George Rebane
Scope insensitivity!!?? Well now folks, the politically correct wordsmiths have presented us with a new use for the word ‘insensitivity’ – a person is no longer ignorant or stupid, he’s just insensitive. So an illiterate is just lexicographically insensitive; that sounds much nicer. And an innumerate person, get this, is one afflicted with “scope insensitivity” which makes him more than ineffective as a voter. Ed Ring on EcoWorld clarifies –
Scope insensitivity is the inability of a person, or voting block, or nation, to understand simple quantitative proportions, which if understood, would cast a policy issue in an entirely different light. Simply put, because of scope insensitivity, the logical conclusions one might rationally find obvious are eclipsed by emotional arguments. Absent the ability to recognize basic quantitative realities, the proper scope of the relevant variables that affect a policy issue are incomprehensible, and policy becomes a puppet of whoever has the most money and the most compelling emotional appeal.
… more here . A related post is ‘How Elections Really Work’ that summarized Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Perhaps the debate is not over after all, and Big Al with his “100% zero carbon electricity in 10 years” is beginning to make some people cower a little. His 'facts' and proposals are beginning to tilt the 
thinking population into re-examining the claims of the IPCC and the true believers of Team Gore (BTW, they include your president and governator). Bret Stephens (22jul08 WSJ) asks why he remains so believable, and notes that in The True Believer Eric Hoffer wrote "The readiness for self-sacrifice is contingent on an imperviousness to the realities of life. . . . All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside it. . . . To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible."
Viz all this, Californians please keep one eye on CARB's Scope Plan for implementing your governator's AB32, and both hands on your wallet.
End of science – out with theory, data rules! This pile of bovine scat was foisted by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in a Wired article. Anderson should either dust off his physics degree or demand a refund from his alma mater for arguing that zillions of data bytes floating out there will now make theorizing obsolete – that all important answers will be found in the huge amounts of data that we daily record and store. No more need to invent or refine theories.
Well, that’s just silly. Theory is the efficient representation of knowledge that lets us predict the future. A simple regression (think of curve fitting) explains nothing and has very limited predictive powers. Besides, having all that data doesn’t mean that you can necessarily do anything with it until you can efficiently search it, and then process what you have found. All this requires more theory and algorithmics based on theory, and … . Science may just be starting for real - after all, fundamentally we’re critters who want to understand and explain what we experience. That's how we live. See related stuff in Singularity Signposts – 22jul08.
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