William M. Briggs

Update The paper on which this post was based has hit the presses which was used as an occasion for Nature to opine that, just maybe, that some of the softer sciences have a problem with replication. I thought it important enough to repost (the original was on 3 March 2012).

Nature’s article is Replication studies: Bad copy: In the wake of high-profile controversies, psychologists are facing up to problems with replication. The meat is found in these two paragraphs.

Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don’t replicate, but this knowledge doesn’t get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I’ve seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.”

These problems occur throughout the sciences, but psychology has a number of deeply entrenched cultural norms that exacerbate them. It has become common practice, for example, to tweak experimental designs in ways that practically guarantee positive results. And once positive results are published, few researchers replicate the experiment exactly, instead carrying out ‘conceptual replications’ that test similar hypotheses using different methods. This practice, say critics, builds a house of cards on potentially shaky foundations.

Ed Yong, who wrote this piece, also opines on fraud, especially the suspicion that this activity has been increasing. Yong’s piece, the Simmons et al. paper, and the post below are all well worth reading.

Thanks to James Glendinning for the head’s up.

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My heart soared like a hawk when I read Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn’s “False-Positive Psychology : Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant“, published in Psychological Science¹.

From their abstract:

[W]e show that despite empirical psychologists’ nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We…demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.

Preach it, brothers! Sing it loud and sing it proud. Oh, how I wish that your colleagues will take your admonitions to heart and abandon the Cult of the P-value!

Rarely have I read such a quotable paper. False positives—that is, false “confirmations” of hypotheses—are “particularly persistent”; “because it is uncommon for prestigious journals to publish null findings or exact replications, researchers have little incentive to even attempt them.” False positives “can lead to ineffective policy changes.”

Many false positives are found because of the “researcher’s desire to find a statistically significant result.” That researchers are “are self-serving in their interpretation of ambiguous information and remarkably adept at reaching
justifiable conclusions that mesh with their desires” “Ambiguity is rampant in empirical research.”

Our goal as scientists is not to publish as many articles as we can, but to discover and disseminate truth.

I am man enough to admit that I wept when I read those words.

Chronological Rejuvenation

The authors include a hilarious—actual—study where they demonstrate that listening to a children’s song makes people younger. Not just feel younger, but younger chronologically. Is there nothing statistics cannot do?

They first had two groups listen to an adult song or a children’s song and then asked participants how old they felt afterwards. They also asked participants for their ages and their fathers’ ages “allowing us to control for variation in baseline age across participants.” They got a p-value of 0.033 “proving” that listening to the children’s song made people feel younger.

They then forced the groups to listen to a Beatles song or the same children’s song (they assumed there was a difference), and again asked the ages. “We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants.”

According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to [the children's song] (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040.

Ha ha! How did they achieve such a deliciously publishable p-value for a necessarily false result? Because of the broad flexibility in classical statistics which allows users to “data mine” for the small p-values.

Ways to Cheat

The authors list six major mistakes that users of statistics make. They themselves used many of these mistakes in “proving” the results in the experiment above. (We have covered all of these before: click Start Here and look under Statistics.)

“1.Authors must decide the rule for terminating data collection before data collection begins and report this rule in the article.” If not, it is possible to use a stopping rule which guarantees a publishable p-value: just stop when the p-value is small!

“2. Authors must collect at least 20 observations per cell or else provide a compelling cost-of-data-collection justification.” Small samples are always suspicious. Were they the result of just one experiment? Or the fifth, discarding the first four as merely warm ups?

“3. Authors must list all variables collected in a study.” A lovely way to cheat is to cycle through dozens and dozens of variables, only reporting the one(s) that are “significant.” If you don’t report all the variables you tried, you make it appear that you were looking for the significant effect all along.

“4. Authors must report all experimental conditions, including failed manipulations.” Self explanatory.

“5. If observations are eliminated, authors must also report what the statistical results are if those observations are included.” Or: there are no such things as outliers. Tossing data that does not fit preconceptions always skews the results toward a false positive.

“6. If an analysis includes a covariate, authors must report the statistical results of the analysis without the covariate.” This is a natural mate for rule 3.

The authors also ask that peer reviewers hold researchers’ toes to the fire: “Reviewers should require authors to demonstrate that their results do not hinge on arbitrary analytic decisions.”

Our trio is also suspicious of Bonferroni-type corrections, seeing these as yet another way to cheat after the fact. And it is true that most statistics textbooks say design your experiment and analysis before collecting data. It’s just that almost nobody ever follows this rule.

Bayesian statistics also doesn’t do it for them, because they worry that it increases the researchers’ “degrees of freedom” in picking the prior, etc. This isn’t quite right, because most common frequentist procedures have a Bayesian interpretation with “flat” prior.

