We wouldn't care about science if it weren't "useful" in the sense of providing value. It would be just another random bit of epistemology.

Which isn't to say that all science has to provide value immediately. We never know what's going to come in handy. Some sciences can go centuries without ever turning over anything of interest to the layman. Many are "useful" only in the sense of giving us some sort of feeling of understanding.

But that feeling of understanding is fake if you never actually apply tests to it. The evo psych stuff is a good example of that. It propagates as myth rather than as science: poorly-performed tests result in poorly-stated and overgeneralized rules that mislead rather than inform. There is, at core, something to that science, but the popular conception of it (as, sadly, with many sciences) is more wrong than right.

They don't need it. They want it. Every dollar they save in taxes is a dollar that their shareholders (including Musk) get to pocket. And the state gives it to them willingly, in the hopes that it brings jobs to the area. Tesla really is a "jobs creator", unlike a lot of other self-proclaimed masters of the universe, and so the tax breaks really are win-win. It's not zero-sum because value is being added: raw materials come in and batteries go out.

That's what business looks like when it's working, and states compete to be in on it. Nevada won, this time, and one can hope that they're not being ripped off in the process. A lot of other companies have been lured with tax breaks in return for promises of economic value that they fail to provide. Often, it was obvious that they'd fail to provide it, but legislatures and governors can be pretty gullible when it comes to "jobs jobs jobs". I've got high hopes for Tesla, since Musk actually is interested in making money by making stuff, but we won't know until it's underway.

The scam in this case involves more expensive items, in the $1,500 range. (The limit is $1,000 rather than $100; I assume that's just a typo, but it's still above that range.)

And apparently the scammers are also on that: they're starting to work up fake money orders as well. I gather that's used more on stores than on Craigslist buyers, where the store can't validate the money order before they hand over the merchandise, but I assume it'll develop.

Yeah, like that's gonna help. If they had the faintest bit of intellectual curiosity they would have found it themselves. They're just going to continue to believe what Fox News tells them. I don't really know how they live with the cognitive dissonance, but apparently they manage it very well. Every piece of data that contradicts them is somehow tainted, so they can live in their own perfectly smooth ball, untouched by any outside information.

That "you can't see the data" lie has been going around for years, and it's so trivially refuted with even the slightest effort. I applaud you for tilting at that windmill, but it is still a windmill.

Unfortunately, it was a very poor kind of science, and that's one of the things that really irked me about the series. The potions (chemistry) class was especially bad. They were taught things by rote, and they learned only that if they didn't follow the procedure then they'd get bad results. Often, interestingly bad, but they thought of them as simply "the wrong thing" to be discarded rather than investigated.

The wizards looked down on "muggles", but they had an awful lot to learn from them. Applying muggle science would have made them vastly better wizards than they were. And they could have done a lot of good for the muggle world as well: people suffered and died needlessly.

I know, it's just a kid's book, and I'm putting too much on it. For drama, Rowling separated the magical and non-magical worlds in a rather unlikely way, and you were supposed to just chalk it up to suspension of disbelief. But I had kinda hoped that the series would go in a direction that realized this. I think it would have made better drama.

The problem, as I see it, is with the uselessness of such studies.

The whole point of falsifiability is that for a scientific finding to be "useful", it has to have the potential to be wrong. You have to be able to say, "If this theory isn't true, then this thing that I want to do will fail." If it couldn't fail, then nothing you do would change whether it were true or not. It's only the possibility of failure that makes success meaningful.

So when I read that these studies aren't repeated, what I hear is that the studies aren't useful. If they were useful, then people would have built on them to make more elaborate structures, and when those structures failed, we'd know that one of the underlying theories was wrong.

Evo psych is rife with conclusions that are popularly held but not actually useful. The myths persist, but never feed into more science. Unfortunately, an awful lot of people who are nominally scientists buy into them, which means that it could be argued that they just plain aren't practicing science.

