Debunking « Quotulatiousness

July 28, 2011

Penn and Teller talk about their new TV show

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: Debunking, PennAndTeller, TV — Nicholas @ 12:29

Erik Amaya reports on the duo’s latest show, Penn & Teller Tell a Lie:

“We kind of forced Showtime into doing a show about science and reality,” admitted Penn Jillette, the more outspoken half of the duo. “We did get to have naked people and we did get to say profanity. I am one of the only people who does not own a motorcycle who has said ‘motherfucker’ enough.”

After referring to their new home as “The Disco Channel,” Jillette mentioned that the cable network was “more interested in science.” Unlike Bullshit, the performer hopes Tell a Lie will take a more pointed view of both science and objective reality. He then outlined the format: “We’re doing six packages, most of them [featuring] us. One of those stories will be a fake, a complete lie. [After each episode], the audience can go to discovery.com and vote on which is a lie.”

Teller clarified that segments within each episode will make certain claims. “We will claim that a single head of human hair can lift a Mustang,” he began. “We will claim that a wrecking ball can be stopped by special wallpaper. We’ll claim that you can put a person into a tank of live piranha and they will not kill him.”

“The person will be Teller,” Jillette interjected.

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April 23, 2011

QotD: The debunking problem in media

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: Debunking, Fraud, JunkScience, Newspapers, ReplicationCrisis, TV — Nicholas @ 12:23

[. . .] the second issue is how people find out about stuff. We exist in a blizzard of information, and stuff goes missing: as we saw recently, research shows that people don’t even hear about retractions of outright fraudulent work. Publishing a follow-up in the same venue that made an initial claim is one way of addressing this problem (and when the journal Science rejected the replication paper, even they said “your results would be better received and appreciated by the audience of the journal where the Daryl Bem research was published”).

The same can be said for the New York Times, who ran a nice long piece on the original precognition finding, New Scientist who covered it twice, the Guardian who joined in online, the Telegraph who wrote about it three times over, New York Magazine, and so on.

It’s hard to picture many of these outlets giving equal prominence to the new negative findings that are now emerging, in the same way that newspapers so often fail to return to a debunked scare, or a not-guilty verdict after reporting the juicy witness statements.

All the most interesting problems around information today are about structure: how to cope with the overload, and find sense in the data. For some eyecatching precognition research, this stuff probably doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that the information architectures of medicine, academia and popular culture are all broken in the exact same way.

Ben Goldacre, “I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem”, Bad Science, 2011-04-23

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March 4, 2011

A model of how government pension schemes work

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: Debt, Debunking, Pensions, SocialSecurity — Nicholas @ 12:04

It’s all so immense that it’s hard to understand, so Karl Denninger reduces it to an easy-to-comprehend model:

Let’s start with the model but take it into the real world. We’ll use you and I.

You set up a business. I’m a “trustworthy guy.” You have employee who you wish to provide a pension.

So every week when you pay them, you take out $100 from their paycheck. You have 10 employees (including yourself) and you come to me with your $1,000 every week and give it to me. I take it.

But instead of sticking it in an account somewhere with your name on it (as a trustee would) I instead give you a piece of paper. It says I owe you $1,000. But it’s not a debt security. You cannot negotiate it like a check, nor can you sell it to anyone else — it’s only valid if you bring it back to me. It says so right on the face. I promise that if you bring it back I’ll give you the $1,000.

Here’s the problem — as soon as you leave I call up my 10 stripper friends and the local liquor store and throw a party. Guess what I use for the money? Your $1,000.

Now here’s the rub — I don’t have any other money. At all.

In fact, I’m in hock up to my neck. I earn $100,000 a year but I spend $170,000. And how do I do this? Well, among other things I have people like you giving me money to “save.” I also have a bunch of credit cards, and everyone thinks I’m a great guy — kind of like an uncle (just call me “Sam”) and so they keep raising my credit limit.

It’s a wonderful life, isn’t it?

Well, maybe for a while.

