The Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire

From On Exactitude in Science by Jose Luis Borges

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

- Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, LibroIV,Cap. XLV, Lérida,1658

The story of all guilds and other special interest groups who seek to survive off the lives of others. They expand till they threaten the existence of the host.

Daniel Defoe was not the only one to remark the current passion for news, and the rancorous tone of political debate that seemed to come with it.

I recently purchased The Invention of News: How The World Came to Know About Itself by Andrew Pettegree. It looks like it is going to be a good read.

He starts off with a brief recount of Daniel Defoe's launch of his political journal, Weekly Review of the Affairs of France in 1704 (and continued till 1713). As Pettegree points out, The Review was chiefly a means for Defoe to make money.

Defoe was lucky. He had launched the Review at a time when the reading public was expanding rapidly, along with a market for current affairs. Naturally Defoe made the most of it. When, in an essay in 1712, he turned his mind to this buoyant market for news publishing, he did not hold back. The present times, wrote Defoe, had seen a media explosion. He recalled a time, even in his own lifetime, when there had been no such torrent of newspapers, state papers and political writing. The rage for news was transforming society, and Defoe was happy to be in the thick of it.

Defoe was not the only one to remark the current passion for news, and the rancorous tone of political debate that seemed to come with it. But if he truly thought this was new he was very much mistaken. The conflicts of the English Civil War over sixty years previously had stimulated a torrent of pamphlets, news reports and abusive political treatises. The first continental newspapers were established forty years before that. Long before Defoe, and even before the creation of the newspapers, the appetite for news was proverbial. ‘How now, what news?’ was a common English greeting, frequently evoked on the London stage. Travelers could buy phrase books that offered the necessary vocabulary, so they too could join the conversation: ‘What news have you? How goeth all in this city? What news have they in Spain?’

If there was a time when news first became a commercial commodity, it occurred not in Defoe’s London, or even with the invention of the newspaper, but much earlier: in the eighty years between 1450 and 1530 following the invention of printing. During this period of technological innovation, publishers began to experiment with new types of books, far shorter and cheaper than the theological and scholarly texts that had dominated the market in manuscripts. These pamphlets and broadsheets created the opportunity to turn the existing appetite for news into a mass market. News could become, for the first time, a part of popular culture.

A progressive would say she is a product of her bad environment, a conservative that she is simply a bad journalist of some ignorance

I think it is the work of Jonathan Haidt which has revealed that conservatives tend to know a lot more about progressives (liberals) and their mindsets than liberals do about conservatives. His explanation is grounded in Moral Foundations Theory which posits that conservatives interpret all elective actions through a six sided prism: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Sanctity, and Authority whereas liberals tend to assess an action primarily or only through the lenses of Care and Fairness. There is the further complication that liberals tend to define Fairness as equality of outcomes whereas conservatives tend to define Fairness as equal rules for everyone.

Haidt observes that the liberal mindset is prevalent in the communication industries - Technology to an extent, but certainly in Entertainment (particularly Hollywood), Media (news), and Academia (K-12 and Universities). The closer people are to producing things, the more conservative or libertarian they tend to be. The closer they are to simply talking about things, the more liberal they tend to be.

As a consequence, if you are of a libertarian or conservative mindset (about 80% of Americans based on self-identification), you are surrounded everyday by the miasma of the liberal worldview on TV, in the newspapers, in entertainment, in school. If you are part of the 20% with a liberal worldview, you often live in a bubble that shields you from all the alternative worldviews. You live in a city, you are college educated, you talk about ideas and abstractions a lot, you are upper middle class, etc. You live a Pauline Kael existence (notorious for making a statement later paraphrased as "I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.") Conservatives cannot escape the liberal worldview, it surrounds them. Liberals have to actively seek out the conservative worldview(s) despite those views being by far the more prevalent.

All this brought to mind by this "Analysis" of excessive Pauline Kael obscurantism, The first female space shuttle commander will speak at the GOP convention. Huh? by Sarah Scoles. Scoles is a recent graduate of the women's college Agnes Scott, both factors (recent and women's college) increasing the probability of lack of exposure to the real world where things are done, from exposure to alternate ideas, and an excessive exposure to gender ideology and progressivism. A progressive would say she is a product of her bad environment, a conservative that she is simply a bad journalist of some ignorance.

