On being blocked on Twitter

Some people employ block chains, so followers of those that get blocked are blocked.

"Obviously, if I actually just want to read it I can log out, or go via some intermediary"

Easiest: a private window. Second easiest: another browser.

I've been blocked by a number of people. Sometimes I know why (and sometimes it's even maybe justified) but sometimes I have no idea. I get the feeling that Roger is trying (somewhat unsuccessfully, it would seem) to distance himself from the climate debate and so maybe is just blocking all those he regards as on the other side. There is also apparently something called blocktogether (that I've never used) in which people can create a list of all those they regard as worth blocking and then pass it around to others.

As far as Judith is concerned, her academic record seems pretty good but not outstanding, so I agree that it's neither meagre nor extremely high.

I think some of the block lists work by blocking you if you FOLLOW certain accounts. The Block Bot is one example. I don't use Twitter very much. I guess this is what Pinko is saying. These 'bots were all the rage during the GamerGate fiasco, used to limit dogpiling on Twitter.

Easy. Avoid Twitter at all times.

RPJr blocks me on Twitter too, for no reason I know of. I've even interviewed him a couple of times.

Ah that explains the unavailable tweet thing. I had assumed it was generally deleted.

Don't have a problem with blocking, one persons sensitive snowflake is another's victim of harassment. No one has the right to impose their free speech on others.

[I have no problem with blocking as a general concept. For someone like RP Jr, who has a reputation - or did, until recently, for being roughty-toughty - it seems odd. And part of his message - or so I recall, I haven't actually looked recently - is about communication and "honest broker" stuff -W]

I agree with James that people have the right to block (I exercise it every now and again, myself; although I try to use mute now, instead of block). Roger, however, in his recent article complained about being blocked, despite being quite a prolific blocker himself. Of course, in the same way that people are free to block if they so choose, people are also free to be inconsistent :-)

[Ah yes (from http://www.wsj.com/articles/my-unhappy-life-as-a-climate-heretic-148072…, my bold): For a time I called out politicians and reporters who went beyond what science can support, but some journalists won’t hear of this. In 2011 and 2012, I pointed out on my blog and social media that the lead climate reporter at the New York Times,Justin Gillis, had mischaracterized the relationship of climate change and food shortages, and the relationship of climate change and disasters. His reporting wasn’t consistent with most expert views, or the evidence. In response he promptly blocked me from his Twitter feed. Other reporters did the same -W]

Jr. blocked me too. Again I have no idea why. If he's trying to stay out of climate discussions he has a funny way of showing that with this latest tweet.

Who cares? Maybe when you cheered the death of Robert Carter he blocked you?

[Well, I care because I bothered to post, and you cared because you bothered to comment. As for the late and unlamented Carter, http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2016/01/19/science-advances-one-funeral-a… wasn't a cheer; there wasn't much to cheer about him for decades -W]

"Try hard, get barred
Get back, write braille."
I think a Nobel Laureate wrote that.

One advantage of being a REAL navel gazer is that you don't have time to network much, have no friends, and therefore don't open yourself up to this sort of a-holery. Plus you get to know your navel real good... that is, if you can even see it....

This Tom Waits song captures the flavor of beiing a STEM type in our ever more medieval torch and pitchfork world. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaLjwSpZ6Cs

[Spammed - be polite, or failing that at least have something of substance to say -W]

Considering I have never read RP Jr's tweets nor tweeted him, I was surprised when I saw a reply to RP Jr, like the one above, that indicated I, too, was blocked.
Regarding Peter Webster's comments on Judith, my spouse also (at times) has nice things to say about me.

[There should probably be a principle to never comment on your spouse in public -W]

This is far more interesting that Twitter.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601666.full

Claims that current models don't handle fresh water correctly, and handling fresh water correctly doing so makes the North Atlantic bistable. Abruptly doubling CO2 takes the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation into shutdown. Really Younger Dryas.

[It is kinda interesting. I find the title odd, and somewhat over-selling: the possibility has hardly been overlooked. To the contrary, it was desperately popular before falling out of fashion -W]

I think Mike was referring to her thin number of sole-/first-author papers, which do make one wonder if she has depended overmuch on the efforts of others.

Steve Bloom, sole author papers are, in some fields, not very good either, especially if you have many of them. It suggests you do not collaborate and/or are in an area that is largely of little interest or considered to be a dead end.

First authorship often is replaced by last authorship/corresponding authorship as you progress in your career.

I think one has to be careful of judging people's academic performance on the basis of a simplistic analysis of their publication record. The norms differ between different fields (in mine, it becomes increasingly difficult to have first author papers because projects are often led by more junior researchers), and it's hard to know what other contributions they might have made. It would seem to me that Judith's academic record is perfectly respectable.

Regarding #14. From the abstract of W.Liu's earlier paper .. " A diagnostic indicator Δ M ov is proposed in this paper to monitor the stability of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The Δ M ov is a diagnostic for a basinwide salt-advection feedback and defined as the difference between the freshwater transport induced by the AMOC across the southern border of the Atlantic Ocean and the overturning liquid freshwater transport from the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic..." Now here is the real challenge. Presenting this concept to politicians who depend on fossil fuel money for their livelihood ; Or, Explaining to these same people that being able to carry a snow ball onto the floor of the US Senate does not prove that global warming is a hoax. Here is another challenge- explaining to a politician with a life expectancy considerably less than a century that an event three centuries in the future should concern him. And finally, how does one prepare for the inevitable misinterpretation of this study by the mini-brained media of the Climate Disinformation Disseminaion Corps? The natural world sure likes to use deception and ignorance to keep life moving along, so I am starting to wonder if the best horticultural survival strategy is to simply live with the weeds of ignorance, and enjoy and observe their natural beauty, only pulling out more virulent of them when necessary..

"To the contrary, it was desperately popular before falling out of fashion -W"

That's why the paper is interesting. ACOC shutdown was a popular idea because of past climate history, as it happened in the Younger Dryas. The idea fell out of fashion when models failed to reproduce the effect in current conditions, but could reproduce in colder conditions. However this paper's modeled shutdown is much slower than the Younger Dryas. That makes the threat much easier to deal with, as slower changes are easier to adapt to than rapid changes. If you know, you can plan, and be ready.

[No; you've simplified a complex history too much. simple models tended to show shutdown more than complex models; the more complex models the more "blurred" the shutdown and the more resistant, to also simplify too much. Previous models have also been able to force shutdown by adding too much fresh water to the Atlantic (see Hansen's recent). This is also adding fresh water, but doing it via flux correction instead of explicit forcing. why is that novel? -W]

I'm less concerned with modeling history than you, and more concerned about climate history than you. Younger Dryas was a startling event in the near past (~12,900 to ~11,700 calendar years ago), an Even Younger Dryas, say starting next decade, would be a disaster. However, if it takes 300 years to ramp up, is a problem rather than a disaster.

Future freshwater flux will depend, among other things, on the melting rate of Greenland. As we get to a climate similar to the Eocene, how long will that pile of ice last? Or will the pile of ice prevent the prevent the Arctic from warming that much until Greenland's ice cap melts?

Stefan Rahmstorf explains on RealClimate what is new about the new AMOC paper.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/01/the-underestimate…

[Yes I read that. I'm not entirely sure it is correct though. I mean, the newness. It adds freshwater in a different way than before, but gets the same result. SR things this is significant, but why? He hasn't explored the possibility of it being just the same thing -W]

For the record, I am also blocked by junior and senior. Senior likely because I pointed out a few times that his favorite humidity dataset is not suited for trend analysis according to the authors. Senior kept on using it as evidence that humidity was not increasing.

http://variable-variability.blogspot.com/2012/12/no-trend-in-global-wat…

"... what’s painfully absent ... is the slightest attempt to address what Pielke is saying...."

