James Taylor writes in Forbes about ‘Fibber McGore’ and his webcast numbers game.
‘This leaves us with either of two possibilities; they are completely ignorant of basic meteorological data or they are deliberately misrepresenting the truth because they believe the ends justify the means.
Either way, they are tying their credibility to Al Gore. That is a losing proposition.
Full story here
Hanlon’s Razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Having said that, there are also exceptions to any rule.
Credibility and Gore?
I know of no philosophical justification for the concept that supports “the end justifies the means.”
I do not know everything so one or more may exist. Since ignorance is no excuse, “deliberately misrepresenting the truth because they believe the ends justify the means,” appears to be the reason. It is the want to True Believers, Demigods, Despots and Politicians of all stripes that seem most pron to this kind of sophistry perhaps it best that we simply relegate them to the irrelevant universe to celebrity twits.
“This leaves us with either of two possibilities; they are completely ignorant of basic meteorological data or they are deliberately misrepresenting the truth because they believe the ends justify the means.”
I don’t see why it has to be either or wouldn’t it be possible for both to be the case.
They are ignorant of basic meteorological data AND they are deliberately misrepresenting the truth because they believe the ends justify the means.
Here is how it works
You take the number of hours in a day (24)
Multiply by the numbers of minutes in an hour (60)
To get a total minutes per 24 hour period of (24 x 60 =1440)
Take the average viewership per program minute (11500)
Multiply by the total minutes of viewership (11500 x 1440 = 1,656,000)
And there is Mr Gore’s number
Tadchem~ There is always the possibility that they are being stupidly malicious.
Bryan A.
Mr Gore’s number was 16 million. Your number is only 1.7 million and order of magnitude short.
Oops.
Replace and with an in the post above.
In fact it is lower than Al’s number by an order of magnitude. He claimed roughly 10 times that figure, or at least that is what the Taylor article says.
Gore “had” 16.3M views, not 16M, including 200,000 for the part of the credits and blank screen at the end.
http://grostemps.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/16-3-million/
Hopefully the image of Al Gore with a long nose will stick in the public memory.
.
A factor of ten short? Then assume that each screen had ten people gathered around it in stupified admiration. /s
I see the Gorebots are busy tonight…
(I hope I don’t trigger an auto-block feature here.)
Algore clinging to the claim of 16M viewers kind of brings to mind the picture of Adolph in his Berlin bunker ordering around divisions that no linger existed.
Multiply the two numbers correctly and you get 11500 X 1440 = 16,560,000 so the order of magnitude is just a mistake.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Well, I doubt that Mr Gore is stupid. After all, “a fool and his money are soon parted”, and he seems to have a fair fortune and seems to be holding on to it.
So that leaves the other option – malice.
“The ends justify the means.”
I believe the origins of this philosophy may be found in a book titled “The Prince” by a gentleman(?) named Machiavelli. He has been hugley influential in political circles for several centuries now – and his ideas have been adopted by a number of “advocacy groups” …
The numbers and honesty.
I wonder what Al sees in the mirror?
The Guy in the Glass
When you get what you want in your struggle for self,
And the world makes you King for a day,
Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,
And see what that guy has to say.
For it isn’t your Father, or Mother, or Wife,
Who judgement upon you must pass.
The feller whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the guy staring back from the glass.
He’s the feller to please, never mind all the rest,
For he’s with you clear up to the end,
And you’ve passed your most dangerous, difficult test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.
You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,
And think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.
You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,
And get pats on the back as you pass,
But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass.
Dale Wimbrow (c) 1934
1895-1954
(I’d add that there is a more important “Feller” than the one in the mirror but this still has a point worth paying attention to.)
AYUP,
I forgot to multiply the 1.6m by the actual total numbers of live viewers
There was a quote in our old statistic text book. ” If you would like to tell a lie keep probability in mind”
When is Algore going to go away? His 15 minutes have been over for a very long time. Please….get lost.