It is a well documented observation that on average, women vote for Democratic candidates more than they do Republican. But among women voters, in the most recent election, 44% voted for the conservative candidate (i.e. Republican). That is a six point gap on either side of 50. Big, but not overwhelming, and indeed, though you wouldn't know it from the press, we have had a couple of elections where the majority of the female vote went to the Republican candidate.

For Scoles though, it is as if that 44% of women don't exist. Space shuttle mission commander (and former fighter pilot) Eileen Collins will speak at the Republican Convention. It is inconceivable to Scoles that a woman could be conservative. In her second paragraph:

With its implied support of Donald Trump, this appearance has left many scientists and space experts scratching their heads. Why would someone who rode a rocket through glass ceilings speak at this event?

Hello Pauline Kael!

Lots of alternative perspectives to explore. How many female space shuttle mission commanders have addressed a Democratic National Convention. None as far as I am aware. What do Democrats have against female astronauts?

Why does Scoles see there as being an incompatibility between being a scientist or space expert and supporting Donald Trump? This seems to go to the implied liberal assumption that you cannot be smart and conservative at the same time, a prejudicial assumption held despite all the voluminous data against it. It is a position of tribal faith not of empirical evidence. Scoles is betraying her core self-conception by indulging in negative prejudices which have no objective basis in fact.

Ironically, Scoles provides the evidence to refute her position that people with a STEM background can't be Republican. It is right there in her article (and confirmed in Wikipedia). Scoles cites the evidence but doesn't do the numbers. In the particular category of astronauts who later became politicans, fully 66% were Republican, including the only scientist among them (Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt). John Glenn (D) and Jack Swigert (R) were out of the fighter pilot tradition while Schmitt (R) was a geological scientist. From this sample of n=3, it would appear that Republicans are the party of science.

The subtle denigration of Commander Collins is not so subtle. Scoles quotes someone describing Collins as a "throwback." Scoles has plenty of space to quote people (Democrats) who see Collins speaking to Republicans as anti-science, anti-female, and anti-progress. Not so for people who see Republicans as fellow Americans, equally smart and equally oriented towards and supportive of science.

It is probably worth noting that across all the campus protests, speech suppression and other progressive repressions which have emerged over the past five years, rarely does any of it come from the STEM departments of the universities. It would appear that progressive utopianism is a symptom of the humanities (and studies departments), not the sciences.

About halfway down the article, we begin to get to what might have Scoles, a Democrat operative with a byline, upset about Collins' speaking to the Republican convention.

Still, her status as a multiple “female first” complicates people’s reactions — especially in an election where Hillary Clinton is a female first, potentially, for commander in chief — no matter how nuanced Collins’s views may be.

Ah. This isn't about Collins, this is about Democrats being concerned that a competent, successful Republican woman with great achievements in STEM might diminish their candidate's record. Why mark this as "Analysis" if it is actually an internal Democratic Party communications planning memo?

There is a passage that I think helps clarify the differences between the mindset of progressives and conservatives. Progressives are greatly given to celebrating firsts. First African-American in space, first female Space Shuttle Commander, first Hispanic mission specialist, etc. Its about group identities and checkbox diversity. Conservatives, tinctured with the tragic view of humanity, see firsts as almost incidental. It is the individual and their achievement against the odds. For a traditional conservative Collins stands out because she bucked the odds as a pioneer and who earned her role as commander through her cumulative achievements. For progressives, it is a diversity box to be checked.

Scoles quotes another Democrat operative taking the odd (for a progressive) position that:

“Being a ‘first’ frequently provides a platform or credibility, and yes, it also often makes people think they ‘know’ everything about you,” Jemison added. “But that single accomplishment doesn't define you."

Scoles' mental gymnastics become excruciating.

And it is true that we are all allowed our own views.

Well thank you. Very generous.

But Scoles still isn't done badmouthing Collins through selective quoting of Democrat operatives.

“She is a career military pilot, so her views on science are no different than many other people's,” he said. “She has no particular expertise in science. She has expertise in flying complex systems. The people who flew the shuttle didn’t do the science.”