But there is a problem with this model. First, this isn’t a “Trust.” A Trust can hold funds for someone, and can even invest them in something, but the funds cannot be converted to the trustee’s use. They must be held segregated and not inure to the benefit of the trustee. Further, the trustee must act solely in the best interest of the beneficiaries of the trust, not their own interest. That’s black-letter law.

Then there’s the second problem — I didn’t invest the money. I blew it, and all of the rest of my money.

One day you come and ask me to redeem one of your $1,000 IOUs. I don’t have any money, but I have a cash advance available on the credit card — or at least I think I do. So I go to the local bank and pull a $1,000 cash advance, giving you ten crisp $100 bills.

Notice what just happened: As soon as you showed up, your IOU, which in fact had no legal status as debt, had to be turned into actual debt at that point in time. Now there really is $1,000 in debt out there — it’s on the credit card.

This is exactly what happened with Social Security and Medicare since Reagan’s “reform” of the systems in the 1980s. Every single Administration since has taken all the money and immediately blown it. There is no money.

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January 21, 2011

Remaking Red Dawn as a metaphor for US fear of China

Filed under: China, Economics, Media, USA — Tags: Debt, Debunking, Movies, Newspapers, Statistics — Nicholas @ 12:59

David Harsanyi notes the remake of the 1980’s movie Red Dawn with the Chinese taking the place of the original film’s Soviet and Cuban troops:

Doubtlessly, the remake will be entertaining and offer a far more plausible plot line than the original — seeing that the Chinese, well, they have a proper army. Producers will almost certainly capitalize on a growing alarmism regarding China’s growth. Few issues, in fact, can bring right and left together in this polarized world of ours than a shared knowledge that China is bad news.

Now, the American populace can typically be divided into two categories: 1. Those who don’t care one whit about foreign policy. 2. Newspaper editors.

So before Chinese President Hu Jintao was here meeting with the president, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal and explained what we think about the topic.

Apparently, 47 percent of those he surveyed cited China as the world’s top economic power. (Only 31 percent properly identified it as the U.S., which has an economy nearly three times the size.) Another Pew survey from last year found that 47 percent of us consider China’s growth a “bad thing” for the United States. A new CNN poll found that 58 percent of us believe that China’s “wealth and economic power” are a threat to the U.S.

I’m certain our relationship with China is layered with international complexity and fraught with danger. But why would we fear the aspects of China’s ascendancy — its “wealth and economic power” — that pose the least threat to United States? Unlike ideological clashes, economic competition can be mutually beneficial. A country with real economic wealth is typically free and doesn’t look kindly on radical behavior. Suicide bombers rarely drive top-of-the-line BMWs.

I have a long history of doubting the stated size and growth of the Chinese economy and therefore feeling that the “threat” they pose is overstated. Overall, the economic growth in China is a good thing, both for China and for the world economy, but there’s still too much malignancy from the “bad old days” of the command economy that haven’t been properly dealt with. China is big, and getting bigger, but will face severe problems the longer these historical artifacts remain unexamined and unresolved.

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January 20, 2011

In case you weren’t worried enough about the rise of China

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: Debt, Debunking, Newspapers, TV — Nicholas @ 16:23

The Wall Street Journal rounds up the leading indicators of the current “USA sliding down the ladder” worries:

Of all the differences between dictatorship and democracy, probably none is so overlooked as the ability of the former to project strength, and the penchant of the latter to obsess about its own weakness.

In 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik and the U.S. went into a paroxysm of nerves about our supposed backwardness in matters ballistic. Throughout the 1980s Americans lived with “Japan as Number One” (the title of a book by Harvard professor Ezra Vogel, though the literature was extensive) and wondered whether Mitsubishi’s purchase of Rockefeller Center qualified as a threat to American sovereignty.

Now there’s China, whose President is visiting the U.S. this week amid a new bout of American hypochondria. In an op-ed last week in these pages, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center noted that a plurality of Americans, 47%, are under the erroneous impression that China is the world’s leading economy. News reports regarding Chinese military strides, or the academic prowess of Shanghai high school students, contribute to Western perceptions of Chinese ascendancy. So does the false notion that Beijing’s holdings of U.S. debt amounts to a sword of Damocles over Washington’s head.

