Black Swan watch
Dave Iverson at Ecological Economic blog, has a post with excerpts from Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan
We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters. The … narrative fallacy… is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event. …
The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently forcing a logical link, and arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impressions of understanding. …
We … have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our [strictly limited "working memory]. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same conditions that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is.
And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. … A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience.” …
Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. (pp. 63-70)
A problem that many (though not all) scientists have is that they tend to use the term “myth” strictly in a pejorative sense, and just see their role as shattering existing ones. Some build their entire career on shattering a particular myth. But if, as Taleb also suggests, myths and stories are how humans cope with complexity, another fallacy is to think that myths can be avoided. Whenever I write that in reports that debunk the myth that forests increase the flow of water, it always gets promptly crossed out – so I also write a blog…. But the challenge in communicating science for policy is to create new more appropriate myths, when the existing ones are no longer adequate. That may be a role better left to comedians (as discussed in this previous post). Not long ago, Taleb was interviewed (video link) by Stephen Colbert, who pointed out that he himself is a Black Swan that could not have been predicted. Precisely!
How do we know?
Although most of my regular work is on land and water, I tend to gravitate towards climate issues on the blog because they make it easy to illustrate archetypal problems in science and policy, and it is all related anyway. However I will be gravitating more towards land and water, which become more relevant in any discussion of adaptation and responses and to climate change. In the meantime, for anyone who still needs convincing that humans have become geological agents, a new paper by Naomi Oreskes not only explains how we know the scientific consensus on climate change is not wrong. It also takes the reader step by step through the various ways that knowledge is validated, whether the subject is climate change, the germ theory, the movement of tectonic plates or even evolution, Science is ultimately about validating knowledge and, as she points out, there is no single sacrosanct “scientific method”- but she reviews the way that different kinds of reasoning and evidence all point in the same direction. With respect to climate, she makes a convincing case that I dare any trial lawyer to poke a hole in, that while scientific consensus could be mistaken, no one has come up with a reason to think that it is. It is worth a read even if you don’t need convincing. She also makes up for whatever climate scientists are lacking in communication skills.
Because of other obligations, I missed her presentation hosted by the American Meteorological Society last week – it was on my calendar, but hat tip to Andrew Dessler for the reminder and the link to the paper and to her presentation.
It all depends on what the choices are
I take most opinion polls I hear about with a grain of salt because what people think usually depends on how you frame the question and what the choices are, and can change as people learn more about the problem. Just now, a new opinion poll on global warming came up on the RSS reader that actually presents the respondents with policy options and cost estimates and shows that the majority of Americans still support taking action on global warming even when presented with costs. It was conducted by the New Scientist with a polling team from Stanford and with some cost estimates and analysis provided by Resources for the Future – and is worth a read. It is also expected to provide a springboard for debate about how best to tackle global warming, which will undoubtedly lead to more learning and possibly to more options…
Hang on to your seat – the tectonic plates of policy discourse are shifting
Is Congressman Dingell getting ready to retire or something? David Roberts unearthed the following remarks from CongressNow which is only available by subscription:
…Boucher, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce energy and air quality subcommittee, last night said that no decisions have been made about a carbon tax, despite comments by House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) yesterday that a carbon emissions “fee” may be necessary to affect climate change in addition to a cap-and-trade scheme….
…”My own judgment is that we are going to adopt a cap-and-trade system and some form of carbon emission fee to achieve the reductions we need,” Dingell said when discussing climate change legislation he intends to bring up in September…
Wonder if the Pigou club had anything to do with this? I know he didn’t call it a “gas tax” but, as summarized in a previous post – the Pigou Club Manifesto published by Greg Mankiw as an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, outlines all the reasons policy wonks keep pushing for a gas tax increase, in spite of campaign consultants who tend to steer clear of such proposals. It is good for creating incentives to reduce consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and road congestion, and places some of the burden on oil companies who would [maybe] reduce prices as consumption goes down. He also argues that consumption taxes are better for economic growth than income taxes because the latter discourage saving and investment, and therefore encourage R&D for gasoline substitutes. And, last but not least, it is a national security issue. To which I would add, that if we all knew what we would get in return, there might even be greater willingness-to-pay a higher gas tax. It would be a small price to pay for a dedicated fund for mass transit that would reduce the need to drive. Like in Europe, where fuel taxes are used to fund an excellent public transportation system. He concludes: “don’t expect those vying for office to come around until the American people recognize that while higher gas taxes are unattractive, the alternatives are even worse.”
Other previous posts about a gas carbon tax: Seeing purple - which summarizes some remarks made by Daniel Bromley, and a follow-up post,
Addendum: And in case you need any more good arguments for a gas tax, here is a link to everything posted on the topic by the geniuses over at the Environmental Economics blog. The Ecological Economics blog has also had quite a bit of commentary on this one.
