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	<title>Armed and Dangerous</title>
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	<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org</link>
	<description> Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life's simple pleasures...</description>
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		<title>Don&#8217;t Dis the Wiccans, Tea-Partiers!</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1676</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1676#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:21:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1676</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A few minutes ago I read Bill Whittle sneering at &#8220;mass-produced members of bused-in wiccan nihilist anarcho-Maoist lesbian eco-weenie anti-war protestors&#8221;.  I tried to leave a comment there; it went into moderation, and I lost my original in the browser shuffle.  I can&#8217;t guarantee that the following is a word-for-word copy, but it&#8217;s [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A few minutes ago I read Bill Whittle sneering at <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2010/02/08/party-time/">&#8220;mass-produced members of bused-in wiccan nihilist anarcho-Maoist lesbian eco-weenie anti-war protestors&#8221;</a>.  I tried to leave a comment there; it went into moderation, and I lost my original in the browser shuffle.  I can&#8217;t guarantee that the following is a word-for-word copy, but it&#8217;s pretty close. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hey! Hey! Don&#8217;t lump all Wiccans in with the left-wing rent-a-mob crowd.  It&#8217;s true that some our more vocal people fit the stereotype, especially in the Dianic wing of the movement.  But there are lots of quieter Wiccans who are gun-toting libertarians like me; for us, the rejection of monotheism and &#8220;faith&#8221; is continuous with the rejection of One-True-Wayism in all its forms. Thomas Jefferson might say of us that we have sworn on the altars of our gods eternal hostility towards every form of tyranny over the mind of man.</p>
<p>Wiccans are potential allies for the Tea Party movement, as long as it remembers that America was founded on religious dissent and doesn&#8217;t fall into an unholy alliance with bigoted religious conservatives as the GOP did.  That choice didn&#8217;t play well with the general population of independents and moderates, either; heed the lesson.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here&#8217;s the disturbing part.  There are now two comments on that post, and mine isn&#8217;t either of them &#8211; suggesting that Bill Whittle did a moderation pass and shitcanned it.  If true, that&#8217;s deeply disappointing news about both Bill Whittle and the movement in which he claims to be a principal figure.  It puts some point on the left-liberal accusation that Tea Partiers are a bunch of reactionary know-nothings wearing fiscal conservatism as mere camouflage.</p>
<p>Mr. Whittle, I&#8217;m making a noise about this because I think your attitude about Wiccans &mdash; whatever it actually is &mdash; is a good proxy for your movement&#8217;s ability to see beyond tired stereotypes and fratricidal culture wars.  Are limited government and individual liberty your actual goals?  If so, can you recognize potential allies from wherever they hail?</p>
<p>Much &mdash; including the future of the Tea Party movement, and perhaps the future of our country &mdash; may turn on your answer.</p>
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		<title>Opening Pandora&#8217;s Music box</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1670</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1670#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:48:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1670</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been meaning to experiment with Pandora Radio for a while, and finally got to it today.  It&#8217;s based on something called the &#8220;Music Genome Project&#8221; that categorizes music by how it expresses a large number of &#8220;genes&#8221; &#8212; traits that describe features like song structure, instrumentation, genre influences, and so forth.  According [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve been meaning to experiment with <a href="http://www.pandora.com">Pandora Radio</a> for a while, and finally got to it today.  It&#8217;s based on something called the &#8220;Music Genome Project&#8221; that categorizes music by how it expresses a large number of &#8220;genes&#8221; &mdash; traits that describe features like song structure, instrumentation, genre influences, and so forth.  According to Wikipedia these are used to construct a vector, and similarity between tunes is measured by a simple  distance function.  You give Pandora a seed artist; it then apparently random-walks you through tunes and artists similar to that artist&#8217;s style.</p>
<p><span id="more-1670"></span></p>
<p>Dang&#8230;it works pretty well. I seeded it with &#8220;Liquid Tension Experiment&#8221;, a John Petrucci side project that has produced one of my favorite albums of all time, <cite>Liquid Tension II.</cite>  I&#8217;m now on about the twentieth track it&#8217;s chosen for me and it hasn&#8217;t picked a dud yet.   Artists: Jadia, Citriniti, Vinnie Moore, Joe Satriani, Dream Theater, Flower Kings, Arena, Stuart Hamm, Jordan Rudess, Brand X, Annihilator, Derek Sherinian, Crime in Choir, Firewind, Greg Howe, Planet X.  If you&#8217;ve never heard of these groups&#8230;I&#8217;m not a bit surprised.  I only knew of about half of them myself &mdash; which is <em>wonderful</em>.  My tastes are pretty recherch&eacute;; they center in a poorly mapped no-man&#8217;s land between prog-rock, metal, and jazz.  Finding more stuff I really like has not been easy in the past.</p>
<p>But even more interesting is that if you ask Pandora why it chose a track for you, it will list the genes that were critical for its selection.  Here are some that repeatedly show up for me: demanding instrumental part writing, great musicianship, intricate melodic structure, hard rock roots, jazz influences, instrumental arrangement, minor key tonality, variable tempo and time signatures, chromatic harmonic structure, electric guitar solo, mixed electric/acoustic instrumentation.  </p>
