Category Archive 'Megan McArdle'
26 Jan 2010

Let’s Hope the Health Care Bill Is Dead

,

Megan McArdle doesn’t believe the progressive commentariat can cheerlead congressional democrats into a desperation move involving getting the House to pass the Senate bill on the basis of written pledges to amend it later to meet House requirements then ramming it through the Senate by cheating and using reconciliation (as described by Dick Morris).

Health care’s popularity drops any time Congress discusses it. With respect to Nate Silver, who argues that the bill would be popular if they ever passed it and could discuss what’s in it, you cannot “prove” that voters like a bill because various bits of it poll well on their own. Do I want a sous vide machine? Certainly! I could take a poll that would show nine or ten wonderful things I would love about owning a sous vide machine. Am I going to buy one? No I am not, because it costs hundreds of dollars I need for other things.

Almost everything polls well on its own, except tax increases. …

I think Yglesias is right that this process was always more fragile than it appeared. As I read it, majorities of both houses do not want to pass this bill–otherwise, they wouldn’t have run for the exits so quick. They were looking for an excuse that they could deploy without risking retaliation from the leadership–and what the Massachusetts election showed, is that they don’t have all that much to fear from the leadership, because the leadership may not be there after November. Reid’s almost certain to lose his seat, and Pelosi may lose her majority in the house.

They don’t want to say they want to kill it, of course. So instead, they’re doing pretty much what I expected: putting it on the back burner. We want to pass health care, but we just have a few things to do first . . .

Once it goes on the back burner, it’s over. As time goes by, voters will be thinking less and less about the health care bill they hated, and more and more about other things in the news. There is not going to be any appetite among Democrats for returning to this toxic process and refreshing those bad memories. They’re going to want to spend the time between now and the election talking about things that voters, y’know, like.

10 Dec 2009

Megan McArdle: “Surely, It Wasn’t Fraud!”

, , ,

Megan McArdle does not believe that conscious dishonesty can be behind the University of East Anglia emails, or the “corrected” temperature charts produced by NIWA and GHCN (the Global Historical Climate Network) .

I am thoroughly unimpressed with the belief that global warming scientists have been engaging in some kind of massive conspiracy to conceal the truth. First, because we seem to be able to observe things like polar ice sheets melting, which point to warming. And second, because, well, why the hell would they? I can imagine a sort of selection bias in the grant process. I cannot imagine hundreds of scientists thinking, well, I put ten years into getting my PhD–time to spend the rest of my life faking data in order to get some grant money! One, yes. All of them, no.

Yet, the facts are troubling. When she looks at the kind of data correction illustrated here:

Megan McArdle is reduced to hoping somebody on the Warmist side has an explanation.

More than one blog is saying this proves that some of the data was falsified. I think that’s too strong. But it does look like maybe they got a little too aggressive massaging it.

Is this an anomaly? I hope it is, and think it probably is. But I worry that it isn’t. And I’m eagerly awaiting someone at RealClimate or similar to explain why and how this kind of correction got applied.

—————————————————

Some of her own commenters do. Wells, at December 10, 2009 6:09 AM, responds:

Oddly for a blog that used to be called “asymmetrical information”, Megan’s missing the agency theory here.

A perceived climate crisis drives grants for research. Grants drive careers: they get you paid, they help you hire others, they give you data that you can use to score the publications that create the public perception of a climate crisis.

Virtuous cycle– as long as the publications support the perception of crisis. Those publications also drive promotions / tenure / editorships. They get you out of low-paid post-doctoral fellowships and into tenure-track professorships. They get your grad students onto a good career track.

If your results are non-significant, then you’re less likely to get published (less contribution to literature). You’re less likely to get grant money, because that goes to people in good career tracks with lots of publications in good journals.

So we have two selection effects: people who are True Believers are more likely to get PhD’s in climate studies to begin with. Then the True Believers are more likely to write papers that help their careers rather than neutral or bad papers. You don’t even need to assume malice: the good scientists just get selected out of the population because they can’t keep up with the phonies, who beat them in grant money, prestige, editorships and faculty appointments.

The temptation to fudge data must be unbelievable, because in that environment, Everybody Does It. And the temptation to fool yourself is certainly unbelievable because all the best people follow the same best practices, so it can’t be wrong. Can it?

Altoids, December 9, 2009 5:11 PM, expands on the same analysis:

Megan,

With respect, you’re setting up a strawman. None of the scientists who have “come out” as climate skeptics allege a massive conspiracy by scientists, any more than there is a massive liberal conspiracy in Hollywood. What you have is a self-emergent, self-organizing bias. I hope I can illustrate it briefly.

