Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015

Vaniver

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

If a person doesn’t believe climate change is real, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is that a case of a dumb human or a science that has not earned credibility? We humans operate on pattern recognition. The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:

Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.

Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.

Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

You can’t tell. And if any scientist says you should be able to tell when science is “done” on a topic, please show me the data indicating that people have psychic powers.

So maybe we should stop scoffing at people who don’t trust science and ask ourselves why. Ignorance might be part of the problem. But I think the bigger issue is that science is a “mostly wrong” situation by design that is intended to become more right over time. How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers? And should we?

Scott Adams

(I think he is wrong about what most climate skeptics are thinking. It seems to me more of a selective reading thing; if the media you see tells you that it's fiercely debated, you're going to think it's fiercely debated by default, rather than know enough to look up the actual state of the field.)

There the xkcd comic asking regarding the moon landing: "If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now."

It's mean, but given the fake NASA discovery that "expands the definition of life" it's funny. At a time where jokes like that can be made, there's really question where the trust is supposed to come from.

7Vaniver11y

My personal experience is that I've mostly seen two main camps of climate skepticism, both of which seem to map to contrarian sophistication levels. I don't see many people who are operating at level 2 and climate skeptics. The first is the 'uneducated' critique, that nature is simply too big and variable for man to impact the climate, be sure he's impacting the climate, or have a desired climate reference level. This seems to mostly be out of touch with the data / scientific reasoning in general, but does fit into Adams's claim; one of the reasons why someone might disbelieve claims that we're sure about the causality and predictions is an overall poor track record of science. In this particular field, for example, some predictions of global cooling were made before, and people who value consistency more than correctness are upset by that. (It's worth pointing out that many people do give the argument "you're able to predict what the climate will look like in 80 years but you aren't able to predict what the weather will look like in 8 days?" despite the inherent difference between climate and weather, but that's mostly unrelated to Adams's point.) The second is the 'meta-contrarian' critique, that pokes at the incentives of climate science, the difficulties of modeling, and the desirability of change. As an exercise in scientific number-crunching, climate predictions are very difficult and in a class of models where many tunable parameters can be adjusted to get highly variable results. Most of our understanding of how the climate will behave depends on the underlying feedback loops, and it seems that positive feedback loops (i.e. the temperature increases, which changes things so that temperatures continue to increase) are more publicized than negative feedback loops (i.e. the temperature increases, which changes things so that temperatures stop increasing). There's also evidence that the net effect of climate change will be positive until it's negative, suggest