Top Scientists Deliberately Misrepresented Sea Level Rise For Years

 

Michael Shellenberger

Oct 24 ∙

For years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has claimed that human-caused climate change has accelerated sea level rise.

But that claim is false. There is no scientific evidence of accelerated sea level rise since the mid-19th Century, and thus none showing human-created emissions caused an acceleration in recent decades.

This does not mean that climate change isn’t happening. It is. It simply means that it has not caused the sea level to rise at a rate any higher than one would expect without human-caused climate change.

Not only that, but the top scientists know this fact and have deliberately misrepresented it for years, deceiving the public.

In September, I reported on one of the first global studies of sea level rise that used tide-gauge data, which is the only real-world data that goes back long enough, to the mid-19th Century, that would allow one to detect whether sea level rise had accelerated, decelerated, or remained steady.

Since then, I exchanged over 50 emails with one of the world’s leading sea level rise scientists, Robert Kopp from Rutgers University, and heard back from IPCC, NASA, and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

What I learned shocked me. For years, the world’s top scientists have known that they cannot prove there has been an acceleration of sea level rise, and yet they have told the public that they can.

Not only that, in the process of this exchange, I gained a glimpse into how the scientists have been able to mislead journalists, policymakers, and the wider public for so long.

You might think this is either old news or unimportant. Some climate scientists in years past have pointed out that the real-world data do not support claims of acceleration. And in recent years, a supposed increase in natural disasters from climate change has eclipsed sea level rise in terms of attention-grabbing headlines.

But sea level rise has, since the 1990s, been the main justification for apocalyptic climate claims, and past efforts to debunk sea level rise have failed to show that scientists were deliberately misleading. The media and others have published terrifying maps of the future showing cities underwater. Accelerated sea level is one of the main justifications for predicting very high costs for adapting to climate change. And while good scientists have debunked acceleration claims in the past, they did not clearly show how IPCC scientists engaged in their manipulations.

Not only can I prove that the real-world data do not support the claims that there has been an acceleration, I can show that the scientists deliberately misrepresented their research, and how they did it, thanks to my on-the-record email conversation with Kopp of Rutgers.

How They Did It

Scientists engaged in multiple forms of manipulation. First, they introduced modeling that, depending on the assumptions, could show deceleration, linearity, or acceleration. Moreover, given that we have over 150 years of real-world data, they didn’t need to use such complicated modeling.

Second, they used alternative and indirect measures to tide gauge data of sea level rise, whose presentation they manipulated to show acceleration.

Third, they used data from periods of time that are far too short to detect a long-term trend. Sometimes scientists point to satellite data that show acceleration over the last 30 years, but that’s far too short a period of time to show a long-term trend. Proof of that is that the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, before there were significant human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, had comparable levels of acceleration

What you’ll see in my exchange with Kopp is that he points to models, alternative data, and short-term data to imply that they support his claim of acceleration. His behavior makes clear that he understands perfectly well that he does not have the scientific evidence to claim an acceleration.

And so Kopp uses irrational tactics, including non sequiturs, or statements that do not follow logically, credentialism, or appeals to his authority as a scientist who knows more, and ad hominem attacks, namely criticisms and insults, to derail our conversation and distract attention away from the central fact that there is no real-world scientific evidence to support his claim of acceleration.

The result is, I believe, more than a damning indictment of Kopp and the other sea level scientists. It is also a fascinating look into how political activists posing as scientists can use rhetoric and bullying to maintain their deception over time.

If this is the strategy Kopp has used over the years, then it helps explain why the world has been deceived for so long.

I will be the first to tell you that Kopp knows far more about this topic than I ever will.

But all of his knowledge can’t get around the fact that he does not have the scientific evidence to make his claim of acceleration.

“A fox knows many things,” the old saying goes, “but a hedgehog, which is like a porcupine, knows one big thing.”

