Intellectual bankruptcy and climate change

Some blog-context: How is a layperson to assess climate change? and Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps) and the intellectual bankruptcy tag

My original idea for this post's title was something along the lines of, "Willfully blind climate change deniers," or perhaps even "Willfully blind climate change denying motherfuckers," either of which followed by an introduction of the following image with something like, "For instance, this motherfucker right here":

But I'm gonna try my best to write this without a bunch of expletives - I've been told it puts off potential readers, as though they couldn't handle expletives, or they look for whatever piss-poor excuse not to read well-argued points, or whatever, I just about don't gaf at this point; the fact that the intellectually-bankrupt twitter gets tons of attention while philosophy blogs in general (irrespective of expletive-to-reasoning ratios) do not, speaks plenty of volumes already (about the intellectual bankruptcy about which I will be speaking here).

I'm gonna try to write this without expletives even though the topic of intellectual bankruptcy generally makes me hopping mad.  And I use the image of the current President because the very fact that he ever became president is indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy.  The Framers of the country weren't intellectually bankrupt, but their legacy has been squandered.  If the country weren't so intellectually bankrupt (and as a dialectician/context-keeper one has to imagine the not just the implications of this conditional but also the presuppositions, which I'll get to as well), we'd have had good enough elected leaders (actual leaders, not the fake kind) that no one would feel the need to turn to a Donald Trump in desperation.

Despite a recent about-face (of the Trump kind, which we have every reason to discount), Trump has a long, exhaustively documented history of intellectually-reckless climate change denial.

The number of man-hours of time and attention wasted on shit garbage like "it's cold here in January, so much for climate change" is probably so off-the-charts as to disgust any decent person.  (Meanwhile, it's summertime in the southern hemisphere/Australia.)

Or how about: "the climate has always been changing, how is this any different?"  Just about as low as it gets by any respectable standards of belief-formation.

Anyone with belief-formation processes so screwed-up as to produce the gobs of Trumpian climate-denial tweets, cannot be trusted to form any credible beliefs (outside of their area of expertise, that is; I'm sure Trump had to have some pretty decent belief-formation processes when it comes to which real estate deal is worthwhile, although even there I "somehow" manage to have some doubt).

Here's a big, probably the biggest part of the problem: climate change being an unavoidably political subject, people from all over the political spectrum have every good reason to distrust the belief-formation processes of those they disagree with.  Political discussion is especially intellectually-bankrupt given that it involves decisions about how to coerce other people (irrespective of or against their considered independent judgment, etc.).  So naturally that's going to encourage a lot of bad-faith arguments for one's policy preferences (a nice euphemism for coercion).

One should probably expect about as much intellectual bankruptcy in a politics-related discussion as just about anything else, save perhaps for religion-related discussions where the canons of logic and evidence espoused by philosophers and/or scientists are routinely flouted.

(People tend to seek meaning in a silent universe, see - and that gives rise to an excrement-ton of wishful thinking.  You'd probably have to consult the philosophy of religion literature for the least-toxic treatments of the subject, and there you are likely to find a whole lot of uncertainty at best, a lot of maybe-not-successful attempts at conceptual clarification, a lot of speculation, etc.  In my personal context the most advanced treatment is the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, where my pretty-reliable ring-of-truth heuristics have told me that it ultimately most likely comes down to a matter of faith that a trio-omni god would create a world like this one containing an excrement-ton of morally-pointless animal suffering in addition to this or that facet of what is now being termed the human predicament [about which I'll have more to say in another post], all of which a trio-omni god would have sufficient reason for creating but which reasons are mysterious and inaccessible to us.  I thought the treatment of the problem of suffering in the Oxford Handbook was close to deplorable, BTW, particularly in its taking seriously the notion that human corruption would be a reason even for animal suffering.  But you should read it for yourself to see if I'm off-base.)

Getting back to the main problem: many people have good reasons to distrust the values and epistemic practices of a great many of their political (and/or religious) Others.

And the main cause for people having such good reasons is that all too few people habitually internalize the canons of reason and evidence espoused by philosophers and scientists.

