silverspoonin
Renewables aren't a panacea, but they exist now and are seeing growing deployment, even without "fuel sources becoming less plentiful". Too late to prevent climate change, but definitely early enough to prevent widespread power scarcity.
Oh, companies will definitely try, and many people will go along with it. But, people who care will continue to maintain self-hosted projects e.g. Home Assistant. Hardware can be jailbroken, and/or small manufacturers will be willing to charge a premium for open/hackable versions. Worst case, many "smart" items can be cobbled together from Raspberry Pi/ESP32/ESP8266.
But I don't see data centers/internet/power being an issue. Data centers are already globally distributed and load-balanced. Internet is near-ubiquitous, with growing wired, wireless & even satellite options. Power generation from renewables, along with storage, have been growing at an accelerated pace even despite (or some say because) the pandemic.
Also, an off-grid solution is very feasible: I can easily imagine a near future where I have my "smart home" running on a local Alpaca instance, being powered by my solar roof.
True; it's not as if elections are tabulated on some sort of "voting machines" that are closed-source and often hacked at DEFCON's Voting Machine Hacking Village.
Strongest political stance I can remember him making lately is ridiculing the idea the last presidential election was stolen.
Honestly, I think any complaints about the "politics" in his netcasts says more about the person complaining than about the actual contents of his podcasts.
"It's slower and uses more memory" goes a long way in encouraging the evaluation of other options.
Calling a claim "ill defined, nonsensical or self-contradictory" is already an evaluation of it's probable truth value.
> Note that the position that OP advanced, and which you appear to be defending is that the bare fact of the existence of a consensus should be treated as primary evidence on its own.
Actually, the person you responded to clearly stated: "how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in". For someone well-versed in the area, or at least with enough free time to become sufficiently acquainted with it, going to directly to primary evidence is the optimal approach. However, in the situation described by OP, were they are limited in the amount of time and cognitive capacity they can invest, then basing decisions on such "Secondary evidence" as expert consensus is the rational approach.
In order to act on a claim (inaction is also an action; "avoid committing oneself to accepting" is just ornate wording for choosing inaction) one must evaluate the "probability of truth" of said claim. To my knowledge, scientific consensus is the most reliable source to inform that evaluation. Since you fail to provide a more effective alternative, then it seems that scientific consensus is at least non-inferior to any other method either of us is currently aware of. Thus it is the rational choice on which to base action; basing them on a less reliable source gives a higher probability of being "wrong", and thus would be irrational.
> I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true.
Honest answer: Then I invite you to attend a consensus conference, or enough of them for the p-value on your evaluation of how they run to reach whatever level is acceptable to you. Tongue-in-cheek answer: You also have no evidence you aren't a simulated agent in an advanced species' super-computer (Descartes's "brain in a jar"). At some point, you have to choose some axioms and build your world-view from there.
Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative?
>Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
The scientific process IS a process of rational error elimination and criticism. Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse.
> Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence?
I think you have the causal chain backwards; the evidence of a good metric for the truth of a matter is what builds consensus. If the evidence is incompatible with consensus, and it holds up to scrutiny & reproduction, then the consensus changes to match. Either way, the end result is that consensus is an improving approximation to "the truth". If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
Also, as to whether believing scientific general consensus should count as "faith" or not, I invite you to read Issac Asimov's short essay "The Relativity of Wrong".