Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 43

Evaporative cooling and AGW

Earlier this evening an Instapundit reference reminded me of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s insightful essay Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs, in which he uses a clever physics analogy to explain why cult-like groups often respond to strong evidence against their core beliefs by becoming more fanatical.

Glen Reynolds used the reference to take a swipe at what political feminism has become, but a more interesting example occurred to me. I think AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarmism is beginning to undergo some serious evaporative cooling. Let’s examine the evidence, how it might fit Yudkowsky’s model, and what predictions it implies.

The 15-years-and-counting period of no statistically significant measured increase in GAT (Global Average Temperature) has been increasingly embarrassing to AGW partisans for years, but the “strong evidence” I’m thinking of is well expressed by this quote from Judith Curry which she reported presenting at the American Physical Society in March 2014:

“The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”

This is cautious jargon for “AGW theory is in a state of epic fail”. Curry is saying that by all the usual standards of scientific evidence, the IPCC sheaf of climate models that alarmists rely on is completely, utterly busted. Its dismal incompetence to predict the behavior of the actual atmosphere can no longer be ignored by actual scientists without doing violence to those standards of evidence.

(I really cannot resist pointing out that I have been predicting this something like this quite loudly since at least the beginning of the grand solar minimum in 2008, when I forecast correctly that measured GAT would track the falling direction of change in incident solar radiation rather the rising direction of CO2 levels. By a year later I had demonstrated a better predictive record than the IPCC ever has.)

Here’s a major sign of evaporative cooling: the American Physical Society has since appointed a committee of working scientists (one of whom is Curry herself) to reexamine and possibly reverse its public commitment to AGW alarmism. As well it should; the alarmists’ predictions have failed so massively that they no longer have a scientific case – they’re going to have to rebuild one with a set of models that at least retrodicts the actual data.

Whatever findings the APS committee issues, the very fact that it has been convened at all is a sign that (in Yudkowsky’s analogy) the higher-energy molecules have become excited by the counterevidence and are exiting the cold trap. Or, in the metaphor of an earlier day, the rats are looking for a way off the sinking ship…

This is happening at the same time that the IPCC’s AR5 (Fifth Assessment Report) asserts its highest ever level of confidence that the (nonexistent for 15+ years) global warming is human-cased. What Yudkowsky tells us is that AR5′s apparently crazed assertion is a natural result of the mounting counterevidence. The voices of sanity and moderation, such as they are in the AGW crowd, are evaporating out; increasingly, even more than in the past, their game will be run by the fanatics and the evidence-blind.

Thus, we can expect the screaming about “denialists” to become ever shrill and frantic as the edifice crumbles further. Many alarmists are now vocally hoping that a massive El Nino event will spike GAT to where it should be according to the models (directly contradicting their own previous argument that the 15-17 year apparent cessation of warming is a data artifact caused by a 1997-1998 El Nino spike). This reifies Richard Feynman’s famous warning about “cargo cult science”; if they wait with faith and purity, surely reality will conform itself to the sacred theory!

Others are attempting to bolt epicycles onto the models to make them retrodict the “pause” correctly; that’s why you’ll see references to “stadium waves”, “ANSO”, and “multidecadal oscillations” increasingly leaking into press accounts. All these attempts have the shadow of doom on them, something even many of their proponents seem to half-understand. But Yudkowsky’s analogy predicts nevertheless that these efforts will redouble.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the simplest explanation for the observed facts is that the CO2/H20 positive greenhousing feedback central to the alarmist models simply doesn’t happen – it was an unphysical fantasy all along. CO2 levels do affect GAT, but only in a straightforward logarithmic/sublinear way that leads to extremely low climate sensitivity – and even that effect is now basically saturated (the atmosphere is thermalizing as much as it can).

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the popular press to catch up to that, alas. They can be counted on to continue siding with the fanatics long after the sane scientists have left the building. Actually, to quote Douglas Adams, “There is another theory which states this has already happened.”

On being a gentleman

So I’m walking down a hallway at Penguicon 2014 and I notice one of the people who had tossed intelligent questions at me during my Ask Me Anything panel. He’s rather hard to miss; you don’t often see guys who fit the description “huge blond viking” so well, and when you do they are not apt to be wearing full drag, including a wig and earrings. Beside him is a rather pretty woman emitting wife-or-girlfriend cues that are not readily reconciled with the drag.