In my exchange with Kopp, I am the hedgehog and he is the fox. He knows many, many things, but I know one big thing: the only reliable long-term real-world data is tide gauge data, and they do not show acceleration.

Between September 2 and 4, Kopp and I each sent over two dozen emails to each other. The entire exchange was on the record, and I am making the entire exchange public here. I am not redacting Kopp’s email address since he lists it on his web page. The emails are in the correct order, even though the time stamps often are not.

	Kopp Emails 19MB ∙ PDF file
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In his first email, Kopp says, Voortman’s recent tide gauge study showing no acceleration “does not cite and does not appear to address the concerns raised in the 10-year-old paper Visser, H., Dangendorf, S., & Petersen, A. C. (2015)…”

But the Visser et al. study shows that different statistical approaches can yield acceleration, linearity, or even deceleration depending on model choice, sampling window, and treatment of variability.

And it’s not just Visser. The peer-reviewed scientific literature as a whole openly acknowledges that the models are assumption-dependent, even as the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers claims “very high confidence” in acceleration.

In Kopp’s first response to me, he implies that Visser et al. and Dangendorf et al. disprove Voortman and De Vos’ study, but they don’t. As noted above, Visser shows that different statistical approaches can show acceleration, linearity, or even deceleration. Dangendorf et al. use a combination of observations and models that have the same problem.

“There are many studies that have done tide gauge level analyses,” Kopp wrote, “with different regression models, and Visser et al address the differences among them.”

I respond by asking “how the community justifies privileging one set of results over others, given Visser et al.’s own demonstration that the answer is highly method-dependent.”

Kopp then says that the journal in which Voortman published is not credible, admits he had not closely read Voortman, suggests that Wang et al. (2025) disprove Voortman, and that other data sources disprove Voortman.

In response, I acknowledge that we have other lines of evidence (altimetry, GRACE, Argo, paleo) but that they don’t contradict the tide gauge data, which is the longest instrumental record we have and it directly, rather than indirectly, measures sea level.

I did not respond to Kopp’s claim that the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is low-quality first because it is credentialism, which is an unscientific and illegitimate appeal to authority and second because he presented no evidence to support his claim. The Journal is peer-reviewed. And even if it wasn’t, Kopp would still need to show why Voortman is wrong.

As for satellite altimetry data, it indeed shows an acceleration over the last 33 years, but that is too short to substitute for a century-plus of tide gauge data. Spatiotemporal reconstructions merge gauges with climate covariates, serial correlation structures, and regional fingerprints. Those methods are not the same as observing acceleration in the gauges themselves.

Kopp then proceeds to claim that “the data systematically — but not universally — favor acceleration, as would be expected in a world in which global mean sea level is accelerating.”

Once again, Kopp is cherry-picking and thus misrepresenting the modeling, and those outputs are based on assumptions, in contrast to the real-world tide-gauge data.

In response, Kopp points to “Wang et al 2021, 2025 and Sweet et al 2022” and claims that there is “unambiguous geological evidence for acceleration.”

But Wang et al. (2021, 2025) and Sweet et al. (2022) are not station-by-station tide-gauge audits. Rather, they are reconstructions and syntheses that show acceleration only after adjustments, infilling, and budget closure.

And there is no “unambiguous geological evidence for acceleration.” Paleo reconstructions are by definition indirect, dependent on proxies like coral terraces or salt-marsh sediments, and thus require interpretive modeling.

In response, Kopp says Wang et al., 2025 use “gauge-by-gauge linear regression model” and writes, “You seem to be stating that only models that have unreasonably simple-minded error structures (i.e., in the case of Voortman, no interannual correlations in sea level unless explained by harmonics) count as ‘not syntheses.’”

At this point, Kopp is simply repeating himself to evade the central point, which he effectively concedes, which is that the tide gauge data show no acceleration.

