Are you trying to make sure we don’t inadvertently discard [hypothesis: unusual utility function]?
Well I’ll say the same thing about [hypothesis: Arrhenius simply had a bad model even though his utility function was not terribly different from ours]
From the wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius )
“In his calculation Arrhenius included the feedback from changes in water vapor as well as latitudinal effects, but he omitted clouds, convection of heat upward in the atmosphere, and other essential factors. His work is currently seen less as an accurate prediction of global warming than as the first demonstration that it should be taken as a serious possibility.”
-sounds like he used a simple, fast model, rather than a detailed one that only a cray-4something supercomputer could run in less than a year. All he has to do is neglect, say, storm damage for his model to feed the wrong results to his final utility function even if he manages to predict the correct temperature.
No, I’m not saying anything at all about temperature or the model; I was talking about the social effects, eg ‘positive effect on society’.
Positive and negative in this day and age is dominated by public opinion and is very different than what it was back then. His view back then could have been as simple as “fewer people will freeze to death and there will be more arable land and better crops”. Ours view today marginalizes those effects and seems almost entirely based on the idea that change of any sort is negative.
Oh, I’msure he gave different weights to different things in his utility function than say…well pretty much anyone other human…but there are plenty of models that show a disaster for any “typical” human utility function. The ones showing disaster: venus and disaster: new ice age…are not exactly rare, though I’m not exactly sure how seriously to take them myself. ”Positive and negative in this day and age is dominated by public opinion”
Relying on Public Opinion is a cheap and dirty variant of Auffman’s agreement theorem; it gives plenty of bad results, but it’s a million times easier to use, and is still slightly better-maybe-than pure random-decisions....er, maybe.
Either that or we just differ in terms of what we’re labeling utility function versus part of the model?
Are you trying to make sure we don’t inadvertently discard [hypothesis: unusual utility function]? Well I’ll say the same thing about [hypothesis: Arrhenius simply had a bad model even though his utility function was not terribly different from ours] From the wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius ) “In his calculation Arrhenius included the feedback from changes in water vapor as well as latitudinal effects, but he omitted clouds, convection of heat upward in the atmosphere, and other essential factors. His work is currently seen less as an accurate prediction of global warming than as the first demonstration that it should be taken as a serious possibility.”
-sounds like he used a simple, fast model, rather than a detailed one that only a cray-4something supercomputer could run in less than a year. All he has to do is neglect, say, storm damage for his model to feed the wrong results to his final utility function even if he manages to predict the correct temperature.
No, I’m not saying anything at all about temperature or the model; I was talking about the social effects, eg ‘positive effect on society’.
Positive and negative in this day and age is dominated by public opinion and is very different than what it was back then. His view back then could have been as simple as “fewer people will freeze to death and there will be more arable land and better crops”. Ours view today marginalizes those effects and seems almost entirely based on the idea that change of any sort is negative.
Oh, I’msure he gave different weights to different things in his utility function than say…well pretty much anyone other human…but there are plenty of models that show a disaster for any “typical” human utility function. The ones showing disaster: venus and disaster: new ice age…are not exactly rare, though I’m not exactly sure how seriously to take them myself.
”Positive and negative in this day and age is dominated by public opinion”
Relying on Public Opinion is a cheap and dirty variant of Auffman’s agreement theorem; it gives plenty of bad results, but it’s a million times easier to use, and is still slightly better-maybe-than pure random-decisions....er, maybe.
Either that or we just differ in terms of what we’re labeling utility function versus part of the model?