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from the whom-do-you-trust...-and-why? dept.
Given that collaboration [in science] is the norm, you may be asking yourself the eternal question: Who cares? How does the image of a lone scientist hero cause any danger to me?
The problem arises when there is a debate about a scientific topic. Following this structure, debate is a necessary and encouraged part of the scientific process. This debate happens before the idea is released to anyone outside of a few scientists and, while it can become heated at times, takes place with great respect between proponents of different viewpoints.
The danger can come when scientific results are released to the public. Our society now provides a platform for anyone to comment, regardless of his or her education, experience or even knowledge of the topic at hand.
While this is an excellent method of disseminating knowledge, it can also provide a platform for any opinion—regardless of the weight of data behind it—to be equal to that released in more traditional scientific ways.
Particularly in today's largely populist climate, people are looking to see the lone scientist hero overthrow the perceived dominance of facts coming from academia.
And herein lies the problem. In this situation, the opinion of a lone commenter may be considered on equal footing with that of tens or hundreds of people who have made the subject their life's work to ensure their interpretations are correct.
Everybody is entitled to their own scientific opinion, but everybody is not entitled to their own scientific facts?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Virindi on Wednesday November 22 2017, @01:15PM (16 children)
Indeed, and going further along this line of reasoning....
If there is an issue of such huge public import that resolving it would require potentially devastating economic changes, the public must be informed about it in intimate detail and should be expected to study it themselves. Of course this would have to include all raw data, computer code, etc. It should be pushed by trying to explain in as detailed a manner as possible why the conclusions are what they are.
Instead what we get is, "Some really important people decided this. Trust them. Any discussion or questioning makes you a heretic unless you are one of the anointed authorities. Oh and the raw data and model parameters are not included in the paywalled paper."
This is neither scientific, nor democratic.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:04PM (13 children)
The problem is that isn't realistic. There is a LOT of training and expertise required to be able to understand the raw data and computer code, etc. that climate scientists used to come up with their conclusions. The science of the climate in all of its intimate detail is not a simple thing that can be explained to a layperson in a few hours. It literally takes years of specialised study to even get the most basic grasp of the topic. Sorry, much of science is not simple. People who aren't climate scientists will look at the raw data and code and be unable to make sense of it themselves, or understand why things were done in a certain way, or they may defer to some other "expert" (the irony) who will look at the data and tell them what they want to hear.
Climate scientists are like a physician who has just told his patient that he suffers from something deadly like, say, cancer, and will need difficult surgery and after that chemotherapy with nasty side effects, or else he will die an excruciating death in only a few years. It is an issue of such huge personal import that resolving it will require a potentially physically devastating treatment. Would such a person demand from his doctor that he be informed about his cancer in intimate detail and study it himself? To demand how the tests that diagnosed his cancer actually worked, and why it reached the conclusion that he had cancer? Or demand to know how and why these nasty chemotherapy drugs he is being given work and the full scientific reasoning behind why he is being given them? There is plenty of science behind cancer that will require nothing less than the educational background of an oncologist to fully understand. Someone who had a diagnosis of cancer though might ask for a second opinion, but if that second opinion concurs with the first, what then? Is that person going to suddenly rail against the medical community and its "anointed authorities" who denounce anyone who disagrees with their conclusions "heretics"? Will they opt for "alternative medicine" from some other "expert" who disagrees with the regular doctors? Some people do that yes, and it seems that the majority of those people die much sooner than those who opt for science-based medical treatment.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 23 2017, @12:06AM (1 child)
I don't the oncologist knows all the specifics you stated about finding the cancer. The doctor is most likely just about you in knowledge about the how cancer detection works. All he does is say,"I ran this test and it says you have cancer." He doesn't know all the mechanisms involved or why they work; a cancer researcher might know. Primary care providers are no more the then help desk of medical world. "I'm doing this because I've been told it works." Specialists like oncologists are like system administrators. "I know I need to configure this doo-hickey to get the results I want." But neither are actually primary sources for knowledge. You need researchers/coders/engineers for that.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:03AM
Just like watching those forensic detectives on TV.
