[ExI] The Republican Party Isn't Really the Anti-Science Party

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-11-13 03:50, spike wrote:
>
> I have been following hurricanes for years now after being told they 
> would get more frequent and more violent.  This year has been eerie 
> quiet in the Atlantic.  Do let us hope that doesn't point to global 
> cooling.  Warming would be OK, cooling, not.
>

Hurricane numbers are a bad indicator for climate: you get very few data 
points even in a high hurricane year.

Consider flipping a biased coin, trying to estimate how biased it is. 
But you only get 2-10 flips each year. Worse, you are trying to tell 
whether the bias is changing.

[ The variance of the estimate from N trials with pN heads is 
(1-p)/(N+1)^2 (it is a beta distribution). going from 2 to 10 flips 
reduces the variance by a factor of 0.67, which is just a 19% reduction 
of standard deviation. If you want to reliably detect a change in p on 
the order of 10% you will need a lot more data - at least more than 20 
data points. ]

I am always annoyed at how many people confuse weather - the stochastic 
outcomes - with climate - the underlying parameters.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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