Oh, we nearly forgot: Tough-as-nails Chinese mothers are raising child prodigies (a billion of them!) while their Western counterparts indulge their kids with lessons in finger-painting.

There you go, more than enough to keep you up late tonight worrying about the inevitability of China’s rise to top economic dog in the pack. Of course, most of it is misinterpretation of the facts, but you can worry about it if you want.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

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October 25, 2010

Amity Schlaes’ (condensed) The Forgotten Man

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Politics, USA — Tags: Debt, Debunking, FDR, GreatDepression, HerbertHoover, Jobs — Nicholas @ 13:07

An article encapsulating some of the key points of Amity Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man in PDF form:

We all know the traditional narrative of that event: The stock market crash generated an economic Katrina. One in four was unemployed in the first few years. It resulted from a combination of monetary, banking, credit, international, and consumer confidence factors. The terrible thing about it was the duration of a high level of unemployment, which averaged in the mid teens for the entire decade.

The second thing we usually learn is that the Depression was mysterious — a problem that only experts with doctorates could solve. That is why FDR’s floating advisory group — Felix Frankfurter, Frances Perkins, George Warren, Marriner Eccles and Adolf Berle, among others — was sometimes known as a Brain Trust. The mystery had something to do with a shortage of money, we are told, and in the end, only a Brain Trust’s tinkering with the money supply saved us. The corollary to this view is that the government knows more than American business does about economics.

Another common presumption is that cleaning up Wall Street and getting rid of white-collar criminals helped the nation recover. A second is that property rights may still have mattered during the 1930s, but that they mattered less than government-created jobs, shoring up home-owners, and getting the money supply right. A third is that American democracy was threatened by the rise of a potential plutocracy, and that the Wagner Act of 1935 — which lent federal support to labor unions — was thus necessary and proper. Fourth and finally, the traditional view of the 1930s is that action by the government was good, whereas inaction would have been fatal. The economic crisis mandated any kind of action, no matter how far removed it might be from sound monetary policy. Along these lines the humorist Will Rogers wrote in 1933 that if Franklin Roosevelt had “burned down the capital, we would cheer and say, ‘Well at least we got a fire started, anyhow.’”

To put this official version of the 1930s in terms of the Monopoly board: The American economy was failing because there were too many top hats lording it about on the board, trying to establish a plutocracy, and because there was no bank to hand out money. Under FDR, the federal government became the bank and pulled America back to economic health.

When you go to research the 1930s, however, you find a different story. It is of course true that the early part of the Depression — the years upon which most economists have focused — was an economic Katrina. And a number of New
Deal measures provided lasting benefits for the economy. These include the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the push for free trade led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the establishment of the modern mortgage format. But the remaining evidence contradicts the official narrative. Overall, it
can be said, government prevented recovery. Herbert Hoover was too active, not too passive — as the old stereotypes suggest — while Roosevelt and his New Deal policies impeded recovery as well, especially during the latter half of the decade.

H/T to Monty for the link.

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November 11, 2009

Why would he do this?

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Criticism, Debunking, Paranoia, Secrecy — Nicholas @ 18:05

My best guess is for two reasons: 1) He can. 2) It drives the opposition batshit insane:

The president who campaigned for a more “open government” and “full disclosure” will not unseal his medical records, his school records, his birth records or his passport records. He will not release his Harvard records, his Columbia College records, or his Occidental College records — he will not even release his Columbia College thesis. All his legislative records from the Illinois State Senate are missing and he claims his scheduling records during those State Senate years are lost as well. In addition, no one can find his school records for the elite K-12 college prep school, Punahou School, he attended in Hawaii.

The whacky public image of the “Birthers” continues to do much damage to more rational criticism of Barack Obama’s administration. Whether there is “fire” to go along with all the breathlessly described “smoke”, it’s taking lots of attention away from the actual policies and actions of the current president, and tarring-by-association those who do criticize. That’s enough of a political win that Obama would be very foolish to do anything to calm them down by releasing these documents.

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