This quote reminded me of something I read some time ago about every cause that Al Gore touches – fails. Here it is and an excellent analysis at that. Pay heed Warmists.
[my bold]
Don’t be too critical, I think his show and count were meant to be Algorecal
MattS and the other pendants … Bryan A was correct in his error.
11500 x 1440 = 16,560,000. There was a typo in the original post.
Bryan A,
Surely 1.6m x 0 = 0?
The comparison is a bit unfair to the original Fibber. McGee was a much deeper and more complex character than Algore. Fibber often confessed, in an aside to the audience, that he didn’t know why Molly continued to tolerate his bloviations and tall tales. Most of the other characters (except for the Mayor, who was a real self-important humorless insightless blowhard) understood Fibber’s inner solidity and liked him
Algore is much more like Mayor LaTrivia.
Completely random, no good reason to post this anywhere on WUWT, except it’s deceptive, ultimately maddening, and fooled me for a bit, thus it’s somewhat similar to Al and his message.
Besides, some people might want a laugh before the Thanksgiving Madness fully descends.
Just found this as a “sig” on a message board, thought it worth sharing. I wonder if there’s a clear “free to copy and use” version around somewhere.
Click this Photobucket link!
Other than that Mrs. Gore, how was the play?
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/11/20/2-ipcc-announcements/
Truthseeker: MattS and the other pendants
No need to hang them : > )
James Taylor,
Lets consider the implications for the Gore philosophy if he does think the ends justify the means. The rational treatment of consistency between actions and values to be achieved by those actions is frequently found in Ancient Greek period of philosophy.
For the rational tradition in philosophy one should have consistency between means and ends; metaphorically, epistemologically and morally.
For the subjective tradition in philosophy there is nothing to be consistent about in reality.
Is the philosophy of Gore from the subjective tradition which would see no problem of in consistency between means and ends? It seems so. It appears to me that he thinks he can subjectively make things up as reality.
John
Correction to my comment @ John Whitman on November 21, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Change this original paragraph:
To the following revised paragraph:
John
Ya know, with all of your good comments above, it always just frightens the heck out of me, that this man came within a handful of votes of being president.
“The ends justify the means.”
Sorry, that isn’t even Machiavelli. He wrote something more like, “When judging men, especially Princes, and there are no disinterested observers, the people will take the results into account”. Every translation is a bit different.
The most effective modern use is the “politics of personal destruction” that the Clintons were so good at. You see, whenever an disinterested observer actually bubbled up to the top the machine would go into overdrive, assuring the observer would be transformed, labeled a crooked political hack and ignored. Problem solved.
john robertson says:
November 21, 2012 at 10:04 am
Credibility and Gore?
—————————–
John, correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t those two mutually exclusive?
[snip. Fact-free pejoratives are not welcome. — mod.]
James Taylor has no credibility whatsoever. He has a track record of deliberately misrepresenting the truth.
And for the record, it’s a joke that my initial comment was “snipped” with the remark that “fact-free pejoratives are not welcome” when this comment thread as well as James Taylor’s linked op/ed are filled with “fact-free pejoratives.” It would be nice to see consistency from the moderators.
Y’all should come on over, Russell Seitz is attempting to defend the 16M figure.
http://blogs.forbes.com/jamestaylor/
BTW, if the name Russell Seitz isn’t familiar, he’s the genius behind a “parody” website, http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/ (notice the clever “double-v” there).
His blog (which doesn’t allow comments), started on Wednesday, February 8, 2012. Guess it’s because he didn’t like the coverage he got here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/27/foaming-climate-change/
The crucial term, often ignored, in Hanlon’s Razor is “adequately”. Lukewarmists would have it that lack of understanding or intelligence is sufficient to explain massive misrepresentation and posting of a claim on total power over the economics of the planet.
Despite the fact that history uniformly refutes that possibility.
Sheer stupidity?? Or …