<p>Yup, they&#8217;ve got my tastes nailed with pinpoint accuracy.  Which is especially interesting since I&#8217;m not completely at home in any of the genres that border on the stuff I like.  I want more intelligence than metal usually offers, less obsessive self-regard than jazz is prone to, and more adrenal vigor than prog bands usually deliver.  By analyzing music to the level of &#8220;genes&#8221;, much finer-grained than genres, Pandora is able to represent this pretty well.</p>
<p>The only thing missing is that I&#8217;d like to be able to tweak my preference vector directly rather than by approving/disapproving tracks.  I&#8217;d like to be able to tell it that I&#8217;m also interested in world-music influences and anything with polyrhythms in it, and to turn my preferences for &#8220;instrumental arrangement&#8221; and &#8220;demanding instrumental part writing&#8221; up to max.  Oh yeah!</p>
<p>But even without that, I&#8217;m sold. Pandora is a special boon for people like me whose tastes don&#8217;t fit the music industry&#8217;s marketing categories well. I&#8217;ll cheerfully listen to their commercials, because the payoff is that they discover stuff for me very, <em>very</em> effectively.  </p>
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		<title>The Great Blizzard of 2010</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1660</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1660#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:48:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1660</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a bulletin for those of my regulars who know that I live smack-dab in the middle of the mid-Atlantic-coast region of the U.S. that&#8217;s just been hit by epic snowfall.  We&#8217;re OK.  It&#8217;s dangerous outside and we&#8217;re not planning on stirring out of sight of the house until the blizzard is [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is a bulletin for those of my regulars who know that I live smack-dab in the middle of the mid-Atlantic-coast region of the U.S. that&#8217;s just been hit by epic snowfall.  We&#8217;re OK.  It&#8217;s dangerous outside and we&#8217;re not planning on stirring out of sight of the house until the blizzard is over, but we&#8217;re OK.</p>
<p><span id="more-1660"></span></p>
<p>Yes, it&#8217;s bad out there. The mid-Atlantic region is snowed in from central Virginia north <s>to just past</s> not quite to New York City. Over much of that area weather conditions are extremely dangerous and authorities are recommending that nobody try to travel unless it&#8217;s an emergency.</p>
<p>It was certainly full blizzard conditions here in southeastern Pennsylvania overnight; snow is roughly 30 inches (76 cm) deep with a lot of blowing and drifting.  It&#8217;s still falling lightly and might reach the neighborhood of 3 feet (1m) by the time it&#8217;s expected to stop, around 1800 tonight.  </p>
<p>We&#8217;re near an edge of the peak-snowfall zone, about 50 miles north of the worst-hit areas in northern Maryland and the Delmarva peninsula. Washington DC, about 100 miles (roughly 160 km) southwest of us and close to the southern edge of the peak-snowfall zone, also has 30 inches on the ground and still rising.  Life-threatening blizzard conditions extend east into most of PA and northern West Virginia, and there&#8217;s deep snow reported all the way east into Ohio and Indiana. </p>
<p>For here and pretty much all points north of DC this is the most intense snow since the blizzard of 1978 shut down the northeast seaboard from southern PA north to Boston.  For DC it&#8217;s all-time record accumulation &mdash; which may be timed just right to have a significant impact on U.S. politics.  In a recession, and after the AGW fraud scandals that have been breaking continuously since November, carbon-cap legislation was always going to be a tough sell; this blizzard may be timed exactly right to put the last nail in its coffin.</p>
<p>Yay!  I know, weather not climate &mdash; still, anything that helps keep the AGW fraudsters from recovering their political clout in the U.S. is good news for all of us.  Thank you, Gaia.</p>
<p>Our power hasn&#8217;t been interrupted, and probably won&#8217;t be; if there were going to be downed lines it would have happened last night.  Our gas lines are likewise OK, not that a blizzard would be likely to damage those.  </p>
<p>So all is well here.  Cathy and I had a warm lazy intimate morning, the fridge is full of food, and the cat is fuzzy.  I made a ginormous pancakes-and-bacon breakfast for both of us and we&#8217;ve been working it off by shoveling our way to the street. When I finish typing I&#8217;ll go tackle the huge sill of snow between our sidewalk and the road, and then Cathy has proposed that we reward ourselves with pumpkin pie and hot cocoa.  Winter has its compensations.</p>
<p>.</p>
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		<title>Error cascade: a definition and examples</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:31:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve used the term &#8220;error cascade&#8221; on this blog several times, notably in referring to AGW hysteria.  A commenter has asked me to explain it, and I think that&#8217;s a good idea as (a) the web sources on the concept are a bit confusing, and (b) I&#8217;ll probably use the term again &#8212; error [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve used the term &#8220;error cascade&#8221; on this blog several times, notably in referring to AGW hysteria.  A commenter has asked me to explain it, and I think that&#8217;s a good idea as (a) the web sources on the concept are a bit confusing, and (b) I&#8217;ll probably use the term again &mdash; error cascades are all too common where science meets public policy.</p>
<p><span id="more-1642"></span></p>
<p>In medical jargon, an &#8220;error cascade&#8221; is something very specific: a series of escalating errors iin diagnosis or treatment, each one amplifying the effect of the previous one.  This is a well established term in the medical literature: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17301195">this abstract</a> is quite revealing about the context of use.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a slightly different term, <a href="http://www.info-cascades.info/">information cascade</a>, which is used to describe the propagation of beliefs and attitudes through crowd psychology.  Information cascades occur because humans are social animals and tend to follow the behavior of those around them.  When the social incentives are right, humans will substitute the judgment of others for their own.</p>
