Two of the “students” in each group were paid actors, told to ignore the smoke. The remaining, real students, presumably not wanting to look stupid or panicky in front of the others, ignored the smoke in 90% of cases. If students were on their own, however, they went to investigate the smoke 75% of the time.[1. A word of warning. This is a classic psychology experiment, and classic psychology experiments have had a bad time lately. A related concept, the “bystander effect”, is looking shaky. But I think this is one of the solid ones. Even if it isn’t, we’re only using it as an analogy.]

The point is that we don’t just care about whether there’s a real chance of danger – even apparently real, apparently obvious signs of very imminent danger, like smoke under a door. We also care, very much, about looking silly.

Seeing the Smoke drew an analogy with the coronavirus, which was then still mainly in Wuhan. “Human intuition is … very good at one thing: not looking weird in front of your peers,” wrote Jacob. “It’s so good at this, in fact, that the desire to not look weird will override most incentives.” The point of his blog was to give permission to worry. If you were the sort of person who would sit in a smoke-filled room until someone else stood up, he said, “I’m here to be that someone for you.” The point was to give you social permission to start making preparations, whatever those preparations were.

I read Seeing the Smoke, and shared it on Twitter, in an attempt to spread the permission. Dominic Cummings, at the time still the chief advisor to Boris Johnson, did as well, and said so in March this year. It, along with a Slate Star Codex blog post a few days later, “helped me and some others in no10 realise we were going terribly wrong”, Cummings tweeted. Put A Number On It is a key part of the rationalist blogosphere, and Cummings, like me, is a fan.

Cummings is going in front of a Commons select committee on Wednesday, to talk about the decisions the Government made as the pandemic spread to the UK. There will probably be mud-slinging and a lot of claims and counter-claims about who said what and when.

Certainly, the arguments over whether or not the Government was “pursuing a herd immunity strategy” seem extremely vulnerable to definitional problems – does that mean they planned to let the virus rip unchecked, or to slow and control its spread? But it’s definitely the case that in early March, the UK was talking about slowing, rather than stopping, the virus: its pandemic flu plan said “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.” Instead, they wanted to let the virus work its way through the population slowly, protecting the most vulnerable, while preventing it from ever overwhelming the NHS. You can call that a “herd immunity strategy” if you like, or not, but that was the goal.

And it does sound as though by 18 March, Cummings was pushing for faster lockdown. That was a few days after the publication of Seeing the Smoke, and around the same time as Tomas Pueyo published his influential post The Hammer and the Dance, calling for draconian, immediate lockdowns to crush the curve, which – if you acted early enough – could be reasonably brief, weeks rather than months.

Whatever one’s view of Cummings, an ability to see the smoke, despite the other people in the room apparently not seeing it, is an extremely useful skill. At the beginning of the year, the media didn’t want to look panicky, it didn’t want to look weird, so too many of us said things like “don’t worry about coronavirus, worry about the flu” or made fun of Silicon Valley types for refusing to shake hands.

There’s a phrase that is used a lot on social media, “read the room”. When people are angry about something, and someone else comes in and says “actually it’s a bit more complicated than that”, they are told to “read the room”. A classic example: when the political analyst David Shor tweeted, during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, that violent race riots in 1968 reduced the Democratic vote enough to tip the election to Nixon, he was told to “read the room” and that he was “tone deaf”. A few days later he was fired from his job.

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“Reading the room”, understanding what the social consensus around some issue is and not straying too far from that consensus, is an important thing. I’m not belittling it: we live in a social world, and we need to understand the mores and demands of that social world in order to prosper in it – and to make that social world bearable for everyone.

If we all ignored the strictures of society, it would be chaos. That includes rules of not saying things that are true but offensive: parents will know the exquisite agony of having their too-young-to-read-the-room child saying things like “Look daddy, that man’s really fat”. I’m not calling for a total free-for-all where you can say anything you like as long as it’s true. But reading the room isn’t always useful, and it won’t tell you if the room is filling up with smoke or not.

Back in March 2020, there was an elite consensus on certain things. Masks don’t work. We shouldn’t panic (37 days before lockdown, UK newspapers were mocking people who were scared of Covid and telling you you were more likely to be killed by a cow). Travel bans don’t work. (I got that one wrong.) If you locked down early, the population would get “behavioural fatigue” after a few weeks.

