Averages destroy important details in the data.

In a world where temperatures and local weather conditions vary wildly across ranges that have real world impact for those people experiencing them, averages destroy the exact information you would need to actually make decisions.

If you dial the average phone number in the USA, you will not get connected with the average person.

ENSO is a natural phenomenon.

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021) concluded with high confidence that human influence has not affected the principal tropical modes of interannual climate variability, including ENSO, beyond the range of internal variability. It assigned low confidence that anthropogenic forcing has caused the observed or paleo-inferred changes in ENSO variability.

These observations should give us a greater appreciation for just how significant natural variation is, compared to any possible anthropogenic impact.

Hrm. It seems like they overlooked a lot of crucial qualifications in the candidate.

I believe the argument is that the due diligence was skipped in the name of DEI.

Ah, the "no true scotsman" :)

How would you strictly define "DEI hire"? Does it require a confession, or can we recognize it through any indirect observation?

You seem to be arguing that racist policies are acceptable if they have only a 1% affect against the discriminated against population.

This is the same argument made back in the day regarding pollution - as long as it is diluted, it's not important enough to pay attention to. 500000 ppm of CO2 is a real danger. 500 ppm of CO2 is a really small number, and we can safely discount it.

It's perhaps an uncharitable way of characterizing your observation, and maybe that's all you're doing - making an observation without a moral judgement.

Dilution is the solution to pollution.

Remember that oldie, but goodie?

So long as we dump our toxic waste into a big enough body of water, and mix it thoroughly, we can ignore it because it's a trivial fraction.

Isn't the implication that they were willfully unaware of it? That they hired him because they skipped the usual due diligence that would have been applied to other more pale people?

Sorta like putting a stab victim into handcuffs because you've been following a narrative that foreigner good, british bad, and don't bother actually checking for stab wounds once someone was accused of using racist words.

Arday was too good to be true, fit all their priors, and their prejudices made them behave in a naive manner. That's the toxicity of DEI, and the death of meritocracy (if it ever existed in the first place).

The imagination can be more powerful than any reality. The proper attitude can create a hell out of any paradise.

And it does.

Two movies on one screen.

The problem is that you can write that list slanted in the other direction just as adroitly.

I think the problem is we don't even believe in the same base reality. There are people who honestly, with all their heart, mind, body and soul, believe that communism will work, and that people can change sex simply by asserting it. And there are people who honestly, with all their heart, mind, body and soul, believe that the only proper family formation is heterosexual, monogamous, dedicated, and producing children.

There is no amount of discussion left to be had - it's time to move to the places where they adopt your personal politics, and live out the consequences. If you want to kill your baby 30 seconds before birth, you have a number of states you can move to. If you want to protect your hearing when practicing with firearms, you have a different choice of states. We have to let people get what they vote for, good and hard, even if that includes voting for allowing people to cheat while voting.

There is no logical reason DEI is bad, no argument that can be made against it that will actually persuade a true believer. They need to live out their convictions, and suffer for it. The best we can do is hope to isolate them in bubbles where they suffer the consequences, and others can make their own free will choices for the better.

From a socialist point of view, the vitamins and minerals are now better distributed for the masses - back in the day, only one person got to have one apple, and got all the vitamins and minerals. Now there are apples for two people, and they both get half of the micronutrient content.

Right?

You're right. The paper is not broken. It just used broken parts.

In other news, skim milk is less nutritious because there are less nutrients per unit volume.

So is anything you add ice to. Or beat into a froth. Or otherwise increase its volume through cooking.

Because everybody knows, there is a human right to have a specific concentration of vitamins and minerals per cubic foot of plant material. It never varied before humans came along, and any change is because reasons.

It amuses me to no end that both sides of the sword I laid on the table were immediately grabbed :)

Doesn't that sword cut both ways?

Sorta like anti-abortion people being pro-death penalty, and pro-abortion people being anti-death penalty?

In the general case they won't need persuading. But they'll be comforted to see reality represented.

Interesting. You see yourself as a comforter. Do you think that people who don't believe as you do will also feel comforted when they see their POV represented?

Are you? It's very falsifiable that not getting a measles vaccine is dangerous for you and your friends and countrypeople.

Tell me, what observations would change your mind on that? What is your falsification criteria? Be specific.

Have the humility to accept that you could be wrong, then be clear about what would change your mind.

CO2 concentration has increased due to the combustion of fossil fuels. You can falsify that by tracking where the CO2 is coming from and going to in the atmosphere.

Let's stipulate to both the greenhouse nature of CO2 and the human induced increase. Those could be interesting things to dive deeper into, but they're not relevant to the actual policy discussion.

Tell me how you would falsify economic models that predict doom 100 years from now, based on global average temperature increases. Again, what observations would change your mind?

But reducing the combustion of fossil fuels is still cheaper than not reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

You seem to have a high degree of confidence in your economic model here.

Just for fun, can you name any economic model that has been able to predict further out than 2 years, for any economic indicator, ever, in the history of mankind?

You seem to start with at least something that sounds scientish, but then you jump to a conclusion that requires certainty that I'm not sure is justified.

So, I think what you're trying to say is that you are trying to persuade, but not the people you're talking to - you're trying to persuade future browsers of comments.

Do you think your comments are going to be persuasive to those future readers?

I'm less concerned with "misinformation" as I am with the inability to for people to think in terms of falsifiability. We live in an age where people have irrational certainty, and have lost track of the error correcting mechanisms that could help them get closer to the truth. Being able to state a clear, necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis, is a lost art.

I will assume that you and I are rich enough to handle disruptions and problems that are a much bigger deal to other people not so blessed. I can only hope that those people who are starving for cheap energy to improve their living conditions manage to get what they need to enter the ranks of the rich and comfortable as quickly as they can.

Given the impending doom, it seems like the only option is adaptation. It certainly seems to be the strategy both you and I have adopted at large, even if the details of our preps might differ.