Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
At 73, I’m now in what I call my “late youth”. As a confirmed wanderer, I’ve seen a bit of the world, and I’ve read and studied extensively about our life here on this most lovely planet. As a result of my wide experience, I don’t often come across a book full of brand-new ideas and concepts which strongly affect how I look at the world.
So I have to give big props to my gorgeous ex-fiancee who went to the library and came back with Scott Adams’ book, “Win Bigly“. Scott Adams is the cartoonist who draws “Dilbert”, and it turns out he is much more than that.
It’s an astounding instruction manual for how to look at the world in a totally different way. In it, I was surprised to find a discussion of climate science. As with most new looks at the world, he introduces and defines a new vocabulary and uses some existing vocabulary in new ways. So let me start by quoting directly from those of his definitions relevant to this discussion.
Filter
I use the word “filter” to describe the way people frame their observations of reality. The key idea behind a filter is that it does not necessarily give its user an accurate view of reality. The human brain is not capable of comprehending truth at a deep level.
Second Dimension
The second dimension describes the most common view of reality—the one in which we believe facts and logic are important to our decisions. This view says that humans are reasonable 90 percent of the time, but every now and then we get a bit crazy.
Third Dimension
The third dimension is where trained persuaders operate. This worldview says humans are irrational 90 percent of the time. The only exceptions are when decisions have no emotional content.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a condition of mind in which evidence conflicts with a person’s worldview to such a degree that the person spontaneously generates a hallucination to rationalize the incongruity.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the human tendency to irrationally believe new information supports your existing worldview even when it doesn’t.
Now, that’s a most different way to look at the world. With the “2-D filter”, the way most people look at the world, including me up until I read the book, the assumption is that humans are mostly logical in how we make decisions … but Adams says no, most of the time people are irrational.
And you know what? I think that irrational sucker Adams is 100% right.
For example, I was watching an old Star Trek episode today. Here’s the dialog:
• Captain Kirk: “It’s war. We didn’t want it, but we’ve got it.”
• Mr. Spock: “Curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.”
My first thought on hearing that was … “Looks like humans need a new filter” …
So without further preface, here are Scott Adams’ thoughts about climate science.
On top of our mass delusions, we also have junk science that is too often masquerading as the real thing. To the extent that people can’t tell the difference, that too is a source of mass delusion.
In the 2-D view of the world, mass delusions are rare and newsworthy But to trained persuaders in the third dimension, mass delusions are the norm. They are everywhere, and they influence every person. This difference in training and experience can explain why people disagree on some of the big issues of the day.
For example, consider the case of global warming. People from the 2-D world assume mass delusions are rare, and they apply that assumption to every topic. So when they notice that most scientists are on the same side, that observation is persuasive to them. A reasonable person wants to be on the same side with the smartest people who understand the topic. That makes sense, right?
But people who live in the 3·D world, where persuasion rules, can often have a different view of climate change because we see mass delusions (even among experts) as normal and routine. My starting bias for this topic is that the scientists could easily be wrong about the horrors of climate change, even in the context of repeated experiments and peer review. Whenever you see a situation with complicated prediction models, you also have lots of room for bias to masquerade as reason. Just tweak the assumptions and you can get any outcome you want.
Now add to that situation the fact that scientists who oppose the climate change consensus have a high degree of career and reputation risk. That’s the perfect setup for a mass delusion. You only need these two conditions:
• Complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions
• Financial and psychological pressure to agree with the consensus
In the 2·0 world, the scientific method and peer review squeeze out the bias over time. But in the 3-D world, the scientific method can’t detect bias when nearly everyone including the peer reviewers shares the same mass delusion.
I’m not a scientist, and I have no way to validate the accuracy of the climate model predictions. But if the majority of experts on this topic turn out to be having a mass hallucination, I would consider that an ordinary situation. In my reality, this would be routine, if not expected, whenever there are complicated prediction models involved. That’s because I see the world as bristling with mass delusions. I don’t see mass delusions as rare.
