August 2022 letter from 17 state attorneys general sent a letter to Blackrock asking them to stop using their pension money for political purposes, saying “Based on the facts currently available to us, BlackRock appears to use the hard-earned money of our states’ citizens to circumvent the best possible return on investment, as well as their vote.”
Climate Science: What Does it Say? A conversation between Dr Jordan Peterson and Dr Richard Lindzen
Conspiracy theories aside, there is something fishy about the Great Reset, Open Democracy
A big Slideshare deck on cognitive biases - fun!
Science is evolving in the wrong direction due to wrong incentives, by Ed Yong in the Atlantic
The sad case of Linus Pauling, who won two Nobel Prizes and couldn't see the forest for the trees.
An amazing essay, The Return of Nature, by Jesse Ausubel
Who fact-checks the fact checkers? Do fact checkers have a strong code of conduct and strict guidelines for which facts they will check, and how? No, say Butler and Uscinsky, and they have looked hard at the issue.
To fix science, allow people to bet on outcomes - a Robin Hanson thought piece.
Buying votes to influence corporate decisions? Yes: Quadratic Voting as Efficient Corporate Governance, by Weyl and Posner.
The famous Dr Fox lecture, in which an "expert" delivers a bullshit lecture and people accept it as brilliant - 6 min.
Remember that big hole in the ozone layer we managed to patch up by getting rid of CFC molecules? It probably had nothing to do with CFCs and is just natural variance.
Predictocracy - a book on how prediction markets will help us all make better decisions.
Remember DDT? We banned it. We shouldn't have.
Publication Bias and Motivated Reasoning - Scilogs piece
Chris Cancialosi on why your financials should be transparent.
Donald Hoffman's excellent TED talk on the gap between perception and reality.
Build a Change Platform, not a Change Program - by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini
From the front lines of the California water drought: Almond farming uses as much water in one year as all of Los Angeles uses in three.
Very exciting, please explore The Center for Open Science
An important piece by Gary Hamel: Beaurocracy Must Die.
The Fundamentals of Decision Quality - video by the Strategic Decisions Group
Prediction markets beat experts at setting odds for FIFA world cup - research paper
“Even the famous Erin Brockovich incident has been ‘debunked,’ Johnson says. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.” - from the Scientific American blog, "Sorry, but So Far the War on Cancer has been a Bust."
The War on Drugs Does not Work and Never Has - London School of Economics study
Cutting Through the Noise Blog
Nobody does anything until it's too late.
— Michael Crichton
Why Sustainable Business needs Better ESG ratings — an MIT Sloane commentary showing that the ratings are arbitrary and the results are debatable
The Inadequacy of Wind Power, a GWPF paper
Challenging Net Zero with Science, by Will Happer and Richard Lindzen
No Matter Your View on Climate Change, Pricing CO2 is Harmful… Why? — by Lars Schernikau
Federal Regulators Should Approve Election Prediction Markets — op-ed piece by John Bailey
My interview with Andrew Stotz — we need a better system for quantifying risk than ESGs.
The CEO’s ESG dilemma — Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance:
In a recent PwC survey, global investors placed ESG-related outcomes such as effective corporate governance and greenhouse-gas emissions reduction among their top five priorities for business to deliver. But 81% went on to say they would accept only a 1 percentage point or smaller reduction in returns to advance ESG objectives—both those that are relevant to the business and those that have a beneficial impact on society. And roughly half of that group were especially unyielding and would not accept any decline in returns at all.
Why Facts Don’t Change our minds — The New Yorker
Speech by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, President of Sri Lanka (ESG score = 98.1) at COP 26, on 31 Oct 2021
hange Our Minds: New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason — The New Yorker
Reframing the climate debate: The origins and diffusion of net zero pledges — a peer-reviewed paper. Abstract:
Achieving net zero emissions has rapidly become the dominant long-term objective guiding national climate policies. At the end of 2018, only 24 countries were considering or had adopted long-term net zero targets. By the end of 2021, this had climbed to almost 150 countries, covering 89 per cent of global carbon emissions. ... The norm of net zero has been institutionalised at the global political level in the period 2015–2018 and cascaded through the international system in 2019–2020. Yet, it remains subject to various forms of contestation, most notably regarding validity, fairness, scope, and implementation. The norm is now at a critical stage in its lifecycle that will decide whether it gets institutionalised or suffers backsliding and even erosion.
Sweden stops subsidizing electric cars — a step in the right direction. Now, they should add a tax of $10k on each one to offset the environmental damage they do.
Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings, by Berg et al.
This paper investigates the divergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings based on data from six prominent ESG rating agencies: KLD, Sustainalytics, Moody’s ESG (Vigeo-Eiris), S&P Global (RobecoSAM), Refinitiv (Asset4), and MSCI. We document the rating divergence and map the different methodologies onto a common taxonomy of categories. Using this taxonomy, we decompose the divergence into contributions of scope, measurement, and weight. Measurement contributes 56% of the divergence, scope 38%, and weight 6%. Further analyzing the reasons for measurement divergence, we detect a rater effect where a rater’s overall view of a firm influences the measurement of specific categories. The results call for greater attention to how the data underlying ESG ratings are generated.