Jeff Id posted an interesting discussion of “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change”. One of the interesting findings is that based on the authors research, individuals perceived risk of climate change is inversely proportional to their score on a numeracy and science literacy test. I reproduced their graphical illustration of the relationship below:
When I read things like this, I always wonder how they measured scientific literacy and numeracy. I downloaded the article which contained the questions; the following were used to test science literacy:
| % correct | ||
| EARTHOT | The center of the Earth is very hot [true/false]. | 86% |
| HUMANRADIO | All radioactivity is man-made [true/false]. | 84% |
| LASERS | Lasers work by focusing sound waves [true/false]. | 68% |
| ELECATOM | Electrons are smaller than atoms [true/false]. | 62% |
| COPERNICUS1 | Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? | 72% |
| COPERNICUS2 | How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun? [one day, one month, one year] | 45% |
| DADGENDER | It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl [true/false]. | 69% |
| ANTIBIOTICS | Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria [true/false]. | 68% |
Only 45% answered the “Copernicus2” multiple choice question right. Those of you who are numerate are permitted to compare that to the fraction that should have gotten it correct by selecting from the 3 choices by randomly.
Come, come now, it’s 45%, you even inspired me to download and check it for myself.
Oh, c’mon, it takes the sun a day to go around the earth. Don’t observations trump models?
==========
RB– Yeah! I managed to fix that before I read your comment– but I did mistype.
Copernicus2 gives away the correct answer to Copernicus1. Not sure if this is an issue or not.
They missed a couple of very good science questions:
Does eating meat from cows exposed to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, “mad cow” disease) cause new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD) disease?
Correct answer. Yes
Should the blood and blood products of all people exposed to meat in the UK during the 1980’s and 90’s be banned worldwide?
Correct answer. Yes
Are then going to be hundreds of thousands of new cases of nvCJD annually in the UK due to eating contaminated beef?
Correct answer. Yes
Is the spending of more that 40 billion dollars on disposable surgical instruments and the destruction of the UK’s entire blood products industry a small price to pay to stop the spread of nvCJD?
Correct answer. Yes
Did the models of nvCJD infection correctly predicts the fact that the people in the UK are dropping like flies?
Correct answer. Yes
Thank the Lord that the government decided to use the precautionary principle and believed Sir John Collinge’s models.
http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/Risk/cjd08.jpg
On numeracy:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
12%
RB– A better question would be
“On numeracy:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. What decade is it?
Just….sad.
RB– A better question would be
“On numeracy:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. What decade is it?”
– Kumquat.
—-
It doesn’t seem impossible to energize a laser with huge sound energy, though it would be odd.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5114771
For question one, it’s right if you say it’s very hot. But hopefully not “several million degrees” 😉
I bet question two is very important to the difference observed. I guarantee you that many fanatical environmentalists would believe all radioactivity was the product of evil man. So fanatical environmentalists probably lowered the score of the climate worriers a bit!
Actually I find it strange that people were largely smart enough to know that radioactivity is a natural phenomenon (at least I hope that was the official right answer!!) but didn’t know the difference between a day, month, and year. Surely this can’t be the same group of people…
Er Jeff, they dont use sound to generate the laser. You spray, at supersonic speed, H2 into F2, generated from electrical stripping of SF6, to generate very energetic HF; which lases.
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. It’s right in the name that a laser is light/radiation. But there is some unfortunate ambiguity in the words “Lasers work by”-clearly they meant how the light part happens, not how one could stimulate the emission of said light.
How about Sono-luminesence?
This would be an example of stimulated light being produced by acoustic radiation. (LASEAR?)
It’s easier for to see how climate alarmism has spread itself over the years.
DocMartyn (Comment #78277)
June 29th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Everything I know about shock waves I learned on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_wave
I’ll have to leave it to the aeronautical engineers to sort this one out.
Frightening results. Imagine the results with anything more than the simplest of questions… true/false approaching 50/50.
So the likely fraction of people who really knew the answers:
The center of the Earth is very hot [true/false]. 72%
All radioactivity is man-made [true/false]. 68%
Lasers work by focusing sound waves [true/false]. 36%
Electrons are smaller than atoms [true/false]. 24%
Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? 44%
How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun? [one day, one month, one year] 17.5%
It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl [true/false]. 38%
Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria [true/false]. 36%
.
Looks to me like earth science teachers are doing a better job that others. 😉
I saw this at Language Log I thought it fit in with the numeracy test:
It’s a spoof of this:
Lucia #78284,
To paraphrase Redd Foxx: Beauty may be only skin deep, but stupid goes all the way to the bone.
Carrick (Comment #78280)-Flash pop? Of course part of the point of a laser is that it is unidirectional, highly focused. A popping bubble would produce omnidirectional radiating light. Pretty cool at any rate.
I haven’t check the paper yet but after what RB posted I would like to know the percentage that got this question right if asked:
2+2=4 [true/false]
DocMartyn,
The link only addressed the effects of shock waves in lasing, I thought it was a funny question because like I said, on the surface it doesn’t seem impossible that the population inversion couldn’t be achieved through sonic heating, although I’ve never heard of it.
I wonder how many Carrick bubbles it would take to make it work.
BBPM3 – busting bubbles per meter cubed.
One difficult thing about the question is all these women want to win the pageant and they know offending the judges is the sure road to losing. They’ve all been going through this at lower level pageants. Many of them have gotten to the point where they just aren’t really going to give a frank opinion if they think that will ding them with the judges.
Still, that by itself can’t explain the one who tried to introduce the notion that everything evolves– small towns into bigger ones and so on. (I think that was Miss Nevada.) Miss Minnesota did make sure she explained that she was Catholic, evolution is not on conflict with Catholocism and JPII was ok with evolution. All true. It’s likely she’s pretty bright– but she was babbling.
Heck, there is one who had lots of great elements in her “yes” answer. She even mentioned that it’s important to know about disease resistant bacteria etc. But she said it in a way that sounded sort of apologetic. It was almost as if she was afraid the judges would actually realize her answer was yes, they should teach evolution.
Oddly, looking back on school, I don’t specifically recollect covering evolution. I know I was aware of evolution, various types of pre-humans, charles darwin, and things like that. But I don’t know if I picked it up from National Geographic, television specials or school. I seem to recollect discussions of humans coming to the America’s over the Bering Straight and hunting large game, and I remember pictures of the evolution of horses. I think that was in school. But I don’t actually remember. I know I was aware of DNA/RNA etc by high school, but I don’t specifically remember learning it.
Oddly, I specifically remember learning about hooking up light bulbs in series or parallel in 4th grade. I thought it was pretty cool — but what was even cooler is that we took the Iowa basics the day after we learned about the light bulbs and I thought “wow! we just learned that yesterday!” when I read the question. Funny the things you remember.
@lucia. Lucia, you follow the monthly temperature data. Are you aware of any major adjustments that UAH made to their data? I was just looking at some of the current UAH data and I noticed that it seemed to have changed quite a bit from what I had before. For example, I have a record of UAH that I took in 2009. In that record January 2000 is shown as -0.19. But the current record has January 2000 as -0.33. That’s quite a drop, and it seems to have been done to all the earlier data, then less so as you get closer in time. But that change wasn’t made in RSS. As a result, the slope of the trend for RSS and UAH that I had in 2009 was very close. Now the slope for the two is very different. Do you have any idea when this happened and why it happened?
Tilo– I don’t download and save any more. I do have old values stored on a backup— but I don’t organize those for later checking.
Oh…. but there is an explanation for a big drop. Roy changed his baseline. My understanding is that climatalogists pre-AGW used to alway use the most recent ‘3’ decades as the baseline. He’d historically used 2 decades because that was all he could use, but at the end of 2010, he switched to using a 30 year baseline. Everything shifted.
Roy also discussed a switch to a new version during 2010. Other than that… I haven’t looked at much. I could look at old posts.
Actually Jeff, a using a sound wave in a liquid surrounding a piezoelectric hollow cylinder, containing a lasing gas could actually work.
Have you seen the design for the sonic powered fusion reactor that the clever Canadians have come up with? This is the smartest thing I have seen in a decade:-
http://www.generalfusion.com/
Neat stuff Doc. There is no question in my mind that cracking matter will be the energy of the future. It turns out that matter is readily available and has a fair amount of energy tied up in it. While solar is cool, the best it will do is last for a couple hundred years and if I had to guess, it might never make the real cut for mass production.
Tilo,
Recently the UAH switched to a satellite with station keeping. If you are familiar with the corrections to sat data, this is more than a huge difference. Lucia is right about baseline, but regarding trend in my opinion, there isn’t a better source available for the recent 3ish years. It is likely that RSS and UAH will continue to diverge due to this change but Lucia may be right regarding what you noticed.
I recently encountered the fact that UAH has rebaselined by RSS has not apparently done so (at least, last I checked), which caused a comparison I was trying to do to look quite odd. My quick and dirty approach was to remove a constant average difference from RSS to line it up with UAH’s new baseline. Ordinarily I would have adjusted the seasonal cycle, but I was interested in differences between them on timescales greater than just the seasonal cycle, and smoothing data. As far as accuracy goes, John Christy has gone out of his way to test UAH against all sorts of independent data and found it to be quite accurate, even before the use of AQUA with station keeping.
lucia (Comment #78292)
June 29th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Lucia the standards for baselines are set by the WMO in their guidelines:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/documents/Guide2.pdf
Dr. Spencer and UAH is just meeting standards set out by the WMO.
Also you can find any changes to the UAH dataset by going to the following link and reading the Readme files:
ftp://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/data/msu/t2lt/
Also for those that complain about “Short” trends dealing with temperature and rail for 30 years minimum should read what the WMO says about that:
I went ahead and plotted 1998 – 2009 with old UAH data and new UAH data. Looks like the baselining assumption is probably correct. The new data trends about .09C lower than the old. But there is more. The shape of the two lines shows that individual points have been modified beyond just changing the baseline. The slope of the trend for the two is very close, but the old trend line was slightly more negative than the new trend line for that period.
Jeff Id: Recently the UAH switched to a satellite with station keeping.
Sorry, Jeff, I don’t know what that means.
RB said in Comment #78272
On numeracy:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
12%
_____
Right off, I knew 12% is wrong, and figured it’s 10 cents. Then I thought that’s too easy, so it must be some other amount. So, I read the question carefully, and decided it’s a nickel.
