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Desrtopa comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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That's how I interpreted it in the first place; "believe in anthropogenic global warming" is a much more nebulous proposition anyway. But while anthropogenic global warming doesn't yet have the same sort of degree of evidence as, say, evolution, I think that an assignment of about 70% probability represents either critical underconfidence or astonishingly low levels of familiarity with the data.
What should astonish about zero familiarity with the data, beyond that there's a scientific consensus?
I would be unsurprised by zero familiarity in a random sampling of the population, but I would have expected a greater degree of familiarity here as a matter of general scientific literacy.
It doesn't astonish me. It's not a terribly important issue for everyday life; it's basically a political issue.
I think I answered somewhere around 70%; while I've read a bit about it, there are plenty of dissenters and the proposition was a bit vague.
The claim that changing the makeup of the atmosphere in some way will affect climate in some way is trivially true; a more specific claim requires detailed study.
I would say that it's considerably more important for everyday life for most people than knowing whether tomatoes have genes.
Climate change may not represent a major human existential risk, but while the discussion has become highly politicized, the question of whether humans are causing large scale changes in global climate is by no means simply a political question.
If the Blues believe that asteroid strikes represent a credible threat to our civilization, and the Greens believe they don't, the question of how great a danger asteroid strikes actually pose will remain a scientific matter with direct bearing on survival.
Wait a sec. Global warming can be important for everyday life without it being important that any given individual know about it for everyday life. In the same way that matters of politics have tremendous bearing on our lives, yet the average person might rationally be ignorant about politics since he can't have any real effect on politics. I think that's the spirit in which thomblake means it's a political matter. For most of us, the earth will get warmer or it won't, and it doesn't affect how much we are willing to pay for tomatoes at the grocery store (and therefore it doesn't change our decision rule for how to buy tomatoes), although it may effect how much tomatoes cost.
(It's a bit silly, but on the other hand I imagine one could have their preferences for tomatoes depend on whether tomatoes had "genes" or not.)
This is a bit like the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is the stuff of front page newspaper articles about the economy, really very important stuff. But if you had to take just one economics class, I would recommend micro, because it gives you a way of thinking about choices in your daily life, as opposed to stuff you can't have any real effect on.
You don't have much influence on an election if you vote, but the system stops working if everyone acts only according to the expected value of their individual contribution.
This is isomorphic to the tragedy of the commons, like the 'rationalists' who lose the war against the barbarians because none of them wants to fight.
Exactly, it IS the tragedy of the commons, but that supports my point, not yours. It may be good for society if people are more informed about global warming, but society isn't what makes decisions. Individuals make decisions, and it's not in the average individual's interest to expend valuable resources learning more about global warming if it's going to have no real effect on the quality of their own life.
Whether you think it's an individual's "job" or not to do what's socially optimal, is completely besides the point here. The fact is they don't. I happen to think that's pretty reasonable, but it doesn't matter how we wish people would behave, in order to predict how they will behave.
Let me try to be clear, since you might be wondering why someone (not me) downvoted you: You started by noting your shock that people aren't that informed about global warming. I said we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that they aren't that informed about global warming. You responded that we're suffering from the tragedy of the commons, or the tragedy of the rationalists versus the barbarians. I respond that I agree with what you say but not with what you seem to think it means. When we unearth a tragedy of the commons, we don't go, "Aha! These people have fallen into a trap and if they saw the light, they would know to avoid it!" Casting light on the tragedy of the commons does not make it optimal for individuals to avoid it.
Casting light on the commons is a way of explaining why people would be behaving in such a socially suboptimal way, not a way of bolstering our shock over their behavior.
In a tragedy of the commons, it's in everybody's best interests for everybody to conserve resources. If you're running TDT in a population with similar agents, you want to conserve, and if you're in a population of insufficiently similar agents, you want an enforced policy of conservation. The rationalist in a war with the barbarians might not want to fight, but because they don't want to lose even more, they will fight if they think that enough other people are running a similar decision algorithm, and they will support a social policy that forces them and everyone else to fight. If they think that their side can beat the barbarians with a minimal commitment of their forces, they won't choose either of these things.
And this is why xv15 is right and Desrtopa is wrong. Orther people do not run TDT or anything similar. Individuals who cooperate with such a population are fools.
TDT is NOT a magic excuse for cooperation. It calls for cooperation in cases when CDT does not only when highly specific criteria are met.
In which case you want an enforced policy conforming to the norm. A rational shepherd in a communal grazing field may not believe that if he doesn't let his flock overgraze, other shepherds won't either, but he'll want a policy punishing or otherwise preventing overgrazers.
