Quotulatiousness

November 24, 2019

Next stage in religious observance for those participating in the “Great Environmental Awakening”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn discusses the obvious next step for those newly converted to the Environmentalist religion:

To quote a line from America Alone: “The future belongs to those who show up.” And, while eugenics is universally condemned as morally repugnant, self-eugenics is an idea we can all get behind. Step forward the “Indefinitely Wild” columnist of Outside magazine, Wes Siler:

    I Got a Vasectomy Because of Climate Change
    Getting one was, by far, the most powerful personal action I could take for our planet

Mr Siler claims to be 38 years old, notwithstanding the prose style of an overwrought pre-pubescent. And he cannot stand idly by procreating while the planet burns. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his sperm for the remnants of Malibu […]

In fact, “the absolute biggest difference” you could make would be to kill yourself right now — rather than merely tossing your unborn children into the infernos of California. Alas, the self-extinction movement has not yet reached that stage of despair, although we should certainly encourage them to follow the necessary logic of their epocalyptic torments. For the moment (and, again, as I wrote in America Alone) contemporary progressivism has “adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion”.

As you might have noticed, there aren’t a lot of Shakers around today. Will there be a lot of anguished environmentalists around once every Wes Siler reader has had his scrotum anesthetized?

No. But at least they’ll have saved the planet, right?

Doubtful. Mr Siler notes that every little baby Siler comes with a price tag of 58 tons of carbon emissions per year. But that’s because he’s American. Mr and Mrs Siler could move to Somalia and have thirty kids for the carbon footprint of one Yank moppet. So why are the same people who lecture us that we only have twelve years to save the planet in favor of every Somali moving to Maine or Minnesota and acquiring a western-sized carbon payload?

November 22, 2019

To think we used to joke about environmentalism as a substitute religion…

Filed under: Environment, Politics, Religion, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

… it’s long since stopped being a joke and become all but the state religion, as Barbara Kay notes on the tenth anniversary of “climategate”:

Rayne pointed out that a cursory perusal of the Environment Canada Adjusted and Homogenized Canadian Climate Data database would illustrate that the daily summer maximum temperatures in Toronto showed no upward trend whatsoever. She further noted that a database for the WMO-certified Pearson Airport site demonstrated there was “absolutely no temporal correlation” for extreme July or August maximum temperatures between 1938 (when the database was initiated) and 2012.

In fact, there was no source in Canada then — and still isn’t — from which CAP could have plucked that ludicrous figure. University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick had at that time just created his invaluable site, yourenvironment.ca, which sets out a complete temporal record of officially recorded air and pollution levels everywhere in Canada. The data for the site is culled from provincial environment and natural resources ministries, or from Environment Canada. Over many decades, no matter where you look in Canada, the graph trends remain resolutely horizontal with tiny upward and downward spikes indicating extreme weather blips.

Every layperson who identifies as an alarmism skeptic has his or her own pivotal moment, and that idiotic “news” story in the Globe was mine. When reporters and editors act like deer in the headlights in the reception and dissemination of demonstrably impossible “information,” it’s clear evidence that they have been gripped by a socially contagious virus. These are the people who in the 19th century would have believed tulip bulb prices were never going to peak, even if every single family on the planet had enough tulip bulbs to fill a half-acre garden.

The late writer Michael Crichton, author of the best-selling 2004 techno-thriller, State of Alarm, was one of the first independent students of environmentalism to define environmentalism as a “religion,” and to observe that its principal characteristic was to cater to the state of alarm he believed is an inherent human need. Its dogmatists act as though they have been appointed Morals Police. And they do not take kindly to dissent.

Al Gore, whose 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth was received with uncritical awe, (one of my friends, normally very brainy, described it as a “religious experience”) was later found by a UK court to contain “nine key scientific errors.” It was deemed rife with “serious scientific inaccuracies, political propaganda and sentimental mush” and the judge ruled that the “apocalyptic vision” presented made it not an impartial scientific analysis, but a “political film.” He continues to hector the world as though that never happened from the depths of a home whose electricity kilowatt hours exceed twenty times the national average.

