On Mon, April 21, 2014 5:39 pm, Tim Josling wrote:
Excellent post Lev. The question is how do we have such discussions in a way that generates more light than heat?
One can exclude people who don't play by the rules of civil debate but the resisting the temptations of the power of censorship seems beyond most people. You often end up with a boring echo chamber.
It is very difficult and, as you mention, it requires people to be acting in good faith to begin with. All participants in the discussion must be adhering to discourse ethics, where the subject under discussion is debated by reason alone. There is, however, good arguments that the human brain is poorly suited for such things. There are tendencies towards selection bias, confirmation bias, and an automatic defense towards defending one's opinions rather than admitting that they could be wrong. To quote from a presenting I gave a few months back: "... by default our beliefs come firstly from emotional responses, not the critical reasoning faculties of the recently evolved parts of the brain. These more primal and subconscious emotional reactions provided a mechanism for quick decision-making that is largely adaptive; hate, fear, lust, hunger, disgust and so forth. As a sapient species we have heuristics for pattern-recognition, which also helped our decision-making adaptability. As a conscious species, these emotions and heuristics mix with our socially-derived needs, such as esteem, repute, and actualisation. As a result we become very irrational indeed. Because we have a very visceral reaction against being wrong we protect ourselves against that possibility - and often with even worse consequences."
I had some success with a fervent but poorly informed global heating sceptic by agreeing to do a deep dive on some specific aspects of the question.. Issues such as the alleged bad faith of scientists lusting after grant money$ and the alleged bad faith of carbon industry lobbyists lusting after profit$ at any cost were out of scope. We worked through things like the history of the global climate and the temperature record, including things like the heat island effect, the effect of CO2 on the earth's albedo, etc. After a few rounds he went quiet on the issue.
It would be very hard to defend against such evidence, although they probably wanted to. At the very least you have put a seed of doubt in their minds which may lead to them changing their mind in the future. -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GradCertTerAdEd (Murdoch), GradCertPM, MBA (Tech Mngmnt) (Chifley) mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt