The point is that, if you assume you can model and predict the climate, and point to CO2, as a driver, like clockwork, then you may entirely miss the graver, more serious, more catastrophic, more disastrous scenario where climate goes and changes more drastically, more quickly, and entirely of its own accord. Would you feel better in the famines if people say, oh well, you know, we were modelling for man made CO2, but we completely missed this other thing, because we were so trying to get people to act on the man made problem, that we overstated our confidence and ignored the possibility that, the climate would shift more extremely, all on its own. Will that feel better? Or will you say, but wait, people knew the climate made extreme shifts in the past, so why did you overlook that? Why not plan for a sudden extreme shift, as that is the biggest threat? And I think there you'll find that people tend to have this notion that the climate and humanity can be managed into a less-consumerist, less greedy and more sustainable economy, and that's what they are interested in, and why not, fair trade sounds good, reduction in nationalism and borders sounds good, but don't let that deny the bigger threat that climate can and will suddenly change on its own. And what are you going to do, in terms of support for policies and technologies, to provide humanity with backup systems? Build more wind farms? I think not.
If Jesus was real and really did say stuff like, "turn the other cheek", then yes he was an individual who was teaching others to start to find their own personal freedom, literally a higher state of intelligence, a more humanistic and identity-less intelligence. Ie. more like what the Buddha is supposed to have been.
But later, with the various Christian sects, it became political, and the Roman Empire got involved, and basically it was turned into a political empire movement. And the kinds of people who want to belong to a giant massive organism because it has power and survival mechanisms, they flock to such "religions" (which are really empires), so they are about power, and yeah they'll go on wars of conquest, as did Moslems and as did Christians. The Ottoman Empire didn't just grow out of smiles and roses. Likewise for all empires of the world.
Arguably, Jesus did something quite clever, he inserted an idea of personal freedom into the monotheistic Judaic line of culture, and he was killed for that, but it was too late, he'd introduced the idea, and some do argue that that idea did influence Western development, and in the end, some individuals felt enough of a sense of personal freedom that they started the Western Enlightenment.
Thanks, I'll read that. Then I'll try to summarise both positions in my head, understand what they are each saying, and then try to figure out which one makes more sense to me. Taleb may be talking more about technicalities, and Pinker may have had to rely more on anecdotes about people's attitudes. It really might mean something that the laws in Britain chose to forbid "cruel and unusual punishments" — what was it that they were doing that was "cruel" and "unusual"? Why do we think that lashing people is barbaric today? So I wouldn't jump to the "debunked" claim, until I understand what Taleb's criticism is actually about. Also, a curious thing about Taleb, I think he claimed somewhere that Lebanon had been a wonderfully stable and diverse and rich society for centuries, so its collapse was a complete shock, whereas, the fall of the Ottoman Empire basically destroyed the foundations of the whole region, so why would its collapse be such a surprise? Sometimes I wonder that Taleb thinks that every other nation should fear collapse and is fooling itself about stability. But then the UK has had the Magna Carta for 800 years, which means that for 800 years it has been gradually building post-authoritarian institutions... so the use of stats is wonderful and all, but I often wonder what Taleb misses in his technical critiques.
And however you doll up humanity today, it is merely an illusion that anything has changed since then.
Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature makes a case that, however bad things look today, the past was much much more violent. Actually his book tries to ask why things have improved so much. Part of our modern feeling that today is terrible, is because we are more sensitive and more empathetic than we've ever been before, so we notice stuff more than we used to. Of course, caveats, not all the planet is living in the 21st Century today, but there is a trend. And we hope it continues. So yes, we are still pretty crappy as humans, but let's not start believing that we are irredeemable—we have made a lot of progress and that means we can make more progress in universal empathy and care and compassion.
They are called the Institute of Forecasters. They study all kinds of models, look at which ones worked and which ones didn't, and whether the ones that did have anything in common, and the ones that didn't have anything in common, to get the principles of what approaches are known to lead to successful models. Feel free to google them.
