Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions
today.duke.edu
today.duke.edu
I've concocted an example:
Statement: The rate of suicides among teenagers in the US has been growing steadily in the last two decades, to the point of constituting now a real public health emergency.
Solution 1: Naturopathic nutrition, holistic and homeopathic medicine are fundamental to ensure the well being of the young generations - courses in these subjects should be part of the standard curriculum starting from primary schools.
Solution 2: Standard psychological welfare assessment tests that can help detecting early signs of depression should be conducted at regular time intervals in schools starting from sixth grade, and counselling should be provided to those who display early symptoms of depression.
Now, I've no clue of whether the statement is true (I made it up). But I'll dismiss it readily as BS if it's followed by proposed solution 1. I'll take mental note if it's followed by proposed solution 2. I simply don't trust any statement coming from proponents of snake oil.
And I know it's besides the point, but I'd argue learning about vitimins is probably less harmful than being forced to undertake psychological testing. YMMV.
It would be solution aversion if you denied that the rate of suicides has been growing because you perceive that the main use of citing an increasing suicide rate is to push homeopathic education.
If your aversion to certain proponents relates back to what it is they are proposing, it is not really an aversion to those proponents but to their proposals.
Maybe proponent aversion would be if you denied that the rate of suicides has been growing because Obama (or black people, "liberals" etc.) had made that claim, independent of the qualities of proposed solutions.
If someone's statements can't be trusted to be true, that doesn't rationally mean their statements are evidence of their contradictions. Even if you don't trust anything Obama says, that shouldn't normally mean that "Obama says that P" is evidence of not-P.
It's not as I understood it. Solution aversion would be denying that the rate of suicides has increased just because I don't think anybody should be administered psychological well being tests. Maybe because I'm secretly afraid that the effectiveness of those tests would prove my ideologically-motivated position wrong. Other than that, I shouldn't be able to provide much logical support for my stance.
> If your aversion to certain proponents relates back to what it is they are proposing, it is not really an aversion to those proponents but to their proposals.
If it were just an aversion to their proposals, it wouldn't reflect itself onto the statement that is ultimately being denied. I could be completely averse to the teaching of homeopathy, but that wouldn't influence my attitude towards the stated problem. In order to be so, there might have to be the relation:
Proposed solution -> assessment of the proponent -> assessment of their original statement.
> because Obama (or black people, "liberals" etc.) had made that claim, independent of the qualities of proposed solutions.
The proposed solution in fact allows me to place the proponent into a classification bin: scientist vs homeopath, conservative vs liberal, alarmist vs denialist. Or just savy vs fool.
> shouldn't normally mean that "Obama says that P" is evidence of not-P.
Not strictly, but remember that, in general terms, non-P is not equally probable to P. P is a specific statement about reality; non-P is any possible other configuration of reality that negates P. That's why the burden of the proof is generally on who makes assertions, not on who denies them.
Another example might be gun/crime statistics from the NRA vs gun/crime statistics from gun-control advocates.
There's the inherent suspicion that the statistics had been twisted to fit an agenda, because you've caught that proponent or someone from the same ideological group doing it before, and that therefore the statistics themselves are untrustworthy.
I apply a mental correction factor when dealing with a group I think lies for agenda purposes -- I figure they're spinning things maximally in their favor, so what they claim forms one end of my error bars. Sometimes my expectations regarding the size of the error bars in that field lead me to believe that it's likely the data is actually centered all the way on the other side. In that sense, their statements can imply their own contradiction in some circumstances.
But the statistics are indeed critical, or must be viewed critically. E.g. the Kellerman study that said "N times more likely to be killed with a gun in the house!!! than use it to kill an intruder" is utterly bogus from the start, because gun owners don't score kills as the only type of successful self-defense uses.
That sort of critical thought, though, isn't particularly fashionable....
(Go programmers are less likely to acknowledge problems solved by generics as real, C++ programmers are less likely to acknowledge problems solved by garbage collection and boundary checking as real, Python programmers are less likely to acknowledge problems solved by static typing as real, same for Haskell programmers & lazy evaluation, etc. This is "political" in the sense, for instance, that a more popular language is tremendously more useful, so you want a language you've invested into to be popular even if it fails badly at solving a real problem; there are real benefits to denying it being a real problem if others believe it isn't real and that belief makes the language more popular.)
I disagree, the two examples (climate change and gun control) aren't that different. Both are issues of personal freedom.
I actually wish they would show some blind spots of collectivist liberal anarchists (people like Chomsky), who I feel very close political sympathies to. I am (obviously) not aware of these blind spots.
I am not sure I entirely buy the idea of "everybody has blindspots" (EHB). It seems to me that liberal democracy, the idea that everybody is entitled to their moral opinion and should have the same influence over what we consider moral, is pretty much an attempt to get rid of any blindspots. The argument EHB is akin to saying "atheists are also believers".
