First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.

The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.

I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.

If they're just adding up each candidate's votes, that's not how approval is supposed to be tabulated in a multi-winner context (which is more complicated); see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting

But I'm disillusioned. Many non-plurality methods (including approval) can effectively solve the spoiler problem (i.e. satisfy IIA)... but I no longer think that spoilers are the absolute most important problem to solve.

The most important problem is single-seat districts creating anti-majoritarian, disproportional legislatures. Because of how people geographically sort themselves among the likeminded, even independent districting commissions will not be able to effectively prevent anti-majoritarian legislatures.

For this reason, I believe that we would greatly benefit from explicitly proportional representation. This can be accomplished through cardinal or ordinal means - I no longer care about that dimension. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't enjoy some incremental benefit from approval or really any non-FPTP system. We would. Seattle should go ahead and do its thing. But the fight for better forms of democracy can't stop with any system that retains single-seat districts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bg8vc/what_websi...

What would happen if you got to be the contrarian that predicted the experts' wrongness? That would prove you're smart.

And a lot of us want to feel smart. So that makes us more vulnerable to certain cognitive weaknesses.

Is that to say that the Prison Experiment is actually explained by the Milgram obedience experiments? :-)

Think about it this way. If you wrote an article about preventing the Toyota bug that resulted in uncontrolled acceleration, unless you were a former Toyota employee there's simply no way you can say "Toyota needs to change these specific lines of code" and you wouldn't even try. You might say "Toyota needs to adopt such-and-such code review practices" or "NHTSA needs to regulate the computer-controlled components of cars like this". Those are early, indirect steps that should force (or incentivize) the actual detailed improvements that you'd like to see happen.

The end of the fourth paragraph and beginning of the fifth paragraph talk imply a solution: use crash test dummies that accurately simulate women's anatomy. (This is made a little more explicit in the ninth paragraph, as it mentions "requiring updated and more equitable dummy implementation tested in every seat".)

The seventh paragraph mentions that insufficient regulation of the auto industry has allowed them to build very large cars. It is thus implied that regulating the auto industry to produce smaller cars would help.

The eight paragraph talks about how the exclusion of women from automotive design decisions has lead them to ignore women as consumers (and crash victims). The implied solution is for auto companies to hire more women.

His view (supported by his grad research) was that the default approach of presenting information allows viewers to gloss over how the video's information differs from their pre-existing mental models. After the video is done, they can go back to their pre-existing models without actually updating with info from the video, because as far as they're concerned, there wasn't conflict between the pre-existing model and the video's info.

His hope in showing interviews with people off the street is to get people to think about how they might answer the interview question. Get people to remember their pre-existing model. Then hit them with the contrast between their pre-existing model and the truth, so the viewer hopefully makes an attempt to incorporate the truth.

Now, this doesn't say anything about the information density of his videos. I don't think they're very information dense. This reply is just about his attempt to increase the viewer's retention of the information that is presented.

The problem is that everybody gets hurt, in at least a short-term sense, by a carbon tax. And yes, a lot of people will understand that this is a necessary pain. But all the worst carbon offenders that might campaign against a climate policy would get hurt by the same thing at the same time, so they would provide a large lobbying voice to weaken or destroy what's hurting them (this example is about carbon taxes, but really any sort of universal punitive measure) as a policy.

Politically, punishments will remain effective for longer if they are targeted so that the opposition to them remains divided. It _might_ help if carbon taxes could be adopted on a per-industry basis, because polluters are nothing if not keen to avoid thinking about anything that they perceive as not their problem- it should be possible to avoid triggering any sort of sense of polluter-solidarity on their part.

Another possibility is offering positive financial incentives to stopping fossil fuel activity. The government could directly give cash to companies that stop pulling coal and oil out of the ground, or stop burning it. Fracking companies in particular should be given a ton of money if they convert to geothermal.