Utopia, you are standing in it!

I enjoyed this book and I believe it provides an important insight. It fits well with Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman).  The  author starts with a deliberately fuzzy/loose pragmatic definition of  “fact” and proceeds to explore the quantitative aspects of evolution (or temporal characteristics) of knowledge and information. He uses mathematical and statistical tools to explore patterns, suggesting common or universal mechanisms. In addition, the pitfalls and biases of  dissemination of knowledge, the persistence of misinformation and the inertia for “changing our minds, when the facts change” are also explored.

I learned a lot from this book. However, I found the repetition of the statement  underlying regularity not an argument.  I felt that the underlying potential mechanisms that lead to these regularities were tantalizingly suggested but not explored. The patterns, which I agree we do not usually consider for information/knowledge, are important but I would have liked more…

The post title relates to a phrase (from Andrew Gelman) quoted  in “The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom” by  Stephen Stigler. It refers to the frequently hidden, frequently unrecognized (or recognized) decisions in the path from hypothesis to conclusion.

I enjoyed and learned a lot from this book.  It provides a historical framework under-pinning the authors construction of a framework to understand statistical science. This naturally includes misconceptions, personalities and unintended sources of progress or innovation.

The seven pillars are:

• aggregation
• information
• likelihood
• intercomparison
• regression
• design
• residual

Professor Stigler also hints at an emerging eighth pillar.

I particularly enjoyed this excerpt (quote from Alfred Marshall 1885):

the most reckless and treacherous of all theorists is he who professes to let facts and figures speak for themselves, who keeps in the background the part he has played, perhaps unconsciously, in selecting and grouping them and in suggesting the argument post hoc…

This graph represents our energy resources in 2006. There’s been a lot of fracking since then, and a lot more discoveries, so it would probably be different today, but not all that much. It is, however, a good visual to illustrate the utter absurdity of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s assumptions about eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with “renewables.” Eliminate the Nuclear energy, the Natural Gas., the Petroleum,  and Coal. Ignore the Hydro because that will not grow — and O-C assumes that tiny pink 2.4% can not only power our industrial society, but also all the high-speed rail she has in mind to replace all the automobiles and airplanes she plans to eliminate.

Lots of worried talk about the “greenhouse gasses” in the atmosphere, but the primary “greenhouse gas” is water vapor – clouds. The carbon dioxide is the same stuff we exhale –a natural fertilizer for plants. The slight rise…

This graph was published on January 2nd, 2019 by Roy W. Spencer PhD. Dr. Spencer runs the satellite program that measures worldwide temperatures, with Dr. John Christy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.  It’s the closest we can get to an official global temperature.

The 2018 globally averaged temperature anomaly, adjusted for the number of days in each month, is +0.23 deg. C, making 2018 the 6th warmest year in the now-40 year satellite record of global lower tropospheric temperature variations. The 2018 globally averaged temperature anomaly, adjusted for the number of days in each month, is +0.23 deg. C, making 2018 the 6th warmest year in the now-40 year satellite record of global lower tropospheric temperature variations.

To clarify, that’s 25 100ths of one degree, and 23 100ths of one degree. Run for the hills!

Temperatures didn’t use to be such a big deal. There were certain vocations where people…

The Reserve Bank Governor is proposing that banks should have to fund a much larger share of their balance sheet with equity rather than debt.  So weak is our system that one unelected person –  on this occasion, one without much specialist expertise – can, more less on a whim, compel bank shareholders to either put billions of dollars more into their businesses, or to markedly downsize those businesses (most probably some combination of the two).    So long as the Governor jumps through the right procedural hoops, there are no appeals, and there is little formal public accountability.     Perhaps political pressure will mount on the Bank?  In these circumstances, one can only hope so.

Today I wanted to focus on a couple of strands in the arguments often used by academics and regulators to support the case for higher minimum capital requirements.   (Upfront I should say…

Here we have Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a couple who were both biology professors at The Evergreen State College (TESC) but were driven out of that place by Authoritarian Leftists whose actions, among the students, bordered on thuggery. Since then they’ve been academic nomads, but have made several videos and podcasts about their experiences and about biology.

Here both Bret and Heather discuss a number of topics, most prominent the touchy issue of sex and gender. The discussion is good and well worth 26 minutes of your time, as it shows how you can be a progressive without having to distort biology or truckle to Blank Slateist ideologues.

The YouTube notes:

In this conversation with Rebel Wisdom’s David Fuller they explain how their experience at Evergreen has influenced their discussions of sex and gender. Heather and Bret will be appearing at the first ‘Rebel Wisdom Summit’ on May 12…

Milton Friedman and Phil Donahue.

At the conclusion of her new book, OPERATION PAPERCLIP: THE SECRET INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM THAT NAZI SCIENTISTS BROUGHT TO AMERICA, Annie Jacobsen discusses her battles with American military and intelligence authorities in trying to obtain documents relating to the employ of Nazi scientists by the United States Army and other government agencies following World War II.  In her discussion a common theme reaches fruition in 2012 as the Department of Defense finally declassified a 1945 list of Nazi doctors who were sought for “mercy killings and medical murder cases.”  On that list were seven Nazi doctors who were employed by the U.S. government even though “U.S. Army intelligence knew all along that these doctors were implicated in murder yet chose to classify the list and hire the doctors.” (437)  These doctors were hired as part of Operation Paperclip a postwar program designed to use the technological and medical knowledge of Nazi…

Today the Polish government is ruled by the Law and Justice Party (abbreviated to PiS).  It is a national-conservative, and Christian democratic party, currently the largest in the Polish parliament.  In the last two years the party which is extremely nationalistic, has created controversies on several fronts.  It is a country where hateful language is pervasive leading to the murder of the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz on January 13 of this year.   Last February the government passed a new amendment to the Law of Remembrance making it a crime to refer to Nazi concentration camps as “Polish,” further it threatens legal punishment for anyone who publicly implies Poles’ involvement in Nazi crimes against the Jews.  Further, a few days ago on January 27th, Polish far right nationalists gathered at the Auschwitz concentration camp to protest, at the same time as officials and survivors marking the 74th anniversary of the camp’s liberation in…