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Comment by jimmytucson | Hacker News Reader

This comment is not satire, I'm being brutally honest: I don't believe everything for the right reasons.

I believe in global warming, but not because of research papers or books I've read on climate change. I've clicked on research papers but I often find the scientific terminology and information in them overwhelming. I think, "It looks like they know what they're talking about." Sometimes I don't even click. I look around at people commenting on it, and if an articulate person makes a case one way or another, it influences my beliefs.

I know this is wrong but frankly it would be impossible to be educated enough on all these matters to justify having an opinion. Imagine if everyone who felt strongly about global warming had read and understood at least one research paper on it. That would mean half my friends, family, and coworkers have read and understood a research paper. I'll take the under...

What makes matters worse is being around people socially who have strong opinions. Not having one can make you look boring or dimwitted. If the conversation wanders into an area in which you do have an opinion--based on facts and research--citing those facts can feel like reading off box score statistics at a Yankees-Red Sox game. No one gets excited!

That makes me cynical. I think, people just want to feel strongly about something, kind of like they want to have a baseball team. It binds them together. I guess that's fine, I just wish we treated it more like sports and less like religion.

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You can develop a (mental) trust chain.

Verify yourself that a few people seem both well-informed and unbiased, using your personal experience or research. Put a decent amount of trust in them.

When a person you trust appears to have high regard for another person's opinion, add some trust to that other person.

When you notice someone says dumb or biased stuff, reduce your trust in them by a lot.

Continue like that for years, mixing some independent verification here and there, and you'll have some idea of what's going on.

If you wanted to talk about core CS ideas, would you just ask anyone? If you knew you were making progress on an academic discourse, would you think to talk about your readings with just anyone?

As soon as you want to make deep progress on anything you need to talk with people who match you on preparation and energy. This is true even on HN and core CS topics.

> I don't believe everything for the right reasons

I can't imagine how it would be any other way. Only on the internet can people be experts on everything. The rest of us just kind of wing it and hope for the best.

When I dont know about something and someone has a strong opinion, I asked to be explained to. Then I ask critical questions designed to undercut their arguments until I am satisfied. This is a way to ckme across as intelligent without having to know about everything.

On something like global warming, I find it easy to trust the Scientific Method, rather than individual papers or individual scientists (or worse, the media translation thereof). The core counter-explanation to the scientific consensus is "Scientists are greedy liars in a giant conspiracy to get rich on research grants", which I find, um, problematic. And, while the phrasing may get prettier, that's what most of these arguments lead to, what most of the people who reject global warming believe.

In a related manner, I tend to judge ideas by who agrees with them. Be careful who you're standing with, they can tell you a lot about the validity of where you're standing. (Or, as a friend put it about politics, "If the racists think the candidate is a racist, the candidate is probably a racist".)

So, for something like global warming, if you're standing with people who believe in and work within the scientific method, you're probably good (assuming you believe in science), and if you're standing with people who believe the world was created in seven days 5500 years ago and corporations whose core business model is to put greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere... well.

> "If the racists think the candidate is a racist, the candidate is probably a racist"

I honestly think ideas like this are one of the most problematic beliefs in the current political discourse. This type of thinking only means we look less and less at the merits of someone's arguments and more and more at the tribe they associate with, or even worse the tribe that chooses to associate with them.

We have absolutely no control over these associations. If some nutjob chooses to support my cause does that somehow means my arguments are less valid?

You’re supposed to soundly distance yourself from them in very unequivocally language and NOT TAKE THEIR MONEY. For my consistency, I dislike politicians of any sort that take corporate donor money. I dislike money being such an important factor in politics these days instead of oh.... how candidates actually vote. I can’t tell what a candidate actually believes when things came down to it versus what their constituents would do. I know that Joe Biden has said before that while he personally doesn’t believe in abortion he believes his constituents want the freedom / choice in their communities. This is tricky. It gets much more clear-cut for me when the only possible motivations are purely based around corporate interests (“jobs” are almost a code word for corporate interests, heck even the GOP pivoted to using “job creator” instead of using corporations around the Romney-Obama election period).