And if you had read the room, you would have agreed with all of it. I know I often did. That’s what the experts are telling us! It’s only Silicon Valley tech bros who want us to stop shaking hands, and Donald Trump who wants us to close our borders. The trouble is, the room was wrong, and reading it correctly didn’t help.

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The rationalists, as Matt Yglesias wrote after the Slate Star Codex kerfuffle earlier this year, are really bad at reading the room, and much better at seeing the smoke. They talk about numbers and facts a lot, and come to conclusions like “actually, if you want to do good in the world, you should contribute to antimalarial charities rather than getting angry about the hot-button issues of the day”. That is the opposite of reading the room.

Cummings, for better or worse, is also terrible at reading the room. And he admires people who are similarly bad at it – the abovementioned David Shor, for instance. He promotes rationalist and rationalist-adjacent people like the podcaster Julia Galef and the superforecaster (and occasional UnHerd contributor) Michael Story. He wanted to hire “weirdos” as government advisers. (As an aside, I suspect that one’s ability to read the room is related to one’s tendency to “decouple”.)

These days, it’s wrong not to like masks, and we’re criticising the Government for not shutting borders quickly enough to counter the Indian variant. Behavioural fatigue turned out not to be a thing. I haven’t shaken hands in 14 months. But we’re still reading the room when we agree with those things. It’s just that the room’s opinion has changed.

An interesting game is trying to work out what the room’s opinions will shift on next. At the moment, it seems to be starting to change on the question: did the coronavirus escape from a lab?

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It’s funny, because the hypothesis “Covid escaped from a Chinese lab” sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory, but all its constituent parts, “there are labs working on gain-of-function research in viruses, including in Wuhan”, “major disease outbreaks have been started by viruses leaking from high-security labs”, and “the Chinese aren’t always super open and transparent about things”, are pretty uncontroversial. Whether it turns out to be true or not, the theory has gone from crackpot speculation to plausible hypothesis, but very few of the facts have changed; only the opinion of the room.

And interestingly, Put A Number On It borrowed the “smoke” metaphor from an earlier blog post by a different rationalist, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who was talking about the dangers of human extinction caused by AI. Perhaps we ought to take that a bit more seriously too. (Although I should declare an interest, since my first book was on that topic.)

Seeing the smoke, not reading the room: these are difficult things to do. They involve putting yourself outside the consensus, outside the cosy circle where we all agree: they risk making you look ridiculous, or worse. In the Covid era, though, reading the room rather than seeing the smoke probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Dominic Cummings has many faults, but I suspect he is better at seeing smoke than he is at reading rooms.

It may sound obvious that you should take both: you get the extra thousand in either case. But the twist is that, before Omega filled the boxes, it predicted what you would do. And if it predicted you would take just the opaque box, it put the million pounds in there. If it predicted you’d take both, it left the opaque box empty. It knows you know this. It’s done this to 100 other people already, and it’s successfully predicted their choice 99 times. What is the rational, optimal thing to do? Do you two-box or one-box? 

This thought experiment is called Newcomb’s paradox, and it has been a source of heated philosophical debate for more than 50 years. The philosopher Robert Nozick, in a long and agonised discussion of the problem, wrote in 1969:

“I have put this problem to a large number of people, both friends and students in class. To almost everyone it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly.”

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The book Rationality: From AI to Zombies mentions this problem. Its author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, acknowledges the philosophical difficulties. But he has a robust and sensible approach. The rational course of action, he says, is the course of action that gives you a million pounds, rather than the one that doesn’t.

In the early 2000s, the young Yudkowsky had something of an epiphany. He was only 20 or so, but he was already quite a well-known figure in certain subcultures on the early modern internet: the transhumanist, technophile set who talked about cryonics and uploading our brains into the cloud.

This was before social media, so these subcultures existed as mailing lists. Great long nerdy conversations went on in people’s emails. Yudkowsky set up his own, SL4; it was about how to bring about the technological Singularity, where advances in computing and AI will render human life unrecognisable. He also founded what was then known as the Singularity Institute (now the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), with the same goal. 

The idea was to bring about superintelligent AI as quickly as possible, because, he thought, being superintelligent, it would be clever enough to fix all the world’s problems: “I have had it,” he wrote, as a 17-year-old in 1996.

“I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships, torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger. I have had it with a planetary death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per day. I have had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality.

