I have been following this site for almost a year now and it is fabulous, but I haven’t felt an urgent need to post to the site until now. I’ve been working on a climate change project with a couple of others and am in desperate need of some feedback.
I know that climate change isn’t a particularly popular topic on this website (but I’m not sure why, maybe I missed something, since much of the website seems to deal with existential risk. Am I really off track here?), but I thought this would be a great place to air these ideas. Our approach tries to tackle the irrational tangle that many of our institutions appear to be caught up in, so I thought this would be the perfect place to get some expertise. The project is kind of at a standstill, and it really needs some advice and leads (and collaborators), so please feel free to praise, criticize, advise, or even join.
I saw orthonormal’s “welcome to LessWrong post,” so I guess this is where to post before I build up enough points. I hope it isn’t too long of an introductory post for this thread?
The aim of the project is to achieve a population that is more educated in the basics of climate change science and policy, with the hope that a more educated voting public will be a big step towards achieving the policies necessary to deal with climate change.
The basic problem of educating the public about climate change is twofold. First, people sometimes get trapped into “information cocoons” (I am using Cass Sunstein’s terminology from his book Infotopia). Information cocoons are created when the news and information people seek out and surround themselves with is biased by what they already know. They are either completely unaware of competing evidence or if they are, they revise their network of beliefs to deny the credibility of those who offer it rather than consider it serious evidence. Usually, this is because they believe it is more probable that those people are not credible than that they could be wrong. This problem has always existed, and has perhaps increased since the rise of the personalized web. People who are trapped in information cocoons of denial of anthropogenic climate change will require much more evidence and counterarguments before they can begin to revise an entire network of beliefs that support their current conclusions.
Second, the population is uneducated about climate change because they lack the incentive to learn about the issues. Although we would presumably benefit if everyone were to take the time to thoroughly understand the issue, the individual cost and benefit of doing so actually runs the other way. Because the benefits of better policies accrue to everybody, but the costs are borne by the individual, people have an incentive to free ride, to let everybody else worry about the issue because either way, their individual contribution means little, and everybody else can make the informed decision. But of course, with everybody reasoning in this way there is a much lower level of education on these issues than optimal (or even necessary to create the necessary change, especially if there are interest groups with opposing goals).
The solution is to institute some system that can crack into these information cocoons and at the same time provide wide-ranging personal incentives for participating. For the former, we propose to develop a layman’s guide to climate change science and economic and environmental policy. Many of these are already in existence, although we have some different ideas about how to make it more transparent to criticism and more thorough in its discussion of epistemic uncertainty surrounding the whole issue. There is definitely a lot we can learn from LessWrong on this point). Also, I think we have a unique idea about developing a system of personal incentives. I will discuss this latter issue first.
It seems to me that the main reason most hypertext sources seem to produce shallower reading is not the fact that it contains hypertext itself, but that the barriers of publication are so low that the quality of most written work online is usually much lower than printed material. For example, this post is something that I might have spent 3 minutes thinking about before posting, whereas a printed publication would have much more time to mature and also many more filters such as publishers to take out the noise.
It is more likely that book reading seems more deep because the quality is better.
Also, it wouldn’t be difficult to test this hypothesis with print and online newspaper since they both contain the same material.