Over at Steve McIntyre’s, there’s a fascinating discussion going on about the relevance of the hockey stick in the context of the Myles Allen mis-identification of the temperature record in a 2011 conference on Climategate as being the hockey stick issue rather than the paleo-record, Yamal, and “hide the decline” tricks being the central issue.
Allen is in a furor defending himself and his misstep, even going so far as to suggesting Bishop Hill is picking “the least flattering” photos to put in the blog post when in fact it is nothing more than the default thumbnail from YouTube. Even the Communicate 2011 website featuring Allen’s presentation uses the same thumbnail (scroll down). The FAIL on display here is hilarious.
In the middle of all this there’s a new paper which may explain why so many scientists, the IPCC, NGO’s, and governments bet on the hockey stick as the “hot hand” in the climate science card game. The paper has a prescient title:
Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice? Implications of Gambler’s and Hot-Hand Fallacies in False-Expert Setting
by Nattavudh Powdthavee, Yohanes E. Riyanto (May 2012)
So why would I point out a paper on gambling as being relevant to the hockey stick? Because, the hockey stick was in fact a huge gamble on the part of “The Team”. They knew full well the science in it was shonky, but they hedged their bets with techniques (such as Mike’s Nature Trick) that gave a result that they felt sure would be “bought” by the scientific community at large. It was a good gamble at the time, but as Climategate has shown us, it may have been a winning hand with a one time jackpot, but they are losing the card game as the other players slowly realize they have a cheat in their midst.
At the blog “Stumbling and Mumbling” there’s a review of the paper with the headline:
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The strong demand for charlatans
In the improbable event of ever being invited to give a commencement address, my advice to graduates wanting a lucrative career would be: become a charlatan. There has always been a strong demand for witchdoctors, seers, quacks, pundits, mediums, tipsters and forecasters. A nice new paper by Nattavudh Powdthavee and Yohanes Riyanto shows how quickly such demand arises.
…
The predictions were organized in such a way that after the first toss half the subjects saw an incorrect prediction and half a correct one, after the second toss a quarter saw two correct predictions, and so on. The set-up is similar to Derren Brown’s The System, which gave people randomly-generated tips on horses, with a few people receiving a series of correct tips.
And here’s the thing. Subjects who saw just two correct predictions were 15 percentage points more likely to buy a prediction for the third toss than subjects who got a right and wrong prediction in the earlier rounds. Subjects who saw four successive correct tips were 28 percentage points more likely to buy the prediction for the fifth round.
This tells us that even intelligent and numerate people are quick to misperceive randomness and to pay for an expertise that doesn’t exist; the subjects included students of sciences, engineering and accounting. The authors say:
Observations of a short streak of successful predictions of a truly random event are sufficient to generate a significant belief in the hot hand.
(h/t to Marc Morano for the link)
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To me, this sounds exactly like what happened with the Hockey Stick, as it was that “a-ha” moment for many people. IPCC had a “hot hand” and everybody started betting on it. Matt Ridley elucidates on that very issue in the CA comments
Matt Ridley Posted May 28, 2012 at 6:38 AM | Permalink
Far from being an irrelevancy, for me personally, the MBH hockey stick was absolutely vital in first extinguishing my scepticism then fiercely re-igniting it. When I first saw it, I was blown away by the clear evidence of unprecedented climate change, and I immediately told people I was no longer sceptical about climate change, a subject I had not been paying much attention to or writing about at that point, but had expressed some doubts about in print a few years before. That it had been published in Nature was good enough for me at the time. Aha, I thought, a smoking gun.
Then when I came across Steve’s work and realised how full of holes both the method and the data were, and that the IPCC was not interested in listening the criticisms, it made me doubly sceptical about not only paleo-climate data, but climate change theory generally, Nature magazine’s standards and — following the farcical enquiries — the British scientific establishment’s willingness to be bought. The hockey stick was by no means the only thing that caused me to change my mind twice, but it was the most salient.
