Using the people picked for funny Jimmy Kimmel interviews is hardly representative, given that they’re literally hand-picked to be the most ridiculous responses.
The article acknowledges this somewhat, but it’s an example of another confidence fallacy: The idea that nobody knows what they’re talking about.
It’s a comforting fiction to tell ourselves when we find ourselves less educated on a topic than we might want to be. The disappointment of not knowing melts away when you can convince yourself that even the people who think they know what they’re talking about are just as uninformed as ourselves.
But it’s a trap. It’s the same line of reasoning that leads people to believing their own random guesses about the climate have equal footing to those of career climate scientists. Or that all political candidates are equally dumb and therefore we might as well pick the one with a personality we like the most. It’s a similar to the “death of expertise” phenomenon.
The truth is, many people do know what they’re talking about and aren’t idiots, but you won’t find them embarrassing themselves on a funny Jimmy Kimmel segment or a Trevor Noah show designed to make us laugh. For that, we need to zero in on the people who don’t know what they’re talking about and then pretend that everyone is just like them. It’s more comforting that way.
> The article acknowledges this somewhat, but it’s an example of another confidence fallacy: The idea that nobody knows what they’re talking about.
It was the opposite for me realization for . When I was young I was assuming if somebody was saying something, they were likely knowing what they were talking about.
After a bit of a ride in life, I know now that people that does do exist, but they are a rare bread, and usually about some very specific topic.
Competent people are the exception, not the rule, degraded mode is the default for humanity, and we are pretty good at going with it. At the beginning I though: what they are doing must be complicated, since it takes so much time and effort, or since there is so much debate about it. One day, you have to do it yourself, or you are behind the curtain, and you realize in 2 years anybody seriously working at it would be better that those life timers.
But still, because of the social pressure, playing pretend is the status quo for most.
Not just about jobs, not just about science, but about pretty basic things in life as well.
In fact, we are constructing a lot of our society around myths that are emerging because of this collecting behavior. It's quite fascinating to watch unfold, but it's such a waste of potential.
Reading what you wrote makes me think of the Murray-Gelman Amnesia Effect. Most people get their information from media and in my limited, anecdotal experience when media talk about an area I do have a great deal of knowledge in there are always mistakes. My belief is that most of us don’t know what we are talking about except in a few areas.
> Using the people picked for funny Jimmy Kimmel interviews is hardly representative, given that they’re literally hand-picked to be the most ridiculous responses.
This is my least favorite genre of lazy content, especially when accompanied by some kind of moral that society is getting dumber.
> their own random guesses about the climate have equal footing to those of career climate scientists.
Notwithstanding that climate models improve with time, is the percent of climate scientist guesses that have come true over the last 50 or so years - at least the "alarmist" ones, which are the ones that climate deniers take issue with - better than chance? It seems the consensus were calling for global cooling in the 70s and then warming disaster around the turn of the century, both of which didn't happen
"Global cooling" was never an expert consensus, so far as I can tell. It was a thing some people thought might happen and would probably be bad, but the idea that in the 1970s everyone was confidently predicting that the climate would cool and it would be a disaster appears to be a thing made up by the boo-to-climate-science lobby.
(In the 1970s some journalists were confidently predicting disastrous cooling. Journalists gonna journalist.)
Some people have in fact looked at the question "how do historical climate-science predictions match up with reality?" and the answer is "rather well". For instance:
"Our survey began with a literature review of every peer-reviewed reference we could find."
"The first result we found is that all of the 17 models correctly projected global warming (as opposed to either no warming or even cooling). While this is so unsurprising to climate scientists that it is not even mentioned in the paper, it may be surprising to non-experts. The second result is that most of the model projections (10 out of 17) published between 1970 and 2000 produced global average surface warming projections that were quantitatively consistent with the observed warming rate."
"To account for differences in emissions between the simulations and reality, we calculated the warming rates with respect to anthropogenic radiative forcing, the rate at which human emissions trap energy at Earth’s surface, instead of calculating them with respect to time. Using this novel metric of the warming rate, we found that the model projections were even more consistent with reality (14 out of 17 models captured this)."
I refer to the belief you have that global cooling had consensus status in the 1970s.
Edit: I don’t recall any predictions of imminent disaster that would occur at the turn of the century. All predictions I recall were always to occur well into the present century. Your question also reads as a rhetorical one. Your post came across to me as one that (confidently?) purports that climate scientists don’t do better than random chance.
The "for profit" industry underwrites the entire scientific/academia industry. Most (all?) of basic science is paid for by the defence industry.
Science is just as political and conformist as any other industry. "career climate scientist" is just an appeal to authority, who actually would sign praise to anyone that would pay them enough.
An academic is just a person who wants someone to give them money so that they never have to face the vagarities of real life outside of the ivory tower.
Scientists that bring in funding are therefore particularly valuable and highly sought after. However, those that bring-in extramural funding, but do not act politically correct are often quickly dispensed with. Because other donors may dislike them.
Really weird that people still put them on pedestals, but I guess "More Doctors smoke Camels."
No. There are tons of people who sympathise with that viewpoint.
The "death of expertise" phenomenon is given a grandiloquent title to cover up what it's really about: the death of trust in academia. Experts are a much larger category of people than academics and there's no generalized crisis of confidence in e.g. plumbers, electrical engineers, advertising executives, whatever. But those people are rarely interviewed as "experts" by the media and political classes. Instead, when these people push for new social policies on the back of "expertise" it's always academics.
And that's a problem because universities don't care about quality control at all and so academic expertise is absolutely overrun with fraud, stupidity, dishonesty and pervasively low standards. The average well read intelligent person not only can beat the career scientist in many fields, but often will, simply because the distorting effects of the academic system are so large.
The article acknowledges this somewhat, but it’s an example of another confidence fallacy: The idea that nobody knows what they’re talking about.
It’s a comforting fiction to tell ourselves when we find ourselves less educated on a topic than we might want to be. The disappointment of not knowing melts away when you can convince yourself that even the people who think they know what they’re talking about are just as uninformed as ourselves.
But it’s a trap. It’s the same line of reasoning that leads people to believing their own random guesses about the climate have equal footing to those of career climate scientists. Or that all political candidates are equally dumb and therefore we might as well pick the one with a personality we like the most. It’s a similar to the “death of expertise” phenomenon.
The truth is, many people do know what they’re talking about and aren’t idiots, but you won’t find them embarrassing themselves on a funny Jimmy Kimmel segment or a Trevor Noah show designed to make us laugh. For that, we need to zero in on the people who don’t know what they’re talking about and then pretend that everyone is just like them. It’s more comforting that way.