<p>A useful, related concept is <a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780674707580?&#038;PID=27627">preference falsification</a>, the act of misrepresenting one&#8217;s desires or beliefs under perceived social pressures. Preference falsification amplifies informational cascades &mdash; humans don&#8217;t just substitute the judgment of others for their own, they talk themselves into beliefs most around them don&#8217;t actually hold but have become socially convinced they should <em>claim</em> to hold!</p>
<p>I use the term &#8220;error cascade&#8221; in a meaning halfway between the restricted sense of the medical literature and &#8220;information cascade&#8221;, and I apply it specifically to a kind of bad science, especially bad science recruited in public-policy debates.  A <em>scientific</em> error cascade happens when researchers substitute the reports or judgment of more senior and famous researchers for their own, and incorrectly conclude that their own work is erroneous or must be trimmed to fit a &#8220;consensus&#8221; view.</p>
<p>But it doesn&#8217;t stop there.  What makes the term &#8220;cascade&#8221; appropriate is that those errors spawn other errors in the research they affect, which in turn spawn further errors. It&#8217;s exactly like a cascade from an incorrect medical diagnosis. The whole field surrounding the original error can become clogged with theory that has accreted around the error and is poorly predictive or over-complexified in order to cope with it.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a classic example of missing what&#8217;s in front of your face (which, incidentally, I first learned of from James Blish&#8217;s <cite>Cities In Flight</cite>; never let anyone tell you reading SF isn&#8217;t useful). For a couple of decades, cell biologists ignored the evidence of their own eyes <a href="http://www.ichg2006.com/abstract/1033.htm">when counting human chromosomes</a>.  The correct number is 46, but a very respected researcher incorrectly &#8220;corrected&#8221; his early count of 46 to 48 and the error persisted.  At least this one was relatively harmless; yes, ther wrong number hung around in textbooks for while, but there wasn&#8217;t any generative theory that depended on it in a big way.</p>
<p>For a cascade with wider theoretical consequences in its field, there&#8217;s the tale of Robert Andrews Millikan and the electron mass.  The famed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-drop_experiment">oil-drop experiment</a> of 1909 demonstrated that electrical charge was quantized, and by implication proved the existence of subatomic particles.  For this he deservedly got the physics Nobel in 1923 &mdash; but his value for the mass of the electron was significantly wrong. It was too low.  </p>
<p>Because Millikan was such an eminence, it took a long time and a lot of confusion and thrashing to correct this.  If you get the mass of the electron wrong it has lots of consequences; all theories that use it have at least to include unphysical bugger factors to cancel the error. You end up with even applied science getting screwed up; if I recall correctly what I first read long ago about this debacle, it caused some problems for the then-new technique of spectroscopy.</p>
<p>And yes, preference falsification distorts individuals&#8217; models of what others around them actually believe even in hard science.  I once tripped over this in an amusing way, when I volunteered to be on a panel on cosmology and dark matter at some SF convention (might have been Arisia 2004).  I did this in the belief that I&#8217;d probably be the lone dark-matter skeptic on the panel &mdash; the stuff smells altogether too damned much like phlogiston to me. But all four of the other panelists (all of them working physicists or astronomers) <em>also</em> turned out to be dark-matter skeptics, surprising not only me but each other as well!</p>
<p>For anybody who wonders, I favor the alternative explanation of why galaxies don&#8217;t fly apart that gravity departs from inverse square at sufficiently long distances (admittedly, this is a purely aesthetic difference, because that theory is not yet testable).  But I digress.  I didn&#8217;t tell that story to argue for this theory, but to illustrate how social pressure to falsify preferences scientists can lead scientists to get stuck in <em>erroneous models of what their peers believe</em>, as well as ignoring experimental evidence.</p>
<p>In extreme cases, entire fields of inquiry can go down a rathole for years because almost everyone has preference-falsified almost everyone else into submission to a &#8220;scientific consensus&#8221; theory that is (a) widely but privately disbelieved, and (b) doesn&#8217;t predict or retrodict observed facts at all well.  In the <em>worst</em> case, the field will become pathologized &mdash; scientific fraud will spread like dry rot among workers overinvested in the &#8220;consensus&#8221; view and scrambling to prop it up. Yes, anthropogenic global warming, I&#8217;m looking at <em>you!</em> </p>
<p>But climatology is far from the only field to get stuck in a rathole.  I have reason to suspect, for example, that Noam Chomsky&#8217;s theory of universal grammar may have done something similar to comparative linguistics.  I have spoken with linguists who will mutter, if no colleague can hear them, that Chomskian &#8220;universal grammar&#8221; has Indo-European biases and has to be chopped, diced, and bent out of shape  to fit languages outside that group, to the point where it becomes vacuous (and effectively unfalsifiable). The gods alone know what distorting effects this rathole has had on analysis of language morphology (which would be like electron-mass measurements or chromosome counts in this case), but we&#8217;re not likely to be shut of them until Chomsky is dead.</p>
<p>There an important difference between the AGW rathole and the others, though. Errors in the mass of the electron, or the human chromosome count,  or structural analyses of obscure languages, don&#8217;t have political consequences (I chose Chomsky, who is definitely politically active, in part to sharpen this point).  AGW theory most certainly does have political consequences; in fact, it becomes clearer by the day that the IPCC assessment reports were <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dd7XhIAS">fraudulently designed to fit the desired political consequences</a> rather than being based on anything so mundane and unhelpful as observed facts.</p>