Yeah, that's right. Collins doesn't have a background in evidence based reasoning and logic. She was probably a poetry major. Or maybe, like Sarah Scoles, her masters was a MFA in Fiction from Cornell. No you say? Collins got her BA in mathematics and economics from Syracuse University? And she has a Masters of Science in Operations Research from Stanford University? Oh, and a second masters in Space Systems Management from Webster University. Well, what does she know about STEM compared to Scoles' MFA in fiction? Or compared to John Logsdon (NYU PhD in Political Science) whom Scoles is quoting?

What reprobates these people are.

Scoles continues her desperate stretching to shield her candidate from comparison to a woman of real accomplishment.

And just because a person has made a trip to space doesn’t mean their thoughts align with mainstream science (although we don’t know that Collins’s do not).

What? What kind of analysis is this? We are going to raise the prospect that Collins holds eccentric, non-mainstream science views and then immediately acknowledge that in fact we don't have any evidence at all to support that speculation? This isn't journalism, this is political operative smearing of individuals in order to further a political/ideological end. Disgusting.

There is someone who does have some non-mainstream science ideas who will be addressing the Democrat National Convention. I wonder what Scoles thinks of her? From the New York Times.

“You know, there’s a new name,” Mrs. Clinton said in the March appearance. “It’s unexplained aerial phenomenon,” she said. “U.A.P. That’s the latest nomenclature.”

Known for her grasp of policy, Mrs. Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential campaign on topics as diverse as Alzheimer’s research and military tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of voters.

Mrs. Clinton has vowed that barring any threats to national security, she would open up government files on the subject, a shift from President Obama, who typically dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated U.F.O. enthusiasts, who have declared Mrs. Clinton the first “E.T. candidate.”

“Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics,” said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for government transparency about extraterrestrials.

Mrs. Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings.

She has said in recent interviews that as president she would release information about Area 51, the remote Air Force base in Nevada believed by some to be a secret hub where the government stores classified information about aliens and U.F.O.s.

Just to clarify, for Scoles, her candidate having a BA in political science and a JD constitute superior STEM bona fides compared to having multiple science degrees from multiple prestigious universities. Indulging in UFO conspiracy theories constitutes a superior STEM achievement over commanding a Space Shuttle mission. Just checking because I was a little confused there for a while.

Go to the Washington Post article and read the comments for a further raucous mockery of this pretense at reporting and analysis.

Sarah Scoles apparently isn't even a Washington Post reporter. She is a freelance "science" writer. Wherever it is that she lives, apparently the boundaries are dreadfully circumscribed. Women can't be Republican, Republicans can't be scientists, and whatever you write has to support your preferred party regardless of the cost to your journalistic reputation.

Shame on Scoles but even more so on the Washington Post for such pathetic tripe.

The answers are out there, just not easily accessible

Well that's interesting. It's sociology so caveat lector. From Scientific progress, risk, and development: Explaining attitudes toward science cross-nationally by Anne M Price and Lindsey P Peterson. Their abstract:

Declining public confidence in science is a concern in the US and Europe, but it is unclear what predicts confidence in science in developed countries, let alone in developing countries. This article examines how development and ‘risk society’ shape individual attitudes toward science across 47 diverse countries, using four theoretically driven measures of risk society. It is found that people in affluent societies have lower support for science than those in less affluent societies. Specifically, individuals holding post-materialist attitudes and living in countries with greater human and economic development (measured by higher internet access and tertiary enrollment, and lower infant mortality) have lower confidence in future-oriented science. The article concludes that the scientific gains that are brought by affluence are accompanied by heightened fears of human-made risks.

There are a number of observable correlations which are difficult to reconcile with one another or in a logical framework.

Countries that become more secular also experience a drop in total fertility rate, usually to well below replacement (Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, China, etc.)

This is complicated by the fact that it also correlates with increased prosperity.

People who self-identify as progressive and open-minded show a strong correlation with bigotry and close minded behaviors.

Countries that try and foster female empowerment end up constraining women's capacity to compete in all fields of accomplishment.

The less religious a country becomes, the less future oriented it becomes.

The safer a country becomes, the less risk-taking, particularly commercial risk-taking, it displays.

You would think, at only a first order of sophistication, that:

The more prosperous a country, the lower the relative cost of having children and then, therefore, the more children people would have.

