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As a climatologist by education and a dabbler in politics, I think you are radically misjudging the ability of most people to have rational discussions about un

• sanxiyn 5y ago
  I think you are the problem. Don't lie. Ever.
  • Retric 5y ago
    Lies of omission are unavoidable when talking to a general audience about any deep scientific or technical issue. A physicist actually explaining Magnetism takes years. If a PHD gives you a short answer their simply lying to you. For example, no ferromagnetic materials aren’t simply all atoms arranged in a specific fashion that’s a monumental simplification.
    • Breazy 5y ago
      An omission really only becomes a lie of omission if somebody would feel deceived upon learning of the omission. Nobody would reasonably feel deceived by your omission of the 0.000000001% cosmic ray hypothesis.
    • generalizations 5y ago
      There's a pretty stark difference. The PhD would retain their credibility if someone explained the difference between the short answer and the complete answer. But that weather dude will lose his credibility, because his audience will feel deceived, not educated.
      • Retric 5y ago
        I have gotten the short answer and a significantly longer answer from a climatologist. The short answer while wrong still seemed like a reasonable summery and quite understated. I can’t say if the full answer would change my opinion, but it seems unlikely.
    • labster 5y ago
      This exactly. After a year of high school physics and a year of mechanics and electrodynamics, they finally get around to telling you: that was kind of all lies, here’s relativity. And then a month later they do it again for quantum, and finally admit they don’t know what is really going on. But Newtonian mechanics is useful!
      • _y5hn 5y ago
        They should state the truth in first year: We have absolutely no final answers for you, and these years will soon be forgotten. You'll earn more earlier taking any job now. Education is overrated in business anyway.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • Retric 5y ago
          I think we can reasonably treat collage students as adults capable of making informed decisions. Most people failing to finish the physics PHD end up in reasonable places, it’s hardly the trap most people getting a 200,000+$ history degree would be in.
      • naasking 5y ago
        Simplified models are not lies, they are true within a defined domain of discourse. That's not what you were describing.
  • bottled_poe 5y ago
    When the message needs to be reduced to a headline in order to get seen, you’ll never pack the whole truth into it.
• contravariant 5y ago
  That's fair but the problem with such a deliberate lie is that I must view everything with suspicion when people say something that supports climate change. Pretty much the only way I can know something is mostly accurate is when there's a shiny leaflet in front of it 'for educators' that I can ignore. And it's not just this problem, it's all problems where people need to be convinced 'for the greater good'. I truly worry that the rightful distrust that those 'white lies' are causing is doing irreparable harm. It's also quite fragile since it opens room for people to point out the misleading or even false information, and in those cases people have a nasty tendency to assume the opposite must therefore be true.
  • dr_zoidberg 5y ago
    I think part of the problem is that the discussion has already been rigged beforehand, and now you _must_ lie to be heard. Not because you want to, but because those that came efore you did. So if you now simply state the facts as they are, the other side will go "oh, things are actually better then, because the previous experts were pretty alarmist, and now this person is telling me something that sounds normal an reasonable". You know where else I see this pattern? Digital forensics, my area of work. People have been selling snake oil all around for years, and know lawyers, attorneys and judges (in general, with some god particular exceptions) believe in whatever they've been seeing in CSI, or their "IT guy" convinced them as possible. Who cares that I'm one renowned expert in the field? _Their guy_ said this thing was possible, so I must be lying!
• xyzzyz 5y ago
  Ah, scientists lying for the benefit of stupid masses. Worked great for public health experts over past 2 years, I'm sure it'll work great for climatologists too.
  • contravariant 5y ago
    Well, either way you provide a good example of the exact problem, I suppose.
    • dmingod666 5y ago
      Are you saying there were no white lies involved? I recollect a series of events that involved people happily spewing Nobel lies especially at the start of the pandemic.
      • _y5hn 5y ago
        In my country they said medical masks should be prioritized for hospitals. Experts doubted they would work well for untrained people, but later research changed that bias. Very few died of Covid as a result of how leadership acted fast, but they admitted it could've been wrong.
• whiddershins 5y ago
  In my view, the problem with the noble lie, which you are engaging in, is that it has been an unmitigated disaster with regards to Covid messaging. As it became obvious some officials were willing to lie, this opened the door to many people having no idea who to trust. I believe public trust in leaders and institutions is at an incredible low, and I’m not sure how it can be repaired. Regardless of whether you think people are capable of nuance, most people have people in their circle who they trust and do have that capacity. Meanwhile, keeping secrets on the internet is very hard. I think a much better strategy is to explain honestly and with nuance, and hope that this will maintain your credibility in the face of an army of internet researchers who will probably do more to shape average people’s conception than you can ever hope to do directly. I would say, please don’t lie.
  • enkid 5y ago
    Can you give a specific example of what you are talking about? What noble lies were being told about COVID? I heard a lot of "we don't knows, but here is the best bet" which were not lies, but all of the lies I heard absolutely were not noble in that they were not for the public's best interest, but rather for the best interest of the individual saying them.
