Cosmos Reboot Review

I dug up Cosmos on Hulu and just finished watching it with my younger daughter. The Bruno section was as bad as the write up in Slate advertised it to be but there was a great deal that was quite right and promoted science very well.

Tyson's promo interview describing science on Colbert was subtly wrong but he got it right in the show itself which was a relief. There were a few things that were overly speculative, the multiverse section sticking out the most for me so a bucket list of mistakes is probably worth reviewing. I hope they settle down and stick to the science.

97% Liars

The Cook 2013 paper asserts that 97% of relevant papers were in favor of the consensus opinion on anthropogenic global warmng backed by the IPCC. There are two problems with the paper.

The first is in the paper's misuse by propagandists. Right in the abstract it lays out that 2/3rds of papers don't actually express an opinion on global warming. The authors could go either way. This is almost never conveyed by propagandists supporting the consensus position.

The second problem is that some of the papers are mischaracterized with prominent skeptics being put into the pro-AGW camp. Cook has not retracted the paper at present. A rebuttal paper, Legates 2013 has been published showing that instead of 97.1% consensus supporting, only 0.3% of relevant papers support the standard definition of the consensus position.

HT: Forbes

Economic Models vs Climate Models

The New Economics Foundation is a UK think tank. They just put out an analysis claiming that climate models are at least as accurate as economic models and somewhat better on average. That being said, we don't treat economic models as serious planning tools 80 years out. We barely believe them for decisions 10 years out.

This is why Rep. Ryan's observation in 2012 that the US economy will shut down in 2027 according to CBO estimates of current path spending didn't freak the entire country out. Nobody believes that is a credible forecast. Too many things will change in the intervening 15 years to get worked up about it.

You can see Tim Geithner trying but not entirely succeeding in laughing at the ridiculousness of projecting things out past ten years. The relevant section about the economy shutting down is between 2:20 and 2:40 in the video below.

so even granting the point that climate models are just as good as the economic models, they must suffer from the same sorts of limits to forecast that the economic models do. Perhaps they are a bit better, perhaps not. Let's be generous and give them 15 years. Virtually no climate measures are justifiable based on the climate model projections 15 years out. The scary numbers don't show up for decades beyond. So who are they trying to fool here? 

Atheist Scientific Ignorance

The show Cosmos has brought out the hater among the atheist crowd. I'm getting an inordinate number of people in my feeds talking about how science demonstrates that religion is wrong. It's all nonsense, of course. Science and religion coexisted quite nicely for centuries and among people of good will still coexists today. But at least on the Internet the atheists are on the march and Neil deGrasse Tyson is their dog whistle.

What annoys me most is deGrasse's scientific sins, not his no doubt genuinely believed atheism. The man's going around giving interviews and subtly asserting consensus science which is a travesty. Science is now and always will be about the evidence and for some strange reason deGrasse doesn't seem to agree.

Science: Right or Wrong

Does science prove theories or laws correct? Or does science simply say that a theory hasn't yet been proven wrong? These sound like very esoteric questions but it's the difference between scientism and science, respectively.

Science attempts to guess at the laws of the universe, computes the implications and consequences of the guess and compares them to experience or experiment. If they don't match, the theory is wrong. If further experiment reveals gaps, the theory is incomplete and thus wrong. Incomplete theories can still be useful. We use newtonian style calculations to this day even though we know that those theories are wrong. They are close enough to reality for a wide range of use cases that they still work, just as long as the limits to their usefulness are kept in mind.

Science is utterly useless as a religious system. For that scientism is a far superior option but scientism has no credibility and no usefulness except when it camouflages itself as science. Scientism says stop thinking, stop examining, stop studying settled issues. They are the corpus of established science, the bible which should not be questioned. When preachers rail against science, it is this that they are protesting by and large. But scientists should be just as dubious about scientism as the preachers. Scientism is not science. It is a kind of philosophical cuckoo's egg, a fraud pretending to be science and bringing actual science into disrepute, causing confusion as to what science actually is.

Feynman Explains Science

How does science work? I sometimes try to explain it but I'm not a pro. Here's a pro.