Yes, and this means that individuals with the ability to influence or enforce policy about global warming can potentially benefit somewhat from knowing about global warming. For the rest of the people (nearly everyone) knowledge about global warming is of no practical benefit.
I agree. Desrtopa is taking Eliezer's barbarians post too far for a number of reasons.
1) Eliezer's decision theory is at the least controversial which means many people here may not agree with it.
2) Even if they agree with it, it doesn't mean they have attained rationality in Eliezer's sense.
3) Even if they have attained this sort of rationality, we are but a small community, and the rest of the world is still not going to cooperate with us. Our attempts to cooperate with them will be impotent.
Desrtopa: Just because it upholds an ideal of rationality that supports cooperation, does not mean we have attained that ideal. Again, the question is not what you'd like to be true, but about what's actually true. If you're still shocked by people's low confidence in global warming, it's time to consider the possibility that your model of the world -- one in which people are running around executing TDT -- is wrong.
Those are all good reasons but as far as I can tell Desrtopa would probably give the right answer if questioned about any of those. He seems to be aware of how people actually behave (not remotely TDTish) but this gets overridden by a flashing neon light saying "Rah Cooperation!".
But sometimes it works out anyway. Lots of people can be fools. And lots of people can dislike those who aren't fools.
People often think "well if everyone did X sufficiently unpleasant thing would happen, therefore I won't do it". They also implicitly believe, though they may not state "most people are like me in this regard". They will also say with their facial expressions and actions though not words "people who argue against this are mean and selfish".
In other words I just described a high trust society. I'm actually pretty sure if you live in Switzerland you could successfully cooperate with the Swiss on global warming for example. Too bad global warming isn't just a Swiss problem.
Compliance with norms so as to avoid punishment is a whole different issue. And obviously if you willfully defy the will of the tribe when you know that the punishment exceeds the benefit to yourself then you are the fool and the compliant guy is not.
Of course they will. That's why we invented lying! I'm in agreement with all you've been saying about hypocrisy in the surrounding context.
At the Paris meetup Yvain proposed that voting might be rational for TDT-ish reasons, to which I replied that if you have voted for losing candidates at past elections, that means not enough voters are correlated with you. Though now that I think of it, maybe the increased TDT-ish impact of your decision could outweigh the usual arguments against voting, because they weren't very strong to begin with.
I disagree actually.
For most people neither global warming nor tomatoes having genes matters much. But if I had to choose, I'd say knowing a thing or two about basic biology has some impact on how you make your choices with regards to say healthcare or how much you spend on groceries or what your future shock level is.
Global warming, even if it does have a big impact on your life will not be much affected by you knowing anything about it. Pretty much anything an individual could do against it has a very small impact on how global warming will turn out. Saving 50$ a month or a small improvement in the odds of choosing the better treatment has a pretty measurable impact on him.
Taking global warming as a major threat for now (full disclosure: I think global warming, is not a threat to human survival though it may contribute to societal collapse in a worst case scenario), it is quite obviously a tragedy of the commons problem.
There is no incentive for an individual to do anything about it or even know anything about it, except to conform to a "low carbon footprint is high status" meme in order to derive benefit in his social life and feeling morally superior to others.
What I think you should be arguing here (and what on one level I think you where implicitly arguing), is that in a sufficiently high trust society one should spend more resources on educating people about global warming than tomatoes having genes if one wants to help them.
It is for their own good, but not their personal good. Like a vaccine shot that has a high rate of nasty side effects but helps keep an infectious disease at bay. If you care about them, it can be rational to take the shot yourself if that's an effective signal to them that you aren't trying to fool them. By default they will be modelling you like one of them and interpret your actions accordingly. Likewise if you just happen to be better enough at deceit than they will fail detecting it, you can still use that signal to help them, even if take a fake shot.
Humans are often predictably irrational. The arational processes that maintain the high trust equilibrium can be used to let you take withdrawals of cooperative behaviour from the bank when the rational incentives just aren't there. What game theory is good for in this case is realizing how much you are withdrawing, since a rational game theory savvy agent is a pretty good benchmark for some cost analysis. You naturally need to think about the cost to quickly gauge if the level of trust is high enough in a society and further more if you burden it in this way, is the equilibrium still stable in the midterm?
If its not, teach them about tomatoes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change_on_humans
Also, it's already having a fairly substantial effect on polar communities in the US, Canada and Russia, making it difficult to obtain enough food. Many of them are impoverished in the context of the national economy and still whaling-dependant in large part for enough food to survive. Any disruption is a direct threat to food availability.