Anyway, the real problem isn’t Bayes versus frequentist. It is the mania for quantification that is responsible for most mistakes. It is because researchers quest for small p-values, and after finding them confuse them for holy grails, that they wander into epistemological thickets.

Now how’s that for a metaphor!

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Thanks to reader Richard Hollands for suggesting this topic and altering me to this paper.

¹doi:10.1177/0956797611417632

Micha Tomkiewicz is a physicist who tells us he was a child in the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen during World War II when the Nazis (and Soviets) were gleefully murdering millions. He said that the Holocaust “killed most of my family and deprived me of my childhood.”

His is one more awful story from a century filled will awful stories of what happens when people assume Utopia can be had by all-powerful central government. His story and the story of his fellow survivors becomes far worse when we consider that there are some who deny the Holocaust occurred, that there are exist people who actively impugn evidence that is plain to the simplest idiot.

We hear these denials, but all of us know that these statements aren’t denials at all. It is clear that the people who deny that millions upon millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and others who were slaughtered by state power think it a fine thing that these souls died. Holocaust deniers, as everybody knows, don’t deny and instead have a secret (and sometimes an open) desire that the killing should begin anew.

Tomkiewicz knows what we know. He understands what the term denier means; he knows it is a code-word for evil.

But even knowing all this, and living the life he as lived, he cannot stop himself from using this word to describe people who do not fret as much as he does about climate change. He is so consumed with his passion that he was able to write this:

In 1933, very few people believed that Hitler would seriously try to accomplish what he preached and almost no one could imagine the consequences of his deadly reign. Although there was evidence available — Hitler was clear about what he wanted to do in Mein Kampf — why did people not pay attention? These “deniers” might as well have been called skeptics in their day.

This is well worth spending a moment to unpack. He begins with a truth: it is true that in 1933 “very few people believed that Hitler” would become the menace he was to become. Tomkiewicz follows this true by claiming the truth was false and that there was enough evidence for all, or at least a majority, to have predicted with certainty that Hitler would eventually come in third as Leader With The Highest Body Count (Mao still holds the title, followed closely by Stalin; thank you socialism!). With loving hindsight, Tomkiewicz condemns the world for being filled with “deniers.”

Which makes it strange that he next says,

But what I am suggesting is that even though it’s hard to see a genocide — any genocide — coming. The future is hard to predict, but we can see this one coming. This genocide is of our own making, and it will effect everyone, not just one group or country.

It is hard to tell that climate change will be a genocide, but it is also easy to tell. Just as he claims it was hard to see that the Holocaust was coming but also easy to see. Just as he paradoxically claims that skeptics, whom he calls “deniers”, cannot see as sharply as he can. He says that skeptics pine for “unattainable certainty” about the coming “climate change genocide.” But he also claims to possess this certainty, or enough of it so that he can demand the government “do something.”

To call a skeptic a “denier” is rank abuse, because as we have seen the word is a stand-in for vile intent. To compare “climate genocide” “deniers” with those who—what exactly? Supported Hitler? Enabled the man? Remember Tomkiewicz implied “deniers” in 1933 were responsible for Hitler—ah, the whole thing is asinine.

A far less serious crime to logic is his begging of the question. Skeptics claim, via arguments and evidence, to be less certain about climate change than Tomkiewicz. Tomkiewicz claims to be more than sure; he says he is certain. But he also implies that because he, Tomkiewicz, is sure then everybody should be, when the point at issue is how certain anybody should be. To attempt to bypass this debate by casting foolish aspersions and distasteful comparisons is a sign of weakness.

Update See this and this.

Dr Overlijden of Levenseindekliniek

A new contest is in order, if it doesn’t already exist. Each year we should recognize and award the person or group who invents the best new Orwellian Phrase. This is a word or words which appear to say one thing but which are in reality their own antonym.

I bruited this idea with a colleague, who was enthusiastic and suggested for a prize the same which Winston received at the closing of 1984. I was sympathetic but thought this lacked charity. But he pointed out that this was the point: the prize is not one which one would wish to win.

Except perhaps by the folks who are responsible for my entry for 2012. These are the Dutch doctors behind Nederlandse Vereniging Voor Een VrijWillig Leveseinde, an organization which will dispatch a van to your very own house filled with doctors itching to kill you. Oh, yes. Leveseinde, you see, means “life’s end” and the docs of NVVE want to be the ones who take you on that journey.

The phrase I enter is NVVE’s “Life’s End Clinic” or Levenseindekliniek. It would not be much of an entry, I admit, except for the addition of “clinic,” an act which abuses that word in a savage manner. Incidentally, this “clinic” (which is not yet fully operational) is a place for those who would rather not have the van park in front of their home and thus frighten the neighbors.

I envision it as the kind of building into which Edward G. Robinson strolled near the end of Soylent Green. Which means we now we have to wonder about Holland’s food supply chain.

