Awesome post. I am all for a global system where all children are born equal and have equal opportunities in life, and health is for all, and we live healthy in a healthy ecosystem.

How to get there? All humans have to become wiser.

We won't get there by creating a new myth, on the back of post modern education which says there are no real truths, so we may as well invent a truth and use that to motivate people by changing their worldview -- "catastrophe/you must act". On the social level it is very dumb to try to create a new myth. We need less myths, not more myths.

And that means, everyone needs to think for themselves and all claims need people to think them through. I used to believe global warming, oh gosh we are in big trouble. But thinking about it to the best of my ability, I don't see how their scenarios are even vaguely right. If temps had been shooting up and their scenarios coming true in a testable way (not just the "chaotic weather/climate" smoke screen and murky "it is somewhere in the deep unmeasured oceans") then I would see it and accept it. I am a pretty depressed guy, depressing news fits my worldview. I don't have an SUV and IO have never owned a car, I live in a small house and I fly once in 10 years, which makes it like, 4 times now. I wear lots of jumpers round the house to keep the heating off. I feel the guilt of being born in the comfortable relatively safe developed world.

If people want to create a social movement, like the Suffragettes, which maintains on principle that the world should be organised differently, fine. Justify it with moral arguments. Don't muddy science by claiming it is all facts and beyond doubt and irrationally play propaganda games, smearing those you can't logically refute as "deniers", when even the most basic bit of core evidence contradicts AGW. Oh yeah it is my own lying eyes, mustn't believe it.

Honestly, the most scary thing in the world is social movements because we have a whole bunch of them coming at us from different levels of development in humanity's own history and spread over 7 billion humans, you have the 2000 year old stuff, the 1000 year old stuff, the 200 year old stuff, the 60 year old stuff, etc. All these social movements are at war with each other.

Environmentalism isn't going to help if they just set up yet another social movement that everyone is supposed to buy into. Fine if you are sensitive and live in California. Not fine if you are genuinely wondering how it can work for a farmer in Kenya. A lot of work all over the world goes into gradually improving things, reducing violence, reducing greed, increasing health, etc. What does your average environmentalist activist achieve?

People try to attain enlightenment, in the hope of finding ultimate peace, but the struggle to attain perfect peace, itself reinforces the feeling that life as it is has to be rejected and avoided. But the way you put it is simpler and better.

Aha, right you are, thanks. Yeah, funny thing about abstraction, somewhere somehow, there still has to be an implementation anyway.

Yes TV often shows ads for breakfast cereals, margarine, meat substitutes, etc. I rarely see one for eggs, or butter, or steak. Somehow I don't need convincing to buy a piece of liver.

I gather in the USA around the time that fake stuff became "heart healthy" there was a senator who represented a lot of big cereals farmers, and he said to the advising scientists, "we don't have time to wait for more research".

Time. Good point. Many building architects defend bad designs with, "but that's all the time we had."

Either the original developers have time to iterate to a cleaner design, or the maintainers have to do it, or the original developers had lots of experience with similar frameworks that they already have better designs in mind—acquired over time.

No the problem for the general public is that there is always risk. Look at nutrition. 50 years ago some sort of consensus was formed that eating fat is bad for your heart. It was a sort of consensus, with politicians, health officials, and manufacturers. You know, all the "stakeholders" as is custom to call them today. And well science, as you know, the reason to trust science more than the next thing, is that it is supposed to be self-correcting. Ie. we expect mistakes will be made but that they will be corrected. But there's the rub, with nutrition, it is taking over 50 years for that correction to take place. 50 years! So the problem for the public is, science is self correcting but that process takes time, so there is always a risk. And what with obesity skyrocketing, apparently because the consensus got everyone to start eating the kind of food that does make them fat and is bad for their heart, the risk wasn't theoretical, it has had a huge negative outcome. That's "consensus". IT IS STILL RISK.

AGW/CC/GCD* is a social movement. It is as if the Suffragettes had decided they needed some science to prove to the world that women should be treated equal. But they didn't need science, they simply had to say that certain principles would be good for everyone, and debate that in a peaceful way. Let science be science, and ethics be ethics.

* Global Climate Disruption

Find a definition of extreme which the AGW people are happy to stick to for 60 years.

Besides if air temps haven't been going up as fast as they were scenario'd as going up, what's causing the "freak" weather? The energy disappearing into the deep oceans where nobody can measure it? That's why it is windy today?

An African witch-doctor has a more refined sense of causality than that.

I wonder how often the men and women of small coastal villages in Scotland thought to themselves, you know, that other villages' entire menfolk were all wiped out by a storm in one night, so perhaps we should all give up fishing.

Something kept them going back out to sea in their boats, knowing the risks.

hey today we have the internet. forget god's eye, all your people on social media will see what you've been doing.

