Sunday, February 05, 2012
Wanna see a real hockey stick?
Pseudoscientists in many fields love to predict that a measurement like temperature or sea level is rising linearly forever. The pseudos have been running this scam for a LONG time, as Swift showed us 300 years ago.
Nature don't play dat. Nature doesn't have "tipping points." Nature always runs in cycles or sigmoids because Nature consists of an infinite number of negative feedback loops.
But human activities certainly can form a linear jump with no visible end, because human activities (especially bureaucracies) are often designed with no feedback or positive feedback. The Economic Populist blog exhibits such a graph of long-term unemployment. It's impressive. From 1950 until Shotgun Paulson's Theft Of A Nation in 2008, the line runs in cycles superimposed on a very slow upward trend as we gradually lose our industries to China. After Shotgun, the line goes almost vertically upward, with no end in sight. ¶ 3:56 AM
Nature don't play dat. Nature doesn't have "tipping points." Nature always runs in cycles or sigmoids because Nature consists of an infinite number of negative feedback loops.
But human activities certainly can form a linear jump with no visible end, because human activities (especially bureaucracies) are often designed with no feedback or positive feedback. The Economic Populist blog exhibits such a graph of long-term unemployment. It's impressive. From 1950 until Shotgun Paulson's Theft Of A Nation in 2008, the line runs in cycles superimposed on a very slow upward trend as we gradually lose our industries to China. After Shotgun, the line goes almost vertically upward, with no end in sight. ¶ 3:56 AM
