[scarejunba]

When deciding 'did something happen?' I need the sources to be generally reliable about fact reporting because they do not rely on pure reason. For fact reporting which is an aggregate, I need to rely upon the track record of the sources. In this case, some of the second-level sources are from the Cato Institute, which I know to be low trust source of truth[0].

This means I have to assign this a low-magnitude coefficient of trust (not a high-magnitude negative coefficient[1]).

That means what you're describing could well be true. I just don't know it based on who's saying it.

0: Compare http://web.archive.org/web/20090402090751/http://www.cato.or... with what I knew at the time

1: The classic "There is no gold buried here" is a high-magnitude negative coefficient

[lliamander]

I am unfamiliar with the history of that particular document. I don't really want to get into the question of climate change here.

Nonetheless, I see what you mean about high vs. low magnitude coefficient trust. Personally, I don't assign a particularly high-magnitude coefficient for Cato either. However, I don't assign a particularly high magnitude coefficient to any economic/political think tank. For two reasons:

1. Economics is not a science in any meaningful sense of the word. There is no empirical process for falsifying theories; there is merely a dialectic. Now, the dialectic can be more or less rigorous, but there is an upper-bound to the level of certainty that dialectic can provide.

2. Everyone has an agenda. This is inescapable when it comes to politics. The best we can hope for is that all parties demonstrate some self-awareness of that fact.

Relative to plenty of other sources, I would say that Cato ranks relatively well. At the very least, they are one of the most respectable libertarian sources, and should probably be taken seriously (even if you disagree with them).