roystgnr comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Thomas 03 March 2012 08:04AM

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Comment author: roystgnr 24 March 2012 10:44:23PM 2 points [-]

I'm not the one who downvoted it, but I'm about to add another, because the quote makes little to no sense without context. Who is "our" and "your"? Does "contribution" refer to CO2 emissions, or to poltiical activism, or to planning work, or to research?

People also tend to downvote pro- and anti-AGW arguments here as "mindkilling", but this one hasn't even reached that point yet. From just the quoted text I can't even be certain whether this is an anti-AGW statement (climate modelling is insufficiently detailed and data is too sparse to justify economic contributions to mitigating global warming!) or a pro-AGW sarcastic summary of an anti-AGW argument (you're ignoring our detailed data and modeling and just deciding how much CO2 we should contribute to the air!) or something I've missed entirely.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 25 March 2012 11:33:04PM 0 points [-]

I see. It was the latter - someone had just pooh-poohed basically all climate science, explicitly citing gut feeling. The above was a very straightforward summary of the 'argument', not really sarcastic.