But it really depends on what you mean by "collectivist". Could iPhone be produced by IBM, a huge corporation with top-down command and control? It's about as likely, I would say.
I work at medium American corporation and it's not really that different from what was called "socialist" enterprise here in Czech Republic. It is certainly more efficient, but sometimes pathologically - good ideas get killed all the time. And there is not really that much less stupidity to go around.
And socialism here (I take it from your question that's what you imagine as "collectivist") certainly wasn't ideal system for liberal left, who would probably prefer some form of worker cooperatives or something like that.
Perhaps I should emphasize what I mean by "collectivist" in my previous comment. I actually refer to empathy (or less selfishness) rather than form of ownership. What I mean is understanding that other side can have a different opinion and willingness to compromise (e.g. your personal freedom) with the needs/feelings of others. It doesn't mean you have to entirely ditch the free market, for instance.
Soviet Union was able to produce something that worked, but it was all below price-quality curve. I.e. you could buy same quality product from Western corporations for less money; or you could buy better quality product for same money. Western corporations also had better selection.
So only buyers were in communist bloc, and what USSR end up exporting is oil and gas.
And that'll happen nine times out of ten, since socialist economies are not optimal.
Libertarian socialists sometimes call states like the USSR state capitalist, because economic activity is still dictated by a top-down hierarchy allocating capital and exploiting workers.
Optimal is not the word you want to use, by the way. Not even free markets are optimal, that's why economists talk about 'market failures'.
So the key difference between the USSR and the Liberal states in opposition to it is the notion of property. Under the USSR, all property is state property and under the Liberal states, property is the bourgeois notion of property.
1. The power structure, on the state level and "business" level, not accountable enough to the people it should serve - no democracy, no consumer choice. The latter was somewhat reduced in the businesses that exported (usually to the third world).
2. Tendency of the regulators to "cut down" the expenses and designating single company to produce certain thing as a means to save resources. This caused huge delays in production as the individual delays accumulated, and in fact caused waste. (I think it's actually redundancy, not efficiency per se, of free markets that is one of the causes of their resulting efficiency.)
Democracy and being able to start independent business (which is not the same as free market or capitalism!) seem to be the two main advantages of the West compared to the East. But you can also see that both problems plague large enterprises in the West, yet despite that they are workhorses of the economy. You can also see that many very successful countries have oligopolies, state-owned enterprises, strong unions, and lots of regulation in general.
I just decided to recheck the thread because I thought that parent asked something yet different, namely, how could innovation happen in collectivist system (whatever that is). I assure you there was plenty of innovation going on in the "socialist" countries; the problem was getting things approved, tested, and produced by the people who decided about resources. Similar challenges are faced by innovators at the bottom in a large corporation.
http://www.smics.com/eng/index.php The state semiconductor corp is still on 40nm, which the Taiwanese TSMC hit seven years ago.
The obvious blind spot is the problem caused by politicization of everyday life.
Faceless authority where your value is determined by market forces and laws that come far above you may feel problematic because it's faceless and impersonal. Impersonality is also benefit. When you do your job and go home, you don't have to suck up for the boss in free time and he don't care what your political views are.
In small democratic organization you have a face. The good thing is that you have a voice and can participate more. The bad thing is that you have a face. Your political opinions and your personal relationships and personality is part of the game. Your professional life is in the hands of your peers and the cliques that organically form.
I also think the point (and large success) of democracy is that it distributes power equally, so we simply stop wasting time on fighting for it and get the stuff done. Especially in direct democracy. So I think what you are saying only applies to "naive" (maybe even strawman) anarchism, where there are no rules, not the democratic one (that I think Chomsky admires).
> you don't have to suck up for the boss in free time and he don't care what your political views are
I am actually not sure this is true in small enterprises. I haven't worked for one, but I know one can get easily fired for voicing sympathies with unions, for instance.
And I actually think we should always assume "nurture". My reasoning is when you assume "nature", that's a dead end. This is a similar argument to whether the world is knowable - assuming it is will get you further.
Genetic therapy as our future? It's likely you will get choices like "you can have 1 more IQ point, bigger toenails and 10% higher risk of cardiovascular disease after 50".
On the other hand, you can do this today, and pick an intelligent partner to have kids with. And people do and we have empirical evidence of growing IQ (but actually it is explained by nurture) - regardless some still talk about how Idiocracy is our future.
As an example, I do not hold that any colonialist explanation for US involvement in Vietnam is necessary. There's an awful lot of ... circumstantial evidence to suggest that, but I don't know for a fact that anyone in the US explicitly wanted to do it for that reason - it's much more likely that simple anticommunism suffices.