>I dislike money being such an important factor in politics these days instead of oh.... how candidates actually vote.

There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics. Political campaigns are entirely ineffective.

The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments [0]

"First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments’ average effect is also zero."

Does Money Buy Votes? The Case of Self-Financed Gubernatorial Candidates, 1998–2008 [1]

"The apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: the best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. [...] self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results"

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042867

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1

Surprisingly, neither of those papers appear to have anything to do with your point that "money is more or less irrelevant in politics". The first seems about personal contact, the second whether where the money came from made any difference, not whether they had any.

When there's no candidate, it's still money that wins initiatives in the western USA. I don't care what that particular study concluded over 40 races of self-financed Gov candidates because it's not compelling. Existing studies of interest that acknowledge definitive correlation only differ in how to measure the degree and where diminishing returns occur.

> There's a large empirical literature on the issue and the conclusion is that money is more or less irrelevant in politics.

That's simply nonsense.

Not everything that happens in law is done through voting though and thus the legislation and lobbying done is studied. I remember someone publishing some results showing that for as little as $50k to a politician’s campaign you can get a return on investment many times over depending upon your industry. In fact, I’d argue the most important things that happen in government is what we do not get to vote on, which is part of why voting is so important - the elected officials fill in the differential.

About that..

"We find no evidence that corporations benefit from electing their favored candidate, and we can statistically reject effect sizes greater than 0.4 percent of firm value. Contrary to the concerns of many observers, corporate campaign contributions do not appear to buy significant political favors."

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/researc...

Joe Biden's position is a good example of what I'm talking about. He can say "personally opposed", but the pro-choice people believe he's pro-choice anyway, and the pro-life people also believe he's pro-choice anyway. The language isn't fooling anyone.

He is pro-choice, and he's not trying to fool anyone. He believe people should have the right to make the decision for themselves whether or not to have an abortion. For himself, he's made the decision he wouldn't want his partner to have one. There's nothing inconsistent or nefarious in that.

I find that kind of honesty refreshing in a politician, when they can set aside their own personal beliefs and actually represent the people who elected them.

> and NOT TAKE THEIR MONEY

So by logical extension, a highly virtuous person would ... donate money to racist causes? Because that is the exact opposite of taking their donations.

There is always going to be one politician who has policies that are more racist-friendly than the other. Targeting specific groups for exclusion from the political process, even at the social level, is a recipe for disaster. We want less of that, not more.

At most, ask for transparency about where the donations are sourced from so the polity can talk about it.

I think devonkim meant that politicians DO in fact have control over which deplorable supporters they get associated with in the public eye -- the politicians who accept donations from racist organizations are the racist politicians.

Firstly, that is not what devonkim said, so he probably doesn't mean that. Secondly, that is also wrong.

Trump is a good example of this sort of thing - a reporter just has to look at him sideways to get told that black unemployment is at a record low, and over the last 2 years he's pulled a couple of pro-black political stunts. About half the media will still call him a racist, because he has _no_ control over who he gets associated with.

I expect this point would come up in a debate so I'll address it - a 'Muslim travel ban' is only racist to someone who is very confused about what 'race' means. Given the pain Bush & Obama have delivered to the Middle East in particular, and the Muslim world in general, this is a distasteful but certainly not inconsistent choice for US foreign policy.

> politicians who accept donations from racist organizations are the racist politicians.

Maybe in the abstract, but who are there "racist organizations" that are making political donations to influence politicans? Assuming we are still talking US politics, the last scandal [0] involving the KKK (only racist organisation I know of) was in 1991! Everything since is literally throwaway one-line comments of no real significance.

I don't think racist organisations are active in politics, they'd make candidates unelectable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_United_States_politi...

I didn’t downvote you because it makes sense if you believe taking money from organizations you dislike would hurt them. Not going to address whether it’s helpful or not because I have no basis to say one way or the other.