<p>When a field of science is co-opted for political ends, the stakes for diverging from the &#8220;consensus&#8221; point of view become much higher.  If politicians have staked their prestige and/or hopes for advancement on being the ones to fix a crisis, they don&#8217;t like to hear that &#8220;Oops! There is no crisis!&#8221; &mdash; and where that preference leads, grant money follows.  When politics co-opts a field that is in the grip of an error cascade, the effect is to tighten that grip to the strangling point.</p>
<p>Consequently, scientific fields that have become entangled with public-policy debates are far more likely to pathologize &mdash; that is, to develop inner circles that collude in actual misconduct and suppression of refuting data rather than innocently perpetuating a mistake. The CRU &#8220;team&#8221; isn&#8217;t the only example of this.  The sociological literature attacking civilian firearms possession has been<br />
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=314">rife with fraud for decades</a>.  In a more recent example, prominent sociologist Robert Putnam has admitted that he sat for <em>years</em> on data indicating that increases in ethnic diversity result in a net loss of trust and social capital, because he feared that publishing it would give aid and comfort to political tendencies he disliked.</p>
<p>So&#8230;how do you tell when a research field is in the grip of an error cascade?  The most general indicator I know is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience">consilience</a> failures.  Eventually, one of the factoids generated by an error cascade is going to collide with a well-established piece of evidence from another research field that is not subject to the same groupthink.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s an example: Serious alarm bells rang for me about AGW when the &#8220;hockey team&#8221; edited the Medieval Warm Period out of existence.  I knew about the MWP because I&#8217;d read Annalist-style histories that concentrated on things like crop-yield descriptions from primary historical sources, so I knew that in medieval times wine grapes &mdash; implying what we&#8217;d now call a Mediterranean climate &mdash; were grown as far north as southern England and the Lake M&auml;laren region of Sweden!  When the primary historical evidence grossly failed to match the &#8220;hockey team&#8217;s&#8221; paleoclimate reconstructions,  it wasn&#8217;t hard for me to figure which had to be wrong.</p>
<p>Actually, my very favorite example of an error cascade revealed by consilience failure isn&#8217;t from climatology: it&#8217;s the the oceans of bogus theory and wilful misinterpretations of primary data generated by anthropology and sociology to protect the &#8220;tabula rasa&#8221; premise advanced by Franz Boas and other founders of the field in the early 20th century. Eventually this cascade collided with increasing evidence from biology and cognitive psychology that the human mind is <em>not</em> in fact a &#8220;blank slate&#8221; or completely general cognitive machine passively accepting acculturation. Steven Pinker&#8217;s book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518">The Blank Slate</a> is eloquent about the causes and the huge consequences of this error.</p>
<p>Consilience failures offer a way to spot an error cascade at a relatively early stage, well before the field around it becomes seriously pathologized.  At later stages, the disconnect between the observed reality in front of researchers&#8217; noses and the bogus theory may increase enough to cause problems <em>within</em> the field.  At that point, the amount of peer pressure required to keep researchers from breaking out of the error cascade increases, and the operation of social control becomes more visible.  </p>
<p>You are well into this late stage when anyone invokes &#8220;scientific consensus&#8221;.  Science doesn&#8217;t work by consensus, it works by making and confirming predictions. Science is not democratic; there is only one vote, only Mother Nature gets to cast it, and the results are not subject to special pleading. When anyone attempts to end debate by insisting that a majority of scientists believe some specified position, this is the social mechanism of error cascades coming into the open and swinging a wrecking ball at actual scientific method right out where everyone can watch it happening.</p>
<p>The best armor against error cascades is knowing how this failure mode works so you can spot the characteristic behaviors.  Talk of &#8220;deniers&#8221; is another one; that, and the moralistic quasi-religious language that it goes with, is a leading indicator that scientific method has left the building. Sound theory doesn&#8217;t have to be buttressed by demonizing its opponents; it demonstrates itself with predictive success.</p>
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		<title>Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1631</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1631#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:08:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1631</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[James Delingpole, in Climategate: Time for the Tumbrils, noting the public collapse in credibility of AGW &#8220;science&#8221; utters a fine rant summed up in this wise (parochial references to British political figures and organizations omitted):

 I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>James Delingpole, in <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100024416/climategate-time-for-the-tumbrils/">Climategate: Time for the Tumbrils</a>, noting the public collapse in credibility of AGW &#8220;science&#8221; utters a fine rant summed up in this wise (parochial references to British political figures and organizations omitted):</p>
<blockquote><p>
 I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians booted out and I want  fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.</p>
<p>For years I’ve been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Now it’s payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don’t want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.