“None of this is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer necessary to look nervously away, repeating the mantra: ‘I can’t solve all the problems of the world.’ We can. We can end this.”*

The reasoning went, very roughly: human intelligence has made human life much better, over the last few centuries; if we make something much more intelligent, it will fix the problems that remain.

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But some time between 2000 and 2002, Yudkowsky had the aforementioned epiphany: just because an AI is intelligent, doesn’t mean it will do what we want it to do. Instead, it will do what we tell it to do. And the difference between those two statements is huge, and potentially disastrous. AI could, he said, ultimately destroy humanity, if we are not immensely careful about how we build it: not because it “goes rogue”, or “becomes sentient”, but simply because it follows its instructions to the letter, rather than in spirit.

Yudkowsky had, though, a devil of a time convincing people of this. If it’s intelligent, it would know what we wanted it to do, his critics argued. It would know the right thing to do.

So, in 2006, he started to write a blog, to explain why they were all wrong. He had to explain why artificial intelligence wouldn’t be like human intelligence. But, he realised, to explain that, he had to explain why human intelligence wasn’t exactly like rational thought — it is full of biases and shortcuts and systematic errors.

But to explain why human thought wasn’t like rational thought, he found, he had to explain what rational thought actually was — in the decision-theory sense, of making optimal decisions with the available information. And then, he found, he had to explain all the ways in which human thought differed from rational thought: he had to list all those biases and shortcuts and systematic errors.

And to explain those, he had to explain — almost everything. At one point, he wanted to write a relatively unimportant post using an analogy of AI utility functions. But in order to do that, he felt he ought to first explain a few other concepts. To explain those, he realised, he needed to explain a few more. But to explain those…

Anyway, long story short, over the following month he ended up writing about two dozen blog posts explaining evolution by natural selection. And then he could write the not-especially-central-to-his-thesis post about the utility functions.

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The whole series of blog posts, which became known as the Sequences, sprawled out to a million words. It was edited down into an ebook version, Rationality, which is a more manageable 600,000 or so — though still rather longer than War and Peace, or than all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings put together.

The Sequences are the founding text for what would, later, become known as the “rationality community”, or the “rationalists”. I’ve written about them, and their AI concerns, a few times in the past; my own first book, The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy, is about them. (It’s also just 80,000 words and gets most of the key ideas across, if you are pressed for time. All good bookshops!) They are a strange bunch: clever, thoughtful, sometimes paranoid; they get accused of being a cult, with the Sequences as their holy scripture and Yudkowsky as a sort of messianic figure (although I think that is not true.)

But the community is that rare thing, on the internet: a place where people can disagree and argue calmly and in good faith. And it sprang up around Yudkowsky’s great sprawling series of blog posts, because he explicitly encouraged that norm.

As well as — or as part of — trying to lay the foundations for AI safety, it tries to establish what it means to be rational, and to make us more so. In other words, the aim is to help us be “less wrong”, as the blog the Sequences are published on is called. Following decision theorists like Judea Pearl, he defined rationality in two forms.

First is epistemic rationality, establishing true beliefs about the world — maximising the extent to which my mental model of the universe, the “map” in my head, corresponds to the universe itself, the “territory” of reality. I believe that there is a door behind me, and that black holes emit Hawking radiation: those are facts about my brain. Whether there actually is a door behind me, or whether black holes really do emit Hawking radiation, are facts about reality.

Epistemic rationality is about trying to make the beliefs line up with the facts. “This correspondence between belief and reality is commonly called ‘truth,” says Yudkowsky, “and I’m happy to call it that.”

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The second is instrumental rationality, choosing the course of action that is most likely, given what you know now, to bring about the things you want to achieve. If you want to achieve Goal X — wealth, world domination, world peace, preventing climate change, Oxford United winning the Champions League — what steps are most likely to achieve that? Rationality, he says, means winning. Winning at whatever you want to win at, whether it’s saving the world or making money. But winning.

I can’t begin to go into the whorls and sprawls of its reasoning: in its efforts to ground morality and rationality on Bayes’ theorem and utilitarian calculus, Rationality reminds me of one of those huge Enlightenment-era works of philosophy, by Spinoza or Leibniz or someone, that start out with some guy sitting in an armchair and end up trying to establish a Theory of Everything. But I do want to come back to Newcomb’s problem, because I think it is key.