After all, weren't the Chinese, in very complex ways, just wanting to "colonize" Vietnam through Ho Chi Minh?
But behind that is the message that power corrupts, and on that point, Chomsky is spot on. But I happen to think it's more about the powerful being constrained by circumstance and resources than by them simply being arbitrary. We have ample evidence of this from LBJ's White House tapes.
But that is perhaps my bias and blind spot, and maybe he's right.
Climate change is different in that cheap energy props up people who struggle economically in the US. So that's why I don't like carbon taxes as well as a solution.
Though you are trying to make a point about communities like Go, C++, Python, and Haskell, you yourself are showing certain prejudices as far as language features that are not objectively justifiable, and it's not really any different.
Similarly, many people may choose their political party because the issues the party ignores just aren't that important to them.
That's pretty much what making a values trade-off is: accepting some problems as normal and unfixable because the fix, in your eyes, isn't worth the trouble it causes.
I fully accept that global warming is real, human-caused, and a major problem in the coming century. However, I don't believe we should limit carbon emissions. Instead, we should earmark all the money that would've gone into reducing carbon emissions (a carbon tax could be useful for this) into developing comprehensive evacuation plans for every major city, as well as a fund for rebuilding. As the effects of global warming hit (which will more likely be in the form of severe weather events than a global rise in sea levels), we migrate away from the hardest hit areas and rebuild in the areas made more hospitable by climate change.
There are two advantages of this:
The first is that many climate scientists believe that it's already too late, and a tipping point was reached around 2000 that's set in motion a catastrophic climate shift that we can't reverse now. Cutting carbon emissions now is a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have left. It won't actually fix our predicament, though it may slow it.
The second advantage is that this covers a number of contingencies other than climate change. A freak hurricane sweeps up the Gulf Coast, headed for Houston or New Orleans? No problem, all of the evacuation routes have been mapped out, we've built enough roads that the population can get out (as an additional plus, this helps rush-hour traffic), and the insurance companies are ready to pay out to help the victims. Drought in California? Move to Seattle or Portland and stop buying beef and almonds. It'd help if we let the price of affected commodities (water, and the things it helps grow) float to reflect their true scarcity rather than subsidize them.
The idea is to fix the problem closer to the symptoms rather than trying to get to the source. Accept that the planet's climate will change, and then work to adapt to that with minimal dislocation rather than prevent it from changing.
Thoughts? It's certainly not the party line, but it makes sense to me. And if you're currently a climate-change denier, would this proposed solution make you reconsider the facts?
1) Migrating an entire city's population elsewhere is a MASSIVE undertaking. Not just in cost, either; we're talking about uprooting an entire population's lives and moving them elsewhere, which has all kinds of social problems. Look at New Orleans and Katrina for a great example of this. Under your strategy, pretty much the whole city should have just been abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere, but for the people who lived and worked there, this simply wasn't even on the table psychologically.
2) How do you propose to both earmark enough funds for realistic relocation/rebuilding efforts, and keep those funds safe from political interests over the span of 100+ years. It's been damn near impossible to keep Medicaid and Social Security funding in place, and those are being used by millions of people every day. "Rainy day" funds are an easy target for reallocation when budgets start getting tight.
Realistically, I think we're going to see individual cities deal with this in different ways, mostly on their own.
As for earmarking funds - one possible mechanism might be a carbon tax + insurance subsidy. The idea is to tax carbon emissions at a rate that is lower than what mandatory carbon reductions would cost, but higher than the expected value of new natural disaster rebuilding. Some of the proceeds would be distributed to existing insurance companies, which already have expertise in both investing and in paying out claims. Normal market discipline keeps this industry competitive, which eliminates the waste that would accrue if a government bureaucracy were created to do the work.
Regardless, we should have comprehensive evacuation plans for each major city worked out. That sort of work costs barely anything and has big payoffs in a lot of situations.
[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/what-would-it-really-c...
[2] http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=2&pi...
[3] http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcolleg...
[4] http://www.mckinsey.com/client_service/sustainability/latest...
[5] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/04/hurricane-sandy-vs-...
[6] http://www.livescience.com/32181-how-much-did-hurricane-katr...
Cant give a source, but the figure ive seen is 150 billion € in Germany, for nearst future.
You need to install overcapacity and service it. You need to rebuild the grid from the ground up, overengineer it massively. You need to add storage, at great expense and huge drain (batteries tend to become worn out in a few years)
What does earmarking money into a rebuilding fund mean? Hoarding U.S. dollars in some account? There is no way to save in current U.S. dollars, ie green pieces of paper, in order to help deal with civilization level catastrophes in the future. You would have to save in terms of real goods. Saving in terms of dollars simply would result in deflation in the near term as you hoard, and inflation in the long-term when you dishoard in order to deal with the catastrophe. When the catastrophe comes, there is no difference between the government dishoarding dollars and the government printing dollars. The government has a printing press, there is no difference between taking the money (metaphorically) out of a hidden vault and between printing new dollars.
