885 karma · joined July 27, 2013
It is truly an indictment of our time that this is deemed a useful standard of evidence.
This one found that there is near unanimity regarding humans being a major component of climate change. It is not “garbage level”, or lacking rigour. It is a useful contribution to the field.
There is a “credibility problem” because vested interests spend a lot of money trying to undermine research that will hurt them financially. This is thoroughly documented.
Which of their positions do you think can be easily dismissed?
> The left ... was never about equality and justice, it was always ... being about POWER
It feels more than a little reductive to attribute this behaviour to "the left" as a whole, when in fact it is a very small number of people. Perhaps you feel it is appropriate in your own context, but again this is a (common) presentation that purports to dismiss an entire "wing" of political thought, but actually just presents crude stereotypes.
Finally, I think the idea that the right present their attempts at power in a more naked fashion just isn't borne out by the evidence. Right wing policies are frequently presented as being dictated by either reason or common sense (often depending on the audience), and those of their opponents dismissed as unrealistic. This is the same kind of veneer you decry on the left, just a different colour - one that some find more appealing.
Politics is the process of distributing power, and left wing politics aims to distribute power more widely, whereas right wing politics aims to concentrate it.
For reference, I simply typed “Nature Human Behavior” into google.
The reductions you discuss are attributable to the first of those two effects. Climate change drives the second. If we mitigate climate change then we can spare ourselves the increases attributable to the second effect.
You may reply that the first effect can always outpace the second, but I hope with some thought you can recognise that there is no evidence to support that claim, and it is essentially just an article of faith.
Seems to me that capital accumulation and inheritance is a pretty obvious mechanism to drive that process.
Unfortunately, predicting its behaviour is difficult, for a variety of reasons. However, that doesn't mean such predictions should not be made, nor that alarm bells shouldn't be rung when it appears that things might be going awry, especially given the AMOC's global significance. Surely we can agree that insisting on only considering dangers of which we are entirely certain is a foolish approach to risk management?
However, having read a bit about their approach, it isn't clear to me that the methods used in that process are particularly effective at assessing longer terms problems such as climate change (and this seems to be a common critique).
There are some interesting analogues between the limitations of the CCC approach and those of longtermism, in that both focus on timescales (respectively short and very long) that diminish the importance of climate change, which is most significant as a medium-term risk. Having said that, at least the CCC work has some methodological rigour on its own terms, and actual utility - as I noted in another comment the longtermism "methodology" seems pretty hopelessly naive, and uninformative.
a) Undeveloped land is freely available, and anyone who wants to can go and cultivate it independently from anyone else, making a life entirely for themselves.
b) All land is already owned, and making a living must be achieved by exchanging (typically labour) with others.
Do you believe that people starting without capital in scenario b) will enter into contracts as freely as those starting without capital in scenario a)?
I find this argument compelling - most methodologies for inter-temporal decision making acknowledge the large uncertainties associated with the future, and, either explicitly or implicitly, avoid making claims about the distant future, either in terms of what plans we should make for the future, or in how future states should affect our current plans.
There is no reason to believe that the proponents of longtermism have addressed this issue - indeed if they had it would be a very significant breakthrough, and we could apply their method to more immediate problems as well. What seems much more likely is that they have not addressed the issue at all, and that their purported accounting is really just a regurgitation of their prior beliefs, and thus, as the article suggests, consequently serves only to justify the existing behaviours of those who subscribe to it.
Characterising that point of view as merely “Someone has failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation” seems ungenerous, and also to implicitly doubt their understanding of what happened, without a particular reason to favour either the child’s or parent’s interpretation.
The problem is that everyone operates on their own understanding, by definition, so wouldn’t it be better to, rather than say “this isn’t gaslighting”, instead note that it being gaslighting depends upon them being correct about what happened?
Such as?
I can’t figure out which part of my comment could be misinterpreted as having said this - please point it out to me so I can clarify my intent.
> “there is zero sincerity in your … comment”
I was very sincere in both of my points, those being, in summary, that your comments in the thread I replied into seem both insensitive and unevidenced.
> “ it's important to view all players as intelligent, rational, negotiating, and ultimately selfish human beings. It's important not to treat aboriginals as childlike, brainless caricatures like mrow84 does (e.g. the "noble savage").”
My only mention of people’s actions other than your own was to say that those searching for their relatives’ remains should probably not be characterised as engaging in a culture of horseshit. You can think what you like, but equating that with “treat(ing) aboriginals as childlike, brainless caricatures” seems like a bit of a stretch. If you think about it you might realise that there is quite a bit of ground between the two.
I feel compelled to note that your response contains no justification for your previous comments’ assertions. I am inclined to think that my original assessment was spot on.