In 1969, Nozick concluded, after much agonising, that you should take both boxes. Imagine the far side of the opaque box is transparent, he says, and that a friend of yours can see into both. Whatever Omega has done, whether the £1 million is there or not, she would be hoping that you take both: if it’s not there, you at least gain £1,000; if it is, you get a bonus £1,000 on top of your million. It’s already happened. The money is in the box, or it isn’t.

Yudkowsky, though, disagrees. The rational thing to do, he says, assuming that you would like a million pounds, is the thing that is most likely to make you a million pounds. Almost everyone who chose to one-box got a million pounds. Almost everyone who chose to two-box didn’t. Only a very clever person could convince themselves that the sensible thing to do is the option that will almost certainly cost you £1 million.

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That’s why I like the book. It may address very serious, high-concept ideas — AI, transhumanism, morality, alien gods visiting the planet and playing strange parlour games with boxes — but it gets to them all in a robust, commonsense way. The moral thing to do is, usually, the thing that kills the fewest people, or makes the largest number happy. As he writes, in a wonderful section on how it seems obvious that consciousness has an effect on the world, because philosophers write books about consciousness, “You can argue clever reasons why this is not so, but you have to be clever.” 

But following these robust, commonsense views to their logical conclusion often ends up in strange places. If you accept some fairly uncontroversial premises, you can end up with AIs destroying the world, brains uploaded to the cloud, galaxy-spanning civilisations of quasi-immortal demigods.

It’s been especially relevant this year. The rationalist community was well ahead of the public, and of many scientists, in spotting the dangers of Covid-19: they are used to data, to exponential curves, to reasoning under uncertainty. They, and the wider tech community, were using masks and stocking up on essential goods, even as others were saying to worry about the flu instead, or mocking tech workers for avoiding handshakes. And now, when we should be working out the risks to ourselves and our families of going home for Christmas, a bit of extra familiarity with Bayes’ theorem and probability theory would probably not be a bad idea.

In the 12 years or so since the Sequences ended, Yudkowsky himself has withdrawn somewhat, working at MIRI or on other projects, occasionally cropping up on Facebook or Twitter. But they remain as a fascinating piece of writing, pulling together a thousand strands of thought into one place. And, whether or not you agree with their conclusions on AI or rationality, they have created a small, safe harbour for peaceable disagreement on the internet. That alone is a legacy worth having.

*Precocious 17-year-olds can be quite annoying.

It is only in the most extreme circumstances that people, stripped bare of the veneer of civilisation, show their true natures. A crisis like the present one brings out the best, and the worst of the humanity. We are tested in the fire. In this case, not the purifying fire of war but the ouchy burny fire of staying at home with our spouses and children for ages and having to play boardgames because we feel guilty about too much screen time. And real characters emerge, thus, according to our favoured boardgames.

Risk

Risk is great fun. You get to try to take over the world. You build armies, squash your enemies, and eventually dominion is yours. There’s a bit of strategy in it, a lot of aggression, and more than just a soupçon of chance: if a few dice rolls go against you, your magnificent army is suddenly a lot less magnificent and, oh crap, there goes Russia. It’s a game, really, for people who want to have kind of a lazy and consequence-free shot at taking over the world, have a bash and hope for the best. Steve Bannon, say, or the Prime Minister.

Diplomacy

Another world domination game, Diplomacy is much subtler and better than Risk. With Diplomacy you can’t just hole up in South East Asia and build an impregnable defensive army in some Pacific island bottleneck. And there is no element of chance. Every territory on the board can house only one military unit – so the game’s essence is in strategic horse-trading with other players in secret conferences in, for instance, the spare bedroom. Then, of course, comes the opening of the sealed orders in which it emerges that everybody has betrayed absolutely everybody else. Henry Kissinger is very good at this game. Michael Gove thinks he’s good at it but isn’t. Gavin Williamson knows he is hopeless, but wants to play with the bigger boys anyway. 

Scrabble

Nobody who seriously plays Scrabble nourishes the illusion that it’s a game for people with good vocabularies and imaginative ideas for unusual words: rather, it favours vicious sadists and pedants who have memorised a complete list of the allowable two and three-letter words (most of which look like a fat-thumb error on a QWERTY keyboard) and who are determined to deploy them in the most pinched and obstructive way possible. You’re thinking: “Wouldn’t it be lovely to make ‘BANANA’ with my two blanks!” They’re thinking: “Good. If I play QG sideways that will spoil the triple-word for everyone else.” I have a hunch Priti Patel plays a mean game of Scrabble, pun intended.

