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> It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred

> It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years. That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints. > What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war. I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it). I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.

kannanvijayan 5y ago
I'd venture the opposite, that people have an inherent need to believe that humanity is special in an objective sense, that drastic change and collapse cannot happen in the timescales we operate in. An adult variant of "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away". After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? > Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue. I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
- acituan 5y ago
  > I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest. Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".) > After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
  - moistly 5y ago
    You keep insinuating that you are not a denier, but really, you are. Climate change is going to rip through society like a wrecking ball. At the very least, massive crop failures are going to result in a global starvation crisis. This is absolutely the truth of the situation, but you dismiss it: “affective/emotional.” You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.
7952 5y ago
It seems biased to assume apocalyptism. It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.
- acituan 5y ago
  > It seems biased to assume apocalyptism. You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? What is the objective measure? What is the criteria to use to find out if and in which direction we are making such an error? > It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project. I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate science is an unknown quantity more than that of a construction project. The reliability of predictions will have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of confidence should reflect that, not the romantically moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can think of.
  - moistly 5y ago
    > how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? LOL, yah, I’d hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury from the local coal plant, or… gosh, any of those errors in the wrong direction, you know. Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an individual basis, and must also press those with more power to do the same.
  - 7952 5y ago
    A lot of things have no objective measure at all. We still have to make decisions and act. And people will naturally see a perspective based on their own experience and understanding. We put the burden of proof on one side or the other. A good example of this was the response to covid. People had completely different levels of optimism based on their background. A good practical tool we have is to just run a cost benefit analysis. But reduce your requirement for unproven benefit as the cost drops. So you require masks in a pandemic even when you don't know if they will work. Because the cost is low the loss is minimal if there is no benefit. This kind of decision is made all the time intuitively in things like renewable energy. Ultimately the political system has to answer these questions. And it deals with such questions all the time. I wonder how predictable international power politics or economics is in terms of "non-linearity and complexity".

kannanvijayan 5y ago

I'd venture the opposite, that people have an inherent need to believe that humanity is special in an objective sense, that drastic change and collapse cannot happen in the timescales we operate in. An adult variant of "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away". After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? > Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue. I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.

acituan 5y ago
> I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest. Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".) > After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
- moistly 5y ago
  You keep insinuating that you are not a denier, but really, you are. Climate change is going to rip through society like a wrecking ball. At the very least, massive crop failures are going to result in a global starvation crisis. This is absolutely the truth of the situation, but you dismiss it: “affective/emotional.” You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.

7952 5y ago

It seems biased to assume apocalyptism. It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.

acituan 5y ago
> It seems biased to assume apocalyptism. You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? What is the objective measure? What is the criteria to use to find out if and in which direction we are making such an error? > It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project. I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate science is an unknown quantity more than that of a construction project. The reliability of predictions will have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of confidence should reflect that, not the romantically moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can think of.
- moistly 5y ago
  > how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? LOL, yah, I’d hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury from the local coal plant, or… gosh, any of those errors in the wrong direction, you know. Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an individual basis, and must also press those with more power to do the same.
- 7952 5y ago
  A lot of things have no objective measure at all. We still have to make decisions and act. And people will naturally see a perspective based on their own experience and understanding. We put the burden of proof on one side or the other. A good example of this was the response to covid. People had completely different levels of optimism based on their background. A good practical tool we have is to just run a cost benefit analysis. But reduce your requirement for unproven benefit as the cost drops. So you require masks in a pandemic even when you don't know if they will work. Because the cost is low the loss is minimal if there is no benefit. This kind of decision is made all the time intuitively in things like renewable energy. Ultimately the political system has to answer these questions. And it deals with such questions all the time. I wonder how predictable international power politics or economics is in terms of "non-linearity and complexity".