The issue is that such a model is based purely on economic grounds rather than on messaging and rhetoric. Accepting money usually implies a form of condonation of the donor because the implication is that you want their assistance. If I take money from the US Nazi party and sue them back (for... something) with said money that’d be complicated but this has happened rarely enough that popular media appears to never show it. This isn’t like a corporate entity like Burger King donating money to a candidate. But it would sure be funny if Burger King donated money to PETA right?

On the flip side, refusing money is usually assumed as a form of demonstration of principle that is even stronger the lesser your wealth; that even if you are poor and destitute (as if our politicians are, yeah I know) you would rather not accept money from someone you disagree with. If a homeless person returns a large sum of money, that makes news (and an ironically higher-compensation Kickstarter / gofundme for the refuser but historically not so). Politicians and powerful people in general work off networks and money as their careers so taking money from someone when you have so much wealth / fame already carries a lot of weight there as well.

Come to think of it, I think I saw someone accept a donation and immediately donate the money to a diametrically opposed organization. But that’s rare enough that it becomes a headline is my point.

Nutjobs agreeing with someone doesn't mean they're wrong, but it's strong evidence they might be wrong. I mean, why are the nutjobs agreeing? That's worth thinking about.

This is especially important because clever politicians can say things that seem reasonable on the surface, but aren't really.

What I'm talking about here is really an application of the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule. Support of nutjobs is 80% likely to be evidence of nutty ideas.

Far right nutjobs (scarequote kind and real ones) have consistently been against US involvement in middle eastern wars. One of the ways the oligarchy works is associating things they don't like, aka "fewer dumb wars" with generally unpopular ideas.

If the reasoning skills of nutjobs are already suspect, you can't take as trustworthy their endorsements.

> Nutjobs agreeing with someone doesn't mean they're wrong, but it's strong evidence they might be wrong

It doesn’t really work well for politics - it’s clear nutjobs support both major parties here in the US.

That's not a very convincing counterargument given that both parties seem to enthusiastically support things like corporate welfare, bogus patents, copyright and other censorship, warrentless surveilance and other domestic spying, private citizens being less well armed than goverment thugs, various horrendous dysfunctions of the health care system, and conditional welfare that cuts people off if they make any progress toward climbing out of poverty, and oppose things like nuclear power, basic income, common carriage requirements for ISPs and gigasites like facebook and google, and crackdowns on techinically-not-lying in contracts and advertisement.

I think you are misusing the term scientific method here.

Scientific method revolves around hypothesis and tests.

Global warming science is based on something else entirely.

Edit: My wording seems to have provoked confusion as to my point. Apologies. My point is that not all science utilizes the scientific method.

As opposed to, say, astrophysics? Anthropology? Geology? Marine biology? Neuroscience? Paleontology? There are any number of scientific disciplines that don't have the ability to run the idealized repeatable experiment-in-a-bottle. In fact, I'd wager the number that do is probably smaller than the number that don't.

There's more to the scientific method than that.

On what is it based then? There are computer simulations ("hypotheses"), which scientists compare with available data ("verifications"). Then verified simulation tools are applied to predict what happens depending on our behavior. The latter part is a hypothesis without a test, but if it turns out to be true, we are in trouble. It's better to trust it and take action...

Obligatory Dilbert Cartoon: http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-05-14

Of course, one must consider that the climate models that have gotten ignored over the years have generally been ignored because they were too pessimistic, despite those ones turning out to be the more accurate ones.

Please clarify. If global warming science is not based on hypothesis and tests, what is it based on? Where are you going with this?

Not OP, but from what I understand a lot of the tests where simulated and the 50' sea level rise they predicted hasn't started happening, etc.

The input data wasn't working with the expected results as well, so they came up with a flaw in the thermometers around the world which they used as justification to massage the numbers.

I dunno. I don't like pollution, but it's feeling a little hoaxie.

Ah, the "Scientists are greedy liars in a giant conspiracy to get rich on research grants" argument.

Is that what I said?

Anyway this doesn't seem like the appropriate forum.

So you don't consider astronomy a science?

