From: David McFadzean (davidmc@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Nov 24 2005 - 08:45:10 MST
On 11/22/05, Thomas Buckner <tcbevolver@yahoo.com> wrote:
> By comparison, former NH governor and White House
> chief of staff John Sununu reputedly has a 180 IQ
> and eidetic memory (both of which I would kill
> for) but somehow managed to be an utter fool in
> my estimation (among other follies, circa 1990 he
> ran a climate sim on his home computer, which
> couldn't have been much better than a 386 with a
> couple megs of ram, and decided global warming
> wasn't for real! When real climatologists running
> supercomputers weren't willing to place total
> faith in their sims.) If there's a better parable
> illustrating that IQ-isn't-everything, I'd like
> to hear it.
There is another possibility here. Perhaps Sununu ran his little
program enough to gain an intuition into the chaotic nature of
dynamical complex systems like weather simulations. He observed how
small changes in the inputs and assumptions led to large changes in
the results and (correctly) reasoned that running on a supercomputer
isn't going to mitigate that problem. So he concluded that
climatologists couldn't possibly know with any degree of certainty
from running their own simulations whether global warming was going to
happen.
:D
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