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Maybe it's the sequence he presented it, but something sound incredibly wrong about this line of thinking: 1) Here's my simple theory (the more charismatic win

by Hondor 10y ago

Maybe it's the sequence he presented it, but something sound incredibly wrong about this line of thinking: 1) Here's my simple theory (the more charismatic wins). 2) Here's all this data to support it. 3) Here's some data that seems to contradict it (Nixon vs Humphry) so now I'll tack on an exception so that it actually agrees with my now more complex theory (the more charismatic wins unless the other one limits their media appearances). If you stop and exclude case where a "carefully scripted campaign spot" means the less charismatic can win, then not only do you have to investigate every other election to see if the less charismatic candidate also carefully scripted their campaign spots, but you've also data dredged to find that specific type of exception in the first place. Sure, now your theory fits all the historical data, but if you try to use it next election and it fails, you can tack on yet another exception and still claim that it's right. "Oh, this one didn't count because of [new reason I though of after the fact]."

basicplus2 10y ago
it seems to work for climate "science"..
- Hondor 10y ago
  It's hard for the layman to see any science happening with climate science. All we hear is predictions that have already come true before they were made, vague unfalsifiable predictions for the near future and the more concrete predictions for so far in the future that we haven't had a chance to test them yet. Maybe we can trust that climate scientists somehow blinded themselves to recent data while making their models, then wrote up or even published their predictions before unblinding themselves and saying "Wow, it turned out to be right!". But we don't hear much about those important methodological details in the popular press. We don't hear about the track record of correct vs incorrect predictions. Each side of the debate only skews it to serve its own interests. For example, I recently read a story on a pro climate change website listing many failures of previous climate predictions. However every single failure was one where it turned out the effect was greater than predicted, never smaller. Thus serving the goal of scaring people. That's probably not really a fair showing of all predictions.

by Hondor 10y ago

basicplus2 10y ago

it seems to work for climate "science"..

Hondor 10y ago
It's hard for the layman to see any science happening with climate science. All we hear is predictions that have already come true before they were made, vague unfalsifiable predictions for the near future and the more concrete predictions for so far in the future that we haven't had a chance to test them yet. Maybe we can trust that climate scientists somehow blinded themselves to recent data while making their models, then wrote up or even published their predictions before unblinding themselves and saying "Wow, it turned out to be right!". But we don't hear much about those important methodological details in the popular press. We don't hear about the track record of correct vs incorrect predictions. Each side of the debate only skews it to serve its own interests. For example, I recently read a story on a pro climate change website listing many failures of previous climate predictions. However every single failure was one where it turned out the effect was greater than predicted, never smaller. Thus serving the goal of scaring people. That's probably not really a fair showing of all predictions.