</p></blockquote>
<p>I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they&#8217;ve earned for themselves.  But revenge, while it&#8217;s a tasty dish that long-time public &#8220;deniers&#8221; like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn&#8217;t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life.  The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them &mdash; ideally, to the point where there&#8217;s a rash of prominent suicides as a result &mdash;  is this:</p>
<p>If we don&#8217;t destroy them, they&#8217;ll surely ramp up <em>yet another</em> colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.</p>
<p><span id="more-1631"></span></p>
<p>To explain why I&#8217;m sure this is so, let me start by reprising a <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447#comment-243073">comment</a> I wrote in late November in response to someone who asked whether I bought conservative Senator James Inhofe&#8217;s theory that the climate scientists are all involved in a monolithic AGW conspiracy.  Here&#8217;s what I said at the time:</p>
<p>If Inhofe actually believes that the entire scientific community is embroiled in monolithic AGW conspiracy, he’s an idiot; I agree with that. What I believe is actually going on is a lot more complicated and ambiguous than that. There are a lot of players in this dance. I’ll round up a few….</p>
<p>First, the scientists. Most are caught up in, or struggling against, an error cascade of humongous proportions. What’s an error cascade? Somebody gave one of the type examples upthread, over the mass of the electron. This is not conspiracy, it’s a result of a tendency to use seniority or authority as a shortcut when it’s technically difficult to evaluate evidence and socially difficult to be skeptical. All humans do this, even scientists.</p>
<p>Next, the Gaianists – term I made up for people in whom “Save the Earth!” has psychologically substituted for traditional religion (in more or less chiliastic forms). They mean well, they really do; they recycle as an act of virtue, they worry about composting and buying local produce — and they’re totally subject to being manipulated by the other players, which is important since most of the action is going on in democracies. They’re not usually manipulated directly by the scientists, except occasionally a very wealthy one (er, think dot.com millionaire) might get hit up for funding. The Gaianists aren’t a conspiracy; they’re not organized enough. There’s some overlap with the scientists at the non-chiliastic end of this group.</p>
<p>Next, the green-shirts. These are political hacks of all varieties who just love the ideas of more carbon taxes, more regulation, and the general expansion of state power, especially if they can posture as virtuous eco-saviors while they’re arranging this. They’re not a conspiracy either, just a bunch of careerists who compete for the Gaianists as a voting bloc. They sometimes behave a bit like a conspiracy, but only because their behavioral incentives tend to push them all in the same direction. Er, they’re not scientists. They’re Al Gore, or they’d like to be, only with political power too.</p>
<p>Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually…</p>
<p>Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.</p>
<p>Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.</p>
<p>My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.</p>
<p>Overall, is this conspiracy? No. Mostly it’s just people responding to short-term incentives, unaware that they’re caught up in an error cascade and/or being politically fucked around. Nobody involved is what you could reasonably call evil…well, except for the zombies. It would be pretty evil if the hockey team had planned all this, but I’m not cynical enough to believe that. Not yet, anyway, but I haven’t read all the emails either.</p>
<p>OK, now it&#8217;s months later and I&#8217;ve read enough of the emails to be fairly sure that the &#8220;team&#8221; did not in fact plan all this.  Nor, I&#8217;m pretty sure, did the green-shirts or the zombies; they merely exploited an opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway.  The key point &mdash; and the reason the AGW frauds need to be shamed and punished &mdash; is that the <b>political background conditions favoring this kind of fraud are still in place</b>.</p>
<p>That is, the zombies and green-shirts still have a powerful interest in magnifying scientific errors that suit their agendas into politicized crusades that could produce error cascades just as huge.  Somewhere out there, there are now-innocent scientific research groups who could become the next decade&#8217;s version of the &#8220;team&#8221;, degenerating into fraudulent conspiracies as careerism draws them in, the political villains cheer them on to rationalize the power-grab of the week, and the Gaianists gamely but stupidly try to do the right thing.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m even prepared to hazard a guess where the next fraud would be ginned up from: environmental toxicology and what are called &#8220;endocrine disruptors&#8221;.</p>
<p>The most effective way to prevent a recurrence is for there to be real penalties &mdash; political, social, and criminal &mdash; attached to playing the environmental-panic con game.  It&#8217;s not a good outcome for any of us if the scientists who committed criminal data fraud and denied FOIA requests get a soft landing to positions elsewhere in academia.  And the green-shirts who used that fraud as cover for their ambitions should absolutely be hounded out of public life so that politics in future will be a bit less toxic. </p>
<p>As for the zombies &mdash; well, hanging them all from lamp-posts would be ideal, but distinguishing them from their more-or-less innocent dupes is difficult.  At least, by destroying the reputations of everyone who promoted this fraud, we might impair the zombies&#8217; past ability to operate Gaianist organizations like so many sock puppets.</p>
<p>The most optimistic take on the long-term outcome is that the collapse of the AGW fraud might at least partially immunize us against future attacks of environmental junk science.  I wish I were in fact that optimistic, but I&#8217;m not.  In any case, a round of public excruciations of the villains in this one is certainly called for, <em>pour encourager les autres</em>.</p>
<p>UPDATE: <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&#038;post=1631">I thought of killing myself, says climate scandal professor Phil Jones</a>.  Instead, this fraud and bully plays the tearful-victim card.  The man truly has no shame.</p>
