[davisoneee]

You say you do a cost:benefit...but where do those costs come from? To me, that's just voluntarily doing your own ignorant, sloppy science I was mentioning above. If you only consider the blatantly obvious costs and benefits, you are completely ignorant of any 2nd or 3rd order...or even your own blind spots. You may radically under or overstate, or even calculate in the wrong direction.

I think a better position is that we should have a higher bar of what level of study or replication is required for a given situation...whether that be health, housing, infrastructure or whatever policy is coming in...what kind of monetary outlay and timeline of impact is expected. I don't think most people here would be happy with a 6-person study, unreplicated, deciding policy...so what IS the threshold?

[efitz]

I don’t analyze the papers, I analyze the policies.

Take the climate. Assuming the science is correct (storms worse, oceans rising, etc), let’s do a cost benefit analysis of the proposed policies.

The proposed policies in the US all dramatically increase the cost of energy (and therefore of everything), but only slightly slow the progression of warming, AND the bigger contributing countries in the developing world, esp China and India, will continue or increase their CO2 output.

We already know how to build dikes, and people who buy oceanfront property already know the risks, and over the last century we as a species have gotten really good as reducing deaths due to weather, so I don’t support the draconian carbon reduction proposals, and instead we can just deal with the side effects as they arise.

[isotypic]

But how do you analyze the policies without doing science? Nothing in the above is sound to me.

"The proposed policies in the US all dramatically increase the cost of energy" - why? How do you even begin to conclude this without looking at some sort of (economic/scientific) analysis?

"only slightly slow the progression of warming" - again, how are you concluding this?

"we as a species have gotten really good as reducing deaths" - why should this trend continue? Why should it continue in the face of more extreme weather/climate change?

All I see are things you _think_ are true, and so to you your argument seems sound. But as the comment you replied to said, all I see is ignorant, sloppy science, since any meaningful analysis of these policies is by definition science. These cost/benefits you mention are not universal apparent truths.

[cynicalpeace]

It's not the current threshold, where you just need a single paper in a semi-prestigious journal to become "the science". This was my point.

[davisoneee]

From my perspective, I don't think I ever see "the science" being decided based on a single crap paper, so it seems a bit of a skeptical straw man. Perhaps that's different in your country, state, city, county, continent, island. Perhaps that's true for a particular policy _area_ that you are invested in. In general, I find arguments on scarequotes "science" often overblown and just reinforcing existing biases.

How much 'policy' are you happy with that you've never checked to validate that it was properly replicated beforehand? How much of your skepticism is against "the science" on new policy you start with an initial dislike to...compared to policy that we consider as standard, are probably comfortable with, likely consider to be 'beneficial enough'...and yet haven't adequately scrutinized?