Credibility completely blown

Nassim Taleb needs help, not only for his hyper aggressiveness on Twitter, but for his extraordinary lack of fashion shame, too:

The entertainer

I've noted before, this paranoid regular at Catallaxy is (from what I can gather) an outback pub entertainer.  I trust that he doesn't tell jokes as part of his act.   Probably plays the guitar and looks to have a drink afterwards with any local redneck who'll listen to him complain about how completely and utterly stuffed is the country that hasn't had a recession for 26 years:

The Rudd/Gillard wars all over again

It's kind of incredible that the Coalition is undergoing the same destabilising turmoil that happened with Rudd and Gillard - with the only difference being that Abbott is so thick he doesn't seem to realise that the public doesn't want him back:

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has threatened to cross the floor of Parliament and vote against any move to introduce a clean-energy target, describing as "unconscionable" any move to wind back support for coal in favour of renewables.

Given that the Turnbull government, due to that pesky constitutional problem, is hanging on by a thread anyway, it must seem particularly odious to him that Abbott would be talking up instability in his own government.

Abbott's reputation as a PM is already near rock bottom.  This is only making it worse, if that is possible.

Hearing the completely wrong message, of course

Hey, JC, you are completely wrong, of course.

It was predictable that any paper that says "maybe we can still limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees because it seems to us that models have been running a bit 'hot'" would be interpreted by twits like you as "the models are all wrong, and this is fantastic everything is going to stop at 1.5 degrees".

Are you typical of traders?  Because if so, it seems to show that traders can have the analytical abilities of a 10 year old and still be able to make a living. It's quite surprising to me, in a way.

Anyway, to better educate yourself (yes I know - as if) on what the paper means, try reading ATTP with his succinct list of doubts about the paper, which will no doubt be expanded upon by others over the next few days.  Many scientists in the field are skeptical about the methods used to reach their conclusion, and it's actually not hard to understand why, even at this stage.  

Then try David Roberts at Vox on this, and his explanation of how the new paper, even if correct, is like this:

It’s like we’re starting a 100-mile marathon, and we’ve got to read a book while we’re running, but we also need to build upper-body strength, so we’re holding the book with one hand and lifting a barbell with the other, and by the way, we’ve never run farther than 10 miles.

Now, along comes this new paper that says, effectively, “Hey, the marathon is only 99 miles!”

That’s ... nice and all. It’s great that what we need to do is not geophysically impossible, merely more difficult than anything humanity has ever done before, by multiples.

I reckon the reason the authors of the new paper might like to sound optimistic of the implications is because they recognise that one lukewarmer argument is the defeatist one that it is already too late to do anything about emissions, and we may as well forget about them and work out how to do geoengineering as the only possible solution.

But always, always, the danger in any paper revising in any way what they think the models mean is that people like you will say "see, the climate scientists were always wrong and now admit that it's all rubbish and everything is going to be fine".  It's the completely wrong message to take, but you're ideologically motivated to hear it wrong. 

As it happens, everyone else at Catallaxy is too high on the red cordial of Trump at the UN, so they don't seem to be showing much interest anyway.  

Truly, the Right of politics has never been more globally dangerous.

Update:  And here is the proper perspective, from some of the new paper's authors (my bold, to make it easier for comprehension challenged traders to follow):

In a study published in Nature Geoscience, we and our international colleagues present a new estimate of how much carbon budget is left if we want to remain below 1.5℃ of global warming relative to pre-industrial temperatures (bearing in mind that we are already at around 0.9℃ for the present decade).

We calculate that by limiting total CO₂ emissions from the beginning of 2015 to around 880 billion tonnes of CO₂ (240 billion tonnes of carbon), we would give ourselves a two-in-three chance of holding warming to less than 0.6℃ above the present decade. This may sound a lot, but to put it in context, if CO₂ emissions were to continue to increase along current trends, even this new budget would be exhausted in less than 20 years 1.5℃ (see Climate Clock). This budget is consistent with the 1.5℃ goal, given the warming that humans have already caused, and is substantially greater than the budgets previously inferred from the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2013-14....

The emissions reductions required to stay within this budget remain extremely challenging. CO₂ emissions would need to decline by 4-6% per year for several decades. There are precedents for this, but not happy ones: these kinds of declines have historically been seen in events such as the Great Depression, the years following World War II, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union – and even these episodes were relatively brief.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that greenhouse emissions can only plummet during times of economic collapse and human misery. Really, there is no historical analogy to show how rapidly human societies can rise to this challenge, because there is also no analogy for the matrix of problems (and opportunities) posed by climate change.

