4 ms·

Smart analysis that aged like milk, given the subsequent 17 years of record heat trends. This is a good example of the dangers of being too in the weeds of comp

by npunt 2y ago

Smart analysis that aged like milk, given the subsequent 17 years of record heat trends. This is a good example of the dangers of being too in the weeds of complexity to not see the big simple picture, the sometimes blinding bias of contrarianism, and how methods of science alone are insufficient guides to solving all of society's problems. One might come to a much clearer conclusion about carbon by looking at the incentives of societies to consume carbon, our struggles with collective decision making, and our very strong tendency to create tragedies of the commons. If you follow the 'needs more research' approach and wait until all the data are in (as Freeman Dyson essentially proposes here), you may be way too late to address and overcome the problem. In other words, science is a method of finding certainty, but often we find ourselves in situations that demand acting from positions of uncertainty, where we have to rely more on judgment calls based our understanding of human behavior. Great points about the need for heretical science tho! Sometimes heretics are right, just not in this case.

npunt 2y ago
Another factor I think that plays in here is a bit of hubris about who has access to truth. Someone of Freeman Dyson's caliber is used to being the one who can see further into complexity to find truth. When someone has these talents, they tend to see all problems as problems they have special access to. If they see a lot of people without their abilities believing a thing with a lot of complexity, this creates the conditions to flip to being contrarians about that subject. I believe this kind of reactive contrarianism has happened in climate science quite a bit. The bias here is that highly talented people sometimes cannot fathom that the ability to see some truths is broadly distributed. But in the case of human behavior, our ability to see truth is broadly distributed, much more so than the science someone like Freeman Dyson can do. And if that human behavior factor is the key variable, then the broad consensus can be correct.
- heisenzombie 2y ago
  Yes, there is certainly an archetype of "Accomplished physicist who has ventured outside their area of expertise and is patronizing the locals with confident proclamations that `this would all be trivial if you knew math better and made these obvious simplifying assumptions`". Occasionally a figure like that is actually correct — for example, Schrödinger bringing the concept of entropy over to biology and thereby influencing Francis Crick to search for the gene. But many more are, to put it politely, not Schrödinger.
acdha 2y ago
I also find it interesting how he correctly recognized that the problem is not simple fluid dynamics but then made two major mistakes assuming that he correctly identified all of the complicating factors and concluding that he had a more accurate understanding than the thousands of people who’d been working in the field for decades. This is practically insulting when he just asserts that climate scientists are staying in comfortable offices without verifying their assumptions, as if there are a number of fields where people are doing fieldwork to collect things like ice core samples, measuring ocean conditions, surveying plant and animal communities, etc. This is, of course, a notorious intellectual pitfall for both physicists and elder scientists but I think in this case it’s more a question of insufficiently vetting information. He wasn’t just wrong in some novel manner but in exactly the ways that the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists were saying in the 90s and early 2000s, down to the decoy concerns about public health and disaster relief (both of which are becoming much harder due to climate inaction). This essay seems like a good example for how susceptible smart people can be to the message that they’re savvy enough to see something most people missed.
- npunt 2y ago
  100%, it reads like 'I found a clever flaw and followed it up with an unrigorous conclusion because I was blinded by my cleverness'. His conclusion that oh the soil can recapture carbon also reminded me of generally smart & accomplished but non-expert people online these days that lean on unrealistic tech solutions they just heard about as being an adequate mitigation for climate change. 'Oh just have ships burn bunker fuel again to put sulfur in the air', 'we can seed the clouds', 'we'll surely build technologies like carbon capture that will solve this'. Rather than fall into the nerd snipe trap of trying to analyze these technologies and their deployment and effect, it's far easier to see it for what it really is: cope. People don't want to face up to how existentially scary and out of control things are in our climate, so they rationalize their fears away. It's understandable, but it's also not sound analysis, and can be safely dismissed as such.
  - acdha 2y ago
    I think your last point is really important. Once you accept that climate scientists are right, you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions and the things you’ll be doing less, not to mention all of the fun ecosystem and disease implications. It’s sooooooo much easier just to hope that the multi-billion dollar campaign saying business as usual will be fine is right, because otherwise you’re pretty much saying your children won’t have a world as good as you did.

by npunt 2y ago

npunt 2y ago

Another factor I think that plays in here is a bit of hubris about who has access to truth. Someone of Freeman Dyson's caliber is used to being the one who can see further into complexity to find truth. When someone has these talents, they tend to see all problems as problems they have special access to. If they see a lot of people without their abilities believing a thing with a lot of complexity, this creates the conditions to flip to being contrarians about that subject. I believe this kind of reactive contrarianism has happened in climate science quite a bit. The bias here is that highly talented people sometimes cannot fathom that the ability to see some truths is broadly distributed. But in the case of human behavior, our ability to see truth is broadly distributed, much more so than the science someone like Freeman Dyson can do. And if that human behavior factor is the key variable, then the broad consensus can be correct.

heisenzombie 2y ago
Yes, there is certainly an archetype of "Accomplished physicist who has ventured outside their area of expertise and is patronizing the locals with confident proclamations that `this would all be trivial if you knew math better and made these obvious simplifying assumptions`". Occasionally a figure like that is actually correct — for example, Schrödinger bringing the concept of entropy over to biology and thereby influencing Francis Crick to search for the gene. But many more are, to put it politely, not Schrödinger.

acdha 2y ago

I also find it interesting how he correctly recognized that the problem is not simple fluid dynamics but then made two major mistakes assuming that he correctly identified all of the complicating factors and concluding that he had a more accurate understanding than the thousands of people who’d been working in the field for decades. This is practically insulting when he just asserts that climate scientists are staying in comfortable offices without verifying their assumptions, as if there are a number of fields where people are doing fieldwork to collect things like ice core samples, measuring ocean conditions, surveying plant and animal communities, etc. This is, of course, a notorious intellectual pitfall for both physicists and elder scientists but I think in this case it’s more a question of insufficiently vetting information. He wasn’t just wrong in some novel manner but in exactly the ways that the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists were saying in the 90s and early 2000s, down to the decoy concerns about public health and disaster relief (both of which are becoming much harder due to climate inaction). This essay seems like a good example for how susceptible smart people can be to the message that they’re savvy enough to see something most people missed.

npunt 2y ago
100%, it reads like 'I found a clever flaw and followed it up with an unrigorous conclusion because I was blinded by my cleverness'. His conclusion that oh the soil can recapture carbon also reminded me of generally smart & accomplished but non-expert people online these days that lean on unrealistic tech solutions they just heard about as being an adequate mitigation for climate change. 'Oh just have ships burn bunker fuel again to put sulfur in the air', 'we can seed the clouds', 'we'll surely build technologies like carbon capture that will solve this'. Rather than fall into the nerd snipe trap of trying to analyze these technologies and their deployment and effect, it's far easier to see it for what it really is: cope. People don't want to face up to how existentially scary and out of control things are in our climate, so they rationalize their fears away. It's understandable, but it's also not sound analysis, and can be safely dismissed as such.
- acdha 2y ago
  I think your last point is really important. Once you accept that climate scientists are right, you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions and the things you’ll be doing less, not to mention all of the fun ecosystem and disease implications. It’s sooooooo much easier just to hope that the multi-billion dollar campaign saying business as usual will be fine is right, because otherwise you’re pretty much saying your children won’t have a world as good as you did.