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This paper would seem to explain why so many bet on the shonky science of the Hockey Stick, and why they keep betting on it even though that “hot hand” has disappeared. I loved this part about ‘“the law of small numbers” – i.e. those who believe that a small sample of signals represents the parent population from which it is drawn‘ because it explains Yamal and the cherry picked ten sample set to a fault:
They write in the paper:
There is little economic theory in this area. Rabin (2002) and Rabin and Vayanos (2010) outline a model in which believers of “the law of small numbers” – i.e. those who believe that a small sample of signals represents the parent population from which it is drawn (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971) – will be willing to pay for services by financial analysts after observing randomly occurring streaks of profitable financial performances predicted by these professionals. This fallacious belief in the hot-hand of a financial expert arises as a consequence of the gambler’s fallacy, which is defined as an individual’s tendency to expect outcomes in random sequences to exhibit systematic reversals.
The authors suggest that an investor who believes that the performance of a mutual fund is a combination of the manager’s ability and luck will, at first, underestimate the likelihood that a manager of average ability will exhibit a streak of above- or below-average performance. Following good or bad streaks, however, the investor will revert to overestimate the likelihood that the manager is above or below average, and so in turn will over-infer that the streak of unusual performance will continue (see also Gilovich et al., 1985). The implication of this is that believers of the law of small number will be happy to pay for real-time price information provided by experts, such as stockbrokers or managers of actively-managed funds, even when it is well-documented that actively-managed funds do not outperform their market benchmark on average (see, e.g., Fama, 1991)
The parallels to the bets made on the Hockey Stick, and the continued faith by many that Mann came by his “hot hand” scientifically and the betting was sound are quite plain. It is another example of confirmation bias.
Here’s the paper and abstract:
Why Do People Pay for Useless Advice? Implications of Gambler’s and Hot-Hand Fallacies in False-Expert Setting
by Nattavudh Powdthavee, Yohanes E. Riyanto
(May 2012)
Abstract:
We investigated experimentally whether people can be induced to believe in a non-existent expert, and subsequently pay for what can only be described as transparently useless advice about future chance events. Consistent with the theoretical predictions made by Rabin (2002) and Rabin and Vayanos (2010), we show empirically that the answer is yes and that the size of the error made systematically by people is large.
Text: See Discussion Paper No. 6557 
@richardscourtney
I’m pretty sure you did not realize what you said in your first comment.
Your completely dismissive and rude statement to Anthony was, “Old news. Heard it. Don’t care.”
Then Anthony said, “Don’t care that you’ve heard it. Others haven’t. My time is precious. This holiday time was well spent.”
You said some nattering stuff after that. All old news, old complaints, so I didn’t care to read it. It was easy. You should try it yourself sometime.
Krugman started by recalling that in Herman Kahn’s 1968 book The Year 2000, Kahn predicted that by the end of the 20th century the average worker would put in 30 hours a week and would enjoy 13 weeks of vacation. Quite wrong, Krugman noted. Kahn had been far too optimistic about
the advances of technology and the benefits they would deliver. But Krugman had learned from Kahn’s mistake, he said, and so he was able to make a series of predictions, including: “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically,” it will become clear by 2005 “that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s” and “10 years from now the phrase ‘information economy’ will sound silly.”
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/29/dan-gardner-the-worlds-top-100-thinkers-cement-their-record-of-failure/
When your political/philosophical ideology decides that something like “redistribution of wealth” is key, and, that somehow, the unbalanced use of fossil fuels by the “oppressors” is the key to that unbalanced wealth, AND, you have a massive, unbalance of progressive, liberal, and otherwise counter-culture hippies staffing major universities EVERYWHERE…is it REALLY surprising, that the political/philosophical ideal of “ends justify the means” uses any means necessary, including, faking scientific evidence, to back their agenda? Oh, and this SAME philosophy (Marxism…I’ll just go to its ROOTS and leave the rest of you to dispute me) also describes the critical success factor of “useful idiots” (Thanks Lenin…your movement is alive and well). Fools and damn fools are the target of most progressive academicians, politicians, and journalists. I am NOT one of their targets.
I have a good friend who has a masters degree in biology, a real science. She is a firm believer that man is causing the planet to warm, and CO2 is the primary culprit. I have been an AGW skeptic since I first heard of AGW. Since I was a scuba diver, my knowledge of the mixture of gases and their percentages in the atmosphere, and the laws of physics that pertained to those gases, made me doubt CO2 could not be doing what the AGW alarmists were claiming. When I point out the miniscule amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the lack of proof that CO2 emitted by man is warming the planet, I still can’t dissuade her from her belief. She has latched on to the AGW bandwagon and will not let go.
One of her “proofs” that AGW is real is the “hockey stick” graph. The first time I saw Mann’s graph, I noticed the absence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Although I’m an accountant, I am also a student of history, and the glaring absence of these historical phenomena raised my skeptic antenna. Something was wrong with the methodology used if historical warming and cooling was missing. Although I have pointed out this flaw to my friend, it means nothing to her (after all she’s a biologist and has never been even remotely interested in history). As Paul Simon wrote so eloquently, and Richard Verney quoted above, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”.
That the behavior discussed is well know is true. That it continues in spite of that knowledge is also true. That all of us are subject to seeing patterns in noise is part of being and saying alive. Our brains, if they are anything at all, are magnificent pattern recognition engines. So much so that it is very easy to perceive patterns in noise.
What we don’t do often enough is stop, take a deep breath, think, and carefully check our premises and calculations one more time and then do it again. However, if you think you see a mountain lion about to pounce on you, make sure you don’t take too long to make up your mind what to do.
The three tree rings game:
There are three bristlecone pine cores.
One shows a rise in temperature, two show a decline but you don’t know which.
You have to find the bristlecone pine core which shows a rise.
You pick a core but don’t know whether it shows a rise or decline.
A second core is revealed to you which shows a decline in temperature.
Which of the remaining two cores is most likely to show a rise in temperature, your original
choice or the one you didn’t choose?
Algorithms on a postcard. :o)
http://www.theproblemsite.com/treasure_hunt/door_hint.asp
Alec Rawls says: May 28, 2012 at 10:38 am
You caught my ambivalence on poor John McCain. I was/am a Republican Party activist volunteer. And I worked to get him elected. (Vote for the wrinkley old dude and the hot chick!) While there was horror that “I AM the ONE” would do what he promised (and he hasn’t failed there), there was just a smidgen of relief when McCain lost. Poor John McCain believed in AGW/Cap and trade AND the efficacy of socialized medicine. He also put his name on McCain-Feingold.
(As county party treasurer, I curse his name every time I have to make out a filing. And his mother, father, dog AND the horse he rode in on.)
If someone is going to destroy these United States, I want a “D” after their name. But, yes, he did go to hell and back for us, a hell where Jane Fonda and John Kerry should spend eternity.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Lionell Griffith says:
May 28, 2012 at 5:22 pm
…..What we don’t do often enough is stop, take a deep breath, think, and carefully check our premises and calculations one more time and then do it again. However, if you think you see a mountain lion about to pounce on you, make sure you don’t take too long to make up your mind what to do.
_______________________________________
As my ponies would say – run first ask questions later. They will run a safe distance away from a noisy new lawn tractor for example and then stop and assess the situation. Too bad a lot of people are not as smart as my ponies. They just keep running and never stop to see if the sky is really falling. http://rgifs.gifbin.com/320sw0sw7847.gif
I am glad to see comity restored between our good host Anthony, and Richard S. Courtney. Like many others, I also often look forward to a cogent summation, comment, or lightning-like argument in support (or dismissal) of a new thread from him. Dr. Courtney is often a model commenter, one who’s example informs my thinking and influences my post’s compositions, I hope. Any other outcome than the present one would be a loss to me. Thank you all.
orson2 says: @ur momisugly May 28, 2012 at 6:14 pm
I am glad to see comity restored between our good host Anthony, and Richard S. Courtney. Like many others, I also often look forward to a cogent summation, comment, or lightning-like argument in support (or dismissal) of a new thread from him. Dr. Courtney is often a model commenter…
___________________________________
Yes Dr. Courtney’s comments are well worth reading. Seems we all have off days.
