From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 02:04:46 MDT
On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 02:00:16PM -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> I believe many of the doomsayers. Their past predictions have been 100%
> right in some areas. However, we then find technological answers to
> avoid disaster. It doesn't make sense to pretend that the warnings were
> false after the fact.
It depends on *which* warnings we heed. While some warnings certainly
have merit and are avoided by technological advance (like the ancient
Greek observation that if every people had the same living standard as
Athens (a few $ a day) the world would run out of firewood and starve),
there are also a lot of warnings that do not have any merit at all.
Warnings have a normal distribution of severity, but the real severity
of the problem is some unknown number (ideally correlated with the
mean). This means that there are always plenty of warnings more extreme
than necessary (and many too mild). Since there are clear public choice
benefits to make drastic and strong warnings it is likely that on
average there will be more overly extreme warnings than realistic ones.
In the end, we should be grateful for people finding problems and
warning about them. But these warnings have to be carefully analysed and
their bias removed if we are to make correct decisions. Quite a few of
the global environment reports released now (in time for the
environmental summit) are useless in this respect, since they base
themselves on higly spurious measures (one of them, I think it was the
one criticized by Bailley, had an environmental footprint measure that
would make total matter-energy conversion power with no emissions or
other environmental costs ultra-unsustainable since footprints was
determined *only* by kilowatts converted into area forest able to
consume the CO2 from an equivalent coal plant!).
Also, as the Athens example show, the developments that make doomsayers
wrong usually doesn't happen because people react to the doomsayers and
invent better stuff (or even that rising resource prices make them
develop better stuff), but due to the ordinary process of invention and
competition. The times where doomsayers have actually been relevant is
for specific problems like Y2K and the ozone layer.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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