Open Carry T-shirts are not a good idea

Open Carry T-shirts are an invitation to be shot by cops
[Via Boing Boing]

The only difference between Open Carry T-Shirts and the Please Kill Me T-shirt that Richard Hell wore is that the Open Carry T-Shirts will really get you killed. Junior sizes available!

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Only if someone has a deathwish. This is crazy. Cops kill unarmed people all the time because they think a bottle is a gun.

Arctic warming makes the eastern US colder

 

Why So Cold? It’s the Jet Stream
[Via Booman Tribune]

Yes, we are having record cold snaps here in the East and Southeast. Global warming must be bunk then, right? Not so fast. Out West, its nice and toasty with unusually warm temperatures. Take a look at this map from the National Weather Service.

So why the big divide between East and West? Isn’t the temperature gradient between colder and warmer supposed to be more a North and South thing? Well, maybe once upon a time. Unfortunately, we are experiencing dramatic changes to the pattern of one of the biggest drivers of our climate on the North American Continent – the Jet Stream -and the rapid rate of the warming in the Arctic is the cause.

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The map up top shows the areas of the US where the highs (red) and lows (blue) were different from the average January weather. The lows allowed cold air from Canada to spill into the US. 

And here is a map showing the departure from the average temperature for January (red is warmer):

All due to where the jet stream falls.

This is pretty much what the models have been saying for much of the last decade. The Arctic warms at a faster rate than the temperate latitude. As the Arctic warms, it alters the shape of the jet streams, making them wavier, like hitting a key on a piano makes the sound louder.

Here is a larger version of picture at top where you can see the other strong ridge from the Atlantic that squeezed the cold air further down.

This means that cold air from the Arctic now dips down further into the US (for those who want more in depth information).

And the same models show more high ridges off the coast of the western US, keeping our skies clear.

So we get a very cold East while the West is warmer than normal. Plants are already starting to bloom. The skies have generally been clear and when it does rain, it pours, because of atmospheric rivers from Hawaii.

These rivers bring intense but pretty localized rain. The rest of the West still sees drought conditions. Several of them saw some of the warmest, driest months on record.

This low jet stream also kept a lot of Gulf Coast moisture from coming end, keeping Texas drier than normal.

This also fits the models which have suggested that the Seattle area will get about the same amount of rain as before, just all at once rather than in a long drizzle.

Every once in a while, these strong jet streams are disrupted and we return to the normal pattern of west to east cold fronts. Seattle gets cloudy and rainy, the rest of the country sees a mostly mild drop in temps.

But for now, the new normal may well be like this, with Seattle clear and dry and much of the rest seeing a large drop in temperatures.

How being WEIRD is a good thing

 

We Aren’t the World 
[Via - Pacific Standard]

IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups.

While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was not. Rather than practice traditional ethnography, he decided to run a behavioral experiment that had been developed by economists. Henrich used a “game”—along the lines of the famous prisoner’s dilemma—to see whether isolated cultures shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness. In doing so, Henrich expected to confirm one of the foundational assumptions underlying such experiments, and indeed underpinning the entire fields of economics and psychology: that humans all share the same cognitive machinery—the same evolved rational and psychological hardwiring.

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Nice article about how the West has actual cognitive differences from tthe East and just about everyone else. We have created and inhabit a different cultural environment and, like Darwin’s Finches, have evolved different social structures to deal with it. These social structures change the way we think.

This is a good thing, as long as we realize that our adaptations to this environment do not necessarily extend to all of humanity. It also fits in well with a recent paper that has gotten some press.

The acronym, WEIRD – Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic – was coined to describe the social groups that have adapted the dominant cultural environment on the planet. Dominant by its outsized effects not only on natural resources but on other cultures as well.

A major hallmark of this:

In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.

This fits in quite well with my model on hierarchical authorities and distributed democracies. Humans have two ways to think about the world – Daniel Kahneman calls them System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, giving us rapid responses to the world around us. System 2 is slow, taking a more analytical approach to gain greater understanding.