The more secular, the more rational and fact-based decision-making people would become.

The more supportive of women as a distinct group, the better outcomes women would experience.

The more prosperous a country becomes, the more it would be able to afford the financial consequences of risk and therefore more risks it would undertake.

The more progressive a person regards themselves as being, the more generous, tolerant, and open-minded they would behave.

Given the observable facts, that's not how the world works. Dropping to next order of sophistication gets to a lot of complications very quickly. The answers are out there, just not easily accessible.

It is actually relatively straightforward to construct a logical explanation for the above observable facts but it involves a more tragic estimation of the human condition than our default utopian/optimistic view.

Learning new words

I finished Vienna Blood by Frank Tallis recently. Very enjoyable. From the blurb:

In the grip of a Siberian winter in 1902, a serial killer in Vienna embarks upon a bizarre campaign of murder. Vicious mutilation, a penchant for arcane symbols, and a seemingly random choice of victim are his most distinctive peculiarities. Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt summons a young disciple of Freud - his friend Dr. Max Liebermann — to assist him with the case. The investigation draws them into the sphere of Vienna’s secret societies — a murky underworld of German literary scholars, race theorists, and scientists inspired by the new evolutionary theories coming out of England. At first, the killer’s mind seems impenetrable — his behaviour and cryptic clues impervious to psychoanalytic interpretation; however, gradually, it becomes apparent that an extraordinary and shocking rationale underlies his actions. . . .

The historical research is very good.

One thing that struck me throughout the book was the author's extensive but not ostentatious vocabulary. It is rare I come across any words with which I am unfamiliar. In this book, eight.

Here are the words with which I was unfamiliar. Some I can surmise something related to their meaning, either from memory or semantic structure. The others? No idea.

Tatterdemalion - ragged?
Tintinnabulary
Penumbral - Having to do with a cloud?
Proscenium
Spatulate - broad and flat, spade like?
Borborygmus
Murine - having to do with mice?
Crepitating - dying?
Haptic

Here are their meanings courtesy of Merriam Webster.

Tatterdemalion - a person dressed in ragged clothing

Tintinnabulary - of, relating to, or characterized by bells or their sounds

Penumbral -

1a : a space of partial illumination (as in an eclipse) between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light
b : a shaded region surrounding the dark central portion of a sunspot
2: a surrounding or adjoining region in which something exists in a lesser degree : fringe
3: a body of rights held to be guaranteed by implication in a civil constitution
4: something that covers, surrounds, or obscures : shroud

Proscenium - the part of a stage that is in front of the curtain

Spatulate - shaped like a spatula

Borborygmus - intestinal rumbling caused by moving gas

Murine - of or relating to a murid genus (Mus) or its subfamily (Murinae) which includes the common household rats and mice; also : of, relating to, or involving these rodents and especially the house mouse

Crepitating - to make a crackling sound

Haptic -

1: relating to or based on the sense of touch
2: characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch

Writing home

From The Invention of News: How The World Came to Know About Itself by Andrew Pettegree.

Pettegree observes that university students in medieval Europe were also nodes in the meager communication network.

The largest universities drew their students from all over Europe. These young men, far from home, were homesick, and all universities developed a sophisticated letter service to allow them to keep in touch with their families. The first documented case of a university postal service is that of Bologna, established in 1158; such a service was a common feature of almost all universities by the fifteenth century. The university of Salamanca in Spain employed fifteen muleteers for its messengers. Bourges, in France, had six couriers from the date of its foundation. The best documented example is that of the university of Paris. Founded in around 1300, its messengers were appointed by different student 'nations' to serve their locality. The longer journeys were made one of twice a year, shorter routes were covered more frequently. The university messengers were privileged individuals, exempted from a variety of taxes and duties. The positions were very much sought after, and became more lucrative when, from the fourteenth century onwards, the couriers began to carry letters also for other customers. This private postal service was remarkably enduring. Jean de Ravillac, the man who in 1610 would murder King Henry IV of France, was one of the petits messagiers of the university: he made his living carrying letters for a consortium of eighty students.

