as dumb as a mushroom

Think, for a moment, about lignin itself.

It's this complex structural biopolymer made by trees. It's what makes trees woody. And it's totally, transcendently worthless to everything else on earth. There's a tremendous amount of stored energy there -- this being why wood burns -- and nothing can get at it. Millennium after millennium, the accumulation of woody debris starves the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and poisons all of the earth's fresh water. Insofar as anything living has the capacity to suffer, everything is.

Eventually, bracket fungus figures out a way to break down lignin. In a matter of a few hundred thousand years, the quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide triples, and the amount of atmospheric oxygen plummets. The giant insects that dominate the Earth begin to die. Temperatures rise. The oceans acidify. Almost everything dies. [Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction, 65.5 My ago]

Go back further, and disruptive species become increasingly catastrophic. For instance, when cyanobacteria discovered photosynthesis and produced oxygen as a byproduct, nothing respirated. These huge mats of bacteria were producing a waste product more toxic than chlorine gas. And it destroyed almost all life on earth, down to the microbiome, not that there was anything other than a microbiome. The ground corroded, crumbled, washed into the sea. [Great Oxygenation Event, 2.5Gy ago]

And then life, by chance, stumbled on a way to use this horrifyingly toxic gas to ride a more efficient biochemical gradient. And that's all there is to it.

In expending all of the Earth's stored carbon, we're acting just like bracket fungus, or cyanobacteria, or the first cycads. We've found a clever chemical trick and are riding the entropic gradient as long as we can, because, at worst, it temporarily relieves suffering, and at best, it gives us more degrees of freedom to someday not act just like bracket fungus.

This is a low bar -- to not be literally as dumb as a mushroom. But the biological incentives of disruptive species, us included, make environmental catastrophe difficult to avert. The dimensions in which disruptive biology is unsustainable will eventually place a burden on biodiversity system-wide. -- Andreas Schou

Profiteers must Profit II

The human ability to disconnect from and deny geopolitical reality lies at the heart of the “green” net-zero project.  Most obviously, those who claim victories along the road to the Nirvana of net-zero must maintain blindness to the way in which the UK economy is integrated into a global industrial civilisation.  As a result, such measures as closing British coal mines and coal-fired power stations can be translated into lower national carbon emissions figures, even though all that is achieved is the outsourcing of UK emissions to other, less developed states elsewhere on the planet.  Aiding this sleight of hand is the international convention that we do not include emissions from shipping in anyone’s national data, giving the appearance that there is no difference between goods moved tens of miles by truck or train, and goods transported by ship from the other side of the Earth. -- Tim Watkins ref

Profiteers must Profit

Scratch the surface of the current plans to decarbonise the economy and replace it with renewable energies and beneath it lays the same logic that has made the UK the 6th richest country in the world. Britain is planning to go green through a new phase of resource and wealth extraction of countries in the global south. At the heart of our economic system fueled by the City of London is a belief that the UK and other rich countries are entitled to a greater share of the world’s finite resources irrespective of who we impoverish in doing so, or the destruction we cause.

This green colonialism will be delivered by the very same entrenched economic interests, who have willingly sacrificed both people and the climate in the pursuit of profit. But this time, the mining giants and dirty energy companies will be waving the flag of climate emergency to justify the same deathly business model. In this new energy revolution, it is cobalt, lithium, silver and copper that will replace oil, gas and coal as the new frontline of our corporate destruction. The metals and minerals needed to build our wind turbines, our solar panels and electric batteries will be ripped out of the earth so that the UK continues to enjoy “lifeboat ethics”: temporary sustainability to save us, but at the cost of the poor. -- Asad Rehman

Simulation as Filter

If you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer, chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no sense -- Scott Aaronson

Hidden Law

A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call "hidden law": the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and, crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or perdition.

Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point it can give way all at once. The showboating narcissist Jack Kevorkian dragged assisted suicide into the open and insisted that it be legalized (and televised). At that point, the deal was off. No one could pretend assisted suicide wasn't happening. Activists framed state right-to-die initiatives, senators sponsored bills banning assisted suicide, and courts began issuing an unending series of deeply confused rulings. Soon decisions about assisted suicide will be made by buzzing mobs of lawyers and courts and ethics committees, with prosecutors helpfully hovering nearby, rather than by patients and doctors and families. And the final indignity will be that the lawyers and courts and committee people will congratulate themselves on having at last created a rational process where before there were no rules at all, only chaos and darkness and barbarism. And then, having replaced an effective and intuitive and flexible social mechanism with a maladroit and mystifying and brittle one, they will march on like Sherman's army to demolish such other institutions of hidden law as they encounter.

The enemy of hidden law is not government, as such. It is lawyers. Three years in law school teach, if they teach nothing else, that as a practical matter hidden law does not exist, or that if it does exist it is contemptibly inadequate to cope with modern conflicts. The American law school is probably the most ruthlessly anti-communitarian institution that any liberal society has ever produced. --  Jonathan Rauch ref

Adequate, not True

... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. -- Henri Poincaré

Alternatives and Models

A further problem that arises in the use of any test that simply rejects a hypothesis without at the same time considering possible alternatives[...] Is it of the slightest use to reject a hypothesis until we have some idea of what to put in its place? If there is no clearly stated alternative, and the null hypothesis is rejected, we are simply left without any rule at all, whereas the null hypothesis, though not satisfactory, may at any rate show some sort of correspondence with the facts. It may, for instance, represent 90% of the variation and to that extent may be of considerable use in prediction, even though the remaining 10% may be larger than we should expect if it was strictly true. 

Consider, for instance, the history of the law of gravitation. Newton first derived it from Kepler’s laws and a comparison of the accelerations of the moon and of a body falling freely at the earth’s surface. Extending it to take account of the mutual attractions of the planets and of the perturbations of the moon by the sun, he got the periods and orders of magnitude of the principal perturbations. But he did not explain the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn, with a period of 880 years, which gives displacements in longitude of 1196″ and 2908″ of arc for the two planets, and was only explained by Laplace a century later. 

The theory of the moon has been taken only in the present century, by E. W. Brown, to a stage where most of the outstanding errors of calculation can be said to be within the errors of observation; there are discrepancies between observation and calculation that are attributed to changes of the rotation of the earth; but these discrepancies are our principal ground for believing in the existence of these changes. In fact agreement with Newton’s law was not given by the data used to establish it, because these data included the main inequalities of the moon; it was not given during his lifetime, because the data included the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn; and when Einstein’s modification was adopted the agreement of observation with Newton’s law was 300 times as good as Newton ever knew. 

Even the latter appears at present as powerless as Newton’s to explain the long empirical term in the moon’s longitude and the secular motion of the node of Venus. There has not been a single date in the history of the law of gravitation when a modern significance test would not have rejected all laws and left us with no law. -- Theory of Probability, Harold Jeffreys 1939.

Position(s)

Science deals with measurable events. Anything non-measurable is non-testable and outside the scope of Science. Scientists might favor some of these non-measurable claims, like believing in ghosts or gods, because they are people, and people are complicated. However Science should be neutral towards these claims. Some accept Naturalism, the philosophical position that states anything non-measurable does not exist -- leading, for example, to Atheism and to several skeptical philosophies --, but that in itself is not a scientific position.

Religion is not necessarily opposite to Science. Sometimes a religion claims something that is testable and there is evidence for and against it (including moral claims), but other religious claims are outside measurement and, thus, outside scientific analysis. What's opposite are the processes of Faith and the Scientific Method, which approaches to evidence are completely in contrast.

On the other hand, pseudo-sciences, like Homeopathy or Flat-Earth theories, make fact-based claims that are subject to scientific analysis (and were tested, and refuted repeatedly). Every social relevant position relating to facts can, and must, be validated by Science. People should have the liberty to select their personal beliefs, but facts are socially shared and are only up to debate under the scrutiny of the Scientific Method.