System 1 is instinctual, rules-based and heuristic. It lives in a world  of metaphor and narrative. It is what allows us to respond properly the first time we see a wolf.

System 2 is slower, analytical and energy intensive. It is fact-based, not narrative-based. It is what allows us to see a wolf and produce a thousand breeds of dogs.

System 2 often is used to produce the narratives needed for System 1 to act to fast. A large part of the necessary adaptations to a new cultural environment is for System 2 to synthesize complexity into the simple narratives that System 1 uses.

This why different cultures are so plastic that they seem to think differently. They have differaent metaphors for System 1 based on the results of previous System 2 processes to assess the environment.

Cultures that failed to do this, to understand the cultural environment they inhabited, by transferring System 2 understanding into System 1 rapid responses, collapsed.

Just as the dodo failed to adapt to humans on the island. 

System 2 is useful when something new enters the environment, requiring deeper examination to understand how to deal with it. System 1 is for things we already know how to deal with, because they are a constant in our cultural environment. 

When someone says “You aren’t listening to me” it is often because  people are reacting with System 1 thoughts about something new that requires System 2 approaches. The listener  really is not ‘thinking’ but reacting. Fast, not slow.

Now on top of these ways of thinking,  we have two modes for organizing our social groups – hierarchical authorities and distributed democracies. The former puts the place of the individual into a specific social structure, atomizing while creating specific roles.

The latter subsumes the individual into a network designed for rapid information flow. Both approaches can use either System. For example, authority coupled with System 1 produces people who instinctually know how is above them and below them in the hierarchy, responding without thinking to commands.

But hierarchy coupled with System 2 produces analysis of a problem, breaking it down into pieces that those in a hierarchy can address more easily.

System 2 coupled with democracy can produce the Scientific Revolution. System 1 approaches here can rapidly disseminate the information from that revolution, by synthesis, not analysis.

So,we can see that WEIRD cognitive approaches have produced extremely large and complex hierarchies and democracies, which both use important System 1 and System 2 processes.

That is what has produced Western civilization. I would suggest that a key adaptation of this culture – something that has allowed it to dominate – has been to make System 2 approaches  external. Tacit System 2 creates shamans and alchemists. Explicit System 2 produces scientists.

WEIRD cultures are more analytical and use System 2 to a much larger extent than any other culture. That is because our rapidly changing cultural environment keeps throwing up novel problems we have to analyze deeply to solve.

We do not have time to relax with our System 1 responses to the world we live in. 

This could explain why there is such a difference in cognition today in America between conservatives in general and liberals. The data suggest that, as a group, conservatives are mostly using System 1 approaches (ie gut reactions and simple narratives) and are less WEIRD than average. Liberals  on the other had, are the mostly WEIRD, using analytical, System 2 thinking much more.

Thus why they have such a hard time coming up with the sort of short pithy metaphors to deal with the world, a world that is rapidly shifting from one stage to another, with the metaphors needed for System 1 thinking ins tremendous flux.

I think this is due to the Information Age, Moore’s law and the exponential economy.

We are living in a rapidly changing cultural environment, one where social norms and System 1 rules are changing. We need to develop new rules, new adaptations to this cultural environment. This requires analysis – System 2 – which is currently found more concentrated in the liberal side than the conservative.

It is a fluke of timing that these different approaches mostly align with political parties. In the 1850s, the thinking was the same – one group responding to changes by deeper analysis while the other retreated to old principles – but the parties were reversed  with the Republicans being the radical party adapting to the new cultural environment.

It doe snot matter which group is doing the analytical thinking. What is important is that we use this analysis to come up with better narratives and metaphors for sustain adaptive System 1 thinking.

The data suggest that less than 20% of even WEIRD cultures spend a lot of time in analysis and deep thinking. So a lot of liberals are also acting with System 1 responses, mostly to old rules for the old environment.

If we fail to adapt to the new cultural environment we are creating, then we will fail as a society. 

This model does not show what the adaptations we need to make will be. But it does suggest where those adaptations, those new stories will come from.

It does explain why the professions most aligned with slow, deliberative, analytical thinking – such as scientists – tend to align with liberals.

And why those most charged with creating new narratives – Hollywood – are also seen as liberal.

I expect this will change as we continue to adapt better to the new cultural environment. The current fluke – where analytical thinking falls more under one political group – may only be seen when our culture is undergoing rapid change. Once we gain better adaptations, creating the necessary narratives to support fast responses, we will all fall under mostly System 1.

Because we will understand the new rules of the culture. In fact, a large part of why System 2 evolved in humanity may simply be to gain understanding that can more easily be implemented by System 1. To create better narratives to explain the world.

And one interesting aspect that unfolds from this data deals with whether urban areas are generally more liberal because they attract liberal people or do they make people more liberal.

I’m falling on the cities make people more liberal. The paper showed that people can easily be trained to use either approach. It is a response to the environment they find themselves and what is required more often – rapid response to something you already know or slower responses to novel events.

I would suggest that having to adapt to the much more complex environment of a large city would require everyone to use more System 2 thinking than living in a rural one.

And right now, more System 2 correlates with being liberal.

I am not surprised that the most liberal cities, such as San Francisco, Washington DC and Seattle, are also home to some of the greatest technology/information/poetical changes driving our new cultural environment. 

The adaptations our culture is acquiring will be driven from those places where greater System 2 thinking is happening. Because they are creating the stories needed to sustain System 1 reactions to the new environment.

What does the community do when someone vital to its success needs help?

 

Internet Comes Through For Developer Of Key Email Encryption Tool
[Via Techdirt]

Yesterday, we reposted Julia Angwin’s article from ProPublica about how the guy behind GPG, a key tool for email encryption, Werner Koch, was basically broke, and that attempts to crowdfund money to keep going hadn’t been all that successful. The story seemed to resonate with lots of people, and the donations started flowing. After getting a grand total of just about €34,000 in 2014, he’s already well over €100,000 this year, with most of that coming yesterday after Angwin’s story went up. On top of that, Stripe and Facebook each agreed to fund him to the tune of $50,000 per year (from each of them, so $100k total), and the Linux Foundation had agreed to give him $60k (though, Koch admits that the deal there was actually signed last week).

Either way, this is great to see, though it’s unfortunate that it had to wait until an article detailing his plight came out. We’ve seen this sort of thing a few times now, such as when the Heartbleed bug made everyone realize that OpenSSL was basically supported by volunteers with almost no budget at all. Thankfully, the attention there got the project necessary funds to continue to keep us safe.

It really is quite incredible when you realize how much of the internet that you rely on is built by people out of a true labor of love. Often, people have no idea that there even is an opportunity to support those projects, and it’s great that Angwin was able to highlight this one and get it the necessary funding to keep moving forward.

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Humans are some of the most altruistic animals ever seen, helping strangers with no concerns for their own help in return.

But what happens when that help creates and sustains the vital work of others? New communities come into existence that would not otherwise exist, communities that do recognize the help given to them by others.

So, what then happens when the altruist, whose help sustained the community, needs help themselves? 

Well, we show altruism in return. we are social animals that evolved a sense that helping others would result in better results for everyone. Here we see such an example.

The Climate Change denialist media continue to lie

 

Scientist Slams News Site That Used His Research To Imply Climate Change Is Fake
[Via Think Progress]

Last week, a new, peer-reviewed paper from scientists at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute was published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper is important: for the first time, it shows that scientists can use incredibly old permafrost to find out what temperatures were like in Siberia thousands of years ago. By using this permafrost, the scientists found that temperatures in Siberia have been gradually rising for the past 7,000 years.