Naturally, a lot depends on who you judge to be competent and in the field. Years ago another field, specialists in forecasting, said that if you look at the things which end up making for good forecasts and models, and you take those things and compare them to what climatology is doing, none of the climatology stuff works. They don't use methods which empirically, from experience, are known to lead to good models. But whose field is it anyway? Of course it is tempting to say, HA! forecasters, what the f*** do they know... but there is a field which studies the methods of forecasting... and so do you listen to that field, or not?
No, that is a bad motivator. It is like, the slave owner motivating the slave with a beating. Yeah, we are all "motivated" to survive.
Making life harder for people is not "good" motivation, that's just called "survival".
Hey, if you make the electricity even more expensive, maybe the women will be "motivated" to going back to spending all day washing the clothes by hand. You're welcome to try doing that yourself.
Also, I could spend all day making a better hunting spear, only for others to come steal it from me by force. It is because life is unfair, that we are all having to try to find better systems that work better for everyone. Like the guys who go round killing rhinos to sell the horns, they just say, "life is unfair, I have nothing, why shouldn't I get something for myself?"
Minimum wage may or may not be a good idea (my guess is it isn't), but "life is unfair" is a moot point, because every human is every other human's problem, one way or another.
Good point, for my own experience, it is nice to have a working iPlayer on the panny Viera—it makes it feel "modern"—but craptastic to keep seeing a "Myspace" ad on the home screen—makes it feel ancient. They seem to think you can just dump an "ecosystem" on these things and make it feel "smart", but it is a fine line between "useful" and feeling instead that you've just driven into a run down small town in the middle of nowhere. Talk about making your shiny gadget feel like it is obsolete on day one.
The "Proofs" against the existence of God, are just as faulty as the "Proofs" for God.
That's an important point, wrt not making claims about what we don't know. I realise Richard Dawkins is critical of people who say, "science doesn't understand x therefore I believe in dragons etc." BUT/AND there is the other side where, scientism claims that life after death is impossible, and that's a step too far because, going back to the "we don't understand x", we don't have the faintest idea what sentience is, and nobody has come up with a good answer for how to even define it, or for how sentience arises out of matter, so Occam's razor doesn't help, because we don't know what the simplest answer would even be.
Why if you are a biological machine, are you also sentient? What's the point of sentience? It is irrelevant to life. Ants and birds might not be sentient, they are just machines running, like plants or trees, so why is there also this odd and unnecessary and frankly, annoying sentience? Yet if your body was here, living, yet without you being sentient, it would seem like... being dead? Why are we so identified with sentience, and why have we no idea how sentience works?
Not that I'm saying people should believe in sentience continuing after bodily death, I'm saying people overstep the mark when they claim that it must end and that's that and anyone who wonders otherwise is a religious nut. That's just where a scientific view becomes a scientism view, a belief in itself. So, remain open minded.
I'm not saying there is a god, and frankly my best speculative guess is that there is a cosmos of many kinds of beings, humans, ants, why not other stuff we don't know about, but there is NO evidence for ANY of the Abrahamic Gods, none of the Pagan Gods, whatever, these are all just old stories, and have no evidence at all for any of it. Those guys were not the first to have hallucinations nor the first to start a social movement.
And most of the main religions REQUIRE you to believe in a God, there is no way round that, and that belief or story is a sort of metaphor of then what you believe yourself to be, that comes to define what you believe you are, a sinner; in submission; etc., and all of those stories are simply bad psychology.
So yes, people should quite rightly be becoming atheist as they catch up with the modern world, like, if you are not atheist, then you haven't actually really quite noticed modernity. But that also means dropping the idea that we are "human animals" because, that's actually just another myth. We don't know what we are because we don't know what the real nature of sentience is. And as we discover more actual knowledge, maybe we'll start to discover something about that.
The hardest thing isn't just to drop the religious beliefs, the hard thing is to not go replacing them with pseudo-modern versions, like "we are a clever ape".
Modernity can retain the mystery because like all things we know we don't know, we simply leave it as an open question. And if atheists start getting too dogmatic then maybe we start a new thing called, "remaining being open minded".
Yes, risk assessment, that's reasonable and that's what I'm saying. Waiting for better models may be more harmful, and/or acting on existing models may be more harmful. So let's remove all the garbage about "deniers" and "marxists", all the feigned certainty one way or the other.
