Robin ruminates:

Bryan [Caplan, and others, but they're just examples so focus on the ideas] shares an all-to-common intellectual flaw with other very smart folks: he trusts his concept intuitions way too much.

Our minds come built with concepts that let us categorize and organize the world we see. Those concepts evolved to be useful in the world of our ancestors, and we expect them to reflect real, important, and consistent patterns of experience in that ancestral world. Such concepts are surely far from random.

Nevertheless, we have little reason to think that our evolved concepts map directly and simply onto the fundamental categories of the universe, whatever those may be. In particular, we have little reason to believe that categories that seem to us disjoint cannot in reality overlap.

Which seems related to:

Everyone tends to float off into space once in a while and fail to see what is sitting there right in front of them. Recently researchers decided to put the theory of "inattentional blindness" to the test: the unicycling clown test. They documented real-world examples of people who were so distracted by their cell phone use that they failed to see the bizarre occurrence of a unicycling clown passing them on the street.

I can accept that cell phone users are an extreme example of "inattentional blindness", or is it "concept intuitions" or some other specific category of tunnel vision? It seems to me to be dead common, even pervasive, and usefully described as bloody minded stubbornness as much as anything else.

"Securing a pristine ice core dating back 130,000 years will provide a snapshot of conditions on Greenland when the average global temperature was 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today," says Dr. Cullen. "The Eemian provides a very realistic scenario of what we might see in the coming centuries."

Climate Central scientists calculate that in 2007, Greenland shed ice at a rate that, melted, equals the equivalent of draining San Francisco Bay – once a week – all year long. Some climate models suggest that if greenhouse emissions are not reduced, Earth's average temperature could approach Eemian era levels when today's children reach their 70's and 80's. Another key question the ice samples may help answer: how long would temperatures have to remain at those levels – or higher – to trigger a major rise in sea level?

One must live in a cognitive vacuum to entertain notions about greenhouse emissions in the coming centuries. Centuries! I find the idea that we will not have easily mastered this issue by 100 years from now to be childish nonsense. It's just not that complex. That doesn't mean that we won't have other problems and that everything will be hunky-dory for ever after, but as noted many times before this is the same sort of short sighted nonsense we heard from those who fretted about the world drowning in horse shit at the turn of the last century when that was how we hauled ourselves and our goods about.