We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The Atlantic Monthly has a profile of Freeman Dyson, a scientist and contrarian who, I would hazard to guess, is known and has been read by a few regulars around these parts. It is okay up to a point – there are some nice biographical details to spice things up – but then it comes up with the following:
“That humanity has been kind to the planet is not a possible interpretation, not even for a moment—certainly not for anyone who has been paying the slightest attention at any point in the 4,700 years of human history since Gilgamesh logged the cedar forest of the Fertile Crescent.”
So I presume that instances such as the spectacular achievements of land reclamation by the Dutch over the centuries – turning tidal waters into productive farmland, for example, don’t count?
On it goes:
“That we repair our damage to the planet is a laughable assertion. It is true that the air is better now in London, and in Los Angeles too. Collars do blacken more slowly in both those places. Some rivers in the developed world are somewhat cleaner, as well: the Cuyahoga has not burned in many years. But it is also true that the Atlantic is afloat with tar balls, and that detached sections of fishnet and broken filaments of longline drift, ghost-fishing, in all our seas. Many of the large cities of Africa, South America, and Asia are megalopolises of desperate poverty ringed by garbage. Vast tracts of tropical rain forest, the planet’s most important carbon sink, disappear annually, burned or logged or mined. Illegal logging is also ravaging the slow-growing boreal forests of Siberia. The ozone hole over Antarctica continues to open every southern spring, exposing all life beneath to unfiltered ultraviolet rays. African wildlife is in precipitous decline.”
These are assertions not backed up by actual numbers or clear sources in the article. They are just trotted out as “facts”. In Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, he points out, if my reading of that book is correct, that much of the data on resource depletion and species loss, etc, is wildly exaggerated, and Lomborg was able to point this out by using publicly disclosed data from the very sources so very often cited by the doomsters. The Atlantic’s article does, at least, concede that in the richer nations of the West, such as the UK, rivers have been cleaned up to some degree (as in the Thames), and air pollution of some kinds is far less – the smogs that were familiar in Victorian London are things of the past. What this article is talking about in fact is more about poverty; but as living standards rise and profit-making businesses look to wring out efficiency gains, so the use of fossil fuels to deliver a given level of output goes down. This has been a fairly widely observed fact. In the US, for example, thanks to improved efficiency as firms look to cut costs, less oil/coal is needed to produce a given amount of stuff now than was the case 100 years ago. Here are some figures from the US Energy Agency.
I suspect the reason why Dyson has got up the nose of the author of this piece is his essential optimism and enjoyment of the idea of human progress, his belief that science and technology can fix all the real or perceived problems, including Man-made global warming. He has likened the Green movement to socialism, and of course that really gets the temperatures rising. The truth, after all, often stings.
I found the tone of the article somewhat patronising, to be honest. Here is this fearesomely bright guy and he’s a Denier! The shame of it.
On a related theme, I have just received my copy of Tim Worstall’s Chasing Rainbows. I’ll try and post a review soon.
I ran across this item in a Jane’s Newsletter this morning:
US, Japan agree to diversify rare earth minerals. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara agreed on 28 October that diversifying sources of rare earth minerals was a priority in the wake of China’s freeze on exports to Japan. These minerals are indispensible to modern defence systems and see commercial use in mobile phones, wind turbines, televisions and hybrid electric drives
Rare earth elements, with names like Yttrium, Scandium, Lanthanum and Praeseodymium, are critical to a modern industrial society. They appear in lasers, high tech alloys, superconductors, and much else. China is applying Mercantilist practices to corner a larger share of the global market in high end electronics. They are the largest producer of the strategic REE’s and see this as an advantage in a geopolitical sense as well.
It will not work however. They may well be the current largest producer, but these elements exist all over the world. In the short term they will gain an advantage. Over the medium to longer term they will accomplish the same thing ITAR regulations accomplished for the United States. They will create a thriving industry elsewhere and it will eventually ‘eat their lunch’.
To paraphrase an old saw: “You can’t fool Mother Market.”
Do you have seven and a half minutes to spare out of your crowded, creative, busy life? I recommend that you find it, and watch this bit of video, now conveniently viewable at Bishop Hill, this video being … well, see the title of this posting.
Of it, the good Bishop says:
This was posted in the comments on WUWT. I’m not sure if it’s recent or not, but it hasn’t been on YouTube for long. I’ve never seen it before.
Me neither. It’s as good a short summary of the whole Hockey Stick furore (Bishop Hill’s book about it all being a much longer version of the same story), what it is, why it matters, and so on, as you could hope to find.
The content of this snatch of video is impressive, of course. But I especially love McKitrick’s calm tone of voice and measured manner.
How those climate warmists must hate the internet. They’re still at it, by the way.
