A possibility that the paper does not raise is that instead of calculating the actual wealth held by the actual top 1%, you could estimate the Gini coefficient from the whole population, and calculate a theoretical 1% wealth.
Taleb would probably object on the grounds that the above will lead misleading results if the population is actually composed of a supper position of several distinct populations with different Gini coefficients.
Since you started this sub-thread and are clearly still following it, are you going to retract your claims that CRU predicted “no more snow in Britain” or that Hansen predicted Manhattan would be underwater by now?
I was going from memory, now that I’ve tracked down the actual links I’d modify the claims what was actually said, i.e., snowfalls becoming exceedingly rare and the West Side Highway being underwater.
I can only comment on the graphs which they themselves chose to plot in 2009. Snowfall was not one of those graphs (whereas it was in 2006).
Interesting. I wonder why they’re no longer plotting some trends. Maybe because it’s too hard to fit them into their preferred narrative.
Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.
Well, it’s sufficiently independent of the UK to function as a tax haven. It’s definitely one of those entities that’s on the fuzzy boundary between country and non-country, along with Hong Kong and (in a slightly different way) Dubai.
I can’t recall anyone calling Hong Kong a country.
Well ICANN for starters.
Liberals would tell a story where things are reversed and class is causal of the pathology- they would say the economic changes that have occurred for the last few decades have increased ‘economic uncertainty’ for the lower class (for some measure of uncertainty.) which has lead to marital stress and divorce.
There were many historical periods with much much greater economic uncertainty, they also had higher marriage rates.
Here is the article I linked to above. Note that it implies a different conclusion about recent temperature trends. Do you have any evidence for preferring your letter to the editor over the article Eric discusses besides it confirming your pre-existing belief?
The rest of said article reads like an attempt to (preemptively?) explain away failed predictions.
It doesn’t read that way to me.
Have you even read the article you linked to? Here are the first four sentences:
Early climate forecasts are often claimed to have overestimated recent warming. However, their evaluation is challenging for two reasons. First, only a small number of independent forecasts have been made. And second, an independent test of a forecast of the decadal response to external climate forcing requires observations taken over at least one and a half decades from the last observations used to make the forecast, because internally generated climate fluctuations can persist for several years.
Well, climate “scientists” are always warning that global warming will lead to disasters that didn’t happen during the medieval warm period, so presumably they’re predicting temperature increases larger than that. (Ok, they also like to pretend the medieval warm period didn’t exist.)
Yes, some global warming believers have made predictions that have been falsified, but “inevitably fail to occur” is wrong. Here’s a counterexample.
The only example of a successful prediction in your article is a rise in “mean surface temperature” which as I mentioned in the grand-parent is not hard to fudge, heck I also linked to data that gives opposite conclusions in the grand-parent. The rest of said article reads like an attempt to (preemptively?) explain away failed predictions.
Julia Hargreaves does a lot of work evaluating predictive climate models, and her conclusion is that there are reliable models for predicting broad global climate response to anthropogenic forcing, but we don’t currently have trustworthy predictions at the sub-continental scale. So I think it is appropriate to be skeptical about confident and precise predictions about what will happen in particular parts of the world.
And yet for some reason all said predictions fail in the same direction.
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you’ve utterly failed since it appears you didn’t know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.
More seriously, are you implying that any increase in the variance is irrelevant so long as the mean doesn’t change much?
I never said anything about an increase in variance, temperature records haven’t been around long enough for it to be hard to find record setting temperatures somewhere. Also, I notice you’re shifting your hypothesis from “temperatures are rising” to “variance is rising”.
As for the argument in the linked comic, when wine grapes can be grown in England and Newfoundland, as was the case during the medieval warm period I’ll start taking arguments of that type seriously.
Who predicted that Britain would no longer have snow or Manhattan would be under water by 2014?
The Climatic Research Unit for the no more snow in Britain. The Manhattan underwater one (or at least the West Side Highway) is Jim Hansen.
But I have a hard time seeing how α can really be that small for income & wealth, because that’d imply mean income & mean wealth aren’t well-defined in the population,
Um no. They’re not well defined over the distribution, they will certainly be well defined over a finite population.
which must be false because no one actually has, or is earning, infinitely many dollars or euros.
You seem to be confused about how distributions with infinite means work. Here’s a good exercise: get some coins and flip them to obtain data in a St. Petersburg distribution notice that even though the distribution has infinite mean all your data points are still finite (and quite small).
Well, I constantly see headlines that say the opposite, i.e., about places with record cold.
Also, what do the headlines mean, do they mean hottest in some particular place, or hottest global average? If the former, statistically you’d always expect temperatures to hit a record somewhere; if the latter, see my remark in the parent about how hard it is to compute “average temperature”.
Also, on the occasions when global warming believers make independently verifiable predictions with definite dates they inevitably fail to occur as shown by the fact that Britain still has snow and Manhattan isn’t under water.
I think that in the current social, political, informational, military, etc. global environment the old-style colonialism is highly unlikely to work.
Can you be specific about what you think is the relevant change?
The problem is that the weather also has many variables. While the chaos implies control principal works for low dimensional chaotic systems, e.g., the three body problem in orbital dynamics, I’m not sure how well it would work for weather.
For temperature data, I don’t think that many people would question the data, average temperatures seem like good, hard facts to me.
Not really. The problem is we don’t have uniformly spaced weather stations all over the earth. Furthermore the locations of the stations we do have tend to change over the time period of interest. (The various proxies suffer from similar problems.) Thus it’s necessary to apply weights to the data we do have to correct for this. Unfortunately, the weights are semi-arbitrary in practice and as we learned from the leaked climategate e-mails frequently have the warming built in.
That is, when I hear empirical data in support of climate change, I think: ‘well, obviously!‘, not ‘here is the data that should be strengthening my belief in climate change’.
What’s your reaction to the data that shows a lack of warming over the past 17-years?
The nastiness Viliam talks about is mostly in the form of trolling or making insulting statements with little semantic content. Lying of the type Arthur advocates goes beyond that since it injects false statements into the discussion and tends to result in one’s side filling up with people who believe said lies and thus willing to lie further.
Europe is more equal on empirical measures such as the Gini Coefficient.
Here is Taleb’s paper about the problems with measures like the Gini Coefficient.
The disagreement wasn’t just about tone. It was about Arthur Chu’s willingness to lie for his cause. The only reason it appeared to be mostly about tone is that Yvain didn’t make the strongest argument he could have.
Agreed, it’s also Eliezer’s super-villain fetish thing.