I am amazed that Anthony has managed as well as he has despite provocation. I certainly know I do not have the type of even temperament he has displayed over the years.
What you didn’t and don’t “get”, Richard, is that the issue is: attention on the issue. Since persistent belief in the discredited Hokey Schtick is itself a problem, this is a report on another shot at dispelling it, plus a focus on the crucial emotional fallacy that enabled it to be persuasive.
It often takes more than one shot to bring down a charging grizzly.
I don’t really think it is useful to hang psychological tags and motivations, to the warmist conformity, wrt to climate consensus. Almost anything that can be said may easily be turned, end on end, and thrown back at skeptics. Just recall – what happened to the term “cognitive dissonance” or “confirmation bias”. These terms were used as a club by both sides.
I am more comfortable with the “Noble Cause syndrome” and “Peer conformity” as normal pressures in modern society. That some delusional characters take advantage of these tendencies, surprises me not at all. It is the role of the realist to point out the delusion of the consensus climate science and prevent propaganda madness.
Unfortunately, the skeptical\realist voice was very weak, for a very long time, and now the question is: Will we succeed in reversing the impressive momentum of unrestrained CO2 induced CAGW? The fat lady hasn’t sung… yet. GK
I doubt their conscience was urging them to bilk taxpayers. T’was a conscious disregard of their consciences what done it.
Ian says:
May 28, 2012 at 1:46 pm
@Gail Combs
Chinese modus operandi: “Punish one, teach a hundred”.
IanM
“Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres…” –Voltaire
richardscourtney says: The ‘hockey stick’ is bunkum.
The hockey stick is very good science … it’s the interpretation that is bunkum!!
it shows that if you select trees for their correlation with modern temperature rise, there is almost no correlation with known events in the past. In other words, that these “proxies” when selected for their fit to modern temperatures, show little “predictive” power of past temperatures.
In other words, the hockey stick was proof of the uselessness of these tree rings as a proxy for temperature in the past. Which makes all other tree-ring proxies questionable.
And it is about time someone took Mann’s data shoved his interpretation where the sun don’t shine and instead demonstrated that when a correct scientific interpretation is applied, it proves that tree rings (or at least this set) have no correlation with past temperature
… just to explain. If you select the trees which match the upswing in temperature (as Mann did), it tells you nothing about the present – because you selected the ones that just happen to fit – and if they fit??? However, if trees were a proxy for the past, then you would expect trees which best represented modern temperatures to also best represent past temperatures (i.e. before accurate temperature records). If they are good proxies, we would expect correlation, so that they all rose and fell together … as one would expect of something responding to temperature.However, if there was no correlation between the trees we would expect them to add together randomly to produce a flat graph.
In other words, you select trees that show the strongest modern temperature response, you would expect them to all rise and fall in the past … not to randomly cancel out but no. They produced a flat graph, thus proving there is no correlation between tree rings and known climate events in the past. There are two possible interpretations:
1. That there was no climate in the past … a patently absurd suggestion which only a scientifically illiterate moron would pick
2. That tree rings do not correlate with past climate and cannot be used as a proxy for past climate. (at least this set over longer periods – there is evidence of short term response to events like volcanoes)
Hmmmmn.
A few things:
We KNOW absolutely that dendrochronology using tree ring thickness differences over the years is valid: many different trees in the same area will change ring thicknesses at the same year, and by combining/overlapping many different trees over their many different years you can get a long continuous record of something.
But … of what though? Only of relative tree growth rates. What caused the differences year-to-year (water, shade, heat, growing season changes, storms, fertilizer)?
As asked above, is there really a valid assumption for dendro-climatology’s assumed tree-mommeters?
Most important – what is the c”correction” for the recent rise in CO2 since 1960 that has been measured? If all growing things on the planet – as measured in the several hundred scientific papers at Idso’s website – are now growing at 13 to 27% faster rates than before, what is Mann-Briffa correction to tree ring thickness since 1960?
