OT: Button your lips, data police are coming...

Obviously not.

Even less likely.

That is your problem - there are a lot of facts that you can't believe, mos t of them involving you being wrong.

You'd like to think so. Unfortunately, posting nonsense is the role you hav e taken on, and you are merely reminding us that you make a habit of it.

We disagree, but this isn't the whole story. We disagree because you are wr ong, and can't learn enough to realise it.

Since I spelled it out below, you really shouldn't have needed to ask the q uestion, but - as I seem to have mentioned before, you can be remarkably st upid.

When the "nice discussion" is merely self-reinforcing exchanges of delusion s - presumably between you and Jamie, who do tend to share a few silly idea s - and you are posting it on a public forum, you have to learn to live wit h the fact that if you post nonsense, somebody is going to point out that i t's nonsense.

The number of false ideas that are "clear to you" would take quite a lot of enumerating, if anybody could be bothered. It's simpler to point out that you are frequently ill-informed, and incapable of getting better-informed.

Do learn to spell narcissistic. You may be able to manage that, even if you have got very little hope of learning what the word means or applying it c orrectly.

And do learn which English words attach to the concept of "foul mouth". You may not enjoy being called stupid, but I'm not being foul-mouthed when I d escribe you that way. "Foul-mouthed" is restricted to the use of a group of taboo words that aren't usually used in polite conversation. Insulting som ebody doesn't necessarily involve being foul-mouthed.

That may be your impression. You may share it with several of our dimmer ps ychopaths, but that doesn't make it correct.

You "know" quite a few things that don't happen to be correct. This happens to be one more of them.

lot > > more to learn I've done all that I'm interested in doing. This does seem to

I certainly don't think that I know it all, but I do seem know quite a bit more about computer modelling that you do - which isn't saying much.

As you illustrate all too frequently. I don't know everything but I do know a lot more that you do, and dismissing your ignorant nonsense is "informed dismissal", though you seem to find if difficult to appreciate this.

You persist in telling us you think so. You might tell us what computer mod els you have worked with - fitting polynomials to arbitrary data isn't a co mmon feature of the computer modelling I've been involved with and it isn't a feature of real climate models.

Computing the greenhouse effect does involve some highly non-linear relatio nships, but parameters involved have been measured with exquisite precision and aren't adjusted in the process of modelling what the atmosphere is lik ely to do.

When the "nice discussion" is merely self-reinforcing exchanges of delusions - presumably between you and Jamie, who do tend to share a few silly ideas

- and you are posting it on a public forum, you have to learn to live with the fact that if you post nonsense, somebody is going to point out that it's nonsense.

I see I am still doing well!

Jamie

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There is no such thing as bad publicity. Being coupled with Joey Hey as a p roponent of silly ideas isn't going to make anybody think better of you - k rw is perhaps dim enough not to have noticed that Joey Hey isn't all that c lever so he may not recognise the magnitude of the insult, but he is anothe r member of the tail of the distribution.

Thank you for that inspirational comment, or should I say statement?

It wsa rather lengthy, something a salesman would do when covering up some daming facts!

Jamie

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a proponent of silly ideas isn't going to make anybody think better of you - krw is perhaps dim enough not to have noticed that Joey Hey isn't all th at clever so he may not recognise the magnitude of the insult, but he is an other member of the tail of the distribution.

I do try and stretch your attention span. And you probably meant "damning" facts. The fact that I think than you and Joey Hey are half-wits isn't exac tly a damning fact - anybody who didn't would be suffering from a lack of i ntellectual discrimination.

Intellect is a broad statement, where as the meaning of which is valid by the beholder.

I bet you put yourself high on the pedestal!

Jamie

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y as a proponent of silly ideas isn't going to make anybody think better of you - krw is perhaps dim enough not to have noticed that Joey Hey isn't al l that clever so he may not recognise the magnitude of the insult, but he i s another member of the tail of the distribution.

ng" facts. The fact that I think than you and Joey Hey are half-wits isn't exactly a damning fact - anybody who didn't would be suffering from a lack of intellectual discrimination.