I've written about all the deplorable practices (leading, not surprisingly, to a wide range of deplorable beliefs) of political leftists who squander whatever credibility they might have had on climate change and other issues with their approach to the subject of capitalism.  (If you want my hunch about this, it has basically to do with rationalization for envy of those with superior talents; when capitalism led to a ballooning both of population and of living standards across the board, what really ticked off the enemies of capitalism is that all the abundance wasn't "shared" more equally.  Nozick also offers pointers in the direction of a psychologically-based diagnosis of anticapitalist pathology.)  The worst offenders in this anticapitalism bunch would be the Rand-bashers, those who willfully refuse to have a fair dialogue about Rand's philosophy.  (See the excremental "scholarship" of Scumbag Duggan for the "state of the art" in this loser genre.)

So when you have rabidly, dishonestly anti-capitalist folks crying wolf about (how capitalism is causing) climate change, many others have abundant reason to discount or ignore their latest wolf-crying.  And as the crying-wolf fable shows, it's kind of a goddamn shame that the boy is ignored when a real wolf is around.

As for the Climate Change Issue, it's one I've followed as a layperson for close to 30 years now; it became something of considerable interest when Rush Limbaugh in his early books would say how it's, well, a hoax, along with the ozone hole (now not really an issue - once governments implemented policies opposed by Rush & Co.).  I still listen to Rush semi-frequently, and he's still pushing the it's-a-hoax line, mixed in (unfortunately and toxically) with other useful insights he has about the bias and corruption of the "drive-by media" to name a major example of what he actually does build his credibility profile upon.  (See, as one glaringly obvious instance of the bias/corruption, the context-erasing "fine people on both sides" hoax that CNN et al peddled to its audience and for which CNN has refused to demonstrate any accountability.  Or how about the New York Times' ill-fated 1619 Project.  Or how these peddlers of fake news twisted Trump's criticism of fake news into a criticism of a free press. And people are now supposed to trust these media sources when it comes to climate change or anything else?)

(Also, Rush has built what credibility he has upon his championing of the American (and capitalist) values such as "rugged individualism," family values, limited government, etc., that the left, with its march through the institutions, is making every effort to pervert or destroy.  As with pretty much anything political, media figures such as Rush get a lot more mileage out of the values they espouse than about what factual or scientific claims they make.)

The left is selective about which experts to consult on which topics.  Like clockwork they'll cite the "97 percent of climate scientists agree" line, but then (also like clockwork) when it comes to minimum wages or rent control they ignore or discount the expert reasoning of economists, also often along with smears of free-market advocates along values-lines.  (If a libertarian says that it really isn't the business of the state to coerce people in their economic decisions, or that there is a principle of subsidiarity that directs people toward non-state remedies to social ills before turning to the force-wielding state only as a very last resort, the left translates that as being heartless, sociopathic - probably an admirer of Ayn Rand's fictional heroes.)

Now, as I've said, I've followed the climate-change issue as much as a layperson could, for nearly 3 decades, or pretty much the time that it's been a big political topic.  And I've heard every which argumentative fallacy coming from what for simplicity's sake I'll term the Right.  (After hearing Rush and consulting 'Conservative Book Club'-type recommended books on climate change and ozone depletion, it wasn't long before I figured out that unless I were to make these subjects a full-time study requiring PhD-level learning in the relevant science(s), this stuff was going to be well above my pay grade.  Cue STEM-lord chest-beating....)  For a great long while the main tactic of the political Right was to be "skeptical" about the climate prediction models.  Another tactic, after time went on, was to highlight the overreaching and alarmism of those who were saying that the polar ice caps could melt by the year 2000.  Another tactic was to be "skeptical" that humans are the primary contributors to present-day climate change.  ("The climate's always been changing....")  Then the tactic was to say that it wasn't warming as much as the 'scientific consensus' (really, a range of opinion widely accepted by the experts) was saying.  Then there was the so-called warming pause that lasted for all of maybe 2 decades (but which had a precedent some half a century earlier, amid an overall warming trend).  Then the tactic was the smear the "hockey stick" authors in what was termed the Climategate controversy.

