at each step the level of doom-mongering increases and the amount of visible uncertainty decreases.
Ordinarily that would be true, but in this case I don’t think it is. At the IRC meetup yesterday, we played a variant of Paranoid Debating where in addition to Red players who try to make the spokesman give the wrong answer, there was also a hidden, randomized time limit and a Deadlocker, whose goal was to make the spokesman miss the deadline (in which case the round ends and everyone else loses).
The climate debate includes deadlockers, and their strategy is to increase the perceived uncertainty.
@jimrandomh, I think what glenra is saying is very much true, even in the formal IPCC report itself. Different coalitions wrote the technical report, the summary and the press release, and each coalition was more politicized than the previous, and had less room for nuance. The technical report had a lot of detail and room for a lot of caveats, graphs showing the limitations of the models and presented alternative views. The summary left out the most optimistic possibilities, and focused attention on nearly the scariest of the possibilities, though these didn’t have the bulk of the probability-mass according to the main report. And of course the press release was designed to attract attention, rather than to illuminate the subject, but that’s the role of a press release.
I agree that there are deadlockers in the larger debate, but you may not have realized that politics and the majoritarian viewpoint had so much control over the official report.
Ordinarily that would be true, but in this case I don’t think it is. At the IRC meetup yesterday, we played a variant of Paranoid Debating where in addition to Red players who try to make the spokesman give the wrong answer, there was also a hidden, randomized time limit and a Deadlocker, whose goal was to make the spokesman miss the deadline (in which case the round ends and everyone else loses).
The climate debate includes deadlockers, and their strategy is to increase the perceived uncertainty.
@jimrandomh, I think what glenra is saying is very much true, even in the formal IPCC report itself. Different coalitions wrote the technical report, the summary and the press release, and each coalition was more politicized than the previous, and had less room for nuance. The technical report had a lot of detail and room for a lot of caveats, graphs showing the limitations of the models and presented alternative views. The summary left out the most optimistic possibilities, and focused attention on nearly the scariest of the possibilities, though these didn’t have the bulk of the probability-mass according to the main report. And of course the press release was designed to attract attention, rather than to illuminate the subject, but that’s the role of a press release.
I agree that there are deadlockers in the larger debate, but you may not have realized that politics and the majoritarian viewpoint had so much control over the official report.
I’m not a climate scientist.