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Can you define 'social power'?

And the moon is made of cheese. Look, I can do nonsense assertions as well!

Hunter gatherer societies tend not to have clear legal systems. What does that have to do with being able to determine 'what was right or wrong' or how people deal 'with justice and injustice'?

We were talking about what does and does not have a clear legal system (Imperial Japan vs the 'Natives' in Canada before Europeans came). There are objective measures one can observe (is there a central authority? are there clear laws? can one get prosecuted for committing crimes? are the laws enforced by employees of the state?) to determine if a society has a clear legal system or not.

I think you give too much value to emoticons.

Sorry, my fault, I misread what you wrote.

The implication was that I should 'move on' because 'most people' would. That is an implicit fallacy and I am not most people. That is not an appeal to authority fallacy. I am not 'most people'. You are trying to 'read between the lines' of what I write on an internet forum in order to make claims about my emotional state. Claiming things like I am 'distraught' or 'can't stand certain things'. You just don't have sufficient evidence to make these claims and I assure you that these claims are wrong. Why not just take what I type literally?

Argumentum Ad Populum Fallacy. Do you have the ability to read minds over the internet? No. So then why do you make these unjustified claims? Why do you feel the need for unnecessary character attacks?

... They are testing 4 different political theories, that is the main point of the paper. If the way they test for Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is flawed, then that has huge implications on their paper, because they main conclusion that they make is a rejection of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy. ... The paper assumes political unidimensionality in order to use median voter theorem to test for Majoritarian Electoral Democracy... Even if I pretend that their test for Majoritarian Electoral Democracy made sense, there are other explanations for their result (that do not reject Majoritarian Electoral Democracy). Maybe the policy makers do mostly consider the public when making decisions and Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is the closer of the 4 models to reality, but the reason we get a non-significant result is because the public is most uninformed or indifferent about most policy issues. When I ask a number of friends or family members about how they feel about a certain policy (ex. what do you think about the oil sands?), most of them don't have an opinion or don't care. Something like 40% of the voting population doesn't vote. So when you gauge public opinion the result will be heavily influenced by those that do not vote, care or have an opinion (where as interest groups will obviously be informed and care about an issue). Add to this the fact that large segments of the population believe in nonsense like the lump-of-labour fallacy and things can get very problematic since policy makes will tend to listen more to constituents that care or are informed about a particular issue that those that do not care or are uninformed. The US has representative democracy, which means that people elect people to make decisions for them. The elected representatives are supposed to be informed and listen to all constituents. Maybe elected representatives are more informed than the general public, and in addition the economic elites and interest groups are also more informed than the general public. Then you could get a regression result that seems to contradict Majoritarian Electoral Democracy even though Majoritarian Electoral Democracy maybe be true, since the correlation between economic elites & interest groups with the decisions of policy makes might be due to each of these factors being correlated with being informed (i.e. informed people are more likely to come up with the same conclusion). Their study doesn't account for how much people care or inform themselves about a particular issue. For all we know, the opinion of median voter that cares and is informed about a particular issue might be closer to the opinion of the 90th percentile than it is to the 50th percentile. Of course what I state here is testable, so if they a future group can account for how informed or how much individuals care about a particular issue (by using survey data for example) then they might able to exclude the care/informed explanation. Even though their main finding is the rejection of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy? With respect to the footnote, why didn't they just directly use the median preference respondent rather than the 50th percentile to represent the median voter in order to test for median voter theorem? Using the 50th percentile doesn't make as much sense. While on the topic, why didn't the authors also try to regress the 10th percentile or other percentiles to test to see if the 'poor' people have a significant impact on policy decisions even when other factors are included? It would have been useful for the sake of consistency. Furthermore, have they provided anyone with the data set for replication? This whole thing seems a bit suspicious. I wonder if the group chose to do many different regressions and picked the regression that gave the result that fitted with their conclusions the most. Such actions are not uncommon in academia, especially when there is a high emphasis on publishing results to get funding. Heck, even Milikan won the nobel prize for his oil drop experiments after he threw out all the data that didn't fit with his model (and didn't tell anyone).

@ Accountability Now - What is wrong with commenting in your own thread after 2 weeks if you get no replies (especially given the quality of the original post)?

@ cybercoma - multicollinearity understating the effect of the income group is only true under a number of questionable assumptions. But in any case, multicollinearity and low R-squared are only two of the 8 points I made. My primary concern is that they way they test for Majoritarian Electoral Democracy (see point 1).

Low R-squared value is only one of the 8 points I made. I'm also not sure why one's approach to regressions should greatly change when looking at a different field of study.

Your choice... What other threads?

