A bit nutty, Jason

Jason Soon keeps noting things said by Nassim Taleb, including re-tweeting extracts of an interview with him that have appeared at Zerohedge.

As far as I can tell, he has a general reputation of being a bit of a loudmouth quasi-contrarian, but with some basic credibility behind him.   He seems, for example, to be on the right side of climate change, arguing that the potential for disastrous temperature rise really means that action should be taken, and those to the contrary bear the burden of proving their do-nothing position.

And on economics, I have the feeling he might be more or less right (if you ignore the personal sledging of Obama) that the economic problems are not really solved:  

Oh, absolutely! The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.

So, he worries about "massive debt".   But things start looking wonky in the second part, when he is asked how the Trump administration can address this:

Of course. The whole mandate he got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s wrong. Instead of Trump being elected, if you went to the local souk [bazaar] in Aleppo and brought one of the retail shop owners, he would do the same thing Trump is doing. Like making a call to Boeing and asking why are we paying so much.

OK, he's stop making any sense. So, Taleb is giving Trump for being a non-expert who talks at a level people can understand.   The problem is - he's ignoring Trump's actual, and plain to see, ignorance on a swathe of economic and other problems, and on those matters where you can tell his general direction, Trump's approach (lower taxes, big infrastructure spend, Mexican wall, the EPA) is only going to make  matters Taleb complains about ("massive debt", climate change) worse.  Not to mention that the path Trump is taking is to decrease banking regulation - no sense of a banker punishment there;  quite the opposite.

As for Trump putting "business sense" into the system - Trump proudly pays no tax and brags about using debt to his advantage, and the string of litigation against his business conduct is embarrassing.

So yeah, sorry, but I have trouble taking Taleb seriously. 

A President for thugs

"Ha ha ha" they laughed. 

President Donald Trump appeared to quip Tuesday that he would “destroy” the career of a state senator in Texas who introduced legislation that a county sheriff doesn’t like.
Rockwall County Sheriff Harold Eavenson complained about the sheriff to Trump during a meeting on Tuesday in the White House with sheriffs from around the country. Eavenson will likely be the next president of the National Sheriff’s Association, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“A state senator in Texas was talking about introducing legislation to require conviction before we could receive that forfeiture money” from drug traffickers, Eavenson said.
“Can you believe that?” Trump replied.
Eavenson continued: “I told him that the cartel would build a monument to him in Mexico if he could get that legislation passed.”
“Who is the state senator?” Trump then asked. “Do you want to give his name?”
Eavenson shrugged.
“We’ll destroy his career,” Trump said as people around him laughed.

That trolley, revisited

John Horgan has been writing some posts about philosophy over at Scientific American, and they make for some interesting and amusing reading.   I'll just note this as an example:

Post-post-postscript: In “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” Peter Singer uses a variation of the trolley problem to guilt New York Times readers into donating more to the poor. He asks us to imagine a man, Bob, watching a train bearing down on a child. Bob can pull a switch that diverts the train onto another track, but then the train will destroy Bob’s Bugatti sports car. Any sane person, Singer writes, knows that it would be "gravely wrong" for Bob not to pull the switch and save the child. It is equally wrong, he asserts, for us to spend on stuff we don’t really need rather than donating to groups that can save the lives of poor children. I was relieved when the Times published a letter that pointed out a kink in Singer’s reasoning. According to a strict utilitarian analysis, Bob should let the train kill the child, because he could then sell the Bugatti and donate the proceeds to a charity that would save lots of children.

A detailed take down of Matt Ridley

Yesterday I noted Matt Ridley's hyperventilating article that appeared in The Times (and was re-printed in The Australian).

Today I'm happy to link to a very detailed rebuttal of it by Bob Ward in a letter he sent to The Times.

Again, the people who should read it won't.

As for John Bates, he has given another interview in which he says he wasn't accusing Karl of fraud.

What's not yet clear is whether he has any problem with David Rose, Delingpole (a clown), Watts up With That and scores of other wingnut outlets reporting on his complaint as if it is a clear allegation of fraud.  