NNVE’s front page proudly announces that “there were over 200 applications from people with a euthanasia request at this clinic. There are reportedly twice as many women as men” (“waren er meer dan 200 aanmeldingen van mensen met een euthanasiewens bij deze kliniek. Er meldden zich twee maal zo veel vrouwen aan als mannen.”). For some reason this brings to mind the phrase “Minorities and women strongly encouraged to apply” which appears at the bottom of every academic job announcement.

The leftward news site MSNBC called the Vans of Death “mobile euthanasia units”, which isn’t Orwellian but is at least sufficiently bureaucratic. “Old Jones was heard groaning last night. Dispatch the M.E.U.!”

The reporter claims all sorts of safeguards are in place. The death supplicant must cry not once, not twice, but thrice or more, “Kill me!” Various folks are interviewed. Documents are signed. And then a doctor—a person once thought to be have sworn a duty to preserve life—slips in a needle which kills you. Well, to be fair, it only puts you to sleep. Once your eyes are closed, that’s when the knife comes out and the Dutch “doctor” slits your throat.

Kidding! Actually, knives are far too messy so “a second injection follows, which will stop [your] breathing and heart beat.” A very long-winded way to say that the doctor actively kills you, that he commits homicide, that he purposely deprives you of your life, that the doctor has stepped just this side of being a murderer. That he gives a whole new meaning to “house call.”

MSNBC reports “The teams”—squads of white-coated killers—”would be allowed one procedure a week because of the emotional toll that each visit takes.”

I’m not sure what to think of that. Does it imply that these killers—for this is what they are—have retained some small scrap of humanity? It must be small because it only takes seven short days for their consciences to quiet enough so that they can kill again. Or is the one-scalp-a-week bag limit imposed so that the “teams” don’t begin to love their jobs too well? And don’t you claim that this isn’t possible, for all history tells us that it is not difficult to find individuals who enjoy killing.

Something has to qualify these people. Perhaps a desire to kill those who claim that they want to be killed will be a prerequisite for aspirants who wish to enter the growing specialty of euthanasia. As this field develops, we can imagine classes in Emergency Euthanasia covering topics like what to do when the needle is not at hand: see pillows, suffocation; tall buildings and the lower lumbar shove; the Ty Cobb upper lumber cranial contact.

Update I originally ended this piece with the unfortunate “Remind me not to visit the Netherlands anytime soon.” By this, believe it or not, I meant something along the Soylent Green line. I stupidly thought it implicit and did not add this. I hope it is obvious that I do not disparage all peoples of the Netherlands. I beg all your pardons. I blew it. I am sorry.

I do, however, disparage the doctors who ride around in shiny white (I’m assuming the color) vans willfully killing people. The Soylent Green business comes in from asking: what happens to the bodies?

This is a work in progress, and today is a busy day. This is just for fun and for you to play with.

The more complex the field of study, the more likely that any result, finding, or theory in that field is wrong. I am only considering science, i.e. that which explains and is subject to empirical verification. I exclude fields such as ethics, morality, philosophy which are fields that tell us “that empirical verification is a good”, and other statements which are not subject to verification.

There are three broad areas, or groupings, of complexity in science. Not uncoincidentally, this laddering also correlates with the fields’ dependence on statistics for evidence, from most to least. The groups are also, from least to most, though somewhat more loosely, ordered by connections with observation via prediction.

1. Behavioral: Education, Sociology, Politics, Psychology.
2. Biological: Economics, Evolutionary Psychology, Psychiatry, Neurology, Medicine (doctoring), Genetics
3. Physical: Climatology, Meteorology, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Mathematics

The demarcations between these areas are not abrupt, nor is the ordering within each group anything more than a crude, but still somewhat useful, guide.

Some explanation is needed. Why is Physics, the mother of all sciences, the field requiring the biggest brains, listed near the end and is therefore one of the least complex fields? Because Physics is not complicated in the sense I mean complex.

Physicists study the fundamental properties of the universe, it’s true, but it’s also so that these basics are not complex. They are amazingly difficult to comprehend, yes, but not convoluted. If under your consideration is just the interaction between two electrons, themselves encased in forces that are as precisely defined as possible, then your world view is narrow, constrained, and quite simple. It might be true, and usually is, that this simplicity is difficult to express and to understand, and that to reach this bare pinnacle requires years dedicated to its singular purpose, but that does not render the process under consideration complex in the sense we use that word here. We are only talking about what electron A and electron B will do in strikingly limited terms.

Too, the physicist has ample opportunity to verify his theories. If, under the circumstances he explicated, electron A goes where he predicted it to go, and electron B behaves as he expected, then the physicist has learned that the theory he entertained is probably right—but only probably. But if the particles go their own way, then the physicist must also venture down a new path and toss out or modify his theory. This deep, lasting, and intimate connection with observation is what keep physics honest.

