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> I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy ALL the pe

> I assume your position was rhetorical since you clearly don't think all or even the majority of any meaningfully large political group are wealthy ALL the people with significant power are wealthy. I'm not downplaying the importance of the poor voting in elections, but that happens twice a year (primaries and general election) and the choice the poor get is which wealthy person gets the power, or in rarer cases, which policy proposed by wealthy people is enacted. The rest of the year, the wealthy people make all the decisions. Certainly which wealthy person is in power makes a difference, but they're still all wealthy people. And to be clear, no major party is immune to this. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Paul--no supposed heroes of change are poor or even middle class. > So this drives people into two groups. People that think that the mistakes of times past are something we've overcome and the predictions of today are now meaningful. The other group tend to think that the past 30 years of predictions will be representative of the next 30 years of predictions. I'm not in either group. I don't believe we've overcome the mistakes of the past. I don't believe we even know what all of those mistakes are, so we can't possibly have overcome them all. What I do believe is that the only effective mechanism we have of predicting the future is science, and that science is a slow process that often gets things wrong, but slowly gets less wrong as it progresses. An alternate theory which just decides to let markets decide the truth isn't even wrong--it's a stopped clock, which is sometimes right but never useful. Science hasn't been right and it may continue to be wrong, but at least it's trying to find the truth via a proven method. Letting markets decide isn't even trying to find the truth.

rjf72 7y ago
I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. For instance to what degree does society create its leaders, and to what degree do leaders create their society? To what degree did Lincoln choose to direct society to end slavery? To what degree did changes in society make inevitable the creation of a "Lincoln"? And then we'd have to try to get into the heads of those in power to determine whether their views are authentic or being driven by political or even economic interests. For example abortion is full of political flip-flopping for people to pander to various demographic bases. Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common. On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. That's fair--I think all I'd like to agree on here is that it's not useful to pretend that parties aren't majority wealthy when you weight for actual power rather than simply counting people. One subtlety in my initial statement that I didn't really explain was that it's not necessary to be wealthy in order to believe that your family will be wealthy in the future. > Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common. This points to another issue, which is that "liberal" and "conservative" are really problematic groupings of ideas. Abortion has nothing to do with climate change, but it's usually impossible to vote on one without taking a stance on the other. > On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? I don't know if I would say I "trust" climatologists, but I believe that they are presenting the best information we have, and I believe that we should always operate on the best information we have, rather than simply doing what's profitable. > Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely. To be clear, I don't think that (most) conservatives are stupid or malicious, and I think that too often liberals have done liberal ideologies a great disservice by making that assumption.

rjf72 7y ago

I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. For instance to what degree does society create its leaders, and to what degree do leaders create their society? To what degree did Lincoln choose to direct society to end slavery? To what degree did changes in society make inevitable the creation of a "Lincoln"? And then we'd have to try to get into the heads of those in power to determine whether their views are authentic or being driven by political or even economic interests. For example abortion is full of political flip-flopping for people to pander to various demographic bases. Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common. On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> I'd prefer to sidestep the leadership issue since it's going to bring up a million and one questions that are going to get philosophical. That's fair--I think all I'd like to agree on here is that it's not useful to pretend that parties aren't majority wealthy when you weight for actual power rather than simply counting people. One subtlety in my initial statement that I didn't really explain was that it's not necessary to be wealthy in order to believe that your family will be wealthy in the future. > Romney was pro-choice, until he wanted to be president. Biden was against federal funding for abortions, until he wanted to be president. It's unlikely their personal views ever changed, but a politician's job is to get elected - and so what a politician says or advocates and what a politician believes don't necessarily have all that much in common. This points to another issue, which is that "liberal" and "conservative" are really problematic groupings of ideas. Abortion has nothing to do with climate change, but it's usually impossible to vote on one without taking a stance on the other. > On the predictions issue, I fully agree with you. And I find it disappointing that debates on this topic in general tend to avoid this actual core issue - should we trust the current predictions, or not? And like you mention there are varying degrees there. So the real question is should society's trust of climatologists' trust of themselves be high enough to justify large scale change, or not? I don't know if I would say I "trust" climatologists, but I believe that they are presenting the best information we have, and I believe that we should always operate on the best information we have, rather than simply doing what's profitable. > Instead debates are people just straw manning one another to no end, which results in both sides thinking the other is full of idiots. No progress is made, divisions are deepened, and further amicable discussion becomes ever more unlikely, all this in turn means any sort of lasting change becomes ever less likely. To be clear, I don't think that (most) conservatives are stupid or malicious, and I think that too often liberals have done liberal ideologies a great disservice by making that assumption.