Utopia, you are standing in it!

1. Intellectuals and a century of political hero worship William Anthony Hay, Modern Age
2. John Stuart Mill: a not so secular saint James Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books
3. Irving Babbitt’s history of ideas Simon Brown, JHIBlog
4. Classical knowledge, lost & found: a history in seven cities David Abulafia, Literary Review

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…