Seth's Blog

To see the usual arguments for global warming, look no further than this list, which gives the most popular “skeptic arguments” with rebuttals. The person who made this list presumably read lots of stuff and tried to select the best rebuttal in every case.

That reading led to this:

Skeptic argument: Models are unreliable.

Rebuttal: Models successfully reproduce temperatures since 1900 globally, by land, in the air and the ocean.

Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say Models have successfully predicted temperatures . . . 

These models have many adjustable parameters. With enough adjustable parameters, you can reproduce anything. The only reasonable test of a model with many adjustable parameters is how well it predicts.

Hal Pashler and I wrote a paper pointing out that psychologists had been doing something similar for 50 years — passing off models with many adjustable parameters as reliable when in fact they hadn’t been tested — when their ability to predict hadn’t been measured. One explanation of the current global warming scare is that there is something to be afraid of. A more plausible explanation, I believe, is that — again — one group of scientists is passing off complex models with many adjustable parameters as reliable when in fact they haven’t been tested.

A friend of mine majored in design at Tsinghua and is now working as a designer. Her opinion of her education has gone down. Designers from other schools are better trained than she is, she sees.

At Tsinghua, her teachers denigrated learning to use this or that software program. To design something using a computer program was to be a design farmer, they said. They preferred to talk about big ideas. “I hate big ideas,” said my friend.

Her comments reminded me of law professors who would rather teach philosophy than how to be a lawyer (and are surprised when students play solitaire during class) and education professors who don’t teach their students how to teach.

A Chinese friend of mine said that if you are at a high level in the Chinese government, you have a great deal of freedom. Below that level, however, you have very little freedom: You spend all your time doing exactly what your bosses want. And you have no idea how long the slavery will last. American government is different, she said. High American officials have less freedom than those outside government. I agree.

My friend disliked Obama because he constantly spoke about big ideals (“liberty” and so on) that my friend thought were very difficult to achieve. In other words, he constantly made promises that he was not going to be able to keep. She noted Obama’s inexperience and said that people in other areas of government are very smart and would outmaneuver him. (Exhibit 1: Goldman Sachs.) This doesn’t happen in the Chinese government because the people at the top are very old and have come up through the ranks, all the way from the bottom. Because of that long experience, they better understand how to get the rest of the government to do what they want.

In China, rich people fear the government. They must do what the government wants or they will be squashed. In America, she said, rich people do not fear the government. If anything, they tell the government what to do. I agree. Many people, such as Hayek and Milton Friedman, want less government. But I have yet to hear one of them answer the point that if government becomes too weak, rich people will control it.

• Nassim Taleb, in this interview, sounds quite a bit like Jane Jacobs
• a fascinating prisoner puzzle
• behind the MMR/vaccine fraud
• a great Book TV program about Lockheed Martin — a parable of American governance

Katy Steinmetz, a writer for Time, made a list called “Nutty Health Claims of 2010″ and “2010: The Year in Preposterous Health Claims.” The list of 12 includes:

• omega-3 makes kids smarter
• probiotics that prevent colds and flu
• Dannon’s probiotics as wellness elixir

Preposterous!

Marion Nestle, the New York University nutrition expert, has often said she thinks the health claims made for yogurt are bogus — at least when big companies make them. She recently called Dannon’s claims “a case study of successful marketing”.