A Ridiculous Daytime TV Nude Climate Stunt
Before us today is an excellent example of the Appeal To Non-Authority Fallacy, as described below and, more fully, in the upcoming second edition of Everything You Believe Is Wrong
Quoting from the story “Lily Phillips, other OnlyFans creators spread the word about climate change“:
“Big Oil [OnlyFans] more people every day than I can do in a lifetime,” said OnlyFans star Lily Phillips in a video called “Body Count.” But this isn’t one of her famous (or infamous) explicit clips — it’s a climate change PSA by Headline Newds, a project about sharing science and news about climate change and the oil industry.
I made a discrete word substitution in the quotation, since this a family blog, which leaves the meaning of the sentence unchanged.
Prescott and Riches [others in the trade] told Thomas that they’re utilizing the parasocial relationships fans of these creators have in order to engage them with the message. And who better to help relay the urgency of climate change than sex workers? “We’re so used to people using sex workers for clickbait and not seeing them as human beings,” Prescott told Thomas.
That’s a strange complaint about clickbait for ladies who make their livings prostituting themselves for clicks. But never mind that. What’s interesting to us is the claim that whores, “who better”, can educate people about “the urgency of climate change.”
The Appeal to Non-Authority is related to its (here) sister fallacy, the well known Appeal to Authority; but in the Non-Authority the appeal is not made to an expert or anyone knowledgable, but instead is made to a person or persons who are demonstrably ignorant about the subject at hand.
And who is more ignorant about the thermodynamics of a differentially heated fluid on a rotating sphere than women who spreads their legs for tokens from degenerate and lonely men? Even Greta Thunberg must look like Newton reborn next to these ladies.
You would have more success examining chicken entrails to augur future temperatures than in consulting with a prostitute while in the throes of lust. The people who thought up the idea ought to have known this, as any sober person would.
So what inspired them?
Perhaps the peer-reviewed paper “A systematic review and meta-analysis of communication strategies to promote climate action” by Tobias Brosch and others in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Brosch himself is some kind of “sustainability” (a word with no fixed meaning) psychologist. Yes, really.
And he appears to be in the same epistemic boat as Lily Phillips, meaning he also has no training or insight into cloud parameterization schemes or skill calculations, and so he, as another Non-Authority, must take as gospel truth the dictates of actual climate scientists.
Which he does. And those dictates worry him (as they probably don’t Phillips, whose interest is almost surely mercenary). So he has done “research” on how to make sure others are as unnecessarily worried as he is.
Lo, he has discovered that “climate change communication strategies have a small positive effect” on some needless measure of awareness we can ignore. Brosch welcomes the effect but laments it is only small.
How to make it bigger and scare more people?
Strategies promoting stronger emotional engagement, such as using storytelling or inducing awe related to the beauty of nature, appeared more effective than strategies merely communicating scientific evidence and facts.
Moreover, using images as opposed to text increased the effectiveness of communication strategies, while studies adopting Open Science standards found somewhat smaller, more conservative, effects.
In a Nature piece covering the paper, with the far-from-subtle subtitle “Evoking emotions is more likely to prompt people to engage with climate efforts than are data alone“, we hear from Brosch:
“Our findings show that merely providing scientific facts is not the best way to communicate on climate-related issues — you need to connect with people,” says co-author Tobias Brosch, a psychologist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
“The emotions you feel when you watch a nature documentary, see the Northern Lights or witness the birth of a new animal imbue these events with meaning,” he adds. “They may also drive you to look better after our environment — by volunteering your time, donating or voting for climate-friendly parties.”
The best strategy, in other words, is not to document dry statistics, which nobody understands anyway, but instead to gaze at a nude prostitute as she frowns about “climate change”.
That’ll really bring ’em over! Where would we be without Science?
See more here substack.com