Posts by BenWilson
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JLM, I think one of the biggest costs in transport is the unloading and storage at end points, which is what makes trucks a winner - this only has to happen once. With trains you've always got to get stuff to the train, and then get it back from the train. It's amazing that this cost drowns out most of the obvious efficiency of trains during the phase where the stuff is actually moving.
It's rather similar to public transport, actually. Standing around waiting for a bus or train comes at a high cost to anyone who gets paid more than a few dollars an hour. Which is, of course, most commuters.
Most assuredly, there are solutions to both problems. But first, you have to acknowledge they are problems.
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You've sold me. Will check it out on the weekend.
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@Rich, I agree. The "withholding belief" position means that people practically act as if they "believe the opposite", because that is what they were doing before. Being unaware of a problem has the same practical outcome as ignoring the problem.
But I do think even ascertaining a general public position on a question that the general public is not literate in is problematic. It's a bit like asking the public whether a gigabyte is more or less or equal to a billion bytes. If they don't know what a byte is, or they don't know anything about the history of binary based names, or for that matter they don't know how much a billion really is (some people, with some justification, think it's a million million), then their answers aren't so much wrong as simply pointing out that the question is an imprecise thing to ask of such an audience. Then there's issue of people always looking for agendas behind questions. When asked if they think AGW is happening, they might decide that the reason for asking is to push some policy change they disagree with, then they might see that denying it is the safest answer, even if it's not what they actually believe.
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Is that like agnostic not atheist?
I guess so. I think you can still hold an agnostic position, even after having examined all the evidence quite deeply though. But yes, agnosticism is quite a common choice if you haven't found the time or reason to go into the guts of religion, and aren't inclined to faith.
In the analogy there are probably "agnostic" scientists on something like AGW, taking the position of neither believing in it nor not believing in it, but I'd be surprised if it was a common position. Ultimately the question is about something factual - it is happening or it isn't, and even if you think it can't be proved either way for sure, you'd probably have an opinion on it. This contrasts with a lot of informed religious agnostics who consider the questions of religion to be meaningless. But certainly the uninformed ones are analogous.
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The majority of it is knee-jerk contrarianism, "Well, somebody told me something that sounds like it might be hard to believe given my current way of thinking about the world, so I'm going to ignore it." I don't see most global warming skepticism from people as coming from any deeper place than that-it's easy and comfortable.
I'm not so sure. It depends what you mean by skepticism. There's skepticism which is a denial of things, an active position of belief in a particular view. Then there's skepticism which is the refusal to actively believe that which is not proven (to oneself). This is a pretty rational position. Sure, people could go find out, but they probably don't have the time or inclination. I don't particularly care to find out, for example, about the tenets of every religion in the world, and prefer simply to remain skeptical on their claims. This is mostly because they have no effect on me at all, and I doubt my ability to have any real effect on anyone who does believe them - if either of these conditions were different, I might care more.
With AGW, I think the main source of disinterest is a feeling of total powerlessness. There's basically this simple feeling that no matter how educated one became on the subject it would have no effect whatsoever on the outcome. It would be a total waste of effort for the individual, the kind of thing you'd only do as a hobby, or because someone was paying you.
Having made the choice to remain mostly disinterested, and thus ignorant, skepticism is a fairly natural position to take. It's a "withholding of belief", rather than a "belief in the opposite".
It's not that it's hard to believe in AGW. It's that it's hard to be sure, without sacrificing a lot of time, or abdicating the responsibility for the surety to someone else. These are both sacrifices that a lot of people are unwilling to make for something that they can't influence or profit from.
I feel a similar way about a lot of scientific theories. How much effort am I really going to make finding out how much danger there is of large asteroids hitting the Earth? Without becoming an actual specialist, I couldn't hope to actually achieve anything by it other than perhaps making myself feel more or less safe. Same goes for the chances of a huge tsunami or volcanic eruption in Auckland. Or being hit by cosmic rays. All of these things pose huge risks for me, but there's also the counterbalancing understanding of my own powerlessness to really effect any purpose in deeply understanding the issue. The same amount of time could be spent doing something I find enjoyable or profitable, or even some altruistic act done simply to actually help someone in a concrete way, if my purpose in spending the time is moral rather than self-interested.
The apathy towards AGW is also two-pronged. Even if everyone on the planet believed it was certainly happening, I think opinions would be divided about whether we could actually do anything about it. Some of that would come back to unbelief in our ability to affect such a large physical system (which is the source of unbelief in AGW generally), but there would also be the unbelief in our ability to affect such a large social system as the entirety of humanity. In so far as general cooperation for "the general good of the planet, against powerful/wealthy interests" doesn't happen much in human history, it might seem quite scientific to believe there's bugger all chance of it happening this time.
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This is a really important point for journalists, who can be remarkably bad at getting it right.
They're not the only ones. All non-specialists have exactly the same problem. Unless you put in the miles to really look at all of the evidence, really get stuck into the debate, you basically have to trust someone. Even afterward, you're still trusting someone - just on a more informed basis.