In 2007, environmental guru David Suzuki stormed out of a Toronto radio station interview when the host suggested global warming was not yet a “totally settled issue.” The incident revealed the mindset of the enviro-ayatollahs. (We see its 16-year-old version in little Pied Piper leader of the Children’s Crusade Greta “how-dare-you” Thunberg.) Suzuki perceived the radio host as a blasphemer, unworthy of his rational rebuttal. Suzuki actually felt enviro-infidels should be literally suppressed, and even opined that politicians who aren’t on board with his views should go to prison. You’d think a guy that far down the rabbit hole would be minding his own enviro P’s and Q’s, but like Al Gore, his real estate portfolio is humongous and his carbon footprint immense.

August 23, 2019

Loving “science”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains the differences between how ordinary people view science and many progressives “f*cking love” science:

For the benefit of younger readers: If you think Lefties Fucking Love Science(TM) now, you have no idea of the torrid affair they carried on with it back when the USSR was still a going concern. Karl Marx, of course, pretended that his sub-Hegelian flatulence was the only truly scientific world view, and his disciples have been playing along ever since. “The facts have a liberal bias,” you’d routinely be informed, by people who spent $200 to have their chakras cleansed by a Navajo shaman once every two months.

I can’t think of a better illustration of what I call (for lack of a better term) the Left’s grammar problem. Lefties tend to get nouns and verbs mixed up. “Science,” for instance. I’m not going to go all Vox Day here and start making up words, but when normal people say “science,” we generally mean it as a verb:

    “Science” is what scientists do; it’s shorthand for “applying the scientific method.”

This is why, when we’re presented with a startling new find from the white coat guys — that the polar ice caps have all melted, say — we ask to see the lab work. If it’s really science, then we should be able to replicate the experiment ourselves. Or, at the very least, you should be able to show us the satellite photos…

Which nicely highlights the Left’s notion of “science.” To them, it’s a noun:

    “Science” is a fixed body of knowledge; upon which “scientists” operate the way theologians work on the Bible.

What “scientists” do in the Left’s world, then, is what normal people call “hermeneutics.” This is why the bizarre phrase “the science is settled!” makes sense to Leftists. You don’t get to see God’s lab work, after all, and you’re not allowed to make up new Scriptures. To them, an ordinary person challenging a “scientist” on a point of “science” is like a layman challenging the Pope on a point of theology.

July 21, 2019

The humble egg – wonder food or deadly poison?

Filed under: Food, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you’ve paid any attention to popular reporting on nutrition studies over the years, you’ll have noticed how just about any advice on food has not only changed, but has often been completely the opposite of advice offered just a few years earlier. During my teenage years, the egg was pushed (thanks in part to the “Egg Marketing Board”, one of Canada’s supply management bureaucracies) as “the perfect food”. During the next decade, as newer nutrition studies were published, suddenly the wonderful, nutritious egg was now a huge risk to your cardiovascular health and even one egg per week might be enough to kill you. Rinse and repeat for so many other foods and you either stop eating altogether or, more sensibly, stop paying any attention at all to mainstream media interpretations of nutrition studies.

It’s been a tortuous path for the humble egg. For much of our history, it was a staple of the American breakfast — as in, bacon and eggs. Then, starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it began to be disparaged as a dangerous source of artery-clogging cholesterol, a probable culprit behind Americans’ exceptionally high rates of heart attack and stroke. Then, in the past few years, the chicken egg was redeemed and once again touted as an excellent source of protein, unique antioxidants like lutein and zeaxanthin, and many vitamins and minerals, including riboflavin and selenium, all in a fairly low-calorie package.

This March, a study published in JAMA put the egg back on the hot seat. It found that the amount of cholesterol in a bit less than two large eggs a day was associated with an increase in a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease and death by 17 percent and 18 percent, respectively. The risks grow with every additional half egg. It was a really large study, too — with nearly 30,000 participants — which suggests it should be fairly reliable.

So which is it? Is the egg good or bad? And, while we are on the subject, when so much of what we are told about diet, health, and weight loss is inconsistent and contradictory, can we believe any of it?

Quite frankly, probably not. Nutrition research tends to be unreliable because nearly all of it is based on observational studies, which are imprecise, have no controls, and don’t follow an experimental method. As nutrition-research critics Edward Archer and Carl Lavie have put it, “‘Nutrition’ is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape.”

Other nutrition research critics, such as John Ioannidis of Stanford University, have been similarly scathing in their commentary. They point out that observational nutrition studies are essentially just surveys: Researchers ask a group of study participants — a cohort — what they eat and how often, then they track the cohort over time to see what, if any, health conditions the study participants develop.