I'm not sure how that's a response to what I said. Electing a president who opts to start a nuclear war would obviously be a political issue, and might have even worse effects on humans.
You said it's not an important issue for everyday life.
Things that significantly impact health (how often are you exposed to pathogens and how severe are they?), weather (makes a big difference even for an urban-living person with access to climate-controlled dwelling like me in the Midwest), the availability of food and water (which you need for not dying), and the stability of where you live (loss of which compromises all the others and requires you to try to find somewhere else and see what happens there) seem like the very definition of important to everyday life.
What I meant was that knowing stuff about the issue isn't important for everyday life. While the availability of food and water is good to know about, what environmental conditions caused it is less important unless I'm a farmer or policy-maker.
Similarly, a nuclear war would impact health, weather, and the availability of food and water, but I am much better off worrying about whether my car needs an oil change than worrying about whether my government is going to start a nuclear war.
Stop being astonished so easily. How much familiarity with climate science do you expect the average non-climate scientist to actually have?
I suspect that people displaying >95% certainty about AGW aren't much more "familiar with the data" than the people who display less certainty -- that their most significant difference is that they put more trust on what is a political position in the USA.
But I doubt you question the "familiarity with the data" of the people who are very very certain of your preferred position.
Desrtopa said:
ArisKatsaris said:
The problem with these arguments is that you need to 1. know the data 2. know how other people would interpret it , because with just 1. you'll end up comparing your probability assignments with others', and might perhaps mistake into thinking that their deviation from your estimation is due to lack of access to the data and/or understanding over it...... ........unless you're comparing it to what your idea of some consensus is.
...Meanwhile I don't know either so just making a superficial observation, while not knowing which one of you knows which things here.
The average LessWronger is almost certainly much more competent to evaluate that global temperatures have been rising significantly, and that at least one human behavior has had a nontrivial effect on this change in temperature, than to evaluate that all life on earth shares a common ancestral gene pool, or that some 13.75 billion years ago the universe began rapidly inflating. Yet I suspect that the modern evolutionary synthesis (including its common-descent thesis), and the Big Bang Theory, are believed more strongly by LessWrongers than is anthropogenic climate change.
If so, then it can't purely be a matter of LessWrongers' lack of expertise in climate science; there must be some sociological factors undermining LessWrongers' confidence in some scientific claims they have to largely take scientists' word for, while not undermining LessWrongers' confidence in all scientific claims they have to largely take scientists' word for.
Plausibly, the ongoing large-scale scientific misinformation campaign by established economic and political interests is having a big impact. Merely hearing about disagreement, even if you have an excellent human-affairs model predicting such disagreement in the absence of any legitimate scientific controversy, will for psychological reasons inevitably shake a generic onlooker's confidence. Listen to convinced and articulate flat-earth skeptics long enough, and some measure of psychological doubt is inevitable, even if you are savvy enough to avoid letting this doubt creep into your more careful and reflective probability calculations.
I agree that they are likely at least competent about the former than the latter, but why do you think they are almost certainly much more competent?
Evaluating common descent requires evaluating the morphology, genome, and reproductive behavior of every extremely distinctive group of species, or of a great many. You don't need to look at each individual species, but you at least need to rule out convergent evolution and (late) lateral gene transfer as adequate explanations of homology. (And, OK, aliens.) How many LessWrongers have put in that legwork?
Evaluating the age of the universe requires at least a healthy understanding of contemporary physics in general, and of cosmology. The difficulty isn't just understanding why people think the universe is that old, but having a general enough understanding to independently conclude that alternative models are not correct.
That's a very basic sketch of why I'd be surprised if LessWrongers could better justify those two claims than the mere claim that global temperatures have been rising (which has been in the news a fair amount, and can be confirmed in a few seconds on the Internet) and a decent assessment of the plausibility of carbon emissions as a physical mechanism. Some scientific knowledge will be required, but not of the holistic 'almost all of biology' or 'almost all of physics' sort indicated above, I believe.
I think you're seriously failing to apply the Principle of Charity here. Do you think I assume that anyone who claims to "believe in the theory of evolution" understands it well?
RobbBB has already summed up why the levels of certainty shown in this survey would be anomalous when looked at purely from an "awareness of information" perspective, which is why I think that it would be pretty astonishing if lack of information were actually responsible.
AGW is a highly politicized issue, but then, so is evolution, and the controversy on evolution isn't reflected among the membership of Less Wrong, because people aligned with the bundle of political beliefs which are opposed to it are barely represented here. I would not have predicted in advance that such a level of controversy on AGW would be reflected among the population of Less Wrong.