When nonscientists take sides with climate scientists, they often think they are being supportive of science. The reality is that the nonscientists are not involved in science, or anything like it. They are taking the word of scientists. In the 2-D world, that makes perfect sense, because it seems as if thousands of experts can’t be wrong, But in the 3·D world, I accept that the experts could be right, and perhaps they are, but it would be normal and natural in my experience if the vast majority of climate scientists were experiencing a shared hallucination.
To be clear, l am not saying the majority of scientists are wrong about climate science. I’m making the narrow point that it would be normal and natural for that group of people to be experiencing a mass hallucination that is consistent with their financial and psychological incentives. The scientific method and the peer-review process wouldn’t necessarily catch a mass delusion during any specific window of time. With science, you never know if you are halfway to the truth or already there. Sometimes it looks the same.
Climate science is a polarizing topic (ironically). So let me just generalize the point to say that compared with the average citizen, trained persuaders are less impressed by experts.
To put it another way, if an ordinary idiot doubts a scientific truth, the most likely explanation for that situation is that the idiot is wrong. But if a trained persuader calls BS on a scientific truth, pay attention.
Do you remember when citizen Trump once tweeted that climate change was a hoax for the benefit of China? It sounded crazy to most of the world. Then we learned that the centerpiece of politics around climate change—the Paris climate accord—was hugely expensive for the United States and almost entirely useless for lowering temperatures. (Experts agree on both points now.) The accord was a good deal for China, in the sense that it would impede its biggest business rival, the United States, while costing China nothing for years. You could say Trump was wrong to call climate change a hoax. But in the context ofT rump’s normal hyperbole, it wasn’t as wrong as the public’s mass delusion believed it to be at the time.
I’ll concede that citizen Trump did not understand the science of climate change. That’s true of most of us. But he still detected a fraud from a distance.
It wasn’t luck.
Zowie!
I’ll leave it there … read the book. It will make the world a whole lot more understandable.
Meanwhile, it’s been hot and dry here on our Northern California hillside. A new fire has broken out northeast of us, but it’s not likely to move this way. And no, it’s not from “climate change” …
And sadly, the idiots running Sonoma county are still stuck in COVIDementia. They are requiring masks at the beach, for heaven’s sake … and yes, that does verify Adams’ “3-D filter”, wherein most of the people act irrationally most of the time and mass hallucination and mass hysteria are common, not rare.
So me, I just be chillin’. I go to the beach. I go to town. They’re letting people cut hair now … but only outdoors. I don’t wear a mask unless I’m required to, and never outdoors. And in particular never at the beach. But I’ll have to wear one for my haircut today, county regs.
My best wishes to all, stay well in this “fiery but mostly peaceful” world,
w.
My Usual Request: When you comment please quote the EXACT WORDS that you are discussing. That way we can all be clear on the subject of your comment.
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Read “Win Bigly” when it was released on Amazon 18 months ago. Still in my nightstand drawer to peruse occasionally. Climate change and it alarmism is such a huge mass delusion fueled by model fakers, liars, and pseudoscientists whose names we’ve talked and written about here at WUWT for a decade. Historians in 60 years, when all of us are dead and the climate change fakers pseudoscientists in academia and government too, will be writing in wonderment at this phenomenon of delusion as a cautionary tale.
On Scott’s observation of Trump, “But he still detected a fraud from a distance.”
Yes he did. And a lot of other things besides climate. He detected the Faker, Liars, and Frauds in both the Democratic Party and in the Republican Party. Fakers like Establishment candidate Jeb Bush who was extremely vulnerable outside the Fat Cat crony capitalists who could support both a Hillary or a Jeb.
Trump kicked Jeb to the curb like a 50 cent hooker with the Republican voters desperate for something other than beltway bandit RINOs.
The problem with climate science is that it stopped being science at least 32 years ago. The sharp turn occurred in June 1988 when Jim Hansen misled Congress with his fake surety and absent uncertainty envelopes.