Engineering tops physics because this field is defined as all sciences exposed completely and continuously to reality. It is less complex in the sense that the rules which govern the field are more worked out in advance, but it is also more complex in that engineering implies building something for human use, and human behavior is the most difficult thing of all to predict. More on that in a moment.

I cheated by putting Mathematics as the field which gives us our most certain beliefs, because math is not a science. Mathematics more properly belongs to philosophy. If you think not, and since science is that which is testable, try empirically verifying that, say, a triangle’s interior angles sum to 180^o or that, in reality, (if I may abuse the notation) alpeh₀ < aleph₁, which is to say one kind of infinity is larger than another kind of infinity. Report back to me when you reach aleph₀. Math is used in science and openly, but so are the other areas of philosophy and ethics, etc. It is just that these other branches more typically remain unacknowledged.

Now, a chemist can tell us with great precision what will happen when Na hits H₂O, but his, or any other scientist’s, ability to predict what John Smith (43) of Cleveland, OH will have for lunch next week Thursday is no better than any unschooled layman. The conceit of the sociologist is to abandon the question and substitute for it one which he believes he can answer: what will the “average person” will eat for lunch in OH. Enter statistics, through which, perhaps (but only perhaps), the sociologist can build a model which will do slightly better than just guessing. And only do better if the prediction is not too far out into the future. Or where the circumstances do not change, it being more of less a mystery what those circumstances are.

Plus the sociologist probably won’t bother to verify his model: won’t use it to make actual predictions. And neither will most of the educationists, psychologists, and so forth. Of course I do not mean all sociologists etc. nor do I claim the fields are sterile.

It is just that the probability of speaking nonsense is greater the more complex the field and the further that field is from empirical verification. Which is why climatology, which is simpler than meteorology, ranks below that field because climatology is further from empirical verification.

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Note: I tried everything I could think of to get the HTML to properly render the Hebrew letter aleph: render it it would, but it would put it in strange places, nowhere near where I put it, and super- or sub-scripted at random.

In her piece “In Praise of Insignificance” in Scientific American, Jennifer Ouellette says,

If one embraces an atheist worldview, it necessarily requires embracing, even celebrating, one’s insignificance. It’s a tall order, I know, when one is accustomed to being the center of attention. The universe existed in all its vastness before I was born, and it will exist and continue to evolve after I am gone. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel bleak or hopeless. I find it strangely comforting.

A cockroach is insignificant even to the extent that squashing it, i.e. depriving it of its life in an expedient and, for the roach anyway, awful manner, cannot be considered wrong. It can even be said to be good or necessary for the “greater good.” What, after all, is the life of one small bug when compared with the wellbeing of even one human being?

But then if that human being has admitted herself to be insignificant, to have willingly placed herself on the same moral and ontological plane as a filthy bug, why is her good to be placed above the roach’s? Don’t just pass this sentence by with a quick nod. Insignificant is a strong word, none stronger. Taken at its definition—which is what we are doing here, to see where it leads us—means meaningless, valueless, of no use, disposable.

Now it might appear to imply that if all accepted that they were insignificant, all would be allowed; that is, any behavior would be acceptable. But this is false; indeed, the opposite is true. No behavior would be allowed or acceptable.

When we examine questions of morality we quite naturally think about what our behavior would do or mean to somebody else; that is, we imagine ourselves acting in some way and then in some person or persons reacting. If we decided that “we are insignificant” then it appears that if I wanted to (say) hit you upside the head with a baseball bat, then that would be fine because your life is insignificant. (Richard Dawkins, for instance, famously admits that rape isn’t “wrong” in this sense.)

That is true in a weak sense, but we stepped over the hard part. The problem is that I have already admitted that I am insignificant too, which entails that I have no justification for my initial act. My pleasure is nothing, even the physical exercise gained in hefting the wood is meaningless. If I realize this, then I cannot justify to myself why I should act. Not just in swinging the bat, but for walking, talking, eating, any activity at all that isn’t automatic (eating is not automatic; it implies you have judged that to feed yourself is good, which admits significance). If I am to be logically consistent, then I must remain entirely impotent and always motionless.

You’ll notice that in these arguments, I sling around the word I, as if I have deduced that I exist, and the same for you. But if I exist, if I am aware of me and that there is a me, then this automatically implies significance (I at least know there is the rational creature me). It remains to be seen what are the limits and implications of this significance, of course, but that there is some significance, that there is an absence of insignificance, necessarily follows.

