Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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I find your comment interesting. Let's take a look at your list.

Solar System -- after 500 years of research, multi-body problem still not solved, many features still amaze and baffle, scientists have no idea how common the system might be

Chemistry -- in spite of having a great model with lots of reproducible experiments, issues remain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_chemistry

Biology -- where to start?

Evolution -- big vague term. Hard to critique this one. Do you mean natural selection inside a species? Speciation?

Medicine -- wonderful ability to find and fix many diseases. Lots of things work although we have no idea why. Lots of things that we think should work don't. Lots of medicine is so much of a mystery that only statistical analysis can give us rough correlations to begin to form theories. The reason it is so advanced? Billions of test subjects (as opposed to one climate for Earth)

And let's not even get into physics, quantum or otherwise. Or cosmology. Or the problems with the use of Cellular Automata as a modeling tool. I could go on.

Be careful with grand sweeping statements. Ignorance is a fine position and should be the default. Science is a humble questioning of the cosmos, always willing to correct itself and always looking for reproducibility. Be careful about putting so much trust in scientists that you forget what science is about.

Ignorant people have plenty of tools at their disposal to reason and understand the quality of the underlying science. The science itself may be complicated beyond belief, but the underlying meta-data -- how science is done -- is not.

> I find your comment interesting. Let's take a look at your list.

I find yours interesting as well, because you struck down a straw man. I didn't say these problems were solved, only that we CAN credibly make long term (which is of course relative to the field) predictions about these fields with reasonable success.

And then you proceed to strengthen my point by reminding me—as if I needed a reminder—that the scientific process is ongoing and our body of knowledge increases every day; new evidence overturns old and we revise predictions all the time.

If this is not a credible process, I think we are operating on very different definitions of ”credible”. And I see 0 evidence that the general body of knowledge amassed by the IPCC has been significantly tainted. Some of it will be overturned, and I'm sure much of it will be repeated and audited over time. That's not a black mark or a warning sign, that is the status quo.

poster -> I don't know nearly enough about climate science to make any claims about it. What I do know about is scientific methods and I do know that there is no scientific method that can credibly make long term predictions about complex systems.

You ->(Provide examples, presumably, of complex systems that we can provide long term predictions about. If you don't know anything about climate science, maybe you should do the rational thing and listen to the experts and the best scientific consensus of the time.

Me-> Provide examples about how in each of your examples, we are not able in many cases to predict long-term system state or reaction to stimulus. Trivial example in medicine: tell me how an individual is going to die by examining them as a baby. Original poster was correct to be skeptical. Ignorant people have plenty of tools at their disposal to reason and understand the quality of the underlying science. The science itself may be complicated beyond belief, but the underlying meta-data -- how science is done -- is not.

You-> Straw Man! You're using a straw man!

I think we're done here.

So you're saying we can't make any sort of general long-term predictions about the Solar System? That's the core of your argument?

Maybe we are done here.

I mean, the crux of this absurd argument is that “our long term forecasts might be updated so they are never trustworthy!” Except that nearly every field of science is this way and it hasn't stopped us from using our knowledge to make meaningful predictions and incredible technological breakthroughs.

Basically a double standard has been applied. When it comes to quantum theory or multi-body problems, our best guess is all cool. But when it comes to the weather suddenly everyone gets all philosophy-of-science and asks what we really know. The absurdity is compounded by the suggesting that climate science is basically models and “long term predictions” rather than a huge array of physical evidence showing us what is happening right now, a short-term trend leading up to it, and a long term contrast with multiple lines of evidence.

In case you think your posts were for naught, know that the argument annoyed me enough that I gave $100 to The Climate Project.

It seemed a more worthwhile use of my resources than posting another comment that would have agreed with yours.

I feel awful. I really do. This is so simple yet somehow it's not getting through.

1. We don't really know anything. So let's all get that out there and get over it.

2. Some things we have a lot of examples of. Stuff like atoms, people, animals. Some things we have only one example of, like the climate. Those things that we have a lot of examples of, we can make better guesses about what might happen based on prior outcomes. Those that we don't, we can't.