“Complicated prediction models with lots of assumptions” is not science. In real science, as opposed to the case with consensus climatology, assumptions do not have the weight of data.
Assumptions are provisional, and recognized so. Experiments are carried out specifically to mortally test assumptions. As an experimental scientist, I have done exactly that and have seen it done in the field as a matter of course.
Grounding theory in the judgment of experiment is the only method that keeps science on the straight and narrow of objective knowledge. All the rest is subjectivist narration.
Climatology does not do experiments. It has observations. Astrophysics as well. Astrophysics is able to make observations of sufficient accuracy to test its theories. Where it cannot, its practitioners hope to do in the future.
However, all climate observations, all of them, are far too low resolution to test the assumption that CO2 impacts air temperature.
Low resolution observations and the unavailability of experiments leaves the door wide open for climate modelers to speculate freely, and to run around pretending that ensemble variance tells them something about physical reality.
Climate modelers are so poorly trained that they don’t even know that their free-wheeling unconstrained speculations are mere pseudo-science decorated with mathematics. And they become hostile when told so.
But the real offense is not that a bunch of applied mathematicians are having a speculative high-paying field day and a fine time posing as planetary saviors.
The real offense is that the ferschlunginer American Physical Society has kept its mouth shut for 32 years about the worst and most incredibly damaging infection of cancerous pseudo-science the world has ever seen.
Whether done cravenly or cynically or by delusion, the APS should be never forgiven its offense against science and humanity. Never. Ever.
“free-wheeling unconstrained speculations are mere pseudo-science decorated with mathematics”
A sort of glorified computer game… at best
glorified only by themselves.
Actually, if games programmers were as hopeless as these guys, computer games would be history.
Beautifully stated Frank.
“Whether done cravenly or cynically or by delusion…”
You’ve left out the most obvious answer; they’re simply poor scientists. They are improperly educated by commercial collegiate institutions, unable to do the requisite research, because the real money now goes to engineers working for companies, so that’s where the highly-capable talent goes.
I saw the other day a quote which indicates that APS now actively supports the AGW consensus and science. Inexcusable!
Eric, I know Phil Bucksbaum, the current president of the APS. He’s a brilliant laser physicist.
No way he’s a poor scientist or badly educated.
I sent him a copy of my paper showing that climate models are predictively useless. He first said he’d consider it. But he met my follow-up emails with silence.
He hasn’t told me it’s wrong (it isn’t). I believe he fully understands it’s correct, and that the models have no predictive capacity. So, then, why the refractory adhesion to the AGW story?
My own personal opinion, unverified and not validated, is that it’s moral cowardice. I believe there’s a lot of that going around.
Thanks for the reply, Pat! Is the symbol of APS an ostrich? Perhaps its tied to the liberal providers of research grants for said scientists? They don’t speak out for fear of being ostracized?
I’m not a scientist, more of an amateur theorist, but I can follow along with the discussions. It doesn’t take a brilliant scientist to understand the limitations of statistical sampling precision and the egregious margin of error induced (not claimed in all media reports so far as I can ever see), nor to see the preeminence of water vapor as a greenhouse gas. What does strike me as flawed to the point of deliberate deception is that NASA KNOWS the greenhouse has no roof, per the SABER satellite program, and yet they stick with the CO2 theory too.
Pat Frank,
Succinctly and devastatingly stated. Bravo!
The professional (alleged) associations beclowning themselves over climate science has damaged credibility of all scientific endevours.
Will archive this in my climate folder so I don’t lose it.
Thanks, Robert, and you’re right. The reputation of science and of scientists has been wounded and will never fully recover.
