A report on Gavin Schmidt’s talk yesterday at AGU.
15 thoughts on “Speaking Up And Speaking Out”
“While some consequences may have their upsides for individual researchers, there are often clear negatives. These might include:
Scientists who enter public debates are under much more public scrutiny.”
This is a bad thing? Shining some daylight on the sausage process is a good thing.
Not necessarily for the sausage.
What I find interesting in this is that he seems to be a warmist who is looking at the data and realizing his cause might be erroneous BS based on incorrect assumptions. Colonel John Boyd’s theory is that intelligent organisms have to compare their mental model to their interactions with the real world, and if their mental model of the world is flawed it has to be corrected. The more intelligent a being is, the faster or more efficiently this happens. In contrast, there are probably some idiots trudging through knee-deep snow in Jerusalem to put up posters about how global warming is happening now, confident that heat causes cold.
Boyd’s way of looking at human behavior is one of the approaches I like to use: We each have in our minds a model of the world around us, we should change that model to get a better fit with reality.
Where I disagree with what you’ve said (not sure if it’s just your way or Boyd’s way of putting it) is that more intelligence leads to better and faster correction, I’d look more to open mindedness, there are plenty of very intelligent people, with closed minds, whose set of beliefs are unshakable, no matter what contrary evidence is offered.
Well, that begs the question of what constitutes intelligence.
When intelligence is tested the test is design to elicit rational answers, in real life situations humans are often more rationalizing than rational.
This is the point I’ve often made about Obama’s alleged intelligence. He may be “book smart” but primarily on the wrong books. One fundamental aspect of intelligence is the ability to learn from experience, regardless of whether it’s your own experience or the experience of others*. Obama keeps advocating socialistic policies that have failed repeatedly around the world. That shows he’s unwilling or unable to learn from experience and is therefore unintelligent.
The aviation community has long studied accidents to learn what went wrong. It isn’t because we’re morbid, we just hope to find ways to prevent similar mistakes. If there was a mechanical failure, learn from it to improve the design or maintenance practices. If there was pilot error, learn from it to improve training and/or checklist procedures. That’s one of the biggest reasons why the commercial accident rate is so incredibly low. We learn from our mistakes and take measures to prevent them from happening again.
*There’s an old saying that I like: “Any damned fool can learn from his own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others.”
Obama’s supporters don’t consider him intelligent because of his (nonexistent) accomplishments, but because he allegedly shares their opinions and worldview. Any evidence that he really does not, and is basically using them as suckers, causes cognitive dissonance and is immediately disregarded in favor of comfortable self-delusion.
You stated that much clearer than I did. I guess by “intelligent” I meant more mentally flexible and adaptable, changing mental models faster when presented with contrary data. But as you point out, intelligence as generally termed more often means having a far more complex worldview that’s much more resistant to change because the person is better at tagging all the contrary data as “exceptions” to be noted, with long, involved, and strained explanations for each one.
To me, that pretty well defines the liberal mindset, where their theory is simple but the world in their head contains a vast mass of contradictory evidence, each bit of which is tagged with a long-winded and improbable explanation, often involving Dick Cheney, the Koch Brothers, or “greed”. Their mental entropy is high and their expectations are continually confounded, and as you point out, the smarter they are, the better they seem to be at coming up with bizarre excuses for the constant failures of their predictions about real-world behaviors, aside from those that involve the voting patterns of people even dumber than they are.
I’ve played with the idea that cities tend to be far more liberal than rural areas because in the city, you can have a flawed worldview constantly reinforced by people you hang out with all the time, with friends offering up their own story to explain away the latest failure when you might struggle to put one together, whereas if left alone you might try to think your way through the problem and have an epiphany, realizing that subsidized contraceptives aren’t really going to lead to utopia, and that maybe men really don’t hate women.
In a city, you don’t have to deal with reality, because there’s a huge gap between most city jobs and basic survival needs. People will starve to death if farmers stop living in the real world, but they won’t if a Starbucks’ coffee-flinger does.