Then I tried to think of a real situation where I would need to overcome ambiguous and misleading language, and remembered my camera’s manual.
Looking at the huge trend divergence that happened in just 3 years between UAH and RSS I have to think that one of them has got it wrong somewhere. But it’s past my bed time. I’ll look at this some more tomorrow.
Andrew_FL (Comment #78270) June 29th, 2011 at 5:28 pm
“Copernicus2 gives away the correct answer to Copernicus1. Not sure if this is an issue or not.”
There are ways of dealing with dependencies in psychometrics but normally dependencies like that would be frowned upon. I haven’t read the paper yet but the test looks a bit iffy.
Perhaps the study results suggest that the group that is more scientifically / numerically literate is less imaginative. That is, they are less likely to see “monsters under the bed” in every dire prediction.
just my 2 cents,
Tim
So is this summary of the paper correct:
“As people get smarter their perception of the dangers of climate change diminishes instead of increasing as it should so we must find another explanation. Ah! here we are. These people find it more culturally congenial to think that way. So the bandwagon can keep rolling. Hurrah!”
Luica,
I don’t always remember where I learned something either. Some things, yes, like a specific course in design of experiments or differential equations. But much of the information I carry around in my head is “sourceless”. I suspect it is more general information that I thought about briefly and that easily passed my “does that make sense/is that consistent with what I already know?” BS filter. For example, I know that most viruses are disrupted by detergents, and I understand why, but I do not remember where I learned that. It is the information which is more complex and/or which initially seems in conflict with my existing understanding where I tend to remember the source.
Tilo Reber (Comment #78299),
The satellite has a rocket thruster with sufficient to fuel on board to keep compensating for (upper!) atmospheric drag during extended operation. Without this capacity, the satellite’s orbit gradually degrades until it burns up in the atmosphere.
Is it really “true” that the earth goes around the sun or is it simply that heliocentric modeling is less complex and cumbersome than geocentric epicycle modeling?
We accept that electrons appear to be smaller but only if we limit ourselves to 3 dimensions. I can’t say for sure what measurable aspects they may have in combinations of the other eleven dimensions.
Whether and X or Y chromosome-bearing sperm reaches the egg may depend on the chemical environment that the potential mommy creates which could be selective and determinative.
The lack of clarity in these questions is appalling. I would have to write additional comments all over the scantron card as I usually do for these kinds of tests.
The paper was interesting. Some thoughts.
1. I’d already come to the conclusion that more science education/literacy is not the solution to convincing people that AGW is a real threat. MY many years reading and writing blog comments have shown me that even intelligent, well-read people can be quite wrong.
2. As the paper notes, ideology is the key. This should be self evident by now. If you give me someone’s opinion on AGW, I can tell you their political leanings quite reliably–or at least give you a list of unrelated beliefs they are also likely to hold.
3. There are ideologues on both sides. Most people who agree with me do so because they are liberal/left, not because they have accurately assessed the science. This is most obvious when looking at comments on political blogs (say Think Progress or some such.) Thoughtless acceptance of global warming gets more annoying to me each year. I could accept it more if people said something like “The NAS believes AGW is real, and they are the experts.” But they expound goofy theories where there is more “energy in the atmosphere” or “we’ve unbalanced the planet.” That’s almost as annoying as people who say “CO2 isn’t a poison!”
4. Jeff Id slays me. Talk about somebody who can’t see past their own biases.
5. Yeah, I thought Miss Vermont was hot.
6. So, if you want to “communicate science,” then the best way is to find ways to appeal to a person’s ideology. Unfortunately, some ideologues don’t allow for much of a solution (Ask a libertarian what the solution to AGW should be, assuming it is real. I’ve asked many and have yet to hear much of an answer.). Also unfortunately, the few conservative politicians who acknowledged AGW have either completely changed their stance or have been relegated to back row status, if not booted out by a more rightwing pol.
George
The following is true: When presented with a multiple choice tests asking a true/false question about the earth going around the sun, one must base one’s answer according to the heliocentric model. Otherwise, one will be marked wrong.
Similar rules apply to other questions. For example when presented with “Electrons are smaller than atoms [true/false].”, do not start to ponder the electrons as waves and start to think about comparing the wavelength or some other “size” feature of the electron to, say, the size of a hydrogen ion. That way lies madness. You’ll also run out of time before finishing the test.
Boris #78313,
I would point out that the sword has two edges. Correct me if I am mistaken, but you appear to address the entire question from the POV that “that even intelligent, well-read people can be quite wrong”… wrong that is, if they have doubts about the validity of the IPCC analysis. IMO, the political biases are painfully evident among “intelligent, well-read people” on both sides, even (and maybe especially) among honest-to-goodness climate scientists, who are overwhelmingly ‘liberal/left’ in political persuasion.
Boris
Alas, she did not make it to the finals. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkSlywOodho&feature=related
The 4 finalists were:
Miss California She’s for legal medical marijuana, but otherwise, no. (She won.)
Miss Tennessee She does not support the 1st amendment if it covers flag buring, koran burning or the bible. (1st runner up.)
Miss Texas. She gave such a vague answer to the question about ‘men in powers’ sexual indiscretion that I suspect she doesn’t even know who the men might be. That is: She did not name Schwarzennegger, Weiner, or Strauss-Kahn, or for that matter anyone else. (3rd runner up.)
Miss Alabama. She thinks if a kid kills himself after being bullied by an internet bully, the bully should be prosecuted. (2nd runner up.)
SteveF–
That’s not fair. See Boris’s 3:
Numerical literacy is not important in climate science.
Success in the science is determined by one’s ability to write Abstracts that say:
“We examined X … and therefore robust global warming.”
It doesn’t matter what the data and the calculations might actually say.
For example, there is a simple formula for calculating 3.0C per doubling of CO2 but it seems to have a wide range of results that are consistent with it (any result really).
Lucia (78318),
The words that I did not like in Boris’s #3 were:
(Bold font is mine.)
The implication is that an accurate assessment leads to agreement with Boris. I disagree with that. I would have no problem with “not because of their assessment of the science”.
SteveF, I suspect there’s room in that comment for people who accurately access the science and disagree with him. There are things related to climate change he and I agree on, there are things we don’t agree on.
The idea there is a “single thing to agree on” is part of the problem with the climate science debate. You are either for us or against us mentality tracks with strong ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum. (Do phrases like “there’s no need for more debate” ring a bell?)
It’s interesting that Boris failed to mention liberals who don’t accept climate change. That’s probably because there are none. I think this is evidence that liberals are more likely to be ideologues than conservatives, though there are plenty of those in both camps.
Why do I need to assess the science?Linzden,Carter etc has done that already.I suspect I would go a long way to find somebody smarter than Linzden,oh that’s right,he is in the pay of big oil,and not really that smart.
Jones,Hansen,Trenberth,Gore etc are a lot smarter.
One thing is for sure,They are all smarter than a 5th grader(maybe not Gore),but they do not agree on the science.
Carrick (Comment #78323)-“liberals who don’t accept climate change. That’s probably because there are none.”
Depending on what you mean by “don’t accept climate change” I think this is varying degrees of wrong. Certainly semi-Lukewarmer Tom Fuller is left-liberal, as are such notables as Claude Allegre and The Nation(!) writer Alexander Cockburn.
Lucia,
I actually watched the end of the pageant. Was really rooting for Miss Tennessee. Apparently she goes to the U of Memphis and gave a nice “Go Tigers!” during an interview question. (I’m a big tigers fan too.)
SteveF,
I’ll concede that most of the mainstream climate scientists whose political views I know are liberal/left. Let’s assume that the small number we know about is representative. Could it not be that years of rightwing opposition to climate science have pushed these scientists leftward?
ha they played Ke$ha
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjAgBNHtns8&feature=related
trashy club chick music for miss america.
re: Boris #78313
Thoughtful comment Boris. Craig Loehle made a comment at tAV which speaks to this and which I agree with:
–
If climate science is about politics, then it makes sense that criticism (legitmate or otherwise) is coming from conservatives rather than liberals.
Carrick,
I suspect you are correct that there are few liberal who don’t accept climate change is real. There are some who do not agree with it’s importance relative to other issues (like Tom Fuller, among others).
I honestly suspect there are few people who have really considered the technical issues who do not agree that some warming from rising GHG’s is inevitable. Where people tend to part ways is in striking a balance between costs (monetary and political) and benefits (a reduction in future potential negative impacts due to GHG driven warming), as well as in the technical certainty of estimated warming and negative impacts needed to justify public action. For those who consider public action appropriate on most any problem (and the taking of sufficient private wealth/personal liberty to enable that public action similarly appropriate), the level of certainty that justifies public action is low.
To – Tilo Reber (Comment #78302) June 29th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
My DSL modem is failing … so this must be short answer off top of my head.
In addition to baseline changes, UAH also had an issue with the way they were correcting the data for some type of measurement difficulty (diurnal variation? sun/shade? don’t recall now) Around a year ago (it seems) they ran through their whole data series and changed it. That change reconciled a lot of the difference between them and RSS.
AFPhys
AFPhys: “That change reconciled a lot of the difference between them and RSS.”
The old data that I had was taken at the end of 2009. I plotted 1998 to 2009, 12 years. At that time the slope of the trend was very close between the two. Now, when I take the new data and plot the same period, the slop of the trend is very diffent between the two. So, whatever changes have been made in the last 17 months have served to increase the differences. I also plotted from 1998 to the present for for both sets and the difference between the slope of the trend is fairly large. SteveF says that the UAH satellite is able to compensate for atmospheric drag by pulsing the satellite rocket boosters – which is good. But I would expect that RSS would compensate for it in their calculations. In any case, so far looking at the data has not given me a clue about who is to blame, but that difference in trend is now very noticable.