Wow. That is an extremely disturbing graph.

This isn't your usual 419 scam. They're not offering millions of dollars to suckers.

What they're doing is buying stuff from Craigslist sellers with bogus checks that look awfully real. There's another step where they send a too-large check and ask for a partial refund. The checks are so good that they clear, and the fraud isn't discovered until weeks later, at which time your bank yanks the money back.

There's still hints of the usual 419 stuff in there, but you don't have to be either gullible or greedy. You simply have to misunderstand the idiotic system under which checks are processed, which is most of us. The idea that a certified check could fail, a month after you deposited it, is baffling to the majority of people who think of a certified check as practically good as cash.

The checking system is so screwed up that most sellers need to treat all checks with suspicion. But credit cards are expensive to process, and Paypal... is Paypal.

There are estimates of the cost, and they are considerable. The error bars are wide, but they are enough to at least start to move forward on some kind of system that will allow us to price in the effects that aren't being accounted for. Insurers are accounting for the effects, but not manufacturers or energy-producers, who can continue to produce as much CO2 as they want with no pricing effect at all. In fact, the possibility that there might be future costs encourages them to burn more now, raising the final future cost.

You can be skeptical of government, but I'm equally skeptical of CO2-producing industries, for which there is even less supervision and even more imperative to create short-term gains at long-term costs. Government is the only mechanism that exists to affect the behavior of these companies, and since it's effectively undeniable that they are causing some sort of global cost there is reason to begin at least talking about regulation. Talks which don't even get started because of the various stages of denialism which insist on "nothing, ever, and we'll come up with reasons for it later." There is an opportunity cost to waiting, and it only goes up.

I believe it's the other way around: we're prevented from talking about changes because we're too stuck on the large number of people who insist that the answer is "do nothing because nothing is happening/it's not our fault/it'll all be OK," based on information that is usually outright wrong.

The short answer to "what do we do?" is "cut back on CO2 emissions". How we do that is a genuinely good question, since it breaks down into questions like "Who will cut, and how much? What will they do instead? How will we enforce it? Is it fair for some to cut more than others? Can a market-based solution help, or do we need something more extreme? Can we help developing countries that really need cheap energy to continue advancing?" The answers are complex, and hampered by the fact that this is an international problem rather than a local one.

There are things that can be done on a national level, especially in western countries, which have far higher per-capita CO2 production than elsewhere. We can encourage more fuel-efficient transportation and more carbon-efficient fuels. We can spend money on research for energy production which can't compete with fossil fuels today and won't turn a profit this quarter or the next. We can find ways to "price in" carbon emissions, to encourage people to shift towards more climate-friendly alternatives. And you can find ways to create carbon tariffs, so that we don't merely export carbon-producing activities to countries with smaller per-capita economies (and thus smaller per-capita CO2 production, even though they're selling off the results of that CO2 production to other countries).

These aren't easy, but they have been discussed, widely. The problem is that the discussions are utterly moot when the United States is unwilling to even consider them. It has the highest per-capita CO2 production (outside of a few oil producers and a couple of tiny countries that don't contribute much overall). (source)

There's a lot more discussion to have. But until we get past the sheer denialism, which is based on outright lies and paranoia, there's no hope of having it.

I suppose, but the distinction seems to me more a matter of where you point them. The damn-near-certain downing of that airliner was with a conventional weapon, and they were surely the intended target, not collateral. We've taken rather a lot of genocides with equanimity, but when Assad did the same thing with chemicals, people started to get outraged.

Nukes do seem most effective in cases where they're going to kill a lot of civilians, even if there's a military objective. It's hard to imagine just what Putin means about a "tactical" usage: it's rare to be able to drop it on a military unit in the field. And even if he did, I'm pretty sure people would still treat it as if it meant he were likely to consider using them on even more obviously civilian targets.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that actual use of nuclear weapons crosses a Rubicon, even for Putin. It suddenly becomes an existential crisis for the rest of Europe, and even the most pacifist, non-interventionist parts of Europe will see themselves as the next target.

