I start, for readers who want to grade themselves on the questions in the previous post, by giving my answers. Other people might want to add more: Climate Change (for someone who considers it a serious problem): What are the major positive effects of climate change?
I have read some of your previous articles on Global Warming. I am not a fan. You are delusional in your understanding of what's happening because you filter so heavily the "evidence" you accept as valid. In short, you engage in "confirmation bias".
Most people do. Even in scientific fields like "Climate Science" this is true. The insight that SCIENCE IS A SOCIAL PROCESS is the foundation of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The seminal work that gave us the useful concept of the "paradigm shift".
If you are an "average" person you absorb about 80% of what you know about the world in High School. Which is why the RIGHT is so obsessive about controlling the narrative for kids. That's where most people learn everything they will ever know about "most everything".
Because, BEING INFORMED (even in an age of free information) COMES AT THE COST OF DISCRETIONARY TIME. #FYI Autistic with Synesthesia I "see" words in shapes, colors, tastes, textures, and sizes.
Most people don't allocate much time to it. What they learn about, Rome for example, once they leave HS is going to be what they absorb through TV, movies, and games. The same is true about Global Warming and Climate Change. Once people stop being "forced" to look at evidence which threatens the world view their parents "gifted" them with, they only "see" evidence which confirms their preferred reality.
Based on the "Climate Science" and opinions you frequently cite, you have sunk deep into a reality of confirmation bias. You have, in fact, become delusional. You are no longer perceiving REALITY the way the vast majority of the world perceives it.
Because here's what 65 years of research on the Earth's Ice Cores (a project on par with sequencing the Human Genome), the paleoclimate record for the last 500 million years (starting with development of LIFE), and DIRECT MEASUREMENTS have revealed.
The CLIMATE MODERATES, the ones you just love to cite, were WRONG.
They got the "science" wrong in the 80's and early 90's. They "assumed" that the RATE OF WARMING would be very slow. That THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM would take centuries, even millennia to occur. They "assumed" (because we didn't KNOW then) that warming by 2100 would be under 1.5C for the levels of CO2 they "assumed" we would put in the atmosphere by that time.
None of these "assumptions" are based on anything other than "gut feelings" when you get down to it.
You are betting the future of your grandchildren on the "gut instincts" of CLIMATE MODERATES from the 80's. Who shaped the prevailing "Climate Science Paradigm" because they got their research funded in the 80's by not being "Alarmists".
Are you so willfully blind that you cannot see the risk of that?
Addendum: My PhD is in Anthropology, my Masters is in the History of Technology, my BS was a EE/CS double major at UC Berkeley. You have a doctorate in Economics?
Is this just a excuse, minimally shrouded in “devil’s advocacy”, to extoll right wing ideology? The only examples used were to take the other side of left of center positions. Your easeful denigration of “blacks” in the affirmative action section made it seem like you just wanted a good reason (in the name of “intellectual exercise”, of course) to express your otherwise hidden beliefs about their inferiority. Perhaps try to take a non-Fox-News approach and critique non-leftest ideologies, such as capitalism or corporatism, which are far more damaging to our world than anything you chose to argue against, and worthy of honest critique
I've just signed up to this substack from a referral at codex, and unless this is some sort of inside joke I'm falling for, I'm quite literally shocked by the stupidity of the very first thing I read.
You treat climate 'warming' literally? A little warmer, on average, would not be a bad thing for much of the planet??? This is Fossil Fuel propaganda for idiots. Please tell me you're joking.
This is overall pretty great, but the guns part is more pro-some guns and not anti-gun control. We don't need AR-15s and all the other aspects of our gun culture that leads to mass killings every day.
If people cared about fertilized eggs and blastocysts, they would realize that god is the greatest murderer of all time. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ for chapter of the same name.
Not sure why it should be viewed as “bizarre[]” that people don’t communicate who have not yet developed their full cognitive capacity; have not yet been exposed to communication from others; and are physically impeded from communicative behavior in a constricted and liquid environment.
"What are the main negative effects of having a minimum wage law or increasing the level?"
"Increasing unemployment among low skilled workers."
Well, now I see why I was having such difficulty with your little test, even for an issue such as this where I have never been convinced that minimum wages are a really good idea.
That implementing a minimum wage increases unemployment in any way, shape or form is, at best, both disputed and likely to be highly situational, and we have plenty of actual cases where increasing the minimum wage did not increase unemployment. And we have good theoretical reasons to believe that increasing the minimum wage in certain situations is likely to create jobs, though of course these involve looking at more than the incredibly simplistic models that many conservative economists like to use (at least when explaining things to the public).
