0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Apr \ parent \ on: World Sea and Air Temperature (how is it going 2024) charts
What makes me skeptical isn't scientists. Its incentives and blind spots.
I agree, and have a meta-theory for things like this: I like to know what people, and what which people, would really like to believe, because believing something else would induce terrible dissonance.
There are so many things! Nearly infinite of them, but some of the historical examples are my favorite, because people can generally agree on how ludicrous those things were now.
  • Like when European colonial powers agreed that black people were beasts, and that enslaving them was a moral good, and biblically sanctioned. This was a very convenient thing to believe for obvious reasons; and there would be huge economic advantages to believing it, or (later) costs to not believing it. (Anything about the scramble for Africa makes good background reading. I can particularly recommend this book.)
  • The lack of harms around cigarette smoking was another good one. Not sure if anyone takes the other side of that anymore.
Anyway, just like measuring tree rings, the cui bono test is one source among many, but it's one of the strongest ones, and most reliable. Or Upton Sinclair's version:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
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