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Claims that the "the science isn't settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.
[...] Those who demand the science be "settled" before we take action are seeking deductive certainty where we are working inductively. And there are other sources of confusion.
One is that simple statements about cause and effect are rare since nature is complex. For example, a theory might predict that X will cause Y, but that Y will be mitigated by the presence of Z and not occur at all if Q is above a critical level. To reduce this to the simple statement "X causes Y" is naive.
Another is that even though some broad ideas may be settled, the details remain a source of lively debate. For example, that evolution has occurred is certainly settled by any rational account. But some details of how natural selection operates are still being fleshed out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday September 16 2016, @05:12PM
Starting with a conclusion is okay, if often not the best approach. Doing so makes it more likely to be wrong and that you are wasting your time, especially if the hypothesized conclusion is not based on reason. But it's not inherently wrong to begin with a conclusion, then try to find out if it's right or wrong.
A big problem is some people are unwilling to discard a conclusion even when it has been shown to be very wrong. Instead, they cherry pick data, or just flat make up evidence. Data that contradicts the desired conclusion is dismissed, smeared as being unreliable, or even as made up, same as they'd make up favorable data. It could be that some suspect everyone of doing it, see conspiracies everywhere, because they would do it themselves, and can't understand why anyone wouldn't do it. They don't see why they shouldn't do it, and get stuck in a mental swamp in which they have no idea which information is correct and which is wrong, and no way to find out. They don't appreciate that science is our best tool for getting out of that swamp, but that it doesn't work too well if it's held in contempt and deliberately misused.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Friday September 16 2016, @09:10PM
A big problem is some people are unwilling to discard a conclusion even when it has been shown to be very wrong. Instead, they cherry pick data, or just flat make up evidence.
But see, that cherry picking shows that your theory is still alive and kicking!
To be quite clear, I do think, GP is bringing this because he disagrees with AGW, and disagreeing with AGW becomes increasingly hard without explaining how a vast majority of scientists can be wrong. He himself is, very much, starting from his conclusion, and defending it uphill, and beyond reason.
However, that does not mean that his line of argument is all wrong. Having worked in science for a bit, I actually think it is quite valid, and something to be wary of. Personally, I have been in the situation of starting from a conclusion. Essentially, our research question / conclusion was of the kind of theory A is better than theory B. And boy, theory B is boring! So we invested a significant amount of resources into our study. Even setting up the methods for my study was a huge effort (at the scale I was working at, at least). And then after about two years (the study needed a delay period, too) we had a huge amount of data, and finally, we could set out to answer our key research question, and ... it kind of sort of was not a clear cut case. So, being the stats guy in the project, I spent a long time with that data, and tell you what, using the right methods, the right subgroups, or the right kind of exclusions, I found enough corners where our beloved theory A was doing great. But some pedantic drive kept me going on until I had convinced myself, that boring theory B simply did a much better job at capturing the overall results. That was a long and painful process, and it was enabled by being young, having a lot of time on hands, and low pressure from the seniors. Not sure I would have reached the same conclusion with a bit more nudging from my fellow research team members.
So far, so good, science won (I hope), but the real staggering realizations started to set in when we were publishing our findings, and going through peer review. Peer review was a bitch. It was giving us quite some headaches, some over ridiculous misunderstandings, many over hair-splitting on words, some over very real substantial problems. But none were about the sensitive spots of my analysis. Today, I am quite convinced, if we had simply run with theory A, we would never have been caught in peer review, and the world would not have known any better.
That was a pretty confined area of research, not too many people working on it world-wide (and that does reflect the lack of importance). I'm sure, more eyes do improve the situation. But do not, ever, underestimate the means, and the motivation of small groups of scientists to nudge results into the direction that they honestly (but mistakenly) believe to be right.