I wonder if blocking amounts to patching the filter bubble to avoid nasty leakage of contrary ideas.

I remember back in the pre-Twitter days when I got email from big names, inviting me to shut up here (that was in the "Foaming" comment thread). I felt like I'd attracted the attention of elephants who took the time to try stomping annoying ants, wondering who else got the recognition of that approach.

Reminds me of what Twain wrote: "If it weren't for the honor of it, I'd just as soon walk ..."

It'd be interesting to know who else gets blocked.

Yep, amazing, I'm blocked on his Twitter too.
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr?visibility_check=true

Today's top item there:

Pinned Tweet
Roger Pielke Jr. @RogerPielkeJr 22 Dec 2016
Intellectual hospitality:
"An attitude of mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information from all sides"
John Dewey 1916

[You can't complain that he doesn't do irony -W]

Oh, wait, what does the banner saying "you are not authorized to see this status" mean?
Izzat 'you are blocked'?:

https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/response-codes

Corresponds with HTTP 403 — thrown when a Tweet cannot be viewed by the authenticating user, usually due to the tweet’s author having protected their tweets.

> [You can’t complain that he doesn’t do irony -W]

That's from an Intellectual Hospital chart, right?

I didn't just count sole-/first-author papers, I tried to get a general sense of the content, and remained unimpressed.

I suppose RP Sr. stands as a contrary example, but again looking at the content of the papers, much of it of such minor import that one wonders how it got published at all, tells the tale.

I know why I'm blocked by RP Jr.: I flamed him for his lies.

bumping my question, as I'm too old to understand this stuff:

what does the banner saying “you are not authorized to see this status” mean?
Does that mean ‘you are blocked’?:

apparently so, or so this guy claims:

https://twitter.com/shawnking/status/282946045799956480

http://www.seoconsultants.com/twitter/block/

If you click the link from Twitter Search to View Tweet of that username, you'll be presented with the below message along with a text message that slides down from the top of the page indicating; Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status. That's a definite confirmation that you've been Blocked.

So can you tell who he does pay attention to? Who's in his bubble?

I see there's discontent in Davos:

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN14Z07V

"Guy Standing, the author of several books on the new "precariat", a class of people who lack job security and reliable earnings, believes more people are coming around to the idea that free-market capitalism needs to be overhauled, including those that have benefited most from it.

"The mainstream corporate types don't want Trump and far-right authoritarians," said Standing, who has been invited to Davos for the first time. "They want a sustainable global economy in which they can do business. More and more of them are sensible enough to realize that they have overreached."

[Well, mostly. Corporations don't want limits on worker immigration, obviously; they don't want Trump's stupid import tariffs and protcetionism (except in the very specific case of their own industry, and not always then). But nor do they want Hillary's stupid regulations -W]

But Ian Bremmer, president of U.S.-based political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, is not so sure.

He recounted a recent trip to Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York where he saw bankers "rejoicing in the elevators" at the surge in stock markets and the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation under Trump. Both Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein and his JP Morgan counterpart Jamie Dimon will be in Davos.

"If you want to find people who are going to rally together and say capitalism is fundamentally broken, Davos is not the place to go," Bremmer said.

[That seems bleedin' obvious. Capitalism, of course, is not fundamentally broken -W]

WC writes: "Capitalism, of course, is not fundamentally broken"

Actually it has always been fundamentally broken. It was a flawed idea from the very beginning. By the early part of the last century it was clear that this was the case. Since then the most successful countries have adopted policies that have tried to correct some of those flaws. The recent financial crisis showed this hasn't been completely successful.

This should have been one of the main take-away points from the 2008 financial crisis: left to their own devices markets can still fail - spectacularly so. Yet there are many people - especially libertarians - who simply cannot abide this. It perturbs their sleep.

