Xpost @ johnquiggin.com
There's a simpler but also more seductive quality with argument from authority.  In simple biological terms, gaining knowledge requires energy expenditure.  This means that the value of any knowledge gained must be totted up against the energy expended to produce it.  In our evolutionary history - ie the integrated period of our brain evolution - starvation was a regular threat.  Simply running a large brain requires 20% of our energy, many other very successful mammals use considerably less.  This produces a quite different knowledge strategy to what you might find in an epistemology text.

We prize cheap information.  We congratulate ourselves in having got to the "gist" of a situation on very limited information.  The Climategate emails was a perfect example of this: virtually no one read the thousands of emails involved but a lot of people were willing to regard the three words "hide the decline" - without context - as as incontrovertible proof that the researchers involved were crooks, and QED that the other thousands of climate researchers were too.  No doubt they congratulated themselves on their incisive intellectual capabilities in forming this judgement.  This is "gisting" gone crazy.  If it weren't so tragic it might be funny.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not limited to anti-AGW types, it's everywhere. 

This is also the key reason why science took so long to get off the ground: sitting around for days, months or years try to find outliers that disprove hypotheses just isn't on in a nutritionally limited environment.  Our brains contain Baysian inference circuitry gated by some pretty worldwise energy expenditure calculations.

The argument from authority strategy is an energy saving knowledge strategy that is built-in or natural to us.  The basic logic: "X says so, X has a pile of goodies/status, therefore X is probably right" is obviously logical piffle but is a reasonable biological strategy, in an evolutionary sense.  Unfortunately, we (in general, not you or I :) are not that good at distinguishing where the pile of goodies came from and whether obtaining them required any relevant mental or physical effort at all.

Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Geoffrey Miller: Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Our instinctive way of thinking about insanity — our intuitive psychiatry — is dead wrong... There's a scientific consensus that personality traits can be well-described by five main dimensions of variation. These "Big Five" personality traits are called openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The Big Five are all normally distributed in a bell curve, statistically independent of each other, genetically heritable, stable across the life-course, unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends, and found in other species such as chimpanzees. They predict a wide range of behavior in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics.

Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits. Over-conscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other "impulse control disorders". Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders. Low extraversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders. Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder. High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia. Twin studies show that these links between personality traits and mental illnesses exist not just at the behavioral level, but at the genetic level. And parents who are somewhat extreme on a personality trait are much more likely to have a child with the associated mental illness.

Nuclear deaths, revised

This article from The New Matilda estimates Chernobly related deaths at between 15,000 and 60,000 on the basis of  that cancers are linear to exposure and that there is no safe low exposure level as assumed by some of the more extreme positions on the pro-nuclear side:

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates a total collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts over 50 years from Chernobyl fallout (see the IAEA Bulletin, Vol.38, No.1, 1996). A standard risk estimate from the International Commission on Radiological Protection is 0.05 fatal cancers per Sievert. Multiply those figures and we get an estimated 30,000 fatal cancers. Now let’s recall that, according to the BEIR report, the LNT model may overstate risks or understate them by a factor of two. Thus the estimated death toll ranges from something less than 30,000 — up to 60,000.

http://newmatilda.com/2011/04/07/do-we-know-chernobyl-death-toll

This kinda fries the graph I quoted in the previous post.

 

Deaths from different types of energy production

Chart of death per energy unit (TWh) produced:


Taken from Edge 341 quote an unreferenced Swedish government report. Undated.  No idea on methodology etc but I'd presume it's within cooee.

Solar is missing, probably because it's very small.

I guess nuclear has upside potential on black swans events but it remains tiny compared to coal and oil.

Women's Underrepresentation in Science

According to this paper the problem isn't discrimination (mild positive discrimination was found at times) it's more to do with women's coice of having kids at the time when men are pumping their careers along.

"Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes."


Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science
Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams
http://www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3157.full

Obesity

Population studies that try to link average life duration and average obesity are confouded by numerous factors, especially medical progress. However, virtually every study that I have seen that correlates body weight with disease prevalence finds a U shaped curve with minimum incidence rates at a BMI of about 22/23. Lower than this you are probably starving yourself or sick; higher and you are hurting yourself. Besides the usual cardiovasular and diabetes these results are common across many cancers, a range of other diseases and aging in general. These results are backed up by physiological evidence of cumulative negative impacts of bloated fat cells on the body.

There are some considerations that that weaken these results, especially the correlation between BMI and sedentry lifestyle. On the other hand, while BMI is easy to measure, it is an imperfect measure of obesity. Body shapes vary and research is indicating that it’s fat around the gut – aka “male fat” that is the problem more than distributed fat. (Or female fat on the breasts and hip which requires physiological effort to maintain so is a sign of youthful good health.) If a better fat measurements were used the impact of obesity on disease would probably increase.

None of this stuff is completely rock solid but the indications are pretty plain. The fact that you might now have an increased life expectancy despite being overweight doesn’t mean that much if the extra life is spent in a poor state of health, unable to do much, and kept alive by drugs. I aim to get as close you can reasonably manage to a BMI around 23 while maintaining activity and equanimity. People should take general body shape and fat distribution into account as well as the simple number.

(crossposted comment at johnquiggin.com)

Pedal Power

Portable Pedal Machines May Help Counter Harmful Effects of Sedentary Jobs!

Maybe I need one of these gizmos.  Desk workers do too many sedentry hours...