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0 pointsyogthos6y ago0 comments

>There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.

There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.

>If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages.

Your skepticism is not rooted in facts and evidence, but rather has an ideological basis. When all the experts in the field unanimously say we should be dealing with global warming, that's what we should be doing. Anybody who is not an actual climatologist needs to get the fuck out of the way.

>Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic?

Sure, it's possible, but only a fool would gamble the fate of humanity on that. The stakes are simply too high here. There are also no actual downsides to addressing climate change. Imagine the horror of having a cleaner environment and sustainable industry creating millions of new jobs and advancing our technology and science.

>Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.

It's good to see that majority of people see the dangerous absurdity you promote for what it is.

>by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy?

And just like with climate change you ignore the actual facts all around you. 80,000 people died in US while 0 people died in Vietnam. Chew on that for a while next time you claim that following scientific consensus is the wrong thing to do.

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oneiftwo6y ago· 1 in thread

>There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.

Again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey. You weigh probability of outcomes and cost of outcomes and come up with a value. That's literally my point, that the you are at one end of a high dimensional extreme. That's what this entire argument boils down to.

Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades. Your exploration constant is far too low if you respond with such blind hostility to anyone with criticism. You're hindering progress and when your policy is guided by such one sidedness, that's dangerous. This doesn't just apply to climate science. We couldn't even get the nutritional pyramid right, and climate science is hard for the same reasons - non-expert mental, data and model driven and only verifiable in hindsight.

Not all scientific fields are equally rigorous. An appeal to a climatologist on the subject of climate is far weaker than an appeal to a physicist on the subject of physics because of the nature of the fields. Climate science by nature is extremely uncertain, i.e. you search the high-d space with less gradient information, and personal/institutional biases can converge to fill in those gaps nicely enough to have you trapped in a local minimum.

yogthosOP6y ago

>again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey.

There is no meaningful comparison between the risk of human extinction with having to transition off fossil fuel economy. This is what this entire argument boils down to. On one hand, you have the end of civilization and possibly end of human existence, and on the other you have some temporary inconvenience. These are fundamentally not comparable.

>Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades.

You're creating a false equivalence between the two possibilities. All the best available science tells us this is happening. There is absolutely no scientific basis to doubt that this is happening.

So, yes there may be a chance that all our accumulated decades of observation and models are wrong, but it's far more likely that is not the case. Our observations are either matching or outpacing what the models predict. You just keep parroting the same nonsense over and over like a broken record. It's dangerous nonsense, and you don't seem to understand what's at stake here.

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