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		<title>&#8220;I forgot he was black tonight for an hour&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1625</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1625#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:21:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1625</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In commentary following Barack Obama&#8217;s 2010 State of the Union address last night, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews said &#8220;You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.&#8221;
It&#8217;s hard for me to even wrap my mind around racial prejudice that blind and entrenched.  If I were black I think I&#8217;d be righteously pissed [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In commentary following Barack Obama&#8217;s 2010 State of the Union address last night, MSNBC commentator <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Matthews">Chris Matthews</a> said &#8220;You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.&#8221;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s hard for me to even wrap my mind around racial prejudice that blind and entrenched.  If I were black I think I&#8217;d be <em>righteously</em> pissed off &mdash; and yet, Matthews and his fans undoubtedly think of themselves as the enlightened ones who are leading the rest of us troglodytes to the sunny uplands of universal brotherhood.</p>
<p>Mr. Matthews, I have news for you: some of us actually manage to forget that Obama is black for weeks at a time &mdash; that is, until we&#8217;re reminded of it by a self-righteous, pompous, race-obsessed idiot like you.</p>
<p>Why does this man still have a job this morning?  Why is there not a universal howling for his blood from bien pensants everywhere?</p>
<p>Oh, right.  I forgot the rules.  Only Republicans get that treatment.</p>
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		<title>Comment to USCG on NAIS policy</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1616</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1616#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:13:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1616</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[These are comments on policy for sharing information from the
U.S. Coast Goard&#8217;s NAIS, a network of 140 AIS receivers covering
U.S. coastal waters, as solicited by Federal docket USCG-2009-0701.
(The docket request for comments is here.)

First, I declare my interest. I am a lead of the GPSD project, a set of open-source software tools for
collecting and processing [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>These are comments on policy for sharing information from the<br />
U.S. Coast Goard&#8217;s NAIS, a network of 140 AIS receivers covering<br />
U.S. coastal waters, as solicited by Federal docket USCG-2009-0701.</p>
<p>(The docket request for comments is <a href="http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/2010-632.htm">here</a>.)</p>
<p><span id="more-1616"></span></p>
<p>First, I declare my interest. I am a lead of the <a href="http://gpsd.berlios.de/">GPSD project</a>, a set of open-source software tools for<br />
collecting and processing GPS and AIS data.  GPSD is extremely widely<br />
deployed on Linux and Unix systems including navigational suites, SBC<br />
telemetry packages, and cellphones. In connection with this project,<br />
I am also the editor of the most complete publicly available<br />
<a href="http://gpsd.berlios.de/AIVDM.html">description of AIS/AIVDM decoding</a>.</p>
<p>One goal of my work is to make access to high-quality GIS information<br />
generally available for purposes of research, day-to-day navigation,<br />
and public safety.  </p>
<p>NAIS data is collected with tax funds. Thus, policy formulation should<br />
begin from a presumption that, absent a showing of specific<br />
unmanageable risks, the general public is entitled to free access to<br />
the data.  The burden of demonstration should fall on those advocating<br />
restrictions rather than openness.</p>
<p>The policy I advocate is complete openness: that all data collected<br />
by NAIS should be made available in real time as an AIVDM stream via a<br />
Internet public feed at a stable and documented address.</p>
<p>    1. How might providing real-time, near real-time, or historical<br />
NAIS information to the public impact maritime commerce?</p>
<p>Accurate and timely information is the life-blood of commerce.  In the past,<br />
increases in the information richess of the environment in which market<br />
actors make decisions have shown a strong tendency to promote economic<br />
activity of all kinds, help markets clear more rapidly, and increase<br />
average wealth levels.</p>
<p>I see no reason for general publication of NAIS information to be an<br />
exception. I cannot predict what specific business strategies or<br />
tactics it will enable, but I think the precedent of GPS provides strong<br />
reason for optimism.</p>
<p>    2. What would be the impact of providing this information, if any,<br />
on the following?<br />
    a. Safety of ships and passengers or crew,<br />
    b. Security of ships and their cargo,</p>
<p>I do not anticipate a safety or security impact. </p>
<p>The substantial safety benefits of AIS in navigational and collision<br />
avoidance systems are readily collected by LOS (line-of-sight) use<br />
through local receivers. Ship velocities are low enough that non-LOS<br />
information over an Internet feed is not generally relevant in real<br />
time.</p>
<p>In the past, there has been some concern that Internet publication of<br />
AIS data might enable commerce-raiding, piracy or terrorism via<br />
non-LOS monitoring of ship locations. But in no conditions short of<br />
major war would commerce-raiding or piracy be an issue for the<br />
NAIS coverage area (U.S. coastal and inland waterways). And<br />
terrorists, unlike national governments, do not generally have the<br />
ability to throw cruise missiles over the horizon.  Thus I conclude<br />
that the risk from publishing real-time ship locations in the<br />
NAIS coverage area is effectively nil in peacetime conditions.</p>
<p>    c. Economic advantage or disadvantage to commercial stakeholders,</p>
<p>I see no disadvantage to anyone in a policy of open<br />