Re: Carrick (Comment #78323)
I recall Judith Curry mentioning that William Gray had traditionally voted Democrat. Freeman Dyson supported the Obama campaign. On the other side, Kerry Emanuel is a Republican. Comments regarding the political nature of the debate by the commenter “Agnostic” at Curry’s website are also interesting pointing to the liberal/conservative divide to be more of an American one.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/06/25/week-in-review-6262011/#comment-80025
AFPhys (Comment #78330)-issue was with the transition from MSU’s to AMSU’s, a sudden change in the annual cycle appeared to occur, which was spurious. UAH instituted a correction for this and it removed much of the season dependent difference between RSS and UAH. Evidence suggests, and this difference still remains, that RSS drifted too warm in the early nineties and too cool in the recent years (actually the ninties was more step shift than a “drift”). Overall, RSS still is slightly spuriously too warm. The data are very close, though.
Boris,
I don’t know; maybe. Some of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” syndrome seems evident in the alliance of climate scientists with strongly left leaning political groups and politicians.
However, I suspect that technically inclined individuals who choose to enter the fields of study which fall under the heading ‘climate science’ tend to have strong ‘green’ sentiments and ‘progressive’ political views. So I do not find it surprising that climate science is tilted in that political direction, independent of any political opposition from conservatives and libertarians. I also suspect that at least some opposition from the right stems from a lack of confidence in the technical objectivity of those with a very different view of the proper roll of government in human affairs, whether or not this lack of confidence is warranted.
Re: Boris (Comment #78326)
Not at all. Us liberal scientists are just born that way 🙂
Somebody (Churchill?) once said that it you are not a socialist as a young man you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative in middle age you have no brains. I take issue with the second half of that statement, but it is true that as I grow older I do feel more and more uncomfortable among knee-jerk liberals. This is the opposite of what you suggest, although I am not sure to what extent I am representative.
Basically, when you start out by seeing very clearly what is wrong with the other side, the only way they can surprise you with time is by occasionally being better than you expected them to be. Whereas for people on “your” side, it works the opposite way.
The ugliness of the right in America has always been obvious to me (the gay-hating, gun-toting redneck stereotype), but it has taken me literally decades to see the ugliness and meanness of the left just as clearly. My daughter has been consistently harassed in high school by both students and teachers for the past two years, just because she believes in God and has moral objections to abortion and to research with embryonic stem cells. Apparently, it is not enough that we, as a family, have an immaculate record of voting Democratic: we are also expected to join in when the enlightened ones make fun of any and all religious or moral beliefs that do not agree with their “progressive” worldview.
Kerry Emanuel:
How did [the Democratic party become the chosen party of the empirical professionals]? Part of the answer is surely obvious: In recent decades, the Republican Party’s rightward shift alienated many academics, scientists, and intellectuals. Indeed, that’s how Kerry Emanuel accounts for his own political transformation. In the early 1970s, as an undergraduate at MIT, he remembers feeling surrounded by the “liberal excesses†then prevalent in the “People’s Republic†of Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I remember hearing fellow students defending Pol Pot and Mao Zedong and Stalin, and I was so horrified,†he says. But now Emanuel sees the situation as reversed: The extremes are on the Tea Party right, the Democrats are centrists and pragmatists, and Emanuel–really always a moderate–finds not so much that he has moved but that his party has. “I’m turned off by those people for exactly the same reasons I was turned off by the ideologues of the 1970s,†he says.
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=reality_bites
Good counter examples Andrew_FL, RB and SteveF.
Though I got a real chuckle out of somebody calling Democrats “centrists”. Looking at the demographics, there are equal numbers of people identifying themselves as Republicans and Democrats, and a larger group (myself included) as “none of the above”.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans should be labeling themselves as “centrists”.
Lucia,
Looks like I’m moderated now! I probably used a “bad word” in my post above…
@RB –
Ottmar Edenhofer – IPCC Lead: “First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” and “Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization.”
So is this what Emanuel now considers to be a centrist?
Re: Boris (Jun 30 07:34), “If you give me someone’s opinion on AGW, I can tell you their political leanings quite reliably–or at least give you a list of unrelated beliefs they are also likely to hold.”
As you may know, I think that AGW is hugely over-exaggerated and most of it is nonsense. What (UK) political party do you think I voted for? And what other beliefs do I hold?
Sure, there is a reasonable correlation, but your claim is OTT.
I think it was Roger Pielke (jr) who pointed out the high proportion of left-wing views in academia. This kind of makes sense since any academic is by definition not interested in making a load of money. This is one of the reasons why the ‘mainstream’ academic view of AGW is biased in the direction that it is.
The following quote is from Mike Gresser’s “Science vs. Ideology & Vested Interest” in his ClarityTherapeutics blog:
“In thinking about your own position on issues to which a scientific approach can be brought, it is well to ask whether you have a vested interest in the conclusion, or an ideological position which might bias your thinking about the issue under consideration. No person can take your scientific integrity away from you, but you are certainly capable of throwing it away if you let personal self interest or adherence to an ideological position draw you away from the rigorous application of the scientific method.”
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=46435918671&topic=8335
I like to think I am objective, but Greeser got me thinking about my position on the science of CAGW, and how much it might be influenced by my distaste for right-wing ideology. I accepted the science long before it became a political issue, but I believe the opposition has made it more difficult for me to remain objective. Now, I have another reason to dislike right-wing ideology.
My vested financial interest is ownership of mineral rights in an area where fracking is used to tap natural gas deposits, but income from leasing these rights doesn’t amount to a lot. However, if I had to depend on this income to live or if it was enough to make me fabulously wealthy, would I be saying CAGW isn’t true or is benign? No, but I would be hoping the science would change in my favor.
PaulM, scientists who work for the federal government, or receive funds from them, are also more likely to have positive attitudes about government involvement in R&D. So that’s a bias right there.
Tilo,
I doubt that Emanuel thinks very much about Ottmar Edenhofer in the context of U.S. politics.
Furthermore:
All of which is what you’d expect to hear from a frustrated climate scientist these days–except, Emanuel is a proud, lifelong Republican. Or at least, he was until recently, when he voted for Barack Obama, the first time he’s ever backed a Democrat. In 2008, Emanuel says, he was a “single issue†voter concerned about science and climate change. “I don’t like it when ideology trumps reason, and I see that the Republicans are guilty of that in spades at the moment,†he says.
“I’ve been toying with the idea of officially switching to independent status,†he adds.
“julio (Comment #78335)
The ugliness of the right in America has always been obvious to me (the gay-hating, gun-toting redneck stereotype)”
So you think that the stereotyping of political opponents as ‘ gay-hating, gun-toting rednecks’ is O.K.
What about racial stereotyping; you O.K. with that too?
It might surprise you how many scientists are on the right; however, we tend to keep our mouths shut least we suffer for our political views.
While I have sympathies towards PaulM’s view about academics, who are not as interested in making a load of money, there was this study which seemed to hint at biological differences (nature vs nurture?):
In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,2687256.story
For me, the most interesting aspect of the headlined study is the fairly strong correlation between views on climate change and cultural worldview. See the graphs for “Heirarchical Individualist” and “Egalitarian Communitarian” in the pre-print PDF. This is where the s— hits the fan. Strong scientific literacy and numeracy serves mainly to more strongly enforce the cultural norms of the group to which one belongs. The question, “What is more important, individual rights and freedoms or the common good?” I believe, is a key forcing agent in climate change opinion.
RB (Comment #78345)-Garbage:
http://randombio.com/nature.html
Emanuel is about as Republican as Dennis Kucinich, he is a media darling fraud who is given interviews to feed the nonsense idea that the GOP is “anti-science” and “alienating reasonable people”. He gives it away by saying that he voted for Obama. He could only do so on the basis of being horribly misinformed about McCain’s position, which was sadly identical to Obama’s on his “single issue”. I think the real reason is because he is Democrat and always has been. He is a lair.
julio (Comment #78335),
It is sad and surprising to hear that your daughter has been subjected to critiques of her religious/moral believes by teachers. If she is enrolled in a publicly funded school (high school or college), then that sort of thing qualifies as illegal most everywhere. Whether or not it is worth a legal fight is a different question. Where my wife teaches, she would be subject to immediate disciplinary action if she ever criticized a student’s religious beliefs.
I think you may be taking the worst possible caricature of ‘gun-toting rednecks’ as somehow representative of conservative and/or libertarian thinking. I don’t have anything against gay or lesbian people (even if I admit to being honestly puzzled how this tendency exists at a significant level in the population when the selective disadvantage is considered). I don’t even own a gun, never mind tote one about.
I think most people who consider themselves conservative or libertarian mainly disagree with people of the left about the proper role and scope of government in people’s lives, and think that much of what government does, especially at the State and Federal levels, is neither just nor good for society in the long term.
PaulM,
I never said I could predict with 100% certainty, but I believe the correlation is quite strong.
Owen,
For sure that is part of it. But I think a more important question is one not asked: “What represents the common good?”; that is where fundamental political differences exist. I would argue that the political result of three wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner does not necessarily represent the “common good”.
Re: DocMartyn (Comment #78344)
You’re right; that was very poorly worded, and I apologize.
What I meant to say was more along the lines of this: that it is not hard to find instances of right-wing politicians pandering to certain groups that strike me as “ugly”: driven primarily by hate, or fear, or both.
Now, I fully admit (and this was, in fact, the main point of my post) that this may have been particularly obvious to me for many years because of my prior (left-leaning) ideological bias, which may also have blinded me for a long time to examples of similar pandering behavior, and similarly ugly groups, on the left.
SteveF
I think you nailed it.
Steve F, it is luxurious and exuberant. The exuberance is necessary to ensure species survival, and the luxury is about why the exuberance is suppressed when tribal survival is paramount.
==========
kim (Comment #78353),
I have not a clue what you are trying to say. Can you clarify? Can you say what earlier comment you are referring to?
Re: Andrew_FL (Comment #78347)
Maybe he wanted the package deal: Congress+like-minded President; just saying ..
Re: SteveF (Comment #78348)
As I have tried to explain above, I was certainly not trying to reduce the American right (many of whose members I like and respect) to a stereotype; rather, I was reflecting on my own inability, for a long time, to recognize the existence of similar pockets of ugliness on my own side of the ideological spectrum.
The irony in my daughter’s situation is that it is typically the left that presents itself as the champion of “tolerance” and “diversity”. It takes a while to realize that, when liberals use these words, they do not really mean what one would think they should.
Survival advantage is a tricky business. The survival advantage of heterozygote sicklers was not obvious to the parents, or the tribes for eons. The advantage of heterozygote CFers is controversial, but may lie in increased survival of infants to enteric pathogens.