I get the idea most have no idea how the chemicals they use work, they are just given them and shown how to use them.
I know when I was a TV repairman as a kid, there was one guy who called me out to fix his TV. Arriving, I noticed his antenna lead-in wire had broken off and it was several inches from the terminal it was supposed to connect to.
His reply?
"You mean to tell me the TV signal got 30 miles from Dothan, all the way to here, and could not make it just one more foot ?!??! "
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Virindi on Thursday November 23 2017, @01:47AM (9 children)
Actually, yes. I know several people who were diagnosed with life-threatening cancers and their immediate reaction was in common: go learn about it as much as possible. In more than one case known to me, the person spent weeks and weeks reading every paper they could find about their particular condition. It's not that they don't believe their doctor, it's that when something has such a great personal impact on them, they want to be informed rather than operating on blind trust.
Which is exactly what I was saying about how climate science should be sold.
You can bet that if tomorrow someone discovered a planet-killing asteroid on an Earth trajectory, every reasonably intelligent person on the planet would become obsessed with learning every detail of deflection plans, orbital mechanics, asteroid composition, etc. It would quickly become common knowledge. Trying to sell a crisis based on faith is, as I said before, an approach doomed to fail.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday November 23 2017, @02:35AM (8 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday November 23 2017, @08:40AM (6 children)
Do you seriously believe such numbers are accurate? If I were a professional scientist (of any type) and I got some survey asking if I believed in climate change, I would consider it insane to return it saying I did not believe in it. If anyone found out, it would be career suicide.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:08AM
However, some people can have all sorts of credentials and....
come up with stuff like this... [youtube.com]
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday November 23 2017, @12:04PM (4 children)
Look at it this way, if I were a professional climate scientist and I had actual honest to goodness scientific evidence that climate change was bunkum, why the hell would I NOT tell people so? How in the world would that amount to career suicide? I would eventually be acclaimed the way Galileo or Einstein were, once I showed them my evidence which is rock solid! Scientists live for being able to prove their peers wrong. If you think that scientists are all afraid to buck the accepted wisdom think again. This is not how science works and progresses. Please, read this link:
https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/01/28/science-and-the-public-part-3-a-scientific-consensus-is-based-on-evidence-not-peer-pressure-and-adherence-to-dogma/ [thelogicofscience.com]
No, the reason why 97% of climate scientists when asked if they accepted climate change is because they have looked at the evidence and have been convinced by it.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday November 23 2017, @01:18PM (3 children)
What if you merely had doubts, but not "rock solid" evidence?
Expressing those doubts would end your career, so it is a situation where you'd have to be very, very sure before you speak up.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday November 23 2017, @02:16PM (2 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday November 23 2017, @04:25PM (1 child)
No, because punishing those who express doubts is inherently dangerous. It supports groupthink and raises the bar for the introduction of contradictory evidence through a mechanism of fear.
Consider the possibility that there is some accepted theory. Then, multiple people discover different weak or circumstantial evidence against it, but none of them come forward because of fear of excommunication. This means that all the evidence is not being heard, that alone is not scientific. Additionally, in such a circumstance, it would be possible that the totality of such weak, independent evidence amounts to stronger counter-evidence......except once again, because of this culture of punishment, it is never heard.
Suppression of evidence, even weak or circumstantial evidence, is not good for the advancement of human knowledge.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday November 23 2017, @09:47PM
As Carl Sagan once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If some theory becomes established to the point that it is considered a scientific consensus, it got that way because there already exist multiple very strong lines of evidence supporting it. To overturn something like that you need to have some very strong counter-evidence or else a reasonable theoretical basis for believing that the present theory has problems. If you have some evidence, even if it might not be really all that strong, pointing to problems with a current accepted theory that is enough for you to publish a paper that will be taken seriously, if only for other scientists to try to refute you or explain your evidence in a way that shows that the current theory can still explain it. Take for instance Lambda-Cold Dark Matter Cosmology, another theory on which there is a strong scientific consensus. A paper showing how galaxy rotation curves challenge dark matter [soylentnews.org] caused a considerable stir within the astrophysics community because it seemed to give good evidence that rival theories to dark matter like modified gravity might be plausible, but it was later shown that the evidence found there could still be explained by dark matter [soylentnews.org].
