Comment on Argument Screens Off Authority

Thu, 09 Jul 2015 16:31:14 GMT

In that case we simply have a disagreement about what constitutes scariness.

We probably do. In this context, "scariness" mean willingness to spend resources now for expected mitigation of potential issues in the future. My willingness is lower than the current mainstream opinion and much lower than that of environmentalists.

many of the things we may reasonably care about are not readily quantified; and any description of unquantified or barely-with-difficulty-quantified things can be dismissed as handwaving.

Handwaving is not just lack of quantification, handwaving is asserting things without adequate support.

For example, I count the phrase "including a wider range of risks and impacts could increase this to 20% of GDP or more" as pure handwaving even though it includes a number.

how scary you think those things are depends on how much you care about the future

I don't think we're talking about "caring" in conventional sense. As I mentioned above, this is really about pricing of future risks with an overlay of generational transfer issues.

Discuss