The worst of this bunch of right-wingers might be the religious fundamentalists who deny that the tri-omni god would facilitate humans making the planet uninhabitable.  (They also have a cognitive bias about a wished-for afterlife, or even an End of Days, that would lead them to discount the importance of planet habitability.)  There is also an unequivocally terrible epistemic practice on the Right when it comes to the science of evolution, to the extent that some 2 out of 5 rightists will affirm that humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.  (Actually, it's roughly 2 in 5 Americans.  The numbers on the Right/GOP are even worse.)  The politicians of the Right enable and coddle this blatant epistemic malpractice, sometimes by directly engaging in it themselves.

So the way I'd put it is that there are plenty of huge trust and credibility deficits in politics to go around.  After all the lies and smears promoted by those on the left, why should those on the right believe them when it comes to climate change?  And after the lies and smears peddled by the Right (an obvious recent one being Obama-birtherism - also peddled by one Donald Trump in the early 2010s), what reason do leftists have for believing them on climate change or anything else?

I've already pointed out the solution to this whole trust-problem, which is philosophical education (i.e., education in the canons of logic and evidence traditionally espoused by philosophers, particularly standards of dialectic exemplified by the likes of the Rapoport/Dennett Rules, ffs already).  It doesn't mean the leftist take on doing philosophy, such as smearing Rand by claiming she's not taken seriously by the community of philosophers.  (The relevant criterion here would be what those who are actually experts in Rand's thought have to contribute to the philosophical discussion going forward, seeing as how Rand isn't around to speak for herself.  Anyway, the case of Hospers just on its own gives lie to the standard leftist smear, even before we take a look at the philosophy professors involved with the Ayn Rand Society.)  It doesn't mean a toxic take on philosophy and science that is widespread on the Right, which is to discount academics and experts in these fields.  (I do share their opinion when it comes to the systemic/structural dishonesty of the academic left, but it's a mistake to regard that crowd of losers as defining the academy as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against] - just as it is a mistake to regard the epistemic criminals of the Right as defining the Right as a whole [although it's a pretty serious mark against].)

Is it possible for the public comprised mostly of laypersons to gave a serious, honest, informed, high-signal-to-noise-ratio discussion of climate change?  Perhaps it is - it would be greatly enhanced by the aforementioned suggested program of philosophical education (along with minimal scientific, historical and economic literacy) - but here's something that might really (ahem) light a fire under everyone's asses as it hits home more and more:

The concern, of course, is that the point at which these infernos hit closer and closer to more and more people's homes, it will be too late to do anything about it.  (If there's anything in your episteme that suggests that the billions of animals perishing horribly in these infernos is Divine Providence, chances are you are a culpable contributor to the problem.)  As the ignored-by-Trump-&-Co. scientists have been saying, some amount of future climate change is already locked in by the rising atmospheric CO2 levels, so chances are the infernos will get worse before we find any ways to make it better.  (And that warming pause that the deniers were touting?  The scientists have an explanation for that: the oceans as heat sinks - and the oceans can only absorb so much, and even if they do, the effects on ocean life are probably not good.)  Just how patient shall we be about AI and/or alternative energy sources for mitigating this problem?

A lot (but far from all) of the disagreements about climate change and other issues is attributable to human fallibility and uncertainty.  See for instance the comments section of that "Trump about-face" link at the top of this post.  (Here it is again.)  Aside from the standard deplorable and gutter-level stuff you might expect to find in a typical politically-charged comments section, you have "advocates" and "skeptics" alike pointing to sites with domain names like realclimatescience.org and realclimatechangescience.org, domain names which are of no use when they take opposite positions on the topic, whatever abundance of links and data appear at either.  Again, how is a layperson to sift through all that, to be able to distinguish the real science from the junk?  So many people on both sides are not only not equipped to deal with the subjects at the pay-grade level required, but they come to the discussion with their usual left- or right- biases that have them treating their own experts as definitive and the opposing ones as discount-able.

