It is sometimes said that facts speak for themselves, but mostly they don't. For one example, consider media reports on the relation between the 2008 bailout and the stock market. When the House voted down the bailout and the market fell, the fall was reported as a response to the failure. When the House passed the bailout and the market fell, the fall was reported as occurring in spite of the passage of the bailout.
Thanks. That is very interesting, in part because it takes the genetic explanation seriously, noting that it requires a good deal of assortative mating to maintain genetic differences and that England, which is where its data are from, had a lot of assortative mating through its class system.
>the fact that total global warming in the past century comes to about one degree centigrade, too slow for anyone to notice in his own lifetime
Does the former necessarily imply the latter? While a 1 C shift in mean temperature is not noticeable, shifting the temperature distribution to the right by even a fraction of a degree, might be noticeable on the tails, as the density of the leftmost tail decreases a lot, and the density of the rightmost tail increases a lot.
For example, if a city has a mean temperature of 12 C and a SD of 10 C, only 0.1% of days would be 42 C or above, but if the mean rose to 12.5 C, the share of days 42 or above would double to 0.2%.
[I'm assuming each day has a single temperature for illustrative purposes.]
I agree with your general point that it is quite misleading to point to given hot weather as being related to climate change.
My point was that *were* climate change to conceivably be noticeable, the noticeable part would not be the mean temperature, but rather the frequency of very rare high temperatures.
I don't know whether such changes could be noticeable, as a quick search didn't turn up the info I'd need on temperature distributions.
Hmm...Rather than calculating the distributions myself, I can just look at highest recorded annual temperature. That could be a nice quantification of the feeling that "it never used to get this hot."
So it seems that although you could have steelmaned the position you were critiquing, even the steelmaned version would have still been wrong.
Not only are the *mean* temperature differences too small to notice, but indeed, even the differences at the tail ends of the distribution are too small to notice.
> Accurate information, as best I can tell by a little online search, would tell students that a single act of unprotected intercourse, randomly timed, has only about one chance in forty of resulting in pregnancy—less if the couple make an attempt to avoid the woman's fertile period. To amorous teenagers one chance in forty might look pretty safe, especially if they tell themselves that they are only going to try it once.
The problem is that amorous teenagers aren't going to only engage in sex once.
Private law has always confused me. It seems more like a stereotypical ivory tower theory than anything practical. I've read it in your books and others, but could not name where except Machinery of Freedom, and I don't know when or what edition.
As I understand it, everyone signs up with protection agencies. When a crime has been committed, you call your protection agency, they investigate, and things are normal if the culprit is with the same agency. Otherwise the two agencies negotiate, with the ever present threat of trial by (agency, not personal) combat to determine the winner.
I have many doubts about the whole scheme, but here one stands out. It's easy to negotiate whether a burglar should get 5 years or 10 years; but no compromise is possible between 10 years of death.
It's like abortion. Pro-abortionists can argue and compromise over 10 days vs 10 weeks; but pro and anti cannot compromise over baby murder vs mother slavery.
Or drinking. One can compromise over what BAC level is criminal, but one cannot compromise over drinking at all.
It comes down to flipping a coin, a pitched battle, money, or some other arbitrary matter unrelated to any pretense of justice.
If a teetotaler is pissed about his protection agency losing a battle and letting a bar stay in business, he may well switch to a more adamant protection agency which is smaller and even more likely to lose pitched battles. That is not justice.
Not that I have a lot of respect for current legal systems anywhere in the world, as far as actual justice goes. But they do at least pay lip service to the idea.
In the system as I describe it, agencies don't negotiate over each case, they agree on a private court to decide all conflicts between customers of the two agencies. I argue in _Machinery_ that the interest of rights enforcement agencies and arbitration agencies will tend to produce efficient law in the economic sense, and that efficient law correlates well although not perfectly with at least a libertarian view of just law.
Where do you think justice comes from and how do you set up a legal system which generates just outcomes?
That last is something I have been trying to figure out for a long long time. It may be that our current system, or similar systems, are the worst possible except for all the others. But I doubt I will ever like it.
As for private courts, I suppose I take as a given when any two parties negotiate or dicker, eventually there has to be some neutral third party, otherwise it never would have come to negotiations.
With the private courts of an A-C system there is a neutral party. The court, the arbitration agency, is selling its services to both agencies, so neutral between their clients.
We also have similar problems with public law. Russia's law says that the inhabitants of Kramatorsk are in Russia and that it's illegal for them to defame the special military operation, whereas Ukraine's law says that they're in Ukraine and it's OK for them to criticize Russia's war as much as they want. Britain's law said that Rushdie was pretty free to publish whatever he wanted about Mohammed, but Iran's law said that he had to die for publishing his book.
