Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

On Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:21:50 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Experience is the worst teacher.

Not at all. Experience is exactly how we (and now computers) learn about
the external world. the most powerful methods available at present are
based on Bayesian statistics and do everything these days from classify
spam to guess about how to balance a portfolio.

The problem with experience is that most people pick a few - sometimes
one - essentially random experience and decide that's the general
case. Especially in the case of bad experiences. That's probably an
evolutionary defense mechanism. Most people have had the experience of
eating something - a hot dog, chinese food, broccoli, whatever - and
getting sick, and hating that food for years, maybe their whole life.
Generalizing in that case is wrong. Ditto "men are no good/women are
no good/you can't trust a Finn." I've seen lots of engineers base
their design habits on a small number of experiences. It's part of our
genetically programmed incorrect valuation of risk. Good for survival,
bad for design.

Experience should show us points in a range of possibilities. For most
people, it has the opposite effect.



Exactly the point of the book. Our brains are generally
wired up for simple things and short terms, not long and
complicated patterns. Modern life has left common sense
behind. Ask any bank manager who has, in the last year,
lost more money than his bank has made since the day he was
born, estimating his risk on Gaussian models.

Most of the senior suits in charge of the trading desks grew up in an
era when they had no clue at all what they were doing other than seat of
the pants and crude calculations. That is why major banks can be broken
by a single rogue trader who understands how to beat the back office
checks and balances (usually someone who has worked in both roles).

Yup, people tend to not believe in catastrophes.

Speak for yourself. Catastrophes can and do happen. Tormenting a farming
computer model to extremes I once had my crops trampled by a herd of
unicorns. I was trying to break it and took it into uncharted territory.

I didn't say thay don't happen. I said that people tend to not expect
them.

Consider the space shuttles. Both the SRB seals and the external tank
insulations were known, continuous hazards. But successive flights
accumulated confidence, when they should have accumulated terror.
Again, a failure of experience.

I grew up in New Orleans, and it was common knowledge that a storm
that took Katrina's path would fill the lake and dump it onto the
entire city. What did they do? Eat, drink, and be merry.



That was in the 80's so I am pretty sure that the better models have
included very low probability high damage events for at least that long.
Some of them were very humourous scenarios (to make the point that
no-one knew what the real ones would be or pretended to be able to
enumerate them all - rusts mutating that would take down wheat
monoculture was/is a real worry).

In your wilful ignorance in the next breath you will deny that there is
any possibilty of an AGW induced catastrophe. Do you see the contradiction?

I don't deny any possibility. I suggest that there is a good cance
that the models are crap, that AGW isn't happening, and that the
"science" is bad. The fact that skepticism isn't allowed over this
issue is a fed flag that the "science" is twisted.

Seriously, think about who, in the AGW debate, is denying
possibilities.

But yes, I really doubt that a little warming, if it is happening,
manmade or otherwise, will cause some "tipping point" catastrophe. All
sorts of real-life problems, from kidney stones to jellyfish to beach
erosion, is being blamed on AGW, and it's silly.

But a little more CO2 will make a lot of plants happy. We were close
to running out.

John


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