This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Allow me to clarify. I'm aware of some of the weaknesses in the models that are used purely for the physical systems, but I actually don't think they're that bad. They're actually pretty decent, AFAICT, where "pretty decent" is a sort of term of art to describe situations where you have an okay sense for the scale of your error analysis and can sort of understand when it might be a problem or not a problem.
Sigh. I really don't know that I have a good way of explaining this intuition. Maybe a story. Long ago, I paid a lot more attention to fairly straightforward aircraft control topics at conferences. One question that came up surprisingly often was, "...would you fly on an airplane that is being controlled by your controller?" There is just a qualitative sense that you develop for how bad the badness is. How the error is likely to be structured, how likely genuinely destructive failure modes are, magnitudes of expected error under various noise distributions, etc.
With that, I guess I'll just say again that I don't think the climate models are "that bad". They're not garbage. There is error, we know some of the sources of error (you mention a couple), and we have an intuitive sense for about how big it may be.
Conversely, what I have significant theoretical disputes with is specifically trying to model economic systems coupled with climate systems. We basically can't even get off the ground, theoretically speaking. The timescales are the wrong way round. When you talk about the apparent fastness of climate dynamics, they are still figuratively glacial in comparison to the dynamics of economic systems (and I sometimes tack on political systems, because it's amazing how many people try to make completely whacko claims about these, too). You did great to realize that attempts like using a static damage function and then proceeding with a simple amortization are bonkers. My point is that the underlying theoretical reason why they're bonkers is because that's just not how one does anything with timescale-separated coupled dynamical systems.
More options
Context Copy link