But those are different countries, with borders separating the two distinct sets of laws. Private law differences are within a single country, everyone intermingled. Neighbors and co-workers live and work cheek-by-jowl and have different protection agencies, with incompatible laws on public drinking, swearing, and nudity, for instance.
It's not worse than public law in these extreme cases; they still come down to something arbitrary, such as king's decrees or elections. It may be better when negotiating 5 vs 10 years. But it doesn't seem to me that it adds any actual justice for all the extra complications.
Half the time, I think I don't understand it. The other half, I know I don't understand it. But I never have a clue as to what I don't understand.
In present US law there are differences within a single country, since some law is state or even local law and what law applies is not always determined by the physical location of the conflict. Consider a liability case over an accident in Florida involving a car built in Michigan, a driver from California and a victim from Louisiana.
Yes, but again, my understanding of private law is that clients of these protection agencies are not geographically isolated, they are all jumbled up, neighbors and co-workers all rubbing shoulders. If all drinkers were isolated geographically from all teetotalers, they would never have any disputes about drinking, and tourists would know what they were getting in to.
They are not assumed to be geographically isolated, although my guess is that an agency will only operate in part of the territory, assuming anything close to the size of the US. So you are probably talking about three or four with significant numbers of customers in your town, constrained by the possibility of competitors moving in if the customers are unhappy.
But in the U.S., as I pointed out, while laws have territorial location law cases may not, since the same case arguably falls under the law of two or more governments.
I haven't yet figured out if I can make corrections after a post has gone out, but I should, since they are still up to be read and I sometimes link to an old post in a new one.
P.S. Inspired by your helpful correction I have just discovered that I can edit old posts and have corrected the error.
I have indeed been attributing recent weather patterns in my city to climate change. I had read that the 1 degree C in warming leads to greater hurricanes, longer winter, hotter summers...Is that not true?
It is a rare self-aware person going after the truth, who argues in effect against his own position. Thanks for doing that.
Judging at least by the IPCC report, warming leads or will lead to milder winters, hotter summers, slightly stronger hurricanes but fewer moderate hurricanes.
My point was that the changes were too slow for someone to observe from his own experience. I don't believe that anyone remembers temperatures fifty years ago accurately enough to detect a half degree change from then to now.
A similar discussion of last names and wealth over time can be seen here (Britian) https://www.takimag.com/article/class-and-family/
Thanks. That is very interesting, in part because it takes the genetic explanation seriously, noting that it requires a good deal of assortative mating to maintain genetic differences and that England, which is where its data are from, had a lot of assortative mating through its class system.
>the fact that total global warming in the past century comes to about one degree centigrade, too slow for anyone to notice in his own lifetime
Does the former necessarily imply the latter? While a 1 C shift in mean temperature is not noticeable, shifting the temperature distribution to the right by even a fraction of a degree, might be noticeable on the tails, as the density of the leftmost tail decreases a lot, and the density of the rightmost tail increases a lot.
For example, if a city has a mean temperature of 12 C and a SD of 10 C, only 0.1% of days would be 42 C or above, but if the mean rose to 12.5 C, the share of days 42 or above would double to 0.2%.
[I'm assuming each day has a single temperature for illustrative purposes.]
Do you think your memory is good enough to distinguish between 0.1% of hot days fifty years ago and 0.2% hot days this year? Mine certainly is not.
I agree with your general point that it is quite misleading to point to given hot weather as being related to climate change.
My point was that *were* climate change to conceivably be noticeable, the noticeable part would not be the mean temperature, but rather the frequency of very rare high temperatures.
I don't know whether such changes could be noticeable, as a quick search didn't turn up the info I'd need on temperature distributions.
Hmm...Rather than calculating the distributions myself, I can just look at highest recorded annual temperature. That could be a nice quantification of the feeling that "it never used to get this hot."
Looking at annual highest temperature for NYC: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/new-york/highest-temperatures-by-year, I see no clear trend in recent decades (the same goes for LA and Chicago).
So it seems that although you could have steelmaned the position you were critiquing, even the steelmaned version would have still been wrong.
Not only are the *mean* temperature differences too small to notice, but indeed, even the differences at the tail ends of the distribution are too small to notice.
> Accurate information, as best I can tell by a little online search, would tell students that a single act of unprotected intercourse, randomly timed, has only about one chance in forty of resulting in pregnancy—less if the couple make an attempt to avoid the woman's fertile period. To amorous teenagers one chance in forty might look pretty safe, especially if they tell themselves that they are only going to try it once.
The problem is that amorous teenagers aren't going to only engage in sex once.
But do they realize that?
Private law has always confused me. It seems more like a stereotypical ivory tower theory than anything practical. I've read it in your books and others, but could not name where except Machinery of Freedom, and I don't know when or what edition.
