These Things I Believe

In recent months, I've come to realize that there are certain things I need to acknowledge if I wish to be taken seriously by my intellectual betters.

1. If we're talking about global warming, it's impossible to see how small changes could have enormous negative consequences. If we're talking about culture or politics, it's impossible to see how they can't.


2. The Free Market is the world's best and most efficient force for transformative change, the vast majority of which must be opposed on principle lest we end up in some sort of queer eco-gulag.
   


3. Alarming news must be viewed as "alarmist," and therefore false, unless it involves Muslims, socialism, environmental regulations, faggotry, blacks, immigrants, academia, or gay black Muslim eco-socialist immigrant academics like "President" Obama.


4. Civility is in a sad state of decline, and everyone who's responsible is worse than Hitler. (PS: Fuck you!)


5. Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of disagreeing with someone who's confident about being right. This is one of the very worst things you can do, online or off. If you choose to indulge in it anyway, don't be surprised when people ignore your so-called "evidence." After all, you've demonstrated that you're a bad person.


6. Argumentum ad verecundiam, or appeal to authority, is the logical fallacy of assuming that working climatologists are a better source for information on climate than economists, retired weathermen, eccentric British peers, and anonymous online paranoiacs.


7. The most logical explanation for consensus is collusion or groupthink. Everyone knows that!


8. Confirmation bias is a plausible explanation for the belief that a given scientific study supports AGW. However, it is not a plausible explanation for the belief that this support can be explained away by invoking confirmation bias.
   


9. The Law of Unintended Consequences only applies to stuff you don't really want to do anyway.
   


10. Global climate is very, very complicated. That's why it must be approached with much more humility and caution and thoughtfulness than relatively straightforward endeavors like civilizing Muslim nations at gunpoint, or regulating human sexuality.
    


11. AGW probably isn't happening, or at least not very much. And if it is happening, it probably isn't a serious problem. And if it is a serious problem, we'll probably have plenty of time to address it through geoengineering, which is a much better solution than reducing emissions, because it relies on the creation of a global regime dedicated to micromanaging our atmosphere and oceans in pursuit of benefits predicted by the same climate modeling we can't trust to predict AGW, instead of imposing some tyrannical big-government measure like a carbon tax. So why worry?
    


12. If I believe that the IPCC is fallible but essentially honest, and you believe it's a snake pit of anti-capitalist ideologues who are only in it for the money, the spirit of compromise obliges me to admit that nothing it says can be trusted until you tell me otherwise.
    


13. If scientists are telling you something you don't want to hear, but you can't quite bring yourself to believe that they've all become Marxists, the most likely explanation is that they've forgotten some fundamental Rule of Science with which you're vaguely familiar. Perhaps they've sinned against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the Principle of Bivalence, or the Empirical Method, or Occam's Razor, or all four. Whatever the case, you can undoubtedly find a quote from Einstein that will put them in their place.
    


14. Most scientific breakthroughs are achieved by angry, incoherent conspiracy theorists with no training in their adopted field and an implacable contempt for pretty much everyone who works in it professionally. This was definitively proved in 1776 by Galileo, and also by that plate tectonics guy, whatever his name was. If you doubt this, please consider the fact that I AM NOW TYPING IN CAPS.
    

If there's anything else you feel I should know, please feel free to explain it to me in comments.

UPDATE: In comments, Rich Puchalsky advances a theory that could potentially unify all the points listed above, as well as everything else worth knowing:

No statement made by a hippie can ever be true. Even in cases where the statement is finally generally accepted as being true, that doesn't it make it retroactively true when it was said by hippies. It only started to be true when the first non-hippie condescended to say it.

Why do I hesitate to affirm that this is 100% true in all possible universes? Only because I don't know for certain that it wasn't written by a hippie. Here's hoping Mr. Puchalsky will soon provide us with evidence of his bona fides, so we can all get on with our vastly enriched lives.

Here's some music while we're waiting. Please note its tasteful use of diminished chord arpeggios, which are of course the best kind.