While we are looking at Randall's posts let's do this one too.

Scientists and engineers have knowledge that equip them in a variety of ways to hazard predictions about the future. Yet, being humans, they have assorted desires and needs that can bias their predictions away from the most likely future courses of events.

This is Randall's concluding graf following a discussion of a Benny Peiser interview of Freeman Dyson about academic - especially British academic - doom mongering.

Benny Peiser: Britain's leading cosmologists seem to be particularly gloomy about the future of civilisation and humankind. . . How do you explain this apocalyptic mood among leading cosmologists in Britain and the almost desperate tone of their pronouncements?

Freeman Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system. In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

Benny Peiser: Your sociological reading raises the question whether the current fashion of issuing doomsday predictions could be interpreted as the revenge by leading academics against the business community? After all, their very activities, success and societal role are blamed for impending catastrophe. Could it be that the scientific prophets of doom are trying to regain some of their lost influence by portraying themselves as saviours who, at the same time, provide governments with strong incentives for increased state power and intervention?

Freeman Dyson: I agree with your diagnosis of the academic disease. The academics are suffering from business envy, in the USA as well as in Britain. . . The academics preaching doom and gloom are indeed hoping to take their revenge on the business community by capturing the government.

This resonates with the argument advanced in the earlier post DWIM that academics oppose capitalism because it does not mete out status and rewards in accordance with their sense of superiority and entitlement. That argument focused on wordsmiths, citing Nozick's analysis, and exempted the numbersmiths. In Britain that may not be the case, and perhaps not in the USA these days either.

Randall wonders: "Can we develop techniques that will let us more easily detect causes of biases in expert predictions?". Perhaps, but detecting inaccuracies, however caused, will do for now. The claims of the doom mongers are of two sorts: those that are testable and based on valid observation, and those that are not. The former are science and the later are religion or politics. Making a clear distinction can help us properly discount the predictions.