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PhilGoetz comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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It's not like a normal person can observe such changes - we're talking fraction of a degree over lifetime so far (Wikipedia says 0.74 ± 0.18 °C over entire 20th century).
It's a matter of your level of trust in "mainstream" scientists, and there's nothing particularly irrational about not having terribly much trust here.
And even global warming is real, it's still instrumentally rational to be wrong - let other people limit their carbon emissions, the world in which you drive SUV and everyone else overpays for Priuses is the optimal world for you to live in. (it would be even better to believe correctly in global warming, but be cynical enough to not give a shit about it, but many people have some sort of cynicism limit...)
I think we can agree that "instrumentally rational" is irrational.
It is irrational in a way that it recognized limitations of human rationality, and decides that sometimes you're better off not knowing. Perfect rational being would not need it - human being sometimes might.
"Oh all right," said the old man. "Here's a prayer for you. Got a pencil?"
"Yes," said Arthur.
"It goes like this. Let's see now: 'Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decide not to know about. Amen.' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open."
"Hmmm," said Arthur. "Well thank you --"
"There's another prayer that goes with it that's very important," said the old man, "so you'd better jot this down, too."
"Okay."
"It goes, 'Lord, lord, lord...' It's best to put that bit in just in case. You can never be too sure. 'Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen.' And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes from leaving out that last part."
In all seriousness, ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but conscious, willful ignorance is reprehensible. Let's actually make an effort to be all right with the way the world is, before we throw up our hands.
I choose to be ignorant about certain things all the time - every moment of my life spent on anything except reading Wikipedia is a choice of selective ignorance.
How much does your life improve by having more accurate view of global warming research, as opposed to being vaguely aware of it but fairly skeptical either way like most educated people? I'd guess improvement will be tiny, and the risk of such knowledge triggering your world-saving instincts is not worth it.
True, but that is ignorance-of-omission. You seemed to be advocating a conscious decision to keep yourself ignorant of certain well-defined areas of knowledge. Apologies if this is not so.
Well, here's the hedonistic vs. goal-oriented view of rationality again. Not everything I do is directly related to satisfying immediate whims. I am a voter and also an engineer, as it happens. Both of these circumstances imply I have an ethical obligation to be at least somewhat conversant on questions of public policy & the environment.
If my "world-saving instincts" should be triggered, I want them triggered. Again, as a bare minimum, public policy depends on an informed public, and GW is a policy problem. But uninformed consent in a democracy is pointless, it doesn't count. We might just as well save money on ballot paper and install a grand Doge for all the functional difference it would entail.
If democracy depended on informed voters, then we could as well give it up and set up a single party government.
Fortunately it does not.
I didn't say it was bad. I said it was irrational.