Science of Libertarian Morality?

There is a new(?) social psychology study which explores the formation of the libertarian personality. Naturally, I have issues with many of the conclusions presented, but it is an interesting read anyway. It can be found here.

- Steve

Insanity

Steve,

Here's one I really don't get. Some guy murders another guy, then goes to court and pleads "insanity".

Huh? How does that work? I mean, don't you have to be insane in the first place to murder someone?

While I'm thinking about it, what's the deal with this "crimes of passion" malarkey? OK, murderer "A" gets the maximum penalty because they prove in court that he "planned" to murder some poor schmoe. Murderer "B" gets off easy because they prove he just all of a sudden went off the deep end and started blasting away.

I mean, what possible difference would it make if you "planned" to murder someone or just got a wild hair? For that matter, why would society enact laws which are more lenient for people who are "insane" and tend to start shooting at the drop of a pin? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I mean, if the aim of our justice system is to "rehabilitate" people, wouldn't it be better to start out with a sane person who plans ahead instead of some whack job who doesn't even know what day it is?

One more thing. How come most of the time when a murderer causes death they sentence him to life? This makes no sense to me.

Now I assure you I'm not a big revenge guy. But doesn't it seem a little ridiculous that when some creep murders somebody they turn around and "punish" him by giving him three squares a day and a warm bed to sleep in for the rest of his life? Wouldn't it make better sense to let Hell foot the bill for the dude's room and board rather than the American tax payer?

If you've got an explanation for any of this, I'd love to hear it.

-Chris

Chris and Steve debate AGW...

You've miles to go before you sleep...

Gentlemen.

As LRA&H approaches its third year in business, I should like to wish you both a Happy New Year.  May you both prosper this year in all ways civil and honorable - not to mention those endeavors to which civility and honor may not be as tightly fastened.

I wish I could say all of your posts have been uniformly entertaining.  Some, to be honest, have been stupefyingly boring - a category in which Mr. Rhetts leads by a nose (Though Mr. Green has made many remarkable contributions).  Yet no road fashioned by human hands will ever be free of ruts and potholes, and at least this one appears to be going somewhere.

Whither?  I suppose you'll know when you get there.  But let's hope that won't be anytime soon...

Best wishes,

Bernardo

Wikigate

Steve,

I'm not much of a legal expert, so I really can't offer much of an opinion on whether or not the recent release by WikiLeaks of over a hundred thousand classified documents constitutes a prosecutable violation of law. However I will say that anyone with half a brain should realize that hundreds of thousands of communications on domestic and international affairs among government officials are bound to include more than a few embarrassing observations, and we should all have the good sense to put these into context.

That said, out of curiosity I did a little checking into what the usual conservative and liberal pundits are saying about this whole WikiLeaks episode. And it comes as no surprise to me that on cue, the conservatives are calling it treason, while at the same time offering all sorts of explanations and excuses for what was said in the most contentious documents. For their part, most of the liberal pundits don't even mention treason and have begun to point fingers and draw conclusions.

And what an amazing irony this is! A little over a year ago, some unknown person hacked into the Hadley CRU, stole and then released to the public thousands of private e-mails - and the shoes were on the other feet. Then, conservative pundits absolutely ignored the ethical considerations of privacy and jumped immediately to pointing fingers and drawing conclusions. Liberals cried foul and started looking for explanations. Does this teach us anything?

I think so. If you want to believe something, somewhere among the thousands of private opinions expressed by imperfect men you're going to find something to bolster that belief. But you know, God help us if tomorrow, by some miracle, we should be privy to everything our "friends" have said about us in private. If this was true, none of us would have any friends.

-Chris

Merry Christmas!

Steve,

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

'Tis the season!

All year long, people of abundant faith and bottomless doubt, curmudgeons and positivists, Christians, atheists, men and women of every conceivable spiritual and philosophical stripe, the fearfully intelligent and the woefully stupid, the young, the old, those claimed by the insensate providence of dogma and those who struggle against it (in short, all of us), have wasted our time pounding against walls. And yet...

