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The main point from Scott's talk today was the one he often brings up; systems vs goals. He gave examples of politics applying policy based on goals, at the expense of functional systems. It's really a reframing of what I've always said, that treating symptoms of a problem rather than the underlying disease will always result in suboptimal outcomes. Even that is just a way to say that First Principle thinking is a better way to problem solve than last principle thinking.
Scott's other big point today was that people are more concerned about things that they are more frequently told to be concerned about, regardless of the actual level and probability of threat.
His example was Mark Cubin (don't know who that is) saying that if global warming is only a 1% existential risk, it still requires all of our resources being leveraged to reduce that risk, because the 1% risk of losing everything is worth protecting it. The flaw is that there are hundreds of (1%) existential risks, and we can't focus everything on each one of those risks, and we don't know which ones are more risky. A meteorite causing extinction is an existential threat, and it's been proven to have happened before, so why not put all effort toward mitigating that risk?
This all goes back to my point that global warming is a risk among an infinite set; one which doesn't make my top 20 list.
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