Some good climate change strips from Scott Adams:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/15/dilbert-scott-adams-disses-the-climate-crisis-again/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/31/dilbert-1-scientists-0/ which links to https://dilbert.com/strip/2017-05-14
From an Australian perspective, it doesn’t seem credible that China thinks global warming is a hoax but encourages western countries to believe and act on it. Does China really want Australia to stop mining thermal coal and exporting it to China? We have been in a bit of a trade war with China recently, with the Chinese targeting barley and wine. In the meantime, thermal coal exports to China soared in the first half of the year. Will the trade war extend to coal? We’d suffer if coal exports ceased, but at least the CO2 emissions we’re responsible for would drop.
The world CO2 emissions would actually increase the replacement coal China would burn would be lower quality. This is the problem with the green emission control shell game if the demand is there it will be met by someone. Prohibition has never worked in there entire history of mankind from Nuclear Weapons, Alcohol to drugs and you would have to be mentally defective to think it’s going to work on emission control.
I think 99% of scientists do not generate their own theories. They merely fall in line with the 1%, who are only right 50% of the time.
Mainstream climate scientists are all followers of an early 19th century geothermal denier: Fourier. It’s “rational” to listen to the guy that never saw a borehole temperature profile.
Future scientists will be laughing at 20th and early 21st century greenhouse gas junkies.
However probably not as hard as most of us laugh at your idea.
As if a borehole temperature profile had anything to do with how much energy is being radiated from the earth.
That’s like saying that measuring the voltage of a battery can tell you how much current is flowing from the battery.
Yes W, absolutely.
What Scott is describing with the filter and hallucinations is Magical Thinking – where-upon The Thinker dwells on a subject, any subject, for soooo long and sooo deeply, whatever it was becomes real to them.
It is endemic in alcoholics and cannabis users – don’t they *always* insist that The Drug is not hurting them and furthermore.implore you to join them in the habit.
Alcohol and cannabis being potent depressants, but folks in ‘ordinary’ depression go there too.
Then he mentions hysteria – basically= Panic
It is, in medical parlance, an ‘Over Active Startle Response’
Yet again it is endemic in folks who are chronically depressed.
BUT, as Adams implies, it is now endemic *everywhere*
Why is everyone depressed?
For the same reason that ‘afternoon power naps’ are needed, why school kids fall asleep an hour after getting to school in the morning and why coffee (optionally nicotine also), both = potent stimulants are often normally taken after a ‘large meal’
The answer is why a highly processed/malted carbohydrate based drink, loaded with refined sugar is a good remedy for insomnia (Horlicks or Ovaltine here in the UK)
Sugar is the cause of the whole carbuncle = Glucose (blood) sugar as we obtain from eating cooked starch
It destroys our minds just as effectively as it destroys our bodies. It is a not especially potent deprssant but we consume it 3,5,5+ times per day. Every day
There is No Remedy because, there are now soooo many of us there is *nothing* else to eat.
Combine that with low levels of Vitamin B & D plus desperately low levels of Iron, Magnesium, Selenium & Zinc (WHERE do we hear about Zinc???!!!) we, as a Global Collective, in some VERY deep $hit
But as we see around here, no-one wants to know. Magical Thinking at its very best!
You mention The Trump.
What’s noticeable about him? 2 things immediately
He doesn’t drink or do drugs and has a very good looking, younger than him, wife
And as Willis’ GEGF will assert – what is THE most attractive thing girls find in men if not a GSOH
The GSOH indicates freedom from Chronic Depression – the GSOH, *any* sense of humour is the thing most immediately lacking in all alarmists. Also Government, media, bureaucracies everywhere in the West at least.
You really should lay off the sugar.
……..there is nothing new under the sun.
I would suggest that mass delusion has defined most of the 20th century, the 21st looks no different.
Climate Alarmism has now graduated to a full – scale religion.As GK Chesterton wrote “When people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing.They believe in anything.”
One of my favorite quotations. It is amazing how prescient writers like Chesterton and CS Lewis were.
I used to write, virtually every day, the motto “QUESTION EVERYTHING”, on my geology classroom blackboard. In other words, “take no one’s word for it, check it out for yourselves”. I abjured the students that this applied to everything I said, but many of them were too indoctrinated by the system to dare to question my utterances. The good students challenged me on countless points.