Kopp writes, “You seem to be saying that scientists should ignore the fact that global mean sea-level is observably accelerating…”

But, again, sea level rise is not “observably accelerating” over time horizons that would show a trend. The only scientific basis for claiming it is accelerating is through modeling. The observable tide-gauge data do not show this. To call model outputs “observable” is deliberately misleading.

Kopp then engages in ad hominem, credentialism, and projection. “Your sociological model would suggest my 2013 paper questioning the so-called mid-Atlantic US sea level acceleration hot spot would have fallen on deaf ears,” he writes. “Google says it has a respectable 181 citations, and in my experience, the reception has been generally positive.”

The fact that his study has 181 citations and a positive reception is no evidence for the open-mindedness of his colleagues or for its accuracy. As such, he is making an illegitimate appeal to authority.

I point out that his own 2013 paper acknowledged that the mid-Atlantic hot spot could reflect ocean-dynamic variability, it would take roughly two more decades to judge it unprecedented, and that the indices were within past variability.

In other words, his 2013 study adds nothing important to the study of sea level rise.

Kopp’s accusation that I am engaging in “sociology” is an interesting bit of psychological projection. Recall that he is the one who suggests that his study was somehow accurate because it had 181 citations, and the response to it was “generally positive.”

Kopp then offers an analogy that backfires on him.

“By your logic,” he writes, “we should never say ‘the temperature outside my house right now is 70 F’. We should say ‘the voltage in the thermocouple in the digital thermometer outside my house right now is 11 mV. The model of the physics of this thermocouple indicates a temperature of 70 F.’”

But his thermometer analogy underscores the problem. Converting a thermocouple’s voltage to a temperature reading is a simple, standardized measurement, while his efforts to show a “global mean sea level acceleration” are enormously complicated, requiring combining a sparse, uneven network of tide gauges with assumptions about spatial covariance, applying vertical land motion and GIA corrections, blending in altimetry, and then averaging across studies.

At this point, Kopp finds another way to talk around the problem by suggesting that he and his colleagues had not misled the public because “high confidence” refers to an assessment based on multiple sources.

It’s an outlandish claim because it’s Kopp’s introduction of multiple sources, his fiddling with assumptions, and his cherry-picking, which make his claim of acceleration not simply unscientific but dishonest.

In sum, our email conversation reveals how Kopp repeatedly introduces irrelevant information clearly aimed at derailing and distracting attention from three essential facts. First, the long-term tide-gauge record does not show acceleration. Second, the models they introduce can show acceleration, deceleration, or linearity. And, third, by cherry-picking the model outputs showing acceleration, and even using models at all, rather than direct, real-world tide gauge data alone, proves that Kopp, his colleagues, and the IPCC are covert political activists who have deceived the world into believing that sea level rise is accelerating.

Abuses of Power

Five days after our exchange, Kopp and 15 of his colleagues demanded that the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering retract Voortman’s study. They wrote that the Journal’s reviewers “failed to recognize the context of this manuscript and the breadth of the existing literature, resulting in at best a superficial review. Upon close examination, we believe the paper contains fatal methodological flaws that compromise the validity of its conclusions and merit retraction.”

But anyone who understands what I explained above will understand what they are doing.

They say that Voortman “stands in contrast both to other studies conducting similar tide-gauge analyses.” Note the language. They don’t say that other studies disprove Voortman; they say it “stands in contrast.” Nor do they say the studies did the same tide-gauge analysis; they say “similar tide-gauge analyses.”

That’s the same strategy Kopp and other scientists use to give people the impression of certain conclusions without directly lying. They complain that Voortman “failed to recognize the context… and the breadth of the existing literature…” But failing to recognize context does not mean the results are wrong.

They say, “Upon close examination, we believe the paper contains fatal methodological flaws…”

And perhaps it does. I do not know. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter if it does. The tide gauge data is the tide gauge data. They do not show an acceleration. And every other way the scientists claim to find acceleration is not scientifically valid, meaning they do not accurately measure what they appear to be measuring.

