2. What makes Morocco special.
3. Food carts as countercyclical assets.
4. Humane Studies Fellowship from The Institute for Humane Studies.
5. Someone is doing on-line education.
6. Austin Frakt on Create Your Own Economy.
Assorted links
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who awards the grant of the oyster guy? what are his other options?
I agree with Pedro. A researcher wants funds and recognition. So there is a incentive to produce results that are spectacular, eye catching etc. The “oyster guy” post doesn’t acknowledge that researchers might be fueled by goals outside the noble “quest for the truth”
It can’t be a centralized conspiracy but could very well be a chaotic, self-organized, yet systematic bias caused by perverse incentives.
Does the oyster guy believe in the Medieval Warm Period, or is he a denier?
A lot of scientists game the system for funding and engage in petty gate keeping. Social scientists are especially distinguished in this respect. And of course there are and will always be wide areas of uncertainty about many of the details and, perhaps, the scale of climate change. But two aspects of this debate (which Tyler has already alluded to elsewhere) are very suggestive. a) There is an established physical mechanism that accounts for the data observed, against which no better, rival mechanism has been proposed. b) while the skeptics have identified a variety of more or less substantive objections to the data observed, they have identified no other data, at the same scale and level of complexity, which is largely and clearly inconsistent with the claims of climate change theories.
How many doctors plodded along day by day bleeding people or, more recently, prescribing Thalidomide? How many scientist plodded along day by day “piecing out the causes and predicting effects” of ether, phlogiston, or spontaneous generation?
So really, what about the oyster guy? People are sheep, even “experts,” and the fact that a lot of them hold a particular belief does not make that belief true.
Besides, the article doesn’t really say exactly what the oyster guy believes. The world is not made up simply of AGW believers and skeptics, there is a large spectrum of effects man could be having on the environment, from little effect to massive effects, and the truth probably lies somewhere in between the most extreme beliefs on either side.
One problem is that nobody really has an intimate personal incentive in knowing the truth about global warming. Perhaps if (fantasy) global warming research was funded by a fiduciary trust of my great-grandchildren (needs time travel) the $$ would be more carefully allocated to knowing the truthful answers.
I think it’s like zero for ten now on the last climate posts here in terms of showing any appreciation of the nuance of the issue, and instead deferring to beltway non-entities like Ezra Klein. Some flunky somewhere gave a speech about what the “impact” would be if a worst case climate scenario came true. So what? How about digging into the actual data and discovering that almost all of it has been “homogenized” into cheese whiz and “value added” into falsehoods for your protection.
Maybe best to get back to the identifying the world’s greatest Portugese novelists & cetera….
My friend just blew all this out of the water. He suggests it’s not about the money or the fame. Scientists are really motivated by the opportunity granted by their status to get laid.
Do we really know who is getting oyster man’s pearls?
So the oyster guy is completely without bias? What a Saint.
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