We need better quality conservatives

Do you remember that when same sex marriage was being debated in France in 2013 there were sizeable street protests?   I see from this rather fascinating piece in The Economist that it has only just gone through Germany's Parliament, and an Archbishop was able to make this (to my mind, quite reasonable) statement:

AS YOU might expect, Germany’s Catholic hierarchs were less than thrilled when legislators voted on June 30th, by 393 votes to 226, to legalise same-sex marriage. Archbishop Heiner Koch of Berlin was one of many top clerics who voiced the church’s view that a distinction between civil partnership, for gay couples, and marriage, for heterosexual ones, ought to be kept. The decision to do away with it, he grumbled,

abandons the differentiated perception of various forms of partnership in order to stress the value of same-sex partnerships...Differentiation isn’t discrimination, and same-sex cohabitation can be valued through other institutional arrangements without opening up the legal institute of marriage.

The article goes on to note the differences in conservative issues between the two countries:

The very fact that German bishops insist they see some value in same-sex partnerships (so long as they are not described as marriage) might be surprising to an American who is accustomed to tooth-and-nail culture wars.

In France, gay marriage became law in May 2013. Street protests by social conservatives, including four huge rallies in Paris within six months, failed to stop the change. But they made history nonetheless, as unexpectedly large social and political phenomena.

True to the movement’s name—Manif pour Tous (Protest for All)—the French gatherings brought together a broad coalition. Some came from the political right and far-right: there were well-heeled Catholics from posh parts of Paris, poorer ones from the provinces and some Muslims. Some supporters even spoke the language of the anti-capitalist left, arguing that gay adoptions and surrogacy might lead to a heartless market in embryos. To some extent, the movement simply capitalised on the general unpopularity of François Hollande, then the Socialist president.

Germany, too, has seen street demonstrations in imitation of the French ones, under an identical banner, Demo für Alle. As in France, the rallies have received discreet encouragement from politicians and clerics. But the German assemblies (focused in particular on moves to liberalise education about sex and gender) have been smaller, and they have drawn counter-demonstrations. It is still possible that same-sex marriage will be contested in Germany, on grounds that it violates the constitution. But the argument will be conducted in the courts, not on the streets.

This Franco-German contrast seems paradoxical. Although each country comprises a wide spectrum of opinion, German social norms are in some ways more conservative than French ones. (Take the issue of abortion. Although both countries have quite liberal regimes for terminating a pregnancy up to 12 weeks, the German one lays down that women must have counselling—in which they are told that fetuses have rights—before undergoing the procedure. That would be hard to imagine in France.)

Some reasons for the French-German difference are clear enough. Any popular street movement that shades into the far-right feels toxic in Germany, more so than in France, for the obvious historical reasons.

The differences in how social conservatism manifests in both countries are interesting, but my broader point (admittedly made from afar and without direct knowledge of how conservative spokespersons present in the media there)  is that it seems to appear in not only a more aggressive, but also a more articulate and less embarrassing form, over there than it does here. 

I should  make allowance for the lack of direct knowledge, and as this article makes clear,  France  on the issue was politically in its own peculiar world.   But I still get the feeling that I am onto something here. 

For me, of course, (but really, how can any intelligent person disagree?) a key reason why I can't respect the social conservatives here more broadly is the stupidity with which they follow the lead of those in the US who are determined to disbelieve in climate change and resist a sensible economic response to it.  If you can't be sensible on that matter, how can you be seen to be sensible on anything?  

And it's true - the "no" case here is being largely built on overblown moral panic over things like Safe School program,  and the current over-reaction in Anglo culture towards uncritical acceptance of what anyone says (at any age) is their "true" gender.  

Much of the French pushback, based more directly on not wanting the government to be endorsing a move away from the natural order of children preferentially being raised by their genetic parents, is a much more solid ground on which to question same sex marriage;  yet it seems to me that the "no" case here handles that poorly too. 

First, they are on a hiding to nothing by claiming that kids growing up in gay households per se are going to do worse than kids from straight relationships.   Most gay households using surrogacy or insemination to make kids are going to be middle class and well educated, and will have deliberately planned the pregnancy.  Of course, they are going to look like their families are doing fine, for now.   And those gay families who have kids from their failed straight marriages - of course they should be able to raise kids too, and in most of those cases, the children are still going to know and spend time with their biological parents.

But none of that means that conservatives should not be able to mount a reasoned case that the matter of making same sex marriage the same as heterosexual marriage reads as endorsement for "anything goes" as far as reproduction is concerned.

It is a difficult argument to make, however, unless you are going to out on a limb against modern standards as to what heterosexual couples may do to make a baby too.   I personally don't have a problem with doing that - I think that surrogacy for anyone is a bad idea, and I find it remarkable that those on the progressive side make no acknowledgement at all that what they think is clearly reasonable in reproductive matters is demonstrably something about which opinion can change against them - the prime example being the idea that protecting the anonymity of sperm donors was something a government should do, to a complete reversal once those kids as adults questioned what politicians thought was "obvious" only two or three decades ago.

Anyway, my point is that we need a better class of conservative here - ours are an unimpressive lot who are doomed to failure on nearly all social issues.

A likely sounding analysis

Noted at The Conversation, the effect of having an optional survey on same sex marriage:

Last week’s Essential had Yes leading 69-28 among the 62% who will definitely vote, and 59-31 among the overall sample. Yes supporters are more likely to vote than No supporters, more than compensating for lower turnout among the young.

Furthermore, as Peter Brent writes, if everyone had to vote in the plebiscite, people who were grumpy about being dragged to the polls for something they perceived as trivial would be likely to vote No. With optional voting, these people are likely to toss the voting material in the bin.

With such strong support for Yes, No’s only hope is to persuade people to vote about different issues, such as safe schools and political correctness. These issues have little relation with same sex marriage, but the No campaign will highlight them in an attempt to persuade people to vote on these issues.

So, a potential 10% discrepancy by having it as an optional postal survey.  On the other hand, is it possible that younger folk, being more mobile in where they live than older families, might be more likely to not get their survey letter?   That might offset things by a few percent, I would guess.

But the point remains - this is a hopelessly inaccurate way of gauging genuine population support for such a matter.

Can't...resist...posting...

Chinese sex doll rental service suspended amid controversy

Right up Sinclair Davidson's alley

The new economy of excrement 

Entrepreneurs are finding profits turning human waste into fertiliser, fuel and even food.

Well, he'd be the richest man in the world, given the mountain loads of it available to him at Catallaxy.

That's a heck of a lot of S

I clicked onto Nature News and a Springer publications alert suggested I might like to see this article, at arXiv.  (Not sure why it would refer me to arXiv, but whatevers.)   Anyway, no time to read it yet, but here's the abstract, brought to you by the letter "S":

This paper uses anthropic reasoning to argue for a reduced likelihood that superintelligent AI will come into existence in the future. To make this argument, a new principle is introduced: the Super-Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSSA), building on the Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA) and the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption (SSSA). SSA uses as its sample the relevant observers, whereas SSSA goes further by using observer-moments. SSSSA goes further still and weights each sample proportionally, according to the size of a mind in cognitive terms. SSSSA is required for human observer-samples to be typical, given by how much non-human animals outnumber humans. Given SSSSA, the assumption that humans experience typical observer-samples relies on a future where superintelligent AI does not dominate, which in turn reduces the likelihood of it being created at all.

Sounds rather silly to me, actually, but perhaps I should read it first.

Comparing infinities

The somewhat mind boggling issue of comparing the size of different infinities is dealt with in more-or-less clear fashion in this Quanta article.  (It's about a recent mathematical discovery in this field.)

For the paranoid

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers -- breaking a long-held barrier and potentially enabling a vast array of interconnected devices.

Quite interesting, actually.  From Science Daily.

Movie noted

Hey, back in the 1980's I read a biographical book about Tesla (I'm not sure which one now, there have been so many), but I do remember thinking that the great AC/DC current wars between him and Edison could make for a pretty fascinating movie.

Today, I see that it has been done - with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Edison.

Of course, this is just the sort of movie that is likely to send me into great reveries about whether its historical inaccuracies are justifiable or not, but still, I hope it's good.

Something to look forward to

Alcohol Abuse Is Rising Among Older Adults

New word needed

I think there needs to be a specific word for the unpleasant feeling of half waking up from a dream in which you have missed an important deadline,  and not being sure if it was a dream or something from work a dream has alerted you to.  

Tim, I think this is up your alley.   Perhaps a German word combination?

Some Cold War history for a Sunday

I didn't know this:  the BBC ran a radio show up to 1974 (not sure when it started) in which they would read out letters from unidentified people in East Germany, detailing their life and suffering there.  This sent the East German secret police nuts, who went to extraordinary lengths to track down the writers:

The Stasi not only viewed the BBC as an enemy broadcaster, they specifically saw this programme as a form of psychological warfare aimed to destabilise the regime and incite resistance. They were convinced Harrison was an undercover spy, wooing agents in East Germany.