H/T to Marina Fontaine for the link.

May 29, 2019

Trudeau’s Liberals consider running on “more taxes” platform for fall election

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Are you ready for more taxes? Justin Trudeau seems to think you are, and internal Liberal Party documents indicate that several “revenue enhancement” tools are among the ideas being considered for inclusion in the party’s election campaign:

Are you ready for a tax on pop?

That is what some Liberals want to run on in October’s election.

Well, that and a carbon tax, a plastic tax, a tax on selling your home and more.

When it comes to taxes, Liberal like them all.

Lest you think I’m picking on Liberals, this actually comes from an internal party document that was first reported by the Liberal-friendly CBC.

“Ontario Liberal MPs want to pitch voters on a “sugar sweetened beverages levy — more commonly known as a soda tax — in the coming federal election campaign,” reported CBC over the weekend.

The information came from a series of policy proposals put forward by Ontario Liberal MPs that were to be considered for both the budget earlier this year and as potential policies for the upcoming election.

“We have a problem with sugar sweetened beverages being too readily available at too low a price and it is massively contributing to the obesity epidemic,” Liberal MP Mark Holland wrote in support of the proposal.

The Liberals want a tax of 20% on any sugar sweetened beverage believing it could bring in an estimated $1.2 billion a year or $29.6 billion over 25 years and health-care savings of $7.3 billion over 25 years.

May 14, 2019

Bullshit in science

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

An older article by Brian D Earp looks at the problem of bullshit in scientific publications:

… if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

And it is with that in mind that I bring up the subject of bullshit.

There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science. When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks.

There are many ways to produce scientific bullshit. One way is to assert that something has been “proven,” “shown,” or “found” and then cite, in support of this assertion, a study that has actually been heavily critiqued (fairly and in good faith, let us say, although that is not always the case, as we soon shall see) without acknowledging any of the published criticisms of the study or otherwise grappling with its inherent limitations.

Another way is to refer to evidence as being of “high quality” simply because it comes from an in-principle relatively strong study design, like a randomized control trial, without checking the specific materials that were used in the study to confirm that they were fit for purpose. There is also the problem of taking data that were generated in one environment and applying them to a completely different environment (without showing, or in some cases even attempting to show, that the two environments are analogous in the right way). There are other examples I have explored in other contexts, and many of them are fairly well-known.

But there is one example I have only recently come across, and of which I have not yet seen any serious discussion. I am referring to a certain sustained, long-term publication strategy, apparently deliberately carried out (although motivations can be hard to pin down), that results in a stupefying, and in my view dangerous, paper-pile of scientific bullshit. It can be hard to detect, at first, with an untrained eye — you have to know your specific area of research extremely well to begin to see it — but once you do catch on, it becomes impossible to un-see.

May 13, 2019

QotD: The Church of Environmentalism

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Julian Simon, the economist who was legendarily skeptical about environmental doom, once posed a question at an environmental forum: “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Almost every hand shot up. He then said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” There was no response, so he asked again, “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Again, no response. Simon concluded, “Well, excuse me. I’m not dressed for church.”

Jeremy Carl, “The Church of Environmentalism”, Claremont Review of Books, 2016-02-25.

April 22, 2019

QotD: Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier

Filed under: France, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It was surprising how much I did not know about Lavoisier; and of how little importance it was. He is Saint George killing the dragon of Phlogiston in this account. Father of modern chemistry, &c. Student of heat and respiration; improver of gunpowder; hyper-efficient tax collector in the bureaucracy of the French Old Regime; academician; weekend geologist; dreamer in agriculture and economics; aristocratic gardener whose works around his Château de Frechines might plausibly be described as an experimental farm; social climber and assiduous self-promoter, whose fame could not hide him from the glinting blades of Robespierre.

A very clever man was our Lavoisier, the more charming the farther one got away from him (often I read between the lines); whose pleasure, once he took offices in the Arsenal at Paris, with a budget to do largely as he pleased, was to conduct violent experiments on anything that was lying around. His revolution in chemistry consisted of quantifying it all.

