5 ms·

Superfreakonomics: The Anatomy of Smear

40 points by spooneybarger 17y ago

spooneybarger 17y ago
and still more: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomics-on-climate-part-1/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomic...
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
- cwan 17y ago
  The chain begins with Joseph Romm telling Caldeira that he had read SuperFreakonomics and “I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance.” Romm adds that “my blog is read by everyone in this area, including the media” and tells Caldeira that “I’d like a quote like ‘The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work,’ plus whatever else you want to say.” Did you read the same post that I did? How can this possibly be characterized as mere "joining" in the debate by "intelligent readers". Isn't having pre-formed views completely disregarding opposing viewpoints (versus an honest attempt at addressing them) the antithesis of intelligent?
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    Let's not allow all this character assassination, and/or accusations of same, to distract from other intelligent readers who are, in fact, joining in the debate: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/book-superfreakonomics.html http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/glo... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-superfreakonomics-i-promise.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-supe...
protomyth 17y ago
So, if I got this right, Ken Caldeira didn't proofread enough and Joseph Romm wanted to do a hit piece on the book and fed Ken Caldeira a quote he was going to attribute to him.
- sachinag 17y ago
  I think that's all true. The part that's important is that Caldiera was OK with the fed quote. Caldiera even updated his website to make it clear that he's OK with the fed quote: http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/ http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/ If you've ever spent substantial time with the press, you'll learn that this happens all the time. If someone feeds you a quote, it's totally OK to say "sounds good" and have them run it. If they feed you a quote and you don't like it, you can say "wait up, that's not right. I'd say [x] instead." Then, sure, you can you say you were misquoted. (You can also decline to OK the fed quote without giving a more accurate one, and it'd be wrong for the journo to run it.) The reason reporters/bloggers/press use fed quotes is that they're short. People who are experts are fucking terrible at being pithy. Reporters have learned to feed quotes as a coping method when dealing with verbal diarrhea.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    An honest question: in this era of blogs and online content, what is the advantage of being pithy and not getting the full explanation (since this was a blog not a printed article in this case)?
    - swolchok 17y ago
      Even if verbal diarrhea doesn't kill any trees, no one is going to want to read it.
      - protomyth 17y ago
        But it would serve the reader better then changing the meaning of the answer. The last election cycle had one too many edits to video that made people look better / worse on both sides. Lord only knows how many quotes in print articles got the same treatment.
mattmaroon 17y ago
Interesting that it has such a positive spin on IV. I've seen more than a few threads about Myrvhold here, mostly about how awful patent trolls are.
trevelyan 17y ago
They wrote a chapter on global warming despite knowing nothing about the subject. Their writing contains gross factual errors including the claims that the earth has been cooling for the past few years and that increased levels of atmospheric carbon do not necessarily warm the planet ceteris paribus. Brad Delong's post on the matter is pretty objective, and pretty damning. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-superfreakonomics-i-promise.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-supe... These guys deserve what they're getting. They should have stuck to small scale sociology in areas no-one else was much familiar with.
- pmorici 17y ago
  "ultimately military power to coerce the rest of the world. " That guy is advocating that the US, China and India should use military power to enforce pollution controls? That's insane.
  - trevelyan 17y ago
    "the cultural, economic, diplomatic, and ultimately military power to coerce the rest of the world. " He's not talking about military power alone. His argument is that consensus among the four major world powers would be able to accomplish carbon reductions. It's a reasonable point.
    - dantheman 17y ago
      He is though, you can say cultural, economic, and diplomatic, but at the end of the day if you say, or I'll kill you it doesn't matter. "I'll do my best to get your money through providing services, selling products, and ultimately armed robbery" is the same line of reasoning.
      - trevelyan 17y ago
        Interpreting what someone says by dropping 4/5 of their argument isn't really grappling with it in good faith. Try, "I disagree that anything short of military force can accomplish meaningful international action on emission reductions." In which case, assuming you actually believe this, you would be contradicting yourself and agreeing with DeLong that it isn't totally futile to expect concerted action to achieve significant emissions reductions. All that being said, there are many cases of international efforts reducing the emissions of environmentally damaging substances (i.e. acid rain, ozone depletion) without resort to armed conflict. So I don't think your position holds up to the scrutiny of the real world. It feels more like an ideological reaction to the existence of global warming (which no-one seriously disputes these days) than an attempt to think through the underlying issues.
jbellis 17y ago
The degree to which environmental orthodoxy brooks no questions (let alone outright dissent) is both scary and unscientific. Cue the torches and pitchforks...
- pmorici 17y ago
  It's the far left's equivalent of the far right's tired line; if you criticize the war strategy, you don't "support the troops". It's ironic that both ends of the spectrum pull the same stunts on their pet issues. It all boils down to fear, the simplest of political power tools. If you can make people sufficiently "afraid" of something you can get them to unquestioningly support things that would be otherwise unthinkable.
  - borism 17y ago
    This is ridiculous. It is about science, not politics. First make a decent scientific point, then make statements like "environmental orthodoxy" or "far left's equivalent". Or maybe there is also a "Newton and Galileo orthodoxy" and Aristotle was right all this time?
    - jacoblyles 17y ago
      1) What changes will occur in the global environment in the future and 2) how we should react to it are separate issues. You will note that (1) is a completely scientific issue, whereas (2) is not. Science can inform the choices we make in response to global warming, but there is no correct scientific answer to how we choose to make the tradeoffs between carbon abatement, economic growth, and etc. What the authors of the book were primarily guilty of was not questioning the scientific orthodoxy about the effects of global warming, but suggesting that carbon abatement was a costly way of addressing global warming compared to alternative remedies. In short, they arrived at the "wrong" political/economic conclusions, where wrong == unpopular.
      - araneae 17y ago
        Right. In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere entirely. Otherwise we're just slowing global warming, not stopping it. And that's not going to happen. Aside from that, it's completely unrealistic that we'll even be able to slow it, given that it needs to be done in all nations,and that's just not going to happen. What we need are large scale technological solutions.