In the end it was the letter writers they really knuckled down on, and the Stasi were extraordinarily fastidious in their pursuit.

They took saliva samples from the licked envelopes to identify blood groups which they cross-checked with doctor's records. They traced fingerprints on the paper, sourced the ink and collated an extensive archive of handwriting samples. 

It was his handwriting that caught out Borchardt.

"It just seemed like an ordinary piece of homework," he says, when the pupils in his class were asked to write an essay describing themselves and their later goals in life.

"The thing is, my father thought I had such terrible handwriting he wanted my sister to write it up for me. He nearly got his way."

As ordered, the school passed the essays on to a Stasi agent. Documents show a painstaking analysis of every curve and stroke of Borchardt's pen, comparing it to the intercepted letters from the anonymous schoolboy.

Good news about our coming overlords

Clear your browser history and go read the Washington Post's lengthy story about the apparent turnaround in China getting most of its transplants from "volunteer" prisoners:

Thousands of organs were being harvested from executed prisoners every year, but over the course of a decade, Huang has garnered support at the highest levels of government and succeeded in pushing China’s medical establishment into dropping the often-lucrative practice.

Since 2010, Huang has slowly built the register of voluntary donors, who now meet the needs of patients who require transplants. Such a register is a breakthrough for China....

In true modern Chinese fashion, donors can sign up through a link and app available through the ubiquitous Alipay online payment system. More than 230,000 people have done so, and a computerized database matches donors with compatible potential recipients, alerting doctors by text message as soon as organs become available. 

Catholicism, but not as we know it

Oh look, an interesting post from Club Troppo.  (Doesn't happen often enough, these days.)

Paul Frijters looks at the demographic health of the Catholic Church, noting the decline in Europe and Australia, but the surprising growth in Asia and Africa.

According to the Catholic Church itself (which measures things partially on the basis of baptisms), its followers numbered 1.3 billion adherents by 2014 making Catholicism the largest religion on the planet and the largest branch on the tree of Christianity that holds about 2.2 billion adherents. Its strongholds in Latin America and Southern Africa are looking rock-solid, and conversion rates in the new centers of Asia (China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.) are looking very healthy indeed. Catholicism is by far the biggest and probably fastest growing of the Christian faiths.

This is all rather interesting for what it means about the future of the character of the Church.   I think African priests, coming from societies where belief in supernatural influence in daily life has not become foreign as it has in the West, are nearly always very conservative and very "by the book", in the way the Church used to be here prior to the 60's.  

What I am not sure about is the likely doctrinal character of Asian priests, particularly Chinese.   I don't think they are likely to be quite in the same ballpark as African ones, but I could be wrong.

Paul notes this about them:

It is, speaking as a pure outsider to these religious games, very interesting to see how successful the Catholic\Christian message is amongst the Chinese in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even in China itself. In Singapore, the proportion of Christians went up from 10% in 1990 to around 20% now, and a little under half of them are Roman Catholic.

 The multicultural aspect of Catholic congregations in many parts of Australia is something that I personally find very appealing about it.   But the cultural conflict between the doctrinally conservative and more liberal wings in Western countries is only likely to be exacerbated by the use of Africa (and possibly some Asian) priests here.

Suffer wingnuts

NPR on the big, big confusion and dismay from the wingnut Trumpsters as to whether Trump is really on their side or not.

Kind of a fun show, if he weren't already irredeemably the worst President the country has ever had.

Bad news

North Korea is ramping up the anti-Japan rhetoric while sending another missile over it.

South Korea is thinking about assassination - but the big mystery I guess is whether Kim's underlings would fight back hard in revenge, or give a sigh of relief that they have a chance at a less nutty leadership.

I'm very fond of both Japan and Samsung products.  We need to find a way to keep both.  

Ridiculously open to manipulation

According to the media, quite a few people are saying that they have received multiple same sex survey forms from ABS, because of previous residents who have failed to update their address on the electoral roll.   A fairly obvious problem with this ridiculously flawed idea.

Does anyone doubt that the greatest enthusiasm for participation in this exercise is from the "yes" side?   Hence I would expect that any potential to exploit flaws is more likely to be come from that side too, and for the results to be skewed "yes" for that reason.

That said, I do expect a properly done survey - like the government could have got Newspoll to do at a tiny fraction of the cost - would also come up with a Yes win - and probably by clear 5 to 10% margin.   (That's my guess, anyway.)

But honestly, there is really zero reason to think that this postal survey idea is going to be accurate, and no one will have any idea as to how accurate it is (apart from comparing it to existing polls - making the exercise completely wasteful.)