As I understand it, everyone signs up with protection agencies. When a crime has been committed, you call your protection agency, they investigate, and things are normal if the culprit is with the same agency. Otherwise the two agencies negotiate, with the ever present threat of trial by (agency, not personal) combat to determine the winner.
I have many doubts about the whole scheme, but here one stands out. It's easy to negotiate whether a burglar should get 5 years or 10 years; but no compromise is possible between 10 years of death.
It's like abortion. Pro-abortionists can argue and compromise over 10 days vs 10 weeks; but pro and anti cannot compromise over baby murder vs mother slavery.
Or drinking. One can compromise over what BAC level is criminal, but one cannot compromise over drinking at all.
It comes down to flipping a coin, a pitched battle, money, or some other arbitrary matter unrelated to any pretense of justice.
If a teetotaler is pissed about his protection agency losing a battle and letting a bar stay in business, he may well switch to a more adamant protection agency which is smaller and even more likely to lose pitched battles. That is not justice.
Not that I have a lot of respect for current legal systems anywhere in the world, as far as actual justice goes. But they do at least pay lip service to the idea.
In the system as I describe it, agencies don't negotiate over each case, they agree on a private court to decide all conflicts between customers of the two agencies. I argue in _Machinery_ that the interest of rights enforcement agencies and arbitration agencies will tend to produce efficient law in the economic sense, and that efficient law correlates well although not perfectly with at least a libertarian view of just law.
Where do you think justice comes from and how do you set up a legal system which generates just outcomes?
That last is something I have been trying to figure out for a long long time. It may be that our current system, or similar systems, are the worst possible except for all the others. But I doubt I will ever like it.
As for private courts, I suppose I take as a given when any two parties negotiate or dicker, eventually there has to be some neutral third party, otherwise it never would have come to negotiations.
With the private courts of an A-C system there is a neutral party. The court, the arbitration agency, is selling its services to both agencies, so neutral between their clients.
We also have similar problems with public law. Russia's law says that the inhabitants of Kramatorsk are in Russia and that it's illegal for them to defame the special military operation, whereas Ukraine's law says that they're in Ukraine and it's OK for them to criticize Russia's war as much as they want. Britain's law said that Rushdie was pretty free to publish whatever he wanted about Mohammed, but Iran's law said that he had to die for publishing his book.
But those are different countries, with borders separating the two distinct sets of laws. Private law differences are within a single country, everyone intermingled. Neighbors and co-workers live and work cheek-by-jowl and have different protection agencies, with incompatible laws on public drinking, swearing, and nudity, for instance.
It's not worse than public law in these extreme cases; they still come down to something arbitrary, such as king's decrees or elections. It may be better when negotiating 5 vs 10 years. But it doesn't seem to me that it adds any actual justice for all the extra complications.
Half the time, I think I don't understand it. The other half, I know I don't understand it. But I never have a clue as to what I don't understand.
In present US law there are differences within a single country, since some law is state or even local law and what law applies is not always determined by the physical location of the conflict. Consider a liability case over an accident in Florida involving a car built in Michigan, a driver from California and a victim from Louisiana.
Yes, but again, my understanding of private law is that clients of these protection agencies are not geographically isolated, they are all jumbled up, neighbors and co-workers all rubbing shoulders. If all drinkers were isolated geographically from all teetotalers, they would never have any disputes about drinking, and tourists would know what they were getting in to.
They are not assumed to be geographically isolated, although my guess is that an agency will only operate in part of the territory, assuming anything close to the size of the US. So you are probably talking about three or four with significant numbers of customers in your town, constrained by the possibility of competitors moving in if the customers are unhappy.
But in the U.S., as I pointed out, while laws have territorial location law cases may not, since the same case arguably falls under the law of two or more governments.
Friendly correction: swith in last paragraph needs a c
I haven't yet figured out if I can make corrections after a post has gone out, but I should, since they are still up to be read and I sometimes link to an old post in a new one.
P.S. Inspired by your helpful correction I have just discovered that I can edit old posts and have corrected the error.
So glad! I recently figured out that one can edit posts on Reddit, so I know the feeling
I like your main point about truth.
I have indeed been attributing recent weather patterns in my city to climate change. I had read that the 1 degree C in warming leads to greater hurricanes, longer winter, hotter summers...Is that not true?
It is a rare self-aware person going after the truth, who argues in effect against his own position. Thanks for doing that.
Judging at least by the IPCC report, warming leads or will lead to milder winters, hotter summers, slightly stronger hurricanes but fewer moderate hurricanes.
My point was that the changes were too slow for someone to observe from his own experience. I don't believe that anyone remembers temperatures fifty years ago accurately enough to detect a half degree change from then to now.
Great point.
I myself have been carelessly attributing the current summer heat to climate change.