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Cluedo

It’s a game about logic, really, isn’t it? I mean, what are you doing just drifting from room to room making random guesses? You idiot! Now you’ve got the player to your left showing you Professor Plum again: a totally wasted suggestion! Look, I know it looks like a bit of fun to you but actually I think you’ll find there are any number of optimal strategy guides available in the rationalist blogosphere. Oh — you what? Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room? Dear me. Well let’s have a look. You fluky BASTARD: I know from my notes that it was a 17-2 chance against you guessing correctly and now you’ve won — which is sad, actually. A senior government source is very good at this game but still always loses.

Monopoly

The attractions of this game to the egotistical, plutocratically minded and unimaginative are obvious enough just from the name. It’s all about money — and about winning by getting all of it. It is also notable for three other features of its gameplay. Once you’ve established a commanding lead, it gets easier and easier, just like real capitalism. Cheats almost always prosper, and people who win at Monopoly almost always cheat, just like real capitalism. And Mayfair is expensive and crap, just like real capitalism. This is the ideal game for the Sir Philip Green in your life.

Trivial Pursuit

This game is a particularly interesting psychological test, not because it attracts pub quiz bores (though it does), but because of the design of the game itself. Ignore the idiotic questions about the litreage of Lake Titicaca or Ginger Spice’s bra: the mechanism is irrelevant. The point is that it is a very long game. It lasts at least twice as long as it takes for everyone around the table to be bored to tears as they make a 65th attempt at getting that orange piece of pie. The team in the lead doesn’t want to stop, though, because they think they’re going to win; and the losing teams can’t give up for fear of looking ungracious. Mind-forg’d manacles, right there: chaining you to the table. It’s the game for god-tier passive-aggressive monsters. Theresa May is the sort of person, I’d suspect, who’d finish a game of Triv. 

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Bridge

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe,” wrote John Donne. He was almost certainly thinking about the game of bridge when this insight occurred to him. Here is a game in which partnership and communication are everything. It is a game in which ruthless killer instincts are couched in extreme courtesy, and if you exclaim “Three no trumps are you out of your tiny mind?” at your partner it will be distinctly frowned on by your opponents. Glory is shared in bridge, as is ignominy. Suitable only for happily married couples with an intellectual rapport such as Ant and Dec, Dr Evil and Mini-Me, or Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.  

Catan

The game for policy nerds. You are encouraged to build a civilisation, gathering and allocating resources, building infrastructure, and basically doing all the stuff that for most of us seems to be rather ruled out by the word “game”. If you’re the sort of person who’d rather muse on the parameters of short-term outlay versus medium-term economic growth implied by HS2, go wild. You are likely to find yourself playing Catan with earnest, slightly thyroidal young men from free-market think tanks or, if you’re specially lucky, George Osborne. 

Cranium

This is the game for your flamboyant uncle and your tipsy mum who misses karaoke. It’s a game for the high-spirited and giggly and creatively inclined and slightly showy-offy. Why master chess when you can measure out the rest of your life in 45 second bursts, trying to hum the Wombles theme tune or make a recognisable three-dimensional image of Ann Widdecombe out of a thumb-sized piece of orange Play-Doh? Davina McCall is undoubtedly excellent at Cranium, as — secretly — is Jeremy Corbyn. 

Snakes and Ladders

It’s entirely random, snakes and ladders. It barely qualifies as a game at all. With poker, say, you’re surfing the waves of chance with on-the-hoof calculations of probabilities, all tempered with psychological acumen. With snakes and ladders it’s more like: yeah, rolled a six. I won. Woo. Or: yeah, rolled a four. Back down the ladder for me. Like, curses. Your turn. Accordingly, it is the preferred game of existentialist philosophers. Also, toddlers.

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Because her shtick is climate change, she’s sparked a massive fight on the internet, down the usual culture-war fault lines. Mainly, a bunch of much older people spent the week telling this child that she’s wrong and awful, and, in one case, that she is “chilling and positively pre-modern” with her “monotone voice”. (Worth noting at this point that she is only 16-years-old, has Asperger syndrome, and is speaking in her second language to audiences of senior politicians.) So, that’s been edifying.