3. In the past, over hundreds of years, we have examples of two types of science, science that speculates by applying rules about structure and theory to unobserved phenomenon, and science that has no idea how things work but can make lots of measurements and guess what might happen. The second kind of science has done much, much, much better than the first, for lots of reasons (too many to go into here) The structure/rule/extrapolation guys do best when it's only a degree or two of extrapolation (which is not true in climate science to any degree)

There's no double standard, because we're not taking the same thing and looking at it two different ways. We're taking many different things and looking at them many different ways. Which is the way it should be, right?

EDIT: The reason we know where Pluto will be in 9 years is that we've been watching the solar system for two thousand years. Plus we have solid observations about all the theory that goes into predicting where Pluto will be. We have observations. We have falsifiable theories. They both agree. That makes orbital dynamics about a zillion times different than, say, psychology. Different kinds of science are not all the same. There are important differences to understand. Medicine is not biology is not physics is not sociology is not climate science. This is NOT about argument from ignorance versus science. It's about the true nature of science, a very important thing to grok. sigh

The reason we know where Pluto will be in 9 years is that we've been watching the solar system for two thousand years.

How long do you think people have been watching the weather for?

Widespread watching and recording, like astrologers did with the planets? Maybe 150-300 years or so? And that's with varying degrees of precision.

It's interesting to note that there was a huge gap in time between observing the weather and recording it. There was a further gap before we started predicting the weather. For most of that time, people substituted superstitions about the weather for science. The sky gods were happy, the sun came out. The sky gods were unhappy, it rained. If we would only do the right thing, the sky gods would remain happy. If we want the weather to be agreeable, we must change our behavior.

With the worldwide climate, we are only about 20-50 years into simply observing and recording. It could be quite a long while indeed before global long-term climate predictions is anything at all like the 3-day local weather forecast.

Remember, three stages: abduction, deduction, and induction. Abduction: gathering data and spotting patterns. Deduction: taking patterns and positing relationships. Induction: taking those relationships and extrapolating to future behavior of the system.

Climate science is currently mostly abduction. But folks like to describe it in terms of induction because lots of pieces of the underlying physics are at that stage. But it doesn't work that way.

I don't know if that strikes you as some kind of big hand-waving philosophy bullshit, but it's just the way things are, whether I point it out or not. I'm just the dumb schmuck stuck with trying to explain it.

You have got to be kidding. 150-300 years?

Agriculture dates back to at least ~10,000 BC (the "Neolithic revolution"). Effective farming (i.e., not dying of starvation) requires planning for changing weather conditions. If you think Neolithic farmers didn't have a vested interest in detecting patterns in weather cycles, you're sadly mistaken.

Hell, the term "meteorology" was coined by Aristotle... in a book he wrote... called Meteorology... in 350 BC.

Remember: abduction, gathering of data and spotting patterns.

Got the daily weather report for Athens for the years 150-100 BC?

Neolithic man had a deeply vested interest in the weather, but that doesn't change his advancement of weather science. The gods were useful for many thousands of years.

Sure, the general idea of watching the weather -- long history there. But that just proves my point. There was a huge gap between seeing and naming it, recording it, spotting patterns, making falsifiable theories, and making predictions. We're just at the "seeing and naming it" stage with climate science. The use of computer models hide this fact, sadly.

Oh, ok. So it takes making predictions to quality as real science.

Here's a real prediction, with actual confirming evidence: giving someone with a high MADRS score an SSRI will reduce their score.

That's beyond seeing and naming depression, it's beyond recording patients' reactions to SSRIs, it's beyond spotting patterns in their reactions, it's even beyond making falsifiable theories about its mechanism of action. It's making predictions which are confirmed on a statistically significant basis.

Does this mean you think psychiatry has the same epistemological standing as physics?

Daniel/Kirin - The two of you basically agree with each other, I'm just wondering if you realize it; it's just that Kirin is trying to make a stronger argument about the effectiveness of science regarding complex systems than Daniel

And both of you would probably agree that radically destabilizing the homeostasis that is Earth's environment by pumping increasingly large amounts of CO2 into it is probably foolhardy, regardless of your belief in the ability of science to make predictions about complex systems.

I've read his blog. I think you're being overly generous with his opinion.

I wish I was wrong about that, though.

Seriously. No one jumps all over NASA yelling about how the science "isn't in yet" when they want to send a probe out to where Pluto will be in 9 years.

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