Many of the sciences are actually better understood as more or less rigorous phenomenologies. Sometimes actually applying the formal scientific method is grossly unethical or ludicrously expensive. In cases like that the phenomenological approach lets you still develop something of an understanding of the subject matter.

From a practical perspective, it doesn't matter if the subject is technically formal science or a rigorous phenomenology, what matters is that you can engineer systems using the knowledge of the field.

We have a lot of measurements in astronomy, which often proove or disprove our hypotheses.

I believe that was the implication of the comment you're replying to, whereas the grandparent talking about "Scientific method revolves around hypothesis and tests" ... seems to have a different understanding.

The same is true in climate science.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, we're currently conducting a global scale experiment (though without a control Earth) that is already showing results.

In astronomy one aberrant observation is enough to completely revolutionize the field or destroy a previously esteemed view. It's not based on melting pot models and so a single mistake indicates something is wrong, perhaps fundamentally wrong. Consider that decades before relativity was discovered we knew very well that something was very broken because Mercury's expected orbit was off by 1/100th of a degree per century.

By contrast, how would you propose falsifying a climate model? Each decade or so we gain another chunk of data we can use to try to trial predictions of the past and, to date, they've done quite abysmally except in the most broad sense of a longterm gradual increase in temperatures. For instance from 2001 and 2010 the warming slowed to 0.11C per decade. [1] For the 17 years before then was 0.17C. There was not a single model that predicted this and, in spite of a number of after the fact hypotheses for that apparent decline, there is still no decisive answer. In a science that was more heavily dependent upon testing, this would be a ground-shaking event. But it's effect on climate science has been relatively minimal.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-global-warmin...

I mean, all that really proves is that climatology is more complicated than orbital mechanics.

Formal reasoning, scientific or otherwise, is all about reducing a subject to cognitive manageability. If the subject is too complicated to do that, then it shouldn't be considered in the same class as subjects where that is possible.

Or maybe we need to put more effort in, collect more data, build better models, until we can understand it.

I could build a cabin using basic reasoning. I can't build a skyscraper with just basic reasoning. Does that mean we shouldn't build skyscrapers? Or just that we should leave their design to someone who really put the effort into the "cognitive manageability" of it?

And really, when it gets down to it, a lot of the blatantly irrational opposition to the very idea of global warming comes from "cognitive manageability". For people who still think Sky Daddy made the world in six days and cavemen rode dinosaurs, the idea that their car is wrecking the atmosphere is beyond their "cognitive manageability", and it gets flatly rejected.

When I see the people who believe in the scientific method mostly lined up on one side of an issue, and people who reject the scientific method mostly lined up on the other side, it biases me. Which was my original point, that so many people have flipped out about.

The person you're responding to is undoubtedly referring to the ability to link cause with effect. As such "cognitive manageability" doesn't mean simple. Relativity is far from simple, but it's cognitively manageable - as is the fundamental science and engineering knowledge used when designing and ultimately constructing skyscrapers.

To give an example of something that is not cognitively manageable, aside from climate, consider the stock market. We can create a million correlations to the stock market. And these correlations themselves all hold true. And there is an immense, literally unlimited, amount of profit to be made if somebody could combine these correlations into a way that could create meaningful predictive value. There's no doubt that billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been spent in pursuit of such. Yet prediction seems to remain impossible. And that's in a field with a fraction of the variables of climate change.

Except that global warming/climate change has now been distorted beyond recognition.

What most believe is no-longer aligned with reality:

- Read Google’s research report for the jaw-dropping reality they uncovered without intent

- Study ice core data

- Understand the concept of planetary scale rate of change

- Understand the fact —FACT— that if we had Captain Kirk erase the entire United States from this planet by trasporting everyone and everything into space CO2 accumulation would continue

- Understand that if we erased all of humanity next monday it would take somewhere in the order if 25,000 to 50,000 years for CO2 levels to drop 100ppm

- Now explain how much in resources and energy would be required to bend the planetary-scale rate-of-change of atmospheric CO2 from about 100 ppm per 50,000 years to 100 ppm in 50 year (a 1,000 x improvement over the natural process)

- Now explain how this massive amount of energy and resources will not produce massively more CO2 (and more)

- If you said “renewable energy” go back to the top and read the Google paper

This global warming thing has been turned into a political football by both sides. What’s sad is the truth isn’t at either end of the scale. Most people who now believe “the scientific truth” are believing sonething as false as those who deny it.