One of the few things an epistemically virtuous layperson can do, is to look at metadata about the state of the discussion or debate.  I take it that there is real debate among real experts about climate change, but that this debate bears little if any resemblance to the public/political "debates" (represented by the now-twice-linked comment thread, the basic form of which you probably have seen dozens if not hundreds of times before, so you may not really need the refresher since there really isn't anything to learn or observe in the comment thread other than about human cognitive behavior/biases).  From my experience, your typical leftist uses shitty lousy argumentation tactics because the ideas/positions they're defending are typically lousy, but that may not be an infallible heuristic.  (There are plenty of folks offering lousy arguments for libertarianism, capitalism, Objectivism/Randism, all of which I take seriously.  [Are there lousy arguments for a basically Aristotelian episteme or dialectic?  I'm not used to seeing such things, and not even clear on what they would look like.  The first thing that pops to mind is arguments by Thomists employing - well, probably abusing - Aristotelian concepts to rationalize dubious sexuality-related positions in Christianity.  Tossing off is contrary to your telos, you see.])

[Edit: a hypothesis I'll float here is: bad ideas/positions will, over time, result more and more in lousy and dishonest tactics in defending them or smearing or ignoring the opposition/refuters.  In the case of far-left ideas - anything basically to the left of a Rawls-ish position - the systemic/structural dishonesty of the left basically had to take hold for good after ca. 1974 with Nozick's libertarian treatise including smackdowns of what he showed to be obviously bad far-left ideas/positions (as though Rand didn't already accomplish the same thing in 1957, although Nozick sealed the deal for any academic-type researcher after he demonstrably did his homework and went from leftist to libertarian/pro-capitalist).  I include in this sweeping intellectual indictment of far-leftists one G.A. Cohen whose argumentative techniques always struck me as dubious (something something Marxist technique turning commonsense and full-story-telling on its head, perhaps enough to make the best dialectical thinkers like Aristotle want to vomit), and who never addressed the basically-Randian point about the unbreakable tie between mind/intellect/freedom and property rights; and I note that Mack's libertarian/capitalist rebuttal of Cohen some 2 decades ago has been the last word as far as I can tell.  (Note also in this context the absence of leftist recognition of Sciabarra's exhaustively researched dialectical-libertarian work going on 2 decades and counting now, as I've mentioned before.  This non-recognition could very well be used as Exhibit A of systemic/structural leftist dishonesty.  It's one thing for the Rawl-ish 'liberals' not to be up on the finer points of dialectical method vis a vis capitalism, but leftists have no such excuse after the (in)famous Marxian appropriation of dialectics.)  So to restate: bad ideas will encourage bad techniques among their supporters, especially as time goes on and rebuttals come in; good ideas don't encourage this dynamic among their supporters although that doesn't mean that they won't still attract some bad/dishonest adherents (the ones whom the adherents of the bad ideas will (dishonestly) treat as the symptomatic of the (non-existent) badness of the good ideas, probably in addition to concocting outright smears of the good adherents/supporters).  This pattern has repeated so many times as to be unmistakable, or so my floated hypothesis in the context of gobs of previous observations suggests....  I also find it prima facie unacceptable for Rawls not to have countered Nozick's 50-page commentary on Rawls' theory in any remotely comparable way, and the pattern will continue to repeat until proponents of any ideas significantly to the left of (say) Milton Friedman ever address (head-on, in good faith) the basically-Randian point; adopting the standpoint of Rawls' Original Position or Nagel's impartiality, whatever their merits, won't justify statist coercion against non-force-initiating producers, especially in light of the unmistakable pattern of free markets raising living standards indefinitely and across the board.]

"The climate's always been changing" is either a mechanism for shutting down honest inquiry in someone's mind, or a good-faith invitation in someone's mind to inquire into how it might be different this time.  (While you can't rule out the latter, usually it's the former.  After all, any reputable climate scientist already accepts that the climate's always been changing, so that can't be what's in contention.  The rate of change is actually relevant.)  That the warming theory adopted by the IPCC is probably the best explanation for a vast web of data should probably be taken by a layperson as the default position departures from which require a really good argument that takes into account all the data (i.e., not evading the whole of the context) as well any actual and anticipated objections/counter-arguments.

