Tag: books

Lomborg returns fire

Bjorn Lomborg responds to what appears to be an incompetent, would-be hatchet job on his climate books:

Howard Friel’s book The Lomborg Deception (LD) focuses on two of my books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (TSE) and the U.S. edition of Cool It (CIUS). It is heartening to write books that engage others, and I welcome his critique.
Unfortunately, it is obvious that Friel has no interest in fair-minded criticism or honest disagreement. Rather, he seems determined to portray me as devious, deceptive, and intellectually dishonest. Ironically, in his zeal to do so, he repeatedly commits the very sins he accuses me of – selective or incomplete quotation, misrepresentation of source material, and even outright fabrication. Rather than engaging with my books on their own terms, he caricatures my work and then attacks it.

Friel makes his intent clear in an author’s note at the beginning of his book, in which he identifies what he calls “Lomborg’s Theorem”: the idea that “global warming is no catastrophe” (p. xi).1 His aim, he says, is to discredit this idea—“to show that Lomborg’s Theorem is grounded in highly questionable data and analysis, and that there is little if any factual or analytic basis for the theorem” (p. xi). Fair enough. This is the stuff of academic debate: are my data accurate and is my analysis valid? I have no problem with anyone questioning the basis of my work, provided the questions are honest and fair-minded. But as I will document below, what Friel does in The Lomborg Deception is something else entirely. In his attempt to prove that my data and analysis are misleading and/or dishonest, he quotes source material out of context, mangles source figures and tables, misrepresents my text and source material, relies more on news reports than on peer-reviewed research, and consistently avoids engaging with the central arguments of my work.

Having written a book that is a response to the arguments of other individuals, I can testify that it is vitally important to attack the target’s strongest arguments rather than sniping away at the trivial and peripheral issues and attempting to portray them in a false light. The fact that I directly addressed the New Atheists’ most important arguments – Harris’s Extinction Equation, Dawkins’s Ultimate 747, and Dennett’s Division of Doxastic Labor – meant that it was impossible for their defenders to get away with their false accusations of strawmen construction. Not that that prevented a few of the less intelligent ones from trying, of course….

Another reason that it is always a mistake to address the side issues in lieu of the central ones and fail to give your target a reasonable benefit of the doubt is that even when you have correctly addressed the relative trivialities, it is usually possible for people to play the interpretation game in an attempt to circumvent a solid rebuttal. For example, it was only because I directly corresponded with Sam Harris that I was able to explode several excuses manufactured for him by his defenders. In this case, after reading Lombjorg’s response, it would appear that Friel chose rather poorly in selecting a target who is clearly not afraid to stand by his works and present a detailed defense of them.

Just to be clear, I read Cool It and was unimpressed by it, albeit not for the reasons that Friel manufactures. I was unimpressed mostly because it is obvious that global warming is not taking place, therefore Man is not causing it, and I have little interest in the alternative “save people from themselves” schemes which Lomborg would prefer to tax people in order to fund.

Mailvox: correcting TIA

In which we are treated to a history lesson that corrects my description of the multiverse theory mentioned in TIA. In the chapter titled “Darwin’s Judas”, I wrote: “Those indisposed to accept the anthropic principle attempt to get around the massive improbability problem it presents by imagining that there are billions and billions of universes, for all things are possible through the scientist who postulates very large numbers. Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer. But not only is multiverse theory every bit as unfalsifiable and untestable as the God Hypothesis, it is demonstrably more improbable. If we accept Dawkins’s naked assertion that a universal designer is more complex than the one known universe, a designer is probably less complex than any two universes and infinitely less complex than an infinity of them.”

However, it appears I am entirely wrong about the multiverse concept being developed as a reaction to the anthropic principle. The gentleman writes:

One point that I think I should mention, though…. the “many worlds” interpretation of what’s going on was not invented by Darwinists in a desperate attempt to widen the playing field and give chance a chance–although they may well have seized upon it. The proposition actually predated the present debate by many years as the 1957 doctoral dissertation of Hugh Everett III at Princeton, who took the scientifically impeccable approach of accepting the mathematical formalism of quantum theory as meaning what it said. Collapsing wave functions and the assignment of statistical weights to the possible outcomes do not follow from anything inherent in the theory itself, but are consequences of the conventional imposed interpretation. Everett’s treatment effectively denies the existence of a separate classical realm, as distinct from a ghostlike superposition of potentialities, and asserts the existence of a universal wave function which never collapses, but decomposes naturally into a multitude of mutually unobserved but equally real worlds, each evolving in time, and in which the familiar statistical quantum laws will be found to apply.

