OT: sea level rise in Florida

On Wed, 13 Jan 2016 21:23:54 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman Gave us:

Some statisticians are idiots.

They will look at two folks who went to a hamburger joint and one bought two burgers and the other didn't eat at all, but he'll still tell you that on average everybody got one hamburger.

Not so IME.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

When statisticians are talking to idiots, they do tend to play down the higher moments of the distribution.

}big fart{

joe

}snip{

Another statistician stepped in a river to cross it. The river was on average only 1 m deep, but he drowned anyway. Or maybe it was the same statistician but we'll never no, he didn't have the time to calculate the probability of that to happen.

joe

}snip{

There are two kinds of people: idiots, and Bill Sloman. ;)

joe

That's exactly how it goes.

White rich well educated female privilege maybe? Any poor person could have told you that.

joe

}snip{

'never know', of course.

joe

Oh. I don't know. They can be brutal if someone presents an argument that either doesn't hold water or has very obvious weaknesses. Then there are the big turf wars over priority and competing theories.

The most recent schism being Steady State vs Big Bang (a derogatory term that Hoyle used for Einstein-Lemaitre universes that stuck).

The Big Bang vs Steady State debacle which set Ryle's experimental radio astronomy group vs Hoyle's Steady State was extremely brutal. It didn't help that there were systematic defects in the early survey data from antenna sidelobes of very bright sources. Both sides fought hard to defend their patch and it is only with the expiry of the last of the old Steady State adherents quite recently that arguments have ceased.

Newton vs Leibnitz and Newton vs Hooke were not much better.

The discovery of Neptune predicted by both LeVerrier (Copley medal) and John Couch Adams (initially ignored) is another example. See

I guess I was speaking more about the weekly departmental talks. It could also be different for different schools... a different culture.

George H.

Interesting disjunction. Not a particularly useful one, and unkind to all the people who aren't idiots, some of whom are even cleverer than I am.

She was white, well-educated and American. Quite a few people had told her that story - she did a bunch of the preliminary interviews for the Poverty Survey, when they were working out how to structure it.

Privileged? Probably not - though being a white American from a family with enough money to let you carry through a university education in the US co uld be seen as privileged vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Having a backgro und that lets you get a Ph.D. (as she did) is definitely not granted to eve rybody, but being smart enough to be able to do a good Ph.D. is another kin d of in-born advantage.

I don't think any of the people we hung around with saw her as "privileged" - Melbourne might have a few graduate students around who got an easy ride , but they didn't mix with the likes of us.

The hell and doom is real enough - you don't need particularly precise models to work that out.

There will be less of it if we stop burning fossil carbon earlier rather than later, and taxing the burning of fossil carbon (rather than subsidising it as we seem to be doing at the moment) is a mechanism for encouraging the switchover to renewable energy.

You seem to want to tout your idiot conspiracy theory, that explains away a very large chunk of good scientific work as some kind of large-scale academic fraud, which has recruited 290 of the world's 300 best climate scientist and got them all telling the same story.

Anybody who could manage that wouldn't waste their talents on such a low-paying scheme, but Joey Hey isn't into plausible nonsense. If it comes up on his favourite denialist web-site he believe every word , no matter how comically silly they are.

Even there I recall some pretty fierce debate in the weekly seminars.

Stephen Hawking famously worked all night to shoot Fred Hoyle down in flames after he presented a flawed paper at the Royal Society.

But even then Fred Hoyle would probably have won a Nobel prize for his work on nulceosynthesis if he had been a bit less abrasive.

Newton seems to have been something of psychopath. Neither Leibnitz nor Hoo ke seems to have wasted much time on being nasty, but Newton outlived both of them, and seems to have spent his declining years rewriting history to emphasise his own contributions.

His comment about having stood on the shoulders of giants seems to have bee n particularly unpleasant. Hooke and Wren were "the giants" involved, but w hile Wren was of normal height, Hooke was decidedly short, and had scoliosi s, which meant that he was also bent and most un-giant-like.

That's your problem. You want them to be "correct" when they only need to be good enough. The science is quite good enough for us to be sure that anthropogenic global warming is real, damaging us right now, and well set set to damage us quite a bit more in the near future if we keep om injecting even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The science is getting better, but the size of the problems we are going to have to solve seems to have settled down.

Science isn't religion. There's no prophet with a god-given revelation involved, and hanging around until one shows up isn't a rational option.

In such cases, it is useful to ask "what evidence /would/ convince you?".

Usually the response is a deafening silence, sometimes it is impossible or impractical. Only very occasionally is the required evidence practical and possible.

My first experience was when I was invited to sit in on a presentation, by a physics student, to a few faculty members including the dean. I had no idea what it was about. The presentation was mediocre, and midway through the dean stood up and said "I think I've heard enough" and everyone left except me and the poor guy. Turns out the guy was trying to get into grad school, realitically wasn't bright enough, and they had just trashed his life in a pretty brutal manner. He was crushed.

There have been a few other instances, at conferences and such, where audience members are insulting and brutal, jumping on every opportunity to slash.

That's closer to my experience. I trust this won't dis my alma mater too much, I loved my time there.

Anyway this was long ago (early 80's), and the department is much different today. But at the time they could only attract a lower quality of US grad students, but China was opening up and had tons of high quality students. There were many TA positions to fill, (big engineering departments) and very few of the US students would "make it through" to a PhD. They were "used" to TA recitations and labs for a few years and then moved on, with a Masters degree...

Thinking back the worse times were during the advanced lab talks. You'd do an experiment for ~2-3 weeks (three per semester) And then write it up and at least once give a ~10-15 minute talk.

Listening to the talk would be ~20 grad students and 6-7 professors.. (the experimental professors ran at least one teaching lab.)

As I said we had some weaker students... weaknesses would be probed... I'm not sure it did anyone any good.

George H.