Those walls won't ever come down. Our bloody fist prints might decorate them briefly after we are gone, but in time they will fade as generations after us rage on.

Steve, we started this blog a little over a year and a half ago. And, oh yes, we've raged. We've raged at different things for different reasons, and most times confronted each other, sometimes rancorously, sometimes politely, with our differences.

Yet always, always, the comforting remainder is that we have raged together.

If there is anything about this season, anything that is, which all of us, regardless of what we believe, unites us, it is that now is the perfect time catch our breath and give thanks for this magnificent gift of life and the brilliant minds God gave us.

So, thanks. I wish I could express to you how much I've enjoyed our debates, not to mention our odd forays.

And please, don't run for office. I can't tell you how embarrassed a liberal I would be to explain why I voted for such a regressive libertarian as yourself!

Peace.

-Chris

I buy you books and all you do is chew the covers...

Steve,

First off, thanks for replying to my comment and question regarding the "missing hot spots". As you may have surmised, I had already checked on this phenomenon and was wondering what your interpretation of it was. At issue, for me in any case, was your conclusion that this condition comprises a "logical flaw" in the theory of AGW. What bothers me most about this is the tendency to claim any conundrum or enigma in climate science generally to be a disproof, specifically, not just of AGW, but of global warming altogether. Follow me here.

The "missing hot spots" were first identified in the late 90's by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. Later in 2004, they re-surfaced in a "bombshell" paper which Patrick Michaels announced was going to "knock the stuffing out" of the IPCC's position on climate change. Yet nothing of the sort happened. The paper was almost universally panned as being the product of poor research, while most of the discrepancies between satellite and surface station measurements were resolved (you may recall our own discussion of this in private correspondence). Now come the same authors (Douglass, Pearson and Singer, with the addition of John Christy) with a new and vastly more limited claim. The assertion now is that the rate of warming in the tropical troposphere only (not, mind you, the existence of warming there - which is not disputed), as measured by satellite and radiosonde, are not consistent with the rate of warming as measured on the ground. Thus, in roughly ten years, the more or less blanket assertions of Soon and Baliunas have been whittled down to a single and much more limited discrepancy, regarding which, as you rightly point out, climate scientists are working hard to resolve.

In any case, why would one immediately assume this whole problem constitutes a "logical flaw" in the theory of AGW? Certainly it represents a problem either in the mechanics of temperature measurement, or in our understanding of what is happening in the tropical troposphere, or most likely, a little of both. But this would be a problem whether the theory of AGW is valid or not. Or, to say this another way, this whole issue progresses from a "logical flaw", to the bare claim that, because scientists don't know everything there is to know about climate science, all of their theories and predictions are worthless.

It doesn't take a lot of brains or ingenuity to stand on the sidelines, as persons like Joanne Nova do, and claim, vociferously, that every problem or disagreement among climate scientists wrecks the whole enterprise. But that's exactly what they do. Nowhere in their literature is the barest hint of appreciation for the notable successes which climate scientists have achieved, or of the thousands of hours of patient observations made by real professionals who have spent most of their lives studying a science not one person in a hundred understands.

Sure, in climate science, as in all scientific disciplines we need, desperately, an environment which fosters honest skepticism and robust debate. But this kind of constant, ignorant back-biting from agenda driven amateurs is poisoning the well. Steve, the place for climate scientists is in the field or the laboratory, not in front of a computer answering perfidious FOI requests or trying to defend themselves from charges of political bias.

And, for the last time, climate science doesn't have all the answers. But for Pete's sake Steve, nuclear physics is riddled with unsolved mysteries. Yet that hasn't stopped nuclear physicists from successfully designing safe and effective nuclear reactors. Similarly, what we know about cancer is dwarfed by what we don't know, yet this hasn't prevented medical researchers from designing treatments which in turn have saved many lives.

