It is widely reported that Kurt Vonnegut gave a commencement address at MIT in 1997 in which he advised the graduating class to “wear sunscreen.” But in fact it was actually a column written by Mary Schmich, published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997. It was a hypothetical commencement speech which gained fame after being misattributed to Vonnegut that wearing sunscreen was advised.
That’s another example of the phenomenon which Michael Crichton named the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect [1]. But I digress. Here’s what I wish to stress. If I were invited to give a commencement speech, an extremely unlikely event, my main advice would be to “choose your experts wisely.”
Choose very carefully whom you wish to trust. In this complex world of ours, none of us knows what is true. That’s simply because we lack the time and the talent to figure out what’s true for ourselves. Therefore we have to rely on experts. That’s what we economists call specialization.
Some people specialize in climate science, some on economics, some on AI, and so on. Because we specialize, we depend on others with their own special knowledge to tell us what is what.
You have to be careful whom you trust. If you choose as your experts activists who are committed to their agendas, you are likely to be deceived. The ax that they are grinding is meant for your wallets to start with but could end up at your neck. Continue reading “Global Warming and Climate Change”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 