Rees and the Royal Society are seeking ever greater roles for science in the political sphere. Politicians, who are suffering from a historic inability to define their purpose, take the authority this lends them with ever more enthusiasm. But this has resulted in a qualitative shift in the character of science. Where once it provided the means to liberate human potential, it now exists to regulate it. Instead of ‘speaking truth to power’, science increasingly speaks official truth for official power. The result is bad politics and bad science.
– Ben Pile of Climate Resistance asks What’s Next for the Royal Society?, the above quote being his concluding paragraph. Linked to by Bishop Hill. Suggested by Michael Jennings, who is on his travels and couldn’t post it himself.
…the value of a scientific theory is judged by its power to predict – not in the sense of “psychic” predictions headlined in supermarket tabloids, but in the sense of predicting further experimental results. One failed prediction is enough to torpedo a theory. Success with every prediction, on the other hand, means only that it has survived everything thrown at it thus far. So, if evolution is valid, the newer discoveries made since its inception ought to be consistent with it. Apart from some haggling among specialists over relatively minor details, this has turned out to be overwhelmingly the case. Darwin and others predicted the essential properties of inherited generic units, even though genes and chromosomes were unknown at that time. From evolutionary theory, DNAs from different species should exhibit a branching pattern that reflects the same time sequence of divergence as it is deduced by other methods; they do. The primitive metabolic chemistry of ancestral organisms should be discernible in today’s organic cells; it is. There shouldn’t be much difference in the genetic code inherited by all organisms; there isn’t. And so it goes.”
“And of the predictive power of creationism? Can it predict which band in a series of tree rings should indicate the same age as a given mix of carbon isotopes? Or the tidal record that ought to be found written into fossil corals by the moon’s orbital motion of several hundred million years ago? Does it have anything to say about the composition of the early atmosphere and the kinds of minerals that would be formed as a consequence – their chemical nature, where they should be located, and at what depths we should expect to find them today? Can creationism, in fact, give a hint of any future finding? Not a one. It operates with hindsight only. Because of its built-in unfalsifiability it can cobble together an explanation of anything at all – but only after the fact as established by other means. As a method of prediction it is sterile.”
James P. Hogan, Minds, Machines and Evolution, in the chapter, “The Revealed Word of God, pages 174 and 175. Hogan wrote good SF and non-fiction, although this Wikipedia entry (treat with some care), suggests he also was a Holocaust denier, which is a bit like finding out that your close friend is selling hard drugs to teenagers. He died in July this year.
As some may know, I wrote a while back about what I saw as an unconvincing attempt by the UK journalist Christopher Booker to play the victim card and assume that advocates of AGW scepticism and intelligent design proponents (i.e., creationists), were both equally victims of intolerance from the scientific community. But actually, as one commenter – I think it was Counting Cats at his own blog – pointed out, there is more in common between AGW alarmists, with their almost religious approach, and creationists.
The reason why I keep returning to this topic is that for all that I am unbudgeable on tolerance for all manner of views, barking mad or eminently sane, the point is that if we are going to be able to resist some of the more oppressive demands of AGW alarmists, it pays not to ally ourselves with what I regard as seriously flawed ideas, such as creationism. It is the sort of thing that will be seized upon by the AGW alarmists, in their quest to treat any dissent as examples of bad science. Just sayin’.
I have been busy travelling lately, so not much opportunity to post much on the site at the moment, but I could not resist this.
In case you missed it, Apple is already the second biggest corporation in the world in terms of capitalization and is poised to pass Exxon as number one, possibly this winter with the iPad this year’s most coveted Xmas gift. The Silicon Valley company is sitting on some 50 billion in cash, pretty well positioned to do whatever it takes to maintain their technological/aesthetic edge. That’s one helluva long way from two young guys in a garage, tinkering with a computer. It’s close to the most extraordinary business story of all time.
– Roger L. Simon. Today I wrote out a cheque for a new super-fast computer, but not an Apple Mac, a PC. But, what kind of purgatory would the PC be in now, without the Mac keeping it semi-honest and semi-friendly and semi-nice-to look-at? Thank you Bill Gates, but thank you even more: Steve Jobs.
That Tim Evans certainly gets about. The last time I had cause to mention him here, he was emailing me about a Cobden Centre scheme to put Austrian economics on the map. Now, with another hat on that I have not seen him wearing before, he is emailing everyone of consequence in the known universe about this (read the whole thing here – it is just over twenty pages long), which is about how the British Government should allow rather than smother the UK version of the space industry, smother having been its preferred policy until now.
And you know? This just might work. If I were the British Government just now, I would be highly receptive to anything which I could call Doing Something, which did not Cost Too Much, and which preferably hardly cost anything at all. True, the report’s author James C. Bennett does recommend a few fact finding junkets for British regulators, to enable them to learn how to create the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, which is must be, he says:
… predictable, sensible, provide reasonable guarantees of safety and make the UK a venue of choice for space operations …
Why can the rules not be along the lines of: do what you want with your own property, provided it is within the laws of contract (e.g. not deafening to people who have been promised no deafening), provided nobody is swindled or deliberately incinerated (accidental incineration being inevitable from time to time in a business like this), and provided that you do not get so angry with any gawping onlookers that you try to murder them. You don’t need a trip to Canada or Australia or India to devise a set of rules like that.
