FEBRUARY 2018

FAKE SCIENCE.

It's another dimension on fake news.

When I was young, I thought Communism/Socialism was how we should run the world.  Not to the benefit of the few wealthy (all wealth is inherited, I thought)

My father deflated me:

"If you are not a communist/socialist by the time you are 20, you have not got the good of the world at heart.
If you are not a Capitalist by the time you are 40, you are not a realist."

The paradigm has changed.  We are in the era of "perception".  The powerful used to control our perceptions through the various media.  The internet has provided alternative perceptions, and they are at polarizing war.  Is Donald Trump a good guy or a crazy apple?  That all depends on who you listen to, and what facts you believe.

Fake News has brought us "Fake Science".  Here is how it works.

• A scientist comes up with an idea, and "publishes" it, maybe in a reviewed journal, maybe at a conference, maybe just an article in a newspaper.
• The Media pick up and promote the idea as factual news. "Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse, the world is facing a global warming catastrophe".
• Various scientists,, looking for something to research, produce papers that explore the possibility of global warming being reality.
• Politicians get into the act. They provide "leadership" and organize funding.
• More scientists get onto the bandwagon.  Those who see holes in the theories learn to shut their gobs.
  

And there we have it.  Theories that predict a "global warming" that has stopped happening, and even if it did, would probably benefit mankind especially considering the looming resumption of the quaternary ice age.

But see the next article on guns.


GUNS.

We have just had a Florida School gun massacre.

I have devoted a leading page to Guns.

In that webpage I have cited the peer reviewed article "Crime, Deterrence and Right to Carry Concealed Handguns John R Lott, Jr, and David B. Mustard in Journal of Legal Studies, vol. XXVI (January 1997)

I have some academic background.  That paper makes a very good case that concealed handguns reduces violent crime.

Here is the first sentence of the abstract:

Using cross-sectional time-series data for US counties from 1977 to 1992, we find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes, without increasing accidental deaths.

Note that Lott and Mustard used "cross-sectional time-series data for counties".  What that means is they examined the data from local government areas (which in the USA can have local laws) to look at the effect of those local carry laws on various crimes.

So they separated out LA from Orange County, SF from Berkeley, Dallas from Fort Worth.  Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens.  And where local ordinances differed, they found different crime rates.  It would be like separating Woollahra from Basnkstown in Sydney, except in Australia our local government has no real power to enact laws as in the USA.

Now for the "Fake Science".  The anti gun people want to regulate guns.  I was sent a newspaper which made a reference to the following paper.

Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis Ian Ayres, J J DDonohue III NBER Working Paper No. 9336 Issued in November 2002 NBER Program(s)

John Lott and David Mustard have used regression analysis to argue forcefully that 'shall-issue' laws (which give citizens an unimpeded right to secure permits for concealed weapons) reduce violent crime. While certain facially plausible statistical models appear to generate this conclusion, more refined analyses of more recent state and county data undermine the more guns, less crime hypothesis. The most robust finding on the state data is that certain property crimes rise with passage of shall- issue laws, although the absence of any clear theory as to why this would be the case tends to undercut any strong conclusions. Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall- issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade. While there are substantial concerns about model reliability and robustness, we present estimates based on disaggregated county data models that on net the passage of the law in 24 jurisdictions has increased the annual cost of crime slightly -- somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars. We also provide an illustration of how our jurisdiction-specific regression model has the capacity to generate more nuanced assessments concerning which states might profit from or be harmed by a particular legal intervention.

We can see here that Ayres et al have cleverly avoided the point.  Lott and Mustard found "We also find criminals substituting into property crimes involving stealth, where the probability of contact between the criminal and the victim is minimal."  What did Ayres et al do?  First they went from county to state data, (Which blurs the detail) and found that certain "property crime" has increased. No mention of "violent crime".  It got aggregated into "crime".  Not something a journalist who is pushing for gun control would notice.  And then, to polish it off, they invent a prediction model (See global warming prediction models, and how well they work!)

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