Evolution drives us all to look after what we see as our own interests, people always think themselves rational and their adversaries irrational.
I don’t see goodies and baddies, just people doing and thinking in the way that hundreds of millions of years of evolution has programmed them to think.
Thesis: human beings are largely acting out of instinct, shaped by their environment, living only in the moment. The very few who think deeper must lead the masses.
Antithesis: most people make conscious decisions informed by the environment, planning for the long term. Society as a whole prospers when people individually act in their own best interests in a free market.
Is there a synthesis that doesn’t inevitably lead to bankruptcy and bloodshed?
Antithesis: most people make conscious decisions informed by the environment, planning for the long term. Society as a whole prospers when people individually act in their own best interests in a free market. But their thoughts and actions will be shaped by their past experiences, their individual nature, and basic human instincts.
Is there a synthesis that doesn’t inevitably lead to bankruptcy and bloodshed?
Check out history.
Despite the impression commonly held that today’s world is very violent, we’re actually living in the most peaceful times known, the level of violence is a result of the rewards of violence vs the rewards of peace for individuals, if individuals believe they’re more likely to survive and prosper through peaceful means rather than violent, they’ll choose peaceful.
The rewards of violence vs the rewards of peace will be dependent on the resources available to a society and the nature of utilizing those resources and the methods of shuffling the wealth and power between members of society, the perception of “is society fair to me?”
Human society, like individual organisms, utilize the resources available to them to produce wealth (In the case of a green plant wealth being more green plant), the richer the environment is in the required resources the greater the wealth that can be produced (why I’m skeptical about dumping lots of people on Mars), but better understanding of the world and advancing technology obviously does allow us to utilize resources previously unavailable to us.
Bonus points for name-checking Colonel Boyd.
George, Gavin doesn’t just “seem to be a warmist”. He’s the uberwarmist at Realclimate but employed by NASA GISS. I’ve read he spends a fair bit of time at Realclimate (or used to ) with some questions about whether this was work time or not.
One of the ringleaders.
“While some consequences may have their upsides for individual researchers, there are often clear negatives. These might include:
Scientists who enter public debates are under much more public scrutiny.”
This is a bad thing? Shining some daylight on the sausage process is a good thing.
Not necessarily for the sausage.
What I find interesting in this is that he seems to be a warmist who is looking at the data and realizing his cause might be erroneous BS based on incorrect assumptions. Colonel John Boyd’s theory is that intelligent organisms have to compare their mental model to their interactions with the real world, and if their mental model of the world is flawed it has to be corrected. The more intelligent a being is, the faster or more efficiently this happens. In contrast, there are probably some idiots trudging through knee-deep snow in Jerusalem to put up posters about how global warming is happening now, confident that heat causes cold.
Boyd’s way of looking at human behavior is one of the approaches I like to use: We each have in our minds a model of the world around us, we should change that model to get a better fit with reality.
Where I disagree with what you’ve said (not sure if it’s just your way or Boyd’s way of putting it) is that more intelligence leads to better and faster correction, I’d look more to open mindedness, there are plenty of very intelligent people, with closed minds, whose set of beliefs are unshakable, no matter what contrary evidence is offered.
Well, that begs the question of what constitutes intelligence.
When intelligence is tested the test is design to elicit rational answers, in real life situations humans are often more rationalizing than rational.
This is the point I’ve often made about Obama’s alleged intelligence. He may be “book smart” but primarily on the wrong books. One fundamental aspect of intelligence is the ability to learn from experience, regardless of whether it’s your own experience or the experience of others*. Obama keeps advocating socialistic policies that have failed repeatedly around the world. That shows he’s unwilling or unable to learn from experience and is therefore unintelligent.
The aviation community has long studied accidents to learn what went wrong. It isn’t because we’re morbid, we just hope to find ways to prevent similar mistakes. If there was a mechanical failure, learn from it to improve the design or maintenance practices. If there was pilot error, learn from it to improve training and/or checklist procedures. That’s one of the biggest reasons why the commercial accident rate is so incredibly low. We learn from our mistakes and take measures to prevent them from happening again.