Oh I agree, and I suppose the big problem today is that we have to rethink our whole education system. We can't afford to be producing people dumb enough to take literally the word of some 7th or 3rd century manuscript. It is the 21st century and Jehova's Witnesses come to the door saying that the laws of man are wrong, only God can make laws. And they mean this LITERALLY. Same with Saudi Clerics who preach hatred and expect followers to not question it because their holy scriptures are "unwritten" (literally the mind of their god and forever excluded from any attempt to question it or reinterpret it on account of it having been written at a historical point in time -- nay, it is "unwritten", forever outside of any context, historical period, and questioning).

The assertion about needing religion though is ... well it is a bit more complex. Historically, religion can play that role. And I think a more mature outlook is to say, well, I have no evidence for what happens after death, one way or the other. I have no evidence for claims about what is consciousness and sentience. They are currently unknown areas. I also have no evidence for a god figure. I mean, even if the universe is a simulation, that doesn't mean it was created by a god figure as we usually think of it. Zoroaster basically said, hey, we have lots of gods, but I'm going to revise that and say ONLY ONE is the real one. So now we have each monotheistic religion fighting the other because they each insist it is their god that's the right one.

No we need to strip it all back and say, look, X Y Z are not known. Why would any child coming out of our education system not ask themselves, hey, dude, what's your basis for that claim? And then just laugh and walk out.

Unfortunately it is a social peer pressure thing and we all copy each other, a sort of mass-mind, culture comes through us and we end up parroting thoughts of others. Kids come out LESS able to question things for themselves. I'm atheist because my parents said, hm, what about religion? Oh let him decide when he grows up.

But I'm also not a "scientism" atheist who insists on having an opinion on the nature of reality and existence. Those are open questions.

But the golden rule of ethics, put yourself in others' place and ask whether you'd like it, well those are the basic ethical things we need, in a stripped down, think about it for yourself, kind of way. Parents should not feel they have the right to send kids to their own little brand of religious indoctrination camp -- like the followers of Apartheid still do in South Africa today, send the kids to camps so the kids can learn that "black people have smaller brains", and other such idiocy.

Whilst I am open to questions about the meaning of life, I think Sam Harris is right, we are as a planet running out of time. Religious extremism is spreading and so is nuclear proliferation.

The world's big religions and empires have in common that it is about organising a mass of people into a group, using rules or myths about supremacy. Maybe Jesus was a wonderful man, but the big business that came after was more about power. But that power and order was also law and order and that's what some would say made life orderly and safe enough and rich enough for people to sit around and invent things, ie. progress.

Multiculturalism, big in Europe, solves some problems whilst creating others. Skin colour or race or any of that does not matter. What matters is rights, equal rights, human rights, free speech, etc. The things which make a modern open society, as opposed to a mere empire of powerful forces. So what happens when 1000 Jehova's Witnesses move into your neighbourhood and they all agree that the laws of man are wrong, and that only God's laws should be followed? What happens when they all picket the local hospital decrying the ungodly acts of blood transfusion? What if Jehova's Witnesses gained political power?

So that's a problem with naive multiculturalism. It has this implied assumption that everyone else will just magically see the superiority of a free open tolerant society with gay marriage and rights for animals and the rights of future ecosystems over the profits of current corps., and just "want to be like us".

Well, it is up to people whether they want to change. And who is to say which way is superior. But the history of the world is different groups meeting and interacting and sometimes it works out well and sometimes not so well. Europe has had two major wars over countries fighting each other and I'm sure we are not there yet for world peace. But things are changing fast and nobody's predictions about "gene pools" will be of any use, there is far too much change going on for anyone to know what will happen.

I distinguish between blind belief "my community told me the moon is made of cheese", and thinking about thought "they say it is made of cheese but what is their basis for that claim, what method did they use?". Most religion is blind belief. Still it can serve a purpose. If the community says that killing is wrong, then whether it is understood or not, there is a benefit. Likewise if happiness and peace are aided by a sense of meaning and purpose, you don't have to understand it to gain some benefit, just like I don't have to understand how a pill works when I take it. But progress depends on people and communities getting smarter and today we all need more of that. We are past the "be good to your neighbour" problems, mainly. That might not be due to religion but due to urbanisation by the way. People living close in cities. Anyway, the host is helped up to a point but it is only one factor. The invention of soap probably did a lot too. There are still question to be asked. Are we clever apes who arose out of randomness and selection? That can be questioned. Perhaps as a view, mortality, causes some stress but we don't actually know what happens to sentience. There is no reason I can think of why our brains which do everything, would have any evolutionary advantage in also producing sentience. So death is an open question. But that's the point, it is an unknown and a question. Not something to have yet more blind beliefs about.

desk - 24"
sofa - 10"
bus - 7"
walking - 4"

Thanks, I've been wondering about this problem for a while. I'd seen ZFS as the technical part, but didn't know what to do about the "no money" part.