When a child, I had the evil of Phlogiston brought to my attention. It was, not from the Dark Ages as popularly supposed, but only from the end of the seventeenth century, the prevailing “settled science” on the combustible principle in the air, and other substances. It was pure theory, and surprisingly easy to kick over with a few methodical tests; notwithstanding the scientific establishment of the day kicked, screamed, and desperately resisted every attempt to displace it. Lavoisier (and Priestley in England) burnt or blew up one thing and another until Lavoisier had discovered and named Oxygen.

And so we advanced from Phlogiston to Oxygen, and incidentally to ascending in hot air balloons. Good show!

David Warren, “Phlogiston”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-05-31.

April 17, 2019

QotD: “[E]valuating food by its calorie count is like evaluating literature by the number of pages in a book”

Filed under: Food, Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… calorie-counting is an ineffective approach to eating. Calories are a crude metric that takes into account nothing about the properties of foods other than the total energy they contain. The value of activities can’t be reduced to a number, and nor can foods. Still calories are listed everywhere, enumerated in enormous fonts on food packaging and across menus and ads for packaged products with nothing to recommend them but a lack of calories.

A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.

That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.

Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.

James Hamblin, “It’s True, Hot Baths Burn Calories: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading”, The Atlantic, 2017-04-13.

March 24, 2019

Trust in scientific findings decreasing among the general public

Filed under: Education, Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Scientific American, Louise Lief discusses the problem of rising public distrust of science:

We live in a moment when preventable infectious diseases like measles are spreading because parents distrust vaccines, and scientists at government agencies are being told not to use terms like “evidence-based.” The president dismisses the findings of a National Climate Assessment by more than 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies that warns of massive economic and environmental damage totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, crop failures, disrupted supply chains and multiple threats to human health, saying, “I don’t believe it.”

But when I argued in favor of the proposition (Resolved: “Science writers are responsible for building public trust in science”) during a debate at the National Association of Science Writers’ 2018 annual conference last fall, the majority of science writers and science journalists present voted that building public trust in science was not the responsibility of science writers.

[…]

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication also tackled the science trust question at the NASW conference, and researchers at Cardiff University have traced credibility and accuracy problems to press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions.

If a problem is discovered or a study is retracted, said Jamieson, the scientist or scientific journal needs to explain to journalists and the public how the error was discovered, what the problem is, and what steps are being taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Scientists often make it hard for journalists to cover these three interrelated issues, she says. Scholarly journal publication protocols may cause scientists to write one article on the problem they’re investigating, and a second or third article on processes and solutions, resulting in coverage that emphasizes problems and shortchanges corrective action.

For their part, researchers at Cardiff University found that press releases from scientists’ own academic institutions about their work were a significant source of exaggerated claims and spin, even though most scientists can approve their wording.

Their study of press releases from 20 leading British universities on health-related science news found that when the press releases exaggerated, it was likely the news stories would too.

An analysis of 41 news articles on randomized controlled trials based on 70 press releases showed only four articles that contained exaggerated claims not included in the press release or journal abstract. Interestingly, they also found the hype and spin intended to tempt the media did not result in more news coverage.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

March 22, 2019

Debunking Stephen Jay Gould

Filed under: Books, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Several years back, I linked to a David Friedman post on a study that contradicted a key argument in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man. While I’ve read a few of his books, it’s been nearly 15 years since I last read anything by him … by now I only have a vague recollection of what he wrote, but his works were quite popular at the time. Much more recently Russell T. Warne looked at different problems in Gould’s work that are much more damaging to his reputation:

Stephen Jay Gould, the famous 20th century paleontologist, published his most celebrated work, The Mismeasure of Man, in 1981. Gould’s thesis is that throughout the history of science, prejudiced scientists studying human beings allowed their social beliefs to color their data collection and analysis. Gould believed that this confirmation bias was particularly powerful when a scientists’ beliefs were socially important to them. […] The Mismeasure of Man provides a great deal of evidence that scientists’ pre-existing beliefs color their judgment — but not in the way he intended. Rather, the book is a perfect example of the sin it purports to expose in others. Gould’s Marxist political beliefs made him attack intelligence research because he saw it as a threat to his egalitarian social goals. Ironically, it was this allegiance to ideology over data that made Gould himself a classic examplar of a biased scientist.

