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0 pointsgeneralizations3y ago0 comments

I think you misunderstood my use of the notion of priorities. Let me clarify.

Take the humble leaf blower. Recently, electric blowers have entered the market - lighter, easier to use, reliable, and you get a whole half-hour of use per charge! This is great for homeowners. Leave the battery in the cradle until you need it, snap it into the blower when you do, and everything just works.

But it's useless for landscapers. They need hours upon hours of use - and charging cradles don't work in a field, and those batteries are too expensive to just bring a box of them.

The homeowner might say, electric is the future! This satisfies all my needs, and it doesn't cause pollution; we should ban gasoline leaf blowers. But the landscaper will reply, No! I need a pragmatic, workable solution now. Only gasoline blowers will last the whole day, with an energy supply I can carry with me - and over years of use, it's more reliable, too!

This, dear reader, is a difference of priority. The landscaper can say, accurately, that gasoline is better - and similarly, the homeowner could say that electric is better. But because their priorities are so different, they will each come across to the other as entirely, irredeemably wrong.

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cauch3y ago

Firstly, you introduced the idea of difference of priority to respond to the misinformation bit. I still disagree with that: the fact that for a landscaper the gasoline is better does not imply that the landscaper cannot lie. For example, a landscaper can say "electric leaf blower will explode and kill your babies". THIS was my argument: the presence of "however" is the result of the fact that, on the internet, people who talk about the advantages of fossil fuels (so, the pro-fossil fuels) have to add a "however" to correct the historical misinformation. Not because they are left-wing or pro-renewable, but because they are intellectually honest.

In fact, I would even think that ChatGPT is building answers by copying what is said on PRO-FOSSIL FUELS WEBPAGES. It is the intellectually honest pro-fossil fuels who say more "however", and it is why ChatGPT ends up saying more "however".

Secondly, as answered, in the case of fossil fuels, it is difficult to find what is the priority in which the fossil fuels are superior. As I've said, you can find people for which the priority is "for the future" and who will think fossil fuels are too problematic, and find people for which the priority is "pragmatically now" and who will think fossil fuels are too problematic.

And, inversely, when you ask someone defending fossil fuels, you end up with people who are saying that their priorities are "pragmatically now" and "for the future" (those are saying that they don't believe in the long term scalability of the renewables, that they think the climate change crisis is overestimated (which is something they should not care about if they don't have a long term consideration), ...).

I understand the homeowner and landscaper difference of priority. But, in practice, I don't see a difference in priority in experts when they are talking about fossil fuels vs. renewables. Knowing an expert X and knowing their priorities does not help to know if they are going to be pro-renewable or pro-fossil fuels.

(I understand that for a layman, fossil fuels may look more pragmatical, but ChatGPT is not trained to reproduce the answer of a layman, it is trained on the data on the web, where the data on the subject is dominated, by construction, by discussion from experts. It is, by construction, dominated by discussion from experts, because a layman will not randomly post articles talking about a subject they don't know much about. And even if they do, not only they need to post on the thousand of different subjects in order to overcome the experts in all subjects, but they need to post regularly on the subject, at which point their opinion will evolve to something closer to the ones of the experts)

On the other hand, knowing the financial interests and the political alignment can help guessing their position. The reason they prefer fossil fuels or renewables is not about their priorities, it's about their personal interest and the position of the political side they like.