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Here's an example of a mechanism of poor decision making.
many of the climate modellers I spoke to were keen to point out that simulating the climate with more complex models may well lead to greater uncertainty about what the future holds. That’s because including sources of large feedbacks – such as forests that can expand or die or tundra that can release vast amounts of methane – adds a whole new suite of factors to which the climate can respond.The idea that greater realism is less useful for decision making is starkly nuts. Good decisions must be based on good information and good analysis. It is only bad decisions that benefit from sloppy thinking.So, it’s quite likely that the next IPCC report will have much larger error bars on its estimates of future temperature or precipitation, compared with AR4. Climatologist Jim Hurrell of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, who is heading up development of the NCAR Earth-system model, had this to say:
“It's very likely that the generation of models that will be assessed for the next IPCC report will have a wider spread of possible climate outcomes as we move into the future".So why include more complexity in the model, if it will produce results that are less useful for decision-making?
Here, it’s worth remembering that for climatologists, models are not just tools that can give a glimpse of what the future holds; they are also an experimental playground – a replica world on which they can test their knowledge of the climate system. Without the ability to conduct global-scale experiments in the lab or in the field, models are the only tools they have. So while the results from more complex models may, in the short-term, be less informative for policy makers and the public, they will help scientists better understand what drives climate change and lead to better simulations in the long-term.It's an odd sort of logic that considers better information to be less information, as if bad information should have equal weight. The desire to make hasty and uninformed decisions is one of the reasons why resistance to technocratic rule is wise. They aren't as smart or reasonable as they think they are, but in their arrogance they blunder about wreaking havoc. They lack the required intellectual maturity to be trusted, as well as having glaring character defects that ought to disqualify them from decision making tasks.
The issues discussed in the previous post are relevant to this sort of bizarre behavior.
I'm off on a tangent and trying to put a source to it. I'm recalling a study about the fact that subjects with with truly lower intelligence overestimated their intelligence and those with the highest intelligence underestimated their own intelligence. In other words, the more ignorant the subjects were, such ignorance included a lack of knowledge of their own ignorance.
Posted by: Jeffrey at March 2, 2010 08:08 AMSounds true, but I haven't seen any compelling studies about it.
I'm as concerned about ignorance as I am low general intelligence since it is an equal opportunity affliction. I find a reverse correlation: more intelligent people underestimate their ignorance, perhaps because they think in relative terms. They seem to think that since they are smarter that they know more and better than others, which immunizes them to some extent to the plague of knowledge.
It is also my observation that this is more true of those who are somewhat above average, and that still greater intelligence helps people to grasp the error in such thinking.
I have no data on this, it's just how things seem to my admittedly meager knowledge, intelligence and educational level.
Posted by: back40 at March 2, 2010 02:40 PM>It is also my observation that this
>is more true of those who are
>somewhat above average, and that
>still greater intelligence helps
>people to grasp the error in such
>thinking.
I agree. It seems to me that one of the good ways to distinguish the really really smart people is how perceptive (and open) they are about their own ignorance. Richard Feynman is a nice example of this.
Posted by: Dave G. at March 3, 2010 04:57 PMSurely you're joking!
Posted by: back40 at March 3, 2010 06:25 PMI just found a "reference" to the studies I was trying to recall on Wikipedia. It's termed the "Downing Effect". I wish there were citations. There was also another aspect to CL Downing's studies I'd remembered reading about which involved an individual's ability to accurately estimate others' intelligence being proportional to their own intelligence.
Posted by: Jeffrey at March 4, 2010 10:58 PMHi Jeffrey, I read that stuff and did some supplementary searches. It seems that there's a maturity angle too in that the tendencies can be improved with education: the more they learn they less they think that they know since they have a better idea about how much there is to know and how sparse our current understandings.
Dave, I wonder if my response above was too curt and clever: did you understand that it was an allusion to Feynman's sense of humor (the book, Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman)? I find humor to be positively correlated with intelligence in many cases.
Posted by: back40 at March 5, 2010 02:27 PM