As I pointed out in my Jan. '19 blog post ("How is a layperson..."), it would really be nice if there were a highly-publicized debate between (say) Michael Mann and (say) Richard Lindzen, for the benefit of laypeople and policymakers.  Why hasn't this happened?  If the debate on its merits really is over - if the IPCC report is pretty much the most definitive context-keeping picture we have right now of the climate situation - then how hard could it possibly be to get the uncoerced agreement of advocates and "skeptics" alike?  While I've personally experienced on many occasions dishonest leftists closing off the possibility of fair debate about Rand or capitalism, how pray tell does this dynamic play out when it comes to climate discussions, exactly?  The Right/"skeptics" accuse the Left/warmers of using various tactics to shut down debate, but my ring-of-truth heuristics tell me that this doesn't ring true about the climate debate because the central claims being made aren't made by those in the social sciences and humanities - people who can be expected to be promoting a political agenda - but by those in the STEM disciplines (which are then seized upon and amplified by the leftists in their usual dishonest ways in order to promote the anti-capitalism policy framework/mentality they were dishonestly promoting already).  Fine, don't pay any attention whatsoever to Al Gore - he's a messenger one might have any number of reasons to shoot - but how about a Michael Mann?  Is there something the "skeptics" have to employ against him other than dishonest/ context-disregarding smears?

So, to wrap up:  Yawning trust deficits.  Intellectual bankruptcy.  Philosophical literacy.

Wallace-Wells & The Uninhabitable Earth (and actionable steps)

Might as well continue in drill sergeant mode for this one.  (And why not?  I find that I rather like writing in drill sergeant mode, for "mysterious" reasons I'll let you use your own fucking noggin to figure out.)

So, I learn about David Wallace-Wells's book, The Unhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (hereafter TUE), after reading Andrew Sullivan's seemingly well-reasoned piece on the toxic-as-fuck radical trans ideology madness.  (I say seemingly, because past experience has made me skeptical about Sullivan; his reckless idiocy about Rand stands out too far, and his verbal fellating of Obama in '08 didn't quite pan out in any sort of transformative presidency.)  (I have a fresh draft still in the queue about the latest ultra-toxic trans ideology madness, quite possibly the gravity well that ends up sucking in the entire political left in its already-near-batshit-crazy current form; long story short, if the left's goal is to get Trump re-elected, then embracing the madness as the Democrats appear poised to do might be a wonderful idea.  It'll help things along nicely if leftists (continue to) foam at the mouth and basically lie that Trumpism is fascism.)  Sullivan's comments on TUE appear at the link below the trans-madness piece.  His views echo those of the great majority of goodreads reviewers: it paints a picture of a future that is nothing short of frightening.

I have no expertise on the subject of climate change.  Whenever I hear about the latest in climate alarmism I am reminded of Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb from half a century ago; suffice it to say that its alarmist predictions did not come to pass.  He lost that resource-scarcity bet with Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource, HINT HINT).  But my well-developed (I think) "ring of truth" detector says that the climate change problem is for real, based on a comprehensive body of data which is best explained by man-made CO2 emissions.  The observed increase in temperatures appears to be happening at a pace well out of the usual range for such things over geologic time.  (Anyway, what do we do if we're still around when that Yellowstone supervolcano blows?  I don't know shit.)  My "ring of truth" detector also tells me that the American Right in particular has been epistemically reckless about this subject.  It's not just that the very stable genius Trump might somehow happen to be right that "climate change is a hoax" (etc.), but rather it's his dogmatic, unaccountable and therefore credibility-shitting way of speaking on the subject, the fucking dickhead.  If he has some kind of argument, I haven't seen it.  The piece of shit.  Speaking of that Ehrlich-Simon bet, Trump should put some of that money where his big loud mouth is and place a bet on climate change outcomes.  Also, the fat scumbag could stand to lose some weight.

The wikipedia page for TUE indicates a reception that's more mixed - as in, less ready than the goodreads reviewers to buy into Wallace-Wells' alarmism.

