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Ch. 10 - Global Warming and Psychic Claims: A Comparison

#70: Aug. - Sept. 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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I wish I'd been able to obtain the book so I could comment on the real subject of it, but my order was cancelled. I hope to have it soon from another source. I'd be interested to see if Riniolo mentions what you do, which is the danger of overanalyzing or waiting to get a degree of certainty that can't be achieved with complex issues. Avoiding an emotional response is usually recommended, but then how does anyone take action without the emotional impetus which seems to come from a feeling of certainty, whether or not this feeling can truly be said to be justified by facts?
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DWill

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Having read this chapter, I better understand the effect of some of my biases and assumptions regarding global warming. I also understand why measurements of temperature and loss of ice cover are not simple facts unmediated by people. A skeptical approach is needed. Those who say that any expression of doubt, anything less than advocacy for the position, is taken as reactionary and backward do have a point. There is an orthodoxy to be dealt with on this matter. The good guys are those who think GW shouldn't be questioned. That is a big problem from a critical thinking standpoint.

I was wrong about the truth of global warming not mattering if the northern ice cap truly is shrinking. It does matter whether the earth as a whole is warming due to human input, because if it is not, there is no conceivable way to target just one area of loss and attempt to slow it down.
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Robert Tulip

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CWT36 wrote:Agreed. Large issues usually require large actions, or at least actions by a large group of people. It just seems that sometimes people tend to wait until all the evidence is in before they take any action. Example: In the 60's and 70's research started to show the dangerous effects of smoking. Some people stopped smoking, but many continued to smoke stating that all the evidence wasn't in. For some it was too late by the time all the evidence was in. I do realize that this may seem counter to much of what Riniolo says. I don't mean to suggest that we take actions willy nilly based on flimsy evidence. However I do think it is sometimes practical to take actions based on a preponderance of the evidence (to borrow a legal term).
Colin, your comment here (my bold) illustrates how Riniolo may be using the concept of critical thinking to pursue a political agenda. In terms of the physics, I just don’t agree with Geo that global warming is a complex problem. Humans are shifting carbon from under the ground into the air at a rate of gigatonnes per year, causing the greenhouse effect. This is fairly simple and the evidence is clear. To deny this is to act rather like the cooked frog in a pot who waits until the water is too hot before trying to jump but then finds it is too late. Riniolo’s version of ‘critical thinking’ would say to the frog that the warming of the water is barely detectable so not to worry. If the frog could take a bigger view – a more wholistic version of ‘critical thinking’ - it would see the path to boiling and jump out. We are in an equivalent situation regarding climate change.

Where climate change gets complex is mainly the politics, and this is where global warming is a great example of your comment in the thread on the introduction:
CWT36 wrote:Page 18 - "It is a fundamental flaw to assume that the mind is not influenced by the process of natural selection and that critical thinking skills exempt us from biases that are part of our evolutionary heritage." It seems that he is implying that biases are a result of natural selection. If this were to be so, there would have to be some evolutionary advantage to these biases. I find this intriguing. Does anyone have any insight into this?
Our evolutionary heritage encourages us to think and act locally, not globally. If I can have a bigger car and house and more children then that seems to be good for me. Global warming undercuts this instinctive mentality with a major externality – our collected local behaviour could cause human extinction. Natural selection has provided us with both the instincts to focus on local needs and the reasoning capacity to consider global needs. For global needs to win against the power of human instincts will require a transformation of politics.

On global warming, I am an optimist that geo-engineering can solve the problem. Large scale production of algae in the ocean is the best way to rapidly push the CO2 concentration down towards 350 ppm while also cooling the oceans, growing protein and providing fuel and fertilizer.

http://www.350.org/understanding-350 has some good information, but is far too bottom-up and doesn’t address the primary need for global engineering solutions.
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DWill

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CWT36 wrote:Page 18 - "It is a fundamental flaw to assume that the mind is not influenced by the process of natural selection and that critical thinking skills exempt us from biases that are part of our evolutionary heritage." It seems that he is implying that biases are a result of natural selection. If this were to be so, there would have to be some evolutionary advantage to these biases. I find this intriguing. Does anyone have any insight into this?
Riniolo puts our cognitive biases into an evolutionary psychology frame, in which the biases do aid in survival and so are selected. He is forthright enough to admit that evolutionary psychology can be speculative. Whatever scenario is chosen can seem plausible but very hard to find real evidence for. But what he says is that humans who tended to persist in their beliefs, rather than abandon them at the first appearance of apparently disconfirming evidence, would have a better chance of passing on their genes. What they had determined to be right through their accumulated experience, probably was, so those who flip-flopped could be more likely to die early. His example is on p. 95. Being persistent in believing things also meant, though, that sometimes we'd persist in a false belief, and to do this we 'needed' some cognitive justifications. Apparently that situation was on average less harmful to survival than abandoning a belief.

I agree with Riniolo--this seems speculative, and not that convincing to me. Could it be that cognitive biases are simply by-products of the development of our cortex? Not every feature of an animal has been a fulcrum for natural selection, some just are there because they didn't get in the way. I think Riniolo's scenario also doesn't explain how emotional biases came to be so important in our beliefs. Although emotional biases can be linked to natural selection, it seems that emotional attachments to our beliefs would not arise just so we would persist in them. This would be an effect of emotional involvement, but isn't an explanation for origin.
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