Giddy Up 409

Baby you're much too fast

    -Prince (Little Red Corvette)

But life is just a party
And parties weren't meant to last

     -Prince (1999)

Greetings

     I hope you are enjoying the recent spate of warm weather.  If it hits 85 in April, what does August hold in store? 

     Well, at least it gets your mind off the political campaign.  Here's some fun facts. from here

"According to Media Matters, there have been a whopping 1,477 questions asked during the 20 Republican and Democratic debates so far. Just 22 of those questions—or about 1.5 percent—have been about climate change. Nine of the debates, including one that took place four days after the historic Paris climate agreement, included no global warming questions whatsoever.  

      Perhaps  this whole climate deal has settled down?    Well... not really.   It seems that things are actually moving faster than anticipated.    The UN reports that the future is happening now, as 60 million are affected by climate disruptions including droughts, and floods..

       Recently the Keeling curve hit a record 409.     Temperature records are indicating that we may alredy be hitting 1.5 degrees above pre industrial temperatures.  see here

 "February was also notably far above the long-term average, enough so that scientists described that month as a "shocker," as well as it being "a kind of climate emergency." Then, on the heels of February, the Japan Meteorological Agency released data showing that March was even hotter. NASA data confirms this increase, and also shows that March was 1.65 degrees Celsius higher than the 1951-1980 March average, while February was 1.71 degrees Celsius hotter than the February average over that time period."

(1.5 is believed to be sufficient to begin the process of melting permafrost, releasing tons of frozen carbon and methane.  see here )

      Meanwhile up north, its hotter than ever.  

 Image source: CIRES.)

As Robert Scribbler reports:

"From just about every indicator, we find that the Arctic sea ice is being hit by heat like never before. And the disturbing precipitous early season losses we now see in combination with the excessive, extreme warmth and melt accelerating weather patterns are likely to continue to reinforce a trend of record losses. Such low sea ice measures will also tend to wrench weather patterns around the globe — providing zones for extreme heatwaves and droughts along the ridge lines and related warm wind invasions of the Arctic that will tend to develop all while generating risk of record precipitation events in the trough zones. To this point, the North American West is again setting up for just such a zonal heatwave pattern. Extreme heat building up in India and Southeast Asia also appears to be following a similar northward advance."

For an interesting review of the impacts of an ice free arctic, see here

Speaking of melting ice, I recently saw a video of James Hanson explaining a new paper he and 18 co-authors published.  It cane be seen here/

     Here's  a transcript.     Here's how it starts:

"Hi, I’m Jim Hansen, Director of the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions program at Columbia University Earth Institute. I want to discuss some implications of the paper Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise and Superstorms that is being published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, a paper on which I have 18 exceptional American and international co-authors.

We have uncovered information and a partial understanding of feedbacks in the climate system, specifically interactions between the ocean and the ice sheets. These feedbacks raise questions about how soon we will pass points of no return, in which we lock in consequences that cannot be reversed on any time scale that people care about.

Consequences include sea level rise of several meters, which we estimate would occur this century or at latest next century, if fossil fuel emissions continue at a high level. That would mean loss of all coastal cities, most of the world’s large cities and all their history.

A more immediate threat is the likelihood of shutting down the oceans overturning circulations in the North Atlantic and Southern oceans. That’s where superstorms come in.  Let me explain."

Here is the paper by Hanson et al

         So, why is the issue all but ignored by the media and politicians?   Perhaps the Hanson video provides the answer.  Listen as he patiently tries to explain the multiple interacting factors ; and the evidence from deep history.  Then take a look at this   Why we can't understand global warming .   Previous issues have been simple in terms of cause and effect. CFC's destroys ozone, tobacco causes cancer, DDT softens egg shells  -   but to understand climate change , you have to be able to deal with multiple causes, effects,  and  feedbacks.  You have to see the system.    

     "Any application or force to something or someone that produces an immediate change to that thing or person is direct causation: When causation is direct, the world cause is unproblematic. We learn direct causation automatically as children because that's what we experience on a daily basis. Direct causation, and the control over our immediate environment that understanding it allows, is crucial in the life of every child. That's why it shows up in the grammar of every language.

The same is not true for systemic causation. Systemic causation cannot be experienced directly. It has to be learned, its cases have to be studied, and repeated communication is necessary before it can be widely understood.

That's right, no language in the world has a way in its grammar to express systemic causation. You drill a lot more oil, burn a lot more gas, put a lot more CO2 in the air, the earth's atmosphere heats up, more moisture evaporates from the oceans yielding bigger storms in certain places and more drought and fires in other places, and yes, more cold and snow in still other places. The world ecology is a system - like the world economy and the human brain.

As a result, we lack a concept that we desperately need. We need to understand and communicate, for instance, about the greatest moral issue of our times - global warming. The ecology is a system operating via system causation. Without an everyday concept of system causation, global warming cannot be properly comprehended. In other words, without the systemic causation frame, the oft-repeated facts about global warming cannot make sense. With only the direct causation frame, the systemic causation facts of global warming are ignored. The old frame stays, and the facts that don't fit cannot be comprehended."

This is Your Brain On Politics

A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

-Buffalo Springfield

So their minds are soft and lazy
Well who do, who do, who do you wanna blame?

Hey, hey, give 'em what they want

   - 10,000 Maniacs

Greetings 

       One of the big features of "The Enlightenment" is that we could , through rational discourse, "reason together" to come up with appropriate measures to deal with problems.   

   Therefore, no matter what problem, the answer is "more information" -   How many times have you heard "They wouldn't believe X, if they just had the facts!"