publication. Because Internet access is unreliable and expensive at<br />
sea and AIS receivers are cheap, substitution of real-time NAIS data<br />
for local receivers seems unlikely.</p>
<p>A policy of unrestricted public access ensures that any commercial<br />
advantages will be symmetrically distributed without favor.<br />
Conversely, restrictions on the data would advantage large players<br />
with the resources to jump through bureaucratic hoops and/or good<br />
political connections &#8212; not a good outcome.</p>
<p>    d. Environmental impact on extractable resources or coastal<br />
activities.</p>
<p>Difficult to call.  On the one hand, open publication of NAIS data<br />
would probably increase general activity levels slightly, with<br />
concomitant slightly increased environmental risk. On the other hand,<br />
AIS is already being used for risk mitigation, e.g. by broadcasting<br />
whale pod locations. More general availability of such data might<br />
head off specific and serious environmental harms.</p>
<p>    3. Is information collected by the NAIS considered sensitive?</p>
<p>I do not believe NAIS information should be considered sensitive in<br />
peacetime conditions.</p>
<p>    a. Is real-time or near real-time information collected by the NAIS<br />
viewed differently than historical NAIS information, and if so, how?</p>
<p>Historical NAIS information presents not even the minimal (wartime) risks of<br />
real-time informstion.</p>
<p>    b. Does the sharing of information collected by the NAIS generate<br />
concern about unfair commercial advantage? If so, for which segments of<br />
the industry is this a concern?</p>
<p>As previously noted, open access would make asymmetrical commercial<br />
advantage impossible.</p>
<p>    c. Is there a timeframe within which real-time or historical<br />
information collected by the NAIS is considered sensitive or is no<br />
longer considered sensitive?</p>
<p>See above.</p>
<p>    d. Given that ships last for decades and that their capabilities<br />
and capacities are relatively stable, is there a concern that<br />
historical NAIS information might be analyzed to derive a competitive<br />
advantage?</p>
<p>See above.</p>
<p>    4. What controls on sharing real-time, near real-time, or<br />
historical information collected by the NAIS with the public are<br />
suitable?</p>
<p>General publication with no controls whatsoever would be the simplest,<br />
fairest, and least expensive policy.</p>
<p>    a. Who should receive each type of NAIS information?</p>
<p>In tha absence of wartime threats to U.S. littoral waters, all NAIS<br />
information should be made generally available in real time on a<br />
stable public Internet feed.</p>
<p>    b. What are appropriate uses of information collected by the NAIS?</p>
<p>Research.  Maritime traffic analysis.  Robustness testing of AIS decoders.</p>
<p>    c. Do message types matter?</p>
<p>I see no reason to complicate policy or implementation by<br />
distinguishing among message types. Publish them all and let the<br />
applications sort it out.</p>
<p>    d. Should addressed messages be handled differently from broadcast<br />
messages? Do addressed messages contain information significant to<br />
understanding maritime activity? Should addressed messages be shared<br />
with the public?</p>
<p>I see no reason to restrict access to addressed messages. Though<br />
addressed, the technological substrate of AIS is such that they are<br />
public broadcasts with no expectation of privacy. Privacy concerns are<br />
properly addressed via message encryption, which AIS readily supports.</p>
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		<title>Corrupted climatology</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1611</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1611#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:28:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1611</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Times of London reports a determination from the Information Commissioner&#8217;s Office of the United Kingdom: members of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The ICO says, however, that it cannot prosecute because of a 6-month timeout in [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Times of London reports a determination from the Information Commissioner&#8217;s Office of the United Kingdom: members of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece">broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.</a></p>
<p><span id="more-1611"></span></p>
<p>The ICO says, however, that it cannot prosecute because of a 6-month timeout in the controlling legislation.  It is launching an effort to have the timeout increased or abolished.</p>
<p>The Times, which has been doing a noticeably better job of reporting on the CRU disclosures and their aftermath than anyone in the American media, also reports that the chairman of the IPCC  <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999975.ece">has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.</a></p>
<p>Those predictions &mdash; trumpeted in the IPCC&#8217;s reports and a major theme in alarmist propaganda &mdash; turn out to have not to have been based peer-reviewed literature or anything as mundane as actual <em>facts</em>, and were inserted in the IPCC report <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dd7XhIAS">purely to put pressure on world leaders</a>.</p>
<p>Those of us who have been saying for a decade that the IPCC Assessment Reports were corrupt piles of political flimflam, and that AGW alarmism was built on criminal data fraud, and that its leading proponents are personally corrupt and complicit in the fraud, were <em>right</em>.</p>
<p>Of course, the mainstream media has learned its lesson and will now treat  AGW claims with rational skepticism.  And, chastened, it will apply more stringent standards of evidence to future environmental panics.  And love is a thing that can never go wrong, and I am Marie of Romania.</p>
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		<title>Some things are&#8230;priceless&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1605</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1605#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:47:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1605</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Yesterday morning I learned that GPSD has been awarded the first Good Code Grant by the Alliance for Code Excellence.
