Life’s Work: An Interview with Penn Jillette | Hacker News Reader

Life’s Work: An Interview with Penn Jillette

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72 pointsnkurz21 comments

I have a strong dislike for Penn Jillette. His show "Bullshit" was often guilty of the same smoke-and-mirrors rhetorical tricks of which they accused others. This became apparent to me when I watched the episode on climate change, where they failed to interview a single scientist on the subject and Penn later suggested he hated the theory because Al Gore was promoting it [1]. The only evidence I can find of his recanting his position on the science is a reddit thread [2]; meanwhile, to this day, I have Climate Change skeptics throwing the Dihydrogen monoxide hoax [3] episode in my face as proof that Climate Change isn't real.

As a rational atheist skeptic, it drives me up the wall that this guy is on the same side as me. When he sounds smart, it's because he's plagiarizing Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and other skeptics who are smarter than him.

[1] http://reason.com/blog/2008/07/03/penn-teller-and-climate-ch...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/26o6o9/what_is_the...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax

I don't care for him either. He did an episode of wife swap and he intentionally raised his kids to shit all over everyone else's ideas 100% of the time. There's something to be said for questioning authority and ideas, but his whole family comes across as rude and immature.

I'm an atheist too, but its counterproductive to spend all of your time telling people how stupid they are.

Perhaps he should hang or goes free by his own words (linked from the Reason blog) rather than the summary: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/03/opinion/oe-jillette3. He explains further in an video interview here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmelsx_penn-jillette-discus....

I don't think he recanted his position, rather he's just decided to keep his beliefs more to himself. The latest I can find from him is in his 2016 book Presto!: "The truth is that Penn & Teller were never climate change deniers. We just didn't know. Since then, peer pressure and kowtowing to authority have shut us the fuck up. We drive electric cars. I can also try to placate the climate people by calling myself a vegan. Eating onions imported from Mexico leaves a smaller carbon footprint than eating local chickens." https://books.google.com/books?id=nVGmCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA240&lpg=...

Personally, I think I agree with Penn. I believe the world is warming, some significant portion of it is anthropogenic, but that many of the "received truths" of popular climate science are based on weak science and overstated evidence. Most of the conclusions will stand, but more will fall than the published error bars would indicate. I think it's a problem that one is not allowed to genuinely say "I don't know" when asked what one thinks about any scientific issue. Whether or not the current conclusions are true, it leads in a dangerous direction when people are shunned for stating their ignorance rather than proclaiming their faith in something they do not actually believe.

He's very entertaining, seems intelligent, and he's a pretty typically myopic ideologue with the flavor being "Libertarian". On the other hand, I look askance at the people who took the magician seriously, just because he told them to.

As much of a rational atheist skeptic you may think you are, I believe you are twisting words. They actually conclude the episode with "I don't know".

If anything he was calling out those manipulating "green" for their own agendas -- and people "connecting" to river rocks.

The bullshit is the lack of consistency. Which one is to be feared: Warming? Cooling? Change? ... Hard to argue change ... What if we can't do anything about it? Are you truly sure the cause is CO2 or is CO2 just an indicator of a warming event?

Gore is a politician and charlatan. [1] Like many attached to the movement, a hypocrite and profiting without any realistic solutions that won't detriment the ecosystem, economy or quality of life in any other manner.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore#Criticism

Yes, we're sure about CO2 being one of the causes. As is widely published, 97+% of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. The consensus is that average temps are rising, and that weather is becoming more extreme.

The only really valid criticism there seem to be that he flies around in a private jet, which seem pretty contrary to his beliefs. Who cares that he advocates for "green" policies that he'd stand to benefit from? If he truly believes in these initiatives, why would he invest in them himself? Do you question SV investors who advocate for better stem education or net neutrality?

> As is widely published, 97+% of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring.

That "97%" claim is questionable.

The usual source on that number is this paper from 2009:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2009EO030002/epdf

A bunch of earth scientists were asked to take a web-based survey with a couple questions about climate. There was about a 30% response rate. Survey question #2 was:

"Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures"?

82% of survey participants answered yes to that question. Which, sure, sounds like a consensus, but it's not a rhetorically convincing level of consensus, so the researchers apparently kept slicing up the data until they could find something better-sounding.

The salami slice that fit the bill turned out to be (quoting a Fig. 1 chart caption): "Climatologists who are active publishers on climate change", which is to say, folks who had multiple recent publications in climate journals and "more than 50% of their publications in the last 5 years had been on the subject of climate change."

