Attack-by-proxy: "The thing about a Roger Pielke Jr train wreck is that you just can't look away."And this guy is a widely-respected professional? Wow.
Attack-by-misrepresentation: "I do remember that what knocked my view of your work over the edge was one of your attacks on Hansen."
Attack-by-hand waving: "Game, set, and match..."
Attack-by-calling-names: "May I just say that Roger Pielke is simply insane?"
19 October 2009
"brad" is Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong emailed me with a verbatim version of comments entered on my post about his attack-by-proxy on me by someone named "brad". I had assumed that "brad" was not Professor Brad DeLong because "brad"'s comments were so sophmoric and inane, but apparently they are one and the same person. Here is how a Berkeley professor represents himself on a colleague's blog:
20 comments:
Yeah, he doesn't play fair--you're not the first victim of his tactics. I really like what he says about economics, but I couldn't handle his off topic opinions. Pity, that.
This guy WAS a widely respected professional.
Roger, I find Climatology and Economics to be similar in their personality quirks (a kind description.) Both are replete with huge egomaniacal leaders who cultivate a cult following. Many of the leaders in each field are more about politics than their ?science?.
As always, YMMV.
Unreal.
Do you think he notices how unhinged he comes across as?
Roger this guy is really a politician ex-Clinton admin. Climate change is all about politics now. You should be prepared for worse attacks as this thing goes forward. This will be especially true AGW doesn't start warming again soon.
Where is the original blog to this, Roger? The link provided only goes to your home page.
-6-ljohnson
Thanks/sorry, now fixed!
-3-CoRev
That's true, unfortunately. The problem stems from common features of both fields: lack of truly controlled experiments, tinkering with complex systems that cannot be put under laboratory examination, close ties to politics and policy making, strong mixture of ideology and facts.
Contrary to physics or mathematics (which I learn to respect more and more), in economics you can draw completely opposite normative conclusions from the very same paper. This is the reason why I hate the distinction between positive and normative economics. I would prefer to call them just "economics" and "politics".
It's UC Berkeley. This is a real "duh" for me.
They have a word for that; Keyboard Warrior.
Climate discussions apaprently bring out the worst in persons....
"J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major."
There you go.
I have bad news.
Outside of the peer-reviewing-peers incest society, y'all don't command the respect you used to.
Some of us are able to spot the real deals when the occur, but I'm an old fart and I still think it is worth the effort.
I wouldn't give a nickel for anybody in the PRB, and not much of the rest of any the UC system.
Or the CU systems with one or two exceptions.
"And this guy is a widely-respected professional?"
No, not really.
The fact that a discipline uses the tools of science (mathematics) does not make it a science.
Nor its practitioners, scientists.
I just posted this up at DeLong's based on comments here and several emails, as a gesture of goodwill, since he apparently has some blog problems.
--------
Brad-
Several people have emailed me and commented on my blog that the comments on this post do not show up on their browser. I am among those folks. I am using Firefox 3.5.3. I thought you might like to know.
Before calling people insane perhaps you could try a little collegiality.
Ahem. Pot kettle and all that.
Dano sends love
After I posted my comment above, DeLong performed a test at 6:09 and now the comments appear:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/10/does-superfreakonomics-need-a-do-over.html
You can now visit that thread to see Lambert picking a fight with me over disasters and climate change. Not his best decision.
Anyway, lets see if DeLong apologizes for the comments made when his blog was malfunctioning. I'm happy to give the guy another chance to do the right thing.
14-Economics is a science-a "dismal" science. Just not a hard science.
Of course, some schools of thought in economics are psuedoscience or even pure crap.
Economists still don't agree on what caused the Wall street crash nor what was the best way to fix it. I've counted around 5 plausible published scenarios and they are all contradictory and controversial. Now if the profession can't agree with hindsight about the 29 crash then how can they pretend to know anything about anything? And why do media pundits still assume that they are worth listening to? Taleb notes that most of the recent Nobel prize winners in economics have been proven utterly wrong. Krugman in his "what went wrong" essay nailed it too: Economists just don't know what they pretend to know and they never did. It is at best only a social science or even still a branch of philosophy, which is what Adam Smith actually did for a living. I wonder how many economists have actually even read The Wealth of Nations (it's online now so there's no excuse). The Chicago school certainly didn't because they treated Smiths "invisible hand" allegory as an entire overriding dogma.
But there's another curious twist. In treating Wm Connolley as his token climate expert DeLong ignores that Connolley is actually a mathematician who has gleaned what he knows about climate not by qualifications but by reading enough papers to be able to run someone else's climate software. Gavin Schmidt is of the same ilk, though at least he wrote some actual code. I do computer modeling too, so am I a scientist? I once asked Connolley if he was really a scientist and he said "then probably yes, now definitely not". So how can he decide who else might be a climate expert? As I noted in DeLongs blog we are entirely too quick to apply the word "expert" to someone just because he professes to know things that wiser heads treat as highly uncertain. Most folk have an inbuilt desire for gurus who basically just tell them what they want to hear. On economics they only want to hear good news and on the environment they clearly only want to hear bad news. Someone recently pointed out that the use of coal saved the Western forests. "What you see depends on where you stand" was never more apt.
It disappoints me so much to see highly educated folks like DeLong (and Romm and Schmidt and Hanson, and so on...) be so outright rude, condescending and shrill. It's really quite juvenile. It makes one think about how insecure they really must be.
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