This is in conjunction with the obvious failures of capitalism: it does not promote social welfare, it does nothing to conserve natural resources, it has no practical mechanism to fund national defense or public safety. These are basic concepts that shouldn't require an economics degree to understand.

As a result we have no 'capitalist' economies anywhere in the world that I know of - we have mixed economies. If anything the tide of history shows a diminishing role for capitalism and an even larger role for socialism. On this overarching point Marx would seem to be correct, he just had many of the mechanisms and details of how we would move from A to B wrong. [1]

Capitalism has always been fundamentally broken. Armies, Navys, public roads, public schools, fire department, public hospitals, social insurance programs, your local gendarmes, national (or state or county or municipal) parks --- the evidence has always been in front of our nose. Some just can't see it.

[1] Forget Marx's rise of the proletariat. Instead think The Stranglers. As we move towards a future where more and more - if not all - work is done by computers and robots how does capitalism continue?

WC - I must admit that as often as you write about things economic I am constantly amazed at your lack of education on these matters or inability to think them through from first principles on your own. You seem to have adopted a lexicon and you parrot responses from within it, never questioning whether it even passes the smell test.

[I am constantly astonished by your self-righteousness and desire to lecture others -W]

Markets are only efficient in certain limited circumstances. From 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook, Volume 1"Generally speaking markets will efficiently allocate resources in the production of goods that are rival and exclusionary, provided there is a sufficient amount of competition." Add to this that even in those areas where markets are initially presumed to be efficient we still see market failures and or the transformation of competitive markets into non-competitive markets.

Regulations are not some undesired gewgaw that we must put up with ("stupid regulations") -- they are essential to making anything resembling a market society work. Without them we would have chaos and anarchy and all be the poorer for it. This has been known for *centuries* fer God's sake.

Capitalism is an amoral system. That puts it immediately into conflict with society. Economics is, after all, a *social* science. Economics is not an endeavor in which we seek to implement the most efficient system, but the system that produces the largest societal good. It is a *moral* choice.

This appears to be the part that perturbs your sleep. You don't want it to be a moral choice, too bad. It is. Ignoring this, pretending it;s all just math leads down very dark roads because capitalism is amoral. This isn't physics where the laws are fixed. We get to choose the laws we want to enforce. If we want the top 0.01% to own the 99% of the world we can choose to do so. If we want a different distribution we can choose that instead. Each is a choice, pretending otherwise is insane.

I've asked you many times before - and never received an answer - when did 'efficiency' become the holy grail? Fill in the blank: We want the most ________ economic system. Efficient? Just? Egalitarian?

Markets only work in certain circumstances and even then they can fail or lead to adverse markets scenarios, and no country on earth is a capitalist one, but it's bleedin' obvious capitalism is not broken. I can only shake my head.

We want the most self-congratulatory economic system.

Russia takes E. Europe, China takes the reefs, now what could the US find handy and convenient to take? Greenland? Or maybe some of those leftover bits of the UK?

WC writes: [I am constantly astonished by your self-righteousness ...]

Why? Self-wrongiousness would seem to be a very strange position to hold. Do you feel your beliefs are wrong? Well, we would be in agreement then, but you can change them. Then you too can be self-right.

It's also a strange argument for someone that writes about the carbon tax as you do. Or regulations, or any number of things. Of course I think I'm right - I'm not schizophrenic. More important, my belief is compatible with logic and data. Yours isn't.

From Brad DeLong:

"The mid-twentieth century Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi wrote that a market economy was a fine thing—it made great sense for individual businesses that made bread or ran streecars had to pass a market-profitability test in order to survive. But, he wrote, a market society is not. Attempting to implement a market society is very dangerous. Why?

Because a market society turns finance into a commodity—which means that the industry you work in and the kind of job you get have to in mass pass a market test.

Because a market society turns land into a commodity--which means that the community you live in has to in mass pass a market test.

Because a market society turns labor into a community—which means that attaining the standard of living you expect and feel you deserve has to pass a market test.