Minimum wage - the argument continues though the answer is known

One data point does not an argument sustain. But it quite probably is the canary in the coal mine. There is a longstanding argument over minimum wage laws. In economics, it is generally true, absent extremely unusual circumstances, that if you make something more expensive (such as labor), you will reduce the demand for it. Pretty much an iron law of reality.

The problem is that that reality clashes with a genuine desire to simply legislate prosperity. People not earning enough? Raise the minimum wage!

Economists dismiss minimum wages as an idea with too many unintended consequences. You raise the price of labor and businesses who buy that labor will 1) pass along the cost to consumers (reducing their welfare), 2) replace labor with capital (robots or similar), or 3) find other ways to dispense with that labor by redesigning the business processes.

Idealists and progressives embrace minimum wages as an easy answer to a straightforward problem.

You would think that this ought to be an easy question to resolve. Does raising minimum wages decrease employment?

Regrettably, the passion to legislate economic outcomes raises the bar of proof pretty high and the evidence is hard to sort.

One complication is that minimum wages are often passed long after they will have an effect. Example: A city's current minimum wage law is $8 and advocates want to raise it to $10. It has been twenty years since the last time the minimum wage was raised. The average wage for an unskilled worker is now $12. In this scenario, even if the minimum wage increase to $10 is passed, the effects won't be easily noticeable since the average unskilled wage is already $12. Studies might be done and they would arrive at the conclusion that minimum wage laws do not affect the demand for labor because there was no change in labor demand. True, yet irrelevant because the study failed to take into account the context that the average labor rate was already above the new minimum.

Another scenario that occurs with some frequency is when the minimum wage law applies to a very small class. Example: A city passes a law raising the minimum wage from $8 to $10 and that minimum wage applies to all non-management employees. Again with context. The city is 80% a white collar knowledge economy. Most employees are, in FLSA terms, exempt employees. So 80% of employees won't be affected by the minimum wage because they are exempt. Let's also say that for the 20% who are non-exempt, 80% of them are union employees with negotiated contracts above $15. So even though they are nominal beneficiaries of the minimum wage law, it doesn't really affect them. 20% of the labor force is non-exempt and 20% of that group are being paid at levels below the new minimum wage - that's only 4% of the labor force. Whatever the impact of the minimum wage might be, it affects such a small percentage that the effects are swamped by larger forces such as season, weather, economic cycle, etc. It will be hard for an economic study to find an explicit impact from the minimum wage.

The final big barrier to generating good data is time lapse. A minimum wage law passes. Business can't immediately adjust except at the margin. It might take 2-4 years to see the complete impact, the amount of time required to test whether consumers will pay higher prices or determine that the business processes have to be redesigned and those new designs implemented to get rid of labor, or new systems or technology purchased and implemented to displace labor, etc. Over 2-4 years there are all sorts of other events happening. Other laws passed, a crime wave, rare bad weather events, an upturn in the national economic cycle, etc. All these other variables obscure what the actual impact might be of the new minimum wage law.

Well constructed economic experiments to reliably measure the impact of minimum wage laws are big, expensive to conduct, last a long time, and take into account many contextual variables. When these kinds of studies are done, they support the traditional economic view that if you make labor more expensive, less will be demanded. But those aren't usually the kinds of studies that are done. Usually, they are short term studies which don't take into account contextual variables and don't address countervailing forces. These studies are all over the place in their outcomes.

What you are left with is a lot of studies, only a few of which are worthwhile. The worthwhile ones say that minimum wage laws are counterproductive but the people who wish to signal their virtue bona fides by legislating prosperity have plenty of poorly designed studies that will say otherwise. And the argument continues even though the answer is known.

But perhaps there is another way to get at the answer as suggested by Mark J. Perry inFollowing Minimum Wage Increases, Unemployment Spikes among Black Male Teens .

Click to enlarge

What is the class of legal labor that is most vulnerable to employment fluctuations and the price of labor? Young black men (16-19). They are the demographic least likely to have completed high school, have poor educational attainment scores, are more likely to have a criminal record, to face the most competition from illegal immigrants, and to function in the most fragile economic ecosystems (inner cities). They are, effectively, the canaries in the coal mine. If there is any group who are likely to show an impact from new minimum wage laws, it is young black men. The chart seems to indicate that minimum wage laws do indeed have a significant affect on the demand for low skilled labor. Perhaps it is a reporting fluke, perhaps the trend line will stabilize a month or two down the road. Perhaps. But this seems reasonably compelling evidence that the emotional inclination to try and solve economic problems by legislating prosperity should be treated with greater skepticism.

