Uncertainty is not an argument for the status quo

The cognitive errors that lets some take demonstrations of uncertainty and confuse them for arguments for continuing the status quo:

(For the following, substitute for "plausible" the phrase "developed/confirmed to such a degree that it is perverse to withhold provisional assent")

1) To inform a rational choice of actions, plausible full narratives compete solely with other plausible full narratives. If I open a door, and in the bright light of the room see a breathing tiger across the room, it is rational to step back out of the room and close the door. Any demonstration of uncertainty of my ability to tell a living tiger from a amusement park animatronic tiger is not an argument to stand motionless at the open threshold. The demonstration of uncertainty can be used to choose between plausible full narratives by discounting some narratives, but it (the demonstration of uncertainty) doesn't have the power to construct a plausible full narrative in opposition to the one under consideration, much less make the opposite of the considered action rationally attractive.

2) Rational action and rational inaction are both born of rational choice. By changing the language, changing the viewpoint, changing the scope, we can phrase action in terms of inaction, and inaction in terms of action. So what is temporally/culturally/situationally described as an action/intervention is under no extra burden of rational justification than what is likewise described as inaction/absence-of-intervention, and inaction does not have a lesser burden of rational justification than action. (Imagine that the decision to burn fossil fuels is remade on the 1st of each year, for example, with a corresponding decision of how much. So burning fossil fuels in the new year is the intervention, and we wish study if that intervention is rational.)

3) Demonstratively persuading plausible full narratives are not in competition with a swarm of idiosyncratic narratives that are each in contradiction with all others of the swarm. The contradictions inside the swarm renders the whole swarm repellent to the rational. From the swarm should emerge a small number of demonstratively persuading plausible full narratives, first, to challenge the mainstream narrative, second. Or else it is more likely the idiosyncratic narratives are just a symptom of the opposition to the mainstream being handicapped by debilitatingly idiosyncratic minds, incapable of meaningful rational persuasion.

Consider the inability to construct a plausible full narrative for a wide conspiracy to assassinate JFK from those who find fault with details of the many investigators that agree that Oswald was the sole gunman. Consider the inability to construct a plausible full narrative for a wide conspiracy throughout the US government to bring down the Twin Towers by controlled demolition from those who find fault with the details of the many investigators. Consider their pathetic nature. Likewise, note that those who would dispose of the mainstream narrative about carbon emissions and climate disruption and ocean acidification shirk from the burden of supplying an persuading plausible full narrative in opposition. How quickly they rush to use the art of controversy! Is it because they have no alternative?

Inspired by comments to the blog posting...

Only In It For The Gold: There Are Skeptics and Then There Are Skeptics

People who do not support vigorous policy can only be skeptics if they offer very high certainty that the science is biased to overstate the risks. Nobody does this very successfully. Some pretend to do this; at least their position is coherent, if not very well supported.

Speaking of Uncertainty with a Mumble-Bumble-Mouth - Mike Hulme

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Mike Hulme: We must stop saying ‘The science demands…’ by Tim Black - Spiked Debate

Mike Hulme prattles on about uncertainty.  [Ignore the bio photo of MH staring triumphantly at his rightmost piece of horizon]

Oh bleh, this Mike Hulme is not even operating at the level of the blogger Phillip Price, who is simply blogging on this topic as a layperson. Hey Hulme, we have tools for discussing uncertainty, and we can demonstrate the deniers are actually asserting much more certainty about the future, evident by their unwillingness to "take out an insurance policy" by starting to tax carbon even at a small amount. And they are asserting a much lower sensitivity than any physical theory can justify:

Phillip Price actually takes time to draw the curve of his uncertainty, a rigor the denialists avoid, no matter how Phillip Price attempts to draw it out of them:

http://manuelmoeg.blogspot.com/2009/12/talking-about-climate-change-publishing.html

http://manuelmoeg.blogspot.com/2010/05/seth-roberts-wrong-about-doubting.html

I agree that science, morality, and policy are best kept separate. But just using the word "uncertainty" for anything besides Revelatory Holy Scripture is silly, acting as if we cannot meaningfully compare different qualities and quantities of uncertainty.

If I take out an insurance policy on my house today, and my neighbor does not, it can be argued that I am rationally dealing with uncertainty, while my neighbor is simply non-rationally wishing it away, ineffectively.  I do not necessarily buy insurance today because I am _certain_ that I will have suffer arson or tornado.

If Hulme's writings lead to less harmful confusion of science, morality, and policy, I will provisionally temporally forgive him sloppiness with the term "uncertainty".

Andrew Gelman on over-use of Economics Utility Model to explain all of psychological behavior

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I was thinking about this recently. Many times, we can model people's behavior as a boot-strap process: people use a personal, informal, emotional process to decide whether to engage in rational (or semi-rational) utility analysis, or not.

[personal/informal/emotional process] ⇒ {{{decision point}}} ⇒ [begin rational utility analysis]

If they "drop out" at the decision point, nothing worth calling a rational utility analysis even gets started.

Many people are so overwhelmed by grappling with the critical issues of life, that they distract themselves into a silly stupor that makes a rational utility analysis impossible.

Andrew Gelman: Taxation curves and poverty traps - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: "

I think the concept of utility is extremely useful, and I've used it in my own applied work (see my papers on the utility of voting and on radon mitigation or the chapter on decision analysis in BDA). Utility is a model, and it's great.
My problem is when people think that the utility model can/should explain everything.
For example, as I've discussed on the blog, I don't think the utility model is particularly useful for explaining uncertainty aversion, seeing as the essence of the 'uncertainty aversion' phenomenon is that preferences can depend on how they are framed and how they are set up in terms of probabilities--two things that violate the classical von Neumann axioms in which preferences should only depend on the ultimate outcomes and their total probabilities, not on where these probabilities come from.
I think it's just sad that utility functions have become a default way of explaining all sorts of psychological processes that don't fit the model so well (requiring the sort of epicyclic adjustments that can make the model more trouble than it's worth). I can respect the general endeavor to take a model and push it as far as you can--to see what tweaks can be done to make it work further than it was originally intended--but, at some point, I think it makes sense to recognize the practical limitations of any mathematical model.
So, yes, I don't think utilities (or, for that matter, preferences) 'exist' in some Platonic sense. But I still think utility theory is great. I think the normal distribution is great, too, even though it can be misused in all sorts of ways!

"

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In a follow-up comment by Gelman:

Nathan (and Dan): I think prospect theory is great. I just don't like trying to explain uncertainty aversion using a nonlinear utility function of money (which, as I and others have shown repeatedly, makes no sense at all when you try to look at it quantitatively), and I really really don't like having to explain this to people over and over again, people whose technical ability is such that they could've realized in the first place the impossibility of explaining uncertainty-aversion-at-any-scale using a curving utility function. And I also don't like the term "risk aversion" casually used in a way that blurs three different phenomena: aversion to risk, aversion to loss, and aversion to uncertainty.