On the ABC Sunday talk show hosted by the former Clinton staff person had Paul Krugman of the NY Times as a guest and he states about the Brits and their alleged malicious and deliberate data manipulation as follows:
"PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: All those e-mails -- people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there. There's nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1998 was a very warm year doesn't actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that's loose wording. Right? Everything is about -- we're really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there's no trend here. And that's what -- the travesty is how hard it has been to explain why that's bad reasoning."
I have seen academic discussions, I have participated in academic discussions, even with emails. At least at MIT, in the engineering department ,it is the facts and the logic that trumps all. You can present a theory but you better be able to back it up with facts. Macro economists have perpetually swung equations around with little prognostic effect. In fact I have seen better witch doctors. Just look at how they fight over competing theories none of which seem to work.
Even more so look at Harvard under the Summer reign, as described in today's Boston Globe. They state:
"Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members....
In the Summers years, from 2001 to 2006, nothing was on auto-pilot. He was the unquestioned commander, a dominating personality with the talent to move a balkanized institution like Harvard, but also a man unafflicted, former colleagues say, with self-doubt in matters of finance."
This is the same team which is guiding us through the calamity we are in now. If I ever tried to hire any one of these characters as a CFO in a start up, the Board would fire me on the spot. When your own money depends on the decisions you make, you find people with a proven track record.
Now back to the Brits in that school somewhere in the hinter lands of the British Isles, East Anglia. Well its not Oxford or Cambridge, so what could one expect? The emails boil with petty anger and incessant ranting of their intents to control the facts, hide and or destroy anything which contradicts their theory, and they work as if driven by some religious belief. And for this they want another 20% of our economy to dry up! What right do they have, what stupidity does the scientific community have to allow this to occur. Yet it is the same scientific community supported by Government contracts, the community whose research is supported if and only if they tow the line.
One should look towards Karl Popper and his theory of science and his principle of falsifiability. The discussion of Karl Popper on the Stanford Philosophy web site, a useful summary, states this theory as follows:
"These factors combined to make Popper take falsifiability as his criterion for demarcating science from non-science: if a theory is incompatible with possible empirical observations it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all such observations, either because, as in the case of Marxism, it has been modified solely to accommodate such observations, or because, as in the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific."
One can thus simply state that, based upon what we know of these characters at East Anglia, that they have just allegedly been falsified by the Popper approach and the theory should be thrown out the window with last night's bed pot and its contents! Yet we have the apologist Krugman, for reasons that go well beyond any human reason justifying their actions. One truly wonders why this is done, yet as a macro economist one would suspect that reason and reality were never truly in reach.
"PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: All those e-mails -- people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there. There's nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1998 was a very warm year doesn't actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that's loose wording. Right? Everything is about -- we're really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there's no trend here. And that's what -- the travesty is how hard it has been to explain why that's bad reasoning."
I have seen academic discussions, I have participated in academic discussions, even with emails. At least at MIT, in the engineering department ,it is the facts and the logic that trumps all. You can present a theory but you better be able to back it up with facts. Macro economists have perpetually swung equations around with little prognostic effect. In fact I have seen better witch doctors. Just look at how they fight over competing theories none of which seem to work.
Even more so look at Harvard under the Summer reign, as described in today's Boston Globe. They state:
"Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members....
In the Summers years, from 2001 to 2006, nothing was on auto-pilot. He was the unquestioned commander, a dominating personality with the talent to move a balkanized institution like Harvard, but also a man unafflicted, former colleagues say, with self-doubt in matters of finance."
This is the same team which is guiding us through the calamity we are in now. If I ever tried to hire any one of these characters as a CFO in a start up, the Board would fire me on the spot. When your own money depends on the decisions you make, you find people with a proven track record.
Now back to the Brits in that school somewhere in the hinter lands of the British Isles, East Anglia. Well its not Oxford or Cambridge, so what could one expect? The emails boil with petty anger and incessant ranting of their intents to control the facts, hide and or destroy anything which contradicts their theory, and they work as if driven by some religious belief. And for this they want another 20% of our economy to dry up! What right do they have, what stupidity does the scientific community have to allow this to occur. Yet it is the same scientific community supported by Government contracts, the community whose research is supported if and only if they tow the line.
One should look towards Karl Popper and his theory of science and his principle of falsifiability. The discussion of Karl Popper on the Stanford Philosophy web site, a useful summary, states this theory as follows:
"These factors combined to make Popper take falsifiability as his criterion for demarcating science from non-science: if a theory is incompatible with possible empirical observations it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all such observations, either because, as in the case of Marxism, it has been modified solely to accommodate such observations, or because, as in the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific."
One can thus simply state that, based upon what we know of these characters at East Anglia, that they have just allegedly been falsified by the Popper approach and the theory should be thrown out the window with last night's bed pot and its contents! Yet we have the apologist Krugman, for reasons that go well beyond any human reason justifying their actions. One truly wonders why this is done, yet as a macro economist one would suspect that reason and reality were never truly in reach.
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