Is this what normal people read all the time? I mean, they make statements like this with no clarification at all:
"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."
What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.
And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.
That's just one example out of a dozen. Is Time an editorial magazine, or is it supposed to be some sort of objective journalism?
That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.
"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."
What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.
Really? This is your complaint? By 'unnecessary,' we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.' That much is evident to any sincere reader of the article who cares enough about the pursuit of knowledge to abide by the principle of charity: Put the best face on the argument before you refute it, otherwise you are not contributing.
The straw-man argument, "Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary," is wholly beside the point.
And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.
Again, this cannot be a serious complaint. The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor. A surface reading would be that we're just raising the temperature of the planet to an unhealthy extreme. A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state. More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.
That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.
This is evident from the shallowness of your misguided critique. More practice at reading, dead-tree media or otherwise, might have made you a skillful enough reader to have been able to follow the plot here.
There's no need to be so aggressive. And I think I made it clear that the example I excerpted was only one of many offending sentences. I could easily pull others, if I were motivated to use my time in such a way. The piece in question made a quantity of assumptions that I normally only associate with activist literature, and not supposedly objective journalism. I don't consider that to be a hallmark of quality news.
Yes, Time Magazine allows editorial writing throughout its content. I won't comment on what I think their biases are, but I'm pretty sure you can detect them on your own.
"we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.'"
Well, even that's wrong. If there was no need at all, then it wouldn't be done that way.
I do this stuff for movies I watch all the time: "Well, Morpheus didn't know any better about the humans-as-batteries, and didn't understand how computing power might be a more reasonable use," and "Equilibrium might be set farther in the future than it seems to be, which would explain how things could have gone this far." When you have to fix up what a columnist really meant, I think that's a sign that something is wrong, and I agree with the your parent poster that this columnist either doesn't understand what he's talking about or is writing for effect without regard to accuracy.
> The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor.
Oh really?
> A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state.
Then the author is babbling. None of the science-based estimates suggest anything like that.
If the author really thinks "sterilizing", "boiling" wasn't a metaphor but scare-mongering.
> More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.
You must not read much mainstream media. Nearly every piece contains little nuggets like the one(s) you mention. It isn't just Time; they all do it. Not surprisingly, newspapers are struggling with their readers now leaving in droves.
Well, for example, a substantial fraction of our marketed energy use is devoted to heating and cooling (more than 50%); better building designs (like those from the Passivhaus program) essentially eliminate that, at a minimal additional construction cost. A lot of what's left is transportation; a switch from trucks to trains, plus bicycles and local electric public transit for short-distance people-moving, plus better streamlining and saner traffic control, would eliminate the majority of that. Your laptop uses maybe 15 watts; your car is maybe 300 000 watts at full power. It's not a matter of eliminating "modern technology" but rather developing and deploying truly modern technology that focuses on energy efficiency.
The idea is to keep the heat inside, not the air. Passive houses typically come with special ventilation systems that completely exchange the air once every 2-3 hours, while keeping >80% of the energy inside. This kind of design is becoming increasingly popular here in Germany.
Cool. I asked because there have been some problems with energy efficient houses in the Netherlands. People actually got health problems because the ventilation doesn't work well enough. Have there been independent studies of air quality for the houses in Germany?
I don't really know, and I don't speak from first-hand experience. But from what I've heard, the main concern is not air quality, but humidity. When you heat up air, its relative humidity goes down. So especially in winter, the ventilation system can blow very dry air into the building. There are simple technical solutions that artificially "humidify" the air, but it's definitely something to look out for. Low humidity can cause all sorts of health problems.
most of our energy use is unnecessary -- from the article
Saul Griffith via Long Now lays out a nice engineer's estimation of factor 7-9x required drop in personal energy use; mostly through deprival: we become vegetarians, travel little, etc. Let's hope that's unnecessary.
The article really mixes two messages: "behavioral economics works" and "Obama knows what's good for you". The second one is claimed without any evidence, so I chose to ignore it.
I stopped reading Time, Newsweek, USNWR, etc whan I was in High School. Later I read that these magazines were written for 8-9th grade level. That was in the late '70s so I'm sure they are dumbing-down to the 5th grade level by now. Bad strategy. Also, and I'm going out on a limb here, but the internet really changes everything. The reporters have not been objective for decades but they are learning that they cannot get away with slop now that the internet exists. Exciting times!
First off, this isn't Digg or Reddit. Snarky, shallow, one-line summaries are generally not welcome here.
Second, your stupid summary is not supported by the text of the article.
people [sic] are irrational and make stupid decisions.
There is some truth to this if we take the best possible reading. Research continually shows that people do make decisions that are not supported by rational thinking. Bubbles arise in very simple trading games, even when there is an objective maximum to the item traded that falls well below the traded value, for example. There are countless other examples and a rich and growing literature on the subject. Thus, your first statement seems actually to be true, even if it was offered with sarcastic disdain.
The government knows better.
Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article. Given that the percentage of people making a given choice can be skewed by how the choice is offered, it seems a reasonable course of action to make the offer in such a way as to achieve the desired result. The decreased withholding example from the article is a brilliant case in point. The government really does know better which way to implement a tax cut in order to increase spending.
Typical Time Magazine.
At some point in your life you're going to have to start addressing the substance of arguments offered rather than considering the source. Maligning Time serves no purpose relevant to the discussion of whether or not the propositions offered in the article correspond to reality. It serves only to rehearse your own biases.
This is a forum for grown-ups. If you can't comport yourself in a manner appropriate to your peers, please remain silent.
Or, to put it in terms more fitting Digg or Reddit: Lurk Moar!
Good point. I think what he meant to say is that the article made sweeping generalizations about the quality of human decision making, resting on a few superficial stats and questionable assumptions. It also fetishized tricks to change folks' behavior while pretending that Obama's public policy goals are indisputable. Since one man's ideal world is not the same as another man's, and the form one's ideal world takes is generally governed by first principles that can't be proved, and since public policy is the means to transform the world into one's ideal, the notion that the administration's policies can't be criticized is ludicrously silly. Sure, I'm interested in the means, but it's by no means settled what the ends should be. (Nor will it ever be, I should add, as long as people are free to disagree.)
Anyone who has followed Time Magazine at all knows that this is typical of its writing.
> Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article.
Hmm. Did govt know best during the Bush years?
Do you really want to argue that general skepticism towards govt is wrong? If it isn't, do you really want to argue that it's a "right-wing canard"?
Hint: saying that someone is "right-wing" or taking a right-wing position isn't actually a cogent argument. The folks who care about the lables either already agree or strongly disagree. The undecided don't care about the labels or the tribes. (Clue: "destroy Bush" was only the goal of leftwing fanboys.)
People are irrational and do make stupid decisions, there's a ton of good science saying so, and there are good scientific explanations. We can't run 50mph and we can't not like high-flavor calories. No blame attaches - human nature is what it is. Equally, we are vulnerable to peer group norms and asymmetric treatment of opt-out versus opt-in. Again, science.
Connect those, and you get a way to manipulate humans into doing nonstupid things.
Should you do that? That's a question ethics, and maybe politics.
Can you? That's a question for science, and the answer seems to be yes.