Most proposals are based on unprovable beliefs that are mistaken as demonstrable truth

I can't get to the original gated article but the original pointer is from Lunch with Philip Tetlock by Tyler Cowen. From an interview between the Financial Times and the University of Pennsylvania forecasting expert, Philip Tetlock.

He [Tetlock] is trying to replace the public debates he describes as “Krugman-Ferguson pie fights” — a reference to the clashes over austerity between the economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman and the economic historian, Niall Ferguson — with adversarial collaboration. “You give each side the opportunity to pose, say, 10 questions it thinks are probative and resolvable, and that it thinks it has a comparative advantage in answering” and then have the two sides give testable answers . . . Here is a very clear psychological prediction: people will come out of that tournament more open-minded than they otherwise would have been. You can take that one to the bank.”

That is a very clever model. Given that most proposals are based on unprovable beliefs that are mistaken as demonstrable truth, this approach would clear the argument terrain very quickly.

I also really like the single line -

There is a price to be paid for feeling good about your beliefs.

Regrettably, authoritarians always try to off-load the price onto those least able to pay. Given that the policies that make the elite feel good also tend to have very high costs, low or non-existent benefits and high unintended consequences, this is especially tragic.

Strange times, despicable behavior, weird headlines

A few months ago, a band of Attorney Generals from seventeen states and led by the AG of the US Virgin Islands launched a shameful effort to deprive US citizens of their First Amendment rights. It was shocking in its naked grab for power. The position of the AGs was that the science of climate forecasting was so well understood that any disagreement with government, supranational and NGO climate forecasts constituted fraud.

The claim was absurd on the face of it. No science is ever settled. We are constantly adding, modifying and changing our understanding. Climate science is one of the more dynamic fields and one of the most difficult to comprehend. Climate is a complex, multi-system, dynamic, self-regulating to a degree, non-linear in nature and is handicapped by a paucity of reliable data records. Climate forecasting models have been consistently wrong and are constantly being redesigned to take into account newly understood aspects such as the affect of clouds, heat reflection, deep ocean heat storage, distinctions between volcanic dust and man made pollutants, etc. If the science were well settled, our models would provide accurate forecasts of the future and models for understanding the past. They do not.

Since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990, it has been apparent that climate change has been simply a fig leaf for seizure of additional money and power by unelected groups and governmental entities. The crude models were then used to justify a demand for centralization of policy decision making and massive money transfers. The more sophisticated, yet still as wrong, models today still serve the same purpose.

In the subsequent quarter century the climate change authoritarian advocates have continued as they began. We had the East Anglia University data hack that revealed that all the data for the initial models had been massaged and that they had maintained no record of who changed the data, how they changed it, and under what rational the data was massaged. There was the revelation of the hockey stick model fraud. There was the uncovering of the trove of emails among the parties at the center of climate change advocacy revealing that they were coordinating with one another to actively suppress science papers that challenged or refuted their positions. There was the coordinated effort to suppress the existence and implications of the Medieval Warm Period and subsequent Little Ice Age. There was the denial that the most stable and unadulterated data (satellite temperature measures), which showed no warming, had any relevancy. There was the constant changing of goal posts and statistical game playing in order to pronounce each year warmer than the last. There was the constant effort to evoke weather as evidence of climate change and then denying the relevancy of weather when it failed to deliver the evidence expected. And on and on.

There is no doubt that climate change is real. There is little doubt that human activities have a reasonable probability of affecting that change in some fashion. But which activities, to what degree, and in what fashion remain very much open questions. We simply don't know. But "Don't know" lines no political pockets, funds no grant research, justifies no exercise of power, and elevates no busybodies over their fellow citizens. Hence, the claim that the science is settled. Regardless of the data.

Into this environment steps the US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker and sixteen of his nearest and dearest fellow AG authoritarians. In March of this year he issued a subpoena demanding that Exxon Mobil provide copies of communications between the oil company and 90 different political and policy organizations as well as communications with any other organizations engaged in research or advocacy concerning Climate Change or policies.

