Gates–It is an interesting study if you like reading studies that reach conclusions that support your beliefs with little scientific basis.
Comment on Challenges to understanding the role of the ocean in climate science by Rob Starkey
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Joe Born
“It turns out, we tend to (over)use confidence as a useful proxy for competence — if you speak firmly, it sounds like you know what you’re talking about. People who showed more confidence, regardless of their actual ability, were judged to be more capable and accorded more regard by their peers.”
I think the chattering classes are particularly vulnerable to this.
Obama has never said much that was very smart, yet I keep hearing the pundits say how smart he is. His great gift is the ability to voice the most groundless of propositions with complete confidence–even when he completely contradicts something he said with equal confidence only a few months before. And gazing into the middle distance as if he can see something the rest of us can’t also helps.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by physicistdave
Judtih,
In my first job after getting my Ph.D., three decades ago, working in the semiconductor industry, I happened to be in a meeting that involved planning to acquire some equipment that I knew nothing about. So, I kept my mouth shut, hoping I might learn something.
After the meeting, my supervisor, a Ph.D. from Taiwan, chastised me for being silent, so I explained that I just would have wasted everyone’s time if I had spoken up. He explained, helpfully, that I just did not understand America: in America, he explained, you had to pretend to know what you were talking about even if you were faking it completely!
A few months later, I was in another meeting with my office-mate, who was also a Chinese immigrant from Taiwan and who was the company’s technical expert on our manufacturing process. A bunch of Americans in the meeting were spouting utter nonsense, and I kept looking to my office-mate to correct them. She remained silent.
Afterwards, I asked her whether I was right that what the others had said was indeed complete nonsense, and she confirmed that it was. So, I exasperatedly asked why she did not point this out in the meeting: she answered that, since she was not absolutely sure of the correct solution to the problem we had been discussing, she was unwilling to say anything, although she was absolutely sure that what our colleagues had been saying was total nonsense.
From which I conclude that the phenomena you are discussing has a cultural aspect. (It would not surprise me if younger Chinese have mastered the lesson my Chinese supervisor tried to teach me and have learned to compete with Americans in terms of faking knowledge they do not possess.)
Dave Miller in Sacramento
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by physicistdave
John Carter wrote:
>For libertarian conservatives, there is a chance to learn and grow about the issue, but only if they don’t use as their source blogs like this (and many others that are far worse) that continue to post clever philosophical musings to chip away at the basic idea of climate change…
Ummm….. John you have not actually been reading this blog, I take it?
When has Judith denied that climate change is real or that anthropogenic CO2 does produce a greenhouse effect?
Are you unaware that she, and many of the rest of us, have tried to point out the fallacies of, e.g., the “slaying the sky dragon” folks who try to deny those basic facts?
The issue that serious people here are trying to raise is that the global models have not been properly tested so that we can know whether anthropogenic global warming is likely to be a minor issue or a true catastrophe.
That is simply normal science: until a theory has been clearly and decisively tested, responsible scientists do not claim definitive results.
For example, to take the field in which I received my Ph.D., I, like most physicists, favored the standard model for the Higgs particle. But, until the Higgs was discovered at CERN, we knew it was a plausible theory, not established fact. And, Indeed, until we get more detailed studies on the Higgs, we have to remain open to the possibility that the discovered particle does not really behave quite the way our models assume.
Why do you think climate science should be any different?
Dave
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Joshua
How are the Salby and response to Gavin posts coming? Much progress?
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Joshua
Good point, steven. And indeed, my belief – that the cause of your amusing logic that I excerpted above is clearly the destruction of logical thinking and critical analysis as the result of progressive influence on K through Ph D. education – is certainly warranted. Well, either that or the monkeys flying out of your butt could have caused it – which is also a warranted belief.
And yes, AK – digging into a stated “warranted” belief in a singular cause for a broad-scale societal phenomenon (such as the supposed “destr[uction] of logical thinking and critical analysis) by asking for definitions and evidence is just nipticking.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by climatereason
Joshua
Were you a fox terrier in a previous life?
Mind you, its a good question. The clouds article gestated for some time but was worth waiting for, perhaps the items you (we) seek will be equally good.
tonyb
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Comment on Challenges to understanding the role of the ocean in climate science by Eric
So Bob, you deny any climate change. Your subjective view is every thing is as it has been.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by AK
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by AK
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Fernando Leanme
I’ve been using the relative humidity outputs from a 54 climate model ensemble, and the results show global warming causes giant snowflakes. This in turn leads to more vehicle accidents because a giant snowflake can drop a huge amount of ice crystals on a windshield. This factor seems to be worsened if the vehicle is one of those super aerodynamic electric battery driven gizmos (the lower turbulence factor allows the giant snowflakes to stay in one piece until they splatter and cause the accident). A new paper is in the works.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Fernando Leanme
This “talking non sense” issue can be a serious problem if nobody dares raise their voice and object to this nonsense. Very educated PhDs require specific orders and questioning during meetings to avoid having the whole team take a trip to Abylene:
http://www.executiveagenda.com/resources/abileneparadoxsummary1.pdf
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Comment on Week in review by D o u g C o t t o n
Not a word of physics in the above two comments of Rob Ellison – a typical response from Climatology Carbonland where personal attack is considered the best line of defence. In other words he has no legal move to get his king out of check. So Checkmate.
Oh, and he never could answer the questions about Venus and Uranus,or produce a study showing water vapour warms rather than cools. So he doesn’t qualify for the $5,000 reward I’ve offered.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by John Smith (it's my real name)
is observed climate change due to natural variation or human activity?
for heaven’s sake
human activity is a natural variation
(unless you believe in heaven, then we have a problem)
let’s prove that without human activity the climate would be more stable
let’s prove that if there were only women, and no men, there would be no war
let’s prove that without Australia, there would be no ‘roo
is the observed increase in CO2 in the atmosphere causing changes in climate distinguishable from historical variation?
good question
conclusion from current observation
no
transubstantiation … always a fun fight
never gets old
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Comment on Week in review by D o u g C o t t o n
Rhyzotika: I haven’t been allowed to write on Roger’s TB blog for a couple of years because I’m seen as a competitor of theirs in the race to explain the gravito-thermal effect. Well I’ve won that with my book, but they don’y know that because they would not deign to read such. (Let me know if I’m wrong about that.) WIlde really doesn’t understand thermodynamics and so he has invented a wild hypothesis about upwards and downward moving pockets of air in his struggle to explain what is only vaguely like the “heat creep” process in my book. Let me know if they write more about it all and I’ll perhaps have my new website up by then and respond to all such posts that stray from valid physics.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by JeffN
He’s answering. Silence is loud.
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Michael
Tom,
Just so delicious!
In this thread partly on Prof David Dunning’s work, Tom lectures Prof Dunning about his field of expertise – a Prof of 30 years research experience.
Could you make this up?
Surely it’s self-parody??
No one could be so obliviously thick, could they?
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Michael
Matthew R Marler | November 13, 2014 at 8:17 pm |
“…and there is no reason to believe it applies to changes in the upcoming decades as CO2 concentration increases toward 700 ppm.”
Are there good reasons to believe it doesn’t?
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by Bad Andrew
“ganging together and just inventing sensitivities for some self-interested political or financial motive”
This is human nature.
Andrew
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Comment on We are all confident idiots by jim2
First, let me thank you for the reference to the book on decoherence.
WRT BS, it does happen in some companies, but the degree depends a lot on corporate culture. It’s far more productive and fun when BS isn’t tolerated.
You seem to have painted with an overly broad brush.
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