| Global Warming as an example |
| Written by John Burch | |
| Thursday, 24 May 2007 | |
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Irrationality at work - on both sides of the global warming debate.
I researched global warming recently . I was reading websites trying to find how much the temperature would change for a given percentage reduction in Solar energy that hit the planet. What I found was extreme emotionally driven opinions on the validity of GW. It was depressing to see so much invective on something that is pure science. I'm not interested in who is right about GW in this article. The interesting thing is that this subject shows so clearly how we screw up the process of finding the truth - on both sides. It doesn't matter what you feel about it, the science is the real information. But even among scientists, people are sure what the answer is - on both sides. None of you, or I, should be so sure of yourself when there are other humans holding the opposite viewpoint. I know how the human world works. They attacked you and your ideas and they didn't come to the same conclusions as you did. They are clearly incompetent. Since you have to be right to be worth a damn in this world, it is essential that you be right. And the other side has to be incompetent or confused. But what if you are wrong - and you will never know if you are wrong - do you still have the right to defend your beliefs? Why aren't you trying to find the truth? Oh, that's right, you already found truth. My bad. But, wait, if we can never be absolutely sure of our answers, how did you become so confident? You realize all that confidence is just the equivalent of a number stored somewhere in your head. Change the number and you would lose all that confidence and be back on the search trail for truth. Too bad we can't reset every one's confidence in their beliefs. Wouldn't it be cool to have everyone really searching again instead of settled into warring factions? Don't you see that if half the world disagrees with you, that is a good argument that you don't have a clue what is real? Half of the questing units came up with a different answer. Why in hell did you come up with the "right" one? Lucky? More intelligent? Better experience? How over confident are you about those things? I think we are all holders of beliefs. No one has absolute information about anything. We only have beliefs and a certain confidence in each belief based on the respect of the channel through which we received that information. Get any of us to respect a channel more than is appropriate and everything we learn through that channel becomes an impediment to further learning and truth. What should be happening? How about we work on being less confident and more open to the idea that we may be wrong? It's hard as hell because we are built this way to defend our beliefs - even when we should be re-evaluating a situation. Why is that? What's so slam-dunk about defending beliefs without good reason? It must work well compared to being unsure of yourself from an evolutionary perspective. The answer is probably related to why a confident athlete competes better than a less confident opponent with superior skills. Anyway, the GW situation is a good example where we need to stay open to failure of our ideas. The more we defend our ideas, the harder our opponents must work to defend their's. I suspect that any search for truth goes better if the different camps don't grab and defend to the death what ever they decide is true. |
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