Thanks for another great post! Particularly liked my spiritual world question. It's something I think about a lot and like to ask people. Unlike questions about theism, which stress people
One of my favourite questions to ask people has always been their beliefs about the efficacy of medicine/healthcare, from what I can tell Robin Hanson is basically correct, and that by any "reasonable" epistemic standards this is pretty clearly the case, yet most people even people who are into applied rationality and such, (Julia Galef might be an example although I'm not sure what she currently thinks, and I'm only going of her tone in her podcast from a while ago) think that Hanson is clearly wrong and maybe a crazy person.
Personally I think Hanson and others understate their argument, that is instead of saying something like " their are significant diminishing returns such that the second 50 percent is probably waste" and mentioning a bunch of RCTs and such or something, you could easily get away (epistemically speaking) with saying something flippant like "medicine is fake, doctors are fake, the whole industry is a pseudoscience (and always has been), health economists are a bunch of lying hacks and the reason people don't care is something something monkey brain, amount of time spend grooming, signalling, etc."
I dispute almost all of the responses on gun control:
Raising the cost of confrontational crime and so reducing its frequency.
It is possibly true that widespread civilian gun ownership occasionally deters criminals. I think it is extremely unlikely that higher gun ownership generally leads to less confrontational crime overall (and it certainly makes conflicts deadlier when they do occur), and would like to see some evidence for this. Most western countries have both substantially lower levels of gun ownership than the US *and* less violent crime. It is probably true that parts of the US with high gun ownership have less violent crime, but that's just an urban/rural divide.
*
Making people less willing to tolerate police excesses.
A better way to deter police excesses is to prohibit police from generally carrying guns (as in the UK). But this probably wouldn't work (at least not as a sudden policy change) in the US. Low confidence on this.
*
Making hunting for food and protecting crops and livestock from varmints/predators easier. Also target shooting.
Hunting for food has basically zero value in a modern society (except recreationally, which I will acknowledge is a real benefit). Crops and livestock are at risk from diseases and pests, not predators. To the extent that they are vulnerable to large predators, fences are vastly superior to firearms at protecting them. Smaller predators attack sufficiently stealthily and in sufficiently large numbers to make shooting them infeasible. Protecting livestock and crops from predators using humans wielding guns is absurdly uneconomic.
*
Making it easier for the military to recruit people with one of the relevant skills.
Making it easier to overthrow an oppressive government.
As you say yourself, the gulf between personal firearms and military technology is already large enough to make this basically irrelevant.
I have read some of your previous articles on Global Warming. I am not a fan. You are delusional in your understanding of what's happening because you filter so heavily the "evidence" you accept as valid. In short, you engage in "confirmation bias".
Most people do. Even in scientific fields like "Climate Science" this is true. The insight that SCIENCE IS A SOCIAL PROCESS is the foundation of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The seminal work that gave us the useful concept of the "paradigm shift".
If you are an "average" person you absorb about 80% of what you know about the world in High School. Which is why the RIGHT is so obsessive about controlling the narrative for kids. That's where most people learn everything they will ever know about "most everything".
Because, BEING INFORMED (even in an age of free information) COMES AT THE COST OF DISCRETIONARY TIME. #FYI Autistic with Synesthesia I "see" words in shapes, colors, tastes, textures, and sizes.
Most people don't allocate much time to it. What they learn about, Rome for example, once they leave HS is going to be what they absorb through TV, movies, and games. The same is true about Global Warming and Climate Change. Once people stop being "forced" to look at evidence which threatens the world view their parents "gifted" them with, they only "see" evidence which confirms their preferred reality.
Based on the "Climate Science" and opinions you frequently cite, you have sunk deep into a reality of confirmation bias. You have, in fact, become delusional. You are no longer perceiving REALITY the way the vast majority of the world perceives it.
Because here's what 65 years of research on the Earth's Ice Cores (a project on par with sequencing the Human Genome), the paleoclimate record for the last 500 million years (starting with development of LIFE), and DIRECT MEASUREMENTS have revealed.
The CLIMATE MODERATES, the ones you just love to cite, were WRONG.
They got the "science" wrong in the 80's and early 90's. They "assumed" that the RATE OF WARMING would be very slow. That THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM would take centuries, even millennia to occur. They "assumed" (because we didn't KNOW then) that warming by 2100 would be under 1.5C for the levels of CO2 they "assumed" we would put in the atmosphere by that time.
None of these "assumptions" are based on anything other than "gut feelings" when you get down to it.
You are betting the future of your grandchildren on the "gut instincts" of CLIMATE MODERATES from the 80's. Who shaped the prevailing "Climate Science Paradigm" because they got their research funded in the 80's by not being "Alarmists".
Are you so willfully blind that you cannot see the risk of that?
Addendum: My PhD is in Anthropology, my Masters is in the History of Technology, my BS was a EE/CS double major at UC Berkeley. You have a doctorate in Economics?