The Google paper is the starting point of something that should have shifted the dialog on the subject years ago. However, their conclusion doesn’t lead to easy money and raises more questions than it answers; a real invonvenient truth.

Here you go:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

So what's the jaw-dropping reality uncovered here?

Sorry, had to go do real work an the entire day flew by. Now I am on my phone and it won't let me copy and paste the relevant passage. I’ll try in the morning from my computer.

The finding, in a nutshell, was that if every source of clean energy was deployed optimally at a global scale, not only would atmospheric CO2 accumulation not stop, it would continue to rise exponentially.

Convert the entire planet to the most optimized versions of “green” energy sources and you pretty much fix nothing.

This is a sobering realization.

I urge you to read the paper, there’s a lot more detail there. They set out to prove renewables could “save the planet” only to discover it would be an exercise in futility.

Thank you very much for that! I will definitely read into it. Good summary.

Here's a couple links you might be interested as well:

Audit of the main IPCC dataset: https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/52041/

More readable summary of the audit: https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2018/10/13/main-temperat...

Thanks again for the heads up on google's report!

What's jaw dropping about Google's research report?

I usually like to use the argument that if climate change scientists were held by so much money you’d see a lot more rich scientists / early retirement scientists outside pharmaceuticals, medicine, and oil & gas. In contrast, I have never, ever heard of a petroleum engineer or oil & gas company manager living in poverty or struggling to find work. Where is all that George Soros money going? You can only fund so many scientists that risk their careers, Hollywood celebrity sex cults, and paid protestors of hundreds of thousands. I did some back of the napkin math with a guy at a bar using his own conspiracy theory addled numbers and it came out to at least $10 BILLION PER YEAR. That’s complete absurdity. I know the Koch brothers are worth a lot but I couldn’t ever think they’re paying that much to fund conservative crap unless they get something in return, which you absolutely can from corporations compared to uh... a lot of papers and bad wardrobes from research scientists?

A lot of it is legal tax avoidance by funneling money through foundations, non-profits, and so on. https://nccs.urban.org/data-statistics/quick-facts-about-non.... As you can see, 10 billion is a drop in the bucket.

I see people doing this, but only selectively when it benefits their existing beliefs. They look at the worse groups agreeing with those they disagree with, while ignoring the worst groups that agree with them.

It can be tough to judge by who you stand with.

I like socialism and communism. I think it can bring lots of good to the world. But people who propagate it are some of the worst people to have ever walked the earth. I think they were just mistaken. 100 million deaths with errors bars bigger than the number of people killed in the holocaust.

I don’t want to be judged for propagating social welfare just because some monsters committed horrendous acts.

Similarly in the US, I support left wing and sanders. But I won’t want to be judged as if I stand with cop killers, antifa, the Congress baseball game killer, etc.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to use this formula frankly. It’s also easy to manipulate.

Experimentally, we have found that there are two choices for who runs a country:

1) Politicians who are greedy, self-centred and ruthless.

2) Politicians who are liars, greedy, self-centred and ruthless.

The big issue with "I like communism" (for socialism the argument changes) is that any time anyone tries it they try to appoint champions of the people to their ruling class and discover they have actually got liars and monsters. This doesn't happen because they got unlucky - this is because there are no champions of the people at that level of power. There are only people with incentives, and communism really screws up the incentive structure.

The best incentive structure, by far, is free markets and democracy, even if the people who rise to the top are all scum. Somehow, "by luck" (bah, people don't get incentives) it all works really well.

I could not disagree more with your second point.