As troubling is the fact that one of the authors of that retraction demand, Richard Tol, openly admitted that he has no evidence that Voortman and his coauthor De Vos did anything that merited retraction. And yet Tol demanded a retraction anyway. Wrote Tol, “retractions should generally be reserved for fraud or irreproducibility,” and then admitted he had no evidence that Voortman and De Vos had committed fraud, nor that their results couldn’t be reproduced.

Then, Tol admitted in an email to me that he had not even read the papers cited in the retraction demand he signed. As such, Tol has engaged in precisely the kind of irresponsible, unscientific, and unprofessional behavior he is accusing Voortman and De Vos of.

Here’s the bottom line. There is no scientific evidence that sea level rise has accelerated, and, rather, abundant evidence that a group of political activists posing as scientists unnecessarily introduced models, and then cherry-picked their most alarmist outputs, used indirect data, and data from too short of time periods, to deceive the public.

And this is hardly the first time that someone has cherry-picked periods of time too short to show a trend. The New York Times did this on landfalling hurricanes, as you can see below with their graph starting from 1980, even though the data goes back to 1900 and shows no increase.

Others, including the Financial Times, manipulated the data by failing to correct the data for better detection of hurricanes in recent decades, thanks to satellites.

And the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still does this on heat waves. Google “EPA heat waves” and the first web page you’ll see reveals graphs since the 1960s. Then,the EPA made its graph from 1890 difficult to find on its website. It shows a massive spike in the 1930s before significant human emissions.

In the end, the fact that there’s no acceleration in sea level should not surprise us, given that we’ve known since 2018 that 89% of the atoll islands that scientists and the media claimed would be destroyed by sea level rise had instead grown or stayed the same size.

If I had to predict how Kopp and his allies respond to this, I suspect they will use distracting non sequiturs, authoritarian credentialism, personal demonization or ad hominem attacks, and obfuscation. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

The scientists cannot change because they have sunk their entire lives and reputations into a massive deception. It will be interesting, from a strictly psychological point of view, to watch how they behave as more people realize that they deliberately deceived the world.

This scandal is also a damning indictment of mainstream media journalists. They not only failed to see through the charade, some of them may have participated in it — all while, no doubt, telling themselves and other that they were neutral and objective “science journalists” committed to reporting the truth.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must not only immediately correct its false claim, it should invite an independent group of experts, including scientists, journalists, and policy experts, to investigate the scandal. If it fails to do so, then it will become increasingly clear to the world that it, and the scientists who create its reports, simply cannot be trusted.

why does time feel to pass so quickly?

 why does time feel to pass so quickly? between 20 and 36, nothing has changed. we need yo make life choices to give us the same sense of progression we had growing up.

Difference between left and right

 (1) Equality vs. Liberty - the more free people are the more inequality there will be. the more freedom you have to work Raj, the greater the inequality at the office as you set yourself apart. When Charlie suppresses your project, he is ensuring equality.

(2) Free Speech vs. Censorship: The left believes some speech should be censored. Some believe some words are objectively bad or do greater harm for the community. The right believes there are no ethics, and thus rights, without free speech. Rights need defending and people to take responsibility which they can't do without free speech. Also hate speech is arbitrary.

(3) Moral Responsibility: The left hold institutions responsible whereas the right holds individuals responsible. Bad stuff comes from corrupted humans whereas the right believe bad stuff comes from human. These stem from differences in human nature.

(4) Feelings are the source of ethics vs God: the left believes people are good so their feels are a great guide of ethics

(5) Rights come from the government: the left believes rights are whatever the people in power or the state say it is whereas the right believes rights come from God or a greater power

(6) The economic goals of society. The left believes in economic equality whereas the right believes in economic prosperity.