I strongly suspect Bates might have voted Trump - he has that carefree attitude to truth about him that indicates as much.

Update:   predictably, all the gullible Right wing columnists (Chris Kenny, Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt) gobble up Ridley and Rose uncritically.   All so easily conned and fooled...

Motivated reasoning and the dishonest and foolish

The latest kerfuffle that climate change deniers and lukewarmers have come up with regarding climate change is the story of John Bates, recently retired from NOAA, who obviously has a grudge against those in the organisation who didn't follow his data preservation protocol before publishing their 2015 paper.

I think Rabbet Run has probably boiled it down to the basics pretty well:

• Bates designed an overly complicated set of procedures for climate data archiving.
• He got upper management at NOAA to sign on because the charts looked pretty.
• There were huge delays in implementation because of software problems and more.
• The process was a huge time sink.
• But it had the virtue of making Bates the Gatekeeper.
• Others were not happy with this.
• They had science they wanted to publish so they found a way around Gatekeeper Bates.
• Gatekeeper Bates went crying to Lamar Smith.
• Trump becomes president
• Denialists need an issue and cast about.

If you read Judith Curry's blog comments about it (one of the few times it is worth going there), you will see the straight talking Nick Stokes and Mosher repeatedly explain that Bates' complaint about data is now redundant - it is all available and has been for a long time - it just wasn't available as soon as Bates thought it should be.

Stokes notes that Bates' comments go beyond this, though, and suggest that he is not above making normal denier talking points.   But he was not directly involved in the paper, and those that were have made it clear that his claims are based on (to be generous) lack of knowledge of the work on the paper.

And besides, the results have been confirmed by completely independent analysis.

So, it is truly a storm in a teacup, and Bates' willingness to run to climate change denying politicians and journalists to make his "whistleblower" claims shows that any interest he may have in public understanding of science has been completely overwhelmed by personal grudges (and, I suspect, political views).  In fact, Rabbet Run's blog now suggests a personal motive.  

Of course, David Rose has blown this up into a full blown fraud allegation, complete with use of a clearly dishonest and deceptive graph which has misled his gullible readers who will not read anything critical of Bates' claims, and the graph gets reprinted by Andrew Bolt.

(After complaint, Rose amended the wording to his graph, but not the graphic itself.  The visual effect is obviously completely misleading and of course it does not suit his propaganda purposes to change it.)

Matt Ridley has also joined in the massive beat up in, claiming (if I recall him accurately enough) that it doesn't matter if independent work has verified the NOAA finding, it's still a huuuge scandal.   [Actually, yes - it matters enormously, you twit, and it makes all the difference as to whether the argument actually changes anything about the results.  It doesn't.]*

This whole process is what is infuriating about climate change debate - so many people with "motivated reasoning" to disbelieve that climate change is real, or serious, simply are being conned by dishonest propagandists and will not investigate enough to understand how they are being connned.

I wouldn't be so annoyed about it if it weren't for the way they are trying to take the world with them down their foolish path.

And now that I have finished this, I see there is a great article covering it up at Ars Technica. 

*   Here's the actual quote from Ridley's huffing and puffing article about politics influencing climate research - truly hilarious coming from him:

Colleagues of Karl have been quick to dismiss the story, saying other data sets come to similar conclusions. This is to miss the point and exacerbate the problem. If the scientific establishment reacts to allegations of lack of transparency, behind-closed-door adjustments and premature release so as to influence politicians, by saying it does not matter because it gets the “right” result, they will find it harder to convince Trump he is wrong on things such as vaccines.

 Stupid, stupid.   As Stokes and others notes - Bates offers no evidence of Karl's thumb "being on the scale", and if those using independent methods confirm Karl's result - then that is strong evidence that Bates' claim is wrong. 
  