Cybercoma @ 1) Maybe, but the point was mostly that the way they define and test 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy' is extremely questionable. Median voter theorem is not necessarily true under multidimensional politics. Stagnant political systems can prevent median voter theorem even under unidimensional politics. Median voter isn't the same as the voter at the 50% percentile of income. @ 4) Your 'rebuttal' to 4 has nothing to do with multicollinearity... Maybe this will help you understand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicollinearity @ 5) I never made any claim about the results not being statistically significant. But if you have a very low R-squared, it is a good indicator that either to model is bad or the data is bad (or both in this case). Also... why didn't they do the fisher test? That is pretty standard. @ 6) It isn't given... If the assumptions are strongly violated then the results of the tests lose credibility. Yet they do no tests. @ 7) Their bias is clear from the text and choice of words. It is clearly demonstrated and I gave examples. Their statement "it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data." is false/unjustified, period. @ 8) It isn't just public opinion. They use the word 'we' several times. It's one thing to talk about public opinion in a neutral manner. It is another thing to state political opinion without support. I'm surprised the referee didn't ask them to remove some of the paragraphs in the conclusion. It is unprofessional. For your last paragraph, as I previous explained, I do not think that the results of the paper are sufficiently strong to justify your conclusions.

Okay, I shall comment on the paper now. Didn't do it earlier because I was lazy. There are a number of comments I could make about the paper, but I will just point out the important ones. 1. The way they 'test' the 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy' theory is rather questionable. They claim that the 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy' implies 'median voter theorem' for the sake of the study. 'Median voter theorem' means that the preferences of the median voter dictate policy decisions. But they admit: "If citizens' preference orderings are not unidimensional and are sufficiently diverse, majority rule – hence also two-party electoral competition – might not lead to any equilibrium outcome at all." Political positions aren't close to unidimensional. Furthermore, the US democratic system (with things like the electoral college system) encourages a stagnant political system that makes it difficult for views contrary to the democrat-republican dichotomy to be represented. Nether multidimensionality nor political stagnancy where given serious consideration in the 'study'. With these issues, why should the median voter theorem hold? The paper even goes a step further and assumes that median voter = voter at the 50th percentile in income. While this assumption is not that unreasonable, the correlation between income and political preference is not necessarily strong, let alone clear (see the two graphs below). They could have simply computed the median voter by saying that the median voter is the one that agrees with the majority for every single issue... the 50th percentile definition seems unnecessary. http://test.causeweb.org/wiki/chance/images/7/72/Income-vs-Republican.png http://test.causeweb.org/wiki/chance/images/5/50/Republican-Vote-Share.jpg 2. For the 1779 'political issues' from 1981-2002 that the study analysed, there were no tests made to examine if these issues were representative of the concerns of the population. For all we know, all the 'political issues' could have involved the legalization of marijuana. The authors even admit in their appendix that 387 of the 1779 questions asked 'essentially the same policy issue'. They could have classified issues into different categories (Economic, Cultural, Environment, Defence, etc.) and see how represented these categories are relative to how the public values these different categories (they could have used public opinion polls, issues discussed during elections, etc.). It is also worth mentioning that the data used is on average 20 years old, so any conclusions that are made are outdated by ~20 years. 3. Overall, I applaud the paper's attempt to test between various theories. Their methodology is simplistic, yet effective at testing the 4 hypotheses and easy to understand. It is clear that doing such tests is difficult and the data is difficult to obtain/scarce, but at least the authors of the paper put different theories to the test. 4. The results on table 2 indicate strong issues of multicollinearity in the data. In particular, the the opinions of the 50th percentile and the 90th percentile have a correlation coefficient of 0.78 (note that this is the 'corrected' R-squared value, the original R-squared value was 0.94, see appendix) and the correlation coefficient between all interest groups and business interest groups is 0.96. Admittedly, because all interest groups includes business interest groups, and because business interest groups and mass public interest groups is only -0.5, the second correlation might not be a big issue. But the multicollinearity between 'economic elites' and 'the median voter' indicate that any conclusions that distinguish between the preferences of the two groups will be rather questionable. Perhaps the study should have used something better than the preferences of the 90th percentile as a proxy for the preferences of political elites. 5. On table 3, the R-squared values are extremely low (between 0.028 and 0.074). I understand that the data quality might not be that good and that low-ish R-squared values are not unexpected in political science studies, but these R-squared values are really low... The models tested do not adequately describe the political preferences of society. The most important result on table 3, according to the paper, is the lack of statistical significance of 'the preferences of average citizens' in Model 4. They use this lack of statistical significance to make their conclusions to reject 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy'. But with the issues of multicollinearity, multidimensional political preferences, stagnant political system, etc. is this result unexpected or unreasonable? I don't think the results of the paper are sufficiently strong to reject 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy' as the authors do. 6. No diagnostic tests were performed on the regression analysis to see if the various assumptions used on ordinary least squared regression hold (such as normality, homoskedasticity, etc.). Also, the model used clearly has specification error and lacks explanatory variables. 7. The error analysis was poorly done. The authors claim that "The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is all the more striking because it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data.". But I just listed some reasons why the statistical significance of the regression coefficient of the median voter could be rejected without having to reject Majoritarian Electoral Democracy (points 1, 4, 5, 6). The political bias of the authors prevent them from seeing any source of error or issue with their study that doesn't help their conclusion (see point 8). Admittedly, using the 90th percentile of voters to represent economic elites might understate the importance of economic elites, and their omission of interest groups might understate the importance of interest groups. 8. There were a few cases of unjustified political opinion in the papers that make it unprofessional. While most of the paper was good, they constantly mentioned 'labour unions' as representative of public opinion and about half way through page 23 they go completely overboard with opinion. They use the paragraph beginning with 'we tend to doubt it' to dismiss the criticism that the results could be due to having an uninformed voting public. They could have just wrote the paper, tested the model, and then made their conclusions about a rejection of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy (and it would have been a good paper). But for some reason the authors feel the need to put unsupported opinion at the end in order to claim that the rejection of 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy' is necessarily problematic for society. It's completely unprofessional! Especially unsupported statements like "All in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own interests than any feasible alternative". Overall, I don't think the results of the paper are anywhere close to strong enough to reject 'Majoritarian Electoral Democracy'. The authors made their conclusions out of their clear political bias (which was unprofessional). If they did their job properly they should have concluded that the results, while interesting and useful for encouraging future studies, are insufficiently strong to reject any of the 4 models. Many people in this thread seem to be taking the conclusions in the paper and running with (much further than the authors did) them to support their dogma regarding 'the economic elites control everything'. I don't give a damn that the paper was written by an ivy league university, that does not matter. Many aspects of the paper were not done as well as they could of and the evidence isn't strong enough to make the conclusions people are making in this thread.

