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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

A lot of it depends on the integrity of the researchers, and I would suspect NOAA scientists have more integrity than the average "bureaucrat".

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You don't need dishonest researchers to see this effect. You just need researchers who care, personally and/or professionally, about the impact of their work.

I'm sure Mr. Spock is a professor somewhere. If you talk to real working scientists, you'll find very few Spocks. Also, there are not a lot of Victorian gentleman-scientists; they all need to be funded...

Sure, but my point is that some scientists are more trustworthy than others, just like some newspapers are more trustworthy.

Eh, the idea of "trust" gets into non-quantifiable territory very quickly. Further, your analogy with newspapers is, quite frankly, not good. I would say that generally speaking, if a newspaper consistently confirms one's biases it is more likely to be deemed "trustworthy" and vice-versa with "non-trustworthy" newspapers.

No thats simply not true. Is a random personal blog as trustworthy as the globe and mail?

You wouldn't expect regular human beings to be subject to confirmation bias? Scientist are people and have opinions. No matter how logical we think we are, all of us have bias. In fact a good scientists is always willing to doubt his or her axioms. Doubt is the pillar of new discoveries and innovation:

http://khanism.org/science/doubt/

The researchers picked by the Koch brothers (Berkely Earth Science) get the same results for temperature reconstructions guys. This stuff is real. You don't even have to do adjustments to get essentially the same trend, you can verify this with excel, all by yourself.

>You wouldn't expect regular human beings to be subject to confirmation bias?

Strawman. Nobody mentioned confirmation bias. We are talking about "bureaucratic incentive", i.e. fudging results to please your boss.

Why? Just a feeling? Like most things the truth probably lies somewhere in the "middle."

In very few things the truth lies somewhere in the "middle". You either have rigorous treatment of evidence combined with methodological design to reduce or eliminate human bias, i.e. sciences, or you have what someone believes based on uncontrolled emotional bias.

Ok... according to woodchuck64, We live in the land of PURE unbiased science! There are ZERO reasons to lean on or massage data one way or another. Funding just comes in, no matter the conclusions.

> Ok... according to woodchuck64, We live in the land of PURE unbiased science! There are ZERO reasons to lean on or massage data one way or another. Funding just comes in, no matter the conclusions.

I didn't say we live in a land of pure unbiased science. However, you can be certain that those insisting that science is biased are basing their conclusions on vastly more biased sources of information than science itself. In one thread, we have a climate science denier who obviously gets moral and emotional comfort from a right-wing political point of view; in another, a creationist who gets moral and emotional comfort from Conservative Christianity. They don't seem to realize that to criticize science effectively, you can only approach from a position with less human bias than practiced science, not more.

The same reason I think that the Globe and Mail or CTV is more reliable than some random ranting blog site.

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