When blowhards agree - they're probably wrong

After some quite extraordinary numbers for alleged child abuse within the Catholic Church were discussed today at the Royal Commission, I was reminded by Twitter that this was Paul Kelly's comment when Julia Gillard first established it:

And on the other side of the political fence (well, I don't think they ever have much in common), here was Sinclair Davidson's comment that same week:

The level of anti-Catholic bigotry being displayed is simply appalling. While criminal behaviour cannot and should not be condoned, this Royal Commission has started off on the wrong foot. Even before the terms have been announced.

 Both reactions look very foolish now, but they did at the time, too.

Scepticism on Republican tax and spend

On Flipboard, I see a burst of scepticism about the deficit increasing effect of Republican "less tax, but same or more spending" plan.

Here, at CSM, there is a "business as usual" estimate that paints a bad enough picture if things stay as they are:

Before beginning the Great Fiscal Policy Debate of 2017, it helps to know where we are starting from, and what would happen if government stayed on its present course. The Congressional Budget Office measures that baseline by assuming that current law remains in place for decades to come.  Gale and Auerbach project the fiscal outlook through a different lens, what they call a “business-as-usual” baseline.

They assume that temporary tax cuts continue indefinitely and that all discretionary spending will increase with the rate of inflation, despite the budget caps that Congress first enacted in 2011 but delayed in 2013 and 2015. They also assume that spending for Medicare and Social Security continues at promised levels even after their trust funds run out of money. They assume the economy continues at close to full-employment for the entire period.

Based on these assumptions, the deficit would more than double from 2.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product to 6.1 percent by 2027. The ratio of debt to GDP, now 77 percent (twice the average of the past half-century) would approach 100 percent in a decade and top 120 percent in two decades.

Those assumptions means this:

 And there, of course, lies the problem: If spending rises to 24.1 percent of GDP by 2027 but taxes increase to only 18 percent, that leaves a troubling fiscal gap. In 2027, the annual deficit under their assumptions would nearly triple in nominal terms to $1.7 trillion and more than double as a share of GDP.

And the final point:

That’s the environment in which President Trump has proposed a tax cut that would add $7.2 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to Tax Policy Center estimates. The outlook developed by Bill and Alan can provide a road map to help understand the consequences of such a fiscal policy.

At Bloomberg, a prediction is made that Republicans will simply let the deficit grow:

What scares deficit hawks like Maya MacGuineas, who runs the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is the prospect of a deal to give both Trump and Capitol Hill Republicans whatever they want. In that scenario, House Speaker Paul Ryan would get the huge tax cut he has always craved, with most benefits going to the wealthy, and would agree to take politically unpopular cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security off the table, as candidate Trump promised. Trump would get the money to bulk up the military and build lots of roads, bridges and airports.

To make Ryan's tax cuts permanent without touching the big entitlement programs that drive deficits, Republicans would have to take the axe to other domestic spending.

Robert Greenstein, president of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, spearheads opposition to reducing spending on the poor and working class. But he has substantive credibility and works with some Republicans. Last week he warned there are "mounting signs" that Republicans are planning "harsher" cuts than they have offered in recent years, slashing as much as $8 trillion of non-defense spending over a decade.

That would take domestic spending, exclusive of Social Security and Medicare, to about half the average under President Ronald Reagan. The impact would fall heavily on the poor.
That would probably antagonize too many voters, though, including some who supported Republicans in 2016. The way to avoid that political trap while giving Ryan and Trump what they want? Let the deficit grow.

And what about the mooted reform of a wide ranging border tax?   Well, Fox Business, of all places, reprints an article that says "it could be a $23.2 trillion headache". 

As spotted on Twitter

The conservative admiration for Putin is getting to a silly, nauseating, level, isn't it?   

As for the news today that everyone expects Bernardi to form his own conservative party:  yes, if it works as a way of purging at least some of the climate change denying, Islamophobic, culture worrying nitwits out of the Liberal Party so that Turnbull can actually stop policy compromising his beliefs, it would be a good thing.  I think....

Yet more quantum for you...

A couple more papers spotted on arXiv:

Can the Many-Worlds-Interpretation be probed in Psychology?