I maintain that human sexuality must be very powerful to ensure the survival of the species. Homosexuality and bisexuality is an exuberant manifestation of that power, hence necessary and inevitable. Cultural treatment of that exuberance is highly variable, but possibly some of those treatments enhance survivability despite the drag of sterility.
====================
RB (Comment #78356)-Except that on his “one issue” he would have gotten pretty much that, a warmer President and a warmer Congress. If the only difference in ’08 had been how the presidential election would have gone, you’d still have had the house pass capn’trade, and likely McCain would have made as much effort to push this issue as Obama has (admittedly not enough for Al Gore, but that’s not the point). If the fear was somehow that if he voted for a Republican President he’d get a Republican Congress, I can’t think too highly of his knowledge or reasoning ability as things don’t just automatically go together that way. And if he didn’t want them to, he could have just voted down the line for people on his side, mostly Democrats, but he would have had his pick for President, and despite claiming to be a Republican, he picked Obama.
Yet another embarrassing admission of ignorance: I do not know if a child’s gender is determined by paternal influence or not.
I see on the internet that papa rules gender,
but I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy (oops, sorry–old song reference)
And we know about information gleaned from the internet…
I will admit one other possibility: even seeing McCain had what he regarded as “right” (left) opinion on climate, he may have suffered from a nasty case of Palin derangement syndrome. You’d hope however that an Academic would think more clearly than that.
lucia said in Comment #78352
SteveF
But I think a more important question is one not asked: “What represents the common good?â€;
I think you nailed it.
______
The common good is what’s best for most. Then the question is most of who ?
julio, I get used to being categorized as a racists, homophobic, religious-fundamentalists who is anti-science, believing that dinosaurs walked the newly created earth 6,000 years ago. In the American context I also hate women because of my lack of enthusiastic support for Roe vs. Wade.
However, like the vast majority of the left I judge people as they are, regardless of color, sex, sexual orientation or religion. I do not judge some ethnic groups or nationalities, either as peoples or individuals, by laxer standards because of history. I believe that university admissions should be based on merit and that African Americans should not be awarded an extra 300 points and Asian Americans lose 150 points; as happens at the moment.
I don’t believe in evolution, I damn well KNOW that each and every part of the biosphere evolved.
I KNOW that as a Northern European I am more different from the greater mass of humanity than any other group; thanks to the 1-4% Neanderthal genes I carry.
The big problem in the USA, including the Climate Wars, is the binary presentation of complex data.
I must either support abortion at 40 weeks or I must claim that life begins when sperm meets egg.
I must support unrestricted embryonic research or I must wish it all banned.
i either state that CO2 emission will cause a 3 degree rise in global temperature by 2100 or I must state that global temperature is constant and noisy.
Bullshit. The only thing I dislike about the USA is the deliberate left-wing media contamination of every debate into Right=Wrong.
The USA could never have something like the Warnock Committee, the whole process, and the witnesses, would be destroyed in detail by the media, which is very sad.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1442316/
The only good news is that the whole news media is that financial bankruptcy has followed moral bankruptcy, meaning that the NYT/Time/Alphabet media will disappear before the Greenland icecap.
However, it is very true that in US universities that there is no free speech and that anyone left of center is very, vary, careful about what they write or say.
Max_OK (Comment #78365)-I think you are sidestepping the issue a bit. Before saying it’s what is best for most, one must ask, best/good in what way? Best in that it accords with people’s desires, needs, rights, thoughts, beliefs, what?
I think it would be best for everyone to belong to my religion so they’d all go to heaven. But I can’t/should force that “common good” on everyone, and not just because that being good for everyone is subjective, but also because the common good is not specifically some matter of spiritual well being. Is it economic well being, cultural well being, psychological well being, what?
And most importantly, Cui Exigo?
OK – I’ve read the paper.
What would we expect prior to the study?
1. Attitudes towards climate-change in the US will vary according to political affiliation. We’d expect Democrat voters to be more concerned and Republicans to be less concerned
2. We would expect BASIC science-literacy and basic numeracy to vary according to level of education. The longer you were in school the better your basic numeracy.
3. We know that, on average, Republican voters are better educated than Democrat votes – up to a point. There is a swing back to Democrats amongst people with higher degrees, so the relationship is more U shaped than linear.
Given the above what should we expect? We should expect that looking at the US population as a whole higher basic numeracy and science literacy should be associated with a greater tendency to support Republican positions.
The data from the study is consistent with that.
Does the study really address their hypothesis? No.
Firstly they need a better, more discriminating, instrument for numeracy and science literacy and secondly they need to control for levels of education. Then they need to look at people grouped by levels of education and see how attitudes vary within those groups based on science and numeracy scores.
Ownen: “What is more important, individual rights and freedoms or the common good?â€
There is no such thing as “the common good”. It is an abstraction. It can only have meaning insofar as how many individuals are receiving a good. The failure of the communal ideal has always been that the sacrifice of the individual was taken to be the right choice. The result was a society of impoverished and miserable individuals with no personal objectives. In other words, all the sacrifices of the individual for the common good only produces the common misery – because ultimately you can only produce a common good one individual at a time.
Tilo:
Here is a link to the Readme file that explains all the changes to UAH and why:
ftp://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/data/msu/t2lt/readme.08Dec2010
Here is some examples of why you will see changes:
1. Added the NOAA 18 satellites data into the calculations in 2010:
Once they had enough overlap between NOAA 18 and NOAA 15 and AQUA to confirm that they were getting good data, they aded it into the calculations since the time they started receiving that data (2005). That is one reason a dataset from 2009 will be different then one from 2010 or 2011.
2. Removed the seasonal bias in UAH dataset in 2010:
So a dataset from 2009 is version 5.2 without the correction one from early 2010 is version 5.3x and one from 2011 is version 5.4 (due to the switch of baselines)
For changes to RSS hit this link:
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#version
The big difference between RSS and UAH is that up until Jan 2011 RSS only used the data from NOAA 15 which had a big diurnal drift that threw the readings off and required a “correction adjustment”. During that time UAH used not only NOAA 15 but NASA Aqua and then added in NOAA 18.
So if you try to compare a UAH 2009 Dataset to RSS 2009 Dataset you have RSS relying on NOAA 15 alone and UAH using NOAA 15 and AQUA. From there you can see how during 2010 there would be even more differences between the two because UAH had 3 satellites in its modern dataset while RSS had one only.
Max_OK
No. The question is what is best for most? Sometimes it’s obvious. But often, it’s not. Much of the debate over the size and extent of government can be traced back to strongly differring views as to what would be better for most people.
As an example: My impression is regular blog visitor A owns a business that he built up from scratch. He employs people yada, yada, yada. As a result of getting his act together and growing the business he now has a chunk of money.
Meanwhile, I work part time and blog. By staying at home a lot, I keep my carbon foot print small. Plus, I have a garden, so I can have low carbon footprint strawberries on my cereal etc. (This springs crop was so bumper some rotted on the vine, especially since I didn’t want to pick them on rainy days. Ick!)
Would it be “best” for the government to tax blog visitor A to pay for running the government, funding schools, building roads and on top of all that to to subsidize my medical and dental because I can’t make enough to cover that if I only work part time? Or, would it be better to tax him a little less that so I have sufficient motivation to work a sufficient number of hours to pay for my own medical and dental? Maybe I could get off my duff, pick those extra strawberries and sell them at the local farmers market, make a few bucks and pay the dentist.
Or, if I don’t maybe my teeth can fall out, which would result in increasing the ugliness of my appearance causing pain to anyone who looked at me– thereby reducing the level of common good which is clearly advanced by everyone being less hideously ugly.
So, is the common good advanced by taxing reader X to pay for my dental? Or by making me get off my duff and sell strawberries to cover my dental, and if I don’t, subjecting the public to having to look at a toothless lazy non-strawberry selling person?
This is obviously extreme– but to some extent, this is the argument one is having when discussing what actions increase the common good.
Lucia (#78371),
Maybe you could sell your excess low carbon footprint strawberries to blog visitor A. Or convert them to strawberry jam that blog visitor A might prefer and pay even more for. That would, unfortunately, increase their carbon footprint.
boballab: “Here is some examples of why you will see changes:”
Thanks, Bob. I had read about some of the changes at UAH. But in any case, there is no clear explanation for why the two are now diverging. There is a clue, but nothing solid. The clue is in the RSS piece you gave above that says:
“Since the 2002-2004 period is when there is an unexplained warming drift in MSU channel 2 data from NOAA-14 relative to AMSU data, this change has the effect of lowering the overall warming in TMT and TLT during the post 2002 period.”
When plotting only up to 2009, I noticed that the new RSS data was sloping more negatively than the old RSS data. So that seems to show the corrections mentioned above. In any case, despite all the other differences, UAH and RSS were tracking very well together before 2009 as far at the slope of their trends went. I wonder if the above correction is responsible for the greater part of their current divergence.
I threw HadCrut3 into my chart, as I had done for the 2009 chart and I noticed that the trend for 1998 to 2009 was flat as a billiard table for the old data and the old period. Now I’ve also added the new HadCrut3 data for a chart from 1998 to the present. And HadCurt3 is still flat as a billiard table. RSS is still trending down, like it did before. But UAH has changed from trending very slightly down to trending significantly up.
Actually Lucia, vaccination is probably the best example of the ‘common good’ vs. ‘individual good’.
A typical vaccine has a significant side effect rate of about 1:1,000,000. Herd immunity kicks in at >95%.
So from my point of view, if everyone else is vaccinated I am protected, but have no risk; so this is the optimum outcome for me.
If more that 5% of people have the same view as me, then we lose herd immunity and I am at disease risk. Disease risk increases as vaccination rates go down.
Game theory tells us that we can only get high rates of vaccination if people know the rules of the disease vs. vaccine adverse reaction rates.
In real life about 2-3% of people can’t be vaccinated (due to illness or hypersensitivity) 1-2% refuse to be vaccinated and 25% are always worried about the evil drug companies (left wing) or evil government (right wing) sticking it to them.
The question is what is best for most?
