If-Then Knots ---------------------->

Strawman

Redstate has a post up criticizing predictions of Venusian runaway warming.  True, some proponents of addressing the ways we are causing the present warming trend have probably predicted Venusian runaway.  It would not surprise me to find that there are folks that are ignorant of climatology on both sides of the political debate.  However, in the scientific debate the risk of Venusian runaway warming is assessed as minimal.  This does not mean that we are out of the woods as far as all bad effects from our impact on the climate goes, of course.  On thing that particularly concerns me is the fact that changes in seasonal patterns and rainfall patterns may upset agriculture, especially in regions already susceptible to famine.  It will not take Venusian runaway warming for us to have those kinds of impacts.  I was going to slam Redstate in this post, but this comment and fact that the post's author felt compelled to say "I am not a 100% skeptic of global warming - nor of the possibility of human influence" shows that even on a far-right site like Redstate their are folks that understand climatology well enough that outright denial is not the default position.

Modeling Epistemic Agents

Suppose you could define an ideal (maybe just a median) Bayesian agent. Then you could make definitions along these lines:

Testimony Skeptic: One who is more reluctant to accept testimony than the ideal Bayesian agent.

Testimony Denier: One who will not accept testimonial evidence at all.

You could start to model different epistemological types by defining scalars on outcomes of probability assessments for given classes of evidence, to get a piecewise function.  Like this:

P_α(h|e&b&c) =  P_ideal(h|e&b&c) for e not in B

                           P_ideal(h|e&b&c)*s for e in B

To get the definitions of skeptic and denier given above you let B be the class {evidence based testimony}. But you could let it be {evidence based testimony about __________}. You could have any number of classes defined in different ways and model all sorts of individuals this way.