Shades of Aldous Huxley in this paper - here are some extracts to give you an idea:

So, his actual suggestion for a psychological test of the many-world:

Seems to be a good idea for a movie script, at any rate.

The second paper has, I think, more of a philosophical tone.  It's by Nicolas Gisin, a Swiss physicist with a lot of experimental and practical experience.  His paper Collapse.  What else? has the following abstract:

We present the quantum measurement problem as a serious physics problem. Serious because without a resolution, quantum theory is not complete, as it does not tell how one should - in principle - perform measurements. It is physical in the sense that the solution will bring new physics, i.e. new testable predictions, hence it is not merely a matter of interpretation of a frozen formalism. I argue that the two popular ways around the measurement problem, many-worlds and Bohmian-like mechanics, do, de facto, introduce effective collapses when "I" interact with the quantum system. Hence, surprisingly, in many-worlds and Bohmian mechanics, the "I" plays a more active role than in collapse models. Finally, I argue that either there are several kinds of stuffs out there, i.e. physical dualism, some stuff that respects the superposition principle and some that doesn't, or there are special configurations of atoms and photons where the superposition principle breaks down. Or, and this I argue is the most promising, the dynamics has to be modified, i.e. in the form of a stochastic Schrodinger equation.

 Actually, the paper itself reads better than the abstract.   Here's the section on many-worlds, which I find the most interesting part of the paper:

His point about the "many-worlds" interpretation meaning that the initial state of the universe had to have been "encoded in some infinitesimal digits of some quantum state" is not an objection that I had heard of before.

It's also not clear to me what he would think of Frank Tipler's argument that many-worlds actually supports free will - which I noted in a post last month.

So, the many-worlds idea continues to intrigue everyone.   Here's a suggestion: the election of Trump might be evidence we've accidentally slipped into a totally unexpected parallel world.  If it can happen, truly, anything can...

No restraint mothers

I really find it hard to believe that pregnant women would assume that any psychoactive drug - in this case, cannabis - is harmless to their developing fetus. 

If legalisation means increasing use by mothers, I suspect that this will be another part of a subtle, long term harm to American society that I think legalisation may be setting in progress. 

There may eventually be a push back.    But unfortunately, for America, the current exemplar of a drug and alcohol free life* is just about the worst possible advertisement for temperance since Hitler.

* starts with "T"

Across the universe

It's very hard getting one's head around the full implications of quantum entanglement, or even understanding Bell's results properly.  (And, I would add, it's not just me.  If you scroll through the quantum section of arXiv, you'll find a large number of physicist types who are still arguing about it.)

That said, at Nature News there's a report about a new experiment that backs up entanglement:

The latest effort to explore the phenomenon, to be published¹ in Physical Review Letters on 7 February, uses light emitted by stars around 600 years ago to select which measurements to make in a quantum experiment known as a Bell test. In doing so, they narrow down the point in history when, if they exist, hidden variables could have influenced the experiment.

“It’s a beautiful experiment,” says Krister Shalm, a quantum physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Although few expected it to disprove quantum mechanics, such experiments “keep pushing alternative theories to be more and more contrived and ridiculous”, he says. Similar techniques could, in the future, help to protect against hackers who try to crack quantum-cryptography systems, he adds.

Here' more, with a particularly important line highlighted by me:

But they left open another loophole — one that is more subtle, and impossible to fully close, says Andrew Friedman, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author on the latest paper. Bell tests also assume that experimenters have free choice over which measurements they perform on each of the pair of photons. But some unknown effect could be influencing both the particles and what tests are performed (either by affecting choice of measurement directly, or more plausibly, by restricting the options that are available), to produce correlations that give the illusion of entanglement.

To narrow this freedom-of-choice loophole, researchers have previously put 144 kilometres between the source of entangled particles and the random-number generator that they use to pick experimental settings⁵. The distance between them means that if any unknown process influenced both set-ups, it would have to have done so at a point in time before the experiment.  But this only rules out any influences in the microseconds before: the latest paper sought to push this time back dramatically, by using light from two distant stars to determine the experimental settings for each photon. “We outsource the choice to the Universe itself,” says Friedman.

