Educate the chimps, then you can distribute the burden of making decisions. That's why democracy with education on the back of reasoned thinking and questioning, defending free speech, and all that, are needed, so that most people can make a useful contribution to making things work. You could be the most benevolent dictator but simply not have the mind capacity to organise a large nation. It isn't about power for the sake of power and greed. If it was that, who cares if one chimp wins over the rest? Revolt so a different chimp can take over? So what if workers take over the means of production. What happens when an individual then invents something which obsoletes the stuff made at the factory by the workers? Should the workers protect the staus quo? So then that one guy or gal ends up with a lot of wealth because they've just replaced a more expensive to make product with a cheaper alternative. So now his workers have to revolt and take over that new gizmo. Life just doesn't happen in a smooth simple continuously fair way.

Be it as it may that nobody who isn't a mainstream climate scientist is allowed to hold any opinion on the subject, and that climate science trumps all other related fields like statistics or geology, it is still reasonable to question the proposed remedies and actions, perhaps more so when those remedies appear to be promoted by idiots.
Technology and social values progress anyway, but the idiots seem to think this can be made to happen to a schedule, and if it can't then they want to reincarnate as a virus to smite the selfish human race. Meanwhile people all over the world continue to make little improvements in technology and society and well, patience is a virtue. There is what's commonly known as the "third" world and the "second" world which are working gradually to improve and educate their girls, and get basic treatable diseases handled, so child mortality can come down, people can return to having two kids per family, and afford a bicycle to get to market, and so on. Doomsday didn't happen, they shifted the date into the future. Well nobody knows the future. Let's all just do our best to make the incremental improvements we can, and test and assess each innovation to see what value, if any, it really offers.

When new evidence contradicts a theory, it doesn't mean the theory is wrong, as there could be something wrong with the new evidence. But it could also mean the theory is wrong. So we make progress with trial and error.

What made me a concerned sceptic on AGW was the claim that the evidence was incontriverible and that to question, to ask if it might be wrong, is morally akin to denying the holocaust, that to question it is to doubt whether the sun would rise in the morning, and to doubt the whole edifice of science.

I would point out that the reason we trust science is that it is self-correcting, with the caveat that the processs of self-correction, over a group of thousands of professionals, that self correction takes decades. Sometimes even 50 years.

When even the head of the IPCC is on video, telling a bunch of young people that, the denialists are like the people who still believe the earth is flat, and the same head of IPCC calls some indian scientists who checked a claim about a mountain range's ice melting by 2035 and found it mistaken, and the IPCC guy then responds and calls then "vodoo scientists", only for it to come to light later that the 2035 number was a simple mistranscription of 2350, you really start to wonder about the culture.

The theory may be right, but if you go round attacking anyone who disagrees, the self correction process becomes a very slow event. Instead of self correcting in 10 years, you are now having to wait until everyone who supports it professionally has retired.

In a climate where people are branded denialists, the self correction goes out the window. We can no longer KNOW if the theory is indeed right, largely right, needs some adjusting, or is just based on mistaken understanding.

If I don't have kids, does the world owe me a million dollars, for all the "externalises" I have saved? I am sure it is more than that, actually.

I am fond of the notion that real wealth is people inventing new clever stuff that saves us all having to own slaves or be slaves. Everything else seems to be made up money, printing money, carbon credits, etc. If someone invented a cheap way to cure cancer, that would take a massive burden off the health system. If politicians are just arguing over which of their lobbyists should gain more influence for the sake of things being more privately financed or more publicly financed, that's not a whole lot of difference, on average, apart from arguments over inequalities, compared to a nation which has high child mortality rates.

If wind power was so good, I think we'd recognise its life enhancing effect. Chop chop, chop chop.

In Soviet Russia, missing ice find you!

I mean that a huge problem in talking about science and religion, is that to many people, they appear to be two completely separate categories, wheras it is more like what you say (and i tried to say in my post) that we all have things we value, but which we would be very hard to objectively prove are actually of more value.

But there is still to bear in mind that there are levels of reasonableness, so there is a big difference between believing in love because you rationally know that all humans are valuable, and believing in love because of a purely mythic belief system forced you to believe it, the book says it, the book is truth, i must not question it, because questioning (thinking for myself) is herecy.

