You can tell someone is irrational if they don’t believe global warming is happening. You can’t conclude much if they believe it is caused by human action, as this is now de rigeur for any one democratic/liberal/educated/cosmopolitan. I don’t know what you can conclude if they believe it is happening but aren’t convinced that it’s caused by human action; but this is a small enough percentage of cases that you don’t really need to classify them.
You can tell someone is irrational if they don’t believe global warming is happening.
It’s not like a normal person can observe such changes—we’re talking fraction of a degree over lifetime so far (Wikipedia says 0.74 ± 0.18 °C over entire 20th century).
It’s a matter of your level of trust in “mainstream” scientists, and there’s nothing particularly irrational about not having terribly much trust here.
And even global warming is real, it’s still instrumentally rational to be wrong—let other people limit their carbon emissions, the world in which you drive SUV and everyone else overpays for Priuses is the optimal world for you to live in. (it would be even better to believe correctly in global warming, but be cynical enough to not give a shit about it, but many people have some sort of cynicism limit...)
it would be even better to believe correctly in global warming, but be cynical enough to not give a shit about it, but many people have some sort of cynicism limit...)
You don’t have to be especially cynical, just recognize the situation as the collective action problem that it is. I’m not that cynical but I’m also not a dupe.
Also, not believing in global warming, if global warming is real, is likely to lead you to do stupid things like accepting certain bets on global mean temperature fifty years out and purchasing coastal properties. So I don’t think it is instrumentally rational, either.
Key word there was rationalization. If terminology is the problem, replace “egoism” by “selfishness” and my point remains the same.
I don’t buy rational egoism. What is rational is whatever advances one’s goals—goals which may or may not be selfish. Considering our inbuilt empathy & love for our families, the general case is that our goals will not be purely selfish.
Even if I was a rational egoist, though, actually believing something against evidence (as distinct from declaring belief or not caring) is utterly irrational.
It is irrational in a way that it recognized limitations of human rationality, and decides that sometimes you’re better off not knowing. Perfect rational being would not need it—human being sometimes might.
“Oh all right,” said the old man. “Here’s a prayer for you. Got a pencil?”
“Yes,” said Arthur.
“It goes like this. Let’s see now: ‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decide not to know about. Amen.’ That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”
“Hmmm,” said Arthur. “Well thank you—”
“There’s another prayer that goes with it that’s very important,” said the old man, “so you’d better jot this down, too.”
“Okay.”
“It goes, ‘Lord, lord, lord...’ It’s best to put that bit in just in case. You can never be too sure. ‘Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.’ And that’s it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part.”
In all seriousness, ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but conscious, willful ignorance is reprehensible. Let’s actually make an effort to be all right with the way the world is, before we throw up our hands.
I choose to be ignorant about certain things all the time—every moment of my life spent on anything except reading Wikipedia is a choice of selective ignorance.
How much does your life improve by having more accurate view of global warming research, as opposed to being vaguely aware of it but fairly skeptical either way like most educated people? I’d guess improvement will be tiny, and the risk of such knowledge triggering your world-saving instincts is not worth it.
I choose to be ignorant about certain things all the time—every moment of my life spent on anything except reading Wikipedia is a choice of selective ignorance.
True, but that is ignorance-of-omission. You seemed to be advocating a conscious decision to keep yourself ignorant of certain well-defined areas of knowledge. Apologies if this is not so.
How much does your life improve by having more accurate view of global warming research...?
Well, here’s the hedonistic vs. goal-oriented view of rationality again. Not everything I do is directly related to satisfying immediate whims. I am a voter and also an engineer, as it happens. Both of these circumstances imply I have an ethical obligation to be at least somewhat conversant on questions of public policy & the environment.
I’d guess improvement will be tiny, and the risk of such knowledge triggering your world-saving instincts is not worth it.