But I'm here to address issues surrounding the climate change debate - e.g., the nature of the debate itself.  I'm also addressing it as someone who regularly beats the drum for philosophical education as a comprehensive means of solving a vast range of human problems/challenges; the aim is to facilitate better living by making humans better problem-solvers.  And I have certain recommendations for living that make abundant sense in their own right, regardless of whether the lifestyle changes involved are necessary to combat climate change.

First off, the likes of Naomi Klein bring their own (leftist) baggage to this issue.  The left has hated capitalism well before climate change ever became a major concern.  All the shitty arguments these disgusting creatures made against capitalism has destroyed their credibility.  The overall credibility of the left today is in shambles.  Just as they are the boy who cried racism, they are the boy who cry that capitalism is inhumane and unjust, and they also happen to be the boy who's been crying climate catastrophe.  This is to say that the more we can leave discreditable and toxic leftist politics out of this, the better, and we'd better look for the most credible people we can find who are not affiliated with the political left (especially the far left).  AOC's credibility is in that toilet she claims the migrants were told to drink from.  Flush her and her ilk down so that we can get serious.

(Besides, anyone who knows about libertarianism/capitalism in steelmanned version knows that there is no such thing in such a version as a right to impose negative externalities.  Private property rights so constrained are consistent with ecological health.  So this is consistent with stiff penalties for the sorts of lifestyle decisions I prescribe against below.  [An issue I am no expert on is how the legal system rationally goes about relying on science to estimate the extent of externalities damages.])

Nuclear energy strikes me as a serious measure to reduce carbon footprint.  I don't know if the nuke facilities can be made redundant in their security measures well enough to avoid Fukashima-like fuck-ups.

But the real solutions lies in basic lifestyle changes (and these are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to give the general flavor/mindset):

Don't have kids.  You don't need them.  (Not as a pressing need, anyhow.  [Edit: Okay, so it's context-dependent, I guess; context-dependent needs...?  I shall think through this more thoroughly, I might be wrong, maybe have fewer kids, etc....]  Existing humans are in abundance and a great many of those could use some Aristotelian-eudaimonic social capital to help get their acts together.  How about prioritizing things in that direction if legacy-traces is the motivation here.)  Easy way to reduce your carbon footprint.  Your biology has programmed and perhaps fooled you into thinking it is an imperative within the framework of a reflective sapient creature's meaning-fulfillment.  Wake the fuck up.  Chances are non-zero that having kids these days will consign them to that uninhabitable-earth scenario.  Don't be a fucking moron.

Stop eating so fucking much, you fat fucking pigs, especially you sedentary and slovenly American pigs.

You don't need that big car, and the big house, with that big yard that you wastefully water and manicture.  Instead of spending all your time and money on that shit, buy some books and read some more.  E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful may not be a bad choice.

Unplug from your devices and screen-time once in a goddamn while at least.  (If you must have screen time, why not use it to be a film buff, and fucking listen and learn any and all necessary film references/quotes.)  You are dopamine addicts seeking your next momentary fix, you fucking pathetic pieces of shit.  Shut 'em off cold turkey if you have to, go outside and exercise (which will require energy but then again your not having kids should offset problems there).  Get off your twitter feed, stop caring about getting the "likes."  Nobody was ever great by virtue of being liked.  No monument has been erected to honor a critic.

Make wisdom and its pursuit the centerpiece of your existence.  Learn to learn better.  If you're going to be online (2 hrs a day is about the healthy limit), seek out and read philosophy blogs rather than the latest twitter turd-pile.  Seek out opposing opinions as much as you can and try to prove your own ones wrong if they haven't been established by exhaustive research.  (Have I established by exhaustive research that wisdom(-pursuit) is a really wise idea?  Am I reasoning in a vicious circle, or a virtuous one?  Is any attempt to refute wisdom-pursuit self-defeating?  You tell me, genius; I don't know fuck-all.)  You're not entitled to your opinion qua opinion, you entitlement-mentality lazy little shit.  Get obsessed with wisdom and character because that's really all that matters, and not all those material consumables.  The more wise you are, the better you can meet your ultimate fate (natural death, car crash, inevitable ecosystem collapse, tech-based immortality, whatever it turns out to be).