That's not how the inheritance works in Westeros. Titles are transfered from parent to oldest son (then oldest daughter if there is no surviving son). The one exception is Dorne where it goes to the oldest child regardless of gender. Also, you have to remember that everyone thinks that Rob, Rickon and Bran are dead (John Snow is a bastard and part of the Night's Watch so cannot inherit anything). If it were not for the Lannisters giving Roose Bolton Warden of the North, Sansa would be Warden of the North. And if it were not for the Lannisters giving the Freys Warden of the Riverlands, Sansa would be Warden of the Riverlands (assuming Edmure is dead and had no children with the Freys). But because of the red wedding, many people in the North and the Riverlands hate the Freys and Boltons. So it isn't unexpected that Sansa in the future will have a strong claim to both. Lysa Arryn is Warden Regent of the East/Vale until her son comes of age much like how Cersei Lannister was the Queen Regent until Joffrey came of age (and is now Queen Regent again until Tommen comes of age since Joffrey is dead). If Littlefinger marries Lysa Arryn, he will become Lord Protector of the Vale until Lysa Arryn's son comes of age. If there were some 'accident' to Lysa's son then the Wardenship of the Vale would go to a sibling of Jon Arryn. He doesn't need to 'have her' in a legally binding sense. He only needs her as an ally. Together they can conspire to take the iron throne. Littlefinger doesn't need to be on the iron throne to control it. If he can get Sansa on it and control her then it is just as good. She is also potentially the 'oldest' surviving Tulley. Sansa and little finger merely have to wait for the Lannister Dynasty to end for the murder accusation to not matter (or the true murderer to be found). It is not like the Lannisters are short of enemies to overthrow them (Stannis, the remaining Starks, Daenarys, etc.). Also, why does Sansa need to marry & have legitimate children? She already has a claim to the North and the Riverlands. Maybe she could marry her cousin (Lysa's son) in which case Sansa could potentially be the ruler to 3 of the 7 kingdoms. Maybe that is Littlefinger's plan? She is too valuable as a bargaining chip, and too risky to reveal in the near future. If Littlefinger reveals that he has Sansa, then the people in King's Landing will want Littlefinger and Sansa dead and a war with the Vale would occur. Petyr Baelish will probably keep Sansa a 'secret' (maybe will tell Lysa Arryn) until all the other parties in Westeros are exhausted from war. Not to mention that as long as the Freys and Boltons exist, Sansa does not have a claim to the North or Riverlands. Sansa and Petyr just need to bide their time... He is already the Warden of the North. His only concern is a rebellion of Stark loyalists (and the ironborne... and whatever happens at the wall).