I stand corrected. And, to be honest, also a little shocked that one of my favorite living authors, whose books rank highly in my personal top 100, actually happened to read one of my books. This is an excellent lesson in the importance of doing all of the tangentially relevant research; I researched the anthropic principle, but only bothered to read up on the various anti-theological attacks on it rather than investigating the multiverse theory itself.

Three book reviews

A new Summa Elvetica review by JS on Amazon:

In any other fantasy novel the question of whether elves have souls would be silly, but in Beale’s world it is profound question which has lasting repercussions. The question works because the medieval Roman Catholic Church is the one asking.  Most fantasy worlds have a facsimile of the Roman Catholic Church without the Roman and Catholic part. Outside of the addition of the RCC the fantasy world is very familiar to anyone who knows the genre. Tough, taciturn, stoic dwarfs and tall, beautiful, arrogant, magical elves live a world with orcs, goblins, lycanthropes, and demons. Beale succeeds in combing these elements into a lively and believable land.

Jason Clark reviews RGD on Amazon:

When considering the matter of how the world went into its economic meltdown people have many explanations, and many solutions.  In this informative and easily digested book, World Net Daily columnist, blogger and Austrian economist Vox Day applies his own expertise to analysing the problem and offering his solution.  Vox introduces us to the different economic schools that have weighed in on this issue, and details how their take on the matter generally fails to address the issue, and how their solutions will only make matters worse.

Bart Fuller reviews RGD on his blog, Liberty vs Leviathan and adds “It’s a most excellent book and joins Hazlitt and Bastiat on my short list of recommendations to friends wanting to learn about economics.”

This is a book for anyone and everyone wanting to make sense of the economic turmoil of the last two years.

One of my minor goals for 2010 will be to finish the sequel to Summa Elvetica. If I’m fortunate, it’s even possible that it might be published in 2010. But I’m not promising anything, as there are other projects which demand priority.

Creating a literary ghetto

To everyone’s surprise, Julianna Baggott blames sexism for the fact that women seldom write great or award-winning books:

I could understand Publishers Weekly’s phallocratic list if women were writing only a third of the books published or if women didn’t float the industry as book buyers or if the list were an anomaly. In fact, Publishers Weekly is in sync with Pulitzer Prize statistics. In the past 30 years, only 11 prizes have gone to women. Amazon recently announced its 100 best books of 2009 — in the top 10, there are two women. Top 20? Four….

What are the stereotypes that drive these biases? Over the years, I’ve developed many theories. Let me offer one here.

I often hear people exclaiming that they’re astonished that a particular book was written by a man. They seem stunned by the notion that a man could write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties. Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be experts on emotion. I’ve never heard anyone remark that they were surprised that a book of psychological depth was written by a woman.

That last sentence summarizes the writer’s problem; psychological depth != literary greatness. That being said, one wonders who she would propose as the female equivalent of Dostoevsky, or even Poe. Now, it’s worth pointing out that female writers often win awards in SF/F, but that’s partly because there are some very good authoresses such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Theresa Edgerton, and Tanith Lee active in the genre, and partly because the SFWA’s Nebula Award has a propensity to devolve into a popularity contest, (see Catharine Asaro, 2001). But I suspect the main reason women write fewer great books is because they simply don’t make the effort to do so.

There’s nothing wrong with rewriting Tom Brown in a fantasy setting, but greatness does not lie that way even if massive sales success does. There’s nothing wrong with writing silly vampire pre-porn for silly teenage girls either – although it would be illegal on aesthetic grounds and punishable by death by sugar overdose if I were ruling the universe – but it’s readily apparent that literary greatness is not on your list of objectives if you’re writing about sexy dead and/or furry things.