Here is William Bernstein’s perspective:
There is much progress to be made on both sides. Those on the left need a better understanding of the mean; those on the right, the variance, and both need to clearly grasp the tradeoffs therein.
http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/adhoc/mean.htm
SteveF
Jam would ship better. The strawberries are smaller than grocery store strawberries, have more flavor but are less sweet. They would probably make great jam. (If I wanted to get off my duff and make jam instead of insisting that blog visitor A pay more in taxes to subsidize my inactivity as I permit perfectly good strawberries to rot on the vine.
Speaking of which… i’m going to go pick some. The bumper crop is winding down, but they are good!
Dang! I knew the crop was dwindling. I guess June bearing ends before July 1. Drat.
Lucia
I don’t think you are considering the intrinsic good of your blogging. Surely visitor A must be required to pay for such a significant cultural endeavor for the betterment of us all. Your noble effort should not be punished because of its lack monetary compensation. That would not be fair. 🙂
DocMartin–
I’m up to date on vaccines. I even got my whooping cough booster!
I suspect good sewers and sewage treatment systems are another example of a collective action where the common good clearly prevails over choices some individual would make.
As I said: Some cases are easy. Others are tough. I picked my dental needs because taxing people to have socialized dental plants falls somewhere between taxing to pay for elective cosmetic procedures and paying for vaccinations which, depending on the threat of any particular infectious disease, blog visitor A might actually want to provide for free.
Example: too many adults at risk for whooping cough puts infants at risk. So, someone with money and infant grandchildren might want to subsidize cheap or no-cost whooping cough vaccines, especially since those getting cheap vaccines are unlikely to abuse the system by getting endless numbers of vaccines. But taxing to pay for tooth whitening, xrays, root canals etc.? The common good in that is not as obvious as with whooping cough vaccines.
BTW to deliberately do the unwise and bring up the controversial topic of the “survival advantage” of homosexuality, or lack thereof:
Especially in the past, being homosexual did not exclude one from being married to, and having children with, members of the opposite sex. Especially when people married less for romantic reasons and more for economic/social ones, and when many marriages were arranged. And before it was more socially acceptable, there was more need for a “cover” of being a happily married man who clearly had a physical relationship with his wife. Why even today many men who would prefer to remain closeted have “beards” as they are known to cover their sexuality.
Of course, this all assumes that this is a genetic trait. I suspect it is epigenetic/triggered partly by the environment of development (note this is not saying it’s anyone’s choice, merely that it is influenced by one’s developmental environment, both before and after birth).
Re: DocMartyn (Comment #78366)
I tend to agree with this, although I do not think it is restricted to the US by any means. But yes, extreme positions and simplistic talking points do tend to crowd out rational, nuanced debate.
You probably meant *right* of center? I think it is too strong to say that there is no free speech in American universities, although it is true, in my experience, that there is an implicit expectation that all faculty will have something of a liberal bent. Of course, I can see how such an expectation may become a form of discrimination, depending on how it manifests itself.
Lucia, would you suppose that you could build a rewarding second career by adapting WTP’s pulse jet mixing technology to the production of strawberry frappes?
Andrew. The homosexual gene thing is very easy to explain in genetic terms.
A ‘Y’ Chromosome spends 100% of its time in males. Over time all the genes on the Y-chromosome have become ‘male’ gene, these code for males bits, testicular proteins and sperm proteins.
A X-chromosome will, on average, and through generations, spend 67% of it’s time in a female body and 33% of its time in a male body.
X-linked genes which aid females, at the expense of males, will survive IF the odds ratios favor female genetic fitness are better than the disadvantages in males.
Simply put, if your daughters chance of having children by a greater level than your sons lose the ability to have children, it will be favored.
So, why would a x-linked gene complex favor homosexuality?
Welcome to Taliban land, a world you know and hate. Firstly, women are male property. Women only see their husbands and their close male relatives.
Secondly, procreation is passive in females, as all females are claimed as wives/slaves; BUT, males are polygamous, and so males take place in tournament selection; a few males score large numbers of females and many have no females at all.
In Taliban land a brother can visit his sister and give her food/money, he can indulge his nephews and nieces. A brother without children, will give more goodies to his sisters children than one with his own kids.
Now, what is a X-chromosome to do in Taliban land. What if a X-chromosome gave a male body it resided in a 30% chance of being gay? It would, generationally, deliver up a man who didn’t take part in a sexual tournament, which he is likely to lose anyway, but will treat his sisters well and treat his nephews and nieces like his own children.
So, from the point of an X-chromosome, episodic male sterility that is linked to behavior that mimics feminine child-caring instincts looks damned useful.
So, the place to look is the X-chromosome, look for activation by in utero steroidal hormones (epigenetics) and maternal IgG’s tuned to fetal androgen receptors.
julio, I take it you have never heard of Speech Codes, and the consequences that happens to transgressors?
Or what about the remarkable slogan
“Free Speech. Not Hate Speech”. Which allows anyone to freely agree with the mainstream consensus, but aggressively persecutes those who disagree.
I so happens that I study a large amount of work on estrogen/androgen glial/neuronal brain sculpting. As a neurochemist I can tell you how the processes of defeminization and masculinization occur and, roughly, how brain sculpting alters male/female brains.
However, almost no one in the USA works on human brain sculpting. Too dangerous. One is not allowed to state that the average woman has a different brain to the average man, to do so constitutes a breach of both speech codes, sexist, and hate speech, misogynistic.
Doc–
Interesting. I’m not surprised that for anything measurable and quantifiable, the mean is different for mean and woman. There have been historic problems with people processing that sort of information inappropriately. (Like for example, prohibiting all woman– including those built like Venus of Serena Williams from jobs requiring strength, while during war time, possibly conscripting guys built like Paul Simon into equally physically challenging situations. ) Brains are even touchier than physiques because quantifying intelligence or personality pre-dispositions is more challenging.
I’m also will not dispute your impression that one is not allowed to state women’s brains differ from men’s in the US. On the one hand, as a matter of literal truth, one is certainly allowed to say it. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was very difficult to report results of this sort and certainly, it would be a difficult issue to broach at a cocktail party!
DocMartyn (Comment #78384)-Your theory doesn’t explain Lesbianism, as far as I can tell. I imagine that, incidentally, in Taliban land men are expected to have children whether they like it or not, and rather than helping out their sisters and nieces and nephews, gay men would be executed in Taliban land-at least if they were found out.
I recall some studies that suggested epigenetic basis, from hormonal exposure in utero. Personally this is not very interesting to me, though. I also want to stop before I inadvertently offend anyone! 🙂
Andrew, male reproductive success is polygamous societies is biphasic, many males cannot get females and a few get many.
In actual Taliban land, homosexuality is indeed a capital crime, but oddly enough there is a huge amount of sex between men and between men and boys.
With regard to lesbianism, I don’t think that present day lesbians have a different number of children than heterosexual women. I am at home now so can only give you this link, from 2004;
http://www.urban.org/uploadedpd/411031_gay_nj.pdf
M/M 2.02; F/F 1.93.
Married M/F 1.90; Unmarried M/F 1.84
See the nurturing behavior of Gay men?
Funny, as soon as I posted my comment I realized why lesbians would still reproduce in Taliban land-they have no choice. Doy! I think you’ve thought this through more than I have, which is not surprising. Thanks for putting up with me anyway! 🙂
Tilo Reber (Comment #78369)
June 30th, 2011 at 1:14 pm
There is no such thing as “the common goodâ€. It is an abstraction
——————————
It is a bit of an abstraction, I agree. But when my community put in a burning ordinance to prevent neighbors from burning garbage and tires in their back yards (which some did), those burning individuals lost some of their freedom while others gained the freedom from smoke and odor. Our municipal ordinances are replete with such examples (and my neighbors can’t raise pigs in town either). One person’s freedom my be another’s enslavement (so to speak). A community, by consensus, operationally defines its “common good,” all the talk of individual freedoms, notwithstanding.
“lucia (Comment #78385) June 30th, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Doc–
Interesting. I’m not surprised that for anything measurable and quantifiable, the mean is different for mean and woman.”
Well is actually more interesting. The means for almost every measure of intelligence skill are about the same. However, the variance if very difference. Women cling to the mean, they are much less extreme. In any population with equal M:F numbers you will find more males on the right, you will also find more on the left. There are many more dumb men than dumb women, but there are ‘focused’ men than women.
You will always find more men in fields where having a highly unusual brain type is an advantage; Chess Grandmaster, theoretical physics. I suspect that you will find that the female brain is, on average, the best compromise of breadth/depth.
Women are stuck with a low maximum level of fertility, whereas men are not. In any tournament men will be the winners. Think of money making, Donald Trump is a tournament player, he has repeatedly bet everything he owns on financial gamble after financial gamble; and he has won. However, bankruptcy court is full of similar men who have also bet everything they own on financial gambles, and they have lost.
Males are more addictive (drugs, drink, gambling) more likely to suffer from mental illness, more likely to be Autistic, to have Asperger’s, to have dyslexia, to die in accidents, to under-estimate risk, to fight, to go to prison, to go broke, to be taken in by Ponzi schemes, e.t.c.
General intelligence is the sum of skills, fidelity, depth and motivation. Women are more likely to be generalists and men, specialists.
Oh, and women can’t, on the whole, read maps.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-335026/Why-women-worse-map-reading-men.html
Doc-
On the other hand, men won’t ask for directions.:)
Out of curiosity, is the map reading thing like an on/off switch?
As far as I’ve been able to observe, my skills and those of my sisters are ok. In his day, Popsie Wopsie was good. All of use prefer maps to verbal only directions, we draw maps, include arrows pointing north, carry maps around, print out maps. But Mom and brother… I’m not so sure. But both can read maps if necessary but they don’t seem to refer to maps reflexively.
I know neither my brother or mother reaches the depths of non-map reading of some of the women in my knitting circle or my best friend from highschool. I swear to g*d it’s like someone went in, found the region of the brain devoted to letting people read maps and zapped it. Once, three of the knitting gals set out to a knitting seminar in Michigan and ended up in…. Ohio. I kid you not. On another trip, they were aiming for Indiana and ended up in… Iowa. *I am not making this up*! (There are more stories. My best friend from high school and maps? OMG! )
Based on experience, about 1/3 the knitting group had the absolutely hopeless map reading ability and the others could read maps just fine. Whether or not the non-impaired could read more complex maps, I can’t say. But they could read ordinary maps well enough to actually find unknown places they’d never been too and they could create maps that a driver could actually follow and find a destination.
