We met our favorite headline the other day: Climate Change Destroys World, Pregnant People Hardest Hit.
A version of that headline rolls off the science press about weekly, now. They are all, of course, scientific lunacy. Our questions are: why is it happening? Why the acceleration?
Maybe the peer-reviewed “Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA” in The Lancet: Planetary Health, by Annika Stechemesser, MSc, and others, will give us clues.
Incidentally, notice that “MSc”? Putting letters after your name is de rigueur in medical journals, all of which are in the love with the Appeal to Authority. You can’t not do it. Skip that.
According to a press article, our Annika said, “If temperatures go too hot or too cold, we found that there’s an increase in online hate speech, no matter the socioeconomic differences, religion or political beliefs.”
It follows that there is an ideal, and likely narrow, range of temperatures in which on-line people can remain in the Love Zone. A fraction of a degree either side, and we all become hateful monsters. At least, on line.
Before we come to that, one last quote from the news source.
And aggressive behavior online has been linked to violence offline too. Incensed posts have led to more violence toward minorities, including mass shootings, lynchings and ethnic cleansing, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.
Yes, there is is again: Online Hate Surges, Minorities Hardest Hit. Never mind.
Now this temperature-controlled “hate speech” idea is preposterous. There is no way it is true, or even worthy of thought. It is asinine. At best, we can say if people spend more time indoors during extreme weather, they likely go online more, and have fun insulting others.
Here’s the paper’s methods:
In this quantitative empirical study, we used a supervised machine learning approach to identify hate speech in a dataset containing around 4 billion geolocated tweets from 773 cities across the USA between May 1, 2014 and May 1, 2020. We statistically evaluated the changes in daily hate tweets against changes in local temperature, isolating the temperature influence from confounding factors using binned panel-regression models.
Oh, well, machine learning. Has to be right, then, eh?
Before the meat, they acknowledge limitations: “For example, in a city with predominantly Democratic voters as of 2016, all racist tweets could originate from a Republican minority or vice versa.” All. “Racist” tweets.
Now the “findings”:
The prevalence of hate tweets was lowest at moderate temperatures (12 to 21 C) and marked increases in the number of hate tweets were observed at hotter and colder temperatures, reaching up to 12.5% (95% CI 8.0–16.5) for cold temperature extremes (–6 to –3 C) and up to 22.0% (95% CI 20.5–23.5) for hot temperature extremes (42 to 45 C).
That “42” in those foreign units are about 108 on the civilized Fahrenheit scale.
Please to notice the advertising phrase “up to.” As in “You could lose up to 20 pounds!” Gaining 5 pounds is logically consistent with losing “up to” 20 pounds. Why do they use this phrase?
Now if heat makes men mad, then Las Vegas, which is often above 110 F, must be teeming with fury. At least, online. Same thing up in northern Michigan, which is where Yours Truly lurks. In winter, a day that reached 12 C, or 54 F, would be greeted with pleased amazement. As it is, it’s usually below freezing. Which causes people’s hearts to freeze, turning to black icy hate.
At least, online.
I can’t resist quoting the opening sentence, a typical academic sentence, combining unnecessary throat-clearing with ridiculous exaggeration: “In the context of rapid anthropogenic climate change, the question of how the climate influences human aggression, which dates back to the ancient world, is more prominent than ever.” (You could cut the Introductions of almost all papers and lose nothing.)
Human aggression “dates back to the ancient world”. Even before they could tweet? Who knew.
The editor of a journal subtitled Planetary Health could scarcely have done less than wet his pants with glee when he saw this idiotic paper. Its very purpose is to publish silliness meant to justify the existence of the Expertocracy.
That, then, is our key. That this journal, and even more certainly that this paper, exists is because a class of people think far, far too well of themselves, and of their importance to the world. They constantly and increasingly devise theories to explain why they are needed, and why they should rule.
This is why the more ludicrous and arcane the theory the better. The more the theory can only be penetrated by Experts, the more valuable it is to them. Hence “climate change” causing mean tweets.
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Oh, well, machine learning. Has to be right, then, eh?
Did the machine quickly learn to ignore tweets within the hoped for temperature range?
Or were the “hate tweets” outside the range simply “IHTFP”?
That article is so breathtakingly stupid, it goes beyond belief that such idiocy could be published.
And yet it does exist. Evil is, above all else, ignorant.
“They walk among us”.
re: ” “They walk among us”. ”
The ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ *is* happening, its just that its happening in a ‘way’ we didn’t expect …
re: “Incidentally, notice that “MSc”? Putting letters after your name is de rigueur in medical journals, all of which are in the love with the Appeal to Authority. You can’t not do it. Skip that.”
My favorite is “MPH”, which, surely stand for something significant in the ‘med whirled’ but NOT on first inspection by a non-medical type (which is to say most people/laymen).
My Dear Mr. Briggs,
Was the weather yesterday relatively hot during the day or cold at night where you live?
