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?

OP, I think those men are not being as vacuous as you think. Derogatory, perhaps. After all, educated and intelligent women do have lower IQ. And whatever intellect is there, it's not being used in the masculine, political or philosophical sense, at least if the above quote is correct. She's saying women like to sit back, focus on immediate gains and wait for men to change the world before hopping on the bandwagon. It's not like men have an ample supply of attractive libertarian women to pick from, but in the case of women that absence of awesome dateable men is presented as the reason for not pursuing the ideology. I didn't make an extensive survey into attractive women within the community before taking the arguments seriously. I think she's right. And the solution for men is to lower our standards for intelligence and become leaders.

A huge inflation inevitably devalues the currency, but it's not necessary. All they need to do is shuffle existing money around and keep their existing capital flow restrictions in place. If they drop those restrictions and currency manipulation (which is the trend since the 90s) the Yuan will find an equilibrium much higher than now.

You are against speed reductions and link to "the Slower Speeds Initiative"? If their summary is fair, the cameras reduce my #1 likeliest cause of death by half. This is a no-brainer.

Rape culture is a culture that uses rape as a standard of evil, but only when it happens to women, if it happens to men it doesn't exist, which means that the purpose is to tap into our female-protecting biases to support any ideology in the traditionalism--progressivism axis.

kathryn, I think you are the one dismissing the silence. Of course it says something is wrong. It says that either the escapee is being lazy (thanks for your input Ragnar), or that he knows you would refuse to accept his boundaries. You owe a friend to not leave them wondering whether they are so antisocial or narcissistic that they would drag you into the mud. Although we weren't close at all, someone did this to me. I assumed he just wanted to avoid explaining the whole thing to himself, but it still made me angry and uneasy.

Can you identify what was wrong with it?

Do you really need four jobs to support one child?

To the extent that I am in touch with the local gay community, their primary goal is to be recognized by society, which in their mind means the government. Any accompanying legal rights are secondary, and to list any of them has demanded a full memory scan when asked This makes the issue off-putting and distracting. It's people fighting with each other over a definition, in the case of my gay activist acquaintances at least, who are slightly too fond of the idea of social progressivism to see the actual human rights violation, the monopoly on law intervening in private contracts. Too off-putting to join them in the pursuit, which is a shame because the gay rights movement has made some impressive leaps in penetrating culture and law. From what I've seen the biggest issue remaining is the relentless and unavoidable bullying in school, and the efforts to tackle that are rightly dismissed, because they are fundamentally ineffective in a prison environment. So that's difficult compared to protesting ideological minorities.

I have similar associations. I get a suspicion that I'm being tricked in with a promise of confirmation bias. How are you with enthusiasm?

What should I expect of your value to me?