If my “world-saving instincts” should be triggered, I want them triggered. Again, as a bare minimum, public policy depends on an informed public, and GW is a policy problem. But uninformed consent in a democracy is pointless, it doesn’t count. We might just as well save money on ballot paper and install a grand Doge for all the functional difference it would entail.
It’s not like a normal person can observe such changes—we’re talking fraction of a degree over lifetime so far (Wikipedia says 0.74 ± 0.18 °C over entire 20th century).
That’s not necessarily true—first, the temperature change is not uniform everywhere, and second, the effects of such changes on weather may be noticeable in ways other than simple warming (e.g. more extreme weather events). Certainly day-to-day observations cannot support the kind of confidence that many scientists have in their conclusions about global warming, but they can lend slight credence to such statements.
But it’s non-uniform enough that some people are observing warming and some are observing cooling. So it seems clear from a perspective that accepts the terms of the claim that all purely local observations are uninformative.
second, the effects of such changes on weather may be noticeable in ways other than simple warming (e.g. more extreme weather events).
Tracking extreme weather events from a local perspective seems likely to give even less reliable results than looking for trends in your local climate.
If you accept the terms of the debate, you have to hope for non-biased global observations that are properly normed against a long baseline in order to make any decisions about what weather evidence counts for or against the positions. At this point, I’m having a hard time finding any non-biased observations.
Fair enough—I was quibbling, to a large part because:
The weather in my home region has gotten weird compared to my childhood—many mild winters and summer droughts, for example.
An Alaskan on DeviantArt a while ago wrote a prose piece about how she was always freezing, never warming enough in the summer to withstand the following winter … and prefaced it with a matter-of-fact note about how that wasn’t the case in recent years.
Hence, when you commented that “[i]t’s not like a normal person, can observe such changes”, that seemed to contradict my own experiences. But given the prior attitude effect, my experiences should probably be discounted a fair bit.
I don’t think this is a fair assessment. I was a global warming supporter up until I saw that awful movie by Al Gore; his inept, unscientific presentation drove me to start looking into the situation.
What I found was a great deal of controversy over the figures—some of the charts cited by Gore tended to suggest the opposite of his thesis (assuming he even had a thesis—that man’s all over the place); that CO2 follows warming, rather than triggers it.
After looking into it further—and hearing a dozen different sets of conflicting data—I eventually gave up on understanding. I don’t know enough about the subject matter to make an accurate judgement, and various sources on all sides of the debate have proved themselves to be biased or incompetent. Alcor I trust to lay out factual information on ‘vitrification’ - whatever the hell that is. The IPCC on the other hand has a political motivation, as (probably) do many of the scientific skeptics.
As a rough estimate, I’d assign a 60% chance that global warming is occuring, while maybe a 10% chance that the climate’s cooling. This is completely ignoring the probabilities of it A) being man made, B) being catastrophic (or even bad), and C) of being correctable by current policies.
Unless if you’re a climatologist or a meteorologist, I’d be very suspicious of strong stances on the matter. Perhaps a better test would be whether somebody supports A) cap-and-trade or B) using a ‘science fiction’ solar-umbrella satellite to cool off the earth.
After looking into it further—and hearing a dozen different sets of conflicting data—I eventually gave up on understanding. I don’t know enough about the subject matter to make an accurate judgement, and various sources on all sides of the debate have proved themselves to be biased or incompetent.
I sympathize. Frankly, most of us don’t know anywhere near enough (nor should we, realistically) about climate science to truly assess the evidence ourselves, particularly when the models necessary for prediction are so complex. What to do in this case? I think we should consider the weight of opinion of actual experts. If you do this, the balance tips markedly towards AGW.
What about vested interests, you say? Well they exist on both sides, but on one side we have the fossil fuel lobby and on the other… conflict of interest wrt research grants (which is not just a problem in the case of global warming!).
Bottom line: If you can’t assess the evidence directly yourself, delegate wisely.