Just because a group of misguided individuals support a specific idea, person, or ideology, doesn't mean that the thing they support should be judged based on the merits of those people. The things should be evaluated based on the individual merits of whatever it is.

Following your logic, I could easily say that Hitler was a vegetarian, so if you don't eat meat, you stand with Hitler.

"I could be wrong. I'm often wrong."

The guilt-by-association rule is not a hard and fast airtight conclusion. This is the stock criticism everyone is making, and it simply doesn't follow. It's evidence of a flaw, but not every bit of evidence is incontrovertible proof of whatever.

Really, doesn't anyone study logic anymore?

Perhaps people are associating your arguments with other, flawed, arguments and assuming yours are flawed as well. Might not be incontrovertible proof but it's enough to critique you.

> The core counter-explanation to the scientific consensus is "Scientists are greedy liars in a giant conspiracy to get rich on research grants", which I find, um, problematic.

I think this is a core counter-explanation for anti-vaccine and GMO as well.

Your comment is dripping with contempt and your attitude is frankly disgusting. Science is not a popularity contest... nor is science so black and white. You'll find plenty of good scientists questioning just how much humans are contributing to global warming, so long as you phrase it like that (nuanced), rather than asking flat out whether people believe in global warming or not (black and white). But what you're trying to do is demonize all scientists who don't agree with your opinions and I find it frankly disgusting. Shame on you.

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong another comment is or how someone's attitude seems. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting to HN.

I think the general problem behind issues like these are that the public has repeatedly been over and over deceived by autoritative voices - might it be experts, academics or government positions.

As a consequence, when people have the gut feeling that something might be off many trust that feeling over whatever truth is them presented.

Also: >> (Or, as a friend put it about politics, "If the racists think the candidate is a racist, the candidate is probably a racist".)

is just amazingly simple minded. By the same logic all dogs are Nazis just because Hitler's dog (probably) loved him and Hitler was a Nazi after all.

I don't think that's actually the same logic at all.

It would be the same logic if Hitler’s dog loved him for being a Nazi (killing Jews, conquering Europe), rather than because of petting and food and playtime.

Thanks for understanding my point. Hitler's dog loved him because the dog cared about food and getting petted. The bad elements were not the main priority of the dog. Just caring about one thing and not caring about the other does not make the dog a Nazi. Even more ridiculous, in the logic of OP, all other dogs who think this is behavior is okay, Nazi dogs.

> caring about one thing and not caring about the other

> in the logic of OP, all other dogs who think this is behavior is okay

No. The OP did not talk about approval. They talked about specifically thinking the candidate is racist.

As the OP, the logic goes like this... "I'm a racist. And I like Candidate X because I believe Candidate X is also a racist, based on the things Candidate X says".

Now, it's possible that Candidate X is not a racist. But if the racists are confused about it, maybe Candidate X needs to be more clear. Because the racists look at Candidate Y and "We hate Candidate Y, because they're opposed to our beliefs". No chance of misunderstandings there.

Now, Candidate X will certainly have other supporters saying "We don't believe Candidate X is a racist", but I look at them sidelong and say "Don't listen to me, listen to the racists".

> The bad elements were not the main priority of the dog.

The dog has no concept of "the bad elements".

I'm sorry what?

A dog isn't a reasoning human being. Using the dog, this way, in the argument is irrelevant and distracting to any of the issues.

I think we can say that EVERY person around Hitler was in fact a bad person regardless of whether they loved dogs.

It may be that people used fallacious reasoning to justify their own support of Hitler (ignoring his other qualities conveniently) for such reasons as "he likes dogs therefore he is a good person".

"I like X because he agrees with me in this narrow way therefore I'll support X doing terrible terrible things but justify it with this narrow reason."

That's a bad person supporting a bad person.

Alright, let's make it about humans:

Person A prefers apple over oranges and potatoes over tomatoes.

Person B prefers also potatoes over tomatoes but does not care about apple or oranges.

Original poster now argues that it is okay for Person C to say Person B is an oranges hater, just because Person B prefers potatoes.

Replace Person A/B/C with your favorite groups of adversaries.

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