Fossil fuels "will" run out eventually, but is that in 10 years, 50 years, or 200 years? Climate is changing, but is it going to wipe out all grain harvests, change some rain patterns, or increase plant growth? Nuclear power is dirty, but is it manageable, is it expensive because of over-regulation, is it cleaner to build nuclear yet risking accidents, but providing for electric cars? Do wind arms actually produce enough energy to merit their use, or will do after enough subsidy to kickstart the system, or should we be thinking other things? Risk risk risk.
See one can't just acknowledge, oh yeah obviously there is risk... so therefore... this here model and solution is what we should do and anyone who disagrees is a denier. Nope. As I was praising the earlier poster, he was being honest.
Whatever we do there are risks, and start yeah, but start what? What if climate change is actually a fairly low risk in the grand scheme of things and meanwhile lack of cheap (coal fired) electricity is holding back Africa, and the underdevelopment of infrastructure, is making one of those global epidemics more likely? Something which could decimate humanity in a few years? Why is climate change touted as THE MOST IMPORTANT issue? When that's just a wild speculation about risk?
I sort of agree, but then, do we have time to wait for the 'logical evolution of the science'? Most science is done by making observations that prove hypotheses. In this case there is a slight problem with this way of making science. Once the observations are indisputable, its a bit too late to change things.
I don't care whether you are pro or against climate change action, but at least you are being perfectly HONEST.
So that's right, it is about risk and how to deal with that risk. To me this analogy fits: you are on a fast road and there is limited visibility, you see some object on the road up ahead, and you know that if you swerve violently you might just swerve into some other car or a tree, or maybe just go off the road and bump and survive, or you could keep going and see whether the object turns out to be an old cardboard box or something less dangerous. The decision/problem is about how best to rationally handle the questions of the risks involved.
There are two common and really idiotic views on climate change:
(1) it is real and happening and undeniable and those who claim we aren't certain are asking for a 100% certainty whereas we are 99.9999% certain so to deny that is tantamount to questioning whether the world is flat or a sphere, and whilst it may be true that in some weird unpredictable way, climate change turns out to be benign, because anything is possible, the risk of planetary disaster, mass extinction, runaway greenhouse, etc. are simply too big and so we have to act, because by the time it happens, it'll be too late, so we MUST act
(2) there is a United Nations drive to create a grass roots political counter culture which will operate via NGOs as an alternative to national governments, for wealth redistribution from rich countries to poor countries, to halt population growth, to halt industrialisation, in some new mix of socialist world government, under the banner of "global justice" and "sustainability", and that movement is simply unelected, undemocratic, authoritarian, and nuts, and they are pushing climate change as "science" via the corrupt IPCC in order to beat everyone into accepting their new "reality"
Now I'm sure many people will think that (1) makes sense and (2) is the idiotic one, but here's what I think really makes sense:
The reason both views stink is because, they are both really about risk and the future, and nobody knows the future. I'm all for a world government, where any kid born anywhere gets the same great opportunities in life, but how do you get there? I'm all for protecting the environment, but there too there is always risk. For example, that TED talk by an ecologist who said that, back in the day, they knew, and all ecologists agreed, that to protect a grassland they had to change things, so they shot 10,000 elephants. And decades later they realised their model was totally wrong. THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. Of course, people only act when they think they know the answer. Of course, decades of expertise can go into that answer. And it can still easily be wrong. To think otherwise is just overconfidence in a world of complex systems. More fool you.
Remain open minded, to both ideas of global governance and to ecological change and to environmental damage and so on, and to economies, to education, to all the other human systems, and remain open minded about all these things, and then when thinking about risks, INCLUDE the risk of your established and accepted expert theory being wrong, include those risks and weigh up all those risks. Yes, welcome a global equal society, but also be sceptical about how to get there, the risks involved, after all, the current system is a product of people's past efforts, and you are not the first generation to suddenly grow some compassion. Likewise, look for risks to the environment, to societies, and so on, and climate change is one risk, but not the only one. Weigh up all the risks.
And the big one, population growth. But another big one is also this:
An environmentalist who had travelled the world to find a job in carbon trading, explained to me that, "it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production and consumption; it is about reducing GREED."
