The original! too many others to read through
Generally forecasting needs to be as dispassionate as possible, but for most people it becomes muddied by prejudices
Quote from: slack---line on February 29, 2012, 08:28:06 amOut of curiosity in your job of making projections, what proportion are borne out successfully and what proportion are incorrect (roughly, I appreciate it's unlikely to binary in outcome)?You have over-inferred about my job: thankfully I am not a forecaster or an economist, so I can't answer that the way you want. I am a professional investor. I do have lots of performance data associated with that - which amazingly suggests I am quite competent - but it's not really relevant: in investing you can often be right for the wrong reasons, or you can be right over one time period but wrong over a longer one, or vice-versa ... you get my drift. However, I am pretty sure I spend more time having to think about broad economic and business trends than most people, and - more importantly - reflect on the forecasting and decision-making process itself. Which is why I am opinionating more forcefully on this thread than on, say, recommended restaurants in Sheffield or the beta for Tetris.
Out of curiosity in your job of making projections, what proportion are borne out successfully and what proportion are incorrect (roughly, I appreciate it's unlikely to binary in outcome)?
More than anything I am surprised by the certainty with which people make statements about the future, especially when linked with the notion that we are at some major inflection point, for example, the end of the fossil-fuel era, right now.
1. is the inflection point now or in several decades?.
2. is the tractory of depletion steep or shallow?
3. (most importantly) is there some as yet unknown innovation around the corner that renders the issue irrelevant.
I've heard similar arguments about size of our output compared to China's. I don't agree it makes our actions irrelevant....
What I don't agree with are 'greens', for want of a better word, who are ignorant of the scale of change required asking people to change their personal behaviours on the presumption that small scale changes by themself will alter anything of any significance, they won't. It reeks of being seen to be doing something whist not registering the reality.
If we hit our current targets for reducing Carbon (as set by the government) for 2015, China alone would make that saving null in just 2 months
I'm really arguing against what I believe are completely useless behaviours dressed up by well-meaning people as morally/ethically superior in the current outlook, which I believe don't do anything to address the underlying problem
and which might even damage the longer-term chances of ever adopting more environmentally benevolent ways of existing.
Not really. There would still be a reduction in the total production over the period. As I said above, developed countries have to lead on this.
On the issue of scale, surely both the example of the flight to Spain and the tar sands mine should be multiplied/divided by a population size if you are to consider one action against another. A country full of people flying to Spain once a year is quite a lot of carbon and the amount of carbon per person from the population using oil from a tar sands mine might not look so huge. Also worth considering that the oil from the tar sands mine will in large part be used for socially necessary/useful things (fueling trains buses etc.), whereas clipping bolts in Spain is almost totally frivolous.
I'm sure if someone suggested we needed to eradicate 6 billion of the population in order to halt and reverse a potentially catastophic climate event, it would meet some stiff morally-based opposition.
Quote from: Bonjoy on February 29, 2012, 04:16:26 pmOn the issue of scale, surely both the example of the flight to Spain and the tar sands mine should be multiplied/divided by a population size if you are to consider one action against another. A country full of people flying to Spain once a year is quite a lot of carbon and the amount of carbon per person from the population using oil from a tar sands mine might not look so huge. Also worth considering that the oil from the tar sands mine will in large part be used for socially necessary/useful things (fueling trains buses etc.), whereas clipping bolts in Spain is almost totally frivolous.I think you're confusing the moral/ethical concepts of 'frivololus/socially useful' with having any relevance with the issue at hand.
I find it useful to have this in mind for when I'm feeling guilty for flying to Spain to clip bolts