(7) Wealth distribution: the left wants to redistrute wealth whereas the right wants to create more

(8) the role of governance: the left believes the gov't ensures equality whereas the right believes the gov't ensures liberty

(9) Who takes care of the family, you and community: the left believes it should be state to take care of humans by ensuring equality. the right believes the individual takes care of ourselves.

(10) Size of government: the left wants a big government and the right believes in small government and big individual

(11) Authority in a child's life: the left believes the state (e.g. the education system) is the primary authority whereas the right believes the the parent is the primary authority

(12) the ideal family: the left believes the ideal family is any group of loving individuals whereas the right believes in the nuclear family. Implicitly the right believes in ideals.

(13) primary categories of human: the left believes the major division between humans is by power reduced to gender, race and class. the right believes in categorizing by moral beliefs.

(14) gender/sex: the left believes gender is a societal construct whereas the right believes sex is in nature

(15) the most important trait for children: the left believes in cultivating self-esteem whereas the right believes in cultivating discipline.

(16) good and evil: the left believes in moral relativism whereas the conservatives believes in moral absolutes

(17) the moral status of America: the left believes America is not a net gain to humanity whereas the right believes America is obviously a positive gain for the world

Economic growth is required for sustainability

There are 2 methods to grow the economy: (1) increase resource consumption or (2) produce more benefits per unit of resource consumption (i.e., increase productivity)

A lot of people think producing oil & gas grows the economy exclusively by method (1). It's easy to see how they come to this belief: we take barrels out of the ground, sell them on the market and count the sale price towards GDP. The more barrels we take our of the ground, the more we grow GDP.

However, if we consider what the world would be like without oil & gas production, it's clear that producing oil & gas grows the economy primarily by method (2). If the world stopped producing oil & gas in the world, the vast majority of the world would clear cut forest to heat our homes, cook our food and grow food without the help of fertilizer which is what we did for thousands of years. So oil and gas production grows the economy by producing 1000s of times more energy per unit of land than we would without it.

If oil and gas workers didn't go to work everyday, there's no way we would be able to set aside vast tracts of land for recreation because we'd have to clear cut and farm it to avoid famine. So contrary to popular belief, oil & gas production is not detrimental but essential to environmental conservation.

Obviously, oil & gas production is not harmless but it's far better than the alternative and it also provides society with the wealth it need to feed the minds that will invent and discover even better energy sources. Maybe we could have stable nuclear fusion powering our society in 50 years if we had 500 million more healthy and educated humans contributing the economy instead of starving to death.

So economic growth is NOT about increasing consumption for the sake of consumption. Economic growth is about producing the means for us to feed people, raise families, conserve nature, explore space, create art, build cathedrals, solve math problems, cure disease and essentially reach potential as individuals and a society. GDP stands for gross domestic "product".

Corporate Games

Life is too complicated for humans to understand in full so we play games in hopes that it'll lead to good outcomes. Every company has a game and we should all be very interested in figuring out that the rules are. Rules of the game outline how a player wins or loses, gains points and how they can be disqualified from the game. How is it possible to be playing a game without being aware of it? It's not. If you're not playing the game you are part of it as an NPC.

Communism and Capitalism are games.

What is the Capitalism game? People organize themselves into hierarchies governed by contracts with aim of producing some good or service for the sake of generating as much profit as possible (max profit = PQ - c). A successful firm will develop a game for its participants to play that generates profit. There might be a game that serve the firm better but the firm knows the current game has worked in the past. Firms may fail when the game no longer generates the desired benefits. A firm must evolve the game it plays if it wants to continue to succeed over the long term. We all live longer, eat better and are generally happier when we play the Capitalism game. There's another game, Communism, that can also be played. Taking it too seriously leads to tyranny, mass starvation and arbitrary imprisonment.