[…]

Most criticism of The Mismeasure of Man was confined to the recherché world of psychologists who study intelligence. However, a new debate opened up in 2011 when a team of anthropologists argued that Gould’s analysis of the data on cranium measurements from 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton was flawed. Gould cast Morton as a racist who fudged his data to match his beliefs about white racial superiority because of a supposed larger skull capacity. Instead, the anthropologists argued, it was Gould who manipulated the data to support his biases.

This ignited a series of follow-up articles in the scholarly literature by authors taking a variety of positions regarding Morton’s data and Gould’s interpretations. Weisberg believed that the re-analysis was flawed and Gould was mostly correct. Kaplan and his colleagues claimed that Morton’s interpretations were flawed, but that Gould was incorrect in believing that he could discern Morton’s actions and motivations. Finally, Mitchell believed that Morton’s data were accurate and that the interpretations were colored by the racism of the era, but the claim that Morton subtly manipulated the data was a fiction created by Gould.

Though still unresolved, the debate shows that a critical analysis of specific sections of The Mismeasure of Man is warranted. After writing an article about Lewis Terman, an important developer of early intelligence tests, I decided that a 23-page section of The Mismeasure of Man would be a valuable section of the book to analyze. This section is Gould’s description and analysis of the Army Beta test, one of the tests that Terman helped create. The Army Beta was used in World War I to screen illiterate recruits for military service.

Having read some of the primary scholarly work about the Army Beta, I knew that some of Gould’s claims were inaccurate. However, I was unprepared for the level of pervasive deception that I encountered when I carefully checked Gould’s claims against the historical record. Moreover, I discovered overwhelming evidence that any pretense of Gould being “objective” — even if defined as “fair treatment of data” — is a farce. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould elevates his biases to the status of uncontestable facts and to great lengths to hide the truth from his readers.

March 21, 2019

Remy: “Affluenflammation”

Filed under: Economics, History, Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ReasonTV
Published on 20 Mar 2019

When quality of life improved, doctors discover a new affliction.

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

A parody of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” written by Remy.

Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom
Video produced by Austin Bragg.

LYRICS

There’s a non-foregone phenomenon in any prosperous nation
When primal fears all disappear the brain then gets a sensation
The medical name we gave this pain is affluenflammation

Ol’ Bill Tub is chugging a jug of cold bovine lactation
When his eyes then realize that carton side’s got information
And since his life contains no strife it’s affluenflammation

For the better part of history diseases all were raging
Measles, mumps up on your junk like they were Kevin Spacey
Then came Jonas Salk
Makes you wonder what all for…

Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation

Ol’ Chip Black is cracking the back of twelve live-steamed crustaceans
For the perks and glee of living free he starts to lose appreciation
And if you probe his frontal lobe — yep — affluenflammation

Through the course of human history each day we faced starvation
Rats and pox and chamber pots, streets filled with defecation
Free markets changed the norm
Makes you wonder what all for…

Cuz we’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation
We’ve got affluenflammation

March 1, 2019

QotD: Toxic masculinity

Filed under: Health, Quotations, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thanks to the new guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) for practice with men and boys, male psychology is no longer a mystery and mental health professionals are now equipped with the tools they need to combat the worst forms of it. According to the APA, boys and men are at risk of suffering from traditional masculinity which is on the whole unhealthy. Turns out, the traditional masculinity that drives many of us men to be confident, assertive, adventurous, stoic, and willing to take risks for our goals, the people we love, and sometimes even complete strangers are bad for us and society.

Who knew?

Biologists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, parents, and really almost all regular folk have long believed that there are meaningful and biologically-based psychological differences between males and females. Fortunately for us mere mortals, the APA is setting the record straight. It is an oppressive patriarchy, not biology, that has shaped our psychology. Gender and the masculine traits associated with being male are social constructs. The APA obviously isn’t denying that evolution is true. They aren’t some kind of silly group of religious fundamentalists. But like most educated progressives, they understand that evolution stopped at the neck.

There is this odd group of evolutionary psychologists who seem hell-bent on holding onto antiquated views about human mental and social life. It seems pretty clear that these individuals are the academic wing of the alt-right. Don’t be fooled by surveys suggesting the majority of evolutionary psychologists self-identify as liberal. We can’t trust people to self-report their own politics. Only the most enlightened are in a position to tell everyone else what they really think. I would laugh at how ridiculous the academics are who continue to insist that males and females are distinct in any meaningful way, but I now know that comedy is a form of oppression.

