnected by transit, media, and commerce, had developed completely different collective understandings of the state of the Scottish independence movement. There were, for example, no front-page headlines in London papers (that I can recall) about Scottish independence.

As it turns out, the Scots were right. Even if the current referendum fails, independence has clearly become a real possibility. And it's interesting to me how unseriously the English seemed to take the whole thing, even as late as last fall. Why didn't they see that how real this was? Did most English have no Scottish friends, did they not travel to Scotland? Or maybe the thought of the UK breaking apart was just too massive an event to ponder, sort of like how San Franciscans live in a state of day-to-day collective denial about The Big One?

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*Photos (more than any normal person would want to see): Edinburgh, Holyrood Park, Edradour distillery, Quiraing on the Isle of Skye, miscellaneous Scotland; London, York.

Why are so many IT workers climate change denialists?

Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems that climate change denialism is even more common among programmer and sysadmin types than among engineers and applied scientists more generally. Without diving into climate science*, here are a few brief hypotheses.

• Computers teach you to think in logic. Climate change modeling relies on the synthesis of a large number of statistical correlations rather than crisp rules of inference. Although logic and statistics are related (probability strictly generalizes logic, in a precise mathematical sense), a mind too narrowly conditioned to thinking in syllogisms may find it hard to reason statistically.
• Computing workers spend a lot of time on the Internet, and are disproportionately likely to be white, male, and libertarian. Climate change denialism is seen as not only respectable but intellectually heroic by (a significant faction of) the tribe of white, male, libertarian Internet users. (Arguably this merely begs the question, however, as the direction of causality may go the other way.)
• Computing workers are more socially isolated than people belonging to the same socioeconomic class. Because they spend less time around an intelligent, well-educated peer group, they are less socialized to defer to the knowledge of others.
• Computing workers spend all their time around intricate machines which (a) they understand better than the general public, and (b) the general public has become heavily reliant upon. This breeds arrogance, and arrogance breeds disrespect for expertise in general. Disrespect for climatologists is simply a special case of this phenomenon. This, however, is true of almost any profession involving specialized knowledge, from plumbing to physical therapy to nursing; so this factor might not prove decisive, except for the next bullet...
• Computing workers are, on average, more "autistic" and less "empathetic" on the autism/empathy spectrum. That is, they are unusually incompetent at modeling the mental and emotional states of other people. As a result, they fail to place themselves in the shoes of professional climatologists. That is, they do not imagine that most professional climatologists have worked hard to become experts in an esoteric and demanding (which is to say nerdy) intellectual discipline; might be driven by passion and curiosity and a desire to get it right; might along the way have been exposed to vast volumes of knowledge with which the lay observer is not familiar. In short, it is much easier to view literally thousands of scientists worldwide as a species of fools, liars, and conspirators when one assumes that they are nothing like oneself. (I strongly suspect that fewer IT workers would be climate change denialists if they realized that climate scientists are natural science geeks like them, whereas the primary beneficiaries of climate change denialism are corporate suits who were probably shoving geeks into lockers in high school.)

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*About which, er, you can say whatever you like, but I'm going to listen to this guy.