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Trust and Fire - Thoughts from the Smoke

2017-08-25 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:48 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning (also: Personal life, Science & nature) · mode: Personal essay · tags: timely hook, self promotion, calendar ritual

With his Montana valley choked by wildfire smoke and the eclipse just past, Hank argues that trusting experts is not an appeal to authority but to a process of checked work (statistics, peer review, science); accepting scientific consensus beats one's own hunch, and discarding systems of trustable expertise is individualism taken to a dangerous extreme.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Wildfire smoke in Hank's Montana valley; the Lolo National Forest fire flares

  • ★★ Hank says Montana's unseasonably hot, dry summer has socked his valley with smoke, sometimes enough that experts advised him not to leave his house, certainly not with an infant. — 00:00:03 · Montana
  • ★★ Hank says it got worse when the nearest fire, in Lolo National Forest, burned more than 9,000 acres in one evening; it was beautiful, and fetching dinner for Katherine he kept stopping to film it. — 00:00:13 · Katherine Green

00:00:28 — The eclipse and the fires: someone knows, and their work is checked

  • ★★ Hank says Monday's eclipse was known exactly decades in advance, leaving time to make eclipse glasses and send them to gas stations nationwide. — 00:00:31
  • ★★★ Hank says he doesn't know how eclipses were predicted before computers or how scientists fight and predict fires, but he knows someone knows, and their work has been checked by others who know. — 00:00:51
  • ★★★ Hank says he has no space in his head to figure all this out alone, and that's good: human progress is not every person figuring out everything for themselves. — 00:01:13

00:01:23 — Trusting experts is an appeal to a process, not to authority; worry about confirming everything oneself

  • ★★ Hank says people answer his trust in experts by calling it the fallacy of appeal to authority, and he agrees that 'this expert says so' is not a good argument. — 00:01:23

  • ★★★ Hank says he appeals not to one person but to a process with a good record of explaining and predicting; the expert is the proxy for the process. — 00:01:35

    “The expert is the proxy for the process.”

  • ★★ Hank says he appeals to all the people who will check the work: to statistics, logic, calculus and peer review, to science. — 00:01:47

  • ★★★ Hank says he is often not arguing but explaining that, on things he isn't interested in or able to learn enough about, he happily accepts scientific consensus as far better than his hunch. — 00:02:03

  • ★★★ Hank says this isn't trusting that experts are right but accepting that professionals are far likelier to be right than someone who just wants to argue: not an appeal to authority but to sanity. — 00:02:18

    “It’s like an appeal to sanity.”

  • ★★★ Hank is worried by some people's current feeling that they must confirm everything for themselves, which he calls individualism taken to maybe a fatal extreme. (hedged) — 00:02:31

  • ★★★ Hank grants that trusting people for the expert label can lead to trouble, but calls robust systems for creating and identifying trustable expertise a great achievement of society; those who would discard them scare him. — 00:02:46
  • ★★ Hank says watching the beautiful and terrible smoke plumes over his town made him grateful to those who study these things for a living so he doesn't have to. — 00:03:08

00:03:21 — End screen: John's 40th birthday turtle cakes, the ROLF Kickstarter, the Gulf Coast

  • ★★ Hank wishes John a happy 40th birthday, which was yesterday (24 August 2017), and says they made him lots of turtle cakes. — 00:03:21 · John Green
  • ★★ Hank says the Kickstarter for ROLF, DFTBA Games' dumb party game, ends in a few days; anyone who wants to help and pledge for a copy has a link in the description. — 00:03:29 · ROLF, Kickstarter
  • ★★ Hank tells everyone on the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana he hopes it won't be as bad as it looks, asks them to be safe and make good decisions, and says he is thinking of them. (hedged) — 00:03:39

In the description and comments

  • ★★★ The description says people chipping away at the idea of objective knowledge are chipping away at the foundation of their own society. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: division of cognitive labour · expert · scientific consensus · Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017 · wildfire

Also: People: Katherine Green

Works: ROLF

Organizations: Kickstarter

Rituals: Happy John Day

Concepts: argument from authority · culture · distrust of expertise · individualism · peer review · science

Places: Lolo National Forest · Louisiana · Montana · Texas

Only in the description or credits: DFTBA Games

Also centred on division of cognitive labour: The Kony 2012 of Roads - Solar Freakin' Roadways

Also centred on expert: Can You Trust Mainstream Media? · Things I'm Finding Encouraging · you'll never know

Also centred on scientific consensus: Can You Trust Science Too Much? · This Might Actually be Happening

Also centred on wildfire: The Amazon isn't "Burning" - It's Being Burned

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