Miles Driven Prediction: It Is Time For Me To Gloat

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Early last month, I made a prediction: Based on my long-held opinion that instability and increases in fuel prices causes people to increase their driving, while decreasing or at least stable fuel prices causes people to decrease said driving, I predicted that

The next per capita miles driven graph will show
a reduction in miles driven from the "8.87% from peak."

Now that over a month has passed, it's time to head over to D. Short's website and view the last month's numbers.


Would you like to wallow in even bigger
proof of my awesome correctness?

As you can plainly see, March's driving numbers dropped from the February 8.87% reduction in peak driving to 9.03%, a drop of .16%. No, it's not much of a drop; but consider that it is a drop of just over a tenth of a percent in just one month!

And so here I type, gloating.

---

I think of this whole Peak Oil theory having freshly read an interesting blog post concerning "Narratives of Explanatory Value." The author outlines the current raft of mis-conceptions widely held by a disturbingly large number of people. A small taste:

• Five years after the financial crisis, the jobless rate has remained stubbornly high. Corporate profits have hit all-time highs, yet wages as a share of profits are at all-time lows. . . .
  
• The wealth of the richest Americans is growing spectacularly every year, even as people under forty are downwardly mobile and told that they will be the first generation to be worse off then their parents. . . . Overall, inequality among working Americans has risen 25 percent since 1980. . . .
  
• A vast surveillance state of unprecedented proportions has been constructed over the past decade in many Western democracies, accompanied by a draconian curtailing of civil liberties. . . . .
  
• The climate seems to be getting markedly weirder all over the globe, with hundred-year storms and weather events occurring almost every single year now. . . . People are starting to take notice of the strange weather which seems to be increasingly permanent. . . .
  
• Riots have occurred all over the world during the past five years. . . . Journalistic freedom is under threat, and Internet controls are being put in place even in Western democracies. . . .
  
• There seems to be a system in place of socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else.
  
• Despite being theoretically a representative democracy where the leaders are chosen by the citizenry, our political choices are permanently narrowed to two preselected candidates from the existing political parties who can raise the most campaign funds.

And, finally, removed from its place in the laundry list of observable phenomena that defy explanation with our current popular, media-broadcast and over-hyped—but, given their lack of insight, still bullshit—narratives, the narrative of explanatory value I find amazingly helpful in deciphering the bizarre occurrences of today: "Oil prices remain stubbornly high, despite being told that we have hundreds of years of fossil fuels left, that America is the new Saudi Arabia, and that we will soon be energy independent."

I can't blame the media for spreading their bullshit as widely as they do. They are, after all, paid for by commercial interests who make money when people fail to question the narratives that encourage quiescence and acceptance. These industry-disseminated narratives are:

underwritten by the wealthy and corporations. It is no accident that the world-view they espouse, when followed to its logical conclusion, leads to outcomes which favor wealthy investors and corporations. . . .

Embedded in these narratives are certain assumptions, assumptions which are never questioned but are implicit. These assumptions are almost never directly articulated, but have been internalized by most Americans and informs their world-view.

Why would these corporate interests push these narratives of little to no explanatory value? Simply put: "Because the media does not exist to inform or further the debate." Rather,

It exists to limit the terms of the debate, to enforce the existing status quo, to legitimize the existing social arrangements and institutions, and to provide a convenient distraction for the masses. It is designed to maximize profits and is dependent upon funds from advertisers, and the last thing advertisers want is people asking inconvenient questions (especially about the economy or consumerism). So the media plays it safe and panders to the lowest common denominator, because that is the way to maximize its profits. Hence the constant stories about celebrities, the puff-piece interviews, the rapid-fire sound bites, the arguing and bickering with no real resolution, opinion pieces with no data to back it up, the suppression of unpleasant facts, the short-attention span "news cycle," and so on.

---

Do you want to finally encounter some actual working narratives, actual theories that help explain what is happening in the world around you? They are plentiful and simple to find, really. Your first and foremost step might seem drastic, but it is necessary:

Ignore any source funded by commercial interests.

Do this one thing, and after a time the bullshit will slowly leak from the crevices of your neocortex. Given enough time to leak and be replaced, you, too, will be able to draw upon more reality-based narratives and make predictions of your own.

Predictions that will prove gloat-worthy.

Comments

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

As per the principles of the scientific method, shouldn't a correlation, any type of correlation, follow the principle of exhamining a maximum long period? You're essentially taking a one-month period featuring some minor changes (0.01%) in one phenomenon (driving) and trying to extrapolate to assert a causation with another (fuel prices). How representative is such a sample (0.01% in one month) in the real world of statistics? Are you sure you're not exhibiting a classical case of confirmation bias? (Which is yet another curious and favorite occupation of the neocortex, btw).