Learn some aesthetic appreciation if you haven't yet.  That'll tune you in better to the beauty of nature and cause you to respect it more.  Stop subsidizing factory farming with your thoughtless, inhumane cakehole-stuffing.  You'll also develop an appreciation for having an aesthetically pleasing figure rather than that tub of lard you're probably dragging around.

If you're having trouble finding guidance, ask yourself what Aristotle, Jesus, Einstein, Ghandi, MLK, the Buddha might do.  Even if you know next to jackshit about these figures, certain shall we say archetypical behaviors and attitudes may pop into mind.  Then adapt for your own personality and circumstances as necessary, since in fact only Aristotle is (was) eligible to do what Aristotle would do.  What if you draw inspiration from both Aristotle and Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, the senior drill instructor (and/or the Snake Diet Wizard, the Fat Shaming King)?  Then incorporate both inspirations into your act.  Don't stop there.  Dialectically synthesize the fuck out of all your positive influences and add your own unique touch, for shit's sake.

When in doubt, try being kind instead of being an asshole.  Try not going out of your way to misconstrue someone's statements on the internet, as insecure strawman-mongering pieces of shit do.  If you do have to be an "asshole," have a good reason, like motivating some weak-ass limp-dick fools into becoming the versions of themselves they can and should be.

Become more acutely aware that human flourishing is a social activity involving a congeniality of diverse and complementary excellences, and act accordingly.  Strive for excellence and nobility and encourage it in others (which is part of striving for excellence and nobility).

===

Is it really hard to believe that if humanity adopts the spirit of these recommendations/guidelines that problem-solving abilities can and will go through the roof?  I mean, after all, how much is the problem-solving potential of AI constrained by the quality of those AI is meant to assist?

Here I'm trying to finally get around to delving into Hurley's Natural Reasons (written at the age of 35 by someone with clearly more raw talent than I possess) presumably in preparation for my own treatise, and I keep getting distracted by this other shit?  Goddammit!

[Possibly in the queue if/when priorities permit: tying together common strands in Ayn Rand and The Big Lebowski.  I am quite possibly the only person on the planet who is very well-versed in both, which should make for some kind of potent combination that manifests itself somewhere/somehow if one makes the effort to look around.  They both have had the word "cult" attached to them in some way or other.  Let's just say I'm an enthusiast for both, and Rand-bashers are a bunch of fucking amateurs; the dipshits don't have the goods they represent themselves as having.  They are high in the running for intellectually laziest worldwide.  Their weakness is vanity.  Rand went out, overcame obstacles, and achieved while they're just looking for a credibility-handout, pretending that it was she who micturated upon their own credibility.  Leftist losers, indeed.  I can't solve their problems, only they can.  As for Rand herself: wonderful woman, I'm all very fond of her.  But as some wiser fella than myself once said, . . . aw hell, I've lost my train of thought here.]

How is a layperson to assess climate change?

A layperson is a non-expert who isn't well-versed enough in a topic -- since becoming well-versed requires years of specialized training and thinking -- to be entitled to much of an opinion on a topic.  The layperson has a cognitive need to look to experts as guides.  One thing the layperson can do is to make some meta-level assessment as to the state of the debate among experts.  One can, for instance, seek out persons routinely cited or touted as the leading proponent of a position and then see how the opposition responds to that leading proponent's arguments.

(One area of expertise I have is on Ayn Rand's philosophy.  I've spent over two decades studying these ideas, listening to several Peikoff courses multiple times, getting familiar with much of the secondary literature.  I've published in that literature myself.  I know who the experts are.  Do Rand-bashers engage in a debate of any form or other with the experts?  No, not in the least.  But that hasn't stopped them from boldly opining that Rand isn't worth taking seriously.  I don't take Rand-bashers seriously; they're ignorant fools.)

For instance, let's say one isn't an expert in all the arguments about the existence of God.  One does know that there is disagreement among experts about any number of facets of such a debate.  One should also have at least a minimal awareness that such a debate isn't going to be settled by science or a debate among scientists but among philosophers.  Philosophers don't take naturalism as a settled metaphysical thesis even if a philosophically-illiterate 'New Atheist' typically does.  (See David Bentley Hart's smackdown of these illiterates.  [What, then, to make of self-identifying 'philosopher' A.G. Grayling, one of Hart's targets?])  So 'New Atheists' wouldn't be the experts to seek out for input.