And people have very strong feelings about these three. People believe that they have a right to the standard of living they expect and deserve, to working in the particular industry at the kind of job that makes up a key piece of their identify, and to the stability of the community that they are used to. People believe they have rights to these things. Yet in a market society the only rights that matter are property rights.

And those rights are controlled by distant sinister people and forces far from the blood-and-soil realities…

And, in Polanyi’s analysis it least, it is the backlash to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century project of implementing a market society that triggered the totalitarian disasters which he watched and from which he fled."

Brexit seems to mean hard Brexit, if rumors are true.

[Given the way the EU are negotiating, it is hard to see that it could mean anything else -W]

So the City will no longer handle business for Europe, and the banks and a whole lot more will pack up and leave. Or maybe the City just leaves, as do the Scots. What's left of Great Britain will become Little England.

[Unlikely. You are under estimating the City, and over estimating the ability of the EU. See for example http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/01/12/bank-of-englands-mar…. Don't forget that although there is a fair degree of ignorance in the UK govt about the EU, the EU bureaucracy itself is hopeless at economics and finance -W]

I'd be more snarking, but in 5 days the USA will have a President known, among many other things, for promises to raise sky high tariffs on most imported goods.

[Trump's politics is visceral, as far as I can tell. So it is tariffs for "bad people" (a stupid idea) and good deals with good people (e.g. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-britain-idUSKBN14Z0Y2). I wouldn't count on either -W]

Make America Grate! When you are poor, you don't buy grated cheese, but grate your own.

More self-righteous criticism of your chosen economic philosophy. I haven't bothered with micro-foundations, yet. It goes hand-in-hand with Rational Expectations, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and Real Business Cycles as one of the economic equivalents of something written by Doug Cotton. From Mean Squared Errors

"The models which preen themselves most ostentatiously in their "rigorous" microfoundations are invariably based on so-called "representative agents." Now, every economist, at some point in their first year of graduate school, learns the mathematically necessary conditions for the existence of a representative agent corresponding to a collection of individual agents. In the lingo of the field, we say that a representative agent exists only if (a) all of the individual agents have identical preferences; and (b) if those preferences are [jargon] quasi-homothetic [/jargon]. "Quasi-homothetic" is a fancy way of saying that 10,000 households whose resources added together equal those of Bill Gates will buy exactly what Bill Gates will buy.

Neither of these conditions are remotely plausible, and nobody believes that they are true, including macroeconomists. And if either of those conditions fails to hold, an economy which behaves as if it posessed a representative agent cannot be derived from classical microeconomic foundations.

Let that sink in for a moment: of all the macro models that have been floated over the last century or so, only the so-called microfounded models are completely and demonstrably incompatible with classical microfoundations. And this is (or should be) obvious to anyone who didn't sleep through the first year of graduate microeconomic theory.

So when I call "microfoundations" a hoax, I'm not kidding around. The only question is, what proportion of macroeconomists have perpetrated this hoax upon themselves, and what proportion has known this all along.
"

Of course this criticism is not new. Krugman has. of course, written on it. "So the truth was that microfoundations in macroeconomics had its moment, but failed utterly at the one thing it was sold, above all, as being able to do – namely, give a better explanation of why nominal shocks have real effects. Time, you might think, to reconsider the project."

But pointing out these glaring defects and inconsistencies to the libertarian RE, EMH, RBC flavored crowd is like talking about climate science to denizens of WUWT. Pretty much pointless.

Chris Reynolds of Dosbat blog used to be a climate change denier. He was able to change. It isn't impossible, just unlikely. Obviously I still hold out hope that you can step off the economics WUWT bus.

"Given the way the EU are negotiating, it is hard to see that it could mean anything else -W"

It is hard to see how the EU could negotiate any differently with a small state with big demands.

