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Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Pie Chart - 0 views

www.desmogblog.com/...dibility-science-one-pie-chart climate pie chart
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 12 - Cached
  • I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology.
  • Of one thing we can be certain: had any of these articles presented the magic bullet that falsifies human-caused global warming, that article would be on its way to becoming one of the most-cited in the history of science.
  • Global warming deniers often claim that bias prevents them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. But 24 articles in 18 different journals, collectively making several different arguments against global warming, expose that claim as false. Articles rejecting global warming can be published, but those that have been have earned little support or notice, even from other deniers.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Anyone can repeat this search and post their findings. Another reviewer would likely have slightly different standards than mine and get a different number of rejecting articles. But no one will be able to reach a different conclusion, for only one conclusion is possible: Within science, global warming denial has virtually no influence. Its influence is instead on a misguided media, politicians all-too-willing to deny science for their own gain, and a gullible public.
  • Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 12
     
    "Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming. The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature."
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Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature - 0 views

iopscience.iop.org/...article
shared by anonymous on 16 May 13 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 May 13
     
    "We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991-2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors' self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research."
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Krauthammer and "Scientific" Political Analysis - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...-and-scientific-political.html economy politics
shared by anonymous on 22 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Anyone having even a passing familiarity with American politics literature (and as someone with more of a comparative/IR focus, my own familiarity is indeed passing) knows there is precisely one reason the Democrats are going to get punished in a couple of weeks: the economy. Incumbents get punished when the economy is bad. The economy right now is really bad, so incumbents are going to get punished especially harshly. That's really the only story here
  • for all of Krauthammer's harping about the importance of independents, there's really no such thing. The vast majority of self-identified "independents" lean strongly one way or another, though they might be more inclined than strong partisans to punish the incumbent party for a poor economy.
  • anonymous on 22 Oct 10
     
    "Anyone having even a passing familiarity with American politics literature (and as someone with more of a comparative/IR focus, my own familiarity is indeed passing) knows there is precisely one reason the Democrats are going to get punished in a couple of weeks: the economy. Incumbents get punished when the economy is bad. The economy right now is really bad, so incumbents are going to get punished especially harshly. That's really the only story here." By Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on October 22, 2010.
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Rand and Aesthetics 9 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-and-aesthetics-9.html objectivism criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 12 May 11 - Cached
  • The problem with this category is (1) the vagueness of its terms, and (2) lack of specific examples.
  • Rand's attempt to use the issue of volition versus determinism to analye literature again demonstrates the futility of viewing literature through this particular prism.
  • Whether their characters are "grand-scale" or not, they are nonetheless drawn in the hope of being compelling and believable manifestations of human nature. And why should any believable representation of human nature be equated with determinism?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Under Rand's conceptual schema, there is (generaly speaking) no way really to distinguish between Romantic and Naturalist literature, beyond recourse to Rand's own statements about a handful of specific authors.
  • In discussing Byronism, Rand is able to provide only one example -- that of Byron himself. She notes that "the chief exponents of this category were poets," yet refuses to name any of these poets other than the aforementioned Byron. This is a typical failing throughout Rand's philosophical writings: a failure to provide specific examples so that her readers could better evaluate her contentions. This failure suggests one of three possibilities:(1) Rand was not familiar enough with those authors to evaluate them (meaning she hadn't read them)(2) Those authors don't fit into her categories, so she ignored them(3) Combination of one and two
  • anonymous on 12 May 11
     
    ""Byronic" Romanticism. With Rand's division of free will into two parts, one pertaining to consciousness and the other to existence, she proceeds to develop a second category of Romanticism:"
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The oldest story ever written - 1 views

