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Comment by tomgaga | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy this. If the article explains it correctly, the argument is that they can show that in place where the climate was stable, and humans were new, the megafouna went extinct. But that implies that they believe that there were places on the planet were the climate was stable. If you look at the greenland Ice core data, you can see extreme peaks and falls around the last quarterly extinction. So sounds like BS to me.

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Well then, let's try "relatively stable" rather than "stable".

These are scientists who probably have some idea of how to measure variance. You're some rando on the internet shooting from the hip. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here's the paper, go wild: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43601643

I think you are being downvoted because you are using the appeal to authority: 'trust them, they have credentials that say they should be trusted on this very subject'.

This repurposed quote from the raiders of the lost ark might also work:

"I assure you ... We have top men working on it!"

"Who?"

"Top. Men."

Yeah, I was thinking it was that or my probably-unneccessary flippant attitude. (And btw, I truly do appreciate HN's habit of trying to explain downvotes.)

I just get triggered at low-effort skepticism. Tomsaga read the word "stable" and assumed it meant "absolutely stable", and didn't ask himself "huh, I wonder if the pop-sci article is masking a more complicated concept with an easy-to-digest concept".

To get more into the climate stability: What they're doing is measuring the difference in temperature and precipitation between the Last Glacial Max and the Last Interglacial. And the maps don't even have `0` in their range, they have a small number but not zero. So yes, climate wasn't stable, but they were able to measure "how stable" it was. (Pages 1-3 in the paper.)

I think an appeal to authority is only fallacious when it's an appeal to an authority that has no relevant expertise. Something like "my dentist says that anthropogenic climate change isn't real, you don't think you're smarter than a doctor do you?"

In contrast, when it comes down to John Q. Internet vs a scientist with relevant expertise, I think it's a reasonable heuristic to think the scientist is more likely to be correct.

IMO the downvotes were more related to the delivery than the content.

Interestingly, there seems to be an equality bias[1] where the experts opinions weight no more than any other person's opinion. So apparently the reasonable heuristic isn't always applied in how we perceive and judge information.

[1]http://www.pnas.org/content/112/12/3835

Yes, but appeal to authority is still appeal to authority as opposed to discussing the merits of the idea. In this place we are better than that. Or we should be.

If the discussion was "who is more likely to be right", well, that's a different matter and I'd agree with credentials. But that's not an interesting discussion really.

If you look at the 800,000 year data there's nothing that odd to suddenly wipe out megafauna when man arrived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...

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