What have you changed your mind about in 2007?

[andygates]

Edge.org, the philosopher's funhouse, has a fascinating stack of little articles by various Big Thinkers entitled What Have You Changed Your Mind About?  Why?  It's refreshing to see people's positions changing due to evidence, experience or contemplation; the internet is too full of dogmatic blowhards reflexively defending their positions.

I've changed my mind about ideas.  I used to think that people could evaluate ideas: that given a commonsense idea and a daft one, the daft one would always lose, because people can see and weigh the merit of both and make an informed choice.  But what I've come to realise is that some ideas are persuasive regardless of their merit.  Setting fire to your neighbours is destructive and dumb, but it's happening right now in Kenya; the BNP are silly racists, but they get voted in right here in the UK.  No, I've reached the position where I think that some ideas are deeply virulent - they spread from mind to mind like wildfire - and that this makes them dangerous, because they're junk compared to what is already there.  The popularity of anything is absolutely no judge of its merit, which, for me at least, puts the final nail in democracy's coffin: not only are the masses uneducated but they're also voting on the virulence of ideas, not their merit.  Give me think-tanks and committees of calm expert heads, any time.

I've also started to move towards a fence-sitting position on, of all things, nuclear power.  The balance of threats feels like it has shifted now that climate change is showing its teeth; people are clearly never going to reduce their energy consumption (and thinking that they will is dangerously delusional); Chernobyl isn't the luminous mutant-infested horror-show it could have been.  I'm still far from convinced: I do not believe a private company should ever operate anything so potentially-dangerous when private companies answer to their Board, and I need to be convinced that a state organisation would do it better.  I still think that renewables will be comfortably adequate and I'm big on wind power.  And of course I have a hardon for space lasers.  But I'm open to persuasion either way.  Maybe it's just because it has been a while since the last big disaster (!)

Comments

[despaer.livejournal.com]

I changed my mind on the worth of solar water heaters for the roof of your house on finding out that they are not compatible with Combi boilers. No fault of the water heaters but combi boilers unfortunately combine being more efficient than a hot water cylinder with being too stupid to cope with pre-heated water. AAARGH when will these people try and use some joined up thinking????

Unfortunately must disagree with you about wind power. Its bloody useless. It is unreliable which is a big no-no for any power supply as you still need ALL your potential capacity needs in place in case of a two week winter high parking itself over the country and giving us freezing cold, clear blue sky days through January, and it's not that great even with ordinary wind. More importantly because the green brigade are so obsessed with wind they are pouring vast amounts of money and effort into wind farms they are missing the chance to do a proper job with solar electricity generation. It works all year so theoretically enough panels = no more need for fossil fuels, especially when combined with the up and coming hydrogen powered car technology. Think about it, crack some water with the electricity from a solar panel to make hydrogen, use that to power a car. If the wind lobby made as much effort with this as they did with big windmills in Cornwall and Scotland...

[andygates.livejournal.com]

This is the curse of renewables: there are so many options and none has really emerged as a clear winner, so any plans are prone to getting dragged into wind vs solar vs tidal vs microturbines in people's hats.

Actually that last one might work. I claim prior art!

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

Interesting idea. I don't know the figures for how large a solar panel you'd need here in the UK to cover the average car's usage (and the hydrogen compressor), but I bet it'd be pretty large, and not very sensible for a cold country with the highest population density in europe (sans malta). Outsourcing our solar power generation to somewhere like mauritania (stable, empty and covered in hot dry desert) would make more sense.
And you can mix the wind with the hydrogen argument - use the high wind points to generate potential energy (be that hydrogen or a reservoir battery) for the low points.
However generally in the UK it looks to me that our politians like to talk loudly, promise much, but actually do little. And we let them. I'm not sure we can do enough to make a difference without radical lifestyle changes, but we aren't even doing the little things. Tax plastic bags, ban filament light bulbs, use tax to incentivise solar power generation. These have all been done in other western countries. What have we done here? Out sourced our manufacturing and changed from oil to gas for our electicity generation (a switchover started more than 10 years ago before there were worries about CO2).

We've inherited a nice large energy account that, like any teenager, we're spending with wild abandon and no thought for the future. I suspect that we're going to have to take quite a drop / change in living standards once we have to generate our own energy rather than using that balance. (unless we can get fusion up and running of course).

[despaer.livejournal.com]

Yup. I'd agree with pretty much all of that. The reason I am fond of the solar panel idea is that you can stick a small one in almost every garden/rooftop/whatever. They are not something whose effectiveness drops to zero below an impractical size. And they are as far as I can tell the only practical renewable that can be installed in a terrace house/garden sized property, like wot most of us live in.

Do It All had a wind turbine that they were marketing last year for residential properties and the blurb looked great until you realised that the quoted power output required a constant force 6 wind to maintain and even then it was only just about enough to run your kettle, and unless you live in Stornoway you can probably count the number of days where a force 6 blows constantly for the day on one hand each year. By all means build wind farms, just don't rely on them.