Statistical conclusions are usually about something in general terms. However, I cannot help but ask the above.
Are you saying that was no human aggression before the existence of Twitter? If this is the case, let’s all stop using Twitter.
I get cranky not only when it’s too hot, but also when I’m tired.
I hope this helps someone.
A petty funny paper, and analysis, Briggs. So let’s have a look at this “Annika Stechemesser, MSc”, what done wrote the silly thing… searching… now select “images” —> whoa! Look at that page of beautiful blond babes named “Annika”. Was expecting the usual blue-haired harpy but find instead the fair flower of femininity — our women — seduced out of their happy family homes by silver-tongued skunks and set to spinning sterile hamster wheels in cubical corporations.
Sad. And totally our fault, guys. We should have been minding the fences and keeping the skunks out. We should have been strong and smart and Godly, but instead we have been weak and dumb and worldly. And so our women left us for greener pastures… or so they thought until finding they’d been tricked into spinning the hamster wheels of oblivion. And we let it happen.
It is in our power to turn this around but it’s not simply a matter of going out and killing all the “bad guys”. Understand — we are the bad guys, and it was our own weakness, folly, and sin that lead to this mess. It is a spiritual battle first and foremost. All the guns and bombs and bullets in the world are of no avail if a man is not following God’s law. Let’s get the beams out of our own eyes. Then we can deal with the bad guys’ motes.
Some pearls:
1 – Your title promises a partial explanation, but I only see exemplification.
2 – The number one driver arises from the union of “publish or perish” with funding control by political appointees (academic or otherwise) whose ignorance of science is matched only by their contempt for it. As a result it’s easy to get stuff logically indistinguishable from spoof papers published, but real science remains at least as difficult to publish as it was in Galileo’s day.
3 – there is a real link between climate and human achievement: every major recorded positive revolution in human development occurred during the first century or two of warming periods, every major descent during the first decades of cooling periods. (And we’re now entering a cooling period).
—
4- I just got back from a dog walk and am sweaty, hence the salutation above. 😉
I’d like to see their definition of a “hate tweet”.
Would “Damn, it’s hot” count? That contains blasphemy.
How about “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” – that has both racist and mutilation overtones.
re: ” So let’s have a look at this “Annika Stechemesser, MSc”, what done wrote the silly thing… searching… now select “images” ”
Almost the spitting image of YT content creator and on-screen personality “Survival Lilly”.
@Rob
“Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”
While potentially racist, it is trans-affirming, so it is probably okay to post on social media.
https://brownstone.org/articles/mitigation-is-the-golden-calf/
Re: pt 3 above: see this stunningly convincing poster by Andy May on Wattsupwiththat:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/17/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years/#more-97612
I want to do a paper on the connection between warmer temperatures and the honking of horns and the barking of dogs and the easy ways to get governments and institutions to part with their money for frivolous but politically convenient propaganda research.
Please send me $1 million dollars.
For an additional $50,000, I’ll throw in loose associations to systemic racism.
The authoress should be given some leeway. She is, after all, only a Master of Expertise.
Which came first: Climate change? Or mean tweets?
In the context of the ancient dilemma, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
Prompted by Guid Jimmy Bagpipe and others, I also had to look her up.
https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/climate-moonbat.jpg
Her pronouns are barker and blathers.
Well, ok, I’m lying, I didn’t get past “hate tweet”, whatever that is (beside expressing my attitude about Twitter, but I don’t think that’s what blathers meant).
By Jove I think I’ve got it!!
People are making the planet hotter…..the hotter planet is making people angrier….angrier people then make the planet that much hotter (which makes much linguistic sense, given that non-angry people are typically described as ‘chill’!)….which makes people that much angrier….and causes them to make the planet even hotter still!!
Hotter — Angrier — Hotterer — Angrierer — Hottererer — Angriererer….until Maximum Angry produces Maximum Hot which drives Super-Saturated Angry….which undoubtedly then melts the whole damned planet.
Somewhere in there we need to be making Smores before it’s too late.
We laugh at this because it is preposterous propaganda but it exists because it works in the sense that the establishment can cite it to suppress the thoughts of others being publicly expressed; people need to be safe and speech that disagrees with the experts is violence.
Someday they will come for Briggs.
Modern life is not a boot stomping on our faces, no;
Modern life is like a based white christian male peacefully walking along beside a body of water from which a trout surfaces and screams If you know what’s good for you, you will immediately give me all of your sevens, bitch.
The body of water is The Donny Brook.
..immediately give me all of your money, bitch
it should read
@Paul Murphy #1
It’s in the second to last paragraph.
2-4: agree
It appears that the lost link between correlation and causation has been found!!!!!
It’s starting to get cold again here in Canada, I better stay off twitter. Oh wait, I closed my account. You’re all very lucky.
Supervised machine learning? I presume that means curated data input and ongoing adjustments to the learning algorithm. In other words, the author’s opinions presented as authoritative data.