Why? The only way you could get 100 is by relying 100% on renewables... but why would you want to do that? Why not use both renewables and non-renewables? The cost savings that come from using more efficient non-renewable energy courses can help finance the advancement of humanity and eventually start space colonization.

You have overlooked some important things in the show. - Petyr Baelish is childhood friends with Catelyn Stark and her siblings Lysa Arryn & Edmure Tulley. - Petyr Baelish is from the Vale & grew up in the Riverlands. - Lysa Arryn is currently single (Jon Arryn died before season 1 which is why Ned Stark became hand of the king). - Petyr Baelish was asked to form an alliance between the Vale and Kingslanding by Tyrion (though it is a trick, Marcella ends up going to Dorne) due to his connections to the Value. - Petyr Baelish successfully negotiates an alliance with the Tyrells and is awarded Lord of Harrenhall. - Unlike most of the characters in game of thrones, Baelish is not Highborn. That is why he created his own sigil (mockingbird) and is often talked down upon by other characters. In season 1, Cersei mocks him and threatens to kill him over this. - In season 3, after he is awarded Lord of Harrenhal he declares his intentions to travel to the Vale in an attempt to marry Lysa Arryn and get the alliance of the Vale for Kingslanding (this is why Tyrion becomes master of coin, because Baelish leaves his position as master of coin). Because Baelish is Lowborn, he needed the Lord of Harrenhal status to marry Lysa Arryn. - Petyr Baelish has decided to take Sansa with him (without anyone else knowing) to go to see Sansa's aunt (Lysa Arryn). - Since most people think Rob, Bran and Rickon are dead, Sansa is assumed to be the Heir to the North. - Since Edmure Tulley, Catelyn Stark & Rob Stark all died in the Red Wedding (Bran & Rickon are assumed dead) & Lysa Arryn is Catelyn's younger sister, Sansa is technically next in line to be the Heir to the Riverlands (after the current unborn child that was 'consummated' between Edmure Tulley and the Frey's during the Red Wedding). Of course everyone hates the Frey's... so it probably won't be hard to make Sansa Heir to the Riverlands. - While Petyr Baelish was master of coin under King Robert's rule, he placed the crown under massive debt to the Bank of Bravos. Tyrion and Ned Stark both mention this. People from the Bank of Bravos will support enemies of the crown if the crown does not pay its debts (and the crown is nearly broke due to the war of 5 kings). In season 4 episode 3, Davos intends to try to get the support of the Bank for Stannis (but Petyr can always try to get their support later). Looking at all these, it is clear what Petyr Baelish's plan is: - Petyr plans to travel to the Erie, marry Lysa Arryn and become Lord Protector of the Vale. Remember that the Vale and Dorne are the only 2 kingdom currenly untouched by war. - With Sansa, he has a reasonable claim to both the North and the Riverlands. - If he gets the support of the Bank of Bravos as well then he will have 3 of the 7 kingdoms (2 devastated by war, 1 untouched by war) as well Bravos behind him. That much power alone makes him a potential contender to simply take the iron throne by force. - He doesn't really have any enemies (except maybe Varys). The people in King's Landing think he is helping them, everyone else consider him a lowborn diplomat, and no one hates the Vale. - Petyr Baelish might just bide his time, wait for all other parties to exhaust themselves, and take the iron throne at the end: - The Frey-Bolton Alliance currently controls the North & Riverlands but are at war with the Iron Islands and are hated by many people. - Stannis intends to go to the wall to help fight against the wildlings & white walkers (not to mention he still wants the iron throne). - Whichever party wins the fight at the wall (Stannis, wildlings or white walkers) will have to head south at some point which means they will fight whoever wins the Frey-Bolton vs Iron Islands Fight. - In the south, there is currently an uneasy alliance between Dorne, Kingslanding, the Westerlands & the Reach. This could fall quite easily, but even if it does not, Daenerys Targaryen will eventually come from Essos (with an army that includes Unsullied, Dovraki & Dragons). In season 4 episode 3, Twyin clearly understands this threat which is why he wants Dorne in the alliance because Dorne was the only kingdom that didn't fall the the Targaryens & their dragons. - Most likely the winner of the war in the south (Daenerys vs Dorne-Reach-Westerlands) will fight the winner of the war in the North-Riverlands-Iron_Islands since the parties appear to have a grudge against each other. Meanwhile, Petyr and the Vale will be completely untouched... able to fight whatever opposition remains at the end...