The team, led by physicist Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna, picked which properties of the entangled photons to observe depending on whether its two telescopes detected incoming light as blue or red. The colour is decided when the light is emitted, and does not change during travel. This means that if some unknown effect, rather than quantum entanglement, explains the correlation, it would have to have been set in motion at least around 600 years ago, because the closest star is 575 light-years (176 parsecs) away, says Friedman, who hopes to eventually push back this limit to billions of years ago by doing the experiment with light from more distant quasars. Their results found a level of correlation that supports ‘action at a distance’¹....

Others argue that although, fundamentally, the loophole is never closable, such experiments are valuable because new theories necessarily become more improbable and contrived, or eventually, end up assuming that everything in the Universe was determined at the time of the Big Bang — a philosophical view that most physicists reject. Reworking experiments to reduce and make better assumptions is therefore worthwhile, says Shalm.

Adventures in cluelessness

A bleat today from Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy:

It does seem to me that the shared values that have maintained our society and civilisation are fracturing. The left for reasons best understood by themselves have chosen to normalise political violence and hate.

This from the man who controls a blog abandoned for years now by any political moderate* due to the aggressive, belligerent and belittling style of attack routine in threads and increasingly present in posts.   Where sexism and demeaning comments about gays, all Muslims, women and all by a tiny handful of politicians are commonplace, and the livid hatred of the last couple of Labor PM's was continually on display by people banned from Bolt.

 * all except one, who ignores my entreaties to not deem it worthy of his occasional presence.

No wonder Donald hates Arnold

More "can you imagine the Right wing/wingnut commentary on this if it had happened under Obama"?

As noted at Axios:

Reuters has a new report on the raid in Yemen this weekend that resulted in the death of Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens. It includes some shocking claims from anonymous U.S. military officials:

• Trump approved the raid without proper intelligence, ground support, or contingency plans.
• The intelligence lapses caused the SEAL team to drop into a reinforced compound with a larger group of Al Qaeda soldiers than expected.
• The "brutal firefight" that killed Owens also resulted in the deaths of 15 women and children, including an 8-year old girl.

Why it matters: A leak like this is highly unusual in the military community — and especially shocking when it comes just 12 days into a new presidency. It raises questions about Trump's standing among his military leaders, as these officials have now thrown their commander-in-chief under the bus.

And as for Right wing commentary, look at Hot Air:

I’ve read the NYT, WaPo, and Reuters accounts of what happened but I can’t recall a single piece of hard evidence alleged that would suggest the White House, rather than military planners, screwed this up. 

Update:  contrast the remarkable fairness of the mainstream news blogs Slate and Vox both saying that people shouldn't rush to judgement about it being Trump's fault.   (Compared to how right wing blogs would treat Obama.)   But the fact still remains (as Vox says):  it seems pretty remarkable that someone within in the military is prepared to complain about Trump so early.  (Again, if it had been military sources leaking against Obama, we would have never heard the end of it from Republicans and their media.) 

At least it's a good sign that Trump doesn't the full support of the military.

Roubini on Trump

Seems to me that Roubini's thoughts on the longer term economic effects of Trumpism are reasonable.  I liked this part, in particular:

Trump’s actions suggest that his administration’s economic interventionism will go beyond traditional protectionism. Trump has already shown his willingness to target firms’ foreign operations with the threat of import levies, public accusations of price gouging and immigration restrictions (which make it harder to attract talent).

The Nobel laureate economist Edmund S Phelps has described Trump’s direct interference in the corporate sector as reminiscent of corporatist Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, if Barack Obama had treated the corporate sector in the way that Trump has, he would have been smeared as a communist; but for some reason when Trump does it, corporate America puts its tail between its legs.

