If it’s bullpuckey then it’s bullpuckey, right?
One of the advantages of being quite as arrogant and selfcentered as I am is the ability to label trite trivias after myself and then claim that they’re grand insights into the State of Man and the Nation.
Thus Worstall’s Acuity.
This is an addition, possibly a corollary, lesson of, conclusion from, Gell-Mann Amnesia:
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Worstall’s Acuity is to do the opposite. If someone’s feeding me bullpuckey on a point I know about then I’m going to assume they’re feeding me bullpuckey on the ones I don’t. This seems only fair and logical and certainly saves a lot of time.
From The Guardian, a report on a report about climate change and environmental limits:
The researchers said global heating was part of a wider crisis that included pollution, the destruction of nature and rising economic inequality.
Economic inequality is not rising. Quite the contrary, economic inequality is falling. The poor parts of the world are growing faster than the rich parts - economic inequality is decreasing. A report here from a decade back and yes, those same impulses have been continuing.
The report itself, rather than the report upon the report, makes the same mistake:
The climate emergency is not an isolated issue. Global heating, although it is catastrophic, is merely one aspect of a profound polycrisis that includes environmental degradation, rising economic inequality, and biodiversity loss (Hoyer et al. 2023).
It’s possible they’re right in some of the things they say. But that’s not the way to bet at all - for on the thing we here know about, economic inequality, they are wholly and exactly wrong. They’ve actually got the sign wrong - inequality is decreasing, not increasing. This does not bode well for whatever other bullpuckey they might be trying to sell us.
It is logical, sensible, for us to reject all of this because we know that they are wrong on the thing that we know about.
After all, if you’re presenting a report about the totality of the world you do have to be correct about that totality of the world, no? And if you’re wrong on one of your basic claims then that really does call into question your ability to be right about anything.
Tim Worstall