So it cannot be that we are insignificant nor can we imagine ourselves insignificant (we can say it, but we’re always either lying or deluded), though it is easy, as history has repeatedly proven, to think the other guy insignificant. Ouellette does not really believe she is insignificant, despite her claims. She informs us that she tells her husband daily that she loves him, a very nice thing. But it is only nice if she admits to being significant, which we have seen she must do. Of course, we haven’t proven that because are are significant saying “I love you” to somebody (and meaning it) is nice, though all of us believe it (and it can be proven).

Ouellette’s first argument is right, though: “If one embraces an atheist worldview, it necessarily requires embracing, even celebrating, one’s insignificance.” I mean her argument is right if you strike out the “celebrating” bit, for to celebrate and to enjoy a celebration presupposes significance. A real world running on atheist lines would contain no celebrations, indeed nothing but non-moving bodies, frozen in realization that nothing—as in no thing—they did matters or is justified.

In a talk at some “sustainability” something-or-other seminar—one this is sure: we’re not going to soon run out of climate conclaves—academic Donald Brown told his audience (25 min. mark) that the people who are not as afraid as he that the world will soon end are committing crimes against humanity. If Brown is right, this put yours truly well into the company of such noted transgressors as Mao, Stalin, Pot and other socialist dictators.

Or maybe Brown hadn’t meant that level of heinousness and instead envisioned lesser culprits, such as the guy who invented the car alarm or whoever it was that thought up the Sony Walkman (which has morphed into our ubiquitous present-day thinking suppression devices).

Anyway, here’s what happened.

Marc Morano at Climate Depot placed Brown’s image and his email in earlier articles on that site in posts which outlined Brown’s views on this and that climate topic. Brown thought that showing his publicly available email and head shot—which are not hidden and are trivially easy to find at Penn State—represented “intimidation.”

This, so Brown claims, led to him receiving emails some of which were scatological and others which threatened death. I unfortunately believe him. There are a lot of knuckleheads out there and the (pseudo) anonymity of the internet fills some with a pathetic false bravery. I wish these foolish souls would think better.

Of course, Morano himself hauls in plenty of scathing missives daily, as do others who run blogs expressing doubt that we should let government “solve” climate change.

Your truly hasn’t received any death threats, but I get plenty of things like this one from yesterday, “I know you are an extreme political right winger, but now you’ve become a ringleader of a hate group.” Ringleader—I presume my interlocutor did not mean in the Tolkienian sense—is a promotion of sorts, up from Lone Wolf. But I’ve still got a ways to go before I reach Mastermind.

Brown, who was dressed a priest (without the collar), early in his talk said that skepticism about climate change should be “encouraged.” But he wants it separated from “disinformation,” which he defines as that which departs from the “consensus.” Brown’s position is thus like that of the dictatorship which claims voting is every citizen’s right, but which produces ballots on which there is only one candidate.

He says that those who speak against the consensus are engaged in an organized “campaign” funded by oil companies and “right wing” groups. This might be true, but none of those funds have managed to trickle down my way. But now that I’m a Ringleader, perhaps I can expect a raise in pay?

Somehow Brown forgot to mention that the funding to spread the “climate catastrophe” message dwarfs, by at least one, possibly two, maybe even three, orders of magnitude any monies skeptics receive. Nearly every government dumps tens and tens and more tens of millions each year on the “problem,” a good chunk of which ends up in the pockets of people like Donald Brown. And then there’s the money sucked in and pumped out by Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra-blah-blah-blah. Skeptics run on alms, consensus members and their hangers on are clothed in gold.

The whole of his talk is to convince that a conspiracy exists to gull the public. In a separate work he hints of dark rooms and speaks of a “climate change disinformation campaign.” He claims skeptics “are guilty of exacerbating risks to our collective well-being and of undermining society.”

He claims the “moral outrage” caused by skeptics “should motivate a movement at least as ferocious as the Occupy Wallstreet movement.” And in his talk he says that climate skeptics are guilty of a “new crime against humanity. [Skepticism] is really evil stuff. It is nasty.”

Donald Brown is not the first to croak out this tune. He accepts the “consensus” as a given, as unquestionable in its outline, its warnings certain. But he is not simply filled with wonder that others doubt his faith, which would be natural. He is instead outraged. He wants action. He walks up to the line, over which is to ask that government silence his enemies, and hovers there. He would cross that line if he could be sure of support from enough of his colleagues.

Yesterday I made the point that Jim Hansen’s latest threat of doom was a conditional one. I also said that there was nothing wrong with this. And there isn’t. Nothing wrong with the structure of a contingent—which is to say conditional—prediction. I hinted, in a way, that better predictions were not so conditional. This is true in a sense which I did not include in my essay, because in fact, all predictions are contingent. And so is everything else.

To clarify, but briefly.

Any prediction is a statement that, given some set of information or evidence or revelation or knowledge, that “Y will happen” or that “There is a P% probability Y will happen.” You cannot just step onto to the street and announce, “The end is nigh” without there being some shared, or assumed shared, conditional set of knowledge which your listeners hold.

