Science Is Not The Answer

Reminder: The Thursday Class is only for those interested in studying uncertainty. I don’t expect all want to read these posts. Pease don’t feel like you must. Yet, I have nowhere else to put them. Your support makes this Class possible for those who need it.Thank you. We’re still waiting on people to give their “good uses” of P-values, so I cannot yet post a reply. Perhaps next week? Meanwhile, we return to my Uncertainty book with an excerpt on an important topic.

This originally appeared at Jaap’s blog, and is presented lightly edited here. He and I have looked at several of the “forever chemical” papers and, so far anyway, have found them wanting. Here’s his particular analysis of two consequences of chemical fears. –Briggs This is about chemistry, of course, and the dislike of molecules, those universal building blocks of our empirical reality, which are distrusted greatly, especially of the man-made, synthetic, kind found in everyday stuff.

My friend Johnathan has responded to the debate on fertility with a perspective I think is shared by many, and which deserves discussion. –Briggs I had a discussion with my wife the other day. She recalled a time in college or high school when the teacher wrote up on the board three letters, MRS. And he told the girls in the class that this was the best postgraduate degree and what it meant for women.

Here is a report on a brief speech made by U.N. “rights chief” Volker Turk, warning that AI, i.e. computer models, are an “existential risk” to man. “I share the concerns of industry insiders that advanced AI could pose an existential risk to humanity,” Turk told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in a sweeping speech ahead of the start of his second term next month.

“Yes, I use P-values. They never did me any harm.” Reminder: The Thursday Class is only for those interested in studying uncertainty. I don’t expect all want to read these posts. Pease don’t feel like you must. Yet, I have nowhere else to put them. Your support makes this Class possible for those who need it.Thank you. Once again, the eternal battle against P-values. I tried to write this one with as little technical apparatus as possible to appeal to a larger audience.

I was on with Jon Harris discussing, among other things, the so-called fertility crisis. I have since seen BAP’s article on the same subject, which is more in-depth, and written with a different purpose in mind. Yet I did not see anything in that interesting article which causes me to change my mind on any of this. My original article on the subject is here. And the one showing we’re living longer is here. All my work is free and user-supported.

A trio of academics, responsible for the paper “Temperature and Maltreatment of Young Children“, did not mention Lindsay Clancy by name, but you will forgive my lapse into clickbait titling when you realize they had women like her in mind. Here is their Abstract (with my emphasis): We estimate the impacts of temperature on alleged and substantiated child maltreatment among young children using administrative data from state child protective services agencies.

Since we’re careening into the last full weekend of a summer that was too brief, and has already exited my far north sanctuary—the maples are already colored—, and since Class will begin again next week, I thought we should revisit this hilarious Research, originally published 8 January 2014. Follow The Science! The scientific life is not as glamorous as you have been led to believe.

The most race-obsessed people, paradoxically, are those who claim race does not exist. Academics in particular are prone to insist on race being a fiction invented by “racists”, people who can’t do proper statistics. These academics become DIE-maniacs, bending all honors toward those races, that do not exist, which they love most, blaming the white race, which does not exist, for all that ails the world. Let us think about some statistics of race.

All know that women, and the men who mate with them, are having fewer babies. There is substantial variability depending on locale, but the trend pretty much everywhere around the globe is down, down, then down some more. Some worry the trend will continue and that, in due course of time, man will go extinct. After all, if the ladies are pursuing everything besides babies, there is not much hope for the future. Naturally, there are causes of this, as there are of all things.