Thanks for another fun column. My own take as a physicist on popular beliefs. When push comes to shove on politics, I tell people that I don’t even believe my own positions. I tell them to consider the amount of work that goes into solving even the simplest of problems; e.g. “What is a vacuum?” or “What is the response of an electron gas to a proton?” People still haven’t gotten a right answer to these problems — even after years of work. Why do you think you can understand politics (a much more open-ended problem) without putting in an at least equivalent amount of work.
From a fellow 73-year-old, I like the expression “late youth”, Willis, and will be using it a lot.
Emotion over reason. A person who thinks with their emotions does not think at all, but tends to relate well. Think about how much the old style of education was based on developing discipline and to an extent, rote learning. Any notion that education should be emotionally satisfying was utterly foreign to the model. But for 50 years now children have been increasingly taught in an environment that seeks to entertain and engage at the expense of mental discipline. People educated in this system have naturally shifted their preferences to emotionally engaging arguments. This will not end well.
I just purchased the Kindle edition from amazon.ca for $1.99. 🙂
Thanks for this post, Willis. I’ve read Loserthink but not Win Bigly. I’ve been following Scott Adams for a few years, mostly by watching his daily videos, so I’ve absorbed the main points. About climate science, I recall he once made the point that if the system is self-regulating with respect to temperature, then all the models and consensus claims are obviously wrong. So I am looking forward to Scott eventually coming to appreciate the observable “emergent climate phenomena” you have been writing about for years. Another discovery I hope he makes is what Pat Frank has been saying and documenting – that there is no way presently to diagnose or predict the impact of carbon dioxide emissions. As he noted above in a comment, the resolution of observations and models is far too low for that. I think if Scott Adams were to grasp that concept, he could communicate it better than most.
Coincidently, I just came across this video about the Gettier Problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzPF9VajSdY
In the words of Arte Johnson, “Very Interesting.”
Scott is proof his ideas are correct as he’s blocked many people on twitter (including myself) for pointing out his rather obvious lack of impartiality when it comes to manmade global warming and COVID… where he “trusts the experts”.
I would read his tweets on these topics and was wondering what game he was playing but I’ve come to believe his brain is rejecting his own ideas. He’s as bad as Taleb.
While Scott Adams unquestioningly has some brilliant ideas, I don’t always agree with his conclusions. It has been evident to me for a few decades now, that there are what he calls “2D” and “3D” worldviews. It is also apparent to me that while there is a small percentage of people that are all 2D or all 3D almost all the time, the vast majority of the population is somewhere in between and they move around within that continuum depending on circumstances. Even the amount of movement (flexibility) varies by individual. I don’t think that our current civilization would be possible if most of the population was squarely in the 3D camp all the time; we would still be stuck in the dark ages.
I would also add under the Confirmation Bias section that people will often just dismiss/ignore facts that don’t support their worldview, as this is usually cognitively simpler than twisting them into a supporting role.
Thanks Willis. It’s funny that Ralph L. Smith Lumber Co. figured out 70 years ago how to manage the forests around where you and I grew up. And no, it wasn’t burning down the forest as the mass delusionists would have it. The selectively logged and replanted on a regular basis, lowering the fuel load one truck load at a time.
It is 8:36 in Berkeley. It is dark outside. A thick layer of smoke. For a satellite view, try
https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-17&z=3&im=12&ts=1&st=0&et=0&speed=130&motion=loop&map=1&lat=0&opacity%5B0%5D=1&hidden%5B0%5D=0&pause=0&slider=-1&hide_controls=0&mouse_draw=0&follow_feature=0&follow_hide=0&s=rammb-slider&sec=conus&p%5B0%5D=geocolor&x=7342&y=3794
Almost everything we know is second hand. There’s a lifelong quest to estimate probabilities. Some people give most weight to observation and experiment, but most people rely on fashionable opinion. And the latter group is in charge.