“Hey honey,” he says “that’s who I was telling you about.” Addressing me, he says “I’ve made The Art of Unix Programming required reading in my IT group.” OK, that’s worth stopping for, if only out of politeness. I say something agreeable.

“I started that”, says honey “but I only got two chapters in. I didn’t understand it.” Closer up she is quite attractive, slender and blue-eyed and fit. Also a bit tipsy, and if I’m any judge not quite as bright as viking-drag-guy even when sober – though this being an SF convention her IQ is probably comfortably above average anyway. This judgment informs my response.

I suggest she try reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar instead, as it’s more accessible to people without a programming background. Mostly anthropology and economics, I explain. Viking-drag-guy says “Huh. I guess that’s true.” I say a few relevant things about praxeology and Hayek. “I think I have a copy at home,” he says to her.

Honey is developing other ideas; there is now a bit of sexual edge in her gaze. “I want a picture with you.” Viking-drag-guy pulls out a smartphone and positions it. Nothing loth, I move next to her and she promptly pulls me into intimate range. I look at the smartphone lens and feel something damp in my cheek. Honey is licking me playfully. I make a startled noise. Viking-drag-guy looks amused. Then honey asks me to kiss her.

She is quite attractive and viking-drag-guy doesn’t look inclined to try to drop-kick me into the next county (an intention I’d have to take seriously from anyone that large, hand-to-hand training or no) so I comply. She kisses me most thoroughly, and while I don’t exactly escalate I do my best to make it an enjoyable experience for her.

To understand my reaction to what comes next, you need to know that various women in my life have insisted that I am quite good at this, and I think I know why; when I kiss a woman she gets my total undivided attention to that moment, contrasting with a lot of men who are distractedly thinking about, oh, I dunno what – their next move, probably. This is why I’m a little surprised when honey breaks the smooch and complains.

“You didn’t give me any tongue!” she says. Er…viking-drag-guy is still looking amused, and she’s still pretty, so I mentally shrug and go in for round two, though I am growing slightly uncomfortable with the situation.

Honey can tell this. “You’re too tense,” she says. “you need to loosen your lips. That’s what makes it passionate.” Uh oh. Now I must risk giving offense.

“I’m sorry,” I explained. “I am, actually, feeling a bit inhibited. I strongly prefer kissing women when they’re completely sober and responsible.”

Honey makes a visible effort to think about this. After a pause, she says “Isn’t that a bit unrealistic?” Those were her exact words.

Boing! A dry, Spock-like voice in my brain informs me that I have obviously encountered a woman who considers inebriation a normal part of the mating dance. I am just reflecting that, by report, this is statistically normal behavior which I can consider exceptional only because I choose my social contexts rather carefully, when viking-drag-guy interrupts my thought.

“He’s being a gentleman, honey,” he says. Whereupon I mumbled “I’m afraid I’m stuck with that,” and took my leave as gracefully as I could.

Review: Monster Hunter: Nemesis

As with my last review subject, if you’re in the market for Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter: Nemesis, you probably already know you’re going to like it. Though maybe not as much as the previous Monster Hunter outings; the author tries for a change of tone in this book, not entirely successfully.

Up to now, the Monster Hunter books have been an entertaining blend of action comedy, gun porn, and horror – more or less the A-Team meets the X-Files, with vaguely Lovecraftian premises implied but played for rough humor rather than cosmic tragedy. They worked well enough on all these levels to be best-sellers – not Great Literature, but I’ll take honest genre craftsmanship like this over the kind of pretentious bilge that usually issues from art-for-art’s-sake posturing any day.

In this book the viewpoint shifts from the familiar Monster Hunter International characters to Agent Franks, the enigmatic Man In Black and top agent of the government’s Monster Control Bureau. We get Franks’s personal back-story; in the process, Correia pulls aside the veil a bit on what’s really going on in the Monster Hunter universe.

Correia has shown that he’s capable of writing more serious stuff in his Grimnoir Chronicles, which this book resembles as much as it does its direct prequels. His writing ability doesn’t fail him – making an even distantly sympathetic character out of Franks is no mean feat – but the reveals about Correia’s worldbuilding left me with a disappointed “Huh? That’s all you’ve got?” feeling. The Grimnoir Chronicles were, in this way, much better constructed.