Is this just a excuse, minimally shrouded in “devil’s advocacy”, to extoll right wing ideology? The only examples used were to take the other side of left of center positions. Your easeful denigration of “blacks” in the affirmative action section made it seem like you just wanted a good reason (in the name of “intellectual exercise”, of course) to express your otherwise hidden beliefs about their inferiority. Perhaps try to take a non-Fox-News approach and critique non-leftest ideologies, such as capitalism or corporatism, which are far more damaging to our world than anything you chose to argue against, and worthy of honest critique
I've just signed up to this substack from a referral at codex, and unless this is some sort of inside joke I'm falling for, I'm quite literally shocked by the stupidity of the very first thing I read.
You treat climate 'warming' literally? A little warmer, on average, would not be a bad thing for much of the planet??? This is Fossil Fuel propaganda for idiots. Please tell me you're joking.
This is overall pretty great, but the guns part is more pro-some guns and not anti-gun control. We don't need AR-15s and all the other aspects of our gun culture that leads to mass killings every day.
If people cared about fertilized eggs and blastocysts, they would realize that god is the greatest murderer of all time. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ for chapter of the same name.
Not sure why it should be viewed as “bizarre[]” that people don’t communicate who have not yet developed their full cognitive capacity; have not yet been exposed to communication from others; and are physically impeded from communicative behavior in a constricted and liquid environment.
"What are the main negative effects of having a minimum wage law or increasing the level?"
"Increasing unemployment among low skilled workers."
Well, now I see why I was having such difficulty with your little test, even for an issue such as this where I have never been convinced that minimum wages are a really good idea.
That implementing a minimum wage increases unemployment in any way, shape or form is, at best, both disputed and likely to be highly situational, and we have plenty of actual cases where increasing the minimum wage did not increase unemployment. And we have good theoretical reasons to believe that increasing the minimum wage in certain situations is likely to create jobs, though of course these involve looking at more than the incredibly simplistic models that many conservative economists like to use (at least when explaining things to the public).
I won't go on with details, but you can find a summary of some of this, along with a shedload of references, here: https://www.businessforafairminimumwage.org/news/00135/research-shows-minimum-wage-increases-do-not-cause-job-loss . (Feel free to ignore the title; if you think that "do not cause job loss" is a little too strong, I agree, though it's not as bad as "minimum wage rises increase unemployment.")
Thanks for another great post! Particularly liked my spiritual world question. It's something I think about a lot and like to ask people. Unlike questions about theism, which stress people
One of my favourite questions to ask people has always been their beliefs about the efficacy of medicine/healthcare, from what I can tell Robin Hanson is basically correct, and that by any "reasonable" epistemic standards this is pretty clearly the case, yet most people even people who are into applied rationality and such, (Julia Galef might be an example although I'm not sure what she currently thinks, and I'm only going of her tone in her podcast from a while ago) think that Hanson is clearly wrong and maybe a crazy person.
Personally I think Hanson and others understate their argument, that is instead of saying something like " their are significant diminishing returns such that the second 50 percent is probably waste" and mentioning a bunch of RCTs and such or something, you could easily get away (epistemically speaking) with saying something flippant like "medicine is fake, doctors are fake, the whole industry is a pseudoscience (and always has been), health economists are a bunch of lying hacks and the reason people don't care is something something monkey brain, amount of time spend grooming, signalling, etc."
I dispute almost all of the responses on gun control:
Raising the cost of confrontational crime and so reducing its frequency.
It is possibly true that widespread civilian gun ownership occasionally deters criminals. I think it is extremely unlikely that higher gun ownership generally leads to less confrontational crime overall (and it certainly makes conflicts deadlier when they do occur), and would like to see some evidence for this. Most western countries have both substantially lower levels of gun ownership than the US *and* less violent crime. It is probably true that parts of the US with high gun ownership have less violent crime, but that's just an urban/rural divide.
*
Making people less willing to tolerate police excesses.
A better way to deter police excesses is to prohibit police from generally carrying guns (as in the UK). But this probably wouldn't work (at least not as a sudden policy change) in the US. Low confidence on this.
*
Making hunting for food and protecting crops and livestock from varmints/predators easier. Also target shooting.
Hunting for food has basically zero value in a modern society (except recreationally, which I will acknowledge is a real benefit). Crops and livestock are at risk from diseases and pests, not predators. To the extent that they are vulnerable to large predators, fences are vastly superior to firearms at protecting them. Smaller predators attack sufficiently stealthily and in sufficiently large numbers to make shooting them infeasible. Protecting livestock and crops from predators using humans wielding guns is absurdly uneconomic.
*
Making it easier for the military to recruit people with one of the relevant skills.
Making it easier to overthrow an oppressive government.
As you say yourself, the gulf between personal firearms and military technology is already large enough to make this basically irrelevant.