Conversation With A Progressive: The British Riots

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Nigel Shocking, just shocking these riots. Wouldn’t you agree?

David No. I’d say rather that they were expected.

Nigel Too right they were. These youth were disaffected. Nothing but products of a society which has given up hope on them. The only surprising thing is that the riots didn’t happen sooner and last longer.

British RiotsDavid Hang on a minute. You’re saying that it was society’s fault that these people broke the law?

Nigel Of course. The evidence is everywhere. We have a society in which “bankers’ bonuses, MPs cheating on their expenses, unemployment, government spending cuts, poverty, social inequality” are routine. Society itself is to blame.

David Let us be clear. Do you claim that it was society that caused these people to steal trainers, iPhones, and televisions? To loot and destroy? To set fire to private property and to attack the police?

Nigel That is so.

David And that if it was society that was the cause of all this, the rioters themselves were not to be blamed? That although they perpetrated these criminal acts, they were justified in doing so?

Nigel A brutal truth and unpalatable. But one which is the case. As the Daily Telegraph said, it is our “culture of greed and impunity” that drove these unfortunates to violence.

David Very well. Let us accept your premise as true—that society caused these people to act in criminal fashion—and see where it leads us.

Nigel No tricks, now.

David Heaven forfend! But you would agree, I hope, that society—since it is society which we are investigating—is composed of people who, more or less, share a common culture or at least a culture which is in parts different than other cultures?

Nigel That is so.

David The culture itself is shaped by its members, by those people who live within certain geographic bounds. Its members interact with one another in ways too complex to track completely, but can we agree that it is these interactions that, so to speak, create the culture? And that culture and society mean much the same thing?

Nigel Of course.

David “Society”, then, is all the people living in some defined place. Society is comprised of all its members, and you say that society is to blame for the riots. Therefore, the rioters, since they are part of society, are to blame for their acts? Isn’t that opposite of what we assumed?

Nigel You don’t understand. When I say society is to blame, I do not mean all of society, but a part of it.

David Which part?

Nigel The part which controls the money and power.

David Do not these rioters control some money and some power?

Nigel They do, but only a fraction. It is money-hungry businesses and power-seeking corporations that control most.

David So it the business owners themselves that were responsible for their shops being vandalized and looted?

Nigel In a roundabout manner of speaking, yes.

David Would you agree that some among those business owners and corporate board members themselves commit crimes? That rioters don’t have a monopoly on lawlessness?

Nigel I more than agree.

David The class of businesses and corporations is not uniform. Some businessmen and some corporations are richer than others.

Nigel This is true.

David Then, according to your hypothesis, those lower in the hierarchy must have been driven to crime by those higher up. Something caused some businessmen to break the law. And the only explanation you have offered is that crimes are committed by unbearable urges caused by being members of the lower classes. It must then be that all crime is caused by person or small group of persons who sit atop the hierarchy.

Nigel I said nothing about unbearable urges.

David Did you not say, after amendments, that merely being a member of a lower class was what “drove” people to crime? And is not “being driven” another way of saying creating an irresistible urge?

Nigel Whether it does or not is not interesting. I protest your bending of words to suit your own meanings. It was clear that by businesses and corporations I meant an entirely different class of people, one who are wholly apart from those under them.

David So businessmen are not part of the same society? Then, since “society” caused the riots, it must be that either these businessmen or the rioters played the role of foreign invader.

Nigel You’re in the realm of the fanciful. Anyway, we would not be the first to arrive at the conclusion of class warfare for social justice.

David I would remind you that it was Cicero who said that an unjust peace is better than a just war.

Logical Probability And The IPCC’s Ambiguous Forecasts

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This post is inspired by Roger Pielke, Jr., as well as Bernie, Matt, and other readers who asked me to have a look at some IPCC probability statements.

Roger Pielke, Jr quotes from the IPCC’s AR4 report

The uncertainty guidance provided for the Fourth Assessment Report draws, for the first time, a careful distinction between levels of confidence in scientific understanding and the likelihoods of specific results. This allows authors to express high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely (e.g., rolling a dice twice and getting a six both times), as well as high confidence that an event is about as likely as not (e.g., a tossed coin coming up heads). Confidence and likelihood as used here are distinct concepts but are often linked in practice.

Pielke rightly became perplexed by this language. What could it mean? He asked his readers (and me via email) to consider the following:

Here are some specific definitions to help you answer some questions.

A. “high confidence” means “about 8 out of 10 chance of being correct”.
B. “extremely unlikely” means “less than 5% probability” of the event or outcome
C. “as likely as not” means “33 to 66% probability” of the event or outcome

So here are your questions:

1. If the IPCC says of a die that it has — “high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely (e.g., rolling a dice twice and getting a six both times)” — how should a decision maker interpret this statement in terms of the probability of two sixes being rolled on the next two rolls of the die?