www.salon.com/...gilgamesh salon history ancient biblical
shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 13 - Cached
  • David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.
  • Think of it: He asks you to be excited about what the characters in his story are discovering even before you know quite how important it is.
  • The recovery of the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut’s tomb: the oldest story ever told — or, at least, the oldest one told in writing.
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  • It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It’s the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark.
  • If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories — the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd’s slaying of the dragon Fafnir — it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years.
  • Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.
  • Instead, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization.
  • much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.
  • The announcement that some of those old, broken slabs of clay seemed to confirm the biblical story of the flood and Noah’s Ark made headlines and instantly catapulted the brand-new discipline of Assyriology to public attention.
  • Smith, too, seized upon the scenes of the flood as validation of the Old Testament account; many early archaeologists were obsessed with biblical verification. Not everyone agreed, however.
  • The New York Times suggested that the inscription “may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.” (In fact, stories of global floods crop up in all sorts of disconnected mythologies.)
  • Certainly, the epic didn’t point to human sinfulness as the cause of the flood, as the Bible does. According to Uta-napishtim, the gods wiped out humanity because the exploding population was making too much noise and disturbing their sleep.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I love ancient gods. They have such personality.
  • largely because he wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.
  • The story of the story, though, is something else again. Luck most definitely played a role. Had a roof beam or a column fallen a different way during the sacking and destruction of Ashurbanipal’s palace in 612 B.C., the tablets might not have been left broken but largely intact.
  • Had “The Epic of Gilgamesh” been taken to another library, the tablets might have been worn out by use and discarded or lost in other disasters like the burning of the great Library at Alexandria
  • Damrosch reminds us that only seven of Aeschylus’ 90 tragedies have survived to modern times. Without the work of dedicated Assyriologists we might have the tablets but be unable to read them.
  • To the ancient Mesopotamians, it probably seemed impossible that one day Gilgamesh would be forgotten — for us, that would be like forgetting Heracles or Superman or Little Red Riding Hood. After a while, people stopped telling his story, and if it weren’t for those buried tablets and the men who dug them up, his name would have vanished forever. In a way, Gilgamesh got his immortality after all.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I purposely didn't highlight the stories. You have to *read those* on the page to truly appreciate them. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of those stories that I learned about during my difficult recovery from adolescent Fundy-Xtianity. In youthful, rebellious glee, I enjoyed that I could dismiss The Flood. With age, though, I see both - and many other heavily borrowed from stories - as part of a continuum of folklore and wisdom. Quite fascinating.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 13
     
    "There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,' the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840." Hat tip to George Station (originally from Hsiao-yun Chan), both on Google+
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The Debunking Handbook: now freely available for download - 1 views

www.skepticalscience.com/freely-available-download.html
shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 12
     
    "The Debunking Handbook, a guide to debunking misinformation, is now freely available to download. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there's no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation."
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The Banality of Systemic Evil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-banality-of-systemic-evil
shared by anonymous on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
  • Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.”
  • a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.
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  • The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:
  • (1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.
  • Swartz, who committed suicide in January at age 26 (many believe because of his prosecution), said that “Moral Mazes” did an excellent job of “explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.”
  • Swartz engaged in an act of civil disobedience to liberate that knowledge, arguing that “there is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”
  • Upon investigating the matter, Manning discovered that none of the 15 had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist organizations. Manning had the allegedly anti-Iraqi literature translated and found that, contrary to what the federal police had said, the published literature in question “detailed corruption within the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people.” When Manning reported this discrepancy to the officer in charge (OIC), she was told to “drop it,” she recounted.
  • The bureaucracy was telling him to shut up and move on (in accord with the five rules in “Moral Mazes”), but Snowden felt that doing so was morally wrong.
  • But wasn’t there arrogance or hubris in Snowden’s and Manning’s decisions to leak the documents? After all, weren’t there established procedures determining what was right further up the organizational chart? Weren’t these ethical decisions better left to someone with a higher pay grade? The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”
  • For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord.
  • The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision.
  • The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not.
  • But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system — in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role.
  • anonymous on 24 Sep 13
     
    "In recent months there has been a visible struggle in the media to come to grips with the leaking, whistle-blowing and hacktivism that has vexed the United States military and the private and government intelligence communities. This response has run the gamut. It has involved attempts to condemn, support, demonize, psychoanalyze and in some cases canonize figures like Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden."
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Odds Are, It's Wrong - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong science layscience statistics methodology
shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 10
     
    "It's science's dirtiest secret: The "scientific method" of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing." By Tom Siegfried at Science News on March 27, 2010.
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A fresh look at the left and right political blogospheres - 0 views

crookedtimber.org/...d-right-political-blogospheres criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 28 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Over 40% of blogs on the left adopt platforms with enhanced user participation features. Only about 13% of blogs on the right do so. While there is substantial overlap, and comments of some level of visibility are used in the vast majority of blogs on both sides of the political divide, the left adopts enabling technologies that make user-generated diaries and blogs more central to the site to a significantly greater degree than does the right. (p. 22.)
  • There are lots of other interesting results in the paper so I highly recommend reading it [pdf]. It’s very clearly written and summarizes related literature well so in case this is not an area you’ve been following, this is a good piece with which to start to familiarize yourself with related debates. If it is an area that you’ve been following then this is a must-read to see some truly original contributions to the literature.
  • anonymous on 28 Apr 10
     
