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A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the default states, and everything else involves some perturbation. This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.

Dale Jamieson

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Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Science
Everyday
Equilibrium
Else
Behavior
Frame
Deal
Involves
Perturbation
States
Deals
Stability
Presupposition
Everything
Philosophy
Math
Tacit
Great
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Mental
Conceptual
Whatever
Models
Default

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

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I'm a subjectivist about morality.
Dale Jamieson
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It is probably true that the economic benefits of being in the EU are a net positive to the UK, but a large number of people do not share in these benefits and the result is increasing inequality.
Dale Jamieson
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You can't imagine anything like nature as we know it without predators.
Dale Jamieson
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It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.
Dale Jamieson
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The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on.
Dale Jamieson
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When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
Dale Jamieson
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If you look globally you see a patchwork of jurisdictions (nations, states, provinces, cities) that have taken aggressive action on climate change, and a patchwork of jurisdictions that have not. These various policies reflect the politics of each jurisdiction and the values of its citizens.
Dale Jamieson
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The only way major change in environmental policy is going to happen, the only way, is if there is a very strong, very active popular movement that demands it and such a movement would be unparalleled because it would be a popular movement that says, Raise our taxes so that we change our behavior.
Dale Jamieson
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Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.
Dale Jamieson
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The seas will continue to rise no matter who gets elected president.
Dale Jamieson
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Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale Jamieson
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We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.
Dale Jamieson
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Attitudes are changing very quickly.
Dale Jamieson
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If we're interested in the continuation of the human experiment we need to focus on resilience and coping with change (whether natural or anthropogenic) rather than living as if God or nature has given us a nice, orderly, calm, Babbit-like existence.
Dale Jamieson
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Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.
Dale Jamieson
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I played with English and Sociology in college but dropped out to work in the anti-war movement. I was going around denouncing the Viet Nam war as immoral but one day it dawned on me that I didn't know what that meant. I signed up for an ethics class at San Francisco State to find out the answer.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change involves fundamental choices about how we want to live and what kind of world we want.
Dale Jamieson
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The Paris climate conference in December, 2015 was a recognition that countries bring their climate policies to international meetings rather than create them during the negotiations (much less do they receive orders from the international community and then go home and implement them).
Dale Jamieson