It also goes without saying that your audience must understand what “end” and “nigh” mean. If your prediction fails, there are more way to escape responsibility by disputing what you really meant by “end” than there are Democrats in San Francisco.

The knowledge of word (or mathematical or whatever) definitions are thus also part of the conditional knowledge which is at least tacitly assumed or sometimes explicitly given. For example, Hansen said (I’m paraphrasing) “If Canada sells it oil and the USA doesn’t do something, the Four Horseman begin their ride.” The conditionality is explicit in part, and stated boldly—in part.

The parts that are missing are where the trouble arises. Firstly, Hansen does not make it clear what “USA doing something” means. What exactly is “something”? This kind of seemingly precise vagueness is the trade secret of five-dollar psychics who pass off cold readings as genuine paranormal knowledge. Hansen’s prediction is in the form of, “I see a U. Maybe with an S or an A. Does that mean anything to you?” He lets his listeners fill in the meaning, which invariably is done in the most charitable way.

Secondly, Hansen’s unleashing of the apocalypse (this is his word) is blurry. He mentions food prices rising to “unprecedented” levels. What does that mean exactly? He also says that we’ll see more bad weather. Well, given inflation and the assumption that we’ve seen bad weather in the past, neither of these events can be said to be rare. Lack of specificity plagues his predictions of plague.

Now I suggested yesterday, in poor, even rotten, language that Hansen should have issued his prognostication in unconditional form. Since this is a logical impossibility, I was as wrong as can be. What I meant, but was too lazy or stupid to clarify, is that he should make his conditions explicit, testable, verifiable, measurable, real.

As should anybody who makes a prediction. This includes people who try to pass off failed predictions as “scenarios.” A scenario is a prediction like any other, but usually issued as a cluster. “If A happens, then Y_A will happen”, “If B happens, then Y_B will happen”, and so on. Well, in the end, if it clear what time horizon is meant, we look to see which of Y_A, Y_B, … actually occurred. Suppose Y_R did. We then look to see if R happened, too. If so, then we have a good prediction. If instead B happened, the forecast is a bust.

In other words, you cannot issue any statement without there being something to back it up. This is the conditionality. Regular readers met this earlier when we spoke of statements of knowledge and of probability. There are no unconditional statements of either, except in one sense, to be explained in a moment.

Above I gave a conditional statement of probability “There is a P% probability Y will happen” but left off the conditions though said they were always there. That means the true statement is really “Given X, there is a P% probability Y will happen.” If you doubt this, I challenge you to discover even one instance of a probability which is not conditional, which does not require a set of evidence or knowledge for its definition. (JH, this one’s for you.)

And the same with knowledge. As we’ve used a hundred times, we know it is true that “Socrates is mortal” only because we accepted the conditions that “All men are mortal. And Socrates is a man.” And because we knew that arguments like this lead to true conclusions. (We also knew what the words meant.)

But how did we know about arguments like this? Well, we just knew. There are some basic, or base truths, which we just know are true. I have earlier said that even these are conditional, and this is so. We say we know that “If x = y then y = x” is true conditional on our intuition.

Our friend Luis objected to the use of the word “intuition.” I can see his point. Let us instead say that all men have these basic truths written in their hearts.

I had thought the furor was over, that those who held ultramontane views about climatologists like James “Lock me up!” Hansen (see below the fold) had given up and gone home, the state of the world being so pleasantly clement and so on. But no. Many remain screwed up into tight little balls of pure fret.

Take poor Alec Loorz, who is nigh eighteen years upon this globe and who, so the Atlantic informs, became a climate activist at age 12 after watching An Inconvenient Truth twice in one evening. Now, I once performed a similar feat when I was that age with Star Wars but as much as I then lusted after a light sabre, I did not delude myself into thinking I was a Jedi Knight. Full disclosure: I still pine for a light sabre.

Poor Loorz is thoroughly American. Not only did he become an “activist,” he turned to that most modern of paths, the Way of the Lawsuit. So dedicated an adept is he that he managed to wangle four other “juvenile plaintiffs” to sue the “federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.”

Incidentally, I say “poor Loorz” because I hate to pick on a kid and because, so the magazine says, poor Loorz has been “diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder” and it is not clear how much this malady drives his activism.

The five children “are demanding that the U.S. government start reducing national emissions of carbon dioxide by at least six percent per year beginning in 2013.” You will be interested in the name of the suit: Alec L. et. al vs. Lisa P. Jackson, et. al. The later named individual is the power-grubbing head of the EPA. It must have come as a pleasant shock to her to be sued to do what she most earnestly wants.