    By Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber on April 28, 2010.
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Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...shootings-in-the-united-states
shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it. 
  • Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not.
  • “Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
  • Lots of guns don’t necessarily mean lots of shootings, as you can see in Israel and Switzerland.*
  • *Correction: The info is out-of-date, if not completely wrong. Israel and Switzerland have tightened their gun laws substantially, and now pursue an entirely different approach than the United States. More details here. I apologize for the error.
  • Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened from 2007 onward.
  • Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier.
  • “The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.”
  • In a subsequent post, Healy drilled further into the numbers and looked at deaths due to assault in different regions of the country. Just as the United States is a clear outlier in the international context, the South is a clear outlier in the national context:
  • “For all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,” writes political scientist Patrick Egan. The decline is most evident on the General Social Survey, though it also shows up on polling from Gallup, as you can see on this graph:
  • The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states. Citations here.
  • Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive:
  • Since 1990, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think gun control laws should be stricter. The answer, increasingly, is that they don’t. “The percentage in favor of making the laws governing the sale of firearms ‘more strict’ fell from 78% in 1990 to 62% in 1995, and 51% in 2007,” reports Gallup. “In the most recent reading, Gallup in 2010 found 44% in favor of stricter laws. In fact, in 2009 and again last year, the slight majority said gun laws should either remain the same or be made less strict.”
  • An August CNN/ORC poll asked respondents whether they favor or oppose a number of specific policies to restrict gun ownership. And when you drill down to that level, many policies, including banning the manufacture and possession of semi-automatic rifles, are popular.
  • Shootings don’t tend to substantially affect views on gun control. That, at least, is what the Pew Research Center found:
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "When we first collected much of this data, it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid "politicizing" the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for "don't talk about reforming our gun control laws." Let's be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It's just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws."
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Freakonomics: What Went Wrong? - 0 views

www.americanscientist.org/...issue.aspx
shared by anonymous on 13 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Oster’s work stirred debate for a few years in the epidemiological literature, but eventually she admitted that the subject-matter experts had been right all along. One of Das Gupta’s many convincing counterpoints was a graph showing that in Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls was near the natural rate for first and second babies (106:100) but not for third babies (112:100); this pattern held up with or without hepatitis B. In a follow-up blog post, Levitt applauded Oster for bravery in admitting her mistake, but he never credited Das Gupta for her superior work. Our point is not that Das Gupta had to be right and Oster wrong, but that Levitt and Dubner, in their celebration of economics and economists, suspended their critical thinking.
  • In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the contrarian claim that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk, an oversimplified argument that was picked apart by bloggers. The problem with this argument, and others like it, lies in the assumption that the driver and the walker are the same type of person, making the same kinds of choices, except for their choice of transportation.
  • Such all-else-equal thinking is a common statistical fallacy. In fact, driver and walker are likely to differ in many ways other than their mode of travel. What seem like natural calculations are stymied by the impracticality, in real life, of changing one variable while leaving all other variables constant.
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  • This unavoidable tradeoff between false positive and false negative errors is a well-known property of all statistical-prediction applications. Circling back to check all the factors involved in the problem might have helped the authors avoid this mistake.
  • How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways? Some possible answers to this question offer insights for the would-be pop-statistics writer.
  • Leave friendship at the door: We attribute many of these errors to the structure of the authors’ collaboration, which, from what we can tell, relies on an informal social network that has many potential failure points.
  • Don’t sell yourself short: Perhaps Levitt’s admirable modesty—he has repeatedly attributed his success to luck and hard work rather than genius—has led him astray. If he feels he is surrounded by economists more exceptional and brilliant than he is, he may let their assertions stand without challenge.
  • Maintain checks and balances: A solid collaboration requires each side to check and balance the other side. Although there’s no way we can be sure, perhaps, in some of the cases described above, there was a breakdown in the division of labor when it came to investigating technical points.
  • Take your time: Success comes at a cost: The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy.
  • Be clear about where you’re coming from: Levitt’s publishers, along with Dubner, characterize him as a “rogue economist.”
  • Use latitude responsibly: When a statistician criticizes a claim on technical grounds, he or she is declaring not that the original finding is wrong but that it has not been convincingly proven. Researchers—even economists endorsed by Steven Levitt—can make mistakes. It may be okay to overlook the occasional mistake in the pursuit of the larger goal of understanding the world. But once one accepts this lower standard—science as plausible stories or data-supported reasoning, rather than the more carefully tested demonstrations that are characteristic of Levitt’s peer-reviewed research articles—one really has to take extra care, consider all sides of an issue, and look out for false positive results.
  • anonymous on 13 Dec 11
     