I'd find it difficult to do that, considering the company I keep. I may be higher on the staircase than you are - probably quite a bit higher - but th ere plenty of people around with better intellectual credentials than mine.

I'm proud of the paper I published that has nineteen citations (only two of them by me) but serious academics (and I know a few) have h-indices higher than nineteen, which is to say their nineteenth most-cited paper has more than 19 citations.

Heavily cited papers get hundred of citations (though this varies a lot fro m field to field).

Because we believe in: Guilt by association!

joe

As you always forget to mention what side of the bell-curved IQ distribution you mean, I take the liberty to imagine that would be the right side. I.e. the side with the high IQ where only a few people reside. I'm sure you count yourself among them, err... us. :)

joe

"Joey Hey isn't all that clever"

I think you are making his point for him.

Wrong. You are both separately guilty of having silly ideas. Some of the si lly ideas you have in common - which makes you both members of a particular class of gullible half-wits - but you are both separately guilty of puttin g forward other peoples silly ideas and defending them as enthusiastically as if you'd separately come up with them by your own intellectual effort.

This makes you separate members of the same classification - half-wits.

The "tail" of the distribution isn't the area where you find high IQs, and the phrase "Joey Hey isn't all that clever" removes any ambiguity. If you were as clever as you seem to think you are, you would have noticed that.

Oh, did I make a mistake? :)

joe

After giving it some more thought I'm happy to educate you that there are two tails: Left and right.

Left is where the mentally deficient, mostly due to birth defect, reside. The right tail is where geniuses like you and me are located. But don't go too far to the right...

A little background reading:

joe

You happiness may be real, your education is imagined. The term "bell curve " makes it clear that there are two tail to that particular distribution - you are in one of them and I'm in the other.

Sadly, you are in the wrong tail. Your idea that you might be a genius is a trifle unrealistic, like most of your claims. I'm smarter than most people , but no genius - and the people I've met who might have claimed that statu s on the bass of the honours they have been granted aren't all that spectac ularly clever either.

es_oleson

If you actually were a member of the "right" side of the distribution, you' d have noticed that this isn't a particularly useful essay.

It lays undue emphasis on Galton's discovery of the fact that high achiever s tended to be related, without mentioning the more recently discovered soc iological fact that success in life is at least as much a function of who y ou know, as it is of what you know (and what you can work out).

The book "Inequality by Design" dismantled "The Bell Curve" (which Oleson c ites without comment in his reference 408 to Herrnstein and Murray) by poin ting out that "The Bell Curve" statistical analysis had fudged the "who you know" component by setting up a single "sociological advantage" parameter

- which was mostly the parental income - rather than treating parental inco me, place of education and childhood environment as three independent (if c orrelated) variables.

The "Inequality by Design" analysis of the "Bell Curve" data explained a lo t more of the variability in individual outcomes than the "The Bell Curve" analysis, and re-instated the superior power of the "who you know" componen t.

At least for the US where - as "The Spirit Level" points out - there's a lo t more inequality than in any other advanced industrial country - Portugal is almost as unequal, but few would call it advanced or industrial.

Oleson's essay does bring in the manic-depressive element in creativity, bu t not in an particularly insightful way. One of my cleverer friends is mani c-depressive, and won't take lithium, because he's so productive when he's manic that it pays for a lot of less productive time when he's depressive. The manic-depression isn't part of his genius - it's just a quirk that lets him be very productive from time to time. My guess is that he'd be just as productive - averaged over time - if he did use lithium to smooth out the fluctuations, but the high you get from working something out is unfortunat ely addictive.

You probably know that, but get it from working out stuff and being happy w ith a wrong answer. Smarter people test their conclusions against reality, and have learned to live with killing off attractive - but wrong - ideas.