As far as I know she wasn't religious, but it seems the West has inherited a monotheistic dogma about man being full of original sin, and sometimes it shows up in environmentalism.
Humans are creative intelligent creatures full of potential for empathy and freedom. But rather than champion our better qualities, some think we should persecute starving Africans for being born.
Thanks, I never quite understood what was going on in episodes of Nurse Jackie, being a UK viewer. And yeah, our 100 billion GBP NHS is pretty much the only thing that matters. That's the price of 2 coffees a day per person, by a simple estimate.
Sure, but unless you want ordinary people to revert to codes of personal honour and clan protection, the state has to be strong.
A strong state isn't a bad state. A bad strong state is a bad state.
"Bad" meaning, dictatorial, nepotistic, corrupt, abusive, etc. And people being flawed, all states have this problem in their government. But my impression is, the level of corruption in say, a Zambia or a Pakistan, is bigger than the corruption in a China, which is in turn perhaps more corrupt than a USA, which is more corrupt than say, Norway. Which is why I'd rather live in Norway than Pakistan.
So ISIL and the Islamists and all the people who are corrupt Islamic leaders, trying to use religion to gain power, rather than just help people, those people WANT the West to look weak, that's the point of terrorist attacks, a few here and a few there, which kill in relatively small numbers (compared to road deaths) but the point is, to create the illusion that the West is weak and ready to fall, and that you know, Islamists will be raising the flag above Rome any day now. It is to make you look weak.
So the state has to respond with signs of strength.
And we hope that USA is not so corrupt that this actually trashes your existing country and so becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
OK well let's say that programming is more like architectural design, ie. it involves drawing, but what you draw comes as a result of thinking over a large set of technical, aesthetic, cultural, psychological, risk, and practical issues, and being able to organise them, puzzle out the contradictions, and find a balance which is about right for the particular site and client and costs and timescales. But again, it is a certain mode of thinking involved, or a set of modes, and if they can't teach people how to get into those modes, then students can't design stuff. Actually, there was a debate about architecture back in 1890 or something, when they were proposing to formalise architectural education, and many architects/master builders of the day, argued that it wasn't something which could be taught. You either had the skills, or you didn't, and no amount of teaching or testing could give them to you. The only way to learn was by apprenticeship, where you'd soon find out if you had the right stuff or not. Personally, I tend to think they had a point. So maybe like architecture, programming isn't about simply executing a mechanical skill, like drawing or coding, but being able to handle all the other stuff. Whether that stuff can be taught, that's the question.
Maybe then there is something about how to really teach programming that everyone is missing. With drawing, people are either good at drawing or awful at it, regardless of classes, until teachers figure out what drawing really is and what the mind is doing when it is drawing. The people who have been seen to do well "in class" are just the ones who happen to have already got that mind skill. So I would wonder whether education has this figured out with programming, and that you'll see bimodal until it does.
According to a book, "Adapt", the reason we're not speaking German now has a lot to do with the Spitfire, a plane which would never have been built had it not been for a few people with very unusual perspectives taking a big leap into radical ideas, despite lack of official funding or support. For example, conventional wisdom from authorities was that the Spitfire was completely impractical because... you had to turn the plane to aim it at the target, as there were no gun turrets.
No crazy people backing weird ideas; no Spitfire; no victory at the Battle of Britain; the Germans take Britain; acquiring some nuclear scientists and accelerating their acquisition of the bomb. It is kinda scary how often it seems to be weird people pursuing odd ideas combined with dumb blind luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Busy with the other things.
The point is that, if you assume you can model and predict the climate, and point to CO2, as a driver, like clockwork, then you may entirely miss the graver, more serious, more catastrophic, more disastrous scenario where climate goes and changes more drastically, more quickly, and entirely of its own accord. Would you feel better in the famines if people say, oh well, you know, we were modelling for man made CO2, but we completely missed this other thing, because we were so trying to get people to act on the man made problem, that we overstated our confidence and ignored the possibility that, the climate would shift more extremely, all on its own. Will that feel better? Or will you say, but wait, people knew the climate made extreme shifts in the past, so why did you overlook that? Why not plan for a sudden extreme shift, as that is the biggest threat? And I think there you'll find that people tend to have this notion that the climate and humanity can be managed into a less-consumerist, less greedy and more sustainable economy, and that's what they are interested in, and why not, fair trade sounds good, reduction in nationalism and borders sounds good, but don't let that deny the bigger threat that climate can and will suddenly change on its own. And what are you going to do, in terms of support for policies and technologies, to provide humanity with backup systems? Build more wind farms? I think not.