Contingent vs Absolute Truth

+Neil deGrasse Tyson has been going around saying something that sounds smart and pro-science but is actually foolish.

If you believe in this, you can't justify Einstein going after Newton. But that's not actually how science works. Science is about discovering contingent truths, not absolute truths. You always get to have a different opinion, but you're constrained to use the opinion that has the best evidence at the time. It's that latter constraint which makes science work, not shutting down your mind and not having opinions about scientific matters that might be different than present consensus.

So why is Tyson doing this? He's got to be smart enough to know that he's taking liberties. Why not teach science as it is? I wish I knew.

Privileged Jesus

I ran across this image in my +google feed and ended up in a bit of a debate over it. Since comments don't really let me do the subject justice, here it is on my personal blog. 

One one level this is a an anti-GOP joke. I don't care enough about the party to really be bothered by it but the composition mostly bothered me because of the image on the right and just a bit for the one on the left. Now to be clear, this is the kind of thing I think of as a representation of Jesus.

In other words, I've got little invested in the north european localized image on the left side of the first image. I don't have anything against it. It's just not my cup of tea.

But I recognized the image on the right from a Popular Science article and thought at the time it was just poor science pushing forensic anthropology far beyond what it has any rights making scientific claims to. Among other things, the team that made the image started off from the Shroud of Turin, a long haired depiction of Jesus with above average height between 5'7" and 6'1" and turned him into a 5'1" short haired man because that was culturally appropriate for a 1st century semitic man and that was athe average height back then. Because that's what Jesus was all about, being culturally respectful and sporting an average physique. As an artistic call, this is perfectly acceptable. As science, it has zero value and is a misuse of the term. It is an example of scientism, adopting the trappings of science without the scientific method.

Now this scientific Jesus image is showing up as evidence that the GOP is anti-science. The actual message to the religiously educated and somewhat science knowledgeable is that in the name of science, we're going to rule in or out your artistic traditions. That's the sort of thing that incrementally makes it harder  to convince skeptical legislators to fund science. They've got plenty of projects clamoring for public dollars. Without an identifiable fingerprint on any of the decisions, now science will get a few dollars fewer. But hey, they get to make a hostile work environment for religious scientists, and politically alienate the GOP from natural allies in the scientific community so if that's what you care about, that top image is just great.

One thing it's not is scientific or pro-science.

Climate Change Public Policy

Climate change as policy is a chain of claims that depends on all of them to be true to justify the public policies that warmists like Al Gore have been advocating. If the chain breaks down along the way, there is no justification for proceeding along that policy course. People seem to forget that so here's a list of all the things that must be true for the green policies being advocated to make any sense whatsoever.

Climate Science:

1. Anthropogenic (man released) CO2 is a major component of climate warming

2. CO2 sensitivity must be high enough

3. CO2 effects must not dampen out too fast (i.e. logarithmic instead of exponential curve for CO2 effect)

4. The net of atmospheric feedback effects must be durably overcome by CO2

Economics:

5. Anthropogenic warming effects must be more expensive to adjust to than to prevent. 

6. The discount rate for time preferences between now and 2100 must not exceed a certain value

7. Investment now in economic growth will not yield so much value that it's a superior use of funds over reallocating the resources to global warming prevention. 

8. Technology will not change enough in the next 90 years to sufficiently change the costs to make waiting and managing the effects the more prudent course. 

9. Purposeful planning on large scales and over decades will not suffer the sort of deviations en route that made a pathetic mockery of Soviet 5 year plans. 

This list is not exhaustive. I'm omitting, for example, the issue of focusing adjustments exactly in the areas where purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates the money is least effective. 

Every single one of these nine points has challengers. The amount of work proving points 8 and 9 are so minimal as to be laughable. It's just assumed to be justifiable as if we haven't had a century of data saying that the problems of long term state planning and government economic distortion are large and largely unsolvable, to a great extent because technology surprises require faster shifts than governments are capable of. 

Every time I hear "the science is settled", it's invariably about points earlier up in the chain which establish that there's some sort of problem but do nothing regarding picking out a policy choice. But the policy choices among the warmists are settled at least as much as they view the climate science as settled. 

