Tag: science

I give it another six years before the incessant warnings about “global warming” become warnings about “the next Ice Age”. Again.

The trend for fall snow across the northern hemisphere has been increasing, defying the forecasts over the last two decades for snows becoming an increasingly rare event. The 10-year running mean of the Boston area snowfall has skyrocketed to the highest level since snow records were kept and that goes back about 145 years! Fluctuations in the temperature regime and annual snowfalls are a function of about 25 global factors including changing oceanic oscillations mainly sea-surface temperature anomaly locations which impact atmospheric conditions creating certain jet stream configurations plus others such as solar activity and irradiance, geomagnetic activity, volcanism, etc.

Interestingly, some scientists have stated that increasing snow is consistent with climate change because warmer air holds more moisture, more water vapor and this can result in more storms with heavy precipitation. The trick, of course, is having sufficient cold air to produce that snow. But note that 93{9fe07fc990c3789707497e3d2c7a52a79af10be4715f25651e7c90f910695225} of the years with more than 60″ of snow in Boston were colder than average years. The reality is cooling, not warming, increases snowfall. Note the graph depicting declining January through March temperatures for 20 years at a rate of 1.5 degrees F. per decade in the Northeast!

The lesson, as always, is pay no attention to politically-motivated science that is used as an excuse to further centralize the economy and society.

25/25. You are a GENIUS!
Way to go! Only people with an IQ score of 153-161 aced this general knowledge test. 

I can personally attest that you don’t need an IQ of 153, much less 161, to score 25/25 on this general knowledge test. Especially since it took me less than 30 seconds to take it. Frankly, I’d be astonished if anyone reading this blog got less than 22 of the answers right.

As a general rule, Internet IQ tests are, like this one, completely fake and meant to flatter the test-taker. Knowledge can serve as a partial proxy for IQ, but it can never provide any sort of quantitative measure because storage is not processing power. Also, genius is not measured in capability or IQ, but in unique historical achievement.

But there is one intriguing thing about this clickbaitery, which is the notion that only people with IQs under 161 can get a perfect score. Are they suggesting that 4SD minds tend to overcomplicate straightforward questions? Or, as is much more likely the case, are they just playing the scientistic game of selling credibility through false claims of precision?

If so, they’re hardly alone. For as Daniel Dennett has assured us, you can trust biologists because physicists get amazingly accurate results.

Is now flipping a coin. If recent studies in reproducibility are to be believed, modern science is now less than 50 percent reproducible.

The same could be said about big projects in which psychologists work together to replicate past studies. Six such projects, including the SSRP, have now been completed. Between them, they’ve successfully replicated just 87 out of 190 studies, for an overall rate of 46 percent. “This is not acceptable,” says Simine Vazire from UC Davis.

The 62-percent success rate from the SSRP, though higher, is still galling to Vazire, since the project specifically looked at the two most prestigious journals in the world. “We should not treat publication in Science or Nature to be a mark of a particularly robust finding or a particularly skilled researcher,” she says. These journals “are not especially good at picking out really robust findings or excellent research practices. And the prediction market adds to my frustration because it shows that there are clues to the strength of the evidence in the papers themselves.”

It’s really rather appalling to contemplate that the foolish likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were dumb enough to seriously believe that what has – at best – a reliability rate of less than two-thirds should be our primary metric of reality.

In addition to its intrinsically anti-Christian purpose that is documented in J.B. Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought, in The Suicide of the West, James Burnham identifies another, equally serious problem with the progressive principle of the right of free speech: the logical and philosophical connection between free speech and the devolution of science from the rigors of scientody to the ever-mutating positions of democratic scientistry.

 If we know the truth, we might reasonably ask, why waste society’s time, space and money giving an equal forum, under the free speech rule, to error? The only consistent answer is: we cannot be certain that we know the truth—if, indeed, there is any such thing as objective truth. Liberalism is logically committed to the doctrine that philosophers know under the forbidding title of “epistemological relativism.” This comes out clearly both in theoretical discussion by philosophers of liberalism and in liberal practice.

We confront here a principle that would seem strangely paradoxical if it had not become so familiar in the thought and writings of our time. Liberalism is committed to the truth and to the belief that truth is what is discovered by reason and the sciences; and committed against the falsehoods and errors that are handed down by superstition, prejudice, custom and authority. But every man, according to liberalism, is entitled to his own opinion, and has the right to express it (and to advocate its acceptance). In motivating the theory and practice of free speech, liberalism must either abandon its belief in the superior social utility of truth, or maintain that we cannot be sure we know the truth. The first alternative—which would imply that error is sometimes more useful for society than the truth—is by no means self-evidently false, but is ruled out, or rather not even considered seriously, by liberalism. Therefore liberalism must accept the second alternative.

