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Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by yummyfajitas on Friday November 20, 2009 @12:28PM (#952804)
Pascal asked a similar question:

If the bible is wrong but the accepted answer, you lose a finite amount of hedonic pleasure in the near term and there are some short term benefits (smaller amount of killing/stealing/coveting).

If the bible is right, but not accepted, you will burn in hell for all eternity.

Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by andreyf on Friday November 20, 2009 @01:00PM (#952876)
The flaw in Pascal's argument is that just because we can imagine something, doesn't make the probability of it occurring greater than 0. Since there is evidence for it, however, the probability of climate change is certainly greater than 0.
Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by prewett on Friday November 20, 2009 @04:44PM (#953491)
If I recall correctly, Pascal's argument was that if the Christian God is truly the one and only god, then if you follow him, you go to heaven and have infinite pleasure. Nothing else gives you guaranteed infinite pleasure, therefore the expectation value for being a follower of the Christian God is the highest.
Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by dave_au on Friday November 20, 2009 @06:57PM (#953782)
Nothing else? What about the other gods that will damn you for not following them? I'd say it's an even split between all religions with a positive afterlife. Better heavens and nastier hells might skew the distribution...
Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by tome on Friday November 20, 2009 @12:39PM (#952833)
Sure, but that's rather over-exaggerating to make a cheap point.

Every business asks a similar question every day.

"If I decide to do A, I might make $B dollars or lose $C dollars. Is this a wise thing to do?"

We tend to think that Pascal's cost benefit analysis was flawed. That doesn't mean we should drop the principle altogether!

Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by yummyfajitas on Friday November 20, 2009 @06:01PM (#953672)
I'm not advocating against cost benefit analysis. If the original poster said "anthropogenic warming has a cost $X with probability P, the fix costs $Y < $P X, therefore do the fix" I wouldn't have said anything.

I'm all in favor of the rational cost benefit analysis you hint at. Most environmentalists are not - witness the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg.

Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by soldarnal on Friday November 20, 2009 @01:42PM (#952993)
The most devastating problem to Pascal's wager, in my opinion, is the many claimants problem - the idea being, "Which god?" The one whose favorite number is 1? 2? 3? etc... I think the same problem will ultimately be devastating to any attempt to apply it to global warming. Which solution? We only have finite resources. Do we build a giant solar shade or do we implement a cap-and-trade solution? There are perhaps an infinite number of possible solutions, each a claimant upon our wager.
Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by tome on Friday November 20, 2009 @02:12PM (#953087)
Each solution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions pulls in more or less the same direction. Choosing a god to worship certainly does not!
Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by soldarnal on Friday November 20, 2009 @06:09PM (#953702)
Presumably the goal isn't reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but maintaining global temperatures, in which case possible solutions do pull in many different directions...

But anyway, that misses the point. The wager isn't cost-benefit analysis where probabilities and expected values are certain; it's decision making in the absence of compelling evidence. What you have essentially done is respond to the multiple claimants problem by saying, "But any form of belief in the Christian God pulls in more or less the same direction." In the uncertainty that the wager confronts, however, "reducing CO2 emissions" and "increasing CO2 emissions" have the same expected value - that is, they are equal claimants. Hence my point that the multiple claimants problem is equally devastating when the wager is applied to global warming.

Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by randallsquared on Friday November 20, 2009 @04:39PM (#953476)
Waiting to do something drastic until we're forty or fifty years richer and more technologically capable seems like an easy answer, assuming you're willing to agree that we're getting more capable of solving the problem faster than the problem is worsening. And assuming that the recent plateau doesn't signal the beginning of the end of the interglacial, which, I'm sure you'll agree, would be a far worse problem than global warming...
Re:Climate center's server hacked, revealing documents and e... by youngian on Friday November 20, 2009 @12:58PM (#952872)
http://blog.iangreenleaf.com/2009/02/pascal-and-global-warmi...

I totally beat you to the punch on this one :D