I think that's very fair, but I don't think you can rule out the effect of social conformity.

If you believe one side or the other is factually correct and the other is factually incorrect, then you drank someone's kool-aid and you should spit it out. Both "sides" use demonstrably false logic and reasoning in their arguments, but that doesn't mean those arguments aren't effective in convincing people to follow them. The fact is that the vast majority of people live their life on vibes and feeling, and not based on logic and reason. That's kind of the point of this article, after all. Logic and reason isn't as effective as appealing to someone's emotions.

Remember that a person who moves from a liberal city to a conservative town will invariably become more conservative in their opinions, and the opposite is also true. Most of what people say outwardly is not an expression of their actual beliefs, but what they believe will get them the most positive rewards from the people around them.

True. I love how the vendors are selling this as a privacy feature, when in reality it's a CYA feature. They're clearly going to be hit by massive class action lawsuits over this, and they just seem oblivious to it. I guess if there's money to be made now, don't worry about the future. Hire some lawyers.

Everyone who supports AI medical transcriptions says, "of course you still need to proof-read it," but we know there are a lot of physicians and psychologists not proof-reading the transcriptions because stuff like this is getting through. Do doctors not take ethics seriously? They're worried about lawsuits, but not worried about using an unproven technology that's notorious for confabulating?

You are correct, and this is part of a broader crisis of falling trust in institutions across the western world. We need science to be able to happen within an open scientific community that the rest of us can see into, but the media has an addiction to reporting on the findings that are weird outliers. But those weird outliers are the most likely to be incorrect, which feeds a cycle of mistrust. I would like to see science come up with a grading system of scientific certainty... where, say, the quantum mechanics model, which agrees extremely well with experimental results to as many digits as we can measure, is graded as a 9 out of 10 certainty, and the results in the squishier social sciences are down in the 2 or 3 range, and then climate science is only going to fall in the 4 out of 10 range at best. New surprising results should come in at a 0 or 1 initially. This would hopefully help the media better understand what they're reporting on.

Isn't "assigning blame prematurely" the precise reason we handed everyone a megaphone by giving them a phone in their pocket with access to social media? I was wondering what everybody was thinking, and now I get to hear them scream it into the void.

This is only one study among many which show over and over that smartphone use is bad for mental health in general, and particularly bad for tweens. I'm not sure why you're so intent on ignoring the mounting evidence, but you do you.

Except that the study says they controlled for that. So within those individual demographics, some 12 year olds had smartphones and some didn't, and the ones that did have them had worse outcomes. You're trying pretty hard to not accept the results.

Mods: To whoever went and downvoted both of my posts... none of the moderation options include "I agree with this" or "I don't agree with this" or "I don't like the implication of this" and that's for a good reason. When you're moderating, you should simply be filtering out *low quality* posts. There was nothing about my posts that was low quality. The posts stated an idea in a well reasoned way. If you disagree, you can post yourself and point out where you think the reasoning went wrong, or where you think the axioms I used were wrong, but moderating a post down just because you disagree is a misuse of the moderation function.

No, I would say... we were inadvertently cooling the North Atlantic with ship emissions, and when we stopped (due to more stringent international emissions standards) then we saw a jump in water temperatures in the ocean. So we're already geo-engineering. Some of it adds together, and some of it reduces the effect of other geo-engineering effects. If we're doing it anyway, and there's zero chance we're "just going to stop" then we need to get better at it.

I don't understand your logic. We had a huge eruption of Mount Pinatubo back in 1991. I was in high school and remember the effects that year. It had a really big impact on global weather patterns including dropping the temperature significantly, but it certainly didn't "kill a lot of flora and fauna." Yes, there was a lot of local damage around the volcano, but that was due to the ash.

We could just build more fission nuclear reactors (and we are now, finally). Fusion is still decades away, even though they've made a big advance recently due to more efficient super-conducting magnets. And renewables really need better energy storage solutions to really increase adoption.

The fact is that with deglobalization and the fall of global institutions, every country now has to guarantee its own energy independence. In the US, that's shale oil (and natural gas). In China that's coal, since almost all of their oil has to be imported from the middle east, and China has a ridiculous amount of coal. Europe would love to switch to renewables, but let's face it, they need to spend money on their military right now, and won't be able to afford subsidizing solar panels in countries where the sun hardly shines.

The problem isn't going away.

Do you have an actual workable idea, or are we all just supposed to lay down and die? You can do that if you want. The rest of us are going to work the problem.

I would much rather we just cut fossil fuels and replace them with carbon-neutral or carbon-negative technologies, but given the political reality, there's no way that's going to happen soon enough, even if we outlawed the use of geoengineering. So given that reality, is this an existential threat to humanity or not? Because if it is, then it's better to roll the dice on geoengineering than watch the end of the world, right? I believe the climate scientists when they tell me climate change is an existential threat, but it's also the climate scientists who say, "no, it's not that bad yet" when you bring up geoengineering. So which is it? And given that we're definitely not going to cut emissions in time, wouldn't it be better to buy ourselves some time before we hit those tipping points we keep hearing about?

I mostly agree with you, but I think it might be unfair to the average American voter. Imagine that you live in West Virginia or Missouri, and you're struggling to get by, as many people are. Your wages haven't kept pace with inflation. You can't afford a house, and the price of houses seems to be rising faster than wages. Big companies have left your town to setup shop overseas, and your neighbors are out of work. Your health insurance sucks and is anything but universal. One big illness could wipe you out. When your wife had a kid, she got 6 weeks(!) of maternity leave, and had to be back at work.

Then you look at the US armed forces... there are 13(?) aircraft carriers that outmatch everything else on the ocean. Stealth bombers that look like spaceships. NASA launching huge rockets at enormous expense to go land people on the moon, when they already did that 45 years ago. A huge nuclear arsenal. This is all to be the world's police, and to provide a security umbrella to Europe.

And then you look at Europe, with their two years of maternity leave, and worker protections, and way more paid holidays, and universal healthcare, and they all like to look down their noses at Americans, while they benefit from a massive security umbrella that the US provides, which frees up the funds to spend on social programs.

Everyone thinks the MAGA crowd are traditional conservatives. Sure, there are some, but the core group of voters used to be democrats. They were union workers, laborers. They saw their savior in Bernie Sanders, and when the dems wouldn't let him run, they decided to follow the other populist voice. Is Trump lying to them? Absolutely.

I don't relate to MAGA at all. But I get it. The security arrangement might have been good for the US in general, but it hasn't been good for the average American worker. That's why we're here.

And there are going to be austerity measures coming to all of Europe. Those social programs are going to shrink. Right at a time when everyone's arming themselves to the teeth. How do you think that's going to play out?

I appreciate the average American's sentiment who want Europe to pay for its own defense. However, there's a lot of American history in the 20th century and before which brought us to this point deliberately. After being drawn into two huge world wars, started by member states of a continent that had continually been at war with themselves, the United States came up with a plan to prevent it from happening again. They invited everyone into an alliance structure where anyone could trade with anyone else, and the US would guarantee free navigation of the oceans so they didn't need big navies, and would provide security guarantees so that the countries of Europe didn't feel the need to arm themselves to the teeth. This arrangement is expensive for the US, but not so expensive as a world war 3. And it worked to prevent WW3 for many decades. Now that the generations who fought those wars are gone, we've forgotten the lessons, and I'm afraid we're doomed to repeat them. European have not evolved. Their geographic and political reality encourages wars among their own states. And as much as the US wants to stay out of it, they invariably get dragged back in every time.