April 2023 – William M. Briggs

The Less You Know About Climate, The More You Cry About Climate

Some things, the saying goes, are too good to check. Take the peer-reviewed paper "Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety" by Hannes Zacher and Cort W. Rudolph…

Culture

Why The Inexorable Increase In The Expertocracy: Examples

Our goal, no easy one, is to figure the trajectory of the Expertocracy. Their goal we know. Complete total full control of every aspect of all life under the guidance,…

Philosophy Statistics

There Is No Problem Of Old Evidence In Bayesian Probability

Rationalists, like those at Less Wrong (think Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander), are prone to fetishsize Bayes theorem, seeing it as the key to all thought. It isn't. Bayes is…

Culture

What Are Your Best Theories For Carlson, Bongino, Lemon Firings?

My guess is that the oligarchs pushed out Don Lemon at CNN, and Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino at Fox, in an effort to cool the flames the oligarchs lit.…

Culture

Virtue Signaling Proves Why Science Is Broken

Few years back some folks invited me to give a talk at Fermi Lab. Subject was how mistaken views of probability were holding particle physics back. (Which I still think…

Culture

Resetting Global Agriculture: The Destructive Road to Dystopia — Guest Post by Jaap Hanekamp

Introduction A title that seems to carry conspiratorial overtones (some might conclude). Well, as my esteemed readers know by now, the so-called “Dutch nitrogen crisis” got me thinking; philosophically, scientifically,…

Statistics

How An AI-Machine Learning-Physics-Sociological-Whatever Model Can Be Good For One Man & Bad For Another

A model---which I do not distinguish between a theory---can be useful to one man and useless to the next. "But Briggs, people don't treat theories the same as models." Right:…

Culture

The Woke’s Nice Book Burnings & The Absence Of Violence

I was reading about the woke's latest modern form of book burning; i.e. expurgating but not eliminating texts. And it struck me. You know what's strange? What's really puzzling? The…

Cloudbuster on The Superpower You Didn’t Know You HadOctober 20, 2025
Of course, the stuff in the library is not free. It is paid for by you and me. Part of…
Cary Cotterman on The Superpower You Didn’t Know You HadOctober 20, 2025
I like how the robot men have little robot ears and robot scowls.
Cary Cotterman on The Superpower You Didn’t Know You HadOctober 20, 2025
My wife likes "The Great British Baking Show". In a couple of weeks, as soon as that's done, we're axing…
Brian (bulaoren) on The Superpower You Didn’t Know You HadOctober 20, 2025
What was it that Nancy Reagan used to say...? Anyhow, for most of my 20 years in China, I did…
Tars Tarkas on The Superpower You Didn’t Know You HadOctober 20, 2025
The problem with the library is fiction has turned into a female SJW cesspool. I especially like science fiction and…