Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

The above header is probably not going to sell many page views. But it is newsworthy, in the sense that it would be a novel observation for a news organisation to publish. It's a species of what I recall Dr Don Stammer aptly describing in the 1980s as the most likely outcome of any problem: the "muddle through". It has been prompted by another delightful piece that the Insta Prof has nudged my way by John Tierney in the New York Times' Science section on 29 July. After the deluge of disaster that the media tips on us every day, I reckon this piece should have been given lead item status by every media organisation on the planet (and now even Memeorandum 's algorithm and ALDaily has picked up this piece , so it's sure resonating with someone other than me and the Prof). The header the NY Times uses is: " FINDINGS : 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List " And, along with confining it to the deep innards of the journal by placing it in the mostly...

Glenn Reynolds has diverted me to yet another minor delight and some more homespun heuristics from a post on Wag Reflex by a Sarah Wilson, who describes herself as "..a pet behavior specialist, author, media personality..". Sarah's little nugget of insight is: " Food for thought: When people teach tricks they are generally success-focused. They laugh and cheer every small attempt the dog makes, and the dogs stay relaxed and happy and LEARN. When people teach “commands” we, all too often, become fault-focused. We get intense and concerned that the dog isn ’t doing it “right,” and the dog picks up on that, losing confidence and slowing down. Take home message? Teach everything as if it were a trick! Seek out the best efforts to reward then have fun, and keep at it. Be success-focused to be successful!" I like it; the exploitation of the human "wag reflex" as a pathway to learning. My tail is wagging at this. It reminds me of an insight I fancied I glea...

Eric Falkenstein 's blog has drawn my attention to an observation on the human condition by Walter Bagehot that I had not previously heard, though I had been growing towards a personal sense of it: " The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm." The way Falkenstein paraphrases it is "that charity does more harm than good." He observes that giving someone something does not help them pull themselves out of their bad circumstances to become self reliant, it rather appears to just increase their dependency. This is his little riff on the mutual interdependence of western feelgood third world giving and the third world "cargo cult" mentality. It can take a long long time to break this cycle, and sometimes it persists in perpetuity (see Untouchables). In Australia the insidious effects of this mutually self supporting vicious circle have seen the perpe...

I've just rediscovered an apt word for this blog's current preoccupations: " heuristics ". It is prompted by an appealing post on Econlog that resonated here mightily. The basic proposition posited there is: " 1. If you don't have clear and convincing evidence that doing something is better than doing nothing, do nothing. 2. If you know that doing nothing is bad, but don't have clear and convincing evidence that one action is better than another, do the simplest, standard thing . " If only these principles were applied by the perpetuators of the current zeitgeist on global warming, then we would probably be dealing with much saner and more plausible policy options on "climate policy" than those they are foisting on us at present. And this also has the merit of seeming to be an iteration of the " Occam's Razor " principle. I also reckon that we can shoehorn these heuristics into the rule of thumb model being propounded he...

I found this so irresistable I am copying and pasting it here in full, rather than simply linking . It has even more applications than it was designed for; as a generic column on international institutions that Alan Beattie of the Financial Times wrote and forwarded to his colleague, Gideon Rachman, the FT's Chief Foreign Correspondent. " By reporters everywhere An ineffectual international organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about a situation it has absolutely no power to change, the latest in a series of self-serving interventions by toothless intergovernmental bodies. “We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness,” said the head of the institution, either a former minister from a developing country or a mid-level European or American bureaucrat. “This is a wake-up call to the world. They must take on board the vital message that my organisation exists.” The director of the body, based in one of New York, Washington or an agreeable Wes...

Professor Ross Garnaut is the eponymous author of Australia's "me too" version for Kevin Rudd of Lord Stern's climate change review to former UK PM Tony Blair. Stern's report, like Garnaut's , describes the outcomes of a series of fiendishly complicated climate change economic models that his army of bureaucrats ran through some impressively powerful processors a couple of years back. The point of all this expensive highly credentialed taxpayer funded prognostication by the Stern and Garnaut boffins, seems to be to try to demonstrate to we rubes that, although the cost of slowing our economic growth by taxing carbon emissions is huge, these computer models projecting planetary climate change when combined with models of a nation's economy over the coming decades, show us that the economic cost of climate change if we don't eliminate growth in CO2 emissions , is even greater than the cost of their proposed solution. So lets pay the price now fo...