Here’s another one of those things I discovered when I was looking at something else, and serendipity kicked in. This comes from comment in Chris Mooney’s Twitter feed highlighted by Tom Nelson.
In another laughable Cool Hand Luke “you gotta get your mind right“ essay at Mother Jones, Mooney complains that “emotions come faster than the “rational” thoughts” when it comes to climate blogs. He writes:
In the context of the psychological theory of motivated reasoning, this makes a great deal of sense. Based on pretty indisputable observations about how the brain works, the theory notes that people feel first, and think second. The emotions come faster than the “rational” thoughts—and also shape the retrieval of those thoughts from memory. Therefore, if reading insults activates one’s emotions, the “thinking” process may be more likely to be defensive in nature, and focused on preserving one’s identity and preexisting beliefs.
I about fell out of my chair laughing when I saw this ad image that went with his story:
The advertisement for the National Resources Defense council has two images:
![NRDC_YearEnd_Stop-BadGuys_DonateNow_300x250[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nrdc_yearend_stop-badguys_donatenow_300x2501.jpg?quality=83)
Photoshopped for emotional effect much? Here’s the other ad:
![NRDC_YearEnd_Statistic-Belugas_DonateNow_300x250[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/nrdc_yearend_statistic-belugas_donatenow_300x2501.jpg?quality=83)
Research for the Beluga whale population reveals this from the NOAA fisheries office of protected resources:
Population Trends
In the U.S., there are 5 distinct stocks of beluga whales–all in Alaska:
- Cook Inlet
- Bristol Bay
- Eastern Bering Sea
- Eastern Chukchi Sea
- Beaufort Sea
Of those, the Cook Inlet is the only endangered population. It is the most isolated stock; genetic samples suggest these whales have been isolated for several thousand years. The Cook Inlet stock has been severely reduced in numbers over the last several decades. NMFS estimates this population numbered as many as 1,300 in the late 1970s. The current estimate is about 325 beluga whales in the Cook Inlet.
“Of those, the Cook Inlet is the only endangered population.” That’s a pretty glaring lie of omission, don’t you think? Here’s a thought; maybe they just moved to a different location. After all, whales have been known to migrate vast distances. Their range (from NOAA) seems to indicate they aren’t static:
Beluga Whale Range Map
But wait there’s more! At the link the ad goes to at NRDC we see these images:
On the link upper right, Stop Big Oil’s Attack on Whales campaign page » we are directed to a page which shows this image of the whale sans the stop sign:
Note the background for the whale image and how the water and sand/gravel looks. Some image research reveals the image to be part of a series taken by photographer Flip Nicklin. On the presentation page at Animals and Earth, we see this image from the series along with the caption:
And here’s the one NRDC used:
Since NRDC doesn’t credit Nicklin in their advertisements, I sure hope they have permission to use the photos.
So, not only does NRDC not tell the reader that only one population has any notable changes, that the 284 Belugas remain is a false number not representative of the whole global population, perhaps only the Cook Inlet population, the photo they use isn’t even FROM Cook Inlet.
Rational readers might find all that a bit incongruous, perhaps even false advertising.
In another hilarious twist of irony, there’s this ad on the story by Chris Mooney at Mother Jones.
I have to wonder if I give them $5 will they bar Chris Mooney from writing junk stories about emotions and science and take NRDC advertisements off their web site? Inquiring minds want to know.
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davidmhoffer says:
January 10, 2013 at 9:18 pm
“Peer pressure for example is an emotional response over riding the facts. Confirmation bias is an emotional response over riding the facts. In any technical decision, the incumbent vendor wins 90% of the time even when they have the weakest product. Why? Because change = risk and most people are risk averse. Better the devil you know. Changing vendors gets you a pat on the back if things improve, it get you fired if they get worse. Unless the current vendor is so bad that keeping them around will get you fired, there’s little reward for changing. That’s why the incumbent vendor wins with an adequate product over and over against a stellar product.”
In your example the person who makes the decision AVOIDS personal risk by deciding to use the known old product. This is RATIONAL. It might not be the best outcome for his company but it avoids personal risk to HIM. (A company can neither be emotional nor rational – a company does not have a brain and is only a legal fiction. The rational or emotional actor is the human involved. In your example, the actor acts rational.)
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You should see the adverts on Dutch TV (one of the few parliaments that has elected politicians from a ‘save the animals’ party).
They always have cuddly seal pups left stranded (deliberately) on a beach, and then some kindly grandma cuddling it. It is never an angry sea-lion or aggressive bull-seal. Nor is it ever some grotesque-looking bottom feeding parasite – it is only cuddly seals and cute kittens that are ever endangered in Holland.
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Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Again documenting more nonsense from the greenies. I note that about half of the beluga range is in Russian waters, and about half of the remainder is in Canadian waters. Accordingly, US-based whiners can have little to no benefit for their stated cause and can only hurt the US economy and bog down the US courts.
The two photos of stranded belugas look to be the same area Just tide in and then out.
