Please don’t try to help. You’re not helping.
You didn’t go, did you? Here it is again. At least give the guy his day in court. You spend more time than this masturbating, and you know it.
OK, the easily cowed have watched the video. Thoughts? Anyone?
Oh wait! I have some!
Every four-square argument should give you pause. It’s Pascal’s Wager, and that is a deeply, deeply flawed analysis. But let’s not talk about Pascal yet. Let’s talk about Global Warming.
I’m going to summarize, as I still don’t think you’ve watched the video. He draws four squares, the quadrants of the “Global Warming is Real / Global Warming is Fake” and the “Do Something / Do Nothing” axes, and pretends to court worst-case scenarios in all four squares. GW is fake and we do nothing? Sanguine. GW is true and we do something? We’ve spent some money, but still sanguine. GW is false and we do something? Global Economic Depression. GW true and we do nothing? The End of the World.
OK, he didn’t actually say “The End of the World”, but that’s even more worst-case than he said, so we’ll leave it.
See? Four squares. Nine minutes. Problem solved. Wager yourself into salvation. Pascal would be proud.
But his argument’s fallacious. If we stagnate the economy to fix global warming, we’re going to end up with “Global Economic Depression”, whether or not GW is true. If his four box analogy were an accurate tool, we would be wagering guaranteed Global Economic Depression against the risk that everything is going to be OK. And … wait for it … Global Economic Depression, in the age of ICBMs, could cause the End of the Fucking World.
But his pretty squares hide problems just by their construction. McGee’s First Law is “Everything is more complicated than it at first appears to be, even when McGee’s First Law is taken into account.” Every time you see a dichotomy, a line in the sand, prepare to argue. “You’re with us or you’re against us.” “Something is alive or it isn’t.” “Something is a person or it isn’t.” “Global Warming is true or it isn’t.” If, just for the sake of argument, GW is a nonzero but noninfinite threat, and we devote the entirety of our resources to it, we’ve overreacted, and we can actually cause the end of the world by trying to help.
But it gets better! How fucked will we be if Global Warming is true but is already irreversible? Then, if we choose “Column A” (the do something [everything] column), we are left with a fucked planet, but with no jobs, no food stockpiles, no medical stockpiles, no nuclear disarmament, no colonization of outer space, no nothing because we’ve spent every cent trying to stop Global Warming.
I’m a registered Green Party member. And I want to save the Earth. But I part company with dichotomizers, Earth-Firsters, and their ilk. The time for debate is not over. The time for debate is now. There will not be a time when debate is unreasonable. And I hate faulty logic. I’d rather have a root canal. It makes me want to scream, and drives my blood pressure through the roof.
We do need to try to save the Earth. But we need to do so by preserving the Earth in the interim. If we start putting infinite resources towards problems, we are guaranteeing our demise. And next week, it might not be GW falling on our heads. It could be AIDS. Or influenza. Or meteorites. Or space monkeys. Or, as Pascal would have it, God. Ditch the boxes, ditch the dichotomies. Plant a tree and bike to work. Shut down coal plants. We’ll turn this around. We’ll just do it without playing four-square.
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October 20th, 2008 at 19h02
[...] Bravo! McGee’s First Law is “Everything is more complicated than it at first appears to be, even when McGee’s First Law is [...]