40 points by spooneybarger 17y ago

and still more: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomics-on-climate-part-1/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/superfreakonomic...

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

cwan 17y ago
The chain begins with Joseph Romm telling Caldeira that he had read SuperFreakonomics and “I want to trash them for this insanity and ignorance.” Romm adds that “my blog is read by everyone in this area, including the media” and tells Caldeira that “I’d like a quote like ‘The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work,’ plus whatever else you want to say.” Did you read the same post that I did? How can this possibly be characterized as mere "joining" in the debate by "intelligent readers". Isn't having pre-formed views completely disregarding opposing viewpoints (versus an honest attempt at addressing them) the antithesis of intelligent?
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Let's not allow all this character assassination, and/or accusations of same, to distract from other intelligent readers who are, in fact, joining in the debate: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/book-superfreakonomics.html http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/glo... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-superfreakonomics-i-promise.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-supe...

protomyth 17y ago

So, if I got this right, Ken Caldeira didn't proofread enough and Joseph Romm wanted to do a hit piece on the book and fed Ken Caldeira a quote he was going to attribute to him.

sachinag 17y ago
I think that's all true. The part that's important is that Caldiera was OK with the fed quote. Caldiera even updated his website to make it clear that he's OK with the fed quote: http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/ http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/ If you've ever spent substantial time with the press, you'll learn that this happens all the time. If someone feeds you a quote, it's totally OK to say "sounds good" and have them run it. If they feed you a quote and you don't like it, you can say "wait up, that's not right. I'd say [x] instead." Then, sure, you can you say you were misquoted. (You can also decline to OK the fed quote without giving a more accurate one, and it'd be wrong for the journo to run it.) The reason reporters/bloggers/press use fed quotes is that they're short. People who are experts are fucking terrible at being pithy. Reporters have learned to feed quotes as a coping method when dealing with verbal diarrhea.
- protomyth 17y ago
  An honest question: in this era of blogs and online content, what is the advantage of being pithy and not getting the full explanation (since this was a blog not a printed article in this case)?
  - swolchok 17y ago
    Even if verbal diarrhea doesn't kill any trees, no one is going to want to read it.
    - protomyth 17y ago
      But it would serve the reader better then changing the meaning of the answer. The last election cycle had one too many edits to video that made people look better / worse on both sides. Lord only knows how many quotes in print articles got the same treatment.