DirkH;
In your example the person who makes the decision AVOIDS personal risk by deciding to use the known old product. This is RATIONAL
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No two situations are alike. But I have over the years seen more people lose their jobs for fear of making a change than I have seen people losing their jobs for having made a change that went awry.
BTW, companies make emotional and irrational decisions all the time. We don’t use the same words to describe organizational decision making, but the terms do apply, though loosely. Companies are founded by entrepreneurs who are be definition risk takers. As companies grow and mature they become increasingly risk averse until they become incapable of change in the face of competitive threats.
Switzerland at one time dominated the watch making market. They were decimated by Seiko and the quartz movement. The quartz movement was invented in Switzerland and the inventor pitched it to every watch company on the country. They all turned him down because they knew how to make watches and they saw no reason to take the risk of changing to this new fangled technology. He went to Japan, sold it to Seiko, and a few years later almost all the Swiss watch makers went bankrupt. Not only are companies sometimes irrational, entire industries can be irrational.
A researcher at 3M came up with glue that kinda sticks but kinda doesn’t. created pads of yellow paper with a stripe of the glue on one edge. 3M killed the project because because they were certain it had no market value. A few months later the admins that the researcher had given samples of the product to ran out. When they found out that the product had been cancelled they went ballistic and gave the execs a talking to. 3M was lucky, that researcher could have walked out the door and taken the idea elsewhere.
The mouse, the gui, and ethernet were all invented at Xerox (among many other things). But the sales and marketing organizations were so resistant to selling anything that wasn’t a photo copier that they failed. Apple, Digital and many others made more money off of the things Xerox invented many times over compared to what Xerox made on photo copiers. So resistant was Xerox to change driven by their own research company (Xerox PARC) that they tried to get back into the computer business by developing new products based on other technologies that were more expensive and a fraction of the performance of the products of other companies who were licensing technology from Xerox PARC. One could hardly call that rational.
@Anthony
junk stories like this are useful for helping break the consensus. When younger people see sloppy work like this, they become much less confident in the narrative. I know in the interest of accuracy you want to see stories like this become less frequent, but I am the total opposite. I want the 300% positive feedback true believers to double down on their ignorance and continue to write junk like this.
The only thing Chris Mooney cares about environmentally is the big daisy on his jacket, which fires seltzer water.
Silver Ralph says:
January 11, 2013 at 5:36 am
“They always have cuddly seal pups left stranded (deliberately) on a beach, and then some kindly grandma cuddling it. It is never an angry sea-lion or aggressive bull-seal. Nor is it ever some grotesque-looking bottom feeding parasite”
Tests with grandmas cuddling angry sea lions and with grandmas cuddling parasites didn’t work out well I suppose so they opted to show the less graphic material.
Belugas rubbing against the sand, video
Caviar is a red herring. (sorry) 🙂
From Wikiipedia: “Beluga caviar is caviar consisting of the roe (or eggs) of the beluga sturgeon Huso huso. It is found primarily in the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest salt-water lake, which is bordered by Iran and the CIS countries of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan. It can also be found in the Black Sea basin and occasionally in the Adriatic Sea. Beluga caviar is the most expensive type of caviar, with present market prices ranging from $7,000 to $10,000 per 1 kg. ”
They could be wrong – they often are.
@davidmhoffer 9:18.
You are right sir, emotional response first, logic later.
Strikes me that this is the reason, most readers here, value the scientific method.
It allows us a filter to evaluate our emotional desire to believe.
And a tool to combat the inbuilt, self justification of dumb decisions.
Course if like Mooney, never look in the mirror, all evil is external , irrational thought is the proper response.
A quivering mass of projection, fear and illogic.
Screaming follow me to his admirers.
Sorry missed the point, what will sell the facts is the emotional response to being hit in the wallet.
Sucker, you are being scammed, used and impoverished. Generally provokes a sever emotional response.
David, I think you may have misunderstood my post.
I never said that people’s decisions are not driven by emotion (in fact, I explicitly said that often, they are). I never said that lots of irrational decisions are not made. either.
What I said was, this glib generalisation does not take into account lots of decisions and human variability.
When I decide to do a load of washing and hang it out because it’s sunny, emotion plays no part whatsoever. I perceive that it’s sunny, and there is a basket of washing to be done, and that’s all there is to it. When, as the person in the office in charge of stationery, I notice that paper is running low, I order more. Same thing.
Of course it is true that some decisions are manipulated by those who play on emotions, or are shaped by people who are primarily emotion-driven. But that’s not what I disputed.
What I disputed was the superficial and facile claim that decisions or beliefs in general are always subsequent to, or subsidiaries of, some upwelling of emotion. Balderdash, I say!
Sea creatures have been observed trying to avoid the noise from seismic airguns. Its decibels are in ranges that over the long term are harmful, and at close range immediately injurious to humans if it were in the air.
