Determined Ignorance on Climate Change: Still Impervious to Facts
Climate change is a hard policy question to address because it pits those who believe in evidence against those committed to knowing as little as possible.
Read more...Category Archives: Science and the scientific method
The Embattled Climate Scientist Who Fought Back
Real News Network interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann, who has come under vicious and persistent attack by right-wing groups who decided to play a reductivist game and focus their attack on one chart Mann developed which became important in popular discussions of climate change.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: Abstraction, Language and Modelling in Economics
Alciphron is the title of the book by the philosopher George Berkeley that was most popular in his own time and is probably his least popular in ours. But in the Seventh Dialogue, Berkeley sketches out some very interesting ideas on human language — something that he recognised as being an absolutely central philosophical question and one that bears directly upon economics.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: A Short Note on a Connection Between Marginalist Economics and Folk Medicine
One peculiar aspect of modern marginalist economics is its obsession with equilibrium.
Read more...Bob Goodwin: Mainstream Medicine Capture of Wikipedia
Yves here. Wikipedia has become widely accepted as a highly credible source (I use it and even contributed in their recent funding appeal). It’s therefore important to know its limits and how they arise. Unfortunately, it appears, like most information sources, that it is subject to pressure, in this case, as Bob Goodwin contends, the medical-industrial complex.
Read more...Tourette’s Adventure of the Mind
By a regular reader of Naked Capitalism who has asked to remain anonymous
A few days after surgery I got Tourette’s syndrome.
Read more...Philip Pilkington: What Happened to Science and Research Funding?
Once again, if you want to understand what has gone wrong with the funding of research, economists bear a lot of the blame.
Read more...The Man Who Won a Nobel Prize for Helping Create a Global Financial Crisis
Yves here. While there have been some good posts expressing consternation at the recently announced winners of the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics, this one is particularly useful in explaining how economists come to treat obviously ridiculous theories as gospel truth.
Read more...Harvard Business School’s Garbage In, Garbage Out “Gender Equity” Experiment
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 54 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post.
Readers may have taken note of a long article by Jodi Kantor in the Sunday New York Times magazine celebrating an experiment on the Harvard Business School graduating class of 2013.
The project was deemed a winner. More women students than ever graduated with academic honors. Student satisfaction levels also rose. Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, this “experiment” looks like a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise.
Read more...Gaius Publius: Climate Crisis: Why We’re on Track for 7°C Warming or Greater by 2100
If we don’t “stop now” — meaning, hit the carbon brake hard and stop the carbon car — we risk going over a cliff whose edge could be as near as five to ten years away.
Read more...Ilargi: Capitalism, A Norwegian Rat And Some Cockroaches
Yves here. Ilargi takes up one of our favorite topics, how the fetishization of numbers and measurement is at best misguided and at worst profoundly dysfunctional, as we discussed in a 2006 article, Management’s Great Addiction.
Read more...I’m Three Hops from a Terrorist, and Therefore Probably in the NSA’s Dragnet. And You?
Last month, the Atlantic highlighted the fact that the NSA had ‘fessed up to the fact that its snooping operation was a lot more encompassing than it had previously admitted.
Read more...The Global Race for Inventors
Yves here. I wonder if the pattern described in this article, which is basically a brain drain of inventors to the US, is playing a meaningful role in the degradation of public education in the US. Why do the elites need to care about home-grown “talent” if they exploit the investments in schooling made by other countries?
Read more...Patrick Durusau: Social Security Numbers – Close Enough for a Drone Strike?
Yves here. It’s important to understand the scope and caliber of the police state apparatus that’s in place. The fact that it’s “dirty” meaning error-ridden and incomplete, is likely the big reason you have analysts like Edward Snowden with wide-ranging access. You still need humans to make connections and interpretations (and that introduces another layer for errors and plants to occur). And that also no doubt is used to justify even wider-ranging and more intrusive searches, such as NSA analysts listening to personal phone conversations of soldiers stationed in Iraq. That sort of casualness leads to abuses like NSA snoops inviting their colleagues to listen in on phone sex.
Read more...Richard Alford: Trust in Economists?
By Richard Alford, a former New York Fed economist. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.
Leonardo da Vinci
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