All those policy choices were made without going through the actual trouble of establishing any of the basic economic groundwork. We're all supposed to acquire historical amnesia about economics. This magical rehabilitation of state solutions justifies permanently moving 1% of global economic product into the service of handling climate change for the next nine decades (the Stern Report's recommendation). It is a fantastic sum to be thrown at a problem using a methodology that is known bad. 

The feds are overregulating poop

Clostridium dificile bacteria is a minor normal component of your gut flora but when antibiotics kill the rest of your normal balanced population, out of control C diff is nasty problem to have. You can even die of it. It kills about 14,000 people in the US and 110,000 globally every year and the trend is going up.

Medically we've found a way to cure the problem and for once, it's a relatively cheap, if disgusting to contemplate, fix. It's called a fecal matter transplant (FMT) and it is exactly what it sounds like. You get a stool sample from a volunteer, make sure that their sample isn't going to make you sicker because they have a disease, parasite, or infection (CPT 44705 costing $500-$1500) and then get a GI guy to insert the sample from either end depending on where the problematic infection is. A colonoscopy is covered by multiple codes and can run from $740 to $8,500. That's an absurdly large variation but it's pretty clear that cash patients will not be going to the more expensive doctors. Whether a colonoscopy is even necessary or a simple enema is sufficient is under investigation.

Compared to surgery that yanks out sections of your colon, the major alternative when things go really bad with this sort of infection, this is getting off light. And even at the beginning phase, the transplant option outperforms vancomycin 94% to 27%. A study comparing the two options was terminated early because it was considered unethical to keep half the study population on the antibiotic.

The cash price for the "low dose" variant of 125mg vancomycin 4 times a day for 10 days is approximately $1000 to $1700 and for the "high dose" variant of 500mg 4/10 is $3900-$4300 so the cost of transplants is competitive.

Unfortunately, the FDA has decided to regulate poop as medicine instead of as a transplant. More specifically, everybody was going to have to go through a month long process of getting each FMT individually approved through the Investigational New Drug (IND) process but the benefits of FMT were so obvious over alternative therapies in the case of c-diff that for that purpose and only that purpose, the process is virtually unregulated. For everything else, the IND process rules and people are actually going the DIY route with poop slurry enemas because of a lack of doctors willing to go through the hassle and expense to go through the IND paperwork hoops.

This is politicizing medicine which is a lot more disgusting that poop transplants. The IND process shouldn't be used for something that isn't a drug. People are suffering and even dying because this area of medicine is being held up by paperwork. 

Germanic Influence on Anglospheric Thought

This talk from Paul Marks is a bit longer than my usual fare. I suggest you spend the time. The question of how and where all the destructive 20th century statism is quite important to the major task of our generation, cleaning out the rot. If you want a summary, I'll attempt to give one after the video

Germans are impressive. They have an incredible academic tradition that is powerful and rigorous. Frederick the Great's taking on the major powers of Europe and winning led to a great deal of intellectual deference in the political classes of England and the US and Bismarck's unification of Germany only strengthened the trend. Bottom up collectivism on class lines and top down collectivism on racial lines both got their foundational texts and impressive heft from their german adherents and even those who opposed these developments were seduced into supporting their spread in the english speaking world.

HT: Samizdata - worth a visit for the comments which are first rate and include lengthy additions from Paul Marks

Something New

Platonic solids, Archimedean solids, Kepler solids, we haven't found a new class of solids for 400 years, until now with the naming of Goldberg polyhedra. Conceptually, you take a regular solid and blow it up like a bouncy castle ride, bowing out the planes. Fill in those bulged out planes with polyhedrons and you get what has been called Goldberg polyhedra since about 1937. But apparently while that satisfied graph theorist Goldberg back in the day, the polyhedrons themselves weren't flat and thus weren't satisfying to Stan Schein who figured out how to make the polyhedrons flat. The only unoriginal thing about it is that he wants to give them the same name as the 1930s discovered shapes, Goldberg polyhedra. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

Nobody knows for sure how this will all play out but it's nice to see in a very geeky way.

HT: Instapundit