[I think you're wrong: both that they could do no different, and that the UK's demands are big. The EU is going out of its way to appear totally inflexible. But its an all-or-nothing strategy; it only works if the UK is scared of it. If we just go for Free Trade then I think they'll end up looking silly -W]

Timmy is in the wrong century. Little England is no longer the fabulously wealthy center of a vast political and commercial empire.
Little England is more like Iceland. Imagine if England was cut off from Iceland's banks, and there was no political linkage...

[The UK is indeed no longer what you say. But what you're completely missing is that it is a major financial center. And finance is a commodity. Not being able to access it is a major problem -W]

RE: UK’s demands are not big.

The UK just wants most of the advantages of EU membership with none of the obligations of EU membership. That's all.

[No, not really. That's just what people who dislike Brexit say; people who want to make it as hard as possible to reach a deal. Which at the moment includes the EU. So exaggerating the magnitude of the compromise required is part of why a fallback to hard Brexit is looking every more likely.

Since we're vaguely on the topic: think back now to poor Dave's attempts to negotiate some kind of face-saving deal with the EU. A few token concessions he could take back and wave at parliament and the meeja. And the EU told him to fuck off (I paraphrase). That didn't exactly help -W]

In a completely unregulated free trade system, IceSave would be everywhere, with different names. Good luck with your savings.

Yes, Yes really.
1) None of your rules. We want to make our own rules.
2) Full EU economic access. We want to play on your playground, for your good, not ours.

From across the pond, looks like Calvinball. Score is currently Q to 12.

David Colander quoting Keynes the elder from Keynes' The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891):

""[F]ew practical problems admit of complete solution on economic grounds alone ... . [W]hen we pass, for instance, to problems of taxation, or to problems that concern the relations of the State with trade and industry, or to the general discussion of communistic and socialistic schemes—it is far from being the case that economic considerations hold the field exclusively. Account must also be taken of ethical, social, and political considerations that lie outside the sphere of political economy regarded as a science ...

We are, accordingly, led to the conclusion ... that a definitive art of political economy, which attempts to lay down absolute rules for the regulation of human conduct, will have vaguely defined limits, and be largely non-economic in character ..."

Colander's summation: "In his book, Keynes argued that economists' failure to distinguish the art of economics as a separate branch from positive and normative economics would lead to serious problems. One hundred years later, he has turned out to be clairvoyant."

Hey, speaking of navel gazing, could you add a tag for "... with inline responses" to make locating those easy? It's been useful at RC so people notice there's one of those replies to their post.

[You want me to tag my posts that I've responded to people in? But wouldn't that be all of them? -W]

No, tag the responses with inline comments, like this

Also, here's an audio track for climate policy; start around 4:12:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHETC5qAnqo

Hm, something ate the example I tried to leave. I meant tag the comments "with inline responses" like RC does, so people notice who's attracted the attention, thus:

...With Inline Responses

2016 Temperature Records: S.B. Ripman
2016 Temperature Records: Qingxiang Li
The NASA data conspiracy theory and the cold sun: Brian Blagden
The NASA data conspiracy theory and the cold sun: Russell Seitz

[If this system has the ability to do that, I've no idea how to use it -W]

Problem is that UK has nothing to sell except financial services and that depends on EU passporting.

On another tack, it would be interesting to build a social network map of people who block you. Eli has a few direct from left field.

Eli is somewhat overstating the EU passporting issue.

UK had an advantage in the commodity market of financial services to the EU because of passporting. The City will not have the advantage after Brexit.

After Brexit, it is hard to see how London will be treated any different than New York or Tokyo. Surely not as sweet of deal as passporting. Likely a level playing field for those outside the EU. Getting the same deal as everyone else isn't "punishment."

Banks can move to where the deal is the sweetest. No longer will that be the City for the EU. The City isn't going away, just will be smaller. UK might fall apart, but even a Little England without Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be a medium sized and quite well off country. Smaller and poorer, but not all that bad even in the worse case.

I wish I could say something like that about Trump and the USA.