What to Make of Judith Curry?

Or   Watt's Up With Judith Curry?

This article is something of a "spin-off" of Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example.

   A Common refrain of those who call global warming a hoax, is that mainstream climatologists are "calling an opposing scientist a 'denier', ostracizing him/her and ridiculing them".

 So what to make of Judith Curry, who while continuing to publish studies supporting the general trend of global warming, has done more to impugn the integrity of her colleagues, and encourage those who call them liars than most actual climate change deniers

When Someone says Islam *is* based on Tolerance, Charity, ... [the meaning of "is", part II]

If you haven't already, I recommend reading Part 1.

OK, if someone says (as I'm sure some do) that "Islam is based on Tolerance, Charity, ..." -- while on the other hand inciting hatred and violence to Jews, or Americans, or Muslims of another persuasion, then this is something we call lying, and that sort of thing happens a lot, as we all know.

But there is plenty of evidence if you're willing to look, of ordinary Muslims, in America, Britain, Pakistan, or Africa, whose lives are about going to work and raising children who say and sincerely believe such a statement.

It really MIGHT depend on what the meaning of the word "is" is. (Reposted)

Reposted from the Ontological Comedian

If you think every word has a definition, and definitions are how we know what words mean, consider the word "is" -- which is a pivotal part of every definition -- indeed of the very idea of definition. A bear is a large furry mammal that sometimes walks on it hind legs, etc., etc.

The Big Lie again: "Holiday Trees" and Steven Levy "commentary"

 The following is going viral again as it apparently has around every Christmas of the past few years
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/l/Steven-Levy.htm#.VIDWCUrUhLU

The above sources says it is based partly on a screed by Ben Stein, which is easy to believe considering other things he's written.

Apparently the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year which prompted CBS presenter, Steven Levy, to present this piece which I would like to share with you. I think it applies just as much to many countries as it does to America.

I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat...

What is Science and What Can We Learn From it About Keeping Our Heads on Straight Generally.

Here are three posts trying to make some contribution to philosophy of science and to the public's understanding of it.

The first, What is A Machine? Natural Machines and Origins of Science tries to express something possibly original about the occasions when people have gotten a foothold on the path to a major branch of science.  Before the scientific revolution there were, hidden amidst the blooming buzzing confusion of nature, a few "natural machines".  Unlike the typical object in nature, they behave with predictable simplicity, although this may not be obvious for a long time -- until certain concepts and technologies aid in their analysis.  These include a heavy dense projectile in (parabolic, as it turns out) flight, and the system of the Earth, Sun, moon, and planets (and their moons).  Probably, I should say machines and mechanical processes, but I like the idea of a flying rock or cannonball as an ultra-simple machine.

The next essay, Finding Your Invisible Elephant. A Science Requires, and is Shaped by, a Tractable Subject Matter suggests that "scientific method", or other good epistemic processes such as peer review journals and conventions are not enough.  Once a discipline, through a fruitful set of techniques, is able to repeatedly find its way to make contact with a coherent set of fundamental facts of nature, only then do the practices of academia give rise to a ratcheting mechanism that can make the diverse efforts of many autonomous individuals and groups converge on better and better understanding of some set of phenomena.  This does not work for literary criticism, and its working in many fields of social science, such as sociology of scientific knowledge, is highly dubious.

The third essay, Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example focuses on a case study of scientific consensus by a practitioner of the fairly new field of social epistemology, Miriam Solomon in her book Social Empiricism.  It concerns the gelling, over several decades, of recognition of the phenomenon of continental drift, or plate tectonics.  Many very diverse disciplines had to finally agree that they all had data pointing to the same surprising phenomena before it could legitimately be said that there was a scientific consensus.

Now, this falls short of what the title seems to promise, but is part of a project of trying to take small, sometimes painful steps in that direction.

Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example.

