seeking the truth

Those Greeks practically invented mathematics way back before Christ, and I don’t think anything was added to what they figured out until the late middle ages. Well the addition of arabic numerals was a big advance, but that was more of a way of keeping track than a new discovery. Myself I found those Greek letters rather elegant, especially the deltas with those little triangles. How come the guys who worked out the latin alphabet didn’t include the delta? It would have gone fine in the place of that stupid ‘O’ which looks just like a Goddamn zero, what the hell were they thinking? Didn’t they realize that in a couple thousand years we would have flight confirmation codes where we would have to squint to see whether it was an ‘O’ or a ‘0’?

The thing is with this plenitude of studies what you really have to do is examine the studies. Like if you are in a mob and the question is whether to fish or cut bait, and some of the guys think we ought to fish and some think we ought to cut bait, you can very roughly just go with the majority, or you can pay attention to who says what, and discount the dumbasses. You really need to examine the studies a bit, which have the biggest samples, which are the newest, which took care to account for other influences, who sponsors them? It is a bit of work, but if you are seeking after truth, it’s something you have to do.

But it is a philosophical problem. It’s a natural tendency to believe stuff that agrees with what you already believe and to toss aside that which doesn’t. But then you run the risk of never learning anything. I think one thing that helps is to read a lot on the different sides of the issue. As you know I am a pretty partisan democrat, and when I read about some terrible thing that the republicans have done I am outraged of course. But then I force myself to think what if the democrats had done something similar, and then it doesn’t seem all that bad.

Everybody believes that climate changes over time (except for maybe those fundamentalists who think we have only had like six thousand years of time). But let’s say we have a bank and people come and go from the bank all the time, and sometimes the bank has a lot of money and sometimes it doesn’t, so really it would be hard to say this or that guy took the money. But if we knew the bank had so much money yesterday and now has considerably less, and that the last guy we saw leaving it (emission CO2) has a long criminal record, and incidentally was seen carrying a bag with a dollar sign on it, I don’t think we’d shrug our shoulders and say how can we tell who took the money.

It is a separate argument what to do about global warming. As a libertarian, and thus a laissez faire capitalist I don’t see how you can think that raising the cost of energy won’t decrease emissions. This is Free Market 101. It may turn out that it’s not wise to raise the cost of energy for other reasons, but then make that argument separately.