I generally agree with your heuristic—eg: arguing “this light should be green for longer to improve traffic efficiency” is ridiculous—but when money or politics get involved it tends to break down. For money, “Red light cameras are there to improve traffic safety, not as cash cows, and the various municipal-funded studies can be relied upon.” For politics, “We have to have a speed limit on the highway, even if it’s irregularly enforced, because allowing people to drive whatever speed they want is just crazy—it’d never work! The cops ticketing speeders are just protecting us from ourselves.”
A better corollary than the traffic issue however, would be medicine; while the majority of us on LW (I suspect) will blindly accept the broad-strokes declared by the medical community, while simultaneously distrusting the rationality of most doctors; when it comes to a specific treatment for a serious condition most of us would be researching it ourselves This goes doubly for the psychiatric field, and area as dominated by the politics of popular thought as it is by the pharma dollars.
This is why I remain dubious about AGW (let alone Catastrophic-AGW). On the one hand we’ve got the oil lobbyists, and living in oil country I hear constant anecdotes about how slimy they are; but on the other side you’ve got the IPCC, a group of technocrats with a prior commitment to big government who are in charge of directing the research. There’s a political bias at work, which I find even more frightening than the oil companies’ profit motive.
As for the rest of the scientists, which ones have actually done the research, and how many are just following the conventional wisdom? Medical doctors still recommend a diet which was created by George McGovern, and I’d be surprised if more than fifty percent of them actually understand evolution (rather than just believe it) - a ridiculously simple theory when you study it.
Several prominent candidates pop up when you consider the IPCC’s bias—are they anti-1st world (Carbon Credit transfers to the 3rd)? Anti-free market (heavy regulation and monitoring for all)? Or—and I think this is a major component of most green activists—are they just simply anti-car? I can imagine the plastic hippies living in the University bubble hating people for driving, and what better way to justify that hatred than arguing that CO2 is a pollutant? We never hear anything about the effects of methane on the climate—except from the low-status vegans.
When things become this jumbled, I’d say it’s better to point out a third way—say ‘I don’t know’, and pre-emptively cut the legs off of the soldier-like arguments of both sides. I’m wary of picking one side of advocates, when both groups are known, as a matter of fact, to regularly molest baby animals before having their first cup of coffee in the morning—in a way it reminds me of voting.
You can tell someone is irrational if they don’t believe global warming is happening. You can’t conclude much if they believe it is caused by human action, as this is now de rigeur for any one democratic/liberal/educated/cosmopolitan. I don’t know what you can conclude if they believe it is happening but aren’t convinced that it’s caused by human action; but this is a small enough percentage of cases that you don’t really need to classify them.
It’s not like a normal person can observe such changes—we’re talking fraction of a degree over lifetime so far (Wikipedia says 0.74 ± 0.18 °C over entire 20th century).
It’s a matter of your level of trust in “mainstream” scientists, and there’s nothing particularly irrational about not having terribly much trust here.
And even global warming is real, it’s still instrumentally rational to be wrong—let other people limit their carbon emissions, the world in which you drive SUV and everyone else overpays for Priuses is the optimal world for you to live in. (it would be even better to believe correctly in global warming, but be cynical enough to not give a shit about it, but many people have some sort of cynicism limit...)
You don’t have to be especially cynical, just recognize the situation as the collective action problem that it is. I’m not that cynical but I’m also not a dupe.
Also, not believing in global warming, if global warming is real, is likely to lead you to do stupid things like accepting certain bets on global mean temperature fifty years out and purchasing coastal properties. So I don’t think it is instrumentally rational, either.
I’d describe that as a rationalization of egoism, wouldn’t you?
What do you mean by egoism?
Key word there was rationalization. If terminology is the problem, replace “egoism” by “selfishness” and my point remains the same.
I don’t buy rational egoism. What is rational is whatever advances one’s goals—goals which may or may not be selfish. Considering our inbuilt empathy & love for our families, the general case is that our goals will not be purely selfish.
