Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Sometimes the deniers are right:

http://ideosphere.com/fx-bi...

If futures markets were used against deniers, they would point to Y2Kdth and similar to support their denials. Just as AGW deniers point to early 20th century eugenics science.

Betting challenges against experts can sometimes undermine their credibility, like James Annon's challeges to Richard Lindzen on global warming.

Applying the inverse of the Kelly betting formula to the bids of person in a betting market should reveal an odds estimate that should align with what the person thinks about the future; this could be a sort of mathematical mind reader. It should reflect what they really believe as revealed in their presumed attempts to maximize their utility function. A metric for the distance between your money and your mouth.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

As I was running some errands, it occurred to me that the snatches of the _New Scientist_ position presented here seem to suggest a Hansonesque blog post title observation, "denial is about being in the wrong political faction" or some such thing.

The lead sentence you quoted seems to illustrate that. "From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march." Climate change economic risks and some strategies to reduce CO2 emissions are tied to policy about genetically modified organisms, especially GM crops. And numerate technically conservative strategies for producing energy while reducing CO2 emissions are closely tied to nuclear policy. Thus opposition to GM crops and nuclear power should be a very big deal by the official mindset of the _New Scientist_. So why pick on people who stand on silly objections to vaccines in preference to, say, people who stand on technically silly objections to proposals for nuclear waste storage? Maybe I move in the wrong circles, but my impression is that the technical consensus about the tractability of the nuclear waste storage/disposal problem[*] is stronger than the technical consensus that the expected damage from climate change caused by CO2 emissions justifies imposing very large energy consumption cuts, and other very large costs involved in rejiggering energy production technologies.

[*] E.g., "resolved: that the fundamental technical risks of depositing nuclear waste in a facility comparable to Yucca Mountain are not large compared to the risks associated with using coal to generate the corresponding amount of electrical energy." (Of course, that doesn't guarantee that nuclear waste policy can't be horribly screwed up in practice, just as "resolved: 1960s-era-technology syphilis treatment is fundamentally a good idea" doesn't guarantee you can't end up with the Tuskegee experiment. But climate change policy can be horribly screwed up too...)

(And alas, I can't see how to construct a tidy "Yucca Mountain facility works as designed" bet.)

Expand full comment
40 more comments...

No posts