So, my empirical observation is that the map reading ability really seemed to resemble an “on/off” switch. Sort of like color blindness. In some women it’s just not there. At all.
I remember reading about that one in the noospapers..
http://www.subjectpool.com/ed_papers/2007/Deary2007Intelligence451-456_Brother_sister_sex_differences.pdf
Not spam, links to a study described as:
Timothy Bates, professor of psychology at Edinburgh University, who led the research said: “The female developmental programme may be tilted more towards ensuring survival and enjoying the safety of the middle ground.”
Before the satellite navigation times, in the course of our holiday trips I was forced to read map for my driving husband. This has caused many marital discords. I needed the map on my lap aligned with the actual direction we were heading, even if it meant for me to read the names upside down. I wasn’t quick enough at the more complicated crossings.
And I always looked out for countryside markers to ascertain where we are on the map.
I like to use such markers when explaining how to get somewhere to strangers as well. I just hate when someone tells me “go 300 meters and then turn right”.
I don’t have any concept of how much is 300 meters….
For some reason evolution has equipped the vast majority of people with the ability to view two dimensional symbols, convert them into sounds (internal to the brain) and identify the sounds with meaning, and also to do the opposite, convert thoughts into sounds (internal to the brain) and then transform these into a sequence of symbols.
This is reading and writing.
I do not have theses pathways, I am dyslexic. I have no intrinsic sub-routines that automatically do all the symbols to sounds (internal) to thoughts or, in my case, zilch ability to convert thoughts to sentences, to words to letter sequences in the right order.
When I start writing a sentence, I often forget what the end was. I write words with (mostly) the correct letters, but not the correct order. I often write sentences with bits missing. I construct sentences using a bit of the brain that was never designed to handle this type of function; the bottom line is that it is doable, but not pretty.
EW comment is representative of a major map reading defect. EW cannot mentally rotate herself within a map. Now a map is only a 2D model of a 2D/3D dimensional interface, should be very easy. If you have the correct intrinsic sub-routine is is easy. If you don’t then you have to use higher intellectual function to construct you model, alas the higher intellect is normally being bombarded with other inputs.
As is happens, this is what my dyslexic brain is very good at. I have worked on protein crystal structures and ‘know’ where I am within the protein and where everything else is, intrinsically. I am very good indeed at modeling 3D objects in real space. The test of this is how good are you at packing a box with disparate objects. I am very good at packing. I not only know which objects I can fit into a space, but I can also make sure that the solid, heavy and robust things go at the bottom.
It is a skill, it is a sub-routine. in some people it is present and capable of handling a lot of data, in some people it is not there at all.
The best way to think of intelligence is that it is the sum of; the internal, error-free, clock rate, the intrinsic sub-routine (hardware), the self written software that connects calculating clusters and finally the rate at which the core functions and the rate/fidelity at which higher intellect talk to each other.
In general, it pays to be a generalist. However, especially in teams, specialists may be a huge advantage. Human males have a much greater range of extremes in brain architecture. A male is more likely to be specialist, have a different distribution of sub-routine clusters.
In my case, I have very good 3D spacial abilities, but this comes at the expense of 2D information processing.
Doc–
Dyslexia does sound like an analog.
EW
When possible, I look for countryside markers too. I put important ones on maps I make for people. Street signs are often inconveniently placed and go by quickly. Markers announcing towns, certain specific malls etc. help the map act like great big “you are here” signs and help the map reader find a reference point quickly.
I had to get to a party at a friends house after a blizzard. I’d never been there. Driving south (which was most of the trip), *every* north facing street sign was plastered with snow preventing me from reading. So, the distance information and countryside marker information became essential.
But even countryside markers are not enough for one of my friends who is absolutely HOPELESS. She finally got GPS for Christmas.
“For some reason evolution has equipped the vast majority of people with the ability to view two dimensional symbols”
Since we are talking about evolution, I feel the need to correct DocMartyn. Evolution is supposedly a directionless process, therefore there can be no “reason” for any of this. 😉
Andrew
Andrew,
evolution may be directionless, but the environmental selection isn’t. If an evolutionary novelty doesn’t fit, it gets pruned.
Andrew_KY–
Just applied force is the “reason” things accelerate, the fitter surviving is “a reason” certain traits are reinforced and others die out. If you want to dispute whether Doc had correctly identified the cause or reason, do so. But natural selection falls in the category to which we apply the phrase “reason for ‘x'”. Trying to argue against the cause and effect relationship of natural selection by creating your own idiosyncratic lexicon is pointless.
DocMartyn (Comment #78384),
.
I thought about your comment, and I must admit that I have some serious doubts. The “Taliban world” you describe does not seem to me to be a fair representation of typical human culture, even stone age culture. The “tournament” competition among males for mates that you refer to is of course common in lots of species. The most distinctive and common characteristic that develops as a result is substantial sexual dimorphism. Since only the largest/strongest males have any chance of contributing to the gene pool, there is enormous selective pressure for rather extreme sexual dimorphism. Many other species have little sexual dimorphism; those species with little dimorphism most commonly form permanent or at least seasonal mating pairs, and both sexes normally contribute to the rearing of offspring.
.
Among primates, substantial sexual dimorphism is not uncommon (for example, baboons, gorillas, and to a lesser extent chimps), but by comparison, sexual dimorphism in humans is very modest. It is also clear that in the vast majority of ancient human cultures (including Native American, African, and Australian Aboriginal) the mated pair was the dominant male/female relationship (which is not to say infidelities didn’t happen). The dominance of the mated pair relationship seems to me perfectly consistent with the very modest level of human sexual dimorphism, and with the large investment in resources required to raise a child from birth to adulthood. Indeed, the larger social structures among native peoples was almost always based on extended families, with most people within a tribe closely related to each other. If ‘tournament’ access to mates were dominant, these kinds of family based social structures would not/could not exist. Human hunter-gatherer societies depended for hunting success on considerable social co-operation among hunters, and I think this level of cooperation is not consistent with most males being excluded from access to mates.
.
The when a male lion (with high sexual dimorphism) takes over a pride from another male, he usually kills all juveniles, since he has no genetic interest in them and wants all resources dedicated to his own offspring. In contrast, men within hunter-gatherer tribes are extremely tolerant of all children, not just their own, which makes sense considering the need for long term cooperation, and considering that within a tribe, most people are related.
.
Even among our closest primate relatives (chimps), where troops are led by a dominant male, and the social pecking order (for both sexes) is clearly defined, most members are linked genetically. While the dominant male always has “first rights” to females that come into heat, and could theoretically exclude access, all other males (who tend to be the dominant male’s brothers, half brothers, cousins, etc.) simply line up and wait their turn with the fertile female. So even among chimps, there is no real ‘tournament’ for access to females.
.
When I have been in the Middle East, I have discussed the issue of multiple wives with men who have this option legally available. I was surprised to learn that multiple wives are in fact relatively uncommon. They explained that a man must be quite rich to afford more than one wife, and that the addition of a second (or third!) wife would make their first wife, who is also often his second or even first cousin, and who has considerable influence with their joint offspring, so unhappy that it would hardly be worthwhile, even if they had enough money to do so. My conclusion is that in the Middle East (as everywhere else) the primary male/female relationship is the mated pair… even when that mated pair is the result of financial negotiations between their respective fathers.
.
I don’t think the case for a prehistoric “Taliban world” is a strong one; there is in fact overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Steve, I believe that until we domesticated plants and animals, that the human race selected primarily for intelligence. Since then it has been for disease resistance.
==========
SteveF, I was describing a plausible mechanism and plausible selection pressure for a genetic cause of male homosexuality.
With regard to male competition, we can compare ejaculate size, sperm density and sperm quality of the great apes;
Bonobo’s are highly promiscuous and have over-sized testicles, high sperm density and high sperm quality.
Gorillas have harem’s, and have small testicles, low sperm density and low sperm quantity.
Humans fall in between, but closer to Gorillas.
Semenogelin II is the main component of semen coagulum, a ‘sperm plug’ that males leave inside females so that if she has sex with another male then the second males sperm will be blocked.
The levels of SII correlate with how much females cheat, having multiple partners.
Levels of the gene for Semenogelin II in humans place us much closer to Gorillas than to Chimps.
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n12/full/ng1471.html
A nice essay on the subject.
http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2009/08/those_cheating_testicles_or_who.php
Love this quote:-
“The anthropological literature also shows this pattern in that 83% of all societies are classified as polygynous (one male marrying multiple females) and that infidelity in both sexes is fairly commonplace”
Bad, bad naughty ladies.
Owen: “But when my community put in a burning ordinance to prevent neighbors from burning garbage and tires in their back yards (which some did), those burning individuals lost some of their freedom while others gained the freedom from smoke and odor.”
There is a huge distance between a burning ordinance and redistribution of wealth based on climate policy, or on the conversion of private property to public property, or on the nationalization of business. I doubt that there is much difference, by party, in supporting ordinances that have clear benefit and little loss of freedom involved. The local ordinances will always be in the hands of locals. With climate policy we are talking massive shifts of power to unelected officials of the UN whose objectives have been stated as being wealth distribution and social engineering.
Oh, and at least my neighbors buring trash is a change that I can recognize as existing and being for the negative. No such recognition happens with climate change unless someone hands you a hockey stick chart or falsely tells you that the climate is making the weather violent.
There is a difference in the item by item recognition of specific needs that are required for a community and a philosopy where the driving idea is that everyone’s life and energies are chained to the supposed “common good”. The later has been shown to be a disaster both on the national scale and on the local scale. Remeber all the 70s and 80s communes that were created on the concept of everyone working for “the common good”. They all failed. And that is because they were all based upon an idiotic and romantic ideal of what somone believed a human should be.
DocMartyn (Comment #78442),
Nope, your own link sates:
Though I think that is all a bit beside the point. We have lots of evidence that ancient human cultures did not commonly have a “harem” type mating system. There is no reason I can see to suppose most human males have ever been excluded from access to females. I don’t know the cause for the fairly high incidence of human homosexuality, but your proposed explanation does not seem to me plausible.
SteveF; DENIER!!!!!!!!!!!!!
🙂
Tilo Reber (Comment #78443),
.
