A girl sitting near me in this Beijing cafe is using a Sony Vaio Series X notebook. I’m blown away how thin and light it is. It cost about $1100 and has a 60G hard drive. Another girl near me is using an iPad, big and clunky by comparison.
Yesterday I attended interviews of Tsinghua students who want to transfer from another major to psychology. Almost all of it was in Chinese, but at one point, as part of an explanation of her interest in psychology, a student said (in English), “Psychology is the bridge between art and science.”
Well put. Maybe she read that somewhere, but I doubt it. I’d never heard it before. Notice how we think art can be done by anyone yet science can only be done by scientists (in extreme cases, only by physicists). Psychology, especially self-experimentation, may lead us out of that desert.
In a previous post I wrote about one of the silliest letters ever signed by a group of very smart people. At the end of my comment, I wrote:
If a letter from 100 United States Senators was full of spelling and grammar errors, would you trust it?
The letter was written by Peter Gleick, a MacArthur Prize winner. In a follow-up essay in the Huffington Post, he twice called ice floes “ice flows” (“there really are polar bears on ice flows”). Who says life doesn’t imitate art?
At the risk of being extremely self-centered, my self-experimentation is related to this depressing news:
The decline of [America's] estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.
The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter.
The bees vanish from the hives. What has surely happened is that their navigational systems have malfunctioned. Bees have dozens of things that must work for them to live, all of which need a certain environment. The bees live in a degraded environment. Which system will fail first? A neural system turns out to be the most sensitive to environmental degradation.
No one predicted this, nor did I predict that my self-experimentation would find many ways in which our environment, like the bees’s environment, has come to lack crucial stuff. But one reason for the two outcomes (colony collapse disorder, discoveries of my self-experimentation) is the same: The nervous system is especially sensitive to the environment. I’ve studied stuff controlled by the brain: sleep, weight, mood, arithmetic. Just as bee brains are the first part of bees to be crippled by a bad environment, our brains are the first part of us to improve when given a better environment.
A long list of National Academy of Science members, including several Nobel Prize winners, have published a letter in Science supporting the idea that humans have caused/will cause serious global warming. The letter is striking in several ways — how preachy it is, how it overstates its case, how it fails to provide evidence, and how it ignores the main arguments of skeptics (at least, intelligent skeptics).
It begins:
All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action.
“Citizens”, huh? This might interest third-graders; if they think that the brighter skeptics or most readers of Science don’t know these “basic scientific facts” they are mistaken.
The letter goes on to claim that the idea that humans are seriously warming the planet is as well established — at least, in the same category of firmly-established theories — as the conclusion that “today’s organisms evolved from ones living in the past”. That is an overstatement.
And the letter ends with hand-waving. In place of evidence that supports what they claim, they simply repeat the claims in detail (e.g., “Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes”).
The letter is unintentionally revealing. Here’s what I would consider reasonable evidence for serious human-generated global warming:
No. 1 isn’t clearly true; the Medieval Warm Period appears to be as warm as now. (Mann et al. understood this point; they tried to diminish the Medieval Warm Period.) No. 2 isn’t clearly true. For example, the 1930s may have been as warm as recent decades. No. 3 isn’t true. Models such as Hansen’s haven’t been shown to predict correctly. There’s no reason to take them seriously.
So No. 3 is off the table (current models are untrustworthy). That leaves Nos. 1 and 2, the failure of which to be clearly true points in the direction of no serious human-generated warming. If a theory makes two predictions, both of which appear wrong, it would be wise to start doubting the theory rather than lecture the rest of us on “basic scientific facts”.
This line of reasoning (ask whether the humans-have-caused-serious-warming idea makes correct predictions) isn’t complicated or obscure but does require you think for yourself rather than accept what you’re told. Apparently no one in this long list of distinguished scientists has done so.
If a letter from 100 United States Senators was full of spelling and grammar errors, would you trust it? Well, no . . . and you might wonder about a world with such a poorly-educated ruling class.
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