    • Breazy 5y ago
      "Stop wearing masks, they don't work."
      • leetcrew 5y ago
        • Breazy 5y ago
          Maybe editorialized a bit, though I didn't attribute the quote to Fauci particularly because the fib wasn't coming from only him. A lot of people were saying similar things. And the context, of course, is fear of mask shortages for people who needed them most. But what really gets my goat, much more than that white lie, is when grown adults feign ignorance and pretend they never heard the lie, that the lie was never told. Two years ago isn't that long ago, we all remember it. I think the feigned ignorance is perhaps another white lie motivated by good intentions; maybe some think they can fight covid by defending the reputations of public health officials who were only telling a well intentioned lie in the first place. But despite those good intentions, I think this denial of history is tantamount to gaslighting.
• Breazy 5y ago
  People are better at sniffing out lies than they are at sniffing out whatever good intentions might have motivated those lies.
  • mikeyouse 5y ago
    I really don’t think that’s true. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of additional Americans are dead from Covid because they believed easily disprovable lies about the safety and efficacy of vaccines by people who have reputations for lying. Most people believe anyone they consider to be an authority. It’s too exhausting otherwise.
    • Breazy 5y ago
      I didn't say people are good at sniffing out lies. I said that people are better at sniffing out lies than they are at sniffing out good intentions between those lies. I'll phrase it another way: When you tell a lie, some people will see through it and some people will believe it. Of those who see through it, some will believe you had good intentions for lying, and some won't. These proportions all vary depending on the exact nature of the lie and the audience receiving it, but it's virtually always the case that [see through the lie] > [see through the lie AND believes it well intentioned] Or put another way: Every time you tell a white lie, you burn your own credibility because some people will see through your lie and won't be inclined to excuse you for it.
    • andrewflnr 5y ago
      More accurately, people are really good at sniffing out lies when it benefits their worldview somehow (and terrible when it doesn't). Why people think conspiracy theories benefit their worldview is a different and stickier question, but somehow they do, so they're hypersensitive to any lies deployed against the lies they prefer.
• chasd00 5y ago
  Once already suspicious people find out you’re lying they will never believe you again.
• throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > Most of the world is not HN, where nuanced discussions work. Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way. So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm. Because if we wait for everyone to feel the impact in earnest, it will be far too late. This is fascinating. I would normally have written this off as a troll like a climate denier trying to discredit one side, but you seem to be well established here and quite possibly identifiable from your about page (not that I tried or am interested in trying to troll through it, just had a quick glance). Don't get me wrong I absolutely accept that some scientists may take a bit of license with the truth when they say a particular weather event was caused or made more likely by climate change without having gone through a full analysis of that particular event and situation. And I even accept there is corruption and dishonesty all the way from a bit of unconscious bias to much worse. It's quite amazing to see a scientist out and admit they lie about the science in order to try to influence public opinion in the hope of effecting the social or political change they want. I really admire and appreciate your honesty here, if nothing else. Can I ask whether you act in any professional or academic capacity as a climatologist? And what are the nature of the lies? Who are they to, how are they communicated?
  • labster 5y ago
    I’m just a software dev now. It’s mostly just people I meet, though I’ve done some lobbying too. Lobbying is a fascinating thing, because all the staff really wants to know is if this issue could help/hurt them in a campaign. I remember once when Zoe Lofgren told me that while she agreed with my issue, there was zero chance Congress would take it up without handling a bunch of barely related issues. The lie mainly has to do with people wanting to see the direct cause. But there is never a direct cause to weather. There’s a probability of enhanced storm intensity, because we observe storms getting more intense. Was it that last storm? Maybe. But the answer I give is yes. Because in all likelihood, there is some influence. But climate change is in fact real, has in fact caused damages. If you are concerned about immigration in Europe, consider that a drought led to a famine led to a civil war led to mass migration. Are there a lot more causes here? Sure. What was the cause? Probably a lot of things. But the weather was surely one of them, and models tell us extreme events become more common under a warming Earth. Climate change has already affected your life. Statistically, it must be so! Just because I cannot say how exactly it has done so, leads people to discount me. So let’s just pretend I know how, so I have a bare chance of being taken seriously. Else my hedging be mistaken for lack of certainty, by confirmation bias of people who yearn for my uncertainty. I see it as akin to novels. The whole point of fiction is to create empathy for another point of view, though the method is a thicket of lies. The truth can very often not be looked at directly. Tell a teenager not to worry about what other people think — see if they get it. Tell a person that being racist is dumb, and see no behavior change. But a story might work, as a magick spell to get one to feel empathy, a lie that reveals truth.
• throttlebody 5y ago
  On BBC.com there was an article which quoted 5 scientists about climate change and one said that 40 years ago we had an extreme weather event every 3 months, in 2021 it was every 19 days and that we will run out of the capacity to pay for it. I can't find the article atm, but its a pretty good way to visualize it.