If Jesus was real and really did say stuff like, "turn the other cheek", then yes he was an individual who was teaching others to start to find their own personal freedom, literally a higher state of intelligence, a more humanistic and identity-less intelligence. Ie. more like what the Buddha is supposed to have been.
But later, with the various Christian sects, it became political, and the Roman Empire got involved, and basically it was turned into a political empire movement. And the kinds of people who want to belong to a giant massive organism because it has power and survival mechanisms, they flock to such "religions" (which are really empires), so they are about power, and yeah they'll go on wars of conquest, as did Moslems and as did Christians. The Ottoman Empire didn't just grow out of smiles and roses. Likewise for all empires of the world.
Arguably, Jesus did something quite clever, he inserted an idea of personal freedom into the monotheistic Judaic line of culture, and he was killed for that, but it was too late, he'd introduced the idea, and some do argue that that idea did influence Western development, and in the end, some individuals felt enough of a sense of personal freedom that they started the Western Enlightenment.
Thanks, I'll read that. Then I'll try to summarise both positions in my head, understand what they are each saying, and then try to figure out which one makes more sense to me. Taleb may be talking more about technicalities, and Pinker may have had to rely more on anecdotes about people's attitudes. It really might mean something that the laws in Britain chose to forbid "cruel and unusual punishments" — what was it that they were doing that was "cruel" and "unusual"? Why do we think that lashing people is barbaric today? So I wouldn't jump to the "debunked" claim, until I understand what Taleb's criticism is actually about. Also, a curious thing about Taleb, I think he claimed somewhere that Lebanon had been a wonderfully stable and diverse and rich society for centuries, so its collapse was a complete shock, whereas, the fall of the Ottoman Empire basically destroyed the foundations of the whole region, so why would its collapse be such a surprise? Sometimes I wonder that Taleb thinks that every other nation should fear collapse and is fooling itself about stability. But then the UK has had the Magna Carta for 800 years, which means that for 800 years it has been gradually building post-authoritarian institutions... so the use of stats is wonderful and all, but I often wonder what Taleb misses in his technical critiques.
And however you doll up humanity today, it is merely an illusion that anything has changed since then.
Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature makes a case that, however bad things look today, the past was much much more violent. Actually his book tries to ask why things have improved so much. Part of our modern feeling that today is terrible, is because we are more sensitive and more empathetic than we've ever been before, so we notice stuff more than we used to. Of course, caveats, not all the planet is living in the 21st Century today, but there is a trend. And we hope it continues. So yes, we are still pretty crappy as humans, but let's not start believing that we are irredeemable—we have made a lot of progress and that means we can make more progress in universal empathy and care and compassion.
They are called the Institute of Forecasters. They study all kinds of models, look at which ones worked and which ones didn't, and whether the ones that did have anything in common, and the ones that didn't have anything in common, to get the principles of what approaches are known to lead to successful models. Feel free to google them.
Naturally, a lot depends on who you judge to be competent and in the field. Years ago another field, specialists in forecasting, said that if you look at the things which end up making for good forecasts and models, and you take those things and compare them to what climatology is doing, none of the climatology stuff works. They don't use methods which empirically, from experience, are known to lead to good models. But whose field is it anyway? Of course it is tempting to say, HA! forecasters, what the f*** do they know... but there is a field which studies the methods of forecasting... and so do you listen to that field, or not?
“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Considering the military is often all about filling problems with bullets, I do indeed respect that he knows what he's talking about.
It is weird, you know, if this was about specifying some IT gadget, people would be all over the hard numbers and data and adding stuff up.
But as soon as it gets onto energy and climate, it becomes this, oh, we can just consume less, and keep building green energy, and it'll all work out.