I answered this puzzler on Roger’s blog (Roger showed two questions, but they are the same at base), but I thought it worth developing further here.

The answer is that there is no answer; or rather, that there are an infinity of answers. The IPCC’s language of “high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely” is ambiguous and incomplete.

Remind yourself that all probability is conditional on certain, exactly specified information, evidence, or premises. What are the premises or evidence for a “high confidence that an event is extremely unlikely”?

Our evidence specifies that “high confidence” means that a statement has 0.8 chance. Here, we have 0.8 chance of an “extremely unlikely event,” and our evidence specifies that this event (call it A) has probability less than 0.05.

We have 0.2 chance missing. That is, there is an 0.8 chance that A is extremely unlikely. But we need the full probability to say what is the probability of A. This must mean that there is a 0.2 chance that A is something other than extremely unlikely. The IPCC does not specify what this “other” than extremely unlikely is, so it could be anything.

We can provide our own evidence to provide a solution. Suppose, just for fun, that the 0.2 chance is for an event A that is merely unlikely, which we specify to mean 0.1 probability. Then we can write a cartoon equation:

      Pr(A | this information) = 0.8 * (Prob < 0.05) + 0.2 * 0.1 = 0.8 * (Prob < 0.05) + 0.02.

And that’s as far as we can go. Whatever 0.8 * (Prob < 0.05) becomes, we add 0.02 to it. The problem is that we do not know what (Prob < 0.05) means. Does it mean “more likely to be 0.05 than 0.01″? Or “equally likely to be any number between 0 and 0.05″ or something else entirely? There is no language in the IPCC that allows us to discern which of these (or some other) is true.

The IPCC’s language is either sloppy thinking or shrewd politics. Given my experience with actual, working scientists, I tend to believe the former. But if it’s shrewd politics, regardless whether A happens or not, the IPCC has given itself wiggle room to say that it predicted A wouldn’t happen, or that it predicted A wasn’t particularly unlikely.

I say this because though we cannot come to an exact solution, we can find its bounds given the language we do have. First, we know there is a 0.8 chance that (Prob < 0.05): the lowest this can be is 0 (just in case (Prob < 0.05) means 100% certainty of 0), and the highest it can be is 0.05 (just in case (Prob < 0.05) means 100% certainty of 0.05). Thus 0.8 * (Prob < 0.05) is between 0 and 0.04.

Now the 0.2 chance. The probabilities available to us are those between 0.05 and 1 (or so it seems; the language is still ambiguous). This means 0.2 times whatever this is is bounded between 0.01 and 0.2.

Our solution is then

      Pr(A | our information) in [0.01, 0.24].

Thus, if A did not happen, the IPCC would point to its prediction and say, “See! We told you so. We said A was nearly impossible and it didn’t happen.” But if A did happen, it could say, “Well, A happened, it’s true. But it happens about 1 out of 4 times, which isn’t that unlikely. We can be satisfied with our prediction.”

Court Of Appeals: Obama Cares Too Much

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One of the sharpest and most compelling arguments of the left is how easily an economy based on democracy can devolve into crony capitalism. Once companies becomes rich enough to lobby, court, and seduce lawmakers into bending the law in their direction, look out. It soon becomes difficult or impossible to tell when companies ends and government begins.

The media, composed mostly of soft left material, does a valuable service—and I say this without sarcasm—by exposing the sleazy private-public connections that would otherwise grow like toxic mold. Of course, this kind of reporting by the media has become an unthinking habit, so that they routinely attack any company of size (that they don’t consider sexy).

A political example: first thing the left did when Rick Perry joined the race for Republican nomination was to charge “Crony!” See Mother Jones.

Funny, then, how the left embraced a key tenet of the Pelosi-Reid-Obama health care law. Which was that every citizen shall pay, from the moment they make their entrance to the second the keel over for the last time, a private company a certain amount of money each month. If the citizen did not want to pay the company, they were to pay a “penalty” directly to the government. This was called the “individual mandate.”

The private company would be one selected by the government itself. Crony capitalism at its most pure, and Congressionally mandated at that. And notice the use of mandate, a rare instance of non-euphemistic bureaucratic language. They were that serious about it. The Democrats (not a single Republican voted for the Act) wanted that money flowing in and, by gum, they were going to get it.

Evidently, the left weighed cronyism versus the unprecedented control over our lives awarded the government by the health care act and chose control.