Currently, I haven't done the miles you have in finding out if your sources are impeccable. So I can either trust you, or trust someone else, or do the miles (or remain skeptical - which is probably the most logical choice, if not the most rational). Most people don't have the time to do the miles. Indeed, most people haven't even done the miles on how to do the miles . They wouldn't even know where to start. The first official sounding source is likely to make a huge impression.
This isn't because most people are lazy. It's because AGW is only one of a million pressing issues.
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Ask a scientist.
There's a circularity problem here. How do I know someone is a scientist? You'd have to be a scientist not to see it.
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I think distrust of "speaking in the name of science" is inevitable. It is not a unified political organization. It doesn't have an official mouthpiece. It doesn't even really have a clear philosophy. Most likely, if it had all of these things, it would also not be as productive.
That said, what else do we have by which to make decisions about scientific matters? As laypeople, who do you believe, and why would you believe them? This is the perennial problem of all specialist knowledge. Without becoming a scientist, there is really only the words of scientists to go on. Even most scientists have only got that to go on WRT any subject outside of their actual specialization. If you're not a scientist, how do you know which people who claim to be scientists to trust? You certainly can't apply the "scientific method" to this decision, because you don't even know what that is.
Most of the average person's knowledge about science does not boil down to reason/rationality/experiment/scientific method at all. It comes down to trusted authority. We choose to trust that someone else has done all of these wonderfully reasonable things. If you're really, really honest about why it is that we trust scientists, how many people are going to base that on "because I myself did a bunch of experiments to confirm it"? How many will be "because I was taught to think that way by my parents/school/television"?
It's not something to blame on anyone. It's a sad fact about human knowledge, and it becomes worse the more knowledge we have, rather than better. The more knowledge there is, the less of a proportion anyone can know of it. If you seek to broaden your knowledge, you also tend to make it shallower as well, and when the depth of the knowledge is increasing all the time, this means people are more and more out of their depth about anything outside of specializations. We're stuck with trust for almost everything. The only question is: Who to trust?
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My point isn’t that “the freedom to do X” should be considered proven to be a good thing without argument, just that we shouldn’t ban it without reason.
That's fine then. I mistook your use of the word "onus" as meaning a one-way responsibility to argue a case, letting one side off without any need to argue. But you meant that there is an onus on both sides to argue their case, which I totally agree with.
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Sure, which is why I’m saying the issue doesn’t seem “easily surmountable”, as was part of your claim.
I was talking about a different issue - you seemed to be saying that defining infinite numbers of things is difficult. I was disputing that. Just about any proposition containing a variable can do it.
I certainly was NOT saying that it's easy to make an enormous number of laws that don't contradict, ever. Just that even if they do, there's still an infinity of cases they cover which are also non-contradictory. This is not valueless, just because there are some problems, or even an infinity of problems. There's an infinite number of ways I could get run over on the way to the shops too, but there's also an infinite number of fairly safe ways to get there. It's worthwhile to know what they are, even if there is still the possibility that I could, for example, get run over on the footpath.
I don’t believe in freedom from all prohibition as a general rule, if that’s what you mean. I am saying any given prohibition needs to be argued for first, before any argument in defence of the freedom is required.
Sound to me like a general rule, and also one that is not a priori in any way. You haven't really offered any reason why you think it should be the de facto standard other than some dubious numbers game relating the difficulties in creating laws, which I really don't think is a strong enough argument to justify something so important.
But that’s not the same thing. If prohibiting things is just wrong, then onus of evidence doesn’t even come into it.
But is it wrong? What's your argument? This is what's lacking here. Something isn't right either, just because it hasn't been proven to be wrong.
It’s not necessarily wrong to prohibit per se. It is wrong to justify a prohibition only on the basis of a lack of reasons against the prohibition.
I agree with that. I'm just having difficulty seeing why you think the converse isn't also true. A lack of reasons for a freedom doesn't give it a free pass either.
So if they give no justification for the proposed prohibition, you still feel the need to justify the freedom from such prohibition?
It would be a much stronger argument than expecting to let "the burden of proof" do all the heavy lifting. That's always going to be a "no, YOU prove it" situation, with no possible resolution, if you dispute this onus. I think freedom has better arguments than that.
Mine! The prospect of having to argue for every conceivable notion that someone might decide should be prohibited is concerning. I clearly hate arguing.
Heh. I'm thinking you just hate the fact that the law is piecemeal. I don't much like it either, but that's the philosopher in me who prefers fewer rules with some kind of core theoretical basis over what we actually have, thousands upon thousands of rules, covering most of the actions humans undertake in a vast web of freedoms and prohibitions, which has come into being from millions upon millions of arguments in courtrooms, councils, parliaments, etc.
But even though I prefer simple, I can see that what we have works, that it is possible, even practical. I think changing it towards a simpler setup requires more than just stating some general rule like "the onus is on people who want to prohibit to justify it", and then expecting this to sway people. There's much more work to do than that if you want to extend the freedoms we have, to remove the arbitrary prohibitions that don't really seem to make sense.
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