We thus face the following situation. Truth is our goal; but objective truth, if it exists at all, is unattainable; we cannot be sure even whether we are getting closer to it, because that estimate could not be made without an objective standard against which to measure the gap. Thus the goal we have postulated becomes meaningless, evaporates. Our original commitment to truth undergoes a subtle transformation, and becomes a commitment to the rational and scientific process itself: to—in John Dewey’s terminology—the “method of inquiry.”

But this process or method of inquiry is nothing other than the universal dialogue made possible by universal education and universal suffrage under the rules of freedom of opinion, speech, press and assembly. Throughout his long life, the commitment to the method of inquiry that is at once “the scientific method” and “the democratic method” was perhaps the major theme of Dewey’s teaching. Let us add that truth thus becomes in practice relative to the method of inquiry. For all practical purposes, truth in any specific scientific field is simply the present consensus of scientific opinion within that same field; and political and social truth is what is voted by a democratic majority.

It is not clear in advance how wide the field of political and social truth should be understood to be; presumably that question too can be answered only by the democratic method, so that the field is as wide as the democratic majority chooses to make it. The plainest summary of the net conclusion of the liberal doctrine of truth is that given in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ aphorism. He conjoins the two key propositions, though I place them here in a sequence the reverse of the original: 1) “truth is the only ground upon which [men’s] wishes safely can be carried out”; 2) “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

Another of the prominent American philosophers of liberalism, Professor T.V. Smith of the University of Chicago—whose influence has been spread much beyond the academies by virtue of his mellifluous prose style and his popularity as an after-dinner speaker—has made the idea of relativity the core of his essay on “Philosophy and Democracy.” “This inability finally to distinguish [truth from falsity, good from evil, beauty from ugliness] is the propaedeutic for promotion from animal impetuosity to civilized forbearance. It marks the firmest foundation”—again the paradox is near the surface—“for the tolerance which is characteristic of democracy alone.”

Professor Smith very rightly cites Justice Holmes as a major source of the influence of this doctrine of relativism among us. “As Holmes put it, we lack a knowledge of the ‘truth’ of ‘truth.’ ” Professor Smith attacks all of the classical theories of objective truth, and declares: “No one of these theories can adequately test itself, much less anything else.” The idea of objective truth is only the rationalization of private, subjective “feelings of certitude . . . ; and certitude is not enough. It more easily marks the beginning of coercion than the end of demonstration. . . . The only insurance the modern world has against the recurrence of the age-old debacle of persecution for opinion is the presence in it of a sufficient number of men of such character as will mollify assertions of truth with the restraints of tolerance.”

Since final truth cannot be known, we must keep the dialogue eternally going, and, where action is required, be “content”—Mr. Hutchins echoes Justice Holmes—“to abide by the decision of the majority.”

Despite being a mild Edgar Allen Poe aficionado, I wasn’t familiar with his Eureka, which is a sort of brilliant stream-of-consciousness intellectual exploration that is almost exactly what Jordan Peterson, in his fevered, cousin-devouring dreams, must have imagined his Maps of Meaning would be. I’ve been reading Eureka and finding it to be an absolute delight, particularly in Poe’s prophetic anticipation of the instrinsic limitations of the methodology of modern science, which he described in the summary of a letter said to have been written in 2848.

“Well, Aries Tottle flourished supreme, until the advent of one Hog, surnamed ‘the Ettrick shepherd,’ who preached an entirely different system, which he called the à posteriori or inductive. His plan referred altogether to sensation. He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts—instantiæ Naturæ, as they were somewhat affectedly called—and arranging them into general laws. In a word, while the mode of Aries rested on noumena, that of Hog depended on phenomena; and so great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first introduction, Aries fell into general disrepute. Finally, however, he recovered ground, and was permitted to divide the empire of Philosophy with his more modern rival:—the savans contenting themselves with proscribing all other competitors, past, present, and to come; putting an end to all controversy on the topic by the promulgation of a Median law, to the effect that the Aristotelian and Baconian roads are, and of right ought to be, the solo possible avenues to knowledge:—‘Baconian,’ you must know, my dear friend,” adds the letter-writer at this point, “was an adjective invented as equivalent to Hog-ian, and at the same time more dignified and euphonious.

“Now I do assure you most positively”—proceeds the epistle—“that I represent these matters fairly; and you can easily understand how restrictions so absurd on their very face must have operated, in those days, to retard the progress of true Science, which makes its most important advances—as all History will show—by seemingly intuitive leaps. These ancient ideas confined investigation to crawling; and I need not suggest to you that crawling, among varieties of locomotion, is a very capital thing of its kind;—but because the tortoise is sure of foot, for this reason must we clip the wings of the eagles? For many centuries, so great was the infatuation, about Hog especially, that a virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called. No man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone. It mattered not whether the truth was even demonstrably such; for the dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only the road by which it professed to have been attained. The end, with them, was a point of no moment, whatever:—‘the means!’ they vociferated—‘let us look at the means!’—and if, on scrutiny of the means, it was found to come neither under the category Hog, nor under the category Aries (which means ram), why then the savans went no farther, but, calling the thinker a fool and branding him a ‘theorist,’ would never, thenceforward, have any thing to do either with him or with his truths.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s also fascinating to see how the Mozart-Salieri relationship seems to play out again and again over time, the inevitable public rivalries between the original thinkers with integrity and talent and the popular pretenders with neither. Sometimes the Mozarts win out, sometimes the Griswolds do. But time always eventually exposes the latter, as your complete failure to recognize the name of Poe’s bitter would-be rival should suffice to demonstrate.

