Global warming is a better test of irrationality that theism

I really like this place. What a relief to have a cogent and rational comment about the global warming debate, and how encouraging to see it lavished with a pile of karma.

And if we're going to talk on the level of tribes anyway then at least use reasoning like this.

how important the problem is relative to other problems, what ethical theory to use when deciding whether a policy is good or bad

Apart from those two issues, the other points you bring up are the domain of experts. Unless we are experts ourselves, or have strong relevant information about the biases of experts, the rational thing to do is to defer to expert beliefs. We can widen the uncertainty somewhat (we can confidently expect overconfidence :-), maybe add a very small systematic bias in one direction (to reflect possible social or political biases - the correction has to be very small as our ability to reliably estimate these factors is very poor).

I might still complain about it falling afoul of anti-politics norms, but at least it would help create the impression that the debate was about ideas rather than tribes.

Excessive anti-politics norms are a problem here - because the issue has become tribalised, we're no longer willing to defend the rational position, or we caveat it far too much.

The irrational thing, and I see it often, is people who believe "nothing should be done about global warming and therefore at least one of the questions above has an answer of 'none'". Obviously, they don't use those words. But when someone switches freely from "the earth isn't getting warmer" to "the fact that the earth is getting warmer is part of a natural climate cycle" there's something wrong with that person's thinking.

Wouldn't denial of AGW equate to one of the following beliefs?

1. Climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is zero, less than zero, or so poorly defined that it could straddle either side of zero, depending on the precise definition.
2. Increased levels of CO2 have nothing to do with human activity.

Anyone who believes in ~1 and ~2 must believe in some degree of AGW, even if they further believe it is trivial, or masked by natural climate variations.

Belief that sensitivity is below 2 degrees doesn't seem utterly unreasonable, given that the typical IPCC estimate is 3 degrees +/- 1 degree, the confidence interval is not more than 2 sigma either way ("likely" rather than "very likely" in IPCC parlance) and building that confidence interval involves conditioning on lots of different sorts of evidence. Belief that sensitivity is below 1 degree does seem like having an axe to grind.

All this is Charney or "fast feedback" sensitivity. The biggest concern is the growing evidence that ultimate (slow feedback) sensitivity is much bigger than Charney (at least 30% bigger, and plausibly 100% bigger). Also, that there are carbon cycle and other GHG feedbacks (like methane), so the long-run impact of AGW includes much more than our own CO2 emissions. Multiplying all the new factors together tuns a central estimate of 3 degrees into a central estimate of more than 6 degrees, and then things really do look very worrying indeed (temperatures during the last ice age were only 5-6 degrees less than today; at temperatures 6 degrees more than today there have been no polar ice caps at all).

It effectively tests just one thing: one's prior on how likely climatologists are to lie or misinterpret data.

People don't start out with a high/low claimed prior on lying climatologists and then decide to start arguing about global warming on the internet - it's vice versa, in most cases. The end result tells you about this whole causal history, which includes a fair bit of irrationality along the way.

Of course, where the causal chain terminates is often in stuff like "my parents had political view X," which we don't particularly want to learn about, and thus has to be controlled for if we want to learn about the intermediate irrationality.

One might argue that a typical theist's knowledge of the lack of material evidence for his religion is also pure hearsay. Neither most theists nor most atheists personally investigated the relevant archaeological artefacts. Similarly, few western theists directly experienced things commonly believed to be extremely evil (holocaust, famines, ). They are simply "mistrusting the current archaeological/historical" elite.

edit:

Yes, yes, of course virtually no real theists (or even agnostics) use the "it's all hearsay, I'm merely sceptical" defence. And indeed, large swaths of theology deal with virtually all problems you could think of. I was merely pointing out that an individual theist could, in principle, use a similar defence to the one ArisKatsaris was using.

What about endorsing notions like "Endorsing notions like 'global warming is a better test of irrationality than theism' is a better test of irrationality than theism"?

I think this a good argument for collecting more points that Less Wrongers can use in real life to guage someone's rationality. I like to bring up Newcomb's problem and ask for reasons for their choice, and if they're two-boxers I try to persuade them to one-box. One intelligent friend was quickly persuaded to one-box when I outlined the expected results, whereas another person eventually said "I think you should just go with your instincts". I felt that gave me a lot of information about their thinking, but more points to bring up would be good.

It would be especially good to find contrarian beliefs to ask about for different groups so as to more easily spot people who can think outside their group norm.

Or whether someone's a neonazi!

Good idea. Let's ask for their political party so we can control for it in our prior probabilities of global warming wackery.

At the risk of starting a mind-killer war :-) has someone done any actual studies on this? I remember a pair of studies that seemed to show that both sides were equally ignorant in economic matters (though ignorant about different things, always supporting their own position), but can't find it right now.

(For posterity: The Two-Party Swindle explains one of the key reasons why not.)

I'm thinking about this, and right now I think belief in astrology is the best test:

• Theism correlates with where and when you grew up more than anything else. (ISTM that in Italy, people from the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies are far more likely to be religious than people from the former Papal States; and I think that in the Republic of Ireland younger people are less likely to be religious than older people. More generally, there are many more atheists in Europe than elsewhere.)
• As for anthropogenic global warming, I just don't think the typical person has encountered enough evidence (of the kind they can understand) to have strong grounds to decide one way or the other, so different beliefs will mostly be due to different priors and/or motivated cognition, the former telling us nothing and the latter telling us the person's political affiliation more than anything else.
• In the case of marijuana legalization (apart from the issue of value judgements), what I see confuses me: ISTM that most people above a certain age are against it and most people below a certain age (except politically right-wing ones) are in favour of it, but that would mean that either 1) support for marijuana legalization advances one funeral at a time, and hence ought to be larger now than 15 years ago than 30 years ago than 45 years ago, or 2) most people change their minds at a certain point in their lives, neither of which I've observed. I suspect that there's some kind of selection bias in the young people I know and the old people I know. (Also, signalling probably plays a helluva part in this, so maybe the old people who claim they never supported marijuana legalization are just lying.)
• I can think of no social, geographical, or political factor which would substantially correlate with belief in astrology, like, at all. (Maybe I just lack imagination, though.)

BTW, I've noticed that among people I know, belief in God and belief in AGW appear to be strongly negatively correlated among physics professors, but not among the general population (any more than you'd expect from them correlating with right- and left-wing political views respectively, at least). Maybe that's just statistical noise from small sample size (and/or cognitive biases of mine -- it's not like I've given out surveys or made statistics).

Tests which were proposed in the comments include whether a person favours legalization of marijuana, [...]

This is actually a good test, but not in the way it was intended. Drug laws are not about drugs, and I expect someone who claims a high level of rationality about political issues to understand this point. So when someone discusses the issue of marijuana prohibition by doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis that takes the purported motives of these laws at face value, I find this to be a miserable failure, no matter what his ultimate conclusions.

I'm not sure the case for marijuana legalization is cut and dried even for pot lovers:

"Our neighborhoods continue to complain daily about the disruption and public safety issues presented by medical marijuana businesses operating in the city,'' says [a popular Los Angeles City Councilman].

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LA-Medical-Marijuana-Pot-Law-Huizar-Motion-134390463.html

Maybe marijuana really does cause less trouble overall if the law forces you to smoke it on the sly.

:-)

It's quite interesting - it's one of my most heavily downvoted posts ever!

anything else that makes you to delay the official thing, will make difference in your life, and not for the better.

Given the state of the official thing, I don't thing that's obvious.

It matters little whether you believe in global warming

Isn't that under dispute between "believers" and non-"believers" to begin with?

There's an entire climate blogosphere out there, full of people who know more and care more, and I see no reason for people to rehash the debate here.

A global temperature trend data set based on satellite data that I consider reliable is maintained at:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

The data goes back to 1978. The last 6 months or so look like a particularly high variance, low trend period, which leaves me thinking that when the variance dies down, we may see a significant shift in the 5-10 year trend line.

The guy has been a skeptic, but has accepted that his data shows a warming trend, though on the lowest end of the UN commission's estimated ranges, coming in at about 0.13C per decade.

I upvoted you (from -1), not because I agree with your conclusion but because you're asking for additional information to inform your decision, which should be celebrated not punished on Less wrong.

Here's an article by William Nordhaus, a climate economist often attacked by people like Joe Romm for arguing for a slower path of carbon emissions reduction than others.

Key graph here. It's hard to do a thorough search and miss such things.

There's this presentation by Richard Lindzen to the British House of Commons explaining why the predictions of catastrophic consequence of global warming are BS.

What did you find when you looked into the issue?

?Explain?