    In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt's friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative.
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What Happened to Psychiatry's Magic Bullets? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...health-theory-discredited.html
shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Despite our ambivalence, sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. They have become yet another commodity that consumers have learned to live with or even enjoy, like S.U.V.s or Cheetos.
  • In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities.
  • Clinical trials have been halted, lines of research abandoned, and the new drug pipeline has been allowed to run dry.
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  • The answer lies in the history of psychopharmacology, which is more deeply indebted to serendipity than most branches of medicine—in particular, to a remarkable series of accidental discoveries made in the fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War.
  • By 1960, the major classes of psychiatric drugs—among them, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs, known as anxiolytics—had been discovered and were on their way to becoming a seventy-billion-dollar market.
  • Having been discovered by accident, however, they lacked one important element: a theory that accounted for why they worked (or, in many cases, did not).
  • —they fashioned an explanation: mental illness was the result of imbalances among these neurotransmitters, which the drugs treated in the same way that insulin treats diabetes.
  • In 1965, Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, reverse-engineered antidepressants and offered an actual theory: at least when it came to depression, the imbalances were to be found in the neurotransmitters he thought were affected by the drugs, dopamine and norepinephrine. Seven years after antidepressants were invented, and five years after Ayd asserted that depression was a chemical problem, psychiatrists finally had a precise, scientific explanation for why they worked. The paper quickly became one of the most cited articles in the medical literature.
  • But Schildkraut was wrong. Within a few years, as technology expanded our ability to peer into the brain, it became clear that antidepressants act mostly by increasing the availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin—rather than dopamine and norepinephrine, as previously thought.
  • The serotonin-imbalance theory, however, has turned out to be just as inaccurate as Schildkraut’s. While S.S.R.I.s surely alter serotonin metabolism, those changes do not explain why the drugs work, nor do they explain why they have proven to be no more effective than placebos in clinical trials.
  • Despite their continued failure to understand how psychiatric drugs work, doctors continue to tell patients that their troubles are the result of chemical imbalances in their brains.
  • As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.
  • the dry pipeline of new drugs bemoaned by Friedman is an indication that the drug industry has begun to lose faith in the myth it did so much to create.
  • Bedazzled by the prospect of unraveling the mysteries of psychic suffering, researchers have spent recent decades on a fool’s errand—chasing down chemical imbalances that don’t exist. And the result, as Friedman put it, is that “it is hard to think of a single truly novel psychotropic drug that has emerged in the last thirty years.”
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 13
     
    "It's been just over twenty-five years since Prozac came to market, and more than twenty per cent of Americans now regularly take mind-altering drugs prescribed by their doctors. Almost as familiar as brands like Zoloft and Lexapro is the worry about what it means that the daily routine in many households, for parents and children alike, includes a dose of medications that are poorly understood and whose long-term effects on the body are unknown. "
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You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You | Code and Culture - 0 views