So basically the finding says among people who are able to get lots of papers published on climate change, THOSE guys share 97% agreement on the "humans are causing it" question.

Out of 3146 scientists who responded, 77 were counted as "Climatologists who are active publishers on climate change". 75 out of those 77 answered "yes" to question 2, hence 97.1% agreement.

But they also broke out just self-identified "climatologists". Eyeballing the chart, it looks to me like they have about 87% agreement on Question #2.

TL;DR: Roughly 87% - not 97+% - of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring. (Or at least, did so as of 2009).

I don't have the citation handy, but there's been more consensus on Question #2 since 2009. Even assuming there wasn't, 87% agreement is pretty good evidence in favor of the idea.

There's at least one other survey that did the same trick - turned ~80% agreement in a big group into 97% in a minuscule subsample.

Additionally, John Cook - the guy who runs skepticalscience - did some studies claiming to find high agreement with "the consensus" among published papers about climate. But his paper were terrible, didn't show what he claimed they did, and were less relevant to your claim.

Here's a blogpost going into some issues with the Cook studies and the claims made for them:

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-climate-falseho...

The difference between disagreeing with 80%-ish and 97% is largely of rhetorical importance. For propaganda purposes it feels like the difference between "a respectable minority view" and "a lunatic fringe". Alas, scientists almost never agree on ANYTHING to the 97% level. So if you hear that level claimed, the best bet is that somebody either fudged with the question - watering it down to such a degree that all the "skeptics" also agree - or fudged with the sample pool, making the surveyed group so tiny and self-selected as to exclude lots of legitimate scientists in related fields.

Forgot to mention: a key part of that question is the vagueness of the wording "significant contributing factor". "Significant" certainly includes "small but statistically significant" and also includes "a meaningful fraction (that still might be less than half)".

Part of the IPCC "consensus view" on climate is the notion that human activity is responsible for more than half of recent warming. Thus it's quite possible - even likely - for someone to be skeptical of the consensus view and still answer "yes" to question 2.

If question 2 were made more precise such that only people who agree with the consensus would answer yes, the level of agreement found - even among climatologists - would be much smaller even than 87%. (I'm guessing closer to 60%. Still probably a majority view in the field, still a "consensus", just not an overwhelming consensus.)

They don't need to know, but if we were talking about something less politicized by the fossil fuel industry, we'd think they were idiots for not deferring to the generally accepted science and instead saying "I don't know."

Like, say they were doing a show on the big bang. That's a pretty non-controversial thing, but we obviously don't know what happened back then. Still, we sure don't see a whole lot of big bang skeptics around (and probably a lot of us here would think they were being willfully ignorant or coy to say "well, I don't know, I wasn't there"). Big bang skepticism isn't an unofficial part of a major political party, either. What's the difference here, I wonder.

>Big bang skepticism isn't an unofficial part of a major political party, either.

Isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right

It shouldn't be. It was a Catholic priest who came up with the idea.

But the thing is we DO know: global temperatures are increasing due to increased levels of greenhouse gases, the dominant cause of which is human fossil fuel consumption. This is ironclad fact. Virtually all of the scientific literature supports it.

Let's be clear: Penn exercises his own unique brand of anti-intellectualism and anti-authoritarianism; more generally, he's just an entertaining contrarian with an empathy gap, but it just so happens that he's on the correct side of things much of the time.

I would pay some money to see him, Ben Stein, Michael Moore, and Bill Maher and Ann Coulter all in the same room together.

Bill Maher admits when he makes a mistake. I think he's in the upstairs room.

I agree with you. Penn's material (even when he's right) is all about calling other people wrong, to boost his own ego and that of his similarly-opinionated viewers. It's crack for the "smarter-than-you" contrarian crowd. I feel as if that kind of attitude is not beneficial to creating more reasoned discourse, and I don't like that at all.

Are you going to hate him forever because he was wrong about something 10 years ago? Penn and Teller made dozens of episodes of that show and most of them were great. Even if they weren't right about every issue, they encouraged their audience to think critically, Which is more than I can say about anything else on TV.

Penn and Teller are a lot of fun and put on a great show. The political issue they spend the most time on is the TSA.

Teller is the best part of the couple. What tops "The word made flesh" as an magic act? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/a-memory...

Penn Jillette is an amazing person. What makes America such a great country is the existence of large number of libertarian business men, leaders and public figures.

In other countries it is uneconomical for most public figures to be critical of their government.

> And yet my heaviest and most important conversations are with Teller. When our parents died, we were the first ones we went to. When I was going to have children and get married, he was the first person I talked to.

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