Emotional response? Yeah, I guess. Having spent a night recently trying to sleep with the constant boom, boom, boom of rock music emanating from across the street, I am on the whales’ side on this one. There must be a better way to find oil.
Any word on how many of these whales were stranded when they decided to swim into the shallows of the estuary to exfoliate (yes, they do that) and the tide went out and caught them?
At any rate it’s as dishonest as the polar bear on the melting ice berg.
To banjo:
No. Beluga caviar is roe (eggs) from the Beluga surgeon, found
in the Caspian Sea and Black Sea. Beluga sturgeon
( Huso huso ) are rare, and this causes Beluga to be the
most expensive form of caviar. I think concern over the species
led the import of Beluga caviar into the U.S.A. to be banned in 2005.
johanna said @ur momisugly January 10, 2013 at 9:18 pm
I’m not so sure. I’m still waiting to see the paper I co-wrote with Hannah (The Great) Gadsby on variations in the mating habits of the Drop Bear (Thylarctos plummetus) in Tasmania published.
http://australianmuseum.net.au/Drop-Bear
TPG – I had no idea you were part of the ground-breaking team that discovered Drop Bears.
Some very funny comments on that thread, especially from those suffering PDPTSS who tried to tell us that they don’t exist. Not to mention the heart-wrenching tales involving pets. Then, the good advice (like not looking up, to avoid exposing the jugular) has certainly been noted by me.
Well done, sir. The path of the pioneering scientist is not an easy one.
@davidmhoffer Instead of exploiting the mouse, GUI and other advanced technology invented at Xerox, the company’s serious venture into computers was with a CP/M machine running a Z-80 CPU. It was called the 820 Information Processor. Presaging the iMac design by many years, it had the entire computer inside the monitor, with a detached keyboard. That was followed by the 820-II. As the IBM PC and clones took over the market, Xerox tried a last ditch play of making a 2-in-1 version with both a Z-80 and an 8088 CPU. A program could be run on one then the system switched to the other CPU while the first task continued to run in the background.
It was too little, too late. Xerox soon bailed out of the computer business.
Galane;
Presaging the iMac design by many years, it had the entire computer inside the monitor, with a detached keyboard.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah, I remember. They also had a “flying window” word processor when nobody had heard of word processors yet and it was WYSIWYG years before anyone started talking about those things. What was truly odd though was that even if you knew about them, you couldn’t buy them. Management was dictating that the store fronts had to dedicate a certain percentage of their floor space to the new products. The store managers were making the big bucks without doing very much work selling photo copiers (Xerox had the patents so no competition) and they didn’t want to waste their time on the new products. So, they would designate the storage room in the basement as “floor space” and put all their demo models down there. Good luck trying to find someone to even talk to about them.
Of course the patents ran out, suddenly there were a dozen competitors and life wasn’t so easy anymore, and their leadership position in technology had evaporated, they were way behind on almost everything. Their efforts after that were, as you said, too little too late. But a remarkable case study in the vision of management being thwarted by thousands of their own employees refusing to change and nearly bankrupting one of the largest companies in the world in the process.
Aldous Huxley wrote:
“kadaka (KD Knoebel)” on January 10, 2013 at 1:15 pm talked of Beluga cavier as though the Cook Inlet Beluga _whales_ had something to do with that delicacy.
Was that person thinking of _eggs_ of the Beluga _sturgeon_, which is primarily found in the Caspean, Black, and Adriatic seas?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beluga_caviar which does not mention existence anywhere else.
Sturgeon are fish that lay eggs, whales are mammals who give live birth.
Bob Armstrong asked if the whales are sunning themselves on the sand. I’m skeptical but it is a possibility to investigate.
I’ve seen seals and sea lions arching their backs to stay out of the water as long as they can, when the tide is rising on the rock outcrop they were perched on.
Much less energy loss out of the water, and if the day is at least bright they get warmth from the sun. (I did not check what they were doing at night in the many days I saw them from a seaside cabin.)
However seals are somewhat more mobile on land than whales? (Flippers relatively larger for body.)
Keith Sketchley says:
January 15, 2013 at 9:13 am
I believe that it was merely another reason we should have a [humor] tag, I’m pretty certain kadaka wasn’t being serious. Me, I found his post freakin’ hilarious. With that in mind, you might want to revisit it, viz:
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
January 10, 2013 at 1:15 pm
w.
A humo(u)r tag would be appropriate, Willis, for obscurely written posts.
Certainly are environmentalists out there who are stupid enough to to connect beluga sturgeon to beluga whales – they regularly leap to connections without checking. (“beluga” probaby comes from a Russian word for white, uses include for a river in Alaska and a rural area there.)
Sturgeon BTW are very large fish which live long, some are in the large Fraser River in BC.
Regarding seal pups, they are sometimes left alone for a while as the mother needs to go get food. Problem in urban areas is people taking the pup as they think it is orphaned or abandoned.
Deer get their fawn to stay hidden under a bush or such, but a beach has less place to hide.
Birds usually have two parents staying around, so they can take turns minding the young,