Can you imagine? A Federal government official exercising the power of government to go on a fishing expedition into the lives and activities of private citizens on the wispy foundation that the AGs understand the science of climate change so much better than anyone else that any contra-position constituted fraud? What a naked display of authoritarianism and ignorance. And to make it perfectly clear that this was a political suppression of free speech, Walker included in his request not just information related to the science but also the respondents' donor lists. You can't get more corruptly political than that.

One of the entities was the Competitive Enterprise Institute and they responded:

The subpoena that you served on the Competitive Enterprise Institute (“CEI”) is a blatant attempt to intimidate and harass an organization for advancing views that you oppose. There is no way to understand your demand that CEI turn over all of its internal documents concerning climate change and its communications with a corporation, ExxonMobil, other than as an effort to punish it for its public policy views, chill its associations, and silence its advocacy.

You acknowledged as much in your remarks at the March 29 “AGs United for Clean Power” press conference in New York. You said that you launched this investigation not to carry out any law-enforcement duty, but to “make it clear to our residents as well as the American people that we have to do something transformational” about climate change, stop “rely[ing] on fossil fuel,” and “look at reliable energy.” You are entitled to your opinions on public policy, but you have no right to wield your power as a prosecutor to advance a policy agenda by persecuting those who disagree with you.

That is, in fact, the law: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). The freedoms of belief and expression guaranteed by the Constitution do not yield even to government officials’ insistence that some perceived crisis demands urgent action, the niceties of the law be damned. That is when the right to dissent matters most.

Your demand on CEI is offensive, it is un-American, it is unlawful, and it will not stand. You can either withdraw it or expect to fight, because CEI strongly believes that this campaign to intimidate those who dissent from the official orthodoxy on climate change must be stopped.

I agree, and would also note that the law does not allow government officials to violate Americans’ civil rights with impunity.

Exxon Mobil, CEI, several Republican Attorney Generals all called the Group of 17 on their totalitarian actions. Claude Walker withdrew his subpoena in May but the other AGs remain eager to suppress. As constitutional law professor Glenn Harland Reynolds noted:

Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”

I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.

[snip]

As the Supreme Court wrote in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”

Then the House of Representatives got involved. Thank goodness for our republican and divided structure of government that tends, imperfectly, to be self-healing against totalitarian power grabs. Congress is now going after the Attorney Generals. In doing so they are bringing back reminders of past times and weird headlines. Such as Liberal AGs Invoke States’ Rights in Climate Change Feud With Congress by Jacob Gershman.

States' Rights? What is this, the 1960s? Democratic Party AGs claiming States' Rights? But that then forces the recollection that it was in fact Democratic Party AGs asserting States Rights in the 1960s. The right to segregation, separate but equal schools, property-baed voting rights, separate water fountains and back of the bus regulations. Bull Connor, Democrat, Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, and indeed Democrat National Convention Member whose actions led to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. Those States Rights' people? The WSJ article notes:

The Tenth Amendment states’ rights movement is typically associated with tea party activists.

But two blue-state liberal state attorneys general are invoking the U.S. Constitution’s limits on federal powers in a showdown with a GOP-led congressional committee looking into their climate change investigations.

A coalition of law-enforcement officials led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been digging into whether Exxon misled investors and the public by downplaying the impact of global warming.

The inquiries have the drawn the ire of Republican leaders of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee who say Mr. Schneiderman is mounting a campaign of intimidation in coordination with environmental groups and trial lawyers.

[snip]

Mr. Schneiderman and Ms. Healey, both of whom stand behind their climate-change work, are balking at the committee’s document demands, saying their offices are insulated by the Tenth Amendment.

It’s questionable whether the Tenth Amendment would shield them, says Vanderbilt University law professor Robert Mikos.

The Constitution restrains the federal government from compelling state legislatures and state officers to enforce federal laws. But it’s doubtful, the professor said, it would apply to the situation here where Congress is looking to remedy an alleged constitutional violation committed by a state authority.

[snip]

Congress, he wrote in a letter last week, has the authority to examine an effort to “deprive companies, nonprofit organizations and scientists of their First Amendment rights and ability to fund and conduct scientific research…free from threats of prosecution.”