It'll be fun when you're getting up in the middle of the night to bathe and shower the family, because that's when the hot water is affordable.
People who talk like this have never, I would guess, lived in a 3rd world country.
"good motivator"
No, that is a bad motivator. It is like, the slave owner motivating the slave with a beating. Yeah, we are all "motivated" to survive.
Making life harder for people is not "good" motivation, that's just called "survival".
Hey, if you make the electricity even more expensive, maybe the women will be "motivated" to going back to spending all day washing the clothes by hand.
You're welcome to try doing that yourself.
Yes, indeed. Unfair.
Also, I could spend all day making a better hunting spear, only for others to come steal it from me by force.
It is because life is unfair, that we are all having to try to find better systems that work better for everyone.
Like the guys who go round killing rhinos to sell the horns, they just say, "life is unfair, I have nothing, why shouldn't I get something for myself?"
Minimum wage may or may not be a good idea (my guess is it isn't), but "life is unfair" is a moot point, because every human is every other human's problem, one way or another.
Good point, for my own experience, it is nice to have a working iPlayer on the panny Viera—it makes it feel "modern"—but craptastic to keep seeing a "Myspace" ad on the home screen—makes it feel ancient. They seem to think you can just dump an "ecosystem" on these things and make it feel "smart", but it is a fine line between "useful" and feeling instead that you've just driven into a run down small town in the middle of nowhere. Talk about making your shiny gadget feel like it is obsolete on day one.
The "Proofs" against the existence of God, are just as faulty as the "Proofs" for God.
That's an important point, wrt not making claims about what we don't know. I realise Richard Dawkins is critical of people who say, "science doesn't understand x therefore I believe in dragons etc." BUT/AND there is the other side where, scientism claims that life after death is impossible, and that's a step too far because, going back to the "we don't understand x", we don't have the faintest idea what sentience is, and nobody has come up with a good answer for how to even define it, or for how sentience arises out of matter, so Occam's razor doesn't help, because we don't know what the simplest answer would even be.
Why if you are a biological machine, are you also sentient? What's the point of sentience? It is irrelevant to life. Ants and birds might not be sentient, they are just machines running, like plants or trees, so why is there also this odd and unnecessary and frankly, annoying sentience? Yet if your body was here, living, yet without you being sentient, it would seem like... being dead? Why are we so identified with sentience, and why have we no idea how sentience works?
Not that I'm saying people should believe in sentience continuing after bodily death, I'm saying people overstep the mark when they claim that it must end and that's that and anyone who wonders otherwise is a religious nut. That's just where a scientific view becomes a scientism view, a belief in itself. So, remain open minded.
I'm not saying there is a god, and frankly my best speculative guess is that there is a cosmos of many kinds of beings, humans, ants, why not other stuff we don't know about, but there is NO evidence for ANY of the Abrahamic Gods, none of the Pagan Gods, whatever, these are all just old stories, and have no evidence at all for any of it. Those guys were not the first to have hallucinations nor the first to start a social movement.
And most of the main religions REQUIRE you to believe in a God, there is no way round that, and that belief or story is a sort of metaphor of then what you believe yourself to be, that comes to define what you believe you are, a sinner; in submission; etc., and all of those stories are simply bad psychology.
So yes, people should quite rightly be becoming atheist as they catch up with the modern world, like, if you are not atheist, then you haven't actually really quite noticed modernity. But that also means dropping the idea that we are "human animals" because, that's actually just another myth. We don't know what we are because we don't know what the real nature of sentience is. And as we discover more actual knowledge, maybe we'll start to discover something about that.
The hardest thing isn't just to drop the religious beliefs, the hard thing is to not go replacing them with pseudo-modern versions, like "we are a clever ape".
Modernity can retain the mystery because like all things we know we don't know, we simply leave it as an open question. And if atheists start getting too dogmatic then maybe we start a new thing called, "remaining being open minded".
OK, so what is the conservative to optimistic understanding on nuclear energy? Should we be building a new generation of plants, and if so, how many?