mattmaroon 17y ago

Interesting that it has such a positive spin on IV. I've seen more than a few threads about Myrvhold here, mostly about how awful patent trolls are.

trevelyan 17y ago

They wrote a chapter on global warming despite knowing nothing about the subject. Their writing contains gross factual errors including the claims that the earth has been cooling for the past few years and that increased levels of atmospheric carbon do not necessarily warm the planet ceteris paribus. Brad Delong's post on the matter is pretty objective, and pretty damning. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-superfreakonomics-i-promise.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/sigh-last-post-on-supe... These guys deserve what they're getting. They should have stuck to small scale sociology in areas no-one else was much familiar with.

pmorici 17y ago
"ultimately military power to coerce the rest of the world. " That guy is advocating that the US, China and India should use military power to enforce pollution controls? That's insane.
- trevelyan 17y ago
  "the cultural, economic, diplomatic, and ultimately military power to coerce the rest of the world. " He's not talking about military power alone. His argument is that consensus among the four major world powers would be able to accomplish carbon reductions. It's a reasonable point.
  - dantheman 17y ago
    He is though, you can say cultural, economic, and diplomatic, but at the end of the day if you say, or I'll kill you it doesn't matter. "I'll do my best to get your money through providing services, selling products, and ultimately armed robbery" is the same line of reasoning.
    - trevelyan 17y ago
      Interpreting what someone says by dropping 4/5 of their argument isn't really grappling with it in good faith. Try, "I disagree that anything short of military force can accomplish meaningful international action on emission reductions." In which case, assuming you actually believe this, you would be contradicting yourself and agreeing with DeLong that it isn't totally futile to expect concerted action to achieve significant emissions reductions. All that being said, there are many cases of international efforts reducing the emissions of environmentally damaging substances (i.e. acid rain, ozone depletion) without resort to armed conflict. So I don't think your position holds up to the scrutiny of the real world. It feels more like an ideological reaction to the existence of global warming (which no-one seriously disputes these days) than an attempt to think through the underlying issues.

jbellis 17y ago

The degree to which environmental orthodoxy brooks no questions (let alone outright dissent) is both scary and unscientific. Cue the torches and pitchforks...

pmorici 17y ago
It's the far left's equivalent of the far right's tired line; if you criticize the war strategy, you don't "support the troops". It's ironic that both ends of the spectrum pull the same stunts on their pet issues. It all boils down to fear, the simplest of political power tools. If you can make people sufficiently "afraid" of something you can get them to unquestioningly support things that would be otherwise unthinkable.
- borism 17y ago
  This is ridiculous. It is about science, not politics. First make a decent scientific point, then make statements like "environmental orthodoxy" or "far left's equivalent". Or maybe there is also a "Newton and Galileo orthodoxy" and Aristotle was right all this time?
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    1) What changes will occur in the global environment in the future and 2) how we should react to it are separate issues. You will note that (1) is a completely scientific issue, whereas (2) is not. Science can inform the choices we make in response to global warming, but there is no correct scientific answer to how we choose to make the tradeoffs between carbon abatement, economic growth, and etc. What the authors of the book were primarily guilty of was not questioning the scientific orthodoxy about the effects of global warming, but suggesting that carbon abatement was a costly way of addressing global warming compared to alternative remedies. In short, they arrived at the "wrong" political/economic conclusions, where wrong == unpopular.
    - araneae 17y ago
      Right. In order to prevent global warming, we'd have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere entirely. Otherwise we're just slowing global warming, not stopping it. And that's not going to happen. Aside from that, it's completely unrealistic that we'll even be able to slow it, given that it needs to be done in all nations,and that's just not going to happen. What we need are large scale technological solutions.