     Other - more cynical folks have asserts that we use of "rational-ity" mainly to "rational -ize" - that is to support an already held view .

     Happily, scientists have studied the question and here are their results:

    

"For study author Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the “deficit model” in the field of science and technology studies — the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan’s data suggest the opposite — that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy. 

Science confirms: Politics wrecks your ability to do math

By Chris Mooney

Shutterstock

Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don’t realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.

The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their “numeracy,” that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a “new cream for treating skin rashes.” But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of “a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public.”

The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What’s more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more – not less — susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.

But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves — to fully grasp the Enlightenment-destroying nature of these results, we first need to explore the tricky problem that the study presented in a little bit more detail.

Let’s start with the “skin cream” version of this brain twister. You can peruse the image below to see exactly what research subjects read (and try out your own skill at solving it), or skip on for a brief explanation:

Dan Kahan

Full text of one version of the study’s “skin cream” problem. Click to embiggen.

As you can see above, the survey respondents were presented with a fictional study purporting to assess the effectiveness of a new skin cream, and informed at the outset that “new treatments often work but sometimes make rashes worse” and that “even when treatments don’t work, skin rashes sometimes get better and sometimes get worse on their own.” They were then presented with a table of experimental results, and asked whether the data showed that the new skin cream “is likely to make the skin condition better or worse.”

So do the data suggest that the skin cream works? The correct answer in the scenario above is actually that patients who used the skin cream were “more likely to get worse than those who didn’t.” That’s because the ratio of those who saw their rash improve to those whose rash got worse is roughly 3 to 1 in the “skin cream” group, but roughly 5 to 1 in the control group — which means that if you want your rash to get better, you are better off not using the skin cream at all. (For half of study subjects asked to solve the skin cream problem, the data were reversed and presented in such a way that they did actually suggest that the skin cream works.)

This is no easy problem for most people to solve: Across all conditions of the study, 59 percent of respondents got the answer wrong. That is, in significant part, because trying to intuit the right answer by quickly comparing two numbers will lead you astray; you have to take the time to compute the ratios.

Not surprisingly, Kahan’s study found that the more numerate you are, the more likely you are to get the answer to this “skin cream” problem right. Moreover, it found no substantial difference between highly numerate Democrats and highly numerate Republicans in this regard. The better members of both political groups were at math, the better they were at solving the skin cream problem.

But now take the same basic study design and data, and simply label it differently. Rather than reading about a skin cream study, half of Kahan’s research subjects were asked to determine the effectiveness of laws “banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public.” Accordingly, these respondents were presented not with data about rashes and whether they got better or worse, but rather with data about cities that had or hadn’t passed concealed carry bans, and whether crime in these cities had or had not decreased.

Overall, then, study respondents were presented with one of four possible scenarios, depicted below with the correct answer in bold:

Dan Kahan

The four problem scenarios from the study (each respondent received just one of these). Click to embiggen.

So how did people fare on the handgun version of the problem? They performed quite differently than on the skin cream version, and strong political patterns emerged in the results — especially among people who are good at mathematical reasoning. Most strikingly, highly numerate liberal Democrats did almost perfectly when the right answer was that the concealed weapons ban does indeed work to decrease crime (version C of the experiment) — an outcome that favors their pro-gun-control predilections. But they did much worse when the correct answer was that crime increases in cities that enact the ban (version D of the experiment).

The opposite was true for highly numerate conservative Republicans: They did just great when the right answer was that the ban didn’t work (version D), but poorly when the right answer was that it did (version C).

Here are the results overall, comparing subjects’ performances on the “skin cream” versions of the problem (above) and the “gun ban” versions of the problem (below), and relating this performance to their political affiliations and numeracy scores:

Dan Kahan

Full study results comparing subjects’ performance on the skin cream problem with their performance on the gun ban problem. Vertical axes plot response accuracy. Horizontal axes show mathematical reasoning ability. Click to embiggen.

For study author Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the “deficit model” in the field of science and technology studies — the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan’s data suggest the opposite — that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy. “If the people who have the greatest capacities are the ones most prone to this, that’s reason to believe that the problem isn’t some kind of deficit in comprehension,” Kahan explained in an interview.

So what are smart, numerate liberals and conservatives actually doing in the gun control version of the study, leading them to give such disparate answers? It’s kind of tricky, but here’s what Kahan thinks is happening.

Our first instinct, in all versions of the study, is to leap instinctively to the wrong conclusion. If you just compare which number is bigger in the first column, for instance, you’ll be quickly led astray. But more numerate people, when they sense an apparently wrong answer that offends their political sensibilities, are both motivated and equipped to dig deeper, think harder, and even start performing some calculations — which in this case would have led to a more accurate response.

“If the wrong answer is contrary to their ideological positions, we hypothesize that that is going to create the incentive to scrutinize that information and figure out another way to understand it,” says Kahan. In other words, more numerate people perform better when identifying study results that support their views — but may have a big blind spot when it comes to identifying results that undermine those views.

What’s happening when highly numerate liberals and conservatives actually get it wrong? Either they’re intuiting an incorrect answer that is politically convenient and feels right to them, leading them to inquire no further — or else they’re stopping to calculate the correct answer, but then refusing to accept it and coming up with some elaborate reason why 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2 in this particular instance. (Kahan suspects it’s mostly the former, rather than the latter.)

The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously described reason as a “slave of the passions.” Today’s political scientists and political psychologists, like Kahan, are now affirming Hume’s statement with reams of new data. This new study is just one out of many in this respect, but it provides perhaps the most striking demonstration yet of just how motivated, just how biased, reasoning can be – especially about politics.