I work in academic science (check my IP address if you wish). Scientists are, in general, uncompromising idealists for objective, physical truth. But occasionally, politics encroaches. Most of my work is funded by DoE, DoD, ONR, and a few big companies. We get the grants, because we are simply the best in the field. But we don’t work in isolation. We work as part of a department, which has equipment, lab space, and maintenance staff, IT, et cetera. We have a system for the strict partition of unclassified/classified research through collaboration with government labs. The department had set a research policy and infrastructure goal to attract defense funding, and it worked.

The same is true in climate science. Universities and departments have set policies to attract climate science funding. Climate science centers don’t spontaneously spring into existence – they were created, in increasingly rapid numbers, to partake in the funding bonanza that is AGW. This by itself is not political – currently, universities are scrambling to set up “clean energy” and “sustainable technology” centers. Before it was bio-tech and nanotechnology. But because AGW-funding is politically motivated, departments have adroitly set their research goals to match the political goals of their funding sources. Just look at the mission statements of these climate research institutes – they don’t seek to investigate the scientific validity or soundness of AGW-theory, they assume that it is true, and seek to research the implications or consequences of it.

This filters through every level. Having created such a department, they must fill it with faculty that will carry out their mission statement. The department will hire professors who already believe in AGW and conduct research based on that premise. Those professors will hire students that will conduct their research without much fuss about AGW. And honestly, if you know anything about my generation, we will do or say whatever it is we think we’re supposed to do or say. There is no conspiracy, just a slightly cozy, unthinking myopia. Don’t rock the boat.

The former editor of the New Scientist, Nigel Calder, said it best – if you want funding to study the feeding habits of squirrels, you won’t get it. If you wants to study the effects of climate change on the feeding habits of squirrels, you will. And so in these subtle ways, there is a gravitational pull towards the AGW monolith.

I think it the most damning evidence for this soft tyranny is in the work of climate scientists whose scientific integrity has led them to publish results that clearly contradict basic assumptions in AGW modeling. Yet, in their papers, they are very careful to skirt around the issue, keeping their heads down, describing their results in a way obfuscates the contradiction. They will describe their results as an individual case, with no greater implications, and issue reassuring boilerplate statements about how AGW is true anyways.

For the field as a whole, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s the unfortunate consequence of having a field totally dominated by politically-motivated, strings-attached money. In the case of the CRU email group, well, the emails speak for themselves. Call it whatever you want.

13 Mar 2009

More Buyer’s Remorse

, , ,

This time it’s Megan McArdle.

Having defended Obama’s candidacy largely on his economic team, I’m having serious buyer’s remorse. …

[H]e… promised to be non-partisan and accountable, and the size and composition stimulus package looks like just one more attempt to ram through his ideological agenda without much scrutiny, with the heaviest focus on programs that will be especially hard to cut.

The budget numbers are just one more blow to the credibility he worked hard to establish during the election. Back then, people like me handed him kudoes for using numbers that were really much less mendacious than the general run of candidate program promises. Now, he’s building a budget on the promise that this recession will be milder than average, with growth merely dipping to 1.2% this year and returning to trend in 2010. Isn’t there anyone at BLS who could have filled him in on the unemployment figures, or at Treasury who could have explained what a disproportionate impact finance salaries have on tax revenue? These numbers . . . well, I can’t really fully describe them on a family blog. But he has now raced passed Bush in the Delusional Budget Math olympics.

14 Jul 2008

SF & Feminism

, , ,

A reader tells Megan McArdle that she’s every nerd’s dream girl because she actually likes Science Fiction, which got the gender wars rolling, and provoked discussion of girls & SF. Poor Megan has had to respond defensively.

I guess some people just date the wrong girls. My wife, as we near Social Security age, is only beginning to recover from a really drastic life-time SF reading habit. 30 years ago, we used to store her SF books on top of a row of book cases, about 15′ long with 4 or 5′ of space above. The stacked up SF filled the space, creating a visually interesting and thought provoking assemblage which came to be regarded by a number of people as a satisfying example of found art. We often speculated on having the whole thing set in lucite. Particularly after one of the occasional book avalanches occurred.

I expect Karen would read more SF even now, if there was more SF and less weak and imitative fantasy out there.

Nobody in our household likes Doctor Who, I’m afraid.

Your are browsing
the Archives of Never Yet Melted in the 'Megan McArdle' Category.











Feeds
Entries (RSS)
Comments (RSS)
Feed Shark