Yes, risk assessment, that's reasonable and that's what I'm saying. Waiting for better models may be more harmful, and/or acting on existing models may be more harmful. So let's remove all the garbage about "deniers" and "marxists", all the feigned certainty one way or the other.
Fossil fuels "will" run out eventually, but is that in 10 years, 50 years, or 200 years? Climate is changing, but is it going to wipe out all grain harvests, change some rain patterns, or increase plant growth? Nuclear power is dirty, but is it manageable, is it expensive because of over-regulation, is it cleaner to build nuclear yet risking accidents, but providing for electric cars? Do wind arms actually produce enough energy to merit their use, or will do after enough subsidy to kickstart the system, or should we be thinking other things? Risk risk risk.
See one can't just acknowledge, oh yeah obviously there is risk... so therefore... this here model and solution is what we should do and anyone who disagrees is a denier. Nope. As I was praising the earlier poster, he was being honest.
Whatever we do there are risks, and start yeah, but start what? What if climate change is actually a fairly low risk in the grand scheme of things and meanwhile lack of cheap (coal fired) electricity is holding back Africa, and the underdevelopment of infrastructure, is making one of those global epidemics more likely? Something which could decimate humanity in a few years? Why is climate change touted as THE MOST IMPORTANT issue? When that's just a wild speculation about risk?
Which do you start?
OK but I don't mean incomplete. Much of what we know is partially true, but useful nonetheless. I get that.
I'm saying that you have no guarantee ahead of time that your model won't turn out to be useless and harmful.
I sort of agree, but then, do we have time to wait for the 'logical evolution of the science'? Most science is done by making observations that prove hypotheses. In this case there is a slight problem with this way of making science. Once the observations are indisputable, its a bit too late to change things.
I don't care whether you are pro or against climate change action, but at least you are being perfectly HONEST.
So that's right, it is about risk and how to deal with that risk. To me this analogy fits: you are on a fast road and there is limited visibility, you see some object on the road up ahead, and you know that if you swerve violently you might just swerve into some other car or a tree, or maybe just go off the road and bump and survive, or you could keep going and see whether the object turns out to be an old cardboard box or something less dangerous. The decision/problem is about how best to rationally handle the questions of the risks involved.
There are two common and really idiotic views on climate change:
(1) it is real and happening and undeniable and those who claim we aren't certain are asking for a 100% certainty whereas we are 99.9999% certain so to deny that is tantamount to questioning whether the world is flat or a sphere, and whilst it may be true that in some weird unpredictable way, climate change turns out to be benign, because anything is possible, the risk of planetary disaster, mass extinction, runaway greenhouse, etc. are simply too big and so we have to act, because by the time it happens, it'll be too late, so we MUST act
(2) there is a United Nations drive to create a grass roots political counter culture which will operate via NGOs as an alternative to national governments, for wealth redistribution from rich countries to poor countries, to halt population growth, to halt industrialisation, in some new mix of socialist world government, under the banner of "global justice" and "sustainability", and that movement is simply unelected, undemocratic, authoritarian, and nuts, and they are pushing climate change as "science" via the corrupt IPCC in order to beat everyone into accepting their new "reality"
Now I'm sure many people will think that (1) makes sense and (2) is the idiotic one, but here's what I think really makes sense:
The reason both views stink is because, they are both really about risk and the future, and nobody knows the future. I'm all for a world government, where any kid born anywhere gets the same great opportunities in life, but how do you get there? I'm all for protecting the environment, but there too there is always risk. For example, that TED talk by an ecologist who said that, back in the day, they knew, and all ecologists agreed, that to protect a grassland they had to change things, so they shot 10,000 elephants. And decades later they realised their model was totally wrong. THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES. Of course, people only act when they think they know the answer. Of course, decades of expertise can go into that answer. And it can still easily be wrong. To think otherwise is just overconfidence in a world of complex systems. More fool you.
Remain open minded, to both ideas of global governance and to ecological change and to environmental damage and so on, and to economies, to education, to all the other human systems, and remain open minded about all these things, and then when thinking about risks, INCLUDE the risk of your established and accepted expert theory being wrong, include those risks and weigh up all those risks. Yes, welcome a global equal society, but also be sceptical about how to get there, the risks involved, after all, the current system is a product of people's past efforts, and you are not the first generation to suddenly grow some compassion. Likewise, look for risks to the environment, to societies, and so on, and climate change is one risk, but not the only one. Weigh up all the risks.