Enter the climate denier media. After the findings were published, notorious climate denier Anthony Watts re-published portions of the Alfred Wegener Institute’s press release for the research on his site, Watts Up With That. It was then picked up by Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller, who wrote that “solar radiation has been melting Siberian ice for 7,000 years,” evidence that “global warming is nothing new.”

In other words, the Daily Caller is using the research to reinforce a common trope among climate deniers: that the climate has always been changing, and humans therefore have no effect. In this case, it implies that Siberian permafrost is thawing due to natural causes. Greenhouse gases have nothing to do with it.

Here’s the problem. The research does not say any of that. It does not show that Siberian ice is “melting,” and certainly does not show that “solar radiation” is the cause. It also does not imply that global warming — a term that describes the effects of man-made climate change — is a phenomenon that has existed prior to the Industrial Revolution, when humans began pumping exorbitant amounts of carbon into the air.

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It is so easy to understand why so many people misunderstand what is going on, when we have media that are so willing to confuse things with lies and misrepresentations.

Here they take a work and present it in a fashion meant to mislead. They want people to be confused, to think that scientists are showing climate change is not happening.

They write that there were things stated in the paper that were never stated. And they use the same tactics again and again. Repetitive and shameless misrepresentations can only be called lying.

The exact same tactics were used with smoking cigarettes. How many thousands of people died because of the selfish, myopic and stupid lies spread then? How many will die because of the selfish, myopic and stupid lies spread now?

The world is warming. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge that cannot accept facts and is simply not acting rationally. 

Now why is it warming? We construct models to test different hypothesis. The ONLY models which come close to fitting reality are those that include the carbon dioxide released by humans. 

And these same models can be checked by running them backwards, or starting in 1900 and running forward. Guess what? They fit the real data within experimental error throughout the 20th Century. 

But only if we include human generated greenhouse gases.The models do a great job describing the data we have already generated.

As with any scientific model, if you want to remove it, you had better produce and support one that does a better job.

So, if one wants to posit that human-generated carbon dioxide is not responsible  one not only has to come up with an unknown source to explain the increasing temperature, but also why the greenhouse gases  we release have little to no effect.

It could happen since science never proves anything with certainty.  But the climate change denialists are not trying to really find that model that explains the world better than the current models.

They simply take potshots and tell lies. Exactly what every other denialist does.

 

Unfortunately, looks like there are a lot of cafeteria fundamentalists

 

New survey shows extent of scientists’ divide with the public
[Via Ars Technica]

In conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Pew Research Center has conducted a large poll that measures both public attitudes toward science and the attitudes of scientists themselves. Although there are some substantial areas of agreement—the public values science almost as much as scientists themselves—the data also highlights many areas where there are huge gaps between the two.

Good and bad news

The good news first. Almost 80 percent of US citizens feel that science has made life easier, and substantial majorities feel that it has improved food, health, and the environment. Roughly 70 percent of the public feel that research pays off in the long run, with support similar for both fundamental research and applied research. Over 60 percent see an essential role for federal funding in scientific progress.

Things get pretty grim from there. One bit of bad news comes from a comparison of these numbers to results obtained by Pew in 2009. Back then, 83 percent of the public felt that science had a positive impact on people’s lives. All the numbers on the specific areas—food, health, and the environment—were down slightly as well. The number of people who are enthused about the US’ scientific achievements, however, saw a more substantial drop, with an 11 point plunge in those thinking we’re doing above average or better compared to other nations.

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Not surprising, people generally like science and have a good view of researchers.

Until science buts up against what they believe. Then many people refuse to acknowledge the facts.

But it appears to be more complex than that. Traditionalists – take a literal view of the Bible, don’t accept evolution or the Big Bang, and tend to score low on science literacy – are 43% of the population. They simply refuse to acknowledge entire areas of reality.

Secularists – more scientifically literate and either viewed the Bible as inspired by God or simply a collection of myths – were about 36%.