codeandculture.wordpress.com/...youbrokepeerreview
shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • no more anonymous co-authors making your paper worse with a bunch of non sequiturs or footnotes with hedging disclaimers.
  • The thing is though that optimistic as I am about the new journal, I don’t think it will replace the incumbent journals overnight and so we still need to fix review at the incumbent journals.
  • So fixing peer review doesn’t begin with you, the author, yelling at your computer “FFS reviewer #10, maybe that’s how you would have done it, but it’s not your paper”
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  • Nor, realistically, can fixing peer review happen from the editors telling you to go ahead and ignore comments 2, 5, and 6 of reviewer #6.
  • First, it would be an absurd amount of work
  • Second, from the editor’s perspective the chief practical problem is recruiting reviewers
  • they don’t want to alienate the reviewers by telling them that half their advice sucks in their cover letter
  • Rather, fixing peer review has to begin with you, the reviewer, telling yourself “maybe I would have done it another way myself, but it’s not my paper.”
  • You need to adopt a mentality of “is it good how the author did it” rather than “how could this paper be made better” (read: how would I have done it). That is the whole of being a good reviewer, the rest is commentary. That said, here’s the commentary.
  • Do not brainstorm
  • Responding to a research question by brainstorming possibly relevant citations or methods
  • First, many brainstormed ideas are bad.
  • When I give you advice as a peer reviewer there is a strong presumption that you take the advice even if it’s mediocre
  • Second, many brainstormed ideas are confusing.
  • When I give you advice in my office you can ask follow-up questions
  • When I give advice as a peer reviewer it’s up to you to hope that you read the entrails in a way that correctly augurs the will of the peer reviewers.
  • Being specific has the ancillary benefit that it’s costly to the reviewer which should help you maintain the discipline to thin the mindfart herd stampeding into the authors’ revisions.
  • Third, ideas are more valuable at the beginning of a project than at the end of it.
  • When I give you advice about your new project you can use it to shape the way the project develops organically. When I give it to you as a reviewer you can only graft it on after the fact.
  • it is essential to keep in mind that no matter how highly you think of your own expertise and opinions, you remember that the author doesn’t want to hear it.
  • time is money. It usually takes me an amount of time that is at least the equivalent of a course release to turn-around an R&R and at most schools a course release in turn is worth about $10,000 to $30,000 if you’re lucky enough to raise the grants to buy them.
  • Distinguish demands versus suggestions versus synapses that happened to fire as you were reading the paper
  • A lot of review comments ultimately boil down to some variation on “this reminds me of this citation” or “this research agenda could go in this direction.” OK, great. Now ask yourself, is it a problem that this paper does not yet do these things or are these just possibilities you want to share with the author?
  • As a related issue, demonstrate some rhetorical humility.
  • There’s wrong and then there’s difference of opinion
  • On quite a few methodological and theoretical issues there is a reasonable range of opinion. Don’t force the author to weigh in on your side.
  • For instance, consider Petev ASR 2013. The article relies heavily on McPherson et al ASR 2006, which is an extremely controversial article (see here, here, and here).
  • One reaction to this would be to say the McPherson et al paper is refuted and ought not be cited. However Petev summarizes the controversy in footnote 10 and then in footnote 17 explains why his own data is a semi-independent (same dataset, different variables) corroboration of McPherson et al.
  • These footnotes acknowledge a nontrivial debate about one of the article’s literature antecedents and then situates the paper within the debate.
  • Theoretical debates are rarely an issue of decisive refutation or strictly cumulative knowledge but rather at any given time there’s a reasonable range of opinions and you shouldn’t demand that the author go with your view but at most that they explore its implications if they were to.
  • There are cases where you fall on one side of a theoretical or methodological gulf and the author on another to the extent that you feel that you can’t really be fair.
  • you as the reviewer have to decide if you’re going to engage in what philosophers of science call “the demarcation problem” and sociologists of science call “boundary work” or you’re going to recuse yourself from the review.
  • Don’t try to turn the author’s theory section into a lit review.
  • The theory section is not about demonstrating basic competence or reciting a creedal confession and so it does not need to discuss every book or article ever published on the subject or even just the things important enough to appear on your graduate syllabus or field exam reading list.
  • If the submission reminds you of a citation that’s relevant to the author’s subject matter, think about whether it would materially affect the argument.
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "I'm as excited as anybody about Sociological Science as it promises a clean break from the "developmental" model of peer review by moving towards an entirely evaluative model. That is, no more anonymous co-authors making your paper worse with a bunch of non sequiturs or footnotes with hedging disclaimers. (The journal will feature frequent comment and replies, which makes debate about the paper a public dialog rather than a secret hostage negotiation). The thing is though that optimistic as I am about the new journal, I don't think it will replace the incumbent journals overnight and so we still need to fix review at the incumbent journals."
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Your Media Diet is Immoral - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...your-media-diet-is-immoral
shared by anonymous on 05 May 14 - Cached
  • here are two important and related limits that I would like to focus on: the limits of our truth-seeking capabilities, as best documented in the biases literature, and the limits of what Daniel Kahneman calls our “slow thinking” capabilities.
  • In the first case, I refer to the fact that we are not some ideal Bayesian-updating computer, but in fact rely primarily on a ton of mental shortcuts that are usually useful but can and do often lead us systematically awry.
  • In the second case, I refer to the fact that deliberation and making choices consume energy, just as surely as physical exercise does.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What this adds up to is the simple fact that there’s a finite amount of things we can devote careful thought to on a given day, and the more we burn our energy doing other things the smaller that limit becomes.
  • As Kahneman and Haidt and others point out, even when you’re deliberating carefully there are shortcuts going on in the background. Nevertheless, for something like a math problem, “slow thinking” is much more likely to perform well when we are rested and our blood sugar is high, relative to where we are by the end of a full day of mental or physical activity.
  • Effective deliberation is bounded by these conditions.
  • Even our more telescopic friends do not have the stamina or the time to carefully investigate the relevant moral context of all of the stories that they consume. The feast is far too great, and the eating feels far too good, to examine all of the parts and bother to ask how all of it was made.
  • And most people are not so telescopic, or only take on the posture of being it. Nearly all of us prioritize deliberation about near things; what to wear today, how to best finish a task at our job, or what to say to comfort a friend going through something. And that’s how we should be. After all, the things that are in our lives are what we have the most context for.
  • Given the limited nature of careful deliberation, and given how our biases are likely to respond to out of context stories we carelessly consume, we are not likely judge most news stories accurately.
  • Storytelling in the public sphere, in its best form, is like an ongoing conversation that has no end in sight. Ask yourself: what conversations matter to you? Which are relevant to your life, and which are relevant to your interests? After figuring that out, be stricter about excluding stories that fall outside of those conversations.
  • Most importantly, let go of any pretense of telescopic morality. It will only hold you back from the things that really matter, the things on which you can make a difference and for which you have the most context on which to deliberate.
  • anonymous on 05 May 14
     