In a sense that's purely symbolic: as you point out he's already gone far beyond the pale. But it's a kind of invisible line, like the use of chemical weapons in Syria that had even the French considering action against Assad. It was vigorous enough that Assad agreed to destruction of the chemical weapons.

It's hard to imagine what the response might be; none of the options are anything but awful. But I think that the actual use of a nuclear weapon would put options back on the table that many countries wouldn't have considered in response to more "conventional" atrocities. I don't really completely understand why mass murder with nuclear and chemical weapons is somehow worse than mass murder with bombs and guns, but it's widely perceived that way.

I'd love to think that "truthful and honest" would work, but it seems pretty unlikely to me. If it's going to cost anybody money, or even just face, it's going to be pretty easy to instill fear, uncertainty, and doubt. As you say, the Koch Brothers are winning, but I can't think of any way to prevent them from winning. The deck is heavily stacked in their favor.

As scientists, we like to think that the universe ultimately and undeniably stacks the deck in favor of reality, and that's true... eventually. A century from now, people will look back and say, "Wow, the data was all there, and it was really obvious. It would have saved so much pain for them to make small changes back then." But that's retrospective. All but the very youngest of denialists will be safely dead before they're forced to confront reality. Even then, there will be those who will blame Milankovich cycles or volcanoes or even just say "look at all the wonderful new Canadian farmland we have!"

So honestly... I really don't know what "truthful and honest" will get us. Sure, hysteria will turn some off... and it will click with others in a "Won't somebody think of the children!" kind of way. This is persuasion, not science, and I truly can't tell you what the most effective tack will be. But there has been plenty of clear-eyed, non-hysterical discussion available for decades, and polls show that it's losing. You can blame the more aggressive promoters for that, but I think that's just an excuse. Really, I think that people will mostly continue to believe what they want to believe, especially when the Koch Brothers and the Daily Fail give them all the FUD they can swallow, and even if there were not a single overhyped story it would have been precisely the same. It might even have been worse.

They might, actually. It's a decent bet that Ukraine wouldn't respond, even to invasion, with a city-destroying bomb. They would instantly become the bad guys in the situation. And if Russia responds to the escalation, the next bomb goes off in Kiev.

MAD never really had to cope with a ground invasion of the US by Russia, or vice versa. It's a very good thing that we didn't share a border, or somebody might have tested it. But even under MAD, there were all kinds of proxy wars, where our allies were invaded, and we never decided to reply with nuclear weapons, even while throwing thousands of lives and billions of dollars at it.

So yeah, Russia might well have taken a gamble on a ground invasion even with a nuclear-armed Ukraine. Nukes are a tricky weapon to use. The main thing they do is deter other nukes, and nobody's threatening Ukraine with nukes. Putin would have to ask himself if he thought the Ukrainian government was crazy enough to respond to its existential, but conventional, crisis with unconventional weapons. And given how aggressive he's been so far in flouting international judgment, he might well believe it.

It's not even really the donors, per se, but their voters. Climate change denialism is very popular. The businesses ensure that candidates who favor them connect with those voters, but it's not like the candidate would suddenly change their mind if those donations dried up. They'd continue to be denialists. And if that politician leaves, the denialist voters will be sure to pick up another denialist candidate.

The business help ensure denialism not with the politicians, but by funding denialist news networks and web sites. They also run attack ads (on any subject, not just climate) to defeat candidates who would oppose denialism.

They don't need to buy politicians. They buy voters instead, by scaring them. You won't fix the candidates, who are just doing what their constituents (at least, 50%+1 of them) want. The direct donations are a pittance. It's the overall miasma of denialism that give us anti-intellectual politicians, not the other way around.

I've got no idea how to fix it. It's famously said that you can't fix stupid, and there's a LOT of stupid.