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Or maybe we need to put more effort in, collect more data, build better models, until we can understand it. I could build a cabin using basic reasoning. I can'

by beat 8y ago

Or maybe we need to put more effort in, collect more data, build better models, until we can understand it. I could build a cabin using basic reasoning. I can't build a skyscraper with just basic reasoning. Does that mean we shouldn't build skyscrapers? Or just that we should leave their design to someone who really put the effort into the "cognitive manageability" of it? And really, when it gets down to it, a lot of the blatantly irrational opposition to the very idea of global warming comes from "cognitive manageability". For people who still think Sky Daddy made the world in six days and cavemen rode dinosaurs, the idea that their car is wrecking the atmosphere is beyond their "cognitive manageability", and it gets flatly rejected. When I see the people who believe in the scientific method mostly lined up on one side of an issue, and people who reject the scientific method mostly lined up on the other side, it biases me. Which was my original point, that so many people have flipped out about.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
The person you're responding to is undoubtedly referring to the ability to link cause with effect. As such "cognitive manageability" doesn't mean simple. Relativity is far from simple, but it's cognitively manageable - as is the fundamental science and engineering knowledge used when designing and ultimately constructing skyscrapers. To give an example of something that is not cognitively manageable, aside from climate, consider the stock market. We can create a million correlations to the stock market. And these correlations themselves all hold true. And there is an immense, literally unlimited, amount of profit to be made if somebody could combine these correlations into a way that could create meaningful predictive value. There's no doubt that billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been spent in pursuit of such. Yet prediction seems to remain impossible. And that's in a field with a fraction of the variables of climate change.

by beat 8y ago

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

The person you're responding to is undoubtedly referring to the ability to link cause with effect. As such "cognitive manageability" doesn't mean simple. Relativity is far from simple, but it's cognitively manageable - as is the fundamental science and engineering knowledge used when designing and ultimately constructing skyscrapers. To give an example of something that is not cognitively manageable, aside from climate, consider the stock market. We can create a million correlations to the stock market. And these correlations themselves all hold true. And there is an immense, literally unlimited, amount of profit to be made if somebody could combine these correlations into a way that could create meaningful predictive value. There's no doubt that billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been spent in pursuit of such. Yet prediction seems to remain impossible. And that's in a field with a fraction of the variables of climate change.