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I am far less confident.
I bet it would depend on exactly which data set you gave them. Do you give them data for the past 10 years, data since 1998, the data since they started measuring temperatures with satellites as well as thermometers, or the longest-running data set, which runs from 1850 onwards? If you just give them the last decade of data, they might well just write it off as flat and noisy, but if you let them judge the recent numbers in the context of the entire time series, they might recognize them as flat-looking fuzz obscuring an ongoing linear trend.
That sounds nice, but I don't know how practical that would turn out to be, in this case or in general. In this particular case, how can I even tell with certainty whether you have 'an agenda' or not? And what if the key participants in a debate all have some agenda? It's very possible that Nisbett has a 'politically correct' (not that I like the phrase, but I can't think of a better way of putting it) agenda, and that Rushton and Jensen have a 'politically incorrect' agenda. How do I know, and what do I do if they do? And so on.
How can you tell anything with certainty? The fact is that you can't. Respectfully, it seems to me you are playing the "I'm such a skeptic" game.
Let me ask you this: Do you seriously doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
I would give them the data since the 1970s when sattelite measurement became possible.
Sorry. I was being sloppy in my earlier comment, and using 'certainty' as a shorthand for 'certainty enough for me to label you as Having An Agenda, and therefore to reject your interpretation of the data as Tainted With An Agenda.' It is of course true that you can't tell anything inductive with cast-iron 100% certainty, but what I'm getting at is the question of how to get to what you or I would practically treat as certainty (like if I put a 95% probability on someone Having An Agenda).
Let me rephrase: in this particular case, how can I even tell whether you have 'an agenda' with sufficient certainty to disregard whatever you say about the data, and retreat to my own common sense gut feeling?
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he believes he's right? A tiny bit, but only in the sense that I am never completely sure of another person's motivation for stating something.
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he wants to convince other people of what he believes? Not really.
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he has an emotional investment in the argument as well as rational considerations? Only a little...but then again, who doesn't get emotionally invested in arguments?
Do I doubt he has an agenda in the sense that he has political motivations for his article as well as self-centered emotional and rational ones? Quite a lot, actually. I don't think I could reliably tell Nisbett's emotional motivations apart from those that spring from his political agenda (whatever that is - Nisbett sounds like a leftist to me, but how the hell do I really know? There were rightists who crapped on The Bell Curve too.) Does it even make sense to distinguish the two? I'm not sure. (I suddenly feel that these are good questions to think about. Thank you for prodding me into thinking of them.)
Also, for whatever it's worth, I am just as sure that Rushton and Jensen have 'an agenda,' however you want to define that, as Nisbett does. Do I throw all their papers out and just go with my common sense?
To clarify, this doesn't mean I can't get behind the idea of being alert to other people's biases on some subject, but I'm not willing to push that to the point of a dichotomy between my common sense vs. someone with an agenda. Taking the global warming example, I'm sure many climate scientists have 'an agenda,' but I'd still tend to accept their consensus interpretation of the data than my own common sense where the two differ, and I think that's reasonable if I don't have time to dig through all of the research myself.
In that case I think I'm roughly 90% confident that fewer than '10 out of 10 statisticians will say the rate is basically flat for the last 10 years'. I am interpreting 'the rate is flat here' to mean that the net temperature trend is flat over time, as I believe we're talking about whether global warming is continuing and not whether global warming is accelerating. (Thought process here: I reckon a randomly selected statistician has at most a 4 in 5 chance of deciding that temperatures have been 'basically flat' for the last 10 years' based on the satellite data. Then the chance of 10 random statisticians all saying temperatures have been flat is 11%, so an 89% chance of at least one of them dissenting.)
By "having an agenda," I mean that Nisbett is emphasizing the facts that support a particular point of view and de-emphasizing the facts which undermine that point of view in order to persuade the reader.
So defined, one can ask whether Nisbett has an agenda. Do you have any doubt that Nisbett has an agenda?
So by your definition, the temperature trend is NOT basically flat between 1995 and the present, correct?
Not much. I think it is very likely that Nisbett suffers from confirmation bias about as much as everybody else.
Eyeballing it I'd say it's much more likely that temperatures rose since 1995 than that they stayed flat, so I'd say you're pretty much correct. I wouldn't dogmatically say it's not flat in big capital letters, but I think the rising temperature hypothesis is a lot more likely than the flat temperature hypothesis.
I'd double check my intuition by running a regression, but that'd stack the deck because of autocorrelation, and I can't remember from the top of my head how to fit a linear model that accounts for that.
I'm not sure what this means. Are you saying that every piece of written material has an agenda behind it as I've defined the term?
And do you agree that according to Phil Jones, there has been no statistically significant warming between 1995 and the present?
The fact that you quote this doesn't help your credibility. The Economist: Journalistic malpractice on global warming
I'm not sure what your point is. My argument does not depend on my credibility.
In any event, do you agree that "journalistic malpractice" works both ways? In other words, if it's malpractice to claim that there has been no warming since 1995, it's also malpractice to claim that there has been no cooling since 1998?
Not every piece of written material, but I'd bet that almost all lengthy pieces of writing intended to communicate a point to others have an agenda behind them, sure. There's always a temptation to round the numbers to your advantage, to leave out bits of data that might conflict with your hypothesis, to neglect to mention possible problems with your statistical tests, and so on.
Even ignoring that sort of thing, cognitive biases play an important role. Nisbett presumably had a half-formed opinion of the race and IQ argument even before he started researching it in depth. And that would in turn have affected which bits of relevant evidence got stuck in his mind. And that would in turn have hardened his opinion. You get positive feedbacks that push your opinion away from others that conflict with it. So even if Nisbett were consciously being as honest as possible, he could still be
just because his mental database of facts is going to overrepresent the 1st kind of fact and underrepresent the 2nd - and precisely because of that, he is going to be sure that his point of view is obviously correct, and precisely because of that, he is going to be writing to persuade the reader of it - even though, as far as he knows, he is being completely honest!
(Tangent: it's somehow amusing and fitting that the person we're using to argue this point is the person whose most cited article is "Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.")
That's what he said.
Ok, and the stronger the agenda, the more you should trust your common sense over claims made by the person with the agenda.
Ok, and presumably what he meant was that any warming which took place between 1995 and the present was less than some statistical minimum threshold. I'm not sophisticated enough to calculate such a limit, but that's what I meant when I said that temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years.
Cool. I feel more comfortable now that you've expressed this in continuous terms. There's still a catch, though: using your definition of having an agenda, I can't really tell whether someone has an agenda without also knowing the facts (because 'having an agenda' here is being used to mean that someone's making a slanted presentation of the facts), and if I know the facts already, I have little need for your has-an-agenda heuristic.
Roughly speaking, I think that's about right.
I think I understand now. Alrighty...yeah, I would suspect that there's been no statistically significant warming trend in the last 10 years. I would however avoid using phrases like 'temperatures have been basically flat for the last 10 years' to describe this, as I nonetheless believe that if one considers the last 10 years of records in the context of unambiguous past warming, they are consistent with an ongoing, underlying warming trend.
I would suggest you practice. It also helps to read people who contradict eachother. It also helps if you learn some of the facts.
Lol, I guess that means American housing prices have been going up the last couple years too.
In any event, I think it's fair to say that temperatures have been basically flat because it contradicts many of the predictions of the warmists.