Even if I was a rational egoist, though, actually believing something against evidence (as distinct from declaring belief or not caring) is utterly irrational.
I think we can agree that “instrumentally rational” is irrational.
It is irrational in a way that it recognized limitations of human rationality, and decides that sometimes you’re better off not knowing. Perfect rational being would not need it—human being sometimes might.
“Oh all right,” said the old man. “Here’s a prayer for you. Got a pencil?”
“Yes,” said Arthur.
“It goes like this. Let’s see now: ‘Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decide not to know about. Amen.’ That’s it. It’s what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.”
“Hmmm,” said Arthur. “Well thank you—”
“There’s another prayer that goes with it that’s very important,” said the old man, “so you’d better jot this down, too.”
“Okay.”
“It goes, ‘Lord, lord, lord...’ It’s best to put that bit in just in case. You can never be too sure. ‘Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.’ And that’s it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part.”
In all seriousness, ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but conscious, willful ignorance is reprehensible. Let’s actually make an effort to be all right with the way the world is, before we throw up our hands.
I choose to be ignorant about certain things all the time—every moment of my life spent on anything except reading Wikipedia is a choice of selective ignorance.
How much does your life improve by having more accurate view of global warming research, as opposed to being vaguely aware of it but fairly skeptical either way like most educated people? I’d guess improvement will be tiny, and the risk of such knowledge triggering your world-saving instincts is not worth it.
True, but that is ignorance-of-omission. You seemed to be advocating a conscious decision to keep yourself ignorant of certain well-defined areas of knowledge. Apologies if this is not so.
Well, here’s the hedonistic vs. goal-oriented view of rationality again. Not everything I do is directly related to satisfying immediate whims. I am a voter and also an engineer, as it happens. Both of these circumstances imply I have an ethical obligation to be at least somewhat conversant on questions of public policy & the environment.
If my “world-saving instincts” should be triggered, I want them triggered. Again, as a bare minimum, public policy depends on an informed public, and GW is a policy problem. But uninformed consent in a democracy is pointless, it doesn’t count. We might just as well save money on ballot paper and install a grand Doge for all the functional difference it would entail.
If democracy depended on informed voters, then we could as well give it up and set up a single party government.
Fortunately it does not.
I didn’t say it was bad. I said it was irrational.
That’s not necessarily true—first, the temperature change is not uniform everywhere, and second, the effects of such changes on weather may be noticeable in ways other than simple warming (e.g. more extreme weather events). Certainly day-to-day observations cannot support the kind of confidence that many scientists have in their conclusions about global warming, but they can lend slight credence to such statements.
But it’s non-uniform enough that some people are observing warming and some are observing cooling. So it seems clear from a perspective that accepts the terms of the claim that all purely local observations are uninformative.
Tracking extreme weather events from a local perspective seems likely to give even less reliable results than looking for trends in your local climate.
If you accept the terms of the debate, you have to hope for non-biased global observations that are properly normed against a long baseline in order to make any decisions about what weather evidence counts for or against the positions. At this point, I’m having a hard time finding any non-biased observations.
Fair enough—I was quibbling, to a large part because:
The weather in my home region has gotten weird compared to my childhood—many mild winters and summer droughts, for example.
An Alaskan on DeviantArt a while ago wrote a prose piece about how she was always freezing, never warming enough in the summer to withstand the following winter … and prefaced it with a matter-of-fact note about how that wasn’t the case in recent years.
Hence, when you commented that “[i]t’s not like a normal person, can observe such changes”, that seemed to contradict my own experiences. But given the prior attitude effect, my experiences should probably be discounted a fair bit.
I don’t think this is a fair assessment. I was a global warming supporter up until I saw that awful movie by Al Gore; his inept, unscientific presentation drove me to start looking into the situation.