Skip all the legal mumbo jumbo and focus on what is tangible: the reduction of CO₂ by six percent each year. Supposing the lawsuit wins (it won’t), we would have to find a way to measure precisely how much CO₂ is emitted before we can know if the decrease from one year to the next is six percent. This being strictly impossible, we would have to resort to bureaucratic definitions of “emit” and “reduce” and of even what “CO₂” means.

This tool, if in the hand of a progressive government, would dwarf the fear factor of the IRS by three orders of magnitude. Think of the indulgences given to “minority owned” and “union staffed” businesses (as in Obamacare). Think of a weaselly EPA “investigator” sniffing around your home with his “greenhouse gas” detector, issuing non-disputable citations for “leakage.”

Somebody needs to tell poor Loorz that the Way of the Lawsuit is a one-way path to hell.

But poor Loorz is not entirely culpable. We can put some of the blame of folks like James Hansen, who peeked out of his cell yesterday to issue yet another conditional threat which promised (again) that end is near.

A “conditional” threat is one which says, “If we don’t do X, then the end shall come.” X can be anything the activist earnestly desires, such as X = “reduce CO₂ emissions by six percent,” or X = “enable the EPA to tax businesses on emissions,” and on and on. You’re hearing a conditional threat whenever you hear of “tipping points.”

One reason to be suspicious of environmentalist threats is that they are almost always in conditional form, and the X is always reduced to monetary or bureaucratic terms. Conditional threats can be valid, of course, but any physical theory worth its weight should be able to make unconditional predictions.

Hansen’s newest conditional threat is projected at Canada. “If Canada [uses its oil sands], and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” Game over! Oh, Hansen also says the future he envisions is “apocalyptic.”

We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

That’s high confidence, brother. That extreme cold weather in Alaska and other parts of the globe this past winter? Also global warming. Say, medium confidence.

Anyway, Canada will indeed use its lucrative and much needed oil sands. And the US of A will do…what exactly? Well, either we take those oils for our own use or we let China buy them. Both of these scenarios see the USA “doing” something. Do these somethings thus negate the conditional apocalyptic prediction?

Come on, Hansen, old boy. Let’s give us a real forecast. Cease these vagaries and put some dates and hard numbers on the doom you see so clearly.

Thanks to New York Times’s (yes) Russ Douthat who alerted us to the paper “Findings from a Decade of Polling on Ballot Measures Regarding the Legal Status of Same­ Sex Couples” by Patrick Egan (NYU).

Statisticians have long known that people when answering political questions lie like a rug, like their pants are on fire, like they are in a mighty hurry to be somewhere else. Not always of course, but especially over “controversial” topics. For example, I am a (part time) academic, a milieu where it is customary and expected to voice support “for” progressive causes. I cannot recall a single soul among my local associates who said at the time they were going to vote for George Bush.

I often use the tale that when Bush was battling Kerry, New York City polls had Kerry besting Bush by a multiple of three to five. The actually result was far smaller. You don’t tell the truth because you don’t know who could be listening. Just like on campus you musn’t let it be discovered that you are against gay “marriage” or that you are a climate skeptic (as to that, see “part time” above).

So when the pollster calls, people lie. The real question is: how much? Egan thinks he has an answer for gay “marriage.” This is:

1. “The share of voters in pre‐election surveys saying they will vote to ban same‐sex marriage is typically seven percentage points lower than the actual vote on election day.”
2. “survey estimates of the proportion of voters intending to vote against same‐sex marriage bans tend to be relatively accurate predictors of the ultimate share of ‘no’ votes.”

I find Egan’s wording confusing (he changes for and against in the sentences), so I’ve re-written his conclusion:

1. Votes to ban same-sex marriage are on average seven percentage points higher than polls indicated. So that if polls found (say) 45% will vote to ban SSM the actual vote will be 52% (on average).
2. Votes for SSM, i.e. votes to ban the SSM bans, match poll estimates on average. So that if polls found 55% against an SSM ban the actual vote will be 55% (on average).

These numbers aren’t far off actual polls and votes. Problem is, they don’t add up, and won’t unless in real cases there are large numbers of undecideds. So is must be that there is lying on both sides, with more coming from those who say they favor SSM. Egan says there is no “immediate evidence” in his data that people are lying to pollsters. But there’s plenty of experiential evidence. Certainly the scenarios I mentioned above are well known. And you yourself will know if you dare to voice opposition to SSM.

This is Egan’s Fig. 2. Each dot is a separate poll, taken over various states. This seems to me pretty good immediate evidence that many people, if they weren’t lying to pollsters, underwent an Obama-like evolution once they stepped behind the curtain. Or it could be that people all told the truth (in a way) but that supporters of SSM much more often stayed home on election day.

Egan has another intriguing result (his Fig. 3). Each of various states had the percent of gay and lesbian population estimated. Surely that is fraught with error, but never mind that. He then plots the average gap between poll-projected support and the actual vote to ban SSM. Regardless of the gays and lesbian estimate, this gap averages about 4%.