Now saving now in terms of hoarding real goods, or in building physical infrastructure, could work. But it's hard to imagine what kind of real goods would be useful in case of massive catastrophe. Most likely the wrong things would be built or hoarded. We're just too far away from the problem, and the government isn't good at making those kinds of calculations. Also, it may not be that necessary. People underestimate how much more valuable flows are than stocks. When cities have been destroyed by fire or bombing, they get rebuilt remarkably quickly, as long as the human capital is still there.
But let's deliver the GP's idea a final blow: The thing you could potentially save would be cheap energy, for example in the form of carbon-based fuels. Which is incidentally what proponents of carbon-neutral energy sources are advocating, by wanting to leave them in the ground.
But I do understand the idea, and I'll go one further. The purpose of "money" is a form of claim check on the labor of other people, one that can be spent according to the preferences of each individual. When I say "save up to fund the inevitable devastation", I mean "it is probably more efficient to redirect the labor of people into fixing the problem after it happens than it is to invest it in changing production processes to speculatively prevent it from happening." I propose one possibility for this in a sibling thread: a carbon tax used to fund an insurance subsidy and additional federal disaster planning and possible infrastructure improvements. The financial & insurance industry can handle the administration; this is after all what the financial industry is for, arranging for a store of these "claim checks" so that you still have a claim on them in the future and yet they can be used for productive work in the meantime.
The government's only role here is to rectify an externality. Carbon emissions are causing harm to people not party to their production, so redistribute this back into the economy at the point that's being harmed, and let the market do the rest.
I wonder if it goes in the other direction too: people exaggerate problems and evidence if they like the proposed solution. Not even for personal gain, but for emotional reasons. (So not somebody exaggerating the threat of terrorism to consciously expand their power or sell detectors but unconsciously because of patriotism or a desire to get the terrorists.)
Nothing deserves forever, and survival of civilization in the modern world depends on adaptation, not holding fast.
Apparently that location is ... Texas.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2015/09/tex...
"Second, Texas has way more wind power than any other state. In 2014, wind accounted for 4.4 percent of electricity produced in the United States. Texas, which has more installed wind capacity (15,635 megawatts) than any other state and is home to nearly 10,000 turbines, got 9 percent of its electricity from wind in 2014."
Even though the article proposes something (green energy as opportunity for capitalism), I think there is a huge problem with climate change for free market proponents, and deeply inside they know it. I don't see how the issue, which is "the fossil fuels have to stay in the ground", can be dealt with free market only.
And I wish it had a solution, so we could get these people to cooperate and acknowledge that there is a climate change problem (for which there is a lot of scientific evidence).
You're free to take out the fossil fuels if you do not use them as fuels but make plastic or whatever (which may lead to other unrelated problems), or if you manage to someone keep the CO2 from being emitted it should also be ok (and again can lead to problems, this time related, such as local and global risk of leakage etc).
On the other hand, other greenhouse gases such as methane or those from deforestation are also problematic. The order of magnitude right now is a lot smaller than the first problem, but that may not stay so. There are also some talks of deliberate climate engineering, which, in first order, may have chances to work (most involved on a deeper level think it's too risky).
All in all, the issue is quite complicated and there are a lot of possible (technical, not just economical/social) solutions with advantages and disadvantages, which I think makes the issue even harder to acknowledge.
It also helps us forget that there's no reliable scientific evidence and certainly no consensus about what, if any, harm climate change will do to us and if it does, whether we'll have time to adapt. Somehow the debate seems to be between "it's true and there's lots of evidence" and "it's not true and I don't believe it" but in reality we really have no idea what it will do. Maybe we don't actually have to leave all the oil in the ground afterall and a few extra degrees turns out to be not much of a problem.
I wish you were right. Unfortunately, the very same vocal people (for example former Czech president Vaclav Klaus) who proclaimed that "adaptation is not a problem" now cry a river when there is a couple thousands refugees at the border from regions that are in war, probably due to drought, probably due to global warming.
> Maybe we don't actually have to leave all the oil in the ground afterall and a few extra degrees turns out to be not much of a problem.
We can always burn it. I don't see how we lose anything by leaving it there.
Show me a truly free market, then we'll talk.
The solution to pollution might just be allowing for property rights in the rivers, oceans, and air, which is not the case now. Since the state owns those regions of the environment, then market forces cannot be brought to bear in the air and water, only state misadventures and mismanagement.
E.g.
Climate change is real -> "So you are saying we should just shut down all industry and go back to the dark ages"
The establishment of Israel was unethical -> "So you are saying we should just push all the Jews currently living in Israel into the sea."
