Our response to covid has a lot of bad implications for the fight against climate change, a far tougher collective action problem. Among the worst is the exposure of "trust the science" as a kind of secular faith, not a genuine defense of scientific thinking. This took many forms
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There was a failure to understand time-critical decision making under uncertainty, a totemistic belief in peer-reviewed publication as the only fount of truth, an ongoing campaign of moralizing outrage against dissenting positions and thinkers who were later vindicated
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Despite heroic efforts, many countries seemed incapable of learning from one another, and there was no ability to coordinate an adequate international response. Difficult concepts and dilemmas were never (in the US, at least) communicated in a way the public could understand
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I find it extremely surprising that this experience does not appear to have colored people's beliefs on the correct policy response to climate change, or our chances of success on that front. This was a dress rehearsal that failed in every imaginable dimension
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Climate science is far more complex than virology, the time scales are too long, the field is by necessity full of guesswork, and the only effective interventions have to be transnational. Our political system and our journalists are not up to the task of getting this right
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Step one of somehow fixing this has to be communicating the core idea of science—that you repeatedly change your mind based on evidence (or lack of evidence!), that you do this rigorously, and that finding out you were wrong about something is a sign that you're winning
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Replying to @Pinboard
Worth giving this a listen https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/05/04/95-liam-kofi-bright-on-knowledge-truth-and-science/ …
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Replying to @henryfarrell
It's a podcast, Henry. It's not going to happen
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Replying to @Pinboard
Fair enough (the relevant bit is where they talk through how you should teach science differently as a process of figuring stuff out through trying and screwing things up, and then build on that to give people a more realistic understanding of its strengths and disadvantages)
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Thank you for indulging my textuality! Very friendly transcript
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Replying to @Pinboard
Well I’m probably bollocksing up the subtleties in my summary, but that’s how I understood it fwiw.
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