tomo,

Feynman seems to have spent his whole life being hands-on, but with brain switched on too. If you haven't read any of his memoirs, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman was my first (in the mid-'90s), and drew me in to buying up his others. At the technical end, his QED on quantum electrodynamics made a very good fist of explaining a different view of optics for the layman.

(On the subject of books, I returned that Kindle edition of the book I mentioned recently. Apparently new publications won't work on old Kindle readers because ... reasons. Ordered the paper edition which will still work despite the age of the reader)

On that tweet: fun to turn urban heat island — a measurement problem — into catastrophe. As for having a Global Chief Heat Officer, I suppose it is immune to ridicule by virtue of already being at the limit.

On the Alina Chan comment, it strikes me that I have been on the wrong track. Throughout the scare, I criticised so-called experts who clearly didn't know what they were doing. Sure, they were a problem, but the bigger danger was from experts who knew fine well what they were doing.

Ross Lea,

Good article, but I'm afraid the BBC will cheerfully shrug it off. All the same, they probably are worried that the Internet poses the greatest threat to their ability to influence. In Star Trek there were plot-convenient concepts of "diverting power from phasers to shields"; the BBC might similarly divert power from the climate alarm boosters to the fact checking unit. Meanwhile we can continue with shields at maximum.

Mailman,

That was an interesting thought. Not too hard to write a Perl script to follow the article links and grab all the articles, but my quick recce of what it would take soon flagged a problem. We would wash up on the same shoals as ALL meta-analyses: the broad brush.

At item 2 in the retracted list is an article retracted not due to flaws but because it was published twice: an error by the journal. How many such cases were there?

At item 6 is the first of (I suspect) many articles which, much as with "climate change", are using the magic word COVID in their titles to reduce friction on the path to publication:

A Discourse Analysis of Quotidian Expressions of Nationalism during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chinese Cyberspace

On top of these sorts of problems is the fact that published papers aren't all equal. A single highly-influential paper being withdrawn is far more important than the retraction of 100 "meh, who cares" type papers. It comes down to that fellow — I think it was Adam Mastroianni — saying that science is a strongest link problem. It doesn't matter how many bad papers there are about COVID if there's one really good one that proves everything. I don't believe there is such a paper of course, but doing stats on the bad ones doesn't advance the search.

An interesting claim that I forgot to mention from that recent EconTalk was that, while we like to think of our systems as tending to redistribute from rich to poor, they actually redistribute from young to old. Not sure that's true, though I'm definitely wealthier now than when I was young, but it'd be just my luck, now that I'm getting into the winning category, that they'd change the rules to go the other way (for fairness, of course).

A lot of discussion at Jo Nova's lately on Australia's "Voice" referendum, to give Aborigines extra non-voting representation to the parliament. I suspect it won't get through and, if so, it will be very interesting to see the responses from the great and the good in the UN, UK, USA, etc. Wondering if there's any news of it in your MSM at the moment?

In regards to the many hundreds of articles being retracted I am wondering how many of them had the same authors? Surely that would be an interesting thing to understand?

A good short paper by Paul Homewood;-

https://www.netzerowatch.com/content/uploads/2022/06/Homewood-BBC-ClimateComplaints.pdf

More than 300 COVID articles retracted so far, including a fair number that appeared in The Lancet.

If we must live in a "publish or perish" world, perhaps there would be fewer retractions if each retracted article counted as, say, −20 articles in your publication count.

tomo,

Not being a rocket scientist myself, that was still an interesting snippet. The implication was that the scientists' brilliance won through *despite* materials shortages, but I wonder if the shortages may have had a plus side too. Feynman had a story of choosing his next employer. I don't remember, but it might have been Stanford vs. UCLA. He checked out the gleaming, pristine, state of the art particle accelerator at UCLA, then he saw the beaten up, spit and baling wire affair at Stanford, and Stanford it had to be. He wanted to really experiment, not just follow accepted paths.

Latest EconTalk on lessons learnt from the COVID responses was a bit of a curate's egg. The guest was an economist in the team for Project Warp Speed, but came across as reasonably objective. He did call closing schools a "quack medicine" (sounds right) and he also said that vaccines should never have been made mandatory (for retaining job, etc.), but there was no circumspection on whether the rush to release vaccines had been wise. Comments there seem to stick to the usual poles.

Another ChatGPT story from comments at Jo Nova's was this tale of a case law citation to an American court where ChatGPT had written about earlier judgements that simply never happened. The judge wasn't impressed and had the nerve to hold the lawyers accountable, not ChatGPT. That's a good call, but it's going to get trickier with other AI applications (e.g. do you blame occupants, owner, manufacturer when self-driving cars go haywire?).

Heard an interesting radio program based on this article telling us that Russia's claims of historical "title" to the Ukraine are no stronger than would be China's claims to parts of Siberia. I didn't know about it, but apparently the border in that area has had a heavy military presence for a long time, but now the Russians have moved a lot of their troops to support the current battles in Ukraine. The Chinese border forces would face much weaker opposition if Xi started saying of southern Siberia what he has said of Tibet and Taiwan: it was always part of China.

A more measured EconTalk, with Tyler Cowen on the hazards/benefits of AI. Wasn't completely cuckoo like that earlier guest, but still seemed a bit credulous to me.

I did like Cowen's point: who says *intelligence* is such a great advantage? I've had the same thought. Humans haven't evolved much in 10,000 years, so what happened to an Einstein or Newton back then? Their great intelligence didn't bring them to the top. For that matter, how many undiscovered Ramanujans have there been who whiled their lives away as peasants much more recently?

They do acknowledge that intelligence itself is a slippery notion, but I'm sticking to my position that ChatGPT is still a long long way from any useful concept of intelligence.

A comment I saw today at Jo Nova's had a pertinent link where, what looked like an excellent response by ChatGPT, was actually riddled with elementary errors.

Like I said a while back, it's flipped search on its head: you now need to search through it's output for the good bits. Progress?

Ross Lea,

Enjoyed the Ian Plimer talk. I think he comes over better in that sort of presentation than he does as a writer — though that might be unfair as I've only read one of his books and it was from the days when he was talking science. As he says in this talk, the battle is political and science won't win the day.

On the GWPF paper, it's been clear for decades that nuclear is over-regulated. It may even have been the pattern for today's "guideline" infested world where *everything* is over-regulated.

Quite closely related to both those items is today's article at Jo Nova's on what lies behind Germany's green fervour.

I suppose the sceptic's creed could be summed up in the proverb Don't judge a book by its cover:

You call yourself a climate scientist, but are your statements scientific or are they political?

You call them nuclear regulations, but are they designed to protect us from nuclear accidents or just to stifle development of nuclear power?

You call yourself Green, but is your aim to protect the environment, or to stifle *all* development (or, as the German case demonstrates, just to enrich yourself, your family and your friends)?

And of course you can extend these sorts of questions to Freedom from Hunger, Save the Children, and all the other high-sounding causes. Maybe they do some good, but you can't know that just from the title.

Excessive “safety” standards have held back progress in the development of nuclear power since the 1950 and needs urgent review going forward.

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/02/Allison-Nuclear.pdf