“The Skeptical Environmentalist” by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor of statistics and former member of Greenpeace who evaluates the facts on various environmental issues. It is a great read and I’m glad I’m doing it but it is rather long.
Most of this sounds good. The last seems less so. Lomborg makes occasionally valid points but the book is in many ways an exercise in motivated cognition.
Have you read the book? The entire premise was that he was debunking claims and ended up being persuaded by them; this seems like the opposite of motivated cognition.
I won’t deny that it seems fairly one sided but it does seem like taking opposing views would be difficult, since he uses the same citations as groups he disagrees with and presumably is better with statistics as a statistics professor; I don’t mean to say that one should be totally convinced by his arguments, but more convinced than I should be by all the arguments without statistics I’ve heard before which were about 50 times as much motivated cognition.
Have you read the book? The entire premise was that he was debunking claims and ended up being persuaded by them; this seems like the opposite of motivated cognition.
Yes. I have read it. I’m familiar with what he claims he is doing, and frankly, I couldn’t tell if it was dishonesty or general lack of self-awareness about his own cognitive processes.
This is not to say that he doesn’t make good points on occasion. And a lot of the responses to him demonstrated about as bad motivated cognition or worse.
There’s a January 2002 Scientific American that had multiple essays discussing the book, some of which are worth reading, and illustrate how some of the scientists he is citing have said explicitly that he’s misinterpreting their work.
That’s not to say that the book is a complete waste of time. There are two general points that Lomborg does make that I found to be worth-while: One, that everything has trade-offs and that much of the environmental movement doesn’t appreciate that and how one should look at the marginal rate of return. I suspect that this sort of argument won’t be at all original to most readers of LW. Two, that by many metrics much of the developed world is environmentally better off now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and by some metrics for some large cities, even larger spans of time. There are also interesting statistics he brings up which by themselves are useful for understanding a larger picture of the world.
The problem with a book like this that touches on a lot of different areas where the author is both not an expert and where experts in some of the areas have specifically pointed out issues with his interpretation of their fields is that it is very hard for a non-expert to tell when he’s made a good point and when he’s using the data well.
I intended to post this earlier but it didn’t seem to go through: I’d be interested in references to the responses you have in mind, so that when I finish the book I could read them and incorporate them into the summary.
Unfortunately, the last time I paid attention to this book was shortly after it came out, so I don’t have a lot of references off-hand. The already mentioned Scientific American seems to be a good place to start (although note that when Lomborg wanted a right of response SA behaved not so well.)
Mk, well chances are it will be a while before I finish the book since I have a lot else to do at the moment; if you stumble across anything let me know otherwise I’ll search myself when I get around to it.
Most of this sounds good. The last seems less so. Lomborg makes occasionally valid points but the book is in many ways an exercise in motivated cognition.
Have you read the book? The entire premise was that he was debunking claims and ended up being persuaded by them; this seems like the opposite of motivated cognition.
I won’t deny that it seems fairly one sided but it does seem like taking opposing views would be difficult, since he uses the same citations as groups he disagrees with and presumably is better with statistics as a statistics professor; I don’t mean to say that one should be totally convinced by his arguments, but more convinced than I should be by all the arguments without statistics I’ve heard before which were about 50 times as much motivated cognition.
Yes. I have read it. I’m familiar with what he claims he is doing, and frankly, I couldn’t tell if it was dishonesty or general lack of self-awareness about his own cognitive processes.
This is not to say that he doesn’t make good points on occasion. And a lot of the responses to him demonstrated about as bad motivated cognition or worse.
There’s a January 2002 Scientific American that had multiple essays discussing the book, some of which are worth reading, and illustrate how some of the scientists he is citing have said explicitly that he’s misinterpreting their work.
That’s not to say that the book is a complete waste of time. There are two general points that Lomborg does make that I found to be worth-while: One, that everything has trade-offs and that much of the environmental movement doesn’t appreciate that and how one should look at the marginal rate of return. I suspect that this sort of argument won’t be at all original to most readers of LW. Two, that by many metrics much of the developed world is environmentally better off now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and by some metrics for some large cities, even larger spans of time. There are also interesting statistics he brings up which by themselves are useful for understanding a larger picture of the world.
The problem with a book like this that touches on a lot of different areas where the author is both not an expert and where experts in some of the areas have specifically pointed out issues with his interpretation of their fields is that it is very hard for a non-expert to tell when he’s made a good point and when he’s using the data well.
Voted up.
I intended to post this earlier but it didn’t seem to go through: I’d be interested in references to the responses you have in mind, so that when I finish the book I could read them and incorporate them into the summary.
Unfortunately, the last time I paid attention to this book was shortly after it came out, so I don’t have a lot of references off-hand. The already mentioned Scientific American seems to be a good place to start (although note that when Lomborg wanted a right of response SA behaved not so well.)
Mk, well chances are it will be a while before I finish the book since I have a lot else to do at the moment; if you stumble across anything let me know otherwise I’ll search myself when I get around to it.