Exxon has leveled similar charges in court papers, describing Ms. Healey’s probe as an “abusive fishing expedition into ExxonMobil’s climate change research over the past 40 years.”

Strange times. It seems like we ought to have a better political class than is in evidence now.

The power to corrupt

Following on from Sunday's post, Smarter people are more prejudiced against larger numbers of people than anyone else, there is another article of interest.

In my first post, I commented on sociology research indicating that people with higher IQs were more prejudiced against more people than those with lower IQs. Based on the numbers, high IQ are four times more prejudiced than lower IQ people. It's sociology so all the numbers are suspect but an interesting possible insight.

This morning I came across Does Power Really Corrupt by Matthew Sweet. It is an interesting round-up of the state of our current knowledge. The answer is that we don't know whether power corrupts. Early sociology studies strongly suggested that it did but they were poorly designed experiments with strong vectors of confirmation bias. The replicability has been poor. The field is ideologically skewed and biased towards an affirmative answer regardless of the data.

Egloff has been doing research since 1993 and is used to the bloody process of peer review. But he was shocked by the hostility towards his work. “I am not on a crusade,” he says. “I am not rich. My family is not rich. My friends are not rich. We never received any money from any party for doing this research. Personally I would have loved the results of the Berkeley group to be true. That would be nice and would provide a better fit to my personal and political beliefs and my worldview. However, as a scientist…” The experience of going against this particular intellectual grain was so painful that Egloff vows never to study the topic of privilege and ethics again.

Who, then, is right? Are powerful people nicer or nastier than powerless ones? How can we explain the disparate answers yielded by these two sets of data?

It may be that rich people are better at disguising their true nature than poor people. If being generous in public brings rewards, then rich people might be more inclined to help old ladies across roads. Selfish driving is consistent with this idea: the anonymity of the road means that aggressive petrolheads need not worry about damaging their reputations. And Keltner points out that the data come from people’s accounts of their own charitable giving, and not from watching them in the act. “We know from other studies that the wealthy are more likely to lie and exaggerate about ethical matters,” he says. “Survey self-report data in economics and face-to-face data in psychology capture different processes. What I say I do in society versus how I behave with actual people.”

But it is also possible that the problem lies not with the survey data but with the psychological experiments. Over the past year, this possibility has become the subject of bitter debate. In August 2015, the journal Science reported that a group of 270 academics, led by Brian Nosek, a respected professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, had attempted to reproduce the results of 100 psychological studies. Ninety-seven of the original studies had produced statistically significant results. Only 36 of the replications did the same. Those numbers threatened to undermine the entire discipline of experimental psychology, for if a result cannot be replicated then it must be in doubt. In March 2016 a panel of luminaries claimed to have detected serious shortcomings in the methodology of Nosek’s paper. The inquiry was led by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard professor with a history of hostility to the replicators. (“Psychology’s replication police prove to be shameless little bullies,” he tweeted in 2014, defending another researcher whose work was questioned.) When a journalist from Wired magazine asked Gilbert if his defensiveness might have influenced his conclusions, he hung up on them. Psychology’s “Replication Crisis” might not yet be over.

In September 2015, five social psychologists and a sociologist published a paper in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences that suggested why psychology might show privileged people in a bad light. Left-wing opinion, contended Jonathan Haidt and his co-authors, was over-represented in psychology faculties. This, they suspected, might be distorting experimental findings – as well as making campus life difficult for researchers with socially conservative views. “The field of social psychology is at risk of becoming a cohesive moral community,” they warned. “Might a shared moral-historical narrative in a politically homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We think so.” So does Boris Egloff. “It was a great and timely paper,” he says. “I congratulate them on their courage.” But it came too late for him. “We spoilt the good guys’ party,” he says.

So the answer is that we simply do not know whether power corrupts and we are not likely to know out of the current sociological academy - they are too undisciplined in their science and too ideological in their convictions.

My suspicion is that the answer will be a weak yes, highly contingent on roles, structures, personality traits, industry and circumstance. Some people with some personality traits in some roles, within some structures, in some industries under circumstances of low transparency and low accountability are likely to display some predictable changes in degree of measured corruption.

But we are a long way from knowing that at this point in time.