The other 21%? They are called post-secularists. They pick and chose the facts they will acknowledge.

As the authors describe:

These people are just as knowledgeable about science as the secularists, but only if the questions about evolution and the Big Bang are left out. Nearly half of the post-secularists view the Bible as literal; only six percent accept the Big Bang, and a tiny three percent are ok with the idea of human evolution. They’re also relatively uncertain about plate tectonics.

No evolution and no Big Bang. Like the traditionalists. But not all believe in the literal Bible. They, like secularists, love science, but only when it does not impact their beliefs.

It appears that traditionalists may, in some ways, fear science and what it will do to their religious beliefs, so they stay away from it as much as possible, preferring ignorance to knowledge.

The secularists love science and have found ways to fully incorporate it into their belief systems. The post-secularists are intermediate, choosing what science they will acknowledge and which they will not.

Traditionalists construct Cargo Cult Worlds that  have the least connection to reality. Secularists construct ones that model reality much better. The post-secularists are in between.

In a complex cultural environment, the further one’s model for reality departs from the real world, the more likely one will make poor decisions and die. 

This would mean that 43% of the population hold views that make them less likely to survive in a complex environment, while another 20% may be at severe risk, depending on just what science they chose to put on their plate.

The question becomes just how far one’s Cargo Cult World is from the real world and how many bad decisions will be made because of their bad models of the world.

As a 21st century company, Apple’s success is simply a mystery to most

 

Bad Assumptions
[Via Daring Fireball]

Great post by Ben Thompson on how Apple remains profoundly misunderstood by many:

And yet, the perception that Apple is somehow hanging on by the skin of their teeth persists. I was speaking to someone about Apple’s particularly excellent China results this afternoon, and was struck at how their questions were so focused on threats to Apple — “How will Apple respond to Xiaomi” for example. This is in stark contrast to the way most think about a company like Google, where their dominance in whatever field they choose to enter is assumed, just as Microsoft’s was a decade ago. Apple, though, is always a step away from catastrophe.

It’s difficult to overstate just how absurd this is, but here’s my best attempt: last quarter Apple’s revenue was downright decimated by the strengthening U.S. dollar; currency fluctuations reduced Apple’s revenue by 5% — a cool $3.73 billion dollars. That, though, is more than Google made in profit last quarter ($2.83 billion). Apple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter. And yet it’s Google that is feared, and Apple that is feared for.

His list of three wrong assumptions about Apple is so spot-on. Worth bookmarking. I’d venture to say that just about all wrong-headed analysis of Apple’s future prospects comes down to one or more of those assumptions. The only one I’d add to the list: Apple can’t innovate without Steve Jobs.

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Most people are applying the wrong model to apple. So its success looks like magic.

Apple has never seemed to operate by normal business parameters, because its organizational structure encourages distributed democracies to solve problems rather than strictly hierarchical authorities. 

This creates a very efficient company able to innovate and change rapidly because information flow is so rapid. But it presents an organizational structure that is unfathomable to most MBAs, who are so stuck in 20th century approaches.

They expect one person at the top to own the agenda, not understanding how anything gets done when leadership is distributed, not centralized.

I worked at one of these new style of companies, where the internal structure allowed information flow to move along social networks links, not hierarchical organizational charts. This allowed us to succeed using fewer people and less money than our competitors.

It made us very adaptable and resilient.

This distributed approach was sneered at by the Wall Street types (“How do you frigging hippies ever get anything done?”) but we understood and loved it.

Apple is so similar and Wall Street treats it the same – it must be magic or luck. But it is how Apple has created a community, both inside and outside its corporate headquarters, that sustains it.

Other 21st century corporations exist – Costco, Pixar, for example. Wall Street misunderstood them also. Until the 21st century ones simply won.

The main worry for these companies is not so much the marketplace as being reborn into 20th century companies by those who do not get it. That was my worry without Jobs. But Cook gets it and the culture goes on.