UID zero divided by zero

Huge problem mixing "science" and "religion" is that for many, religion is about "faith" and science is about reason. So it invokes the pre-modern versus the modern. Another problem is not just faith but the content of that faith. The Protestant Work Ethic is credited by some as a key ingredient why the West developed so fast, as the faith was, work for the sake of work, develop for the sake of development. That is a huge contrast to mere warlord hedonism, or a monk sitting recluse and fasting. Arguably, faith in modern progress is a thing people value and value for its own sake. So one can say that science has this aspect of faith in self determined progress and ability to lift ourselves out of material mysery. However, we are now talking a very reasonable humanistic value, in contrast to "kill the hethens" and "burn the witches who float like ducks" faiths which are just ignorance, along with "world created in 6 days". Now any atheist may say they have zero beliefs, but ask them what they want, and it is stuff like, to love my family, to see my children happy, to make a positive impact on the world. Now as it happens, none of those answers can survive a thorough postmodern deconstruction, they are all groundless, or "empty" as some Buddhists might say. So where are the atheists who say, "Darling, of course I don't love you, we all know I merely have a flow of hormones and other mood altering chemicals flowing around my brain, for survival reasons, selected by the environment from random mutations" No of course not, there are things which we still value as intrinsic to human life, not life as a collection of 40 trillion cells, but sentient experienced life with compassion and love. There is no reason why as biological machines, we need to be sentient, my brain can respond to the environment without there needing to be "anybody here" to experience the show. Anyway, this is where you can get into a scientific humanistic rational ethical purposeful arena, where as we understand more about the brain, and psychology, we can maybe understand more what makes people happy, what makes for better education, what makes for a better and healthier life. Here some rational "atheists" would be happy to include anything we might already have some ideas about, such as Buddhist self-questioning, who are you? and certain meditation, etc. as a small part of an overall scientific understanding of love, insofar as these things can be rationally tested, not merely believed. And if that means that most of traditional religious teaching is shown up to be the head fuck that it really is, well so be it.

Who is root?

Imagine the damage when they realise your monitor is displaying over 2 million single pixel movies!!!

No phone calls?

I don't disagree but I'm reading someone's code at the moment, some routines in R, and the word "training" is in the name of a routine, but it doesn't explain in which sense of the word "training". So now I have to try to figure out the meaning of the result. I'm sure it was obvious to the author. Maybe fine grained comments are bad, but an overall story explaining in ordinary words the overall intent and picture would be nice. Anyway, IANAP.

"Having a conversation with the sketchbook" is a notion in visual design like architecture or construction. For little scripting tasks, I find talking to the comments an exercise in clarifying what I am trying to do and why. The intention, the way it fits the bigger picture. The code is the reality, the comments are the mental intention. Unless it is a very well understood area where to be a programmer you really have to know the domain and the problems very well, so the code is immediately obvious to the trained eye. But for run of the mill make stuff up as we go along problems, the intention needs to be talked about, methinks.

I gather the real basis for "diversity" is the cognitive skill of finding fault with one's own thinking, beliefs, attitudes, etc. But too often it is merely used as a narrative to find fault with the opponent. Basically, honest diversity is about being able to deconstruct one's own view, "maybe we are treating gays unfairly". So it is an actual skill HOWEVER, unless one has that "bending over backwards to prove one's self wrong" skill, the teaching of diversity can merely encourage tribalism. Basically, you get good at deconstructing the other's views, "gee you must have some hidden neocolonialist power drive", but don't get round to deconstructing your OWN views, "gee I wonder if I am using the neocolonialist phallocentric racist narrative to bypass any need to look at whether my own views might also contain some errors which need examining." Which is where perhaps the "left" then fails to deliver, because in trying to promote diversity, it doesn't examine the key ingredients which are necessary for true diversity, namely developing the cognitive skills. So the kids who are already smart enough to get diversity, because they criticise their own views just as honestly as they criticise other's views, can thrive in these exercises. But the kids who don't already have the skill, will find it a bridge too bar, the curriculum is literally over their heads, and instead tend to interpret the lesson as a free pass to encourage tribalism. Of course, a left narrative is that everyone is equally smart, it is just life or society that is unfair, so the notion of a teaching about diversity being "over their heads" sounds nasty, but the consequence, if true, is that the left ends up ignoring the needs of those people whom it most desires to help. It is just a matter of adding some intermediary steps toward diversity. One book on cognitive development describes engaging kids in a boat building project, where they get to build their own boat, so that's the "selfish" motivation, but the work is arranged so that for some tasks, they need to help each other in a cooperative way, so it gradually introduces social bonding and social cooperative skills. But it doesn't make those the obvious goal. Anyway, IANA... etc.

And that's a place where religions differ somewhat: do they advocate converting others?