Firms within the same industry play similar games.So what is the finance game? Small aspects of finance require high level math and deep familiarly with thousands of financial products and regulations but the majority of the money in finance is in safest and most boring versions of the following: stocks, options, bonds and mutual funds. Unlike in manufacturing, revenue are not unlocked by overcoming design, engineering and logistical obstacles. The most common obstacles in finance are take form of prisoner's dilemma game series. Both sides agree to a board set of actions and outcomes but the details are left vague to allow all parties to fulfill their commitments to the best of their ability - however that also means that both sides are left vulnerable to the quirks, incompetence and character flaws of the other once a deal is signed. If both sides cooperate in good faith, the deal is done and everyone splits the benefits. If either side shirks for any reason, the other side will lose trust and shirk as well. Both side will then be locked in a series of low benefit uncooperative equilibriums.

The game is getting projects done and the most important factor for getting projects done is trust because it's the only way to obtain true competency when everyone has large incentives to lie. You need to have trust in-order to procure the project, you need trust among the working teams in-order to execute the project and you trust to get the advice needed to prevent a disaster.

So networking is about getting the relationships and competencies you need to get shit done. It's also about advertising your competencies and willingness to form relationships to others. A firm with a well networked and competent workforce can execute on a lot of deals and make a ton of money. MS expands its network it gets to make more deals and make more money.

So interesting.

Topic: Fasting is the Obvious Answer to Obesity

The most obvious solution to losing weight is to stop eating and obesity is one of the most deadly diseases. Yet so few people would ever consider fasting for losing weight. People across all cultures fear not eating which is very odd humans evolved to survive without regular access to food and fasting is recommended by the all the great world religions. Fasting is easy. Literally anyone obese can do it and it does not require any medication, trainers, restriction of activities, shopping, cooking and cleaning. To the contrary, fasting will save time and money. 

Humans are built to fast, they’ve chosen fating to make themselves healthier for thousands of years and they will save substantial amounts of time and money. So it’s very odd that we have come to fear it when it’s needed more than ever. 

On one hand it’s obvious how fasting works. A person doesn’t consume any calories, their body burns fat which leads to weight loss. But why doesn’t consuming less calories work? The same logic applies but millions of earnest people have failed to lose weight using that strategy. The devil is in the details. Fasting used to be imposed on humans by nature. Vegetables and fruit aren’t always available in all places and successful hunts are sporadic by nature. We are adapted for feast and famine cycles. It’s why we so easily put on fat. 

The human hormone insulin drives fat storage. High insulin levels stores fat and blocks the conversion of fat stores to energy. This fact apparent when insulin is artificially increased in diabetics and fat storage increases even under the most restrictive of diets. The relationship is so tight, fat accumulation appears right in the area where insulin is injected. When humans stop eating for a couple days and they body has figured out it’s not eating anymore, insulin levels drop and it stays low. The body stops storing fat and actively converts fat into ketones and glucose. Essentially, human fat stores are turned into water and carbon dioxide. When it comes to weight loss, that’s it. Reducing calories does not work because insulin levels stay high when we eat numerous small meals. High insulin levels blocks the body’s access to fat - even when there’s limited caloric intake to support regular activities. So when a person is on reduced calorie diet, they do not have access to calories in their fat stores. Their metabolism adapts by ramping down and decreasing the amount of energy available for daily activity. The dieter becomes tired and irritable. They may still lose weight but at a much slower rate than simply by fasting and a higher proportion will come from the break down of muscle. 

Fasting, on the other hand, opens up vast caloric reserves for the body to use. Metabolism will remain high, facilitating weight loss and the faster will experience only limited changes in their mood. Their daily activity will not be impacted. The brain prefers ketones as an energy source and the liver is able to easily convert ketones to glucose for muscles. Hunger is also not a problem because the hunger hormone ghrelin also drops and stays low when fasting whereas it stays high on a calorie deficit and the dieter lives daily starvation. 

Autophagy is another benefit of fasting. The energy expended in digestive can be redirected towards cellular repair. When insulin declines, glucagon increase and stimulates autophagic processes. At the same time, fasting also increases growth hormone which stimulates the creation of new cells. 