Too much focus on the “common good” is the best way I know to reduce the wealth of a nation. Exclusive focus on the “common good” inevitably leads to widespread poverty…. except for the ruling elite, as George Orwell seemed to understand.
Is it incorrect to say the Sun goes around the Earth?
Doesn’t it follow Kepler’s laws?
Doc said “evolution” did something for a “reason”. I’m sorry Lucia, but that’s not possible, as the popular understanding of evolution excludes purpose of any kind. Materialists don’t like the implications.
Andrew
StevenF: “Too much focus on the “common good†is the best way I know to reduce the wealth of a nation.”
In addition to the endless chain of evidence for this, China owes its entire economic boom to the economic freedom it has provided. The Chinese communists are now communist in name only. At this point, the party simply wants to retain political power. The ideaology has been thrown out the window. Wide disparities in personal wealth now exist. Compare North Korea, next door, where no such economic freedom has been allowed and where the hard line insistence on “the common good” has only produced the common starvation.
Andrew_KY (Comment #78452),
I would like to reply, but before I do, can you tell me if you believe evolutionary change is responsible the diversity of bacterial, plant, and animal life forms on Earth? (Not a rhetorical question.) If not, that is ok with me, but then there will not be anything worthwhile for me to write.
Andrew_KY–
Let’s see:
“For some reason evolution has equipped…”
“For some reason, water has seeped into…”
Water is directionless and non-sentient. Yet, for some reason, people think it can do things for ‘reasons’.
SteveF–
I suspect informal polygamy has been pretty common. In Cuba, my Dad’s great uncle had his official and unofficial family. Dad his siblings and mother moved back go Cuba for a while. Dad and his brother Chico very confused when one of his “cousins” introduced himself on the playground. The boy explained the relationship, and Dad and Chico were still confused because they’d met Uncle Frank, Uncle Frank’s wives and their children. Fortunately, the someone other than Uncle Frank’s wife to explain this to them. They learned that everyone know about these kids (in fact, Uncle Frank paid their tuition, clothed them, housed them etc.) However, the topic was never, ever, every to be discussed in front of Aunty whatever her name was.
(I only remember Dad’s blood relative names. Frank, Paul, Maria were his mothers cousins. I mostly don’t remember their spouses names. As far as I am aware, Uncle Paul did not have a second family. I think I’ve got the correct uncles matched to having and not having 2nd families. )
Dad had similar stories in El Salvador. He met his buddy Charlie the jeweler when the jewelers half brother Roberto introduced them. The Roberto was from the “legal” family; the Charlie was “from the other side of the blanket” family. (I think I have these right– but I’m certainly not confident enough to use last names! I was a kid and this is all 2nd hand.)
I think this sort of thing happens when the poor end of the spectrum is very poor, divorce laws make it financially and socially catastrophic for women to dump their cheatin’ husbands and legal polygamy is not an option. Not all rich men have second families under these circumstances, but some do. Informal social rules even form. For example: Having an indiscrete affair with a woman from the same social class will often be seen as beyond the pale. But having a whole second wife who is treated as more or less 2nd hand and never discussed. Happens.
I’m not going to begin to speculate what happens in Saudi Arabia where polygamy is technically permitted and the religion is very harsh to adultery.
Tilo Reber said in Comment #78453
StevenF: “Too much focus on the “common good†is the best way I know to reduce the wealth of a nation.â€
In addition to the endless chain of evidence for this, China owes its entire economic boom to the economic freedom it has provided. The Chinese communists are now communist in name only. At this point, the party simply wants to retain political power. The ideaology has been thrown out the window.
________
Tito, you may have a misunderstanding about state-owned and partially state-owned enterprises in China, a misunderstanding that could result in you underestimating their importance.
ttp://www.heritage.org/research/testimony/2011/04/chinese-state-owned-enterprises-and-us-china-economic-relations
The Chinese economy is state-directed. Our economy isn’t. That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.
Lucia,
I believe there are allowances for temporary marriage .
Tito,
I’m sorry about the link. I can’t get it to work. I know Googling the following will work:
The Fall and Rise of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises
RB–
Heh. She might be happier if she got to have temporary husbands on the side too. 🙂
Unlimited temporary wives. Wow!
Lucia,
No need to speculate, I can tell you: the official line is “stoning for the woman, beheading for the man”. How often this is enforced (the offended families apparently have some say) I can’t say for sure, but I can say that all men I have met are VERY careful to avoid any circumstance where someone might imagine they even spoke with a woman who is not their sister, wife, or mother. It is quite bizarre.
.
Informal arrangements of second wives/families are not terribly uncommon, especially where the economic options available to poorer women are very limited. Usually it is very much socially frowned upon, but still not uncommon. In the States, it usually leads to divorce/remarriage of course, but women in the States have more economic options. In France, well, it is a whole other bottle of wine…
SteveF
And the whole DSK event has resurrected stories about past presidents extra families etc. Speaking of which, my hairdresser mentioned a supposed breaking tidbit… I better go google now.
Max_OK: “The Chinese economy is state-directed. Our economy isn’t. That puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”
It remains that to begin with everything was a state owned enterprise. And the Chinese economy was a failure. This changed and the Chinese economy took off. Now, it sounds like, from 2006, the state has been back in an expansive mode. That is good for us as it will make the Chinese less competitive. I don’t see their economy being state directed as a competitive advantage. I believe that the more they return to that model the less successful they will be. No one gives a damn about succeeding if all of the gains go to the government. Employees working for the state will always be less motivated than those working for themselves.
SteveF (Comment #78468):
There are other ways to make sure you don’t get caught talking too, no offense to Lucia’s Saudi readers at large :).
“What I do remember very well, you know,” said Carmen Bin Laden, “was my brother-in-law was standing at the stairs of the plane. He came and I say, ‘Hi,’ you know, and you know, and he looked at me and he said, ‘Don’t talk.'”
SteveF
Once you factor in the presence and power of the mutaween the situation becomes very understandable.
Re: Max_OK (Jul 1 12:42),
Remember when the Japanese MITI was supposed to give them a competitive advantage over us? That was shortly followed by the lost decade(s) in Japan. Where the state-directed economy succeeds on the world stage in China, like in rare earths, it does so by cheating. They sell at a loss for years to run everyone else out of the business and then raise prices and limit access.
Official corruption is also wide spread in China. Bribery is a fact of life. NPR was reporting recently that local governments often set up unsanctioned toll booths on highways. That can be dealt with if it’s relatively minor. But if transaction costs increase too much, things will fall apart.
South Korea is shooting for the common good – imagine government planning of strategic industries! See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/06/06/bloomberg1376-LMEDUK6S972D01-0F4GKLUGGI0N9B2B4L48MH206B.DTL
I think the Korean people will greatly benefit from their government’s foresight and action.
Then we also have Germany and China – http://usgreentechnology.com/stories/china-and-germany-take-lead-in-green-technology-revolution/. http://chinalawandpolicy.com/tag/china-green-technology-investment/
Half the Korean people surely haven’t benefited from decades of central planning. Why on earth would it work for the other half, or the rest of us for that matter?
Tilo Reber said in Comment #78470
“Now, it sounds like, from 2006, the state has been back in an expansive mode. That is good for us as it will make the Chinese less competitive. I don’t see their economy being state directed as a competitive advantage.”
_____
U.S. companies do not agree.
“U.S. companies complain that Chinese policies aimed at creating “domestic champions” are making it increasingly difficult to operate in the Chinese market, and provide a sheltered environment that allow Chinese state-owned enterprises to grow into fierce international competitors.”
Robert D. Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs
http://www.peopleforum.cn/redirect.php?tid=91321&goto=lastpost
DeWitt Payne said in Comment 78477
“Remember when the Japanese MITI was supposed to give them a competitive advantage over us? That was shortly followed by the lost decade(s) in Japan. Where the state-directed economy succeeds on the world stage in China, like in rare earths, it does so by cheating. They sell at a loss for years to run everyone else out of the business and then raise prices and limit access.”
________
Sounds like Wal-Mart.
Japan did take a huge bite out of the auto market, and still has it.
Cheating is just good business if you can get away with it.
Robert D. Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, says
” It is clearly China’s choice whether or not to create and sustain state enterprises. But where SOEs and SSEs are made artificially competitive by practices that distort competition—privileged financial support, regulatory benefits denied to private companies, protection against competition, practices that enable them to obtain intellectual property at the expense of other companies, or enable Chinese companies to obtain advantages in government procurement—these policies become a serious concern to the United States and other trading partners.”
http://www.uspolicy.be/headline/state’s-hormats-us-china-relationship-next-five-years
Well. we could put import duties on Chinese goods.
I need to clarify something in my previous post.
Robert D. Hormats did not say “Cheating is just good business if you can get away with it.” I said it.
Andrew_FL (Comment #78485)
July 1st, 2011 at 9:02 pm
“Half the Korean people surely haven’t benefited from decades of central planning. Why on earth would it work for the other half, or the rest of us for that matter?”
——————————-
Central planning is one thing – planning in strategic areas (like energy) is another. IMO, the South Korean people will benefit from their government’s foresight.
Reason can mean both ‘motive’ or ’cause’ so both sides of the arguments are correct, but I know you are just joshing 😉
Philosophers define their terms carefully, so I am told.
“For some reason, water has seeped into…â€
Lucia: Most do not talk this way. They would leave “For some reason” off. It’s a redundancy.
SteveF: I do not believe Evolution is “responsible” for anything.
Andrew
Andrew_KY 78533,
Although I must admit that I am surprised by your answer, thanks for that clear reply. You saved me the time needed to write a longish comment.
Re: Max_OK (Jul 2 02:20),
Not really. Wal-Mart is and always has been profitable. Wal-Mart sells at lower prices because they can demand lower prices from their suppliers. They also require their suppliers to lower their prices for the same product every year. In a lot of cases this results in lower quality versions of brand name products being sold at Wal-Mart. I’d also like to see an example of any Wal-Mart store raising their prices after local merchants have disappeared.
Andrew_KY–
These three setences are screwed up in so many ways.
!_ I don’t know how “most” talk where you are, but around here in Illinois plenty of people around here say “for some reason weeds sprouted” or “for some reason water seeped” etc.
2) Plenty of people are redundant and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that.
