Skeptics are Morons

I gotta tell you folks, I’m feeling pretty depressed today.  I Spent the night arguing with my girlfriend, my car’s being a piece of shit, there’s nothing funny on the internet today, and, as my friend Griffin so eloquently put it, I’m looking out the window at an ashtray sky.

Might as well write about Climate Change, I guess.  That’ll at least give me a good excuse to get drunk later.

A while back Robin Hanson put up an interesting piece on the Overcoming Bias blog titled “Contrarian Excuses”.  The gist of the article is that, generally speaking, you’re better off believing what the established authorities tell you; your own common sense isn’t going to hold a candle up to what the experts say to is true.

If you’ve read any of my other stuff on here, then you might think that I disagree this argument – after all, even thinking about people who trust the government makes me physically ill, I make no bones to hide my disgust with the MSM nor the public who watches it, and I consider it a point of moral principle to break at least one Federal law per day.

Except that’s not what Hanson’s saying.

There’s a world of difference between trusting established authorities, and believing in conventional wisdom.  When Consumer Reports tells you that antiperspirant works best if you put it on just before you go to bed, they’re doing it because they’ve done the homework; you’re an idiot if you don’t believe them.  You haven’t done a double-blinded study, and your intuition in this case is worthless.  The same goes for anything involving actual scientific research.

Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, is a horse of a different colour.  Believing in it is saying “This is the way my daddy done did it, and I’m-a gonna keep done doing it too.”  Back on the old RMMB Advice Board I once pointed out that everybody has a normal childhood, subjectively speaking – after all, what else do you have to calibrate ‘normal’ with aside from your own experiences?  Your mom can work at the steel mill and drink a twelve pack a night, and as far as you’re concerned that’s where the bar is.  The same thing goes for culture – good god, kids today actually think it’s normal to pay $10 of taxes on a pack of cigarettes!

Conventional wisdom is your intuition pretending it’s an abstract law – it’s nothing but the monkey brain talking, the part of you that listens to cops, trusts the government, tries to censor culture, and thinks there’s a palpable difference between illegal drugs and booze; it’s the bit that screams ‘think about the children!’ and researches conspiracy theories; it’s the bit of you that (as Pierre Trudeau once said) needs to sit down, shut up, and vote Liberal.

So given all that, I’m a true-believer in Climate Change, right?

Good thing we’ve got Taw to the rescue, from the Less Wrong board, replying to Hanson’s article:

But, if you put climate change scientists in reference class of “highly politicized science”, then the chance of them being completely wrong becomes orders of magnitude higher. We have plenty of examples where such science was completely wrong and persisted in being wrong in spite of overwhelming evidence, as with race and IQ, nuclear winter, and pretty much everything in macroeconomics. Chances of mainstream being right, and contrarians being right are not too dissimilar in such cases.

Listen folks, I don’t really want to take a stance on this issue.  If you’re talking about evolution, thermodynamics, probability theory, or quantum mechanics, then I’m up for a good debate – but when it comes to climatology I don’t know jack.  Hell, I don’t even know if ‘climatology’ is a real word.  The stance I’d like to take is simply “I don’t know,” but with the way things are right now even saying that is violently political.

For those of you not familiar with Climategate (yes, I hate that moniker too) I suggest you look into it: the short of it is that leading scientists who’ve been advocating the anthropic climate change hypothesis had their emails hacked a while back, and it turns out that they’ve been actively trying to cover up legitimate science and silence qualified dissenters.

And for those of you who aren’t aware of what’s been going on at the Copenhagen Conference,, I recommend you check out some of the political artwork that’s being done about the event.

As usual the details are being clouded with ad hominem attacks: the media’s comparing the email-hacking to what happened to Palin (even though it’s not comparable, and even if it were that doesn’t change things), and any coverage of Copenhagen is focussed on the ‘job creation’ nonsense rather than the Freedom of Speech issues.

The whole damn thing’s a boondoggle.  Even if the climate change hypothesis is true, the Green policies being instituted right now aren’t going to help things.  It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction all over again, and there’s not much we can do about it.  Stock up on filament light-bulbs, I guess, and punch a politician if the opportunity presents itself.

It’s not like voting is going to fix this problem.