Even asking a question shows a fallacy, since it implies that the existence of an adequate solution is related to the truth of the existence of the problem. A very common example is
There might be innate differences in ability/interests between men and women -> "If this was true, what would that imply? What is your end goal here"
Just because of that, you can't derive with absolute certainty that there's "a better solution". It might just be the nature of the problem has no solutions that everyone "likes".
As my opinion on a problem diverges from society's, I fit less and less with that society, prompting me to withdraw from it.
Huh. I'm finding myself experiencing this in a range of issues in recent years.
So its not that people don't like science or don't know how to think rationally. Everyone is just really good at rationalizing their pre-existing worldview.
Question remains, what can we do about people in denial? Because many problems won't solve themself.
Literature like this makes me happy, because it is further evidence that the alarmists have very little material left. Mercifully we may have hit the high-water mark of this generation of misanthropic environmentalist nonsense and can now enjoy several decades of joking about it. The "Recursive Fury" paper[0] was probably the actual high-water mark, and this looks like pretty much the same tactic.
The fact remains that current proxy studies are thoroughly insufficient as p̶r̶o̶o̶f̶ evidence of any long-term trend we can expect to continue in a non-linear system as complex as the global climate.
I guess these folks think I must be unhappy about the "necessary solution" (oh hey, it turns out to be reorganizing society according to their political beliefs!) but that amounts to an elaborate and silly ad hominem, nothing more. I think I'll write more about the "psychology journal ad-hominem" because it has become annoyingly common in recent years.
The science of climate is not settled, and will not be settled in your lifetime. Get used to it.
[0]http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/213/4511/957
They predict about half a degree C, and that seems to be holding up.
More interesting though, what would be convincing? Computers are fast. To paraphrase the red queen, we accurately predict 6 complex nonlinear systems before breakfast. Do you think there are other hidden effects that humans haven't observed? In what sense is it not settled?
Anyway, I don't think we are talking about even close to the same meaning of "complex", but one possible situation that would help convince me is if we had a "control" planet, and an "experimental" planet, with nearly identical climates and biodiversity and so on, and then we raised the CO2 level of the experimental planet, keeping in mind that all kinds of other inputs to the non-linear system should remain the same, like land use, fishing, other industrial activities, etc. If the experimental planet diverged significantly from the control planet, it wouldn't be solid 100% irrefutable proof but it would be far better evidence than anything we have today.
So on this one issue it's impossible for you to be convinced.
Of course, if the ocean was engulfing whole communities faster than people could run uphill, or people were choking on CO2, I'd probably be a whole lot less rational about it and say "let's throw things at the wall to see what sticks."
But so far, and after reading what I figure are among the strongest arguments out there, it still looks like your typical doomsday story dressed up as science.
See, for example, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1461-0248.2001.... (yet another tribolium paper. The favorite insect of nonlinear dynamics and chaos books everywhere.)
I don't think we need to overturn anything mathematically to be able to talk sensibly about climate models, predictions, complex forcing mechanisms, and control. We just have to stop putting the cart before the horse (or the shady politician before the scientist) and look at what can be done to stabilize the ecosystem -- not necessarily worrying about catastrophic predictions, but simply looking at some of the measurable negative effects (like acidifying oceans, brought up in a sibling comment) and determining how to control the system in order to slow or even reverse those effects.
I think you imagine that you are being very rational, because you've studied some climate science and believe you're intelligent enough to form your own judgement, but you're wrong. It's extremely irrational to dismiss the consensus opinion of climate science researchers based on your own (epistomologically limited, non-professional-climate-scientist) assessment of their research.
> it still looks like your typical doomsday story dressed up as science.
And say the likelihood of this doomsday scenario being correct is 10% by your assessment: do you think a rational risk analysis would conclude that we should do nothing and go about business as usual? Do you also enjoy playing russian roulette when your not skimming climate science articles?
As far as "complex" goes, i'm thinking of the old strange attractor. I don't know if it'll rain on sept 19 2016, but i think it's safe to say there will be 3 inches of rain next september. If we refine our understanding and language, there's a nice probability density function for quantity of rain over the month of sept 2016. Not much probability around 0, not much beyond 6, but a big lump right there at 3.
I outright reject the "no model is possible" argument. If nothing else, it's that way because god wills it. Some folks argue weather is related to frequency of gay sex. I'm confident the above paper outperforms that model.
The nice thing about the above model is it is testable. we know historical variation around the prediction. We can make a prediction based on increasing CO2, then increase it, and see how our prediction plays out. (edit and we did, and the model was pretty good, but earth actually got warmer faster than the paper predicted http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evalua...)
So, anyway, weather works "somehow" and we can make forecasts. Although it's never been tested, i'm pretty sure Pat Robertson is wrong and it's not gay sex driven.