The problem isn’t that women don’t write “write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties”, it is that they don’t tend to write about much else. While there are an increasing number of 40-something male writers who are making a career of doing this sort of narcissistic writing – Dave Eggers and stunt writer A.J. Jacobs spring to mind – the fact is that great literature requires more than navel-gazing, sexual daydreaming and gossip, no matter how well written that navel-gazing, daydreaming and gossip might be.

In any event, the only award that truly matters is the one that time conveys upon an author. No amount of awards or sales are going to turn Harry Potter and the Banquet of Boredom, The Picasso Crossword into works of literary greatness. If you try to accomplish something original, you will probably fail to reach the heights, but if you don’t even try then you definitely will. Summa Elvetica probably hasn’t sold one-tenth as many copies as the worst-selling novel published by Tor last year; it didn’t win a single award or even receive a single review in any literary publication. Given the limitations of the author, it may not even be as good a novel as any of those published by Tor. On the other hand, can anyone argue with a straight face that any of those books attempted to do even half of what was accomplished, let alone attempted, in SE?

Now, note that I’m not complaining in the slightest. As evidence, I will point out that one can’t give a book a title like “A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy” without knowing that practically no one is going to want to read it, to say nothing of throwing in all the untranslated Latin. I could not possibly care less what a literary world of readers who consider Dan Brown to have produced the best of the year’s best happens to think. I am simply observing the industry realities, not arguing that anything should be changed in order to accomodate my idiosyncratic preferences. The industry has already changed enough over the last three decades, as its increasing bias towards various elements preferred by female editors and readers continues to drive young men away from books and towards computer games that still respect the heroic tropes.

Baggott’s article indicates that we should expect to see the same pattern at work in literary awards that we are presently seeing in the awarding of university degrees. Female writers will eventually get their statistical due and make up the majority of literary award winners in time, but no one outside what will have then become a female-dominated literary ghetto will give a damn because the substantive value of the awards will have been destroyed by the very process of the desired transformation. As I predicted back in 1995 (this 2007 Ben Bella piece was simply a reworking of a proposed article for CGW that editor Chris Lombardi described as the most insane piece he’d ever read for the magazine), the next great art will not come from academia, Hollywood, or literature, but from the game industry. Imagine, for example, if Rob Pardo had been a genuine intellectual in the Tolkein mode and harbored ambitions of doing more than Warhammer Fantasy Battle meets Everquest.

I still like fantasy. I still write fantasy. In fact, SE fans may be pleased to learn that I’m presently working on a map for the next book. But I read very little of it these days because so much of it is derivative, predictable, trivial, and boring. There is more astonishment and daring in a single Call of Duty mission – and every MW2 player knows to which mission I’m referring – than there is in any twenty SF/F books published today.

Summa Elvetica on Kindle

At my request, Marcher Lord has graciously decided to price the Kindle edition of Summa Elvetica at only $1.99. On a related note, in working on the sequel, I’ve had to develop some of the things that were left out when I accelerated the pace towards the end. Originally, I’d intended there to be two or three chapters set in the Elven High City which would be largely devoted to telling more about the elves and delving further into the intellectual issues. So here’s the question: if I happen to write those chapters in the course of writing the new book, does it make any sense to add them to a revised edition of SE or not? And if you already own a copy of SE, would this be something you would appreciate or simply find annoying?

“Magnificent Failure”

Fred of Analytical Mind reviews Summa Elvetica on Amazon:

It is generally a good idea to read any Author’s Note one comes across, but in this case it is absolutely critical to understanding what you have just read, which turns out to be all that was salvaged from a planned epic philosophical trilogy that apparently couldn’t be made to work. Given such a genesis, it is amazing just how good it turns out to be!

Theodore Beale has arguably returned high fantasy to its origins, which was a medieval world dominated by a rich and powerful Roman Catholic Church. The utter separation of church from most modern fantasy has resulted in a number of idiocies that fail to withstand scrutiny: Divine Right of Kings without a Divine, priests without gods, etc. The result is one of the most fascinating fantasy worlds I’ve ever visited, and one I’d like to revisit again in future sequels. Mr. Beale has also given us a fascinating cast of characters that I’d like to hear more from: Marcus Valerius the still-wet-behind-the-ears scholar, Lodi the dwarf, Caitlys the Lady Shadowsong, Brother Grimfang the you-won’t-believe-it-until-you-read-it, and especially Bessarias the convert. One hopes that with time Mr. Beale will see his way to producing a sequel or two, perhaps with a bit less philosophy and a bit more adventure.

