North Korea 'may not be performance art', say experts

python-spanish-inq A classic from the Daily Mash:

NORTH Korea is not an elaborate modern art installation, as previously suspected. As the tiny nation seemed to be genuinely threatening the United States with a nuclear strike, experts said it was now likely that Kim Jong Un and his late father are not ground-breaking surrealists in the mould of Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Anne Widdecombe.

Well, I liked it. Since I'm here: I haven't written on the Lewandowsky stuff before (I just copied someone else, mainly because I liked the cartoon) but it seems to have been getting sillier. mt seems to have it about right.

Continuing with the misc: Tamino demonstrates almost convincingly that we would have seen a 20th-century-a-like spike, had their been such a spike, in the dim and distant past in the Marcott et al. proxy reconstruction. I don't think its done quite right but its right enough to get the conclusion right. And, as usual, it exposes the idiots who assert the reverse based on no evidence at all.

And to end, I'll slavishly copy mt by slavishly pointing to KK on nukes.

Refs

* Iran Kicks America In The Nuts
* (Black) cat's entertainment
* History Licking Its Chops To Judge George W. Bush (h/t Eli)

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You know you , Tamino, the likes of Eli Rabbet and all those other pathetic stupid , oh so witty and side splittingly funny names, are beginning to fray at your edges, as the unravelling starts in earnest.

This is gonna get real good-thanks

By Lawrence jenkins (not verified) on 04 Apr 2013 #permalink

Wanna bet?

By Eli Rabett (not verified) on 04 Apr 2013 #permalink

Eli, I'll bet he doesn't

By Quiet Waters (not verified) on 05 Apr 2013 #permalink

Re Lewandowsky, I'm not sure that MT does get it quite right, especially with the comments he included. He has raised some interesting points as usual. (I added some of my own to his article. )

It will be interesting how it plays out.

Ethics in the new internet era. Do we even know yet if the issue is one of ethics or one of 'accuracy'? The blogosphere is full of conspiracies. Which one to believe?

Lewandowsky is one of those cases where I feel like the conclusion is probably correct, but I'm unsure whether the methodology is any good. Not that I've spent much time actually reading the papers, because I don't particular like that genre of social-science-writing to begin with, so I might be biased. But if I had been them, rather than descending into the depths of comments in blogs (and comments everywhere are notoriously bad) I would have stuck to what the blog-owner approves as a top-level post or what is actually published.

I think a great example of paranoia comes from the originally released draft of D'Aleo and Watts:

"Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.”

Or one could look at that great and noble blogger, Steven Goddard, who believes that Obama was born in Kenya and that mass shootings are filmed by the government.

But I would also say that there is occasional paranoid-type proclamations from the side of the angels, often when discussing the role of evil oil money. I think people on both sides underestimate the power of confirmation bias and ideology, such that you don't have to create an actual conspiracy in order to have coordinated actions (whether that coordinated action is piling on Marcott et al. or whether it is lobbying to kick an editor off a journal). Now, my opinion is that the "conspiracies" on the contrarian side are pitiful and dumb, whereas the ones on the "warmist" side are understandable and justified...