So, i still dont' get why it's not settled. The best models we have are refinements of the above paper. Is there some other model that gives better answerers?
And I like the idea that atmospheric composition could be a strange attractor in the climate system.
But then you'd have to throw the simple forcing model for CO2 out the window, and come up with a hypothesis for why there is a strange attractor somehow causing CO2 and temperature to exhibit a linear relationship. Wouldn't your favorite model have to be rewritten at that point?
And then you'd need an explanation for how the water vapor feedback forcing (a critical part of most alarmist models) fits into those dynamics. And why a similar albedo forcing or plant cover forcing or fracking-earthquake forcing or Chinese economic forcing does not. I don't think you will find it simple to describe at anything but the most abstract level. But it is an interesting idea.
Yes, i enjoy civil rational discussions (well, i try to be rational) on HN. there's a bunch of smart people and it's fun.
Anyway, i think i get your point, allow me to phrase it this way "they may be getting the right answers, but they aren't getting the answers for the right reasons"
My handwavy counter argument is, Aristotle said "continuous motion requires continuous application of force" and he was wrong. But in day to day life, if you need to move the cart, you gotta keep pushing on it. He wasn't dead wrong, he did capture some essence the truth. Newton came along and got more of it. Einstein got even more.
Allow me to put a few more words in your mouth. I think you weakly agree with the climate scientists, not the crazy militants, but the grad students sitting in a tiny office doing math. You don't think they're dead wrong, they just don't have enough of the truth to be useful, newton hasn't come along yet and shown us how it all fits together.
Ok, i gotta go get some stuff done, but it was indeed thoughtful and fun.
The notion of "proving" a future trend doesn't make sense. That's not how science works. You test a model against past data, and then people use the model to help them make decisions until we find a better model. Things are only ever proved after the fact.
> Literature like this makes me happy, because it is further evidence that the alarmists have very little material left.
That doesn't really follow. The promotion of a psychological study could be the result of alarmists running out of material as you describe, or it could just be one story in a queue of many others.
> Mercifully we may have hit the high-water mark of this generation of misanthropic environmentalist nonsense
Making generic insults at unnamed people and ideas doesn't really add anything to the conversation. Could you describe some actual nonsense that has someone's name attached to it so we could talk about it?
And the entire OP is a thinly-veiled insult aimed at the authors' political opponents. That's the point I'm trying to make, although perhaps it could be made more politely.
- The global warming part is discussed in much more detail (i.e. actual percentages, the statement that Democrats didn't show different behavior).
- Measuring the total number of violent break-ins is way easier than measuring humanity's impact on global temperatures, the available data regarding the former is a lot simpler to logically connect to "a problem" than the available data regarding the latter, etc.
- I'm not aware of any politically significant faction on the left claiming that violent crimes are not increasing, if that is in fact what researchers are claiming.
In short, it seems like the other half was thrown in there to suggest a balanced perspective (again, the actual paper may be different so this could only affect the press release).
Is actually a bit hard. That's why we (our DOJ) and e.g. the U.K. mirror direct police reports (which have under-reporting by citizens and outright falsification by authorities) with surveys, and those of course have their own problems. But, yeah, easier than climate.
I'm not aware of any politically significant faction on the left claiming that violent crimes are not increasing
I think by this you mean you think the significant factions of the left claim violent crimes are increasing?
When violent crime has been decreasing for quite some time.... My favorite point to make here is that our post-WWII history may track demographics better than anything else, the thesis behind this being the more young men in your population, the more crimes.
Let me add a favorite statistic here: since I've been watching this closely, the number of people and guns in the US have increased by roughly 50%, and the absolute number of fatal gun accidents has dropped by 25%.
That's a false comparison. Counting the number of violent break-ins is harder than measuring the increase in global temperatures, which is the fair metric to compare against. Instead of just setting up a bunch of thermometers and averaging the results, you have to settle on a definition of violent and comb through police statistics (to get the number of reported break-ins) and surveys (to get the number of unreported break-ins).
> I'm not aware of any politically significant faction on the left claiming that violent crimes are not increasing
The point of the paper is that when the proposed solution to a reported increase in violent crimes involved a policy liberals would object to, such a faction began to emerge. Whether violent crimes are actually increasing and whether liberals are currently denying said increase are both irrelevant.
The actual paper is linked to from the article posted. I only did a cursory read and didn't find it to be dripping with bias, but that's just my opinion. Here's a direct link to the paper: http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/9256
- Watch the documentary called "Pandora's Promise"
- Don't throw away aluminum or other metals if you can help it, and don't litter
- Support organizations and companies that are good members of society, at least as best as you can tell
- Encourage and persuade other people to care. Coercion is not going to work better in the long run because any scheme will eventually fall apart and at that time we will all be a lot better off if people have some kind of internal understanding of these values.