Unfortunately you are not wrong.
I like to refer to the 2-D world dwellers as “Stupidians”; they’re happily, or unhappily, unaware, willing to jump on whichever bandwagon the Intelligensia has presented to them, and will ride it until the inevitable ditch or until the wheels fall off. At that point they will promptly jump off and proceed to emphatically beat the dead horse. The incorrect science, sloppy statistical presentation, and haphazard physics application trouble them not one iota. The cannot even grasp the concept that the bubbly stuff in their cans of soda is plant food, essential for photosynthesis. CO2 is bad in the 2-D world, period.
3-Ds are nothing more than neo-gnostics and are as stupid and worldly, or more so, than the 2-Ds they exalt themselves above. To truly know and understand, you must become 4-D. No 4-D marginalizes any 2/3-Ds; they pity and love them.
I was just thinking to point out that perhaps, indeed, the 3rd dimension is not the end of the story either. Nor, I suspect, is the 4th!
Scott Adams has some interesting takes, but don’t forget that ultimately – he’s a persuader.
Or put another way: how can any persuader be relied upon for objective analysis? Particularly a persuader who fills a very specific (and small) niche?
His work during 2016 on Trump was good; his other non-cartoon work, generally not so much.
Persuader = salesman
My own personal favorite scientist is Alfred Wegener. I mentioned his name a few years ago on a WaPo forum on the subject of climate change, and received lots of “thumbs down.”
Started listening to Scott Adams in 2015 because he was the only guy who explained what Trump was doing. Not only did he do that but explained how he was doing it, why and what was going to happen next. He has kept it up since. Trump is a trained persuader too.
I don’t understand the world of persuasion at all, finding it making less sense than quantum physics, which I understand hardly at all. It is a field at right angles from everything I think I understand, but I’m working on it.
He does a few other things of note. One is the notion of two movies on the same screen. This falls out of his observation that reality is not something we humans evolved to recognize or even need, so we create our own individual realities based on which facts we choose to use. Reality may or may not exist at all, as it is not an evolutionary necessity. He kind of pokes at it with his comments on the Simulation (think Matrix mentioned earlier).
Final observation is that we Americans have labored mightily to build a society that supposedly rationally draws conclusions based on data. All the structures are in place to do so. Problem is that the data is crap, and we have been in GIGO land for decades, perhaps centuries.
There were a couple Tommy Lee Jones lines in Men In Black that captured the notion of human irrationality nicely. Who knew the writers were this close to whatever passes for reality these days? Cheers –
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!”
“1,500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”
If we had not evolved to detect and pay attention to physical reality, agimarc, we would have rapidly starved and/or rapidly been predated into extinction as a species.
Imagined reality became an option when humans became relatively safe from the immediate dangers of physical reality. When safe – especially when made safe by the efforts of others – humans can be self-servingly delusional without mortal consequence.
Personally created reality is a luxury of high civilization.
My father taught me to “do the math” when people make claims. Many of my friends over the years have followed the Global Warming lemmings until I gently nudged them towards looking into the facts behind the claims.
I got a Economist friend to look at the programs being used and the results they were getting. He came to me and told me he couldn’t believe how poor the programming was and how overblown the hype of the final results. He found one program that got the same results regardless of the input.
I got a friend who had a physics background to look at the forecasting models. He came back laughing at the claims being made for predictions 5-10-20 years down the line.
Another friend was a Chemist. I got her to look at the “ocean acidification” studies. She came back to me marveling at how the studies had no real basis in science.
Most Scientists believe that other Scientists have the same qualifications and standards that they do. They are the ones most easily swayed by the appeal to authority. If you can get them to take the time to look into the actual science you often get another Catastrophic Global Warming opponent.
Not sure I agree with Scott’s definition of confirmation bias. I think that is our tendency to give more weight to facts and opinions that agree with what we already believe.