[kevinavery]

> e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?

> Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.

> I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.

One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.

[w3mmpp]

Another plausible explanation is those who share his view won't admit it publicly to not destroy their career.

[_Microft]

Sharing his view and still doing research and publishing results contradicting this view to advance their career seems unlikely to be honest.

[w3mmpp]

Why? The world is full of people doing an honest job at their level without believing in the direction their industry, as a whole, is taking.

[titzer]

It's not helpful when scientists share their views outside their specialty and get things wrong. As much as I appreciate and respect Freeman Dyson, I wish he would have kept his views to himself on this particular issue, as he was remarkably ill-informed and stubbornly so. But that said, there's a difference between sharing your view and going on a crusade, which he didn't really seem to do. Now, if he had gone on a crusade, that'd be a different matter.

[poilcn]

If you have a group of people with Sacred Knowledge™ who are the only capable of judging on things and you have to literally believe them (and dare you not!) as their proofs lie in the realm of sketchy models in which they ignore billions of variable, it's not science, it's at least scientism. But there is more. They have a whole set of signs of a pseudo-religion. Their own Original Sin, apocalypse, Messiah.

Judging by the consequences for those public figures who made a mistake of doubting these believes, it's a whole totalitarian sect.

[titzer]

Except these people (Scientists(tm)) have to show their work and anyone can follow along and participate, provided they aren't so afraid of their own ignorance and terrified of feeling stupid that they strike out with disbelief and denial.

Sure, scientists make mistakes. Their models need adjustment. They ignore variables because they don't have the computational power to model every electron in the universe. Yeah, imprecise models make imprecise predictions. No one has accuracy of 100%. Sometimes it's 90%, sometimes it's 50%. Sometimes it's 99.9%. It's rarely, rarely ever 0%. People just don't publish scientific results that are 100% wrong with no checking whatsoever.

But that's not the level of conversation we are having. We usually aren't talking about adjusting and tinkering or adding sub-models for systems that aren't fully understood yet. We aren't asking what we missed, we aren't examining the assumptions from the outset, trying to get to something that works. We aren't talking details of climate models or pointing to something in the inner guts of their computer simulations that we can fix up, remove, replace, etc. All of that is really complicated and hard! And we aren't doing that specifically because you frame that stuff as "Sacred Knowledge" which you reflexively and categorically reject--it's a shortcut thinking that doesn't require you to understand math, code, or read a goddamn paper. It's a shortcut that allows you to keep reasoning in a vacuum and go about your daily life because you actually hate the idea of being an (xyz) scientist.

As such, we end up in a situation where you are forced to argue a position that results from all-or-nothing thinking, and have to start accusing them of being a religion, a totalitarian sect, usually because one of them got pissed off at some really outrageously stupid disinformation spread deliberately by politicians. But you are forced there because you either can't or don't want to cede any rhetorical ground of being fully and utterly more right than "they" are, because you have no idea what will happen if you cede any ground at all. So instead the othering intensifies. Reject everything they say! We must throw them out! It's a religion! Look, one of them got pissed off one day! They were wrong that one time! I don't trust a word they say!

And you only frame things this way because that's how you think--in terms of religion and power. Moreover, it's how you think they think.

No. I absolutely and unequivocally reject the framing of your comment. It's lazy and it's a lie.

There is no "Sacred Knowledge." Go dig. Scientists welcome it. But don't be a denialist moron. There are too many of those. Denialist morons reject even the basics of what scientists do. Sometimes they couch it in more-scientific-than-thou-art framing like yours, sometimes they don't. But they come out in anger and denial. You know what? That pisses off anybody. To have your work shat on, you better believe that pisses people off. We end up circling back over and over and over again to the same basics and it's just exhausting, because people aren't motivated by a desire for the truth, they are motivated by their tribal instincts which underpin your framing, whether you recognize it or not.

[tanseydavid]

"Denialist morons" -- what justifies this sort of name-calling?

You do nothing to help your argument by resorting to this type of language.

[titzer]

> what justifies this sort of name-calling?

terse catharsis.

[_Microft]

Ars Technica has an article about Mr. Dyson and in the comments, the author attempts to explain why Dyson might have had the view on climate science that he had. I found the suggested reasons plausible.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-physic...

[pavlov]

Another plausible explanation is that Dyson’s generation of scientists mostly ignored climate. It was a “yin” problem when these men were looking to make their mark on a “yang” problem — new physics, thinking machines, conquest of some new domain.

Now the yin problem has revealed itself as an existential threat to the growth-centric way of life built upon the work of the great minds of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly they and their disciples are reluctant to accept this.

[TopHand]

In the mid 1980's I attended a library sale. I bought a collection of Science News magazines that covered the whole year of 1959. For those of you who don't know that was the International Geophysical Year. I don't feel like digging it out right now, but there was a short piece about a scientist who was studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate. I did not find a follow up article, but it does demonstrate that this has been going on a long time. Just because your old doesn't mean you haven't considered it.

[yongjik]

Yes, it's a very old problem. Greenhouse effect was first considered by Arrhenius... in 1896.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...

[TopHand]

Thank you for the link. I suspected it went back further than 1959, but could not come up with a publication for it. I should have searched wikipedia. I had a great interest in the Ice Age in my youth. Most of the books I read on the subject were older than 1959. The idea that the Ice Ages were caused by the green house effect was quite prominent in most of them. They did not extrapolate it to industrial, Agriculture, and individual pollution. Though I do recall a theory I read that the Agricultural Revolution is what ended the last Ice Age.

[Fnoord]

I was taught about the problem in elementary school in The Netherlands at around the year of 1990. We had it as "theme week". Which means we had to, for example. make a collage about it. At another time (around same year) we had such about alternative energy as well ("alternatives to the status quo ie. coal").

[dirtydroog]

I can recall being taught about acid rain in Ireland in the 1980's

[pavlov]

Yes, it's been going on for a long time. And the Dysons and Feynmans of the science world didn't care, because this topic wasn't sufficiently big and axiomatic for them. That was my point.

[tanseydavid]

>> because this topic wasn't sufficiently big and axiomatic for them. That was my point.

That was your SPECULATION.

[fmajid]

I remember being a big advocate for nuclear power from the mid-1980s when I was in high school, precisely because it was the only way to fight the greenhouse effect as it was known back then.

Dyson is exhibiting a pathology common among physicists, a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect along the lines of “physics is hard, therefore everything else is easy for me”. We see it often when they dabble in social sciences, or biology, or economics. The complete opposite of intellectual humility and the scientific method.

[lonelappde]

That's not what Dunning-Kruger is.

[thedance]

That was a pretty verbose version of Ok, Boomer.

[stonogo]

There are endless ways to phrase "old people who don't know much about something still insist their opinions should be given equal weight as experts" but "ok boomer" is probably the most succinct.