2) In anycase if “for some reason” is redundant that means that the water– which lacks sentience–did seep “for a reason”. Admitting there can be a reason and observing the fact that there is a reason, that the existence of a “reason” is self evident to the extent that observing so is redundant hardly supports your case that someone cannotobserve that evolution can’t be a “reason”.
So, it seems to me that you’ve simultaneously said things that are totally wrong and also shown why your gripe against someone saying evolution is a reason is totally idiotic.
Owen says “…imagine government planning of strategic industries!”
I know people who work in high levels of government. No thanks.
SteveF: I’m sorry I can’t elaborate as I’d like. I am constrained by word/character limits, time between comments and such.
Andrew
Andrew_KY–
I took you out of the plugin. Feel free to answer SteveF. Note: please do not argue by asking questions. If you do argue by asking questions, SteveF is authorized to respond with “Please suggest your answer to that question first.”
Thanks, Lucia.
“can you tell me if you believe evolutionary change is responsible the diversity of bacterial, plant, and animal life forms on Earth?”
SteveF: I believe with “responsible” you meant “source or cause”. As a Catholic, I believe that God is the ultimate source or cause of the diversity of all life on earth. Now, I do believe that mutations can cause changes in organisms, but I do not believe that mutations are the cause or source of complex organic structures. There is no evidence they are the cause. Bacteria develop resistance, because of simple changes and that’s where it stops. Michael Behe explores the evidence that is available in “The Edge of Evolution”. I read it a couple of years ago. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend it.
Andrew
Andrew_KY,
Religious belief is not a meaningful subject of debate, since it is not subject to falsification or refutation. So any discussion of evolution with you would be (I am quite sure) a waste of your time and mine. Sorry.
SteveF,
No problems. We’ve been down this road before. I am aware that materialists by philosophy do not stray into waters they’ve defined out of existence. That would defeat their philosophy. But since the waters have runneth over me, I can tell you it’s really not as bad as you don’t imagine. 😉
Andrew
Re: Julian Braggins (Jul 2 06:27),
Here Andrew, start with aristotle on the four causes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes
there is a nice little paragraph on teleology and evolutionary biology.
Steven Mosher,
It would be more helpful if you would quote specifically what you think is the relevant part of your link, so I don’t have to guess what I’m supposed to take from it.
Andrew
Re: Andrew_KY (Jul 3 15:37), it’s all relevant. You appear to use the word cause in a casual way. Suggest you do some reading, STARTING with that secondary source and then plow on to the primary.
Steven Mosher,
I’ve had enough experience trading with comments with you such that this is just another “throw a link at somebody” so you can “win”. Fine, you win. You are the Smartest Guy on the Internet. If you ever decide to comment something helpful in regards to this conversation, I’ll read it.
Andrew
Boris asked,
“Ask a libertarian what the solution to AGW should be, assuming it is real. I’ve asked many and have yet to hear much of an answer.”
Well, today is your lucky day. 🙂
First, let’s be clear what is meant by “AGW is real.” I take that to mean that adding CO2 to the atmosphere at rates consistent with projected population and economic growth over the course of the next century will have “catastrophic” climate consequences, with “catastrophic” meaning that the calculable costs will greatly outweigh the calculable benefits.
If that were indeed the case — or if the best available evidence indicates that would be the case — then governments would be justified in enacting measures to slow the rate of CO2 emissions. Indeed, they would be obliged to do so. The measures chosen should themselves be cost-effective, of course.
In the view of most libertarians the purposes of government are to:
1. Secure individuals in the exercise of their natural rights;
2. Manage natural commons; and
3. Provide certain public goods (a common defense, a rule of law, a sound money supply, public rights-of-way, etc.)
Maintaining a hospitable climate falls easily under #2 above.
SteveF wrote,
“But I think a more important question is one not asked: ‘What represents the common good?'”
To which Lucia replied,
“I think you nailed it.”
Yes indeed. Goods (and evils) are always relative to persons. A statement in the form, “X is good” is meaningless; to be meaningful a valuer must be specified, i.e., “X is good for Alfie.” Whether X is indeed good for Alfie is an objective matter — we determine whether X is good for Alfie by observing whether Alfie invests any of his resources — time, effort, other assets he may have — in the pursuit of X. If he does not, the proposition “X is good for Alfie” is false. (But there is a caveat here: Alfie must be aware of the costs and benefits of X).
Because the interests, tastes, desires, and goals of people differ greatly, there are very few “common goods” to be found among any large group of people, if you mean, “common to them all.” Indeed, among a society comprised of millions of people, there are probably none. There will be a few common to most of them, however. A hospitable climate would be one of those.
Max_OK wrote,
“The common good is what’s best for most.”
No. That would be only a plurality good, not a common good.
Andrew_KY–
If you do click Mosher’s link you will find the word “caused” used in ways which you evidently think it cannot be used. 🙂
Lucia,
Thanks. I didn’t know I was in a debate about the usage of “cause”. Please point me to where exactly that became an issue.
Andrew
Two points re: maintaining a hospitable climate.
1. How does one maintain a constantly changing climate?
2. Warmer climates are more hospitable than colder climates.
===================
Kim
There is a limit though. Perpetually above 90F is not nice.
Andrew_KY:
You have also linked “cause” to “responsible”
Julian linked the word “cause” to your quibble about “reason”:
Note that the word “cause” and “reason” are linked.
So “cause” is getting used all over the place here, and you are in a debate about whether or not evolution can be “the reason” or “the cause” for something. You could, of course, engage all these observations about the connection between “cause” and “reason”…. or… not….
Lucia,
In my comments “cause” is “something that produces an effect”. I don’t see an issue with that. (Re: SteveF’s question that used “responsible”)
And the debate I thought was Doc’s usage of the phrase “for some reason”. Which I thought implied motive or purpose.
Maybe Doc can tell us what he meant.
Andrew
Andrew_KY–
Well… maybe you should look words up in the dictionary and notice the full range of definitions before criticizing someone else’s perfectly correct use. As Julian wrote “Reason can mean both ‘motive’ or ’cause’ so both sides of the “. This is true. You ought to know it is true and ought perfectly well to have understood Doc’s usage. If you didn’t at the time you criticized Doc for using the word reason, by the time everyone discussed the link between “cause” and “reason” you certainly ought to have slapped your hand on your head, seen where you bungled criticizing Doc’s statement and said “d’Oh!”
Also: If you understood Doc’s usage but were just trying to create a stooooopid semantic argument: That’s the sort of thing that justifies giving you time outs and limiting your comments. Because it’s the sort of argument that only 14 year olds find clever.
“In my comments “cause†is “something that produces an effectâ€.
Well… maybe you should look words up in the dictionary and notice the full range of definitions before criticizing someone else’s perfectly correct use”
Lucia, I didn’t criticize anyone’s use of the word “cause”. Steven Mosher criticized mine. Said it was “in a casual way”. Tomorrow I’m going to use “concrete” vaguely and see how much angst I can stir up. 😉 lol
Andrew
Andrew_KY–
You criticized Doc’s use of reason. If you’d looked up the word in the dictionary you would see your criticism is idiotic because for it to hold, we have to all forget that “reason” can have the meaning “cause”.
Also, you used the word “cause” here. “SteveF: I believe with “responsible†you meant “source or causeâ€. As a Catholic, I believe that God is the ultimate source or cause of the diversity of all life on earth. “ you then continue using the word “cause”. After that, Mosher pointed you to a discussion which involved the many ways in which the word “cause” is used and which discusses evolution and also religion– a topic you discussed in your response to SteveF. But you don’t want to take that up. Which is fine.
Anyway, SteveF has decided discussing evolution with you is a waste of time. I agree. It seems you don’t want to discuss it with Mosher either. So, I think that should end it.
Lucia,
SteveF ended the discussion of evolution with me. I can talk about it till the cows come home. He doesn’t want to.
Steven Mosher declined to get specific about his problem with my usage of “cause”. If he wants to have a reasonable dialogue about that, we can.
And I only started talking about it because someone else brought it up, Doc, and he has declined to respond also.
Andrew
Andrew_KY–
I’m not surprised Doc didn’t respond to you criticism of what he said based on your distorting the definition of “reason”. Mosher responded to your request that he clarify what he wanted you to read at the link and you gave a snotty answer.
Before going to bed, I’m going to go back to limiting your posts. I’d lifted the restriction to permit you to discuss with SteveF. If someone else thinks they want to have a long conversation with you, I’ll unrestrict you again.
kim wrote,
“Two points re: maintaining a hospitable climate.
“1. How does one maintain a constantly changing climate?
“2. Warmer climates are more hospitable than colder climates.”
The climate can be constantly changing yet remain hospitable. When the changes threaten to render it inhospitable then we intervene (to the extent we are able) to maintain it within hospitable limits.
Sure, G.E., though I might alter the content of your parenthetical: (beyond the extent that we know what we are doing).
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DeWitt Payne said in Comment #78536
Re: Max_OK (Jul 2 02:20),
Sounds like Wal-Mart.
Not really. Wal-Mart is and always has been profitable.
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China’s State-owned enterprises (SOE’s) have a lot in common with Wal-Mart, including size, resources, and profitability.
“BEIJING: China’s centrally-administered State-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the supervision of the state assets watchdog saw profits grow 200 percent year-on-year in January, the watchdog said Tuesday.”
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2010-02/23/content_9491810.htm
China has a mixture of State-owned, privately owned, and hybrid enterprises (partially State-owned). Examples of the latter are computer- maker Lenovo and home-appliance producer Hair, which incidentally both supply Wal-Mart for the U.S. market.
Wal-Mart has settled out of court in a few cases of predatory practices, but I don’t know the details.
G. E. Morton said in Comment #78566
Because the interests, tastes, desires, and goals of people differ greatly, there are very few “common goods†to be found among any large group of people, if you mean, “common to them all.â€
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The inmate population attests to that. And even within prisons, interests. tastes, and desires probably differ a lot. But getting out may be a common goal.
“lucia (Comment #78581)
July 3rd, 2011 at 8:31 pm
Andrew_KY–
I’m not surprised Doc didn’t respond to you criticism of what he said based on your distorting the definition of “reasonâ€. ”
I didn’t think this was the place. Perhaps if the topic ever come up on an open thread.