Yes, You’re Right, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Is An Idiot

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• But there has to be something out there better than plastic. Clean, gaia friendly and with virtue signalling credibility.

  Now there is people - my unicorn fleece eco-wrap has all these features. I just need £10M from crowd sourcing to commercialise it. Metro-London fund it for the sake of the planet.

  • I would like to come in with you on this scam important advance in green environmentalism.

    I can arrange for all the energy used in the manufacture of this product to be designated as carbon-neutral, since it will be saving plastics manufacture, and therefore your carbon permits can be immediately sold to other companies who need to buy them to keep manufacturing evil carbon-guzzling products like concrete, steel, medicines, electronics, etc..

    All we will need is an estimate of how much eco-wrap(tm) you intend to produce each year so that we can apply for our licence to steal money from critical industries save the world. May I suggest that your business plan should estimate a need of about 10 times the total packaging budget of the entire planet to start with? The civil servants who will rubber-stamp our application have all taken environmental degrees, and consequently can't do simple maths...

    • Dodgy, none of my business but you might wanna go with a pseudonym should you go in on it.

      • You mean, more of a pseudonym than I have already?

• Feynman’s Contention. That off their specialist subjects experts are just as dumb as the rest of us.

  Feynman did indeed say that 'science was belief in the ignorance of experts'. But he made many other 'contentions' as well - his point about the double-slit experiment containing the entire key to quantum mechanics, or his assertion that there is 'room at the bottom', for instance. I was initially confused as to which one Mr Worstall meant.

  Perhaps it would have been better to refer to Arthur Clarke, who raised this assertion to the level of a Law?

  Clarke's Second Law:
  When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  Actually, I can begin to see a ramping-up here. We move from experts being dumb 'off their specialism', to experts being dumb 'on their specialism if that counters the accepted paradigm'. With Climate Change we are now well into the stage where specialists put their fingers in their ears and refuse to listen to disproofs of their expertise - indeed, where they actively suppress and pursue anyone who they believe to hold these contrary opinions.

  I offer the small example of Professor Ian Jolliffe, the world authority on the topic of Principle Component Analysis - a statistical technique for extracting small signals from data containing a lot of noise. Michael Mann famously used this technique to produce his 'hockey-stick' graph showing current temperatures rising drastically, and he did it incorrectly, producing average temperature rises where they did not exist.

  Prof Jolliffe was oddly slow to point this out, and, after the controversy had raged for many years, was finally prevailed upon to issue a statement in which he agreed that Mann's maths was wrong - indeed, incomprehensible, and that the famous graph was therefore incorrect.

  'But', he said, 'I am sure that there are many other proofs of Climate Change, so this is not to be taken as a disproof of the theory....'.

  Could there be any better example of Kuhn's contention that 'INSIDE their specialist subjects, experts will defend the status quo where it is obviously wrong rather than make the jump to a new paradigm'?

  • Feynman:

    "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy"

    • Thank you, Mr Worstall.

      I fear, however that Kuhn's point about the paradigmatic (?) revolution of science applies to all human thinking. Including the apologies for scientists that we have today.

      Sinclair said it well - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Feynman was living in a world where scientists had some freedom - they are now all part of Eisenhower's 'scientific-technological elite.', and their salaries depend on them all hanging together.

      In many cases, therefore, they are not passively dumb - they are actively malicious. H F-W's salary depends on him supporting a plastics ban more strongly than other competitive celebrity cooks. He is probably as aware of the benefits of plastics packaging for food as you are - but he would lose his job if he said this.

      I think this is much worse than just being dumb. Dumbness can be cured. But lying to the public creates a deep hole which is hard to dig yourself out of...

      • But lying to the public creates a deep hole which is hard to dig yourself out of...

        Only if you get found out. With the Twatter SJW lynch mobs it's likely any dissent will get drowned out.

        • Ah. You are thinking about being found out by the mob, and losing your position. I am not.

          I am thinking about the deep moral hole which is being dug for society, by society. As our leaders lie and get away with it, so too do our establishment, business people and intellectuals. Soon everybody is lying, because not lying in tune with the mob is dangerous.

          It gets worse and worse. We are now at the stage where refusing to accept that a man can become a woman by saying so will lose you your job, The lies required by society will become more and more fantastic, and everyone is faced with the choice between saying what they don't believe, or being ruined. That is the deep hole which we are digging ourselves into.

• ‘But what they all wanted most was simply to come home with less plastic...’

  Then take the plastic wrapping off before you leave the supermarket and put it in a bin. *

  Too easy?

  People should learn to deal with their own problems not expect others to do it for them.

  *Good little Churmans already do this in Germany (where else?).

• I think you're the idiot not realising what idiotic and ignorant people like you who are turning the world's oceans into a plastic sea. Supermarkets are charging more because it's going through a slow development, and therefore who cares if we're spending 50p-£1 more. As the end product is saving our planet. You're the ignorant twat. And Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall isn't an idiot as he has done more research than you into this topic. As it is an issue we need to change. You're the idiot here.

  • Gaaaaaayyyy.