A great description of Trump

From Slate:

To say Donald Trump is a binary thinker is to give the president of the United States too much credit for the complexity of his views. Trump is a cartoonish thinker. Terrorist Muslims are storming the gate, conniving criminal Mexicans are doing the same, inner-city Chicago is worse than Afghanistan, and it goes on and on and on. It’s a school of thought cultivated by a steady diet of Fox News with a helping of Breitbart on cheat days. Completely unaware of what he doesn’t know, and utterly uninterested in discovering it, Trump storms around saying outlandish things and padding his ongoing narrative by explaining the things everyone knows already. It’s like the class clown who didn’t do the homework got called on by the teacher and, after embarrassing himself in front of the entire class, got elected president of the whole country.

The latest glimpse into Trump’s world of cartoonish thinking comes via the Associated Press, which reported Wednesday that during the president’s phone call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto last week, the president of the United States, joking or not, implied that perhaps he should just invade Mexico.

Send in troops! To Mexico! Why not? I’m the president! This is what presidents do and say in movies that I’ve seen. It’s a thought so ill-constructed it could be confused as the plot line of a sequel to Canadian Bacon....

You might want to brace yourself now for when Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping speak on the phone. 

An unexpected danger from a delicious food

Lychees can be dangerous.  Quite a surprise:

For more than two decades, apparently healthy children in the Indian region of Bihar suffered sudden seizures and lost consciousness. A third of them died, leaving doctors baffled. 

But a team of American and Indian scientists say they have found the cause of the mystery illness, which killed more than 100 children a year: eating too many lychees on an empty stomach.

The research, published in medical journal The Lancet, has found lychees — particularly unripe fruits — contain an amino acid that affects blood glucose levels.

That reminds me - they must not have become very cheap this year, because we hardly seem to have had any at home.  

If there was any doubt: a complete jerk

There's a remarkable account of Trump's call with Malcolm Turnbull in the Washington Post - and I am a bit puzzled as to why anyone from the White House with knowledge of the call would have confirmed to a reporter - in a lot of detail - how much of an aggro, self aggrandising jerk Trump was to poor old Malcolm.

It certainly makes it seem very much on the cards, as was reported yesterday, that Trump will change his mind on taking the Manus Island/Nauru refugee/prisoners.  

Thiel goes country shopping

Weirdo billionaire Peter Thiel loves New Zealand, I see, saying some years ago that it's the country that most aligns with his view of the future.   Which means, I guess, he really loves an economy based on dairy cows  and hobbit films, with next to no manufacturing,  and increasingly entrenched inequality due to the low taxes rich people like him have to pay.  Of course he would like the place. 

I know - on the face of it, the figures for the New Zealand economy currently looks quite OK; but I just have a hunch it's a case of too many eggs in one or two baskets.

And this guy paints a simple picture of how lowering taxes just makes inequality worse:  

VICE: Hi Tim, could anyone have predicted such a dramatic transition over the past two decades?
Tim Hazledine: I mean, which part? We were a very equal society and really prided ourselves on the living wage, or social wage, and then we hit the 1980s and went the other way. As inequality increased economists began to recommend trade-offs. The thinking was that you can reduce inequality by raising taxes. Many argued that would in turn reduce economic growth, because we would be taxing our big industries.

But that's not what happened right? Instead big earners revolted and taxes were lowered?
That's right. Cutting the tax rate was supposed to encourage really smart, energetic people to work hard. But these people basically said thank you very much, played some more golf and then went on more holidays, which didn't help at all. What the OECD study and a few others have revealed is that no, it's not even a trade-off. Not taxing to sustain economic growth is not bad for good—it's bad for bad. The countries that have higher inequality are doing poorer.

 

I have to say...

....listening to both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison over the last 24 hours, am I the only person who is really sick of them spending so much time on attacking and blaming Bill Shorten and Labor rather than justifying and detailing the benefits of their policies? 

I didn't think much of Bill Shorten's appearance at the Press Club this week, either.

I honestly don't think it is just increasing cynicism with my age:  we genuinely have a very uninspiring and low calibre bunch of politicians nationally at the moment.