jacob wrote: ↑Sun Dec 16, 2018 10:51 am
I think it's because FIRE tends to attract a [much] larger than average fraction of people with libertarian leanings. In those circles climate change or dealing with externalities in general is somewhat of a no-no.
lol. might brute suggest an alternative hypothesis?
libertarians rally around 2 topics, human rights and economics. they typically all agree on human rights and so spend their entire time fighting and debating over economic issues.
thus, compared with the average population (and scientists), libertarians are vastly over-equipped when thinking about externalities. essentially most libertarians are probably a 2-5 on the Wheaton scale in economics (brute has out-debated many economics majors over the years on various issues), with some of them being literal thought leaders (e.g. Murphy's day job is the economics of energy, his Wheaton level there is equivalent to that of DLj in physics).
being mentally equipped in a field also reduces one's ability to simply accept the easy solutions ("2+ levels below look like idiots"). so libertarians don't fall for the cheap emotional shots like "there is a cost to X so X must be stopped!" or "authority says X must be stopped!". most climate change issues are phrased for Wheaton levels 0-1, sometimes 2. thus 95% of the debate seems to be on the level of idiots to most libertarians.
very rarely do the 2 opposing sides ever interact on a Wheaton level higher than 3 - to be honest, brute hasn't really seen it even though he's been following the debate for about a decade now. a few of the posts in the IPCC thread approach a level 3 or so, where the libertarian side (i.e. brute) acknowledges that the physicists are probably right about the physics of it, and the concerned side (i.e. DLj et al) admit that there is such a thing as discounted present value and opportunity cost, and just because X has a cost associated with it does not mean X must be prevented.
[edit]
brute just thought of something else.
in both the Austrian and Chicago tradition of economics, vigorous debate, which would seem insulting/combative to many humans, is seen as a respectful and time-tested way of arriving at better results. there is a certain intellectual no-holds-barred mentality to it, with libertarians debating each other very intensely, over and over again. this strikes brute as a certain old-school scientific mentality, maybe deriving from the ancient greeks.
brute does not know if a similar mentality exists in higher-Wheaton-level climate science, but at the lower Wheaton levels of pretty much any doctrine, skepticism and debate is seen not as a positive, but as heresy to the faith of the tribe. skeptics are not engaged to be proven wrong, they are excommunicated. this has even happened on this forum, with members calling brute a "denier" and "not dissimilar to what Republicans would say" (rofl how that's even a pejorative).
in all fairness it happens the other way around, too, e.g. all the "herp derp socialism" posts that libertarians love to ridicule instead of engage.