*There’s an old saying that I like: “Any damned fool can learn from his own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others.”
Obama’s supporters don’t consider him intelligent because of his (nonexistent) accomplishments, but because he allegedly shares their opinions and worldview. Any evidence that he really does not, and is basically using them as suckers, causes cognitive dissonance and is immediately disregarded in favor of comfortable self-delusion.
You stated that much clearer than I did. I guess by “intelligent” I meant more mentally flexible and adaptable, changing mental models faster when presented with contrary data. But as you point out, intelligence as generally termed more often means having a far more complex worldview that’s much more resistant to change because the person is better at tagging all the contrary data as “exceptions” to be noted, with long, involved, and strained explanations for each one.
To me, that pretty well defines the liberal mindset, where their theory is simple but the world in their head contains a vast mass of contradictory evidence, each bit of which is tagged with a long-winded and improbable explanation, often involving Dick Cheney, the Koch Brothers, or “greed”. Their mental entropy is high and their expectations are continually confounded, and as you point out, the smarter they are, the better they seem to be at coming up with bizarre excuses for the constant failures of their predictions about real-world behaviors, aside from those that involve the voting patterns of people even dumber than they are.
I’ve played with the idea that cities tend to be far more liberal than rural areas because in the city, you can have a flawed worldview constantly reinforced by people you hang out with all the time, with friends offering up their own story to explain away the latest failure when you might struggle to put one together, whereas if left alone you might try to think your way through the problem and have an epiphany, realizing that subsidized contraceptives aren’t really going to lead to utopia, and that maybe men really don’t hate women.
In a city, you don’t have to deal with reality, because there’s a huge gap between most city jobs and basic survival needs. People will starve to death if farmers stop living in the real world, but they won’t if a Starbucks’ coffee-flinger does.
Evolution drives us all to look after what we see as our own interests, people always think themselves rational and their adversaries irrational.
I don’t see goodies and baddies, just people doing and thinking in the way that hundreds of millions of years of evolution has programmed them to think.
Thesis: human beings are largely acting out of instinct, shaped by their environment, living only in the moment. The very few who think deeper must lead the masses.
Antithesis: most people make conscious decisions informed by the environment, planning for the long term. Society as a whole prospers when people individually act in their own best interests in a free market.
Is there a synthesis that doesn’t inevitably lead to bankruptcy and bloodshed?
Antithesis: most people make conscious decisions informed by the environment, planning for the long term. Society as a whole prospers when people individually act in their own best interests in a free market. But their thoughts and actions will be shaped by their past experiences, their individual nature, and basic human instincts.
Is there a synthesis that doesn’t inevitably lead to bankruptcy and bloodshed?
Check out history.
Despite the impression commonly held that today’s world is very violent, we’re actually living in the most peaceful times known, the level of violence is a result of the rewards of violence vs the rewards of peace for individuals, if individuals believe they’re more likely to survive and prosper through peaceful means rather than violent, they’ll choose peaceful.
The rewards of violence vs the rewards of peace will be dependent on the resources available to a society and the nature of utilizing those resources and the methods of shuffling the wealth and power between members of society, the perception of “is society fair to me?”
Human society, like individual organisms, utilize the resources available to them to produce wealth (In the case of a green plant wealth being more green plant), the richer the environment is in the required resources the greater the wealth that can be produced (why I’m skeptical about dumping lots of people on Mars), but better understanding of the world and advancing technology obviously does allow us to utilize resources previously unavailable to us.
Bonus points for name-checking Colonel Boyd.
George, Gavin doesn’t just “seem to be a warmist”. He’s the uberwarmist at Realclimate but employed by NASA GISS. I’ve read he spends a fair bit of time at Realclimate (or used to ) with some questions about whether this was work time or not.
One of the ringleaders.