But there’s a specific criticism, or argument, that certain people have been making, which is that Thunberg is a cult leader, or that environmentalism is a religion. The argument is, presumably, that if something is a cult (or a religion: the two terms get used interchangeably), then we can ignore it.

Some grown-up people with newspaper columns have all made this claim, including Brendan O’Neill, Iain Martin, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Andrew Lilico. Spiked, which O’Neill edits, also used the formulation about Extinction Rebellion: “the new millenarian cult”.

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This argument gets trotted out quite often – I used to see it all the time in the comments when I worked at the Telegraph, people talking about the “green religion” and the “eco-cultists”. It actually also came up in another context, when I was writing my book (The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World!). A group of people are worried that, when superintelligent AI is built, it will go wrong, not by breaking its programming or “going rogue” or anything, but simply by doing exactly what we asked it, in ways that we don’t want. That group of people, who are usually known as the Rationalist community, are often described as a “cult” because they believe in an apocalypse, they want money to help stop it – and they do some weird things, like polyamory and group sex.

Of course, it’s easy to call anything a religion (or a cult), because the words are so fuzzily defined that almost anything can fall into them. But let’s imagine that they’re right. Imagine there’s some stable psychological role that religion plays, to do with authority and community and morality, and that green activism plays the same role; or that the fear of ecological disaster, or AI apocalypse, triggers the exact same pattern of neurons to fire that fired in the brains of the Branch Davidians or the Heaven’s Gate lot.

Imagine that what goes on in George Monbiot’s brain, when he warns that we need to wean ourselves off economic growth if we want to avoid disaster, is precisely what goes on in the brain of an imam who says we need to stop having gay sex if we want to stop all these earthquakes.

Say that’s all true. What does that mean? Does it mean that the world isn’t warming? Or that AI isn’t dangerous?

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Obviously not! It doesn’t mean anything! The question, “is climate change real, manmade and dangerous?” is about atmospheric physics, which you can try to answer by doing studies of carbon dioxide levels and climate sensitivity, and by making ever-more detailed models of the climate system, and doing your best to predict future emission levels.

The question “is environmentalism a religion?” is a question about psychology or sociology, which you can try to answer by interviewing environmentalists and maybe doing fMRI brain scans. The answer to the latter will give you close-to-zero information about the answer to the former. You can’t psychoanalyse your way to the truth.

You might argue that, if Thunberg or Monbiot really are a cultists who believe with the same fiery faith of an Old Testament preacher, you have less reason to believe what they say. Which would be fine if they were the only ones saying it and you had no way of checking. But they’re not: climate scientists, who are basing their beliefs on good old-fashioned data, say largely the same things.

If you don’t believe them, fine! If you think that the NASA satellite readings are wrong or that the ice-sheet loss is natural or that the rise in wildfires is a coincidence, that’s a legitimate thing to believe – although I’d say you’re reading the evidence badly. But arguing that Greta Thunberg is a cult leader, as well as being an odd thing for a man in his 40s to say about a teenage girl, does not give you a reason to believe those things.

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The trouble is that it feels like it does. It feels like a real argument that we’re having. Debating the “is the climate warming?” question is hard, because we’re not very knowledgeable about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or the absorption spectra of greenhouse gases. Debating the “are they a cult?” question is easy, because we can all say “A looks a bit like B and B is a cult”. So it feels like we’re debating the interesting but hard question, but in fact we’re wasting our time by substituting a boring but easier one.

You know what? I think there is quite a lot of overlap, psychologically speaking, between some climate activism and some religious belief. There’s even a brand of theology called “ecotheology” which explicitly makes that link. A lot of the behaviours seem similar, about sin and abstinence and guilt as well as the unwavering faith and conviction. I also think that Left-wingers have found it easier to believe in climate issues because it’s easier to square it with stuff they want to do anyway, like higher taxes on industry and greater state intervention, while Right-wingers tend to see it as in opposition with the free market, so they are more likely to reject it. That’s not surprising, that’s bog-standard motivated reasoning. We all do it.

But I am also pretty sure that Greta Thunberg is, largely, right when she says that there really is a looming problem. that the world’s governments and businesses aren’t doing enough to avoid the worst effects, and that we really are going to face up to a need to balance economic growth against ecological loss. And if she’s right, it doesn’t matter if she was told it by a burning bush, we still need to do something about it.