• taxyz23 5y ago
  A propagandist by his own resume. Doesn't do the cause much good. http://www.brentlaabs.com/about http://www.brentlaabs.com/about
• generalizations 5y ago
  One of the big arguments against climate change is the suspicion they "the scientists are lying". You're taking away the credibility of the entire field.
  • dmingod666 5y ago
    1 - Making predictions about the future with certainty is not something that is generally considered in the realm of mortals. 2 - People can distrust models as being inaccurate and bad at predicting the future.
    • generalizations 5y ago
      1. Nobody's talking about that. 2. Of course they should be able to.
      • vkou 5y ago
        > 1. Nobody's talking about that. Yes, they are. Every election winter, or so, some performative artist shows up to Congress with a bag of ice, and announces in front of cameras something along the lines of "Checkmate, scientists, if global warming is real, why is it snowing in my congressional riding?"
• diamondlovesyou 5y ago
  I address this mostly to this comment's siblings: the fact that you're upset about the lying bit only reinforces labster's point. I say this based on the comments thinking that the lie is actually meant to deceive, getting distracted with the word "lie" and its connotations, and missing the broader issue. The issue is that the general population can't be reasonably expected to understand how climate change works, and how statistics play out in climate change modeling. Unless the message is dead simple, the message will be lost. What the "lie" "really" says is subtextural/etc: to those that need to hear it, it says what it needs to say to get them to understand what needs to be done (and, importantly, isn't wrong, just isn't the whole picture either); to those that already know the answer, you didn't need to hear the lie in the first place. There is no deceit. Climate change needs participation from everyone, and, for better or worse, everyone includes a majority of, eh-hem, less-than brilliant people. We need them to understand regardless of our own righteousness.
  • generalizations 5y ago
    > to those that need to hear it, it says what it needs to say to get them to understand what needs to be done This only works if truth is used. The labster seems to be assuming they have credibility; but if they're lying, or if they're associated with liars, they'll lose it (if they haven't already).
    • labster 5y ago
      That’s not really true. Anyone who has ever taught a freshman physics class is a bald-faced liar. We are absolutely certain Newtonian mechanics does not represent our universe. Yet for some reason we do not assume physicists lack credibility, even though we know for a fact that thousands upon thousands of physicists are teaching an entire semester of lies. The lies are useful for making good decisions, though. I offer the same. A simplification that does not quite represent reality, but you should 100% consider it anyway if you build a bridge, because it will save you a world of hurt in the future.
      • vorpalhex 5y ago
• vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  When you say you lie, your replies are from people who think that you’re being deceptive. I don’t think that’s true and I don’t think lie is an accurate descriptor of what you’re doing. You’re lowering the fidelity of a model you’re communicating. What you’re doing is tailoring your message to a wider audience. That’s not as dramatic of a description as claiming you lie to people, but I think it’s more accurate. If you want to communicate reality, you need to understand your intended audience. Finding what to emphasize and what to simplify will determine whether people understand you.
• avereveard 5y ago
  "it's not that we have to change models every five years as none of the old are tracking the present, it's everyone else that's stupid" - yeah sounds about like something a climatologist would say
• naasking 5y ago
  > Most of the world does not give a shit about climate change unless they will personally suffer in some way. That's uncharitable and untrue. > So I lie. So that even if this storm or that hurricane didn’t hurt them, they will have empathy for those who did suffer from a climate-enhanced storm. People distrust science after decades of bad science journalism and bad science communication, and you think the solution is to outright lie and undermine all of your credibility. I'm sure that'll work just great, and it won't at all simply reinforce the beliefs of those who already agree with you while arming those you were actually trying to reach with reasons to distrust you. Not like we didn't see exactly this sort of lie backfire during the pandemic.
  • throwawaylinux 5y ago
    > That's uncharitable and untrue. This is a strange misconception about climate change, even among many of what should be the better educated and informed section of the population, at least on the issues of the science. The misconception is that more people need to be convinced about climate change and the need to take action. Many climate change topics that come up even on here get well received comments about problem of the greedy selfish uneducated rednecks who are preventing climate change action, and the subsequent hand wringing about how to educate or scare or convince them into changing their minds. The facts just don't support this outlandish idea though. Even in the country with the most climate deniers in the world, Indonesia, they number just about 21% of the population. In the USA, deniers are under 20% and a staggering two thirds of people and more than half of Republicans think the government should take more action on climate change. This is an overwhelming political mandate, it's not even a question. The ruling class enacts far less popular policies and legislation all the time and doesn't bat an eye. You're telling me they'll go on expeditionary wars on flimsy pretexts that last decades and cost trillions of dollars and kill thousands of Americans, but they won't implement overhwelmingly popular policy that has bipartisan support of voters to address what they keep telling us they believe is the biggest and most important problem facing humanity? This is clearly utter bullshit. And that's the way they like it. Their divisive propaganda (which includes seeding distrust in science) has worked extremely well. The facts show that they never had any intention to more about climate change, that they routinely lie about the political reasons for not doing more, and they're happy that the commoners are blaming one another for it instead of the robber barons who own them.