So fasting and calorie deficit dieting seem like they should be equally effective until we look at what is happening at the hormonal level inside the human body. When we take into account hormones, fasting is vastly superior to dieting. 

The hardest thing about fasting is the social alienation. Fasting was societally regulated in religious societies. In Christian societies, intermittent fasting was required on for the 40 days of Lent, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday for most denominations. Muslins fast during Ramadan and Buddhist fast during periods of extended mediation. Fasts were balanced by societal feasts. Everyone fasted and feasted at the same time.  

In modern life, there are only feasting seasons like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fasting is done alone and the practice itself comes off as judgemental and/or abhorrent. Fasting also opens up a lot of time and humans like to think about food when they are bored, whether or not they are fasting, but it makes fasting seem extra difficult. Ideally, fasting takes place during a busy time during the year when it is easy to forget to eat. Fasting should also be balanced with feasting to rejuvenate social relationships, replenish exotic nutrients and build new cells. 

Topic: Is self-esteem a valid psychological concept?

Topic: Is self-esteem a valid psychological concept?

Self-esteem is fake news. Meta analysis of over 10,000 studies have only found weak evidence that higher levels of self-esteem result in better life outcomes like teen pregnancy, substance abuse or delinquent behaviour This means that educators have wasted an enormous amount of time and resources over the last 30 years developing self-esteem. The losses are not limited to the education system. Generations of students will continue to waste an order of magnitude more time and resources seeking self-esteem for no benefit throughout their life. The bleeding could have been stopped if psychologists, educators and promoters would have waited for more evidence and quickly dropped the concept when it was clear it wasn’t objectively valid. 

“The associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent. The nonrelationship holds between self-esteem and teenage pregnancy, self-esteem and child abuse, self-esteem and most cases of alcohol and drug abuse. . . . If the association between self-esteem and behavior is so often reported to be weak, even less can be said for the causal relationship between the two.” (https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/truth-self-esteem)

Was self-esteem ever a valid psychological concept? Validity is a binary evaluation. A concept is either valid or it’s not at any moment in time. A concept can be valid at one point in time and invalid at another. From an objective point of view, if a concept is found to be longer valid, it was never valid to begin with however. This means that most valid concepts that we have today, will likely be shown to be invalid later which means that most concepts we have today are likely to be invalid. That the sun revolves around the Earth was always an invalid concept. However, it was subjectively valid a thousand years ago. So what do we mean when we say a concept is valid? A psychological concept (or model) is objectively valid if when all humans across all time and space assume it true they are are able to successfully predict and manipulate the external world. A psychological concept (or model) is subjectively valid if when individual humans it is true they are able to thrive. 

Self-esteem failed on both counts. It neither led to scientists being able to predict outcomes nor have individuals who believed in self-esteem flourished. It may have been once subjectively valid. If life is terrible enough, applying methods to develop self-esteem will not do much more harm and some of the methods might coincidently be very similar to methods recommended by a better concept. So some people starting a certain place will flourish and concept will be subjectively valid for this people for a time. A concept stops being subjectively valid when the subject becomes aware of another concept, that when assumed true, would lead to continued and greater flourishing - and it will be closer to an objectively valid concept. 

Is there concept that is more subjectively valid and more likely to be objectively valid? The Big 5 personality model which has stronger evidence behind its predictions and is theoretically more sound. Its current objective validity means that individuals aware of the model are more likely to flourish due to the principle that accurate and precise perception of the external world will better empower a conscious mind to replicate itself. At least - that has been my experience. 

So self-esteem is no longer a valid psychological concept for most people because its supporting evidence is weak and they are aware of the Big 5 model of personality. It’s an interesting conclusion that bad ideas can be subjectively valid for people unaware of better ideas which means the point of education is to offer concepts that the educators finds valid and persuade the student to find those concepts valid as well so that they can flourish - and their flourishing is our flourishing.