    "Moral determinations require context. Modern journalism, which faces a powerful tension between the context that is morally relevant and the context which makes a good narrative, has to cope with difficult ethical problems. However, journalism is not really serving two masters, the ethics of journalists on the one hand and the craft of storytelling on the other. No, journalism serves but one master-its audience. If a particular outlet is morally deficient, its audience must bear at least some culpability, for no outlet can continue without its audience."
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Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...came-our-zeitgeist-mascot.html literature
shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    A reference to Mark Dery in h+ magazine.
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The big letdown - 0 views

www.boston.com/...the_big_letdown politics
shared by anonymous on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • In short, alleviating disappointment means understanding what someone actually means when they say they’re disappointed. And for a politician, it means realizing that a certain amount of disillusionment is built into the system--the natural human optimism that allows people, election after election, to believe campaign promises also consigns them to repeated bouts of disappointment. Even if a voter manages to keep his expectations low in the fever of a campaign, research suggests that his conception of the counterfactual--what might have been if different decisions had been made, different policies pursued, or different politicians elected--grows increasingly positive in his memory, setting him up for disappointment.
  • Of the two sister emotions, regret is by far the more studied. Regret--or, more accurately, our desire to avoid future regret--is a major factor in how we decide what to do, what to say, and what to buy. A man might go on an adventurous vacation because he doesn’t want to regret missing the opportunity, or he might forgo ordering a fifth and then a sixth cocktail because he regretted it the last time he did it. Disappointment, on the other hand, usually drives us to do not much at all, making it a less fruitful emotion for marketers and professional motivators. Negative emotions like anger or fear give people energy and incentive to act; disappointment does the opposite. That difference is reflected in polling right now that shows a yawning enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, with the former angry, motivated, and eager to vote, and the latter listless and expected to stay home in the upcoming mid-term elections.
  • Gilovich sees several reasons for this, but one of them is that over time we steadily minimize the barriers to action that shape our decisions. Our instinct is to come to believe that the thing we didn’t do would have been less difficult than we found it at the time. ”We think it’s easy in retrospect to have learned a foreign language. Sure, we think, we could have found a half an hour a day to listen to tapes. But half an hour a day in actual life is hard to find,” says Gilovich.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Taken together, this body of research underlines just how inevitable some degree of disappointment is, in electoral politics as in our personal lives. There’s ample research in the psychology literature that shows just how incorrigibly optimistic and trusting human beings can be, and how vulnerable, as a result, they are to campaign rhetoric like Obama’s in 2008. ”Don’t compare me to the Almighty,” Vice President Joe Biden likes to say, quoting Boston’s former mayor Kevin White, ”compare me to the alternative.” Even when they think they’re doing just that, though, people tend to romanticize the road not taken.
  • anonymous on 12 Oct 10
     