What did that (missing ??) correction do to his assumed relationship between tree ring thickness and temperature in the recent past, and the far past?
Constant temperature + greater CO2 => greater ring thickness
Greater temperature + constant CO2 => greater ring thickness
What were CO2 levels when the “average” sea water was cooler and warmer from AD 600 through AD 1850: MWP to LIA to Modern warming period?
For me it was the ice-core fiasco that first convinced me to be pro-AGW and then subsequently to realise that AGW theory was a big lie. The early graphs of the ice-core data suggested that CO2 and temp moved hand-in-hand so it was easy to suggest that CO2 did indeed cause increases in temperature as the theory suggested, It was not until I printed out the data as graphs myself that I convinced myself that CO2 was lagging temperature, did not cause exponential feedback in temperature and that increases in CO2 could not reverse an unexpected decline in temperature. It was at this point I realised that a significant number of climate scientists were indulging in a bare-faced lie for some reason, and that this lie was being condoned by Wikipedia and many people in the media. It also became clear to me that some people would not open their minds to even a small element of the truth no matter how clear you made it to them. Of course the ice-core data is no longer considered a central plank of AGW evidence – clearly the “lie” within that “evidence” has become too toxic for the movement.
It is interesting that Derren Brown was mentioned in this topic. It has always amazed me the number of people prepared to believe each week that Derren has performed a “miracle” when he makes it clear week after week that what he is doing is nothing more than conjuring tricks. It is an astonishing demonstration of the power of suggestibility in some humans and frightening that so many can be so easily duped. I firmly believe that for humanity to make real progress we need a cure for suggestibility.
Scottish Sceptic:
At May 29, 2012 at 12:57 am you say
No.
The ‘hockey stick’ is the obtained conclusion from an incorrect interpretation of results from a mistaken method for data selection.
The conclusion from an incorrect interpretation of results from a mistaken method for data selection which provides a wrong indication is very bad science.
However, as you say,
So, if you want to be pedantic then I would accept an amendment to my statement that says
The ‘hockey stick’ is bunkum: it results from an incorrect interpretation of results from a mistaken method for data selection. A correct interpretation of the data shows that tree rings do not indicate temperature.
But I prefer ” The ‘hockey stick’ is bunkum” .
Richard
AMAZING! 🙂
Mr Biffa and Mr Mann can’t defend the Hockey Stick…yet Mr Myles Allen thinks he can?
Louis says:
May 28, 2012 at 1:47 pm
“…all religions are little more then charlatanism, with no foundation in reality except to concentrate power and wealth in a ruling class….”
—–
Because the ruling class has misused and corrupted religion to maintain power over people doesn’t mean all religion is charlatanism. That would be like declaring all science to be charlatanism because some are willing to misuse and corrupt science for power and personal gain. Neither science nor religion would be of use to charlatans if there wasn’t some basic truths and power to be found in them. In both cases, the trick is to be wise enough to discern truth from falsehood so you don’t end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Don’t blame God for what men have done in His name without first finding out what it was God wanted done.
And, yes, Gail, there ahve been errors in translation but those are men’s doing.
Since I’m approaching the border of that sometimes fuzzy line and so the mod doesn’t pull what must be his increasingly itchy snipper finger, I won’t go any further.
(If it is pulled, no offense taken.)
jayhd says:
May 28, 2012 at 4:35 pm
“and has never been even remotely interested in history”
Exactamundo!! I find this to be be true in many “believers of the cause”
Ryan says:
May 29, 2012 at 2:42 am
“I firmly believe that for humanity to make real progress we need a cure for suggestibility.”
I found out recently that hundreds of people sent letters to the coast guard requesting that they rescue the people stranded on Gilligan’s Island. You can imagined the look of astonished incredulity on my face. I realized then why telemarketing still exists.
@Gail Combs:
“I have often wonder how many people are individuals/leaders and how many are only followers …”
I have a recollection of reading something General Sir Brian Horrocks wrote:
“In any group of 10 men, 1 is a natural leader, 1 will lead if he has to, 6 will follow,
and 2 would rather not be there”