andrewducker

Tossing a coin: I've heard before the idea that you toss a coin and once it's spinning in the air you suddenly know what you're hoping for. I'm never completely convinced by it, though, because it presupposes that what you viscerally want the decision to be is necessarily the right decision.

For some kinds of decision that's just fine – when there's no reason for you not to do whatever the hell you like, e.g. "should I go and see this film, or that one, or just stay at home and eat ice cream?", no problem at all.

But as soon as the decision you're trying to make has an element of balancing your wants against considerations like other people's wants or ethics, or even just balancing your own short-term and long-term wants, the idea of determining your visceral desire and then doing that seems to me to have fundamentally missed the point of why you'd be struggling with a decision of that type in the first place.

That's a good point, and I think you analysed it exactly right.

I wonder if the lesson is "if you consider tossing a coin, you'll discover if your visceral reaction is what you want to base your decision on or not"? :)

I think I might do that, I only think about this sort of thing about simple decisions when I should usually be making the decision based on what I want, but aren't doing so for some reason.

I agree, if you're wrestling with an ethical dilemma, chance probably won't help.

Well, at least in tossing the coin, you'll know what you viscerally want. I find that sometimes it's necessary to separate that out from the more logical parts.

The climatic effect of windfarms en masse interested me.

I’ve been thinking about the effect of solar power in the Sahara being shipped to power European cities which presumably must make the Sahara slightly cooler and Europe slightly warmer.

Then I’ve been thinking about the Sundrop farm in South Australia and what kind of leakage of moisture you get from having thousands and thousands of them. Even just the sweat of several hundred thousand people a day would amount to something like a 150 thousand tonnes of additional water a year. Which is about 1/1000th of 1% of the flow of the Thames.

Looks like whatever we do we’re going to bump up against the environment in one way or another.

Nuclear ftw! :)

I’m not against nukes but they also have an environmental footprint.

Huh.. the Chrome performance link is defunct, inasmuch as Aptiverse appears to have changed hands.