But then again, such expeditions can be fun, and I suppose there have to be inducements to Government people to behave sensibly. And such is the state of the modern world – the EUropean bit of it especially – that if some activity has not been supplied with the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, it can not even start.
It so happens that James C. Bennett is in the room with me as I write this, he being in Britain now to promote this thing, and he has just said, in connection with the above:
”Better to send regulators to Ottawa than to Paris.”
Indeed.
I can think of few greater contemporary British journalists than Christopher Booker. He is the AGW alarmists’ waking nightmare. In fact, he inflicts sleep deprivation on all manner of promoters of scares, seeing, as HL Mencken once realised, that scares are a means by which power-hungry folk can persuade benighted citizens to sign up to the latest safety measures.
And yet even great men have their off days. In last week’s edition of the Spectator (which is behind a subscriber firewall), he writes, on page 20, that there is a dastardly campaign by the Darwinian establishment to crush any signs of dissent from those who subscribe to some form of Intelligent Design (or what might be more accurately known as Creationism). He then goes on to liken the plight of these poor, oppressed ID advocates with AGW skeptics. And yet the parallel strikes me as absurd. AGW skeptics fall into various camps: those who simply want to trash any suggestion that AGW is a problem; those who say that AGW is a problem but who are unsure about its effects, and those who realise that AGW is probably happening but who debate whether it can be mitigated, reversed or adapted to, and who want to know about the pros and cons (think of the likes of Nigel Lawson, or Bjorn Lomborg, etc). A lot of AGW skeptics pore over immense amounts of data to highlight their doubts; and some of them, such as Lawson, employ powerful economic and related arguments that draw on known facts.
But ID advocates do not have the same kind of facts, as far as I can see, to conclusively press their case. What they have instead is a sort of “We cannot explain X so in the absence of a better idea, we’ll assume a Creator got involved”. Not terribly convincing, is my reaction. I accept that some scientists might be sympathetic to ID without losing any integrity, but what Booker’s article signally fails to address is whether any ID advocate has given a plausible explanation, with proof and evidence, of how a particularly complex phemomenon of nature came to be “created”. All they do, it seems from Booker’s article, is to state that because there are “gaps” in fossil records, etc, that therefore the gap must imply that some outside agent (like a God), caused X or Y. But his article does not go beyond that to explain what sort of processes these ID folk imagine happened. And the reason for that is simple: they don’t know. By contrast, AGW skeptics seem to a far more persuasive lot and are able to throw out all manner of facts and data to back their case up. I am just not convinced that Creationists come remotely close.
In fact, a recent comment on this kind of issue by someone called bgates on Samizdata nicely captures a key issue here, because it might explain why a lot of people treat evolution theory and creationism as being on an equal footing:
“It’s interesting that so many people who think they’re proponents of evolution discuss the matter in terms of “belief”. I’ve never heard anyone voice a belief that red light has a longer wavelength than blue, or a belief that B-lactam antibiotics work by interfering with bacterial cell wall synthesis. Those statements are instead presented as facts that have been deduced from an examination of physical evidence. The difference seems to be that so many of the most fervent defenders of the theory of evolution are unaware of the (astonishing, voluminous, and altogether convincing) physical evidence supporting the idea. They don’t have knowledge of the evidence, they have faith in their belief, and they’ll fight for their beliefs as passionately as any mujahedeen.”
And in conclusion, for all I support Booker’s general stance on free speech and resistence to any thought control, I think – as a AGW skeptic myself – that is not really smart for Booker to lump AGW skeptics into the same supposedly “oppressed” category as creationists. If creationists come in for abuse, they need to raise their game and employ the same rigour, if they can, as those who have looked at the AGW issue, and cried foul.
Sidepoint: Timothy Sandefur had some interesting thoughts about science and freedom of expression, and the role of the state, here.
David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:
I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.
The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.
Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.
But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.
In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn’t got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day – puff-puff – the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.
We’ll see. Well, I probably won’t see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.
And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.
For a couple of centuries an “Advertisement” in Philosophical Transactions expressly forbade pronouncements by the [Royal] Society as a whole on any scientific or practical matter.
… it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.
That sensible “Advertisement” disappeared in the 1960s when a politically ambitious physicist, Patrick Blackett, was the President.
– From the blog of Nigel Calder, doyen of science writers, via Philip Stott, who does his bit to inject some climate realism into the Radio 4’s Home Planet.
The Royal Society should return to its former path of virtue. And The Lancet would benefit from that motto, too.
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)
For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?
I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.
Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.
We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.
My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.
But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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