From what I can tell there has been no climate conspiracy. One thing that always helps me visualize what we are doing with our atmosphere is astronaut Gerry Carr's observation that if the earth were the size of an apple then the atmosphere would be as thick as the skin of the apple. We have a terribly fragile environment and everything should be done to conserve it. If we go 100% renewable there will still be untold amounts of damage caused to our eco-systems due to mining etc however it will be much easier to contain than the burning of fossil fuels which just spew out and spread around our minuscule atmosphere unchecked. Nuclear mining will also cause damage and while I am not against nuclear as an option it does bother me that we build nuclear stations in earthquake hotspots. This doesn't instill a great deal of confidence in me that we will make good decisions with something as potentially dangerous as nuclear in the future.
Let me take a stab at this:
> thoroughly insufficient as proof of any long-term trend we can expect to continue in a non-linear system as complex as the global climate
Sometimes, non-linearity doesn't really matter. Human body is complex system, we don't fully understand it, but you wouldn't stand in front of a car that runs 100kph. Because then we just know what is going to happen, from perfectly linear Newton's law.
In the 1950s, Plass did some equilibrium calculations of climate sensitivity to CO2. I think he came with a value around 2 degrees. Modern consensus is 3. This all happened despite decades of research, involving all sorts of additional non-linearities. What does that tell you? He was right in the ballpark, and he actually had a decent model!
Just as we cannot say what injuries you end up with in the first example, we cannot easily say what will happen to the Earth. But we are very certain it will heat up (and roughly how much). Unless of course humans on the Earth react non-linearly and decide not to emit more CO2, just like person in front of a car can somewhat non-linearly jump to the side.
And Plass definitely missed at least one non-linearity. Out of curiosity do you have a list?
> And Plass definitely missed at least one non-linearity.
AFAIK he only included CO2 and water vapor (as a feedback) in his calculations. There are many more both positive and negative feedbacks, such as methane or aerosols. But they pretty much cancel out in the end, as more complex models indicate. And Plass was completely ignorant of climate history, which is also one of the important sources of climate sensitivity estimates.
You're confusing hating cancer cells with hating all cells. Not everybody takes and exploits and degrades everything as a matter of course. A bunch of people do, and a whole lot don't stand up to them. If we don't destroy our environment it's not because we cared or payed attention, but just because we're lucky, once again. This doesn't do for me. That's all. What other people of "my generation" think is not my concern either.
I don't understand these arguments that global warming is "true" (100% likely) or "false" (0% likely). Because those probabilities are nonsensical.
Reasonable people might assign anywhere from 10% to 90% to that. Even if a person thinks it's 30% likely, that person might still find it prudent to take steps to avoid it. Or maybe not. But at least they have some thought process behind their viewpoint.
If that is what you mean, my completely unscientific guess would be a decimal, then a whole lot of zeros, then a one. And I would not find it prudent to do anything to avoid that possibility that takes longer than five seconds. The steps usually recommended are much bigger than that.
The earth climate system is not impossibly complex. The global temperature is at it's core determined by an energy balance. Visible light from the sun enters, infrared radiation leaves. Some of that infrared radiation is blocked, then temperature has to rise before the balance is restored. Simple as that, and completely uncontroversial, because proven by spectrum analysis of our neighboring planets (and the moon).
Now I know that doesn't give you hard answers to questions policymakers want, like 'will New Orleans flood from increased tropical storms? Will the Middle East and India dry out?' We don't know that, and yes, that sucks.
But we do know the effect of increased amounts of greenhouse gases. (And, for what it's worth, we do also know that carbon dioxide taxes work much better than an emission trading system does, as proven by e.g. Norway vs. European Union, and as proven by the fact that industry and fossil fuel companies actually prefer it).
And the fact that the top comment on HN is about climate change denial rather than the actual article is excellent proof of the study's truth.
Albedo is an important factor, but there is actually very much uncertainty about human influence on earths albedo, and at any rate the effect seems to be pretty small. Humans' effect on CO2 on the other hand is extremely well-established and much greater, which is why it's logical to focus on it.
Germany little experiment with solar is already causing massive issues, ecology wise too. Factories are already saying fuck it, building their own local generators, with worse exhaust and lower efficiency.
Keep adding more nonsense costs to industry in EU. And you know what? China would pick up the slack, and they hardly give a shit about anything. Right now,overdoing this locally actually increases net pollution. I guess we get to feel good.
As for China stealing European industry, that's happening already, and it's really nothing a little protectionism can't help. Protectionism is bad, but so is losing jobs, and worse is acting like you are powerless when really you aren't.