What I found was a great deal of controversy over the figures—some of the charts cited by Gore tended to suggest the opposite of his thesis (assuming he even had a thesis—that man’s all over the place); that CO2 follows warming, rather than triggers it.
After looking into it further—and hearing a dozen different sets of conflicting data—I eventually gave up on understanding. I don’t know enough about the subject matter to make an accurate judgement, and various sources on all sides of the debate have proved themselves to be biased or incompetent. Alcor I trust to lay out factual information on ‘vitrification’ - whatever the hell that is. The IPCC on the other hand has a political motivation, as (probably) do many of the scientific skeptics.
As a rough estimate, I’d assign a 60% chance that global warming is occuring, while maybe a 10% chance that the climate’s cooling. This is completely ignoring the probabilities of it A) being man made, B) being catastrophic (or even bad), and C) of being correctable by current policies.
Unless if you’re a climatologist or a meteorologist, I’d be very suspicious of strong stances on the matter. Perhaps a better test would be whether somebody supports A) cap-and-trade or B) using a ‘science fiction’ solar-umbrella satellite to cool off the earth.
I sympathize. Frankly, most of us don’t know anywhere near enough (nor should we, realistically) about climate science to truly assess the evidence ourselves, particularly when the models necessary for prediction are so complex. What to do in this case? I think we should consider the weight of opinion of actual experts. If you do this, the balance tips markedly towards AGW.
What about vested interests, you say? Well they exist on both sides, but on one side we have the fossil fuel lobby and on the other… conflict of interest wrt research grants (which is not just a problem in the case of global warming!).
Bottom line: If you can’t assess the evidence directly yourself, delegate wisely.
I generally agree with your heuristic—eg: arguing “this light should be green for longer to improve traffic efficiency” is ridiculous—but when money or politics get involved it tends to break down. For money, “Red light cameras are there to improve traffic safety, not as cash cows, and the various municipal-funded studies can be relied upon.” For politics, “We have to have a speed limit on the highway, even if it’s irregularly enforced, because allowing people to drive whatever speed they want is just crazy—it’d never work! The cops ticketing speeders are just protecting us from ourselves.”
A better corollary than the traffic issue however, would be medicine; while the majority of us on LW (I suspect) will blindly accept the broad-strokes declared by the medical community, while simultaneously distrusting the rationality of most doctors; when it comes to a specific treatment for a serious condition most of us would be researching it ourselves This goes doubly for the psychiatric field, and area as dominated by the politics of popular thought as it is by the pharma dollars.
This is why I remain dubious about AGW (let alone Catastrophic-AGW). On the one hand we’ve got the oil lobbyists, and living in oil country I hear constant anecdotes about how slimy they are; but on the other side you’ve got the IPCC, a group of technocrats with a prior commitment to big government who are in charge of directing the research. There’s a political bias at work, which I find even more frightening than the oil companies’ profit motive.
As for the rest of the scientists, which ones have actually done the research, and how many are just following the conventional wisdom? Medical doctors still recommend a diet which was created by George McGovern, and I’d be surprised if more than fifty percent of them actually understand evolution (rather than just believe it) - a ridiculously simple theory when you study it.
Several prominent candidates pop up when you consider the IPCC’s bias—are they anti-1st world (Carbon Credit transfers to the 3rd)? Anti-free market (heavy regulation and monitoring for all)? Or—and I think this is a major component of most green activists—are they just simply anti-car? I can imagine the plastic hippies living in the University bubble hating people for driving, and what better way to justify that hatred than arguing that CO2 is a pollutant? We never hear anything about the effects of methane on the climate—except from the low-status vegans.
When things become this jumbled, I’d say it’s better to point out a third way—say ‘I don’t know’, and pre-emptively cut the legs off of the soldier-like arguments of both sides. I’m wary of picking one side of advocates, when both groups are known, as a matter of fact, to regularly molest baby animals before having their first cup of coffee in the morning—in a way it reminds me of voting.