I won’t reveal details because the book is not so botched that it deserves to be spoilerized, but I will observe that Lovecraftian and Miltonic themes don’t really mix. Also that there are logical implications from a premise that all human souls have existed from the beginning of time that are obvious, that Correia never engages, but – given what else is going on – really ought to have.

Maybe it’s time for the Monster Hunter sequence to die, staked and silvered like so many of its unnatural antagonists. I think there’s life in the characters yet, but the setting is in trouble; Correia seems to me to have painted himself into a corner that he’s only going to get out of by ignoring the problems or pulling some pretty serious retcons.

I think one of the lessons here is something I learned writing for Battle For Wesnoth; for certain kinds of serial fictional settings, writing a final level of explanation of What’s Really Going On is a bad idea – it’s not necessary to what your story is doing, and it closes off too many possibilities for future episodes. I think Correia has made that error here.

Still, if you liked the prequels, you’ll probably enjoy this well enough. Villains scheme, heroes struggle, stuff blows up a lot. Franks – of all not-quite-people – gets some character development. It remains to be seen whether the next book has anywhere interesting to go.

Review: The Rods and the Axe

If you’re in the target market for Tom Kratman’s The Rods and the Axe (Baen) you probably already know you’re going to like it. Though nominally SF, this is in reality pretty straight-up military fiction. Bimpty-bumpth in his continuing series on the wars of Patrick Carrera on the colony world of Nova Terra, it delivers Kratman’s usual goods.

The usual goods are detailed, gritty war-nerd porn laced with conservative political satire – the latter rather heavy-handed, but sometimes wickedly funny anyway. I call it “war-nerd porn” rather than “war porn” because Kratman is less focused on thalamic narratives of carnage and courage than he is on the mechanics, tactics, logistics, and strategy of war. This is military fiction aimed more at wargamers and history buffs than anyone else; it’s easy to imagine the author and a handful of ex-military buddies roughing out the plot over maps and sand tables.

Stylish writing this is not, but Kratman is competent enough to do what he intends. This wargamer and history buff gives it a thumbs-up, while noting some problems. Kratman has never been great at characterization and the effort he puts into it here is pretty perfunctory compared even to the previous volume (Come and Take Them). If he doesn’t budget more attention to this going forward, the human-interest aspect of the series is likely to evaporate, leaving only the elaborate wargaming and the forward ratcheting of his series uberplot to attract readers.

For Kratman’s target market, that might be enough. Still, I hope for a bit more psychological life in the next one. Finally, fair notice that the book finishes with a pause in the action rather than any actual ending.

Review: Right to Know

There are many kinds of bad SF out there. One of the subtler kinds is written with enough competence that it might be good if the author had any original ideas, but reads like a tired paste-up of familiar genre tropes and plot twists that an experienced reader can see coming a light-year off.

Edward Willett’s Right To Know (Diamond Book Distributors) is such a novel. Oppressive society on a decaying generation starship! Plucky, desperate resistance! Planetfall where humans with FTL drives got there ahead of them! Earth has mysteriously vanished! Fanatical planetside cultists mistake our hero for their messiah! Head of the Resistance is the Captain’s daughter! (That last one would only be an actual spoiler if you’re thick as neutronium, because it’s telegraphed with about the subtlety of a brick upside the head.)

Worse, the book doesn’t work very well even on its own terms. To name only one of the obvious problems, the whole plot turns on the ship’s oppressive officers somehow learning their target planet is inhabited without having twigged that the planetsiders are human. Um, hello, radio emissions? And we’re supposed to believe that the Mayflower II carries planet-buster missiles but doesn’t mount a decent telescope or survey probes?

A lame tissue of cliches like this usually has one of two origins. It may be cynical hackwork by someone who knows the genre very well, is getting paid by the yard, and doesn’t care to work any harder than minimally necessary. Or it can be evidence of naivete by someone who means well but barely knows the SF genre at all and has mistaken surface features for essence. The difference is significant because the naive auteur may improve, but the cynical hack is unlikely to; such laziness becomes a habit difficult to break, especially when it pays.

I’m going to go with the “cynical hackwork” theory on this one, given that the publisher reports the author to have uttered over fifty books. I’m posting this review mainly as a warning: given that this is what volume 51+ looks like, neither the past nor the future works of Edward Willett seem likely to be worth a pitcher of warm spit. Avoid.