A non-expert in theology or the dialectical state-of-the-art in debate about God-related topics does usually have enough minimal human skill in the art of research to be able to do a bit of search on the topic.  Say that one wants to find a book where two authors debate the subject thoughtfully and indepth, being duly responsive to the other side's arguments.  Well, such a book isn't hard to find.  Say that one goes to goodreads and searches for "god debate."  Lo and behold, at least one significant result appears right near the top of the search results: God?: A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist, co-authored by William Lane Craig (longtime well-known pro-God arguer) and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, philosophy professor (then) at Dartmouth, an Ivy-League School, and (now) at Duke, a prestigious university.  (It helps even more as a quality-signal that it's published by OUP.)  Going in, a layperson should expect a fruitful discussion at the very least of the issues, challenges, and problems that arise for experts in the debate.  Somehow, the caliber of the debate that occurs in this book isn't well-reflected in many popular, lay-level discussions one is likely to encounter (where, e.g., 'New Atheists' as well as opposing fundamentalist-theists take up a lot of the airspace).  But at least the layperson has somewhere to go to find something that can aid in making some assessment of the quality of the arguments on a difficult topic.

I don't find (so far) any such promising avenue of lay-research for someone wanting to get the best, most high-profile dialogue available on whatever there is to reasonably disagree about on the climate change issue.  I'm a layperson to the issue -- I possess neither the expertise nor the time to go through the peer-reviewed literature, for example.  My best epistemic assessment of the issue that I can muster at this point is: there is a modest risk of modest damage from climate change, assuming present trends continue.  There are good reasons to believe that present trends won't continue as we approach an increasingly singularity-like future.  As far as we know, humans will come up with technology to mitigate or reverse any damaging climate change.  But not knowing what that technology is right now, we face a situation of uncertainty and risk.  (We might do as Nietzsche advises -- Live dangerously! -- and test our worthiness as a species, that is, to face and perhaps overcome obstacles even to our very existence.  What won't kill us will only make us stronger, etc.  If we can't overcome this challenge, then what ultimately is the point of our continued existence?)

As a layperson on climate change I came to hear about -- I don't remember how -- Richard Lindzen (MIT, atmospheric physics) as "a leading critic of climate change orthodoxy."  I know about leading climate-change "orthodoxy" proponent Michael E. Mann (Penn St., climatology and geophysics) from a recent book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.  Now, ideally, for the intellectual enrichment and edification of the lay-public, I imagine these two people duking it out in a well-publicized debate so that us layfolk can have some idea of where reasonable disagreement among established experts occurs on this subject.

But that duking-out hasn't happened, and if no such sort of duking-out as ever happened, then the state of public layfolk knowledge or dialogue on the climate change issue is almost sure to be impoverished.  So a next step might be to do the same kind of goodreads search I did on the God subject in hopes of finding a case comparable to the Craig-Armstrong book: "climate change debate".  But the results there aren't promising.  I don't find any such book.  What now?  Perhaps try another search at another book source: Amazon.  There do appear to be a couple books that look promising but they're expensive and not reviewed.  (In one case, it's a more than $60 book from a publisher I've never heard of, one participant is a professor of geography, and I'm not even sure I've heard of the universities that either of the participants is affiliated with.)   What now?  How about a youtube search on "climate change debate."  The videos less than ten minutes in length are utter shit for my purposes.  How about the modified search for videos longer than 20 minutes.  I'm not seeing promising leads here, either.

How much more digging do I do given my limited time and mental resources, and where?  I'm not looking for any number of climate-change websites, many with flaky-sounding names, that push one side of the argument or the other, I'm looking for a debate between well-vetted experts.  Maybe there really isn't a debate to be had at that level, maybe there really is a "consensus" among the well-vetted experts.  (97 percent can't be wrong, right?  What role does Lindzen play here, then?  What about Condorcet-like reasoning applied to a community of experts?)  But how is the laypublic to know this?

Well?