Once again you have asserted things like "excommunication" or a "culture of punishment". Please show some actual evidence (there's that word again!) that such a culture actually exists to a significant degree in the modern scientific community, enough to show the effects you mention. So far you have only made assertions without any evidence that that is actually how the modern scientific community operates.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday November 23 2017, @07:58PM
Let's read that link rather than just say stuff.
So what exactly is supposed to be wrong with the Cook study? For starters, it classifies research incorrectly [populartechnology.net]. There are numerous interviews with researchers who complain that their work was misintepreted or excluded. This was explored further [populartechnology.net] to find a considerable portion of the overall papers in the field had been excluded.
And if you glance at the "updates" from my first link, you see also that John Cook failed to disclose a conflict of interest, namely that the paper was done to provide talking points for climate change propaganda.
It severely overstates the case. Almost no one explicitly supported climate change theory in their papers. As someone else chose [wattsupwiththat.com] to interpret this data:
Also
Let us note here that there are probably more such scientists in agreement that global warming is largely man-made. I am part of that. It is deceptive to portray that as consensus on the rest of the climate change baggage such as the need for urgent mitigation efforts. A straw man argument is the fundamental basis of this paper.
Finally, the methodology of the research was deeply flawed [blogspot.co.uk].
[...]
So your link starts with defending extensively a piece of known bad science. And you linked it why? This is yet another reason why I think the climate change mitigation side is broken. They would rather defend bad science than come with scientifically valid defenses of their beliefs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 23 2017, @03:42AM
You ask a bunch of questions. What you don't get here is that the people who will research their illness will more likely be able to determine who the real experts are, while the people who take such things on faith are more likely to end up listening to the charlatans because they have no way to distinguish between expert and fake.
I'll note that has been quite the problem with the climate change thing with a lot of would-be experts claiming all sorts of potential catastrophes without providing evidence for those catastrophes. Later in this thread, you wrote:
Bullshit. I agree that modern climatology has been obfuscated impressively, but we don't need extremely high levels of "understanding" of the science, we need evidence which is in short supply. But then, I don't feel the need to employ several fallacies just to explain some point of science. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 22 2017, @11:13PM (1 child)
You mean such as the large and publicly accessible data sets that NOAA, NASA, and countless other governmental and research institutions have out there?
You mean like the numerous publicly available journal articles subject to peer review, including analysis of those same data sets?
Have you even looked for the data? From what I've seen, everything you have asked for is available and more, excepting the actual computer code itself... but if you aren't going to trust their conclusions, shouldn't you be doing your own "clean" analysis of the data yourself rather than their "flawed code?"
Are you sure you aren't letting your preconceived notions bias you? From what I've seen, the people you are attacking seem to be open and transparent... at least in comparison to the groups like ExxonMobile who are saying, "we have scientists who disagree with those clearly-bias university researchers... but you don't need to see our evidence, trust us."
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Thursday November 23 2017, @01:40AM
Yes. A lot is open, for sure...for instance, NASA temperature measurements.
The part that is not open, as far as I can tell, is the actual model runs. Computer code, input data, raw output data.
A result which is not subject to being reproduced, is not falsifiable. This same problem occurs in other branches of science as well: papers which do not adequately describe experimental methods used.
In the case of a model, it would be expected to get completely different results if you used different code and different input values.
But, I wasn't just talking about climate science either. I know we latched on to that, but really the discussion was more of a general nature. And yes, there are branches of science where that kind of "full data" does exist, such as particle physics.
I think you are casting me too much as an "evil denier". I never stated a position on this subject at all.