    "America is disappointed. The economic recovery, such as it is, has produced few jobs and little growth, the war in Afghanistan is going poorly, and Washington's political culture, which President Obama took office promising to reform, is as vitriolic and paralyzed as ever. As a supporter put it to Obama at a Sept. 20 town hall meeting, "I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people. And I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting."" By Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe on October 10, 2010.
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A Geopolitical Journey, Part 1: The Traveler - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...itical_journey_part_1_traveler geopolitics reflections
shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • I try to keep my writing impersonal. My ideas are my own, of course, but I prefer to keep myself out of it for three reasons.
  • First, I’m far less interesting than my writings are.
  • Second, the world is also far more interesting than my writings and me, and pretending otherwise is narcissism.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Finally, while I founded STRATFOR, I am today only part of it.
  • Geopolitics should be impersonal, yet the way we encounter the world is always personal. Andre Malraux once said that we all leave our countries in very national ways. A Korean visiting Paris sees it differently than an American. The personal is the eccentric core of geopolitics.
  • I travel to sample the political fault lines in the world, and I have done this all my life. This is an odd preference, but there might be some others who share it. Traveling geopolitically is not complex, but it does take some thought.
  • It assumes that the political life of humans is shaped by the place in which they live and that the political patterns are frequently recurring because of the persistence of nations and the permanence of geography.
  • I begin my travels by always re-reading histories and novels from the region. I avoid anything produced by a think tank, preferring old poems and legends.
  • Reading literature can be the best preparation for a discussion of a county’s budget deficit.
  • It is inconceivable to me that Russia, alive and unrestrained, would not seek to return to what it once was. The frontiers of Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union had reasons for being where they were, and in my mind, Russia would inevitably seek to return to its borders. This has nothing to do with leaders or policies. There is no New World Order, only the old one replaying itself in infinitely varying detail, like a kaleidoscope.
  • Our trip now is to countries within and near the Black Sea basin, so the geopolitical “theme” of the trip (yes, my trips have geopolitical themes, which my children find odd for some reason) is the Russian re-emergence as viewed by its western and southwestern neighbors:
  • I want to see the degree to which my sense of what will happen and their sense of what will happen diverge.
  • Romania, Ukraine, Moldova and even southern Poland cannot be understood without understanding the role the Carpathians play in uniting them and dividing them.
  • I want to understand whether this time will be different and to find out whether the Poles realize that in order for things to be different the Poles themselves must be different, since the plain is not going to stop being flat.
  • Walking a mountain path in the Carpathians in November, where bandits move about today as they did centuries ago, teaches me why this region will never be completely tamed or easily captured.
  • Nothing taught me more about American power and history than taking that trip and watching the vast traffic in grain and steel move up and down the river. It taught me why Andrew Jackson fought at New Orleans and why he wanted Texas to rebel against Mexico. It explained to me why Mark Twain, in many ways, understood America more deeply than anyone.
  • Political leaders think in terms of policies and options. Geopolitics teaches us to think in terms of constraints and limits.
  • According to geopolitics, political leaders are trapped by impersonal forces and have few options in the long run. Yet, in meeting with men and women who have achieved power in their country, the temptation is to be caught up in their belief in what they are going to do. There is a danger of being caught up in their passion and confidence.
  • There is also the danger of being so dogmatic about geopolitics that ignoring their vision blinds me to possibilities that I haven’t thought of or that can’t simply be explained geopolitically.
  • The direct quote can be the most misleading thing in the world.
  • I am not looking for the pithy quote, but for the complex insight that never quite reduces itself to a sentence or two.
  • There is another part of geopolitical travel that is perhaps the most valuable: walking the streets of a city. Geopolitics affect every level of society, shaping life and culture. Walking the streets, if you know what to look for, can tell you a great deal.
  • If a Montblanc store is next to a Gucci shop, you are in the wrong place.
  • All of this should be done unobtrusively. Take along clothes that are a bit shabby. Buy a pair of shoes there, scuff them up and wear them. Don’t speak. The people can smell foreigners and will change their behavior when they sense them. Blend in and absorb. At the end of a few days you will understand the effects of the world on these people.
  • There are three things the geopolitical traveler must do.
  • He must go to places and force himself to see the geography that shapes everything. He must meet with what leaders he can find who will talk to him in all parts of society, listening and talking but reserving a part of his mind for the impersonal reality of the world. Finally, he must walk the streets. He won’t have time to meet the schoolteachers, bank tellers, government employees and auto repairmen who are the substance of a society. Nor will they be comfortable talking to a foreigner. But geopolitics teaches that you should ignore what people say and watch what they do.
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "Editor's note: This is the first installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States. " By George Friedman at StratFor on November 8, 2010.
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The History of Libraries Through the Ages - 0 views