But one week ago, the US Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit rejected the crony capitalism mandate of so-called Obama-I-Really-Do-Care. In a majority, but alas not unanimous, opinion, the court said

[T]the individual mandate exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional. This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives. We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers. “Uniqueness” is not a constitutional principle in any antecedent Supreme Court decision. The individual mandate also finds no refuge in the aggregation doctrine, for decisions to abstain from the purchase of a product or service, whatever their cumulative effect, lack a sufficient nexus to commerce. [pp. 205-206]

The court also rejected, in fatherly words, the thin Obama government’s argument that the mandate was a novel form of tax. “We add the truism that Congress knows full well how to enact a tax when it chooses to do so. And the Act contains several provisions that are unmistakably taxes.” Further,

The plain language of the individual mandate is clear that the individual mandate is not a tax, but rather, as the statute itself repeatedly states, a “penalty” imposed on an individual for failing to maintain a minimum level of health insurance coverage in any month beginning in 2014.

Judge Stanley Marcus, if his rambling, and at times sputtering, eighty-four-page dissenting opinion is any guide, was beside himself. He liked the individual mandate and he liked it bad.

The judge said the mandate was necessary to take money from those that have it and give it to the government so that the government could in turn use a portion1 of the money to award health insurance to those without it, particularly “those with pre-existing conditions and lengthy medical histories.”

Judge Marcus is not alone in misunderstanding what health insurance is. It is a bet with a company that you hope you do not win. You bet that you will get sick, the company bets you won’t. If you win, the company pays for you doctor’s bill. If you lose, the company keeps your money.

If a company took those with “pre-existing” conditions they would be making bets they have already lost. Where’s the fun in that?

Again, insurance is not health. People want health, not insurance. Merely possessing insurance does not guarantee health. And who says that I should pay for you to restore your health? If I do, does that mean that I can have a vote in how your live your life? (The government would say yes.)

All theses are simple arguments, easily understood. The majority of the 11th Circuit Court did understand them. It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court does, too.

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1The rest it would keep for itself.

Is My Site Visible In China? Strange Request Day

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Update: 2:30 PM PST. The database was corrupted most of the day. I believe I have isolated the problem (I hope). All comments made today were lost. I apologize for this. Please re-submit.

Busy day today, so a small request. My secret project, for which I promise an announcement soon, is taking up much of my time.

When my number one son lived in Shanghai (some two years ago) he told me that he could not access my site. Is that still the case?

Google analytics indicates that I have a couple of hits a month from Beijing, but I am not sure these are accurate. Google, like many other companies anxious to do business with China, has labeled Taiwan as part of China. So I cannot be sure the hits registering as Beijing are not actually coming from Taiwan—where I have a steady supply of readers.

The hits—six last month—from Beijing might be real, too, but not from civilian Chinese. And it could also be that Google errs in its counts, particularly of small numbers.

Of course, if this site is not visible in China, I cannot expect to learn that from people who live there, since, of course, they will not see my request. And if nobody living there responds, it is still more than possible (given the English-only content of this site) that nobody in China wants to come. So this is a difficult thing to measure.

I ask because we have read often that China bans sites that are in any way critical of the government. I have been, in any way, critical, but I am also just one lone voice in the wilderness. Knowledge of whether this site is banned will give some information to the lengths the government of China is willing to go to restrict information.

Incidentally, I have no hits from North Korea. Not even one the whole year—at least, as far as Google Analytics can determine. I believe we also looked at this two years ago and found the same thing. The joys of socialism are ever lasting.

Iran has picked up: six whole hits last month. Afghanistan is always there—but here I know that a substantial portion of these hits are from servicemen since a few have emailed me.

The only other blanks for this year are Central Africa: DR (those terms used loosely) Congo, Chad, Niger, Somalia, etc. None from Nicaragua. Nary a Nepalese visitor. Total of zero from Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. And a complete paucity of Papua New Guineaians. Well, none from Greenland, either, but that land mass is in a different category than the others.

Google says that well over a thousand hits are unclassified. Some of these are probably bots or spam makers. But some could be from the countries registering zeros.

It’s not relevant, but most of the search-directed traffic comes here with my name as key word (I’m famous!). But will one of the 198 people who searched for “porn rape”—I get a regular stream of these—and who landed here tell me why you thought a statistician would have what you’re looking for? And can Google say why they direct them here? (Of course, and depressingly, my asking will cause an increase.)

And Luis, you’ll be delighted to learn that 58 people searched for “luis diaz relativism.”

Update From an anonymous source:

Sites that can’t load at all, fully blocked

http://www.climateaudit.org/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

http://climateskeptic.wordpress.com/

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093389/ The Last Emperor Page
http://www.youtube.com/ (any flash)

Sites that can download, appears free, but no photos or flash at all

http://en.wikipedia.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianenmen_square

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989

http://www.bubbleinfo.com/ (no youtube as it is fully blocked)

Sites that appear to work normally (content not obviously blocked)

http://climatedepot.com/

http://rankexploits.com/musings/

http://joannenova.com.au/ no flash, pics ok

http://my.yahoo.com/

http://www.google.com/

http://www.climate-skeptic.com/

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