Anything already slow on the desktop, and which is always being used for ever more demanding projects, isn't really moving to the web.
Autocad for example.
And the big one, population growth. But another big one is also this:
An environmentalist who had travelled the world to find a job in carbon trading, explained to me that, "it doesn't matter if CO2 isn't really a problem, because by cutting CO2 you force a reduction in production and consumption; it is about reducing GREED."
As far as I know she wasn't religious, but it seems the West has inherited a monotheistic dogma about man being full of original sin, and sometimes it shows up in environmentalism.
Humans are creative intelligent creatures full of potential for empathy and freedom. But rather than champion our better qualities, some think we should persecute starving Africans for being born.
Thanks, I never quite understood what was going on in episodes of Nurse Jackie, being a UK viewer. And yeah, our 100 billion GBP NHS is pretty much the only thing that matters. That's the price of 2 coffees a day per person, by a simple estimate.
Sure, but unless you want ordinary people to revert to codes of personal honour and clan protection, the state has to be strong.
A strong state isn't a bad state. A bad strong state is a bad state.
"Bad" meaning, dictatorial, nepotistic, corrupt, abusive, etc. And people being flawed, all states have this problem in their government. But my impression is, the level of corruption in say, a Zambia or a Pakistan, is bigger than the corruption in a China, which is in turn perhaps more corrupt than a USA, which is more corrupt than say, Norway. Which is why I'd rather live in Norway than Pakistan.
So ISIL and the Islamists and all the people who are corrupt Islamic leaders, trying to use religion to gain power, rather than just help people, those people WANT the West to look weak, that's the point of terrorist attacks, a few here and a few there, which kill in relatively small numbers (compared to road deaths) but the point is, to create the illusion that the West is weak and ready to fall, and that you know, Islamists will be raising the flag above Rome any day now. It is to make you look weak.
So the state has to respond with signs of strength.
And we hope that USA is not so corrupt that this actually trashes your existing country and so becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
OK well let's say that programming is more like architectural design, ie. it involves drawing, but what you draw comes as a result of thinking over a large set of technical, aesthetic, cultural, psychological, risk, and practical issues, and being able to organise them, puzzle out the contradictions, and find a balance which is about right for the particular site and client and costs and timescales. But again, it is a certain mode of thinking involved, or a set of modes, and if they can't teach people how to get into those modes, then students can't design stuff. Actually, there was a debate about architecture back in 1890 or something, when they were proposing to formalise architectural education, and many architects/master builders of the day, argued that it wasn't something which could be taught. You either had the skills, or you didn't, and no amount of teaching or testing could give them to you. The only way to learn was by apprenticeship, where you'd soon find out if you had the right stuff or not. Personally, I tend to think they had a point. So maybe like architecture, programming isn't about simply executing a mechanical skill, like drawing or coding, but being able to handle all the other stuff. Whether that stuff can be taught, that's the question.
Yes, sorry about the poor use of tenses, that is what I had in mind.
Maybe then there is something about how to really teach programming that everyone is missing. With drawing, people are either good at drawing or awful at it, regardless of classes, until teachers figure out what drawing really is and what the mind is doing when it is drawing. The people who have been seen to do well "in class" are just the ones who happen to have already got that mind skill. So I would wonder whether education has this figured out with programming, and that you'll see bimodal until it does.
According to a book, "Adapt", the reason we're not speaking German now has a lot to do with the Spitfire, a plane which would never have been built had it not been for a few people with very unusual perspectives taking a big leap into radical ideas, despite lack of official funding or support. For example, conventional wisdom from authorities was that the Spitfire was completely impractical because... you had to turn the plane to aim it at the target, as there were no gun turrets.
No crazy people backing weird ideas; no Spitfire; no victory at the Battle of Britain; the Germans take Britain; acquiring some nuclear scientists and accelerating their acquisition of the bomb. It is kinda scary how often it seems to be weird people pursuing odd ideas combined with dumb blind luck.