This is how I think about it now:
Amount of test hardware you can now afford: $500
Being able to tell people that your project is funded by the sale of indulgences&#8230;priceless!
]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Yesterday morning I <a href="http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Bad-Code-Offsets-Open-Web-Innovation.aspx">learned</a> that GPSD has been awarded the first Good Code Grant by the Alliance for Code Excellence.</p>
<p>This is how I think about it now:</p>
<p>Amount of test hardware you can now afford: $500</p>
<p>Being able to tell people that your project is funded by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence">sale of indulgences</a>&#8230;priceless!</p>
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		<title>Are political parties obsolete?</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1601</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1601#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:31:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1601</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s been a lot of punditry emitted in the wake of Scott Brown&#8217;s victory in the Massachusetts special election to replace Teddy Kennedy. All of it that I&#8217;ve seen is aimed at making some partisan point in the Democratic vs. Republican tug of war.  But the facts of the Brown victory seem to me [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There&#8217;s been a lot of punditry emitted in the wake of Scott Brown&#8217;s victory in the Massachusetts special election to replace Teddy Kennedy. All of it that I&#8217;ve seen is aimed at making some partisan point in the Democratic vs. Republican tug of war.  But the facts of the Brown victory seem to me to suggest something different and more radical: that political parties as we have known them for the last 200 years may be obsolete, or at least well on their way to becoming so.</p>
<p><span id="more-1601"></span></p>
<p>Here are the two facts that have given me seriously to think about this:</p>
<p>1. More than 50% of the Massachusetts electorate is registered independent.</p>
<p>2. In the last week of the campaign, Scott Brown was able to raise over a million dollars by going direct to potential supporters via the Internet.</p>
<p>These data strike at the heart of the two essential functions of the political party: getting out the vote,  and raising campaign funds for its candidates.  Scott Brown proved that he could succeed, in a traditionally Democratic state and without significant backing from the national Republican party, pretty purely on grassroots enthusiasm  and the leverage provided by Internet social media.</p>
<p>Nationally, the percentage of voters refusing to affiliate with a party isn&#8217;t over 50% yet, but it&#8217;s been heading steadily upwards.  Straight-ticket voting has been in decline for decades. </p>
<p>Furthermore, both major parties are showing signs of disintegration as factions near their edges grow increasingly restive and (in part) bolt to form separate movements.</p>
<p>This is clearest on the Republican side.  The Tea Party movement has an ambiguous relationship with the national Republicans, sometimes behaving like a fiscal-conservative party faction but often proclaiming itself a separate movement and opposing party-backed Republican candidates.</p>
<p>On the Democratic side, the &#8220;netroots&#8221; around sites like Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are putting increasing distance between themselves and the national Democrats.  The left-wing revolt against the Pelosi/Reid/Obama health-care reform bill is a leading indicator here.</p>
<p>What the netroots and the Tea Partiers have in common, of course, is that they&#8217;re both virtual organizations that rely on the Internet for the reductions in internal coordination costs they would normally get from having offices and org charts.</p>
<p>Glen Reynolds and a few others have noticed this; there&#8217;s been some muttering in the blogosphere about &#8220;disintermediation&#8221;, but nobody until now seems to have thought seriously about the medium-to-long-term effects on the major parties.</p>
<p>The major parties have anyway been looking both battered and sclerotic for a while now.  On the Democratic side,  the party has had to rely increasingly on the personal charisma of adventurers (the Clintons, Obama) to draw voters who no longer have any loyalty to the party&#8217;s platform or history.  On the Republican side, that party is so bereft of leadership that it has in effect outsourced that function to conservative talk-radio hosts.</p>
<p>Now, the political parties increasingly find that they have to compete with the Internet-mediated political networks &mdash; and the parties are  losing.</p>
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