Let me just go on record as believing that it is not a good or necessary thing to make comedic action movies about 12-year-old girls who shoot people in the head. Because this is what I think of when I read a quote about the loss of dignity and importance – the way a culture, not individuals, loses its sense of dignity and importance by finding opportunities to leach the innocence from anything previously regarded as sacrosanct.
The comments on the HotAir thread are full of the usual scoff-talk – why, comics were once considered corrupting to children! Elvis was forbidden to be seen from the waist down! Piano legs were covered by Victorians! Christians chopped peeners off Roman statues! and so on. If there was once a standard now seen as silly and puritanical, it must mean our current standards are the same.
This is the same fallacy as that engaged by someone who, in response to a critique of his loony ideas cries, “They laughed at Einstein, too!” To which the rational rejoinder is, “They also laughed at Soupy Sales.” It’s an unjustified extrapolation, and a more robust defense is required.
We now know that the models can’t even forecast the past (and they’re extremely shoddy work on inspection), and they want us to rely on them to make trillion-dollar decisions?
I think I’ve found the pseudocode for Mann’s temperature charts:
input hockey_stick array
input year_data array
For each year (1000 - 2009) {
while (year_data_of_year less than hockey_stick_of_year) {
if (year_data_of_year less than hockey_stick_of_year) {
year_data_of_year += 0.1 degrees
}
}
plot year_data_of_year
}
See, nothing to it. Poor Harry wouldn’t have had so much frustration if he’d just stuck with the script.
I scored about a five, which puts me in with most of the herd. I was best at judging right angles (typically close to a one) and splitting them, and worst at judging distance (centering the line and circle, where I averaged nine or so).
As Joe Katzman says, it’s hard to know whether this should be comforting, or frightening:
Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache.
You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say “Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature” actually understates the scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the angels. Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.
This seems to be congruent with Axelrod’s work. I wonder if the successful ones use Tit for Tat?