Things that might not be quite TRUE

One of the weirdest things about being a Real Researcher, For Reals in the grad school gig is that it really forces you to come face to face with the idea that actual papers with actual ideas that lots of actual people think are quite convincing might be wrong, even though lots of people think they're quite convincing.

I mean, there are several rather reputable ideas about treaty-making that I'm simply not sure about. For instance, there's the idea that building scientific knowledge-gathering into a negotiation convention is an important and helpful thing. A lot of people argue this about several important environmental treaties, like the acid rain accords. They might be right; but my guess is they are more boundedly right than generally right, and that the mechanism might be different than they think. I think the mechanism in the acid rain case might be that the increase in knowledge allowed negotiations to become more pointed, and hence more effective, but making it clearer who was at fault for what, and how much damage, precisely, those specific states were causing if they didn't stop. If that's true, then knowledge only helps in cases where specific individual damages can, by virtue of additional knowledge, be better traced to specific individual states. Increasing knowledge seems to have been only marginally helpful in the case of climate change, where this is not the case.

Or tonight, in a rather random book on the Law of the Sea negotiations, the author states at the outset that one critical factor in making the Third Round of negotiations more fruitful than prior rounds is the shift to use of a "single negotiating text", which he states is an innovation. Really? The idea of putting all your proposed bits of draft text in one document where they can be looked at together and slowly consolidated via negotiation is an innovation? And one that makes a serious difference? Coming up with the idea of creating a single negotiating text is really helpful, AND people never thought of it before the 1970s?

God help us all.