Viewing entries in
Scientific Encounters
Other than climate change, at least four factors contribute to the growing cost of weather-related events in the US: increasing density of coastal populations, exceptionally high inflation in the construction industry, rising value of assets, and changes in crop insurance.
So, what does one do with this assertion of fact? Some options: 1) investigate the claim and remain noncommittal about its truth-value until questions are answered to your satisfaction (if they ever are); 2) register the claim as a possible fact but remain noncommittal about its truth-value. Reject further investigation as too time consuming: 3) accept the claim as true or true-enough, and leave it at that: and, 4) accept the claim as plausible, which is good enough to present it as established fact in the service of some higher purpose… Reject further investigation as quibbling about details and overlooking the bigger picture.
Are the costs of weather-related damage going up because the weather in the US has gotten worse? For example:
Are hurricanes more powerful or frequent?
Are heatwaves longer or more intense?
Are droughts getting longer or more frequent?
Are high precipitation events wetter or more frequent?
The Our World in Data website has tons of data pertinent to these questions, summarized in a series of charts. First, trends in hurricane activity…
Both articles seemed to suggest that, thanks to climate change, weather-related damage is on the rise in the US and the increased cost of this damage is due mostly to changes in the weather and not to factors unrelated to the weather, such as trends in population density or the value of assets in climate-vulnerable areas. Is this actually the case?
Trust is science is a good thing, right? Maybe, maybe not. Consider…
No surprise here: the smaller the metro and nonmetro population group, the more likely offenses will be cleared by arrest, especially for property crimes, although once again the countryside doesn’t quite follow the pattern.
Republicans often assert that cities run by Democrats are more crime-ridden than those run by Republicans. Democrats often counter there’s no evidence of that. Neither side presents evidence one way or another, other than the anecdotal sort. So I decided to look into the matter myself, using cities with Republican mayors as a proxy for cities that are not dominated by Democrats or progressives. My sample included all the cities with Republican mayors on Wikipedia’s list of mayors of the 50 largest cities in the US, of which there were ten with Republican mayors. I also chose ten cities with Democratic mayors from Wikipedia’s list and then looked up the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) 2019-2020 figures for homicide and aggravated assault crime rates, et voila!. Here is what I found…
Our apprehension of reality is always subjective, in that what we perceive and pay attention to is guided by our desires, goals, expectations, and preconceived notions. But humans would not have survived without an ability to track the world outside their heads, the world as it is, aka the objective reality.
Diversion is an intervention in the criminal justice system that provides offenders with a chance to avoid conviction and a criminal record by undergoing a period of community supervision. The study found that diversion for first-time felony offenders cut reoffending rates in half and increased employment rates by nearly 50% over 10 years.
As for Biden’s infrastructure plan, 59% of those surveyed in the NBC poll thought it was a good idea, 21% disagreed, and 19% had no opinion. Which got me thinking: what is it about the infrastructure plan that these people think is a good idea (or not)? Biden’s infrastructure plan is immense and involves dozens of large-scale projects, including …
Why do so many Covid deaths go unreported? One reason is that most people die at home in developing countries and out-of-hospital deaths are rarely medically certified. For example, only around a fifth of all deaths are medically certified in India. Even in countries with substantial hospital data, cause-of-death is often misclassified, often a result of insufficient physician training. Sometimes, though, misclassification is deliberate, as in some hospitals in India, where officials have directed doctors to list cause-of-death as “sickness” and not Covid, possibly to avoid a panic. And then there’s Russia…
Non-native species are typically described as “invasive” species, clearly not a term of endearment. However, many biologists and conservationists are having a change of heart regarding these much-maligned “aliens” (another common descriptor): they’re not all bad - and some may even help native species survive and thrive, especially in biological communities under stress from habitat loss and a changing climate. A zero-tolerance approach to non-native species makes no sense when their effects are often neutral or positive.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, was founded in early 2019 by the then-mayor of Stockton, a city of about 292,000 in California. SEED is midway through an experimental project to demonstrate the advantages of a guaranteed basic income. The project includes a “treatment” group of 125 individuals who will receive a guaranteed monthly stipend of $500 for two years, as well as a control group that does not receive the stipend. Of the 125 in the treatment group, 100 comprise the core research sample and 25 serve as a “politically purposive, or storytelling cohort, or who publicly spoke about their experience with SEED.” (Preliminary Analysis: SEED's First Year, March 2021).
Hill himself was ambivalent about the utility of these criteria. On the one hand, he asked “in what circumstances can we pass from this observed association to a verdict of causation?” Yet he disagreed that any “hard-and-fast rules of evidence” existed by which to judge causation…
The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association. A week ago, it published Covid-19: Russia admits to understating deaths by more than two thirds. An extended excerpt:…
Motivated by love of truth, glory, and tenure, scientists tend to be a critical bunch: they like to pick holes in each others’ arguments and evidence. To defend themselves against this critical onslaught, scientists adhere as much as possible to various procedural norms governing the gathering and analysis of evidence - also known as the scientific method.
But bounded rationality fails spectacularly when untethered to something real, - that is, unless it is grounded in the real world…
According to psychologist Gary Klein, confirmation bias leads us to:
Search only for evidence that confirms our beliefs
Prefer evidence that supports our beliefs
Best remember information in keeping with our beliefs
Interpret evidence in a way that supports our beliefs
Rely on favored beliefs to misunderstand what is happening in a situation
Ignore opportunities to test our beliefs
Explain away data that don’t fit with our beliefs
All the above countries have been hit hard by Covid, especially as colder weather set in, but Spain, Belgium, the UK, France, and Italy are managing to turn things around. Why not the US? What did the European countries do differently? Well, for one thing…
Before anyone assumes that remote workers moving from Blue to Red areas will change the politics of their new home, consider the opposite possibility: their new home may change the Blue transplants even more. That’s because political views aren’t fixed for life and where one lives can have a big effect on how one thinks about politics. At least that’s according to Jeffrey Lyons, a political scientist who studies why people change their political views over time. The rest of this post summarizes Lyons’ findings on factors that make some people more likely to change their politics than others.