Tag: science

The Igon Value of Intelligence

Steven Pinker bitchslaps Gladwell:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.

Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who, unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the relevance to teacher selection (the focus of the essay) remains tenuous.

Actually, depending on the blog, you might be better off to bet on it over the average peer-reviewed article. “Peer-review” is just a sciency name for what is more commonly known as “editing”. And you have only to look at a newspaper to see that no amount of editors necessarily precludes egregious errors of fact and logic. But otherwise, yeah. Gladwell is a twit. Sure, he’s sold a lot of books, but then, so did whoever wrote “Who Moved My Cheese” and “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”. Does anyone seriously ascribe intellectual relevance to those best-selling authors?

Steve Sailer follows up Pinker’s stake-and-garlic with a beheading, showing that Gladwell isn’t just a twit, he’s apparently a clueless and cowardly little bitch as well:

Without admitting it, Gladwell seems to have given up former position that NFL achievement “can’t be predicted,” there’s “no connection,” etc. etc. He now seems to be saying that, when you take into account the higher pay of higher draft picks, NFL teams aren’t economically optimizing their draft picks, which is a wildly different thing.

NFL teams aren’t economically optimizing their draft picks! I’m sure Detroit fans will be SHOCKED… as are those who have suffered through seasons of the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment (2nd round, 2006). Gladwell obviously pays zero attention to professional football or he could not have possibly have written this: “And what Berri and Simmons in particular—and Massey and Thaler in general—remind us is that that kind of blind faith in the likes of Matt Millen and Al Davis simply isn’t justified.”

Yes, because there were just massive legions of fans in Detroit and Oakland with blind faith in Davis and Millen…. For crying out loud, why do some people find it so impossible to admit that they’re wrong even when smart people are rubbing their noses in their mistakes in the national media? Everyone is wrong from time to time. Absolutely everyone! I despise those who try to move the goalposts once they’ve been cornered and proven wrong; are they so stupid that they genuinely believe that no one is going to notice that what they’re saying now is not what they were saying before?

AGW/CC travesty confirmed

There isn’t any science to support the outrageous conclusions driving Kyoto and Copenhagen. None. Cram this statement from one of the leading IPCC scientists down the throat of the next idiot you hear using the term “global warming denier”:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
– Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessment of Climate Change

Here’s another one: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

The so-called scientists know their models are wrong. They know the global warming they predicted isn’t happening. And yet they are trying to keep it quiet, so that all the credulous science fetishists who believe wholeheartedly in the “science” won’t lose faith in the cause and pull out the scientific supports from the global governance scheme. Speaking of which, here’s another: “One particular thing you said – and we agreed – was about the IPCC reports and the broader climate negotiations were working to the globalisation agenda driven by organisations like the WTO.”

This is confirmation that AGW/CC is indeed what I said it would turn out to be, namely, The Biggest Science Fraud Yet. Of course, if the climate scientists had one-tenth the integrity that the fetishists claim they do, it wouldn’t have been necessary to learn what they really think about the matter from a whistleblower releasing hacked emails.

Ian Wishart’s Investigate Magazine confirms the emails are real(4.1 meg PDF):

The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine. In an exclusive interview, Jones told TGIF, “It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

In a word: awesome! Whoever did this merits knighthood by the Legion of Doom.

Overselling swine flu

I’ve been wondering about swine flu since the time the English papers were full of panic-stricken reports that a perfectly healthy child had died of swine flu. Upon reading the details, it became clear that she had only died of it after first suffering through the medical equivalent of getting run over by a truck twice:

If you’ve been diagnosed “probable” or “presumed” 2009 H1N1 or “swine flu” in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That’s according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.

What I don’t understand is why the medical authorities seem so determined to see an epidemic of one sort or another take place. First bird flu, now swine flu, and in two years time we’ll probably be instructed to quake with fear over the lethal dangers posed by Malaysian Spitting Frog Flu. I’ve never seen anything like the media coverage of medical matters like the last five years. Even the height of the AIDS scare was nothing like this.