It has taken me a while and two false starts that will probably turn into short stories or novellas, but I finally have a handle on how the sequel to Summa Elvetica is going to go. I’m not going to rush it or commit to a publishing date before it’s complete, so I don’t know when it will be finished, but I have been scribbling away at it in a desultory manner. The main problem was figuring out who was going to be the protagonist and how that character would relate to Marcus’s continuing development.

But when I realized I was blithely following the model of the my previous books – something I tend to dislike in other authors – and that it would be pointless and unimaginative to repeat the Aquinas fireworks, the possibilities opened up and led to a concept that I think will work out better in the end.

Gladwell and the Igon Value

I can’t honestly say I dislike Malcolm Gladwell’s books or even Gladwell himself.  How can you possibly develop a dislike for a genuinely curious dilettante who writes entertaining pop social science?  But to call him even a minor genius is to considerably overrate the man:

The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures….  An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The ironic thing is that mass popularity of the sort that Gladwell enjoys is not only not evidence of surpassing brilliance, it is almost always precisely the opposite.  To be able to belabor the obvious to the clueless masses in an interesting manner is a useful gift, to be sure, but it helps to be closer to their average level of intelligence, not farther away.  I find it very strange that most people intuitively understand there tends to be an inverse relationship between brilliance and mass popularity when it comes to popular music and popular television shows, but not popular books.  Regardless of whether one is talking about Gladwell, Dawkins, Rowling, or Brown, their appearances on the bestseller lists is no more indicative of literary accomplishment than the consistent chart-topping of Britney Spears or 50 Cent is indicative of musical greatness.

Don’t get me wrong and think this is some sort of sour grapes or something based on the failure of my latest book to make its mark on the bestseller lists.  (It won’t, so long as the recovery theme remains in effect throughout the mainstream media.  In fact, I suggest that we can track the public perception of the state of the economy by how well the book is selling.)  Now, I love the Sports Guy and I’m delighted that The Book of Basketball actually hit #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list.  But as much as I happen to enjoy the Sports Guy’s writings and find them entertaining,  don’t believe that BoB or any of the present #1 bestsellers written by Mitch Albom, John Grisham, or Joel Osteen are particularly well-written or brilliant books.

Returning to Gladwell, Steve Sailer twists the knife: “Should I pause before I publish and apply reality tests to Dr. Frink’s theory … Nah! Dr. Frink is a wonderful genius! This time I’m clearly not overlooking any problems with the basic idea of my article.”  The amusing thing is that as with Paul Krugman and his claim that half of all U.S. banks failed in 1931, the error is a long-standing one.  In this case, Gladwell first introduced the concept of the Igon Value to an unsuspecting world six years ago.

As one of Sailer’s commenters notes, a Bertrand Russell quote would appear to be more than a little applicable here: “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”

Errata

In any book full of statistical minutia, it’s highly probable that the author will make the occasional dumb mistake. Sometimes it’s a typo, sometimes it’s a failure of research, sometimes it’s a misstatement, and sometimes it’s just an inexplicable error. This doesn’t make you feel any better when you catch your own dumb mistakes, or worse, have to rely upon other people catching them for you. But this historical howler, I have to confess, makes me feel rather better about my own 1931-related error. It also may help explain my low opinion of certain mainstream economists for those who think I show insufficient lack of respect for fame and professional credentials. And while I’m inclined to give authors the benefit of the doubt when it comes to statistical citations, I’m not sure this one can be considered an excusable error, especially since it was made by an economist who has often written about the Great Depression as if he knows a great deal about it.