On a possibly-but-not-necessarily-unrelated note, I found this email from a reader to be more than a little amusing.

I was over at my sister’s place today and saw a copy of The Irrational Atheist in their library. When I asked about it, her husband, who is a recent MDiv graduate, told me that it was assigned reading in seminary. Amen. 

Anyhow, “Hogian” is an apt description of the science-loving dogmatists who demand “proof” and “evidence” for event the simplest and most straightforward claims. They inevitably confuse the means with the end, and not infrequently go so far to claim, without any apparent sense of irony intended, that any factual statement made without evidential support and reliable sourcing being subsequently provided is inherently untrue.

Be very careful before casually throwing out that “seeking a better life”  rhetoric to justify immigration. Because you’re granting entry to the vast majority of the global population with that rationale:

The victory of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) in the recent Mexican presidential election likely means an increase in immigration to the United States. AMLO has called immigration a “human right that we will defend” and will probably continue the Mexican government’s meddling in American affairs. AMLO has also reportedly promised to demand “respect” from President Trump and the United States, which probably means less cooperation in stopping Central American migrants from moving through the country.  If Mexico continues its decline into lawlessness or goes into recession, immigration from Mexico itself will sharply increase.

The ironic result of all this: the worse Mexico performs, the more powerful that nation becomes. Many nominal American citizens believe their first loyalty is with Mexico. Though they don’t want to live there, they don’t want to surrender their identity. Exporting its underclass to the U.S. spares Mexico and other Latin American countries the need for internal reform. As Tucker Carlson recently put it: “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class”.

Furthermore, Mexico and other Latin American countries continue to benefit from the endless flow of remittances from the U.S. America is literally paying welfare benefits to illegal aliens (if only for their anchor babies), some portion of which they then proceed to send home.

This phenomenon should be termed “Failure Migration.” The lower a people’s level of civilizational accomplishment, the more that people is able to expand its influence. This paradox is another example of how the modern social and political system has a destructive and even dysgenic effect.

As I’ve been pointing out recently, it’s going to be interesting to see how the non-Posterity US citizens attempt to thread this particular needle. Why should their German, Dutch, Italian, Irish, and Jewish ancestors have had the right to seek a better life that they are denying to Mexicans, Somalis, Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians today?

Average IQs are plunging across the West, most significantly in the USA and Sweden. This is more than societal self-destruction, it is civilizational suicide.

Remember, this is the standard by which Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris believe truth should be measured:

“The majority of papers that get published, even in serious journals, are pretty sloppy,” said John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who specializes in the study of scientific studies.

This sworn enemy of bad research published a widely cited article in 2005 entitled: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Since then, he says, only limited progress has been made….

“Diet is one of the most horrible areas of biomedical investigation,” professor Ioannidis added — and not just due to conflicts of interest with various food industries. “Measuring diet is extremely difficult,” he stressed. How can we precisely quantify what people eat?

In this field, researchers often go in wild search of correlations within huge databases, without so much as a starting hypothesis. Even when the methodology is good, with the gold standard being a study where participants are chosen at random, the execution can fall short.

A famous 2013 study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet against heart disease had to be retracted in June by the most prestigious of medical journals, the New England Journal of Medicine, because not all participants were randomly recruited; the results have been revised downwards.

So what should we take away from the flood of studies published every day?

Ioannidis recommends asking the following questions: is this something that has been seen just once, or in multiple studies? Is it a small or a large study? Is this a randomized experiment? Who funded it? Are the researchers transparent?

These precautions are fundamental in medicine, where bad studies have contributed to the adoption of treatments that are at best ineffective, and at worst harmful.

In their book “Ending Medical Reversal,” Vinayak Prasad and Adam Cifu offer terrifying examples of practices adopted on the basis of studies that went on to be invalidated, such as opening a brain artery with stents to reduce the risk of a new stroke.

It was only after 10 years that a robust, randomized study showed that the practice actually increased the risk of stroke.

Never forget that science cannot be considered reliable until it is called “engineering”. Until then, the most that one can accurately assume is that it has about a fifty percent chance of actually being correct. The fact that some physicists got some very accurate results in the 1950s says precisely nothing about that study published by a biologist or a medical researcher or an economist 70 years later.