Review: Extreme Dentistry

Fearless monster killers have been a very popular trope in SF and fantasy lately, in a trend perhaps best exemplified by Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter sequence but extending to the dozens of nigh-interchangeable Buffy clones in leather clogging the Urban Fantasy subgenre lately. Hugh A. D. Spencer’s Extreme Dentistry seems to have been intended as a dark and mordantly funny satire of this sort of thing, and succeeds.

If you’ve ever thought of shopping malls as soul-sucking traps, this is the book for you. Humanity has an enemy/parasite: the Hive, the ultimate consumer-consumers, shapeshifters who zero in on lust and greed and feed on it, and are gradually assimilating increasing numbers of normal humans through the miracle of modern marketing. Mindless in its native form, the Hive can only think by patterning on humans, which it understands (sadly) well enough to manipulate.

Our viewpoint character loses his family to the Hive and discovers that the creatures who have been surrounding him at his shitty job have been literally feeding on his pain for years – office politics really is hell. Cured of the Hive’s mutagenic infection and broken free of its control, he is ready to join the war being waged against it by … Mormon dentists?

The tone veers from Grand Guignol to action comic to pop-culture satire, often within the same paragraph. My favorite bit was when the coalition of the willing (churches) discovers that Hive entities can be drawn irresistibly into prepared kill zones by displays of bad modern art. Along the way the author skewers nearly every other form of cant and pretension imaginable; Marxism, corporate-speak, organized religion, and academic politics are only among the major targets.

I should note that this book is pretty dark and strong drink even by horror-literature standards; there are scenes you are not going to actually enjoy unless you belong in a mental institution. On the other hand, I found it worthwhile to keep reading. On the gripping hand, I am not sure the premise can sustain the sequel hinted at by the handling of the ending.

On its own it counts as the sort of dubious tour de force that reminds me of Nine Inch Nails. That is, it is far from clear that what the artist is doing is actually a good idea, but the quality of his execution is impressive.

Review: Child of a Hidden Sea

The orphan discovering that her birth family hails from another world is an almost hoary fantasy trope – used, for example, in Charles Stross’s Family Trade novels. What matters in deploying it is how original and interesting you can be once you have set up the premise. A.M. Dellamonica’s Child of a Hidden Sea averts many of the cliches that usually follow, and delivers some value.

Sophie Hansa, a marine videographer in San Francisco, is trying to re-contact her birth family when she sees a woman, apparently her aunt, being attacked by men with daggers. She attempts to intervene an, after an inexplicable explosion of something, finds herself adrift in an alien sea, trying to keep herself and her wounded relative afloat.

Sophie has arrived on Stormwrack, an alternate Earth where variegated island nations dot a vast sea. Her aunt, it develops, is a courier for the Fleet, a peacekeeping force that has successfully suppressed internecine warfare for around a century. Sophie has been caught up in an attempt to neutralize the Fleet and break the long truce.

We are launched into a lively tale of intrigue, derring-do and strangely limited magic. The author has fun busting some genre expectations; Sophie’s video cameras and other imported Earth technology work just fine on Stormwrack, but the locals are uninterested in what they call “mummery” and consider inferior to their enchantments. Sophie is not some angsty teenager who spends a lot of time on denying her situation and blunders into a coming-of-age narrative, she’s a confident young woman who plunges eagerly into exploring Stormwrack’s half-alien ecology and many mysteries.

And mysteries there are aplenty, only beginning with why her birth family seems so dead-set on avoiding her and exiling her from Stormwrack back to our world, which they call ‘Erstwhile’. Who is trying to break the Cessation, and why? Is Stormwrack another world or the far future of Earth? We don’t get answers to everything; the book seems to end setting up for a sequel.

The writing is pretty good and the worldbuilding much better thought out than is usual in most fantasy; Ms. Dellamonica could write competent SF if she chose, I think. The book is slightly marred by the sort of preachiness one expects of a lesbian author these days, and there is a touch of Mary Sue in way the ultra-competent protagonist is written. But the whole is carried off with a pleasing lightness of touch and sense of fun. I’ll read the sequel.

Penguicon A&D party heads up!

I, and a largish crew of the usual suspects, are at Penguicon.

Friends of Armed & Dangerous party will be 9PM tomorrow in 403 at the Westin Southfield Detroit.

