Tim DeRoche

Is global warming responsible for the California drought?

There’s no way to no for sure, but Judith Curry examines the case and finds it flimsy.

It’s very easy to imagine an advocate – on either side – using this event to fear monger – either about global warming or government intervention.  So the burden of proof is high.

I briefly entered into the World of Water a few years ago, when I looked at water-saving technologies for a large landscaping company.  What became clear immediately is that we’re all paying a lot less for water than it actually costs.  Many farmers, in particular, have access to heavily subsidized water.  But residential and commercial consumers also get their water at a reduced rate.

If the government is fixing prices, then it’s going to be extremely difficult to get an accurate read on supply and demand.  And fixing prices is one easy way to generate shortages.

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“Neuroscience will become something that is apprehensible to ordinary people”

So says the recently deceased Sherwin Nuland in an episode of On Being.

He says that, initially, the general public turned away from genetics.  But “bit by bit people began to understand DNA.”

I’m not sure how well most people understand DNA.  I presume most people have some vague understanding that DNA is somehow linked to all that stuff we inherit from our parents.  But how many people understand the DNA codes for proteins?  Or that it consists of a paired code?  Or even that it resides in the nucleus of our cells?

Neuroscience seems even more difficult to understand on an intuitive level.  Will we ever understand how our brains work?  Even if we believe – rationally – that our everyday experiences have a basis in the biology of our brains, won’t the connection between the two remain inscrutable?  Even for those of us who can draw realistic pictures of the human brain and rattle of the names of multiple neurotransmitters, won’t it always seem magical to be alive and conscious?

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“I am always disappointed by the media coverage on my research area.”

Faye Flam gets upset that some obviously conceptual charts are not labelled as such in a post at Poynter.

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I have no problem with conceptual graphs like this, though it’s probably a best practice to label them as such.

This one is useful because it tries to articulate the varied incentives of scientists, journalists, and readers.  What’s most amusing is that the chart reveals several key assumptions of the Swedish physicist Sabine Hossenfelder who created it:

1.  The optimal amount of “accuracy” wanted by readers is 0!

2.  Both scientists and journalists are willing to sacrifice accuracy in order to get press attention.  Scientists – of course – have the purest motives of anyone depicted on the graph, showing a greater willingness to sacrifice readers for greater accuracy.

3.  There’s an inverse correlation between accuracy and readership.  As Flam notes, there are probably lots of cases in which there isn’t such a straightforward trade-off between these two variables.  This relationship could vary by scientific field, by type of study, by type of media outlet…or even by the skill level of the science writer.

4.  If we’re letting the scientist define accuracy, then it’s likely going to reflect whatever concerns they have about getting funding or scoring points against the folks who disagree with them.

 

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“Compelling evidence that labor markets are pretty tight”

Evan Soltas has a great post showing that employees are quitting their jobs more frequently than you would expect, if the labor market is as tepid as some of us think.Image

I’ve been extremely skeptical that the unemployment rate is a good measure of the health of the labor market, since it doesn’t take into account those who’ve given up looking for work or just stopped working. See Calculated Risk’s posts on the labor force participation rate vs. the unemployment rate.

But Soltas makes a good case – based on the quitting rate – that my (and his) skepticism was possibly misplaced:

“If the long-term unemployed are disconnected from the labor market, they really can’t matter much in a macroeconomic sense — that is, their unemployment no longer has the power to restrain wage growth or discourage the employed from quitting and switching jobs.”

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“When to shoot down… bad work and when to ignore it.”

Andrew Gelman recounts a call he got from a journalist about a pretty shoddy looking study, examines the dilemma that journalists face in deciding what to write about, and then nicely ties this to the dilemma that editors face in deciding what studies to publish:

“The problem, as I see it, is when a claim presented with (essentially) no evidence is taken as truth and then treated as a stylized fact. And the norms of scientific publication, as well as the norms of science journalism, push toward this. If you act too uncertain in your scientific report, I think it becomes harder to get it published in a top journal (after all, they want to present ‘discoveries,’ not ‘speculations’). And science journalism often seems to follow the researcher-as-Galileo mold.”

How many journalists call up a respected skeptical scientist to get a take on a potential story before writing the story?  How many ignore the skeptic because it takes the fun or the fear out of the story?

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White noise machines cause deafness. Or not.

In Slate, Melissa Wenner Moyer takes a closer look at a study of infant sound machines that generated lots of scary headlines.

It turns out that turning up one of these machines to maximum volume and then placing it a foot from your baby’s eardrum might possibly exceed some noise threshold that was established for a completely different purpose.

But please click on our scary news story!  

“Infant sleep machines can cause noise-induced deafness – Study”

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Neuroreductionism: “the tendency to perceive human experiences as valid or genuine only when they can be linked to measurable brain activity”

In Reason, Stanton Peele is skeptical that brain studies can tell us much about the nature of addiction: “Addiction is a specific involvement a person forms in a particular period in his life. Nothing more scientific can be said than that.”

I once heard a scientist – can’t remember who – say that interpreting brain-imaging scans is like looking down from an airplane at night and trying to figure out what people are talking about in their living rooms by interpreting the pattern of the lights.

 

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