percentient

There's a loose amalgamation of euro-dwellers discussing all things hyperborean (as well as mediterranean sometimes) in the weekly call/hangout session on Google+: https://plus.google.com/communities/105784012586757265988 At the moment there's a recession in activity about as deep as the financial crisis, but I think there are many who would back me up in saying that the group has been a positive influence. We have organized some meetups through this channel as well. I think it's time to remind the board contributors and lurkers of the existence of this group. The call is on Saturdays at 1900 Central European.

I trust Scott Alexander's (ostensibly uppity) review http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/04/book-review-superforecasting/, and by the way he has been pretty good at prediction himself.

I get your point, but I doubt that freeing a kid of parasitic worms will make her more socialist. How about this, "For every mile ridden, and for each dollar from you, I will print a hundred leaflets explaining market capitalism, and throw them from a helicopter"

Have you checked the Effective Altruism movement? Don't let your inner Rand dismiss the whole thing over the "altruism" part. They have a lot of good things to say. One of which is a realization that you already made: most people do most good by giving money instead of time. Helping people involves specialized skills like anything else, and if you really care about the results, just train yourself into the highest-earning professional you can, take a lot of risks, start companies, make as much money as you can, find the best-documented charity with best marginal impact and dump your money on that. They're a bit Africa-focused though, given the utilitarian universalist approach. If that doesn't bother you, maybe pick one of these and highlight how many helping-units you get with each bank note. http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

They look at just homicide, and there is an argument to be made that gun prevalence causes some murders http://i.imgur.com/SrG6h6r.png(Miller, Hemenway, Azrael).

So you are saying there's a legitimate case for the idea that CO2 comes out of the oceans and then proceeds to have no effect on temperatures?

This problem is easily fixed by just looking the answer up. CO2 causes warming and some of it goes into the ocean. I am not going to say that you should abandon your out-of-the-academic-box thinking and spend a thousand hours studying the physics, chemistry and biology of this, but at some point you just have to get the basics straight. There is literally 100% certainty and incontrovertible, doubt-this-and-reveal-your-ignorance high school level knowledge about which way the carbon goes, and which way the direction of influence is. There are extensive and repeated observations of atmospheric and marine concentrations, observations of air flow patterns combined with concentration measurements, micrometeorological flux measurements, emission inventories, and most importantly carbon isotope and oxygen measurements, showing that CO2 goes up the pipe and then some of it dissolves into the ocean. It can't simultaneously go into the ocean and come out of it, on average. It goes in. Even if we include lakes. On top of that there are laboratory, satellite, and surface measurements showing that greenhouse gases warm shit up.

Indeed, very fun to read, thanks. I love this kind of stuff. But the more I read it, the more it seems to me that he is a polemic and a nit-picker rather than a truth-seeker. At some point, after insulting enough professionals, it's more likely that he's the clueless one. Just you know statistically speaking. His essential gripe is that IPCC et al. use the wrong words. In his mind "significant trend" should be reserved for cases where no reasonable stochastic process whatsoever could produce a time series as the one observed. In fact, not even unreasonable processes, like the difference-based one he used to draw the "stock price" random walk curves in the beginning (his ARIMA(3,1,0) model is just silly, temperatures don't work that way -- I'm pretty sure it allows them to approach literally any value given enough time). Instead, IPCC just say "look, the error bars clearly show that the temperatures have risen, and that the changes are down to external forcings or unkown multidecadal internal processes, instead of being produced by simple short-term processes that would be visible in the time series itself". They do mix up some words and concepts in the AR5 in my opinion, but it's not dramatic. The Breusch & Vahid article, also a subject of his criticism, make the opposite sin of being super rigorous to the point of allowing the ARIMA(3,1,0) type unphysical models.

These numbers are terrifying. So much so that I refuse to believe that 15% of France supports ISIS, which would imply like 5--10% support from non-muslims too, because none of the independent non-government estimates of the muslim population are over 10%, and it's easy to prove not all muslims support ISIS. Let's apply some of that science skepticism to the methods used in the poll (which was by the way funded by the Russian govenrment). My guess is that the respondents just didn't know what they were answering for some reason. But then that goes none of the way to explaining why two million French muslims would appear to support suicide bombing -- and they specifically mentioned CIVILIAN TARGETS as well, which I think you didn't mention.

Hold on, they're using a measure of male-ness that's not just chromosomes or penis, and they've been doing that since the 60s. Isn't that gender-fluid to begin with? To accept that there is never a universal and clear-cut criterion for gender? If women in sports is supposed to be this glorious thing for girls to look up to, and aspire to, what good does it do to see a bunch of self-identified intersex women with genetic disorders, who most girls can never and should never want to be like? What do these people want?? I have short legs and I can never be successful in sprinting either. THE IAAF IS OPPRESSING ME

"All reconstructions extend to 1500 C.E., thus avoiding the use of sparsely replicated information from chronologies with few trees in the early years of their stacks." I think he's being a bit dramatic here. The authors are just showing yet another variable that shows exceptional drought in the region. It's not even an article, just a one-page "opinion & comment" piece, which we would have known had he linked to the original source. Is that even peer-reviewed? Since he's comfortable assuming fraudulent intent, I'm going to go ahead and say that he neglected to link to the source to cover his ass.

Remember; doubt surprising conclusions in science. They're probably wrong.

Overconfidence is a huge one. There was a study in the 70s that tested how overconfident people are about their opinions. They found that "over the large number of questions for which people gave odds of 1,000,000:1 or higher, they were wrong an average of about 1 time out of every 16" implying that they were too certain by A FACTOR OF SIXTY THOUSAND. There's almost uncountably many factors that go into our beliefs and decisions that we are not aware of. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Baruch_Fischhoff/publication/230726569_Knowing_with_certainty_the_appropriateness_of_extreme_confidence/links/00b4952b854b29281c000000.pdf

Turns out I never prepared a speech in support of the prohibition of drunk driving.

Same goes for drunk driving?