[ExI] Forbes posting

[Anders Sandberg]

On 05/12/2012 22:45, Jeff Davis wrote:
> Global warming due to anthropogenic increase in CO2 is real, but what 
> does that ***really*** mean?   The issue has been thoroughly 
> politicized.  Climate models have long been crap, and I think, still 
> are.   The left says "We're doomed!  We're doomed!" and the right says 
> "What problem?, fill 'er with high test."

Hanging around climate scientists (in a broad sense) is interesting. The 
local Oxford consensus is something along the lines of:

    "Humans are definitely changing the climate in worrying ways, but
    the models can we make are fairly crappy due to foundational reasons
    that are unlikely to ever go away (but we still want bigger
    computers! Because they are cool!) But the *big* hole in our
    knowledge is the mapping climate -> weather -> human impact. We
    simply do not have any good ways of estimating that. And then
    politicians and activists take our dear research and make it
    *stupid*. Oh, and geoengineering looks like it could work... which
    is *scary*, because it is going to be the mother of all governance
    and safety problems - now you have climate change with some of the
    stupid people in charge."

Of course, at least in Europe farmers are largely decoupled from actual 
climate: given the current subsidy situation and the apparent 
impossibility of dislodging it, you can do well by not producing anything.

The problem for engineers is that engineering works when you get to 
build a clean system that optimizes certain things. But if you need to 
interface with messy existing systems that change, behave irrationally 
or even adversarially, then it becomes *much* harder. It often fails as 
a discipline because it produces too brittle solutions in the face of 
this kind of mess. Which doesn't mean that neat solutions to particular 
problems are not transformative and desirable. It is just that, as soon 
as you scale them up to a  big system it will start to interact with the 
mess.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University

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