www.zencollegelife.com/-of-libraries-through-the-ages
shared by anonymous on 27 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Since the beginning of time, there has been a need to preserve artifacts in some fashion for later appreciation by new generations. As a result, it seems there has always been some form of a library in existence.
  • From the years 1600 to 1700, interest in libraries increased significantly. This occurred largely because the quantity of books increased and the costs associated decreased. Even more, there was a renewed interest in classical literature and culture, prompting nations to build great libraries and universities to accommodate and honor them.
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Rand and Aesthetics 1 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-and-aesthetics-1.html objectivism criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Rand's foremost consideration in her aesthetics was to judge. She belonged to what I call the malicious school of aesthetic criticism: it was not enough for Rand merely to glorify her own preferences, she also had to denigrate the preferences of those with different aesthetic tastes.
  • The Objectivist aesthetics is largely a rationalization of Rand's own aesthetic prejudices and hatreds. Rand's actual doctrine is littered with overly vague generalizations, historical inaccuracies, false attributions, and a congenital incapacity to understand any work of art she failed to respond to.
  • Despite all her high talk about reason and objectivity, her aesthetics remains rooted in her own blatantly subjective feelings.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • six main prejudices:
  • (1) prejudice in favor of Rand's "ideal" man, i.e., the man who has "no inner conflicts," whose "mind and his emotions are integrated," and whose "consciousness is in perfect harmony"; (2) discomfort with tragedy; (3) mania for realistic description or literal representation; (4) strong preference for plot over character in literature; (4) indifference to most forms of beauty, particularly beauty of nature; (6) indiference, sometimes even hostility, to most aesthetic forms.
  • anonymous on 09 Mar 11
     
    "Intro. Aesthetics, if it aspires to be in the least rational, sane, and just, must seek to explain, rather than judge, personal responses to works of art. When aesthetics seeks to justify a specific set of preferences, it degenerates into mere special pleading and rationalization."
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Rand & Aesthetics 7 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-aesthetics-7.html criticalthinking objectivism
shared by anonymous on 01 May 11 - Cached
  • Rand's belief that one can infer the artists "fundamental view of man and of existence" reaches its most elaborate development in her Romanticism/Naturalism dichotomy.
  • Generally speaking, most great literature attempts to portray human beings realistically, which means: under the influence of various passions, desires, and sentiments. Some characters may appear to have more self-initiative and therefore could be considered as exemplars of "free will"; others characters may be more passive or impulsive, and therefore could be considered exemplars of "determinism." However, there is nothing mandatory or even insightful in such interpretations.
  • She describes a plot as "a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story." The language Rand uses to describe a plot quite literally drips with determinism. After all, how can a logical sequence of events in which every event is "connected" and "determined" by previous events entail free will?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Yes, I know, Rand insists that the events are driven by the goal-directed behavior of the story's characters. But even with this condition, Rand's concept of plot still smacks of determinism, suggesting the sort of characters who never waver from their goals, as if once a choice is made, one cannot change one's mind and adopt a different route.
  • However (and this a very important point) even though Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hardy wrote "fatalistic" narratives, this is hardly proof positive that they were determinists.
  • Perhaps they were, perhaps not. Their choice of subject matter is not decisive in this respect. Sophocles and Shakespeare simply dramatized whatever stories happened to be commonly available. There is no reason to assume that the decision to dramatize a "fatalistic" narrative indicates either a conscious or subconscious commitment to determinism.
  • anonymous on 01 May 11
     
    ""Volition" in art. With her selectivity principle well in hand, Rand proceeds to make yet another invidious distinction: An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man and of existence. In forming a view of man's nature, a fundamental question one must answer is whether man possesses the faculty of volition-because one's conclusions and evaluations in regard to all the characteristics, requirements and actions of man depend on the answer. Their opposite answers to this question constitute the respective basic premises of two broad categories of art: Romanticism, which recognizes the existence of man's volition-and Naturalism, which denies it. "
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