“Back to bank runs: in 1931, about half the banks in the United States failed. These banks were not all alike. Some were very badly run; some took excessive risks, even given what they knew before 1929; others were reasonably well, even conservatively managed. But when panic spread across the land, and depositors everywhere wanted their money immediately, none of this mattered: only banks that had been extremely conservative, that had kept what in normal times would be an excessively large share of their deposits in cash, survived.”
– Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics, p. 100 (1999)

I found myself wondering if he’d figured out his tremendous mistake or if anyone had bothered to point it out to him at some point in the ten years between editions. Fortunately, I also happen to have his revised edition. The answer: apparently not.

“Back to bank runs: in 1931, about half the banks in the United States failed. These banks were not all alike. Some were very badly run; some took excessive risks, even given what they knew before 1929; others were reasonably well, even conservatively managed. But when panic spread across the land, and depositors everywhere wanted their money immediately, none of this mattered: only banks that had been extremely conservative, that had kept what in normal times would be an excessively large share of their deposits in cash, survived.”
– Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, pp 96-97. (2009)

If you should happen to consult RGD, you’ll see that 2,293 of the 20,367 banks in the United States failed. That’s 11 percent, which is not even close to “about half”. You can also check Banking and Monetary Statistics 1914-1941 or Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States 1857-1960 if you don’t wish to take my word for it. The problem is that repeating this erroneous historical “fact” twice in ten years isn’t merely an error, it tends to suggest that Krugman really doesn’t know all that much about the Great Depression, and even worse, hasn’t read Milton Friedman.

RGD $1.99

While I wasn’t able to make the ebook available for free, you can get the PDF for only $1.99 at Scribd immediately. The Kindle version will also be $1.99 when Amazon finally gets around to updating their database and makes it available. Even if you’re waiting for your hardcover to arrive, you might still like to check out the Scribd preview, since it features three four-page sections that cover the comparison of present and historical bank failures, the “global savings glut” and the failure of the monetarist predictive model, and five of my suggestions for what can and should be done on the macro scale. I always prefer to have both the book and the ebook myself, and thanks to the low ebook price and the Amazon discount you can get both the hardcover and the PDF for less than the cover price of the former alone.

Today looks like a busy day. I had three radio interviews yesterday and five today; it was gratifying to discover how keenly interested people are in the subject matter. Granted, the national show was focused on money matters, that being the name of the show, but regardless, it was remarkable to observe the divergence between the reactions of the Wall Street-based financial media and the talk radio hosts to yesterday’s “surprising” GDP report. Speaking of today’s radio shows, one of them is The Barry Farber Show. I’ll be on from 8PM to 9 PM Eastern and his producer said that he’d very much welcome callers with questions about the book in the second half-hour. The number is 800-336-2225 if you’ve got an economics related one that I haven’t addressed here already and the show has an Internet live stream available.

RGD on Lew Rockwell

The Return of the Great Depression

It can quite reasonably be said that at no point in economic history has technical knowledge ever been less relevant to being a good economist than today. Mainstream economics is in complete disarray. In the UK, economists are reeling in shock as their predicted third-quarter recovery has failed to appear, while in the USA, Nobel-winning Keynesians are first calculating the need for a $600 billion stimulus, then turning around and declaring a $787 billion stimulus is insufficient. A report from the Kiel Institute entitled The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics has concluded that a “reconsideration” of the “basic premises” of standard macro and finance models is required due to their inability “to provide any insight into ongoing events.” And even the venerable Economist has been wondering aloud where economics went wrong.

Garbage in, garbage out. The truth that is known to every computer programmer is finally beginning to penetrate the economic elite. Keynesian models have failed. Monetarist models have failed. Neo-Keynesian and Post-Keynesian models have failed. The only known concepts that have not completely failed – yet – are the financial instability hypothesis of Hyman Minsky, Richard Koo’s concept of a balance-sheet recession, and the credit-focused cycle theory of the Austrian School.

Mr. Rockwell, the chairman of the Mises Institute and a great champion of both Austrian economics and human liberty, was kind enough to ask me to personally introduce RGD to his readership. This is an article I wrote specifically lewrockwell.com for the official launch of the book today, and I’d encourage you to check it out. I have to admit, I was a bit taken aback to hear the host quote the opening sentence of it during my interview on The Rob Johnson Show.