Also, Norway is just bad example, since they were literally rolling in cash. And, if most of your energy comes from hydro, a little feelgood CCS wont drive the price through the roof. Now, if you look at EU, it's mostly fossil fired or nukes. Close the nukes and force CCS on the rest - insane power costs
And don't give me solar, Germany is finding how it is failing. (Because every other day the energy prices go negative and wind/solar has right of way actual power plants go bankrupt. This in no way means they are unneeded,just that the law is broken)
Also, claiming the parent post is "clearly out of ignorance" is both arrogant and disrespectful. There are published reports from reputable sources postulating vastly different theses/opinions.
"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell
This seems to me a form of calling names, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do. Instead of telling someone that they are ignorant, it's more civil and substantive to simply post better information. They may or may not become less ignorant, but everyone else can learn something.
Are you suggesting that this was a "last resort" after "running out" of research in favor of the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis? Do you think that the Duke Fuqua School of Business is so tightly knit with the climate science community?
I think you may be biased by your hope that no further evidence surfaces; otherwise, how could you continue believing what you believe?
Take this not as criticism of your beliefs, but as criticism of how you cling to your beliefs. I try to be happy to be proven wrong, no matter the consequences. Can you say the same?
Paraphrasing Popper, it is easy to find confirmations for any theory if you are looking for confirmations. So we will see plenty more global warming anecdotes in the coming years.
But the last proxy study to get big attention was Marcott 2013, no? And I'm sure you didn't read about it on CNN, but the meaning of the abstract had to be "clarified" on that one.
Regarding Marcott 2013: are you saying that your scepticism is mainly for proxy studies, and there haven't been many recently?
What about that paper don't you trust? Have you read it yourself? (I'm reading it right now) Do you think it's intentionally underestimating the temperatures in the past to confirm that global warming is occurring?
Marcott 2013 was cited in a lot of newspaper claims that the 20th century was "the warmest of the past 10,000 years" or something to that effect. It turns out they only kept a few proxies all the way through the 20th century to generate the uptick, removing the ones that did not contribute, and eventually had to concede that their study was not a reliable basis for any conclusions about the past century:
> Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.[0]
The claim they opted to make instead is that the temperature estimates from their proxy study can be compared with thermometer readings and that the thermometers indicate higher values in recent years, a much weaker conclusion for a proxy study.
Given the history of problems with every high-profile proxy study that comes along, and considering that they are the cornerstone of any logical reasoning connecting modern temperature data to measurable long-term climate-scale trends, I suggest that the conclusions about temperature anomalies (going back more than a few hundred years) are a lot less robust than many believe.
[0]http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/respon...
Frankly, I'm sure you feel like you're winning a Bravery Contest (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates...) by posting this here, and I hate pile on, but this was blantant hyperbole.
The science of the shape of the earth isn't settled either. Nothing is ever really settled. But to "un-settle" a matter of science, you need actual evidence. Which the deniers do not have.
I take it from your argument that
1) you reject the IPCC scientific concensus that climate change is largely caused by human activity and will lead to significant impacts in the next century and
2) you disagree with the introduction of regulatory frameworks to, for example, build the external costs of carbon emissions into the economy in the form of carbon taxation.
I also assume that you think you believe 2) BECAUSE you believe 1).
Faced with a research paper that suggests that often people adjust their opinion of research based on the palatability of proposed solutions, I find it interesting that you don't see this paper as evidence that you should go back and reconsider whether your rejection in 1) is, at least in part, driven by your distaste for the kind of solution proposed in 2).
What I don't see is any reason why this research gives you further confirmation for your position with respect to 1), which would therefore reinforce your commitment to 2).
Can you explain your logic a little more clearly?
To clarify, the basic problem is that anyone talking about this story at face value will either a) presuppose that each problem is legitimate, or b) get accused of being affected by the psychology under discussion. The choice of global warming combined with the description of the effect as one of "aversion" and "denial" implies that people who don't agree with the mainstream argument are affected, while those who do agree are not. Notice how this release does not mention the equally valid conclusion that people who like a solution might be more inclined to believe that the problem it solves is real.
Being an unconventional environmentalist myself, I've seen this tactic several times before and am simply pointing out what it is: a retreat from the actual issue under consideration, and an attempt to re-frame the debate as one of psychology and the mental shortcomings of members of the opposition. Don't get me wrong, I can totally agree that some version of this phenomenon is real. In fact I've wondered many times over the years how much I might be personally affected by it. The general case is called "confirmation bias" and I'm not typically that optimistic about my own immunity to it, although I have made and will continue to make efforts to recognize and counter it. Thank you for your reminder and for being tactful and polite about it, but the idea is not news to me.
In summary, whether I may believe some version of 2) in part because I believe 1) or vice versa is an interesting question. However, immediately framing this particular research in this particular way amounts to (or will be used as) an elaborate and silly ad-hominem, nothing more. Anyone who uses it is grasping at very fine straws.