This, and a similar result found for automated versus human-contact polls, is the evidence Egan uses to say that people don’t lie to pollsters because of the subject matter. But I don’t buy it. Who trusts the computer which calls your house? Who trusts a pollster? Many people just don’t like being put on the record. Right, Mr Obama?

I like this kind of research and hope we can see many more papers who examine the outcome of actual elections versus polls. This will allow us to put real, not abstract mathematical, plus or minus bounds when giving out a poll result. When you hear a poll if you listen carefully you catch something like, “The margin of error is plus of minus four percent.” But that number is a theoretical calculation based on at least the assumption that everybody is telling the truth.

Because people lie, we need real margins of error discovered from real data. This would be an excellent masters of dissertation topic.

Also see this article from the Washington Post; via HotAir.

North Carolina voted 61 to 39 to amend its constitution to read that marriage is solely a union between a man and a woman. This was, as far as democratic elections go, a “landslide.” Even NPR called the result “overwhelming.”

According to a theory of government to which many claim they subscribe, this vote has decided what is right. That is, saying marriage is one man-one woman is now something which all from North Carolina must accept (if this theory is true). The day before the election they might have thought that marriage was between any group of humans who cared to call their grouping a “marriage”, but after the vote they surely must accept that they were wrong.

Yet somehow this is not so. There are many in that state who claim the result has not decided what is right. They agree that they will have to abide by the implications of the vote, but they say that the moral question was decided incorrectly. The Huffington Post reports that citizen Linda Toanone said, “”We think everybody should have the same rights as everyone else. If you’re gay, lesbian, straight — whatever.” The “evolving” Obama campaign said it was “disappointed.”

I only wish to make one point, a very small one, and only to those who were in the 39% or their supporters, to those people who say the vote “got it wrong.” If you say the vote is wrong you are admitting that there is some principle higher than democracy which decides what is right and wrong. You are saying that a true moral matter can, even must, be discerned in ways which are not appeals to the “People.” You are saying Rousseau and Mill were wrong.

Once you realize this, that there really are true and false moral questions that are true or false regardless of what anybody believes, you have made perhaps the most important step you can make, philosophically speaking. Although I am on the opposite side of you with this vote, I welcome you to the ranks of those of us who say that universals exist. It is now only a matter to discover what these universals are.

As to that, and to show that some of the “higher” principles which you might hold don’t work in this case, here is the case for and against so-called gay marriage:

The brief argument against is this: marriage, except in rare instances and very narrow circumstances (e.g. one man from many in a culture who holds a harem, concubines for the king), has everywhere and always been between a man and a woman; it is biologically natural, i.e. natural law says one man-one woman; and there are plenty of well known religious justifications we needn’t bother explicating. And notice I’m not giving any of the negatives, of which there are many.

Bad arguments for are these: (1) “Jesus never said it was wrong.” Neither did He say raping a child and cyanide poisoning were wrong. (2) Two consenting adults. Why two people in a union and not three, four, more? All history says two, but all history also says one man-one woman, and you can’t take just the part of history you like and ignore what you dislike. (3) Two people have a “right.” Any two? Like a man of 70 and a boy of 9? If you’re willing to draw a line here, you admit that lines can be drawn, which is the point of this article.

Better arguments for are these: (1) “Equality.” Not that this is a good argument, but this tune when sung rings pleasantly in the ears of us Moderns. The default reaction is to support that which is claimed to lead to equality. But here it begs the question, which is “Why should so-called gay marriage be allowed?” or “Is it moral?” It cannot be a matter of equality if we discover that so-called gay marriage is immoral or wrong. Chanting “Equality!” means you have already pre-decided the argument.

(2) Marriage is a contract. But all history and experience says it is not. It is a much deeper union. It is only so that the state steps in after the union and regulates certain matters arising from this union, but only matters relevant to the state’s purse and not those relating to the union itself. Note that many elevate these temporal financial considerations over marriage itself. The state historically has banned some unions (cousins, siblings, and on on).

(3) Some people are born gay. Regardless whether this is true, accept that it is for argument’s sake. This is still another question-beggar. Just because one has “no choice” in being gay does not mean that gays can marry; that, after all, is what we are trying to decide. The argument is worse still when we consider this (weak) analogy (others will suggest themselves to you). Some people are born who never grow higher than five feet. These people do not have a “right” to be placed on an NBA team because tall people can join these teams.

(4) The only argument which remains is the (perpetual) “I should have it because I want it.” More background is here: I, II, III, IV.

Incidentally, that many argue in favor of so-called gay marriage is a powerful argument against evolutionary psychological explanations of the behavior of human beings. What would Richard Dawkins think?!

Remember in the comments that we are ladies and gentlemen.