This leads me to the remainder of your post.

I gather you personally are unsure of how climate models are constructed, how they are checked for accuracy, and to what extent climate scientists employ them to make predictions about climate change. What mystifies me most about this is how, after months of rendering judgements, you turn around and ask where you can find the source material on that which you are judging! Are you kidding me?

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Forgive me for saying this, but frankly, what you're saying here is that you've been repeating the most common skeptical arguments without taking the obvious and rational first step of going to the source documents and checking them out for yourself. In other words, you're allowing others to do your thinking for you.

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Either (a), You are so entranced by your own conspiracy theories that you have denied yourself huge repositories of useful information because you assume, a priori, they are all the work of ideologues, or (b), you simply don't know these repositories exist. I don't think I can do much about (a). The central burden of a conspiracy theory is that it usually compels one to search, not for enlightenment but confirmation. Regarding (b) however:

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Back in July, I posted links to 4 separate sites: NOAA, NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and The National Science Foundation, where you can find a wealth of information about the science behind climate change. In December of last year, I wrote a post specifically about climate modeling, with helpful links to UCAR's Community Climate System Model (CCSM), which reviews in some detail how one of today's most powerful climate models has been put together and how it is checked for accuracy. In separate correspondence, I sent you links to the IPCC, where you can read for yourself all the current reports, along with supporting material (By the way, the volume by Working Group 1, "The Physical Science Basis", includes an extensive discussion of climate models - along with a copious list of references.).

Are you reading any of this stuff?

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Not to complain, but every time you've mentioned some new argument, I've gone to the source you referenced, read it, and done the necessary checking. Here's how that works. Some time ago in private correspondence you cited some Anthony Watts material on the unreliability of surface station temperature readings. I went to the source, found one of the stations Mr. Watts said was unreliable, and checked it out by comparing readings (available at the NOAA) from that site with two nearby sites. I overlaid the readings from the three sites and sent you back a graphic which clearly demonstrated that the readings from the station Mr. Watts was questioning were almost in perfect agreement with nearby sites - which would be virtually impossible if any or even all of the sites were reporting false readings.

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What troubled me then is the same thing which troubles me now. Anthony Watts (one of the critics you apparently rely on) was telling his readers that certain surface stations were giving false or unreliable readings, yet didn't take the elementary, and easy step of verifying this claim with freely available data. But then again, neither did you. Darn it, I, a boob, easily and independently discovered a means to determine the Watts' claim was nothing more than what comes from the south end of a north bound horse. Why wouldn't you have done the same thing?

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To me, this example perfectly characterizes the shoddy nature of the "scholarship" of your primary sources of information on climate change. But more importantly, it indicates that you yourself are not subjecting this material to the same standards of proof you demand from qualified and legitimate climate scientists. By all means, all theories, not just those of science, usually stand or fall based entirely on the results of repeated attempts to disprove them. Certainly they do. That's how science works. But for heaven's sake, shouldn't you demand at least some scientific rigor from your sources? In other words, how much time do you spend checking the other side of the argument before you accept an accusation as true?

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I get the impression you consider climate models to be some sort of voodoo. Stop thinking that way. Climate models are really nothing more than very large algorithms which allow climate scientists to correlate millions of bits of raw data. What do you expect them to use, black boards and slide rulers? I noted in an earlier post that NASA saved millions in the design of the Mars Landers by using sophisticated models to anticipate the effect of the Martian atmosphere on the entry capsules and parachutes. Similarly, all the major aerospace companies across the globe successfully employ computer models to test aircraft designs at a fraction of the cost previously required by the testing of full scale mock-ups. Now that I think of it, computer models have saved diverse industries billions of dollars in design costs, not to mention having made a major contribution to our own safety and comfort.

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How silly do you think these industries would be if they declined to use computer simulations because they are not perfect?

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Anyway, enjoy.

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-Chris