Bloodmouth Carnist T-shirts will be on sale.

Have you no decency, sir?

I know it’s from 2001 and thus putatively old news but, sadly, this thread from Free Republic could have been spun yesterday – and it made my jaw drop open. It says so much about what’s wrong with both the left and right wings of American politics in this century.

So, the bare bones of the story: a 15-year-old-boy is dying of cancer in Australia and his last wish before he passes on is to have sex. Friends (including, it is implied, the psychologist who reported an anonymized version of the incident) arrange a date with a prostitute. Upon hearing of this, various medical ethicists, clerics, and other viewers-with-concern flew into a tizzy.

I have to add this: According to one psychologist, “In a child dying over a long period of time, there is often a condition we call ‘skin hunger,’” The terminally ill child yearns for non-clinical contact because “mostly when people touch them, it’s to do something unpleasant, something that might hurt.”

The first item of idiocy came at me within the story, from an unnamed ethicist obviously deep in left-feminist-moonbat land who objected to the proceedings as “degrading to women”. Um, excuse me? If that hooker has anything even remotely like the emotional wiring of a normal human female, after that gig she’s going to feel better about her line of work – less “degraded” – for the entire rest of her life. In fact, the first woman I shared the story with immediately said she’d have volunteered to de-virginate the kid herself, and I’d bet long odds the professional waived her fee.

“Degrading to women.” As applied here this is duckspeak, pure and simple – a catchphrase intended not to express or provoke thought but to shut it down. If anything, this particular shibboleth of the left has become worse overused and more emptied of meaning in the thirteen years since.

But as appallingly stupid and insensitive as that was, it pales into insignificance besides what the social-conservative right-wingers got up to in the thread comments.

Representative line: “This is the sort of soul-less, animalistic response to impending death that might be expected from a human child raised by beasts.” What kind of miserable, pathetic excuse for a human being – what kind of utter want of empathy – does it take to not grok that in the kid’s inexperienced adolescent brain his bottled-up sexual urges got all tangled up with his skin hunger and that this was completely reasonable?

Another prize: “Fornication is a serious violation of the 6th Commandment, particularly if it occurs with a prostitute. One scriptural reference can be found at 1 Corinthians 6:15-20.” If I needed any reason to despise Christians those two sentences would ring the bell. Your Jesus tells you to act from compassion and kindness, yet you dare condemn in this legalistic stick-up-the-ass fashion? I’m betting more genuine love passed between the hooker and the kid in whatever short time they spent together than the waste of oxygen who wrote those lines will ever feel.

All this does a pretty good job of highlighting why, as much as I loathe left-wingers, I will never, ever self-identify as a conservative.

Why Donald Sterling is not Brendan Eich

Because I objected to the scalping of Brendan Eich for having donated to Proposition 8, a friend has (perhaps jocularly) challenged me to defend NBA team owner Donald Sterling against an effort to push him out of his franchise for racist remarks and behavior.

I’m not going to do that, because I don’t think these cases are at all parallel. The differences begin with this: Brendan Eich was targeted for bullying because he performed a political, expressive act that his political opponents disagreed with. In both law and custom, we recognize that political expression needs to have the strongest possible protection. None of Sterling’s racist behaviors can reasonably be characterized as political expression.

Another key difference: there is no evidence that Eich ever engaged in bigoted behavior against individual gays – in fact, there are plausible interpretations of Eich’s behavior that imply no prejudice at all (he might, for example, have believed it was important to assert popular sovereignity against a court that has exceeded its remit). There is, on the other hand, ample evidence of Sterling’s racial prejudices being expressed against individuals over whom he had power.

I admit to some uneasiness about the outcry against Sterling; it especially disturbs me that he was outed by illegal taping of a private conversation. I think Kareem Abdul Jabbar put the case that there is excessive finger-wagging going on here very well. But those concerns don’t rise to anywhere near the level of alarm I felt about the way Eich was treated.

Honesty compels me to admit that I am opposed on principle to some of the anti-discrimination laws that Sterling is now said to have been violating for a long time. If he doesn’t want to rent his property to blacks or hispanics, I don’t think the law should force him to do so. But I do think it is ethical and just for him to be boycotted for this odious prejudice, and I join Kareem-Abdul Jabbar in wondering why nobody organized that sooner.