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ChrisHallquist comments on Trusting Expert Consensus - Less Wrong
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Comments (79)
I saw that thread too, and was horrified - horrified that people were downvoting Stuart. And actually, on reflection, that that comment was upvoted is pretty horrifying too. The comment claims ambiguity in Stuart's post when there is none: it brings up value judgments and policy and so on when Stuart was very specific that he was talking about denial of the very existence of AGW, rather than about disagreements on appropriate policy responses. That tells me the commenter - and everyone who voted it up - was emotionally uncomfortable with the idea that AGW delialists were just completely wrong, so they read ambiguity into Stuart's statement that wasn't there.
The problem with saying "I'm only talking about X, I'm not talking about Y" when Y is related to X but less extreme, is that in politics people who are Y are often caricatured as being X. It's pretty hard to tell the difference between someone who really means to attack X and only X, and someone who is attacking Y by implicitly accusing them of being X and then attacking X.
It's the same reason as to why Jews might feel themselves to be a target when someone argues how bad it is to kill Christian babies to use their blood to bake matzohs, even if they have not personally killed any babies. Certainly if anyone posted such an argument I'd mod them down, even if I agreed that it's bad to eat babies and that they have correctly stated why.
This is a really bad example in this context. It would only be similar if there were some people who were actually using blood to bake their matzohs. When X and Y both actually exist, the situation is different.
If that's how you feel, replace it with "greedy Jewish bankers". Real ones exist, but it's unlikely that someone complaining about them is limiting his complaints to the ones that exist--he's probably saying it because he thinks there are more greedy Jewish bankers than there really are.
The point is that it may make sense to object to an otherwise legitimate attack on a group that doesn't include you if the attacker thinks that the group includes you.
I'm not sure that's a good comparison either, although it is slightly better. In that context, there'd be a legitimate complaint possibly of "greedy bankers" but it is doubtful that "greedy bankers" is a subset of Jewish bankers. Not the case for the example in question.
Strong disagreement. Stuart_Armstrong uses interchangeably the phrases "global warming denial," "someone who denies the existence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)," and "global warming skeptic." There is significant ambiguity there- many people identify as "global warming skeptics" in that they are skeptical of the moral and political claims of the global warming movement, not that they deny the existence of AGW. Similarly, many people identify as "global warming deniers" because they deny the moral, predictive, or prescriptive claims put forward by the global warming movement.
(Note that Thomas, who did express doubt in AGW, got downvoted to -3.)
I didn't see any effort on Stuart_Armstrong's part to disambiguate those or notice that he needed to. For example, in your post, it looked like you carefully limited the consensus to the actual scientific consensus on historical anthropogenic climate change, and if Stuart_Armstrong had mentioned that he was just talking about the historical record, there wouldn't have been a need for steven0461's comment.
Note this subthread in particular.
I'm not skeptical of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, or of the increase of atmospheric CO2, or that increasing CO2 levels will generally lead to higher temperatures, or that we have had higher temperatures in the last few decades.
But I am skeptical of the model projections into the future, and even more skeptical of the claims that the accuracy of those models have been established when they've proven inaccurate for the last decade. When you make predictions that fail, you should be decreasing your certainty in the model that gave those predictions.
I put "predictive or prescriptive claims" into my second bit, but I probably should have included it there as well.
That demands seems a little strange. Should he have disclaimed any claim about future warming? But given past warming caused by human CO2 (and other) emissions, we should expect more warming if we continue that activity (actually, the IPCC thinks warming would continue even if CO2 were kept at current levels).
On the other hand, I'm not seeing any way to read Stuart's statement as anything like, "if your estimate of future warming is only 50% of the estimate I prefer you're irrational."