    One common way of attacking the mainstream of climatology for its "global warming consensus" is to claim that consensus is just that sort of authoritarian "group think" that Galileo confronted in the Inquisition.  A companion claim is that mainstream climatologists have abandoned "the scientific method".  Some of those who say they have a case against AGW are likely to say that they are practicing the true "scientific method" and anyone who doesn't accept their experiment(s) or studies as decisive must be rejecting the scientific method.  They may also delve into the mainstream studies.  Global warming dissidents (who rarely sound to me like true skeptical thinkers) often cite studies by scientists who would be surprised to learn that anyone is saying their study disproved AGW, so it is often not scientists, but "science critics" claiming the scientific method has been abandoned by mainstream climatologists.  One person with whom I recently argued (on Facebook) said "When I went to college and took experimental psychology, the premise of experimentation was to challenge existing theory" and later "There is a scientific experimental process ... propose a postulate, select your population or test material, identify and isolate variables, run your test, draw conclusions, repeat, publish, then stand up to challenge."

Gerrymandering Viewed as a Nonpartisan (or rather pro-electorate vs the system) Issue

The difficulty we have with gerrymandering is that it will always seem attractive to the party in power. Common sense reforms should make us all feel we have more of a chance of being represented. Redrawing the map by both sides has one big nonpartisan effect; it is overall very good for incumbents. It tends to make every district a "safe" district for one party or the other. Another effect, sometimes in competition with the first is, due to "safe" districts, primary elections become very important; general elections much less so. During the primaries, candidates must try to "click" with one group riled up enough to turn out for primary elections. So you are far less likely to get people with balanced perspectives. In this age, balance or moderation tends to be ridiculed by both (or all) sides. But it is the way of getting the best from multiple perspectives. It gives you people able to argue fruitfully, not just posture for the "base". In reality, sometimes the more conservative idea fits the situation best, and sometimes the more visionary idea does. If people can fruitfully argue, we are more likely to get the benefit of that. I believe you are also more likely to see flaws (to missing the mark or just excess complexity) corrected in some legislation with more moderates rather than the attitude extremists often have "We won't cooperate to improve it because we like it being as bad as possible because we want it to fail" (see http://tinyurl.com/pf2z4qx). What would an alternative to eternal gerrymandering look like? Maybe laws that say a district should have a certain geometric compactness. That is something  where an intuitive concept could be represented by a mathematical formula. We might not understand the formula, but by looking at examples of what conforms to it and what violates it, we could see whether results look intuitively right. Better yet, in my opinion, we might introduce an arbitrariness, according to a mathematical formula. If you had a square state (which we don't of course) it could look like a checker board. Actually this doesn't quite work because it won't give you districts of approx equal population within a state, city, or county to be "districted" More sophisticated mathematics could generalize that formula. Another reason for putting it all in the hands of a mathematical/computer best line-drawing system that we can judge intuitive by the intuitive pleasingness of the results: it eliminates the considerable amount that can be done to create solid incumbancy districts (Dem districts or Repub. districts, or white, black or Latino districts) while the districts still look nice and geometrically compact. I believe some decades ago, gerrymandering, or rather drawing maps heavily relying on human judgement to attain some electoral tendency, regained some respectability when they were used to increase the chances of certain minorities getting a representative who looked like them. Lani Guinier, a legal scholar nominated by Clinton for Attorney General had some ideas for allowing such possibilities without distorting the electoral map in any way. They involved a sort of one man, N-vote sort of system, which was quickly vilified (as was Guinier) as a violation of the sacred 1-man 1-vote principle; but it did not violate it at all in spirit. Besides anti-gerrymandering, another common sense reform principle driven by the goal of real representativeness (not favorong one ideology or the other) is to reduce the role money plays. In http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/08/might-it-be-possible-to-tune-out-or.html I proposed a model for this, suitable for growing up from the "grass roots" *if* the idea and trial results can over time persuade enough people. One example of money in politics that a conservative might be able to relate to is how much of a farce the 2012 Republican presidential primaries were. There were several instances of one candidate being up in one state and another in the next that looked less like the states having different ideological tendencies, and instead seemed explanable by someone having just bought a few million dollars worth of ads through one PAC or another. E.g. Sheldon Adelson bringing Newt Gingrich up from out of nowhere to near the top for a couple of days. Adelson is a casino magnate whose main issue these days is to suppress online gambling.