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Even a clock that's low on batteries shows approximately the right time, just two seconds after the measurement has been started. :)

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Sometimes "peak oil" scaremongerers tend to resort to propaganda of their own to push their own agenda, I'm sure a smart and reasonable guy like you would've already considered that as well.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I have. See below.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Right. If "gaining edge" over others is what this is all about, then I don't see how these two pieces weren't written up to gloat, as you're trying to assure the audience in that addendum.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Wow. Tough crowd tonight.

Gaining an edge can be good, can it not? And since I'm not making a secret of this theory, I fail to see how sharing a narrative and ever so slightly demonstrating its explanatory value—as opposed to the thought-stoppers that pass for news and opinion in commercial media—is a crime.

But perhaps you're right. Perhaps we shouldn't get all excited about anything, ever, just to prove we're humble enough to be taken seriously.

My bad.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Sarcasm duly noted.

Gaining an edge can be good, can it not?

Like I said - sure, if indeed that's what your purpose ultimately is.

I fail to see how ... is a crime

I don't know if anyone has mentioned anything about crimes here.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Does the winter have something to do with this? Been a nasty month in US weather wise.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I've no idea what's causing the current spike. We went last year with little to no spike like it. Milder winter, sure, could be.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

But what if my arbitrarily random predictions happen to contradict yours, and are proven correct over an extremely long (let's say, one-month) test period? Would you be prepared to retract your gloating then? ;-)

Your premise is sound. The methods of reaching your conclusion, not as much.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Quite correct. See below.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Yes I read it. I hope I'm getting this right: so you're saying you were purposefully using a flawed method to portray the flawed mindset of those who are prone to criticizing Obama, based on an extrapolation from a period that is too short? - But then you still went on to advocate for the accumulation of many small predictions based on that same flawed method, hoping that they'd somehow build up to result in a larger picture being correct?

A flawed method is still a flawed method. If you want to make a general prediction of the larger picture, just do it.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

But then you still went on to advocate for the accumulation of many small predictions based on that same flawed method. . .

The flaw, as I think we can agree, is taking too small a sampling and reaching a conclusion based on that.

The "accumulation of many small predictions" based on the larger sampling—and the theory behind—provides evidence of the explanatory value found in the theory.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

OK, but where's the larger sampling? Why opt for the smaller one over its large counterpart, assuming that you had both?

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

What if I told you that in February I had predicted that in a month's time lemonade consumption would increase slightly, despite the steady increase of lemonade prices - and it really happened in March? Would that mean that some new sort of reverse correlation between lemonade price and lemonade consumption has been discovered, or merely that it's an indication of some other factors being at play here? Like, perhaps, people's seasonal preferences to refreshing beverages with the approaching of the warm season, or something entirely different?

It doesn't work that way, I'm afraid. If you so much insist on using an unreasonably narrow time period for comparison, perhaps you should've at least compared this month's results with those from last year's counterpart period.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

To all those that question my very, very limited extrapolation, I am guilty as charged. This pair of posts (the one last month and this one) are a ridiculously simplified example of prediction and should, of course, not be taken in isolation as concrete evidence of the soundness of the PO theory.

I drafted these two posts to distill the essence of PO theory in the same way that, for example, someone who does not share fondness for our current US President might disparage the Affordable Care Act after it's been in effect for only a number of days, or a similar someone might poo-poo AGW because man, is this winter cold.

However, the rest of the graph cannot, in my opinion, be dismissed as lightly as my one-month prediction. This was, if you will, the meta-reason for the posts, to demonstrate the predictive power of Hubbert's theories (he made three of them based on his findings; only two are really ever discussed, even though the third is an eye-opener). Why is it, after almost 9 years from June of 2005—which, let's remember, was but a month away from an interesting event (http://peristaltor.livejournal.com/66451.html) only discovered after the fact—that fuel supplies have not returned to their pre-June 2005 levels, and with them the price, and with that the amount of driving we 'Mericuns do?

There is far, far too much hand-wringing going on, trying desperately to dismiss Hubbert's conclusions. And sadly, this is being done in far, far too public of places, while Mr. Hubbert's conclusions are mostly relegated to the far less traveled backwaters of media.

I did not write up these pieces to gloat about the doom that will befall us all, because I don't think such a thing is necessarily inevitable. I wrote them up to demonstrate that, with the theory clearly in mind, one can make tiny little predictions that might come to pass. Make enough tiny little predictions and one can gain an edge over others who hold to heart narratives of a far less explanatory nature.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Ya got me. Well done.