Vast isn't close sufficient to define a consensus. I could say 'the consensus of hamburgers is vast', but that gives no information as to what the 'consensus of hamburgers' is. And millions upon millions of people also believe in religious faerie tales from thousands of years ago. It does not make them correct. This is an 'argumentum ad populum' fallacy by the way. Appeal to the people. How about you just use your brain to examine some of the evidence yourself? Have you no ounce of skepticism at all? Again, appeal to the people... Look, this kind of 'blind faith' into stuff you are authoritatively told is extremely dangerous. I'm sure Saudi Arabia and Iran consult 'religious experts' when deciding how many stones they should use to stone rape victims. I'm sure the people in the US that choose not to give their children vaccines have been convinced by 'experts' that vaccines cause autism. I'm sure that white supremacists in the US south in like the 1930's were told by 'expert scientists' that negros are mentally inferior to white people. Should I continue? If you don't want to think for your self, then why do you insist on advocating extreme CO2 mitigation policies? Why not let the 'experts' that can at least think for themselves to do that? Are you seriously trying to use this deflection tactic to justify the use of logical fallacies? It is not incomprehensible. Try using your brain. What challenges to 'the consensus' have I made in the first post? None... probably... but then again 'the consensus' has not been defined by you. What I did do was examine some unsupported claims made by climate alarmists with regards to changes to the jetstream and evaluate its truth. I went a step further and made an attempt to quantify the expected changes for the benefit of the discussion. I then summarized the results in the summary for those that were too lazy to read the methodology and reasoning. After that I did a tl;dr for those that were too lazy to read the first post. But clearly you don't even want to bother reading that... Also the fact that you have 'faith' in science really says a lot about how you approach things. Having 'faith' in anything is contrary to the scientific methodology. Science is a methodology for finding truth using observation, skepticism, principles like Occum's razor, etc. Faith is the complete opposite of science.

I already answered that. Because there are multiple definitions and it means different things for different people. Which is why I ask you to define it for the sake of the discussion. In science it is important to have clear definitions. I.e. You want to use appeal to authority fallacy to back up your dogma, but do not want your dogma challenged or to actually understand the 'science' itself (because that would take effort, and it is much easier to believe in dogma). It is very dangerous for a large segment of the population to advocate extreme CO2 mitigation policies when then understand basically 0 of the 'science' behind it and they rely on appeal to authority and ad hominem to make arguments. It makes it easy for people with certain agendas to use misinformation to get what they want (such as the common claim 'Science tells us we must drastically cut CO2 emissions or it is the end of the world!'). I.e. you looked at the first two words then ignored the post because it said 'climate alarmist'. Being a climate alarmist, you view that the paper is hostile to your beliefs and therefore assume that it is wrong rather than actually reading and examining the arguments that are written. That is dogmatic thinking (the complete opposite of science).

Walk away? I was busy. It is up to you if you want to reply or not. I make no expectations about if people want to continue to participate or not.

Why is it so difficult for you to define 'the consensus'? Oh wait, it is because you want to change the definition whenever it is convenient for you and avoid challenges to the claims that you make. I think you are the one being childish here... There are a number of consensus about climate change, such as the consensus that increasing CO2 concentrations will increase global average temperatures, the consensus that polar regions will warm faster than equatorial regions ,etc. Then you have fake consensus that are made up by climate alarmists and put under the umbrella of 'the consensus' in a attempt to use appeal to authority and to avoid having to justify one's claims. Such claims include 'there is a consensus that climate change is bad' (such moral judgments are outside of the scope of science), and 'global warming causes extreme weather events to get worse everywhere' (talk about a poorly defined claim). I would read the paper and consider its arguments based upon the merits of the arguments used. It also helps that I'm not a rightwing denialist.

I ask you to not be vague in your claims and you continue to be vague. I guess you like hiding behind an armor of ambiguity so that you can redefine what you mean whenever it is convenient for you. The reason I ask you to define what you mean is there seems to be many different definitions of the 'consensus'. Butterflies affect the climate. What is your point? Climate Alarmists != 'vast majority of academic peers being out to lunch'

Yes 'climate change' is real. The climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years. And indeed in less than 2 billion years, the sun will get so hot that the Earth will not be able to sustain liquid water. That will indeed be a catastrophe of climate change. In 5 billion years the climate will change greatly as the sun in a red giant phase devours the Earth. That will certainly be a catastrophe. Be more specific with your claims please. I'm not 'kidding'. Now indicate where I stated or implied that 'the vast majority of my academic peers are out to lunch' or retract your claim.

Read the entire paper. I have many comments but I will post them later (no time right now). I think many people in the thread are reading too much into the 'results' of the paper.