Saturday 12 October 2019

Pascal's Wager on Protect & Survive


Overheard at dinner while discussing crockery:

Hayley's dad: "You can't go wrong with white."

Chairman: "That's a bit racist, isn't it?"

We're staying at Oxwich Bay for a couple of nights and brought Hay's dad and his girlfriend, Barbara. and I intend to get some windsurfing in today, if I can get the car near to the sea. 

Given I was taking the windsurfer, we needed two cars - one for Hay, Hay's dad, his girlfriend and all the normal luggage, and the support vehicle with me and the windsurfing gear. We were travelling in convoy, but Hay was in the car with the sandwiches. Once we had left the M4 near Swansea, Hay very kindly exited her car at a set of traffic lights while on red and rushed over to my car to deliver an egg mayonnaise sandwich. This was repeated at two successive sets of traffic lights and proved a most efficacious way of staving off my hunger pangs.

On this issue of Extinction Rebellion, some climate science deniers are using the tactic of saying that kids are being needlessly frightened by all the hoo-haa, thus attempting to deflect the argument away from the object. However, does anyone remember the Protect and Survive public service announcements in the 70s and 80s about impending nuclear attack? I guess that didn't frighten any kids.


When adults are attacked by kids for not behaving like adults over climate change, they have one of two options; one is ti simply grow up and the other is to defend themselves by attacking people like Greta Thunberg with ad hominems/

Another consideration for the denialists - Pascal's Wager. In the context of belief in God, Pascal's Wager has one serious flaw, in that an omniscient God would know that one's alleged belief in Him was as the result of hedging one's bets and not blind faith, the latter being the requirement for salvation. In the case of anthropogenic climate change, Pascal's Wager is an entirely valid argument for climate change action - the consequences of doing nothing are far worse than the consequences of doing something, should the threat of climate change be real, whereas if climate change is not real, it just makes for a less polluted world, which in itself is not a bad aim.

Denialists keep saying that the protesters should be protesting in Beijing, but Beijing is not the political space of the British protesters, and it's governments that are the real target. The British protesters are targeting the British government - within their own political space.

Another UK argument is that the UK has already set the most ambitious targets for carbon neutrality, but it hasn't - the Nordics are far ahead, as they are in most things.

Finally, denialists maintain that people will be put off doing anything after having been inconvenienced by a protest. However, no-one with more than two functioning brain cells will be less convinced of the science behind climate change just because they were inconvenienced by a protest.


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