Perhaps the saddest part of reading the new APA guidelines is realizing just how many American boys and men suffer from traditional masculinity and don’t even realize it, and how many mothers and wives tolerate and even promote this sickness. There are millions of couples and families across the United States who are living lives imprisoned by traditional gender roles and on the surface appear to be happy and flourishing. I especially feel for all the conservatives and devout Christians who are most vulnerable to this illness. It doesn’t help when alt-right institutions such as Harvard publish research suggesting that children may benefit from being raised in such traditionally religious homes.

Clay Routledge, “Thank you, APA”, Quillette, 2019-01-22.

February 23, 2019

How a statistical error became the key argument in the “everyone must turn vegan” movement

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Conversation, Frank M. Mitloehner explains how a flawed statistic — comparing numbers derived from non-parallel bases — evolved into one of the most widely quoted arguments for governments forcing people to give up meat in their diet:

As the scale and impacts of climate change become increasingly alarming, meat is a popular target for action. Advocates urge the public to eat less meat to save the environment. Some activists have called for taxing meat to reduce consumption of it.

A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change.

[…]

Global livestock production by region (milk and eggs expressed in protein terms).
Source: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Setting the record straight on meat and greenhouse gases
A healthy portion of meat’s bad rap centers on the assertion that livestock is the largest source of greenhouse gases worldwide. For example, a 2009 analysis published by the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute asserted that 51 percent of global GHG emissions come from rearing and processing livestock.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the largest sources of U.S. GHG emissions in 2016 were electricity production (28 percent of total emissions), transportation (28 percent) and industry (22 percent). All of agriculture accounted for a total of 9 percent. All of animal agriculture contributes less than half of this amount, representing 3.9 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That’s very different from claiming livestock represents as much or more than transportation.

Why the misconception? In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a study titled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which received widespread international attention. It stated that livestock produced a staggering 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The agency drew a startling conclusion: Livestock was doing more to harm the climate than all modes of transportation combined.

This latter claim was wrong, and has since been corrected by Henning Steinfeld, the report’s senior author. The problem was that FAO analysts used a comprehensive life-cycle assessment to study the climate impact of livestock, but a different method when they analyzed transportation.

For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.

However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted.

February 19, 2019

Judging a book by its cover (or people by their appearance)

Filed under: Books, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reviews How to Judge People by What They Look Like, by Edward Dutton:

This short book is equally naughty and entertaining. It bounces along, making its points in a light-hearted and generally a witty manner. It is naughty so far as it is a flat challenge to many of the pieties of our age.

We are told never to judge a book by its cover — that the substance of a person, this being character and intelligence, have no measurable relationship to his external form, this being his physical appearance. At the extreme, of looking at correlations between race and intelligence, you can get into serious trouble for disputing this piety. Even moderate dissent earns hostility or just ridicule. Look, for example, at the relevant textbooks. The phlogiston theory is covered as an early theory of combustion, superseded by the truth. Phrenology is denounced as barely short of a moral and intellectual failing. No one thinks ill of Lamarck for this theory of inherited characteristics. Lombroso and his measurement of criminal heads are seen as steps on the road to Auschwitz.

The author of this book takes aim at every one of these pieties. He begins with the easy targets. Within ethnic groups, he goes over the increasingly rehabilitated claim that intelligence is largely inherited — about 80 per cent. He adds the other increasingly rehabilitated claim that there are differences of average intelligence between groups—that the peaks of each distribution curve occur at different points along the scale.

[…]

Now, what follows from all this? The answer is that all truth is important — so far as this is the truth; and I do lack the statistical grounding and the time or inclination to check the author’s scholarship. Even when a particular truth has no practical value, a regard for truth is a generally useful prejudice. But there are certain conclusions that appear to follow.

First, there is has been a progressively greater diversity of external form since the industrial revolution. The stated reason for this is that the harsh conditions of a traditional society, in which about 40 per cent of children died, and the higher classes had more surviving offspring, created a strong bias towards the survival of the intelligent and conscientious. Since then, the fall of infant mortality towards zero has thrown this process into reverse. That may explain the growing fall in genius or just high intellectual quality as a fraction of modern populations. It may also explain the decay — and the author says nothing of this — of free institutions, and their replacement by less complex and more maternal forms of government. Old England was free because its people were capable of being free. Modern England is unfree because the people have changed.

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