Al Gore commits an Igon error

As I have said many, many times before, AGW/CC is a complete crock of steaming bovine ejectus. The “scientists” who subscribe to the theory are either corrupt, ignorant, or ideologically supportive of global governance and this will become increasingly obvious to everyone over time. So, it should come as no surprise that the leading AGW/CC salesman should demonstrate that he has very little grasp of temperature as his numbers are off by an order of magnitude:

Conan: Now, what about … you talk in the book about geothermal energy …
Al: Yeah, yeah.
Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that’s generated from the core of the earth …
Al: Yeah.
Conan: … to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?
Al: It definitely is, and it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot …

The interior of the earth is actually somewhere between 3,700 and 6,000 degrees Celsius, depending upon the estimate. Needless to say, this suffices to show that no intelligent individual should pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore’s statements about planetary temperature, past, present, or future. Everyone makes mistakes, but in this particular case, as with Gladwell’s infamous Igon Value, the nature of the error indicates the degree of the ignorance.

It’s not what you have, but how you use it

While I disagree with the idea that IQ isn’t a reasonable measure of intelligence, I very much agree with the distinction between intelligence capacity and intelligence utilization. From New Scientist:

The problem with IQ tests is that while they are effective at assessing our deliberative skills, which involve reason and the use of working memory, they are unable to assess our inclination to use them when the situation demands. This is a crucial distinction: as Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University puts it, intelligence is about brain power whereas rational thinking is about control. “Some people who are intellectually able do not bother to engage very much in analytical thinking and are inclined to rely on their intuitions,” explains Evans. “Other people will check out their gut feeling and reason it through and make sure they have a justification for what they’re doing.”

The analogy I prefer is firepower. IQ is intellectual firepower. Some have .22 caliber popguns, some have 152mm howitzers. But a .22 to the forehead is far more lethal than a 152mm artillery shell that falls miles wide of the target. This is why I occasionally refer to “functional idiots”. These are people with the intellectual capacity to function in an intelligent manner who for various reasons don’t actually use that capacity and so end up with conclusions that are identical to those reached by people without any such capacity.

When people are doing the same stupid thing over and over again, when they are trusting the word of some scientist or priest rather than critically examining the reliability of that word, when they are operating on the basis of information instilled in childhood about which they have never actually thought or on pure emotion, it does not matter how intelligent they are, because they are obviously not making use of that intelligence.

One of the greatest challenges that intelligent people face is learning to distinguish between when they are using their intelligence and when they are not actually making use of it. The action of an intelligent person behaving thoughtlessly is no more likely to be intelligent than the action of an unintelligent person, and in fact, if the action of the intelligent person is not guided by the wisdom of the stored societal knowledge known as tradition, it is actually very likely to be observably less intelligent and lead to less positive results.

What Chesterton described as “the democracy of the dead” may not always be the optimal path, but it is unlikely that it is the most suboptimal one. As has been demonstrated many times throughout the past, creating a significant disaster worthy of historical note usually requires a truly intelligent person. This is why wisdom is always to be preferred to mere intellectual brilliance.

The charlatans are failing

The public is rejecting the AGW/CC scam:

Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says…. The poll was released a day after 18 scientific organizations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming. A federal government report Thursday found that global warming is upsetting the Arctic’s thermostat. Only about a third, or 36 percent of the respondents, feel that human activities — such as pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles — are behind a temperature increase. That’s down from 47 percent from 2006 through last year’s poll.

Brainwashing and appeals to scientific authority only go so far when Joe Public’s car is buried by snow in early October. No doubt the true believing scientific community will respond with calm reason and logical persuasion, by which of course I mean that we can look forward to the usual suspects shrieking about how stupid everyone is for daring to think for themselves and wistfully dreaming of PhDoctocracy.