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Comment by michaelneale | Hacker News Reader

Charles Sturt Uni is a fairly well regarded Australian university. It isn't one of the so called "sandstone club" but I believe it does legitimate stuff (it isn't that easy to be called a university here). They also often specialise in rural/earth science matters (I always thought of them as a rural uni). If that helps?

Yeah it is my instinct to to use credentials but then I pull myself up and think "is this a high brow ad-hominem thing" but it probably makes sense to be curious/skeptical at first.

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Ruling out potential bias isn't ad-hominem fallacy IMO. Ad-hominem fallacy relates to irrelevant personal attacks. Bias is relevant- just like citing an author's history of proven fraud would not be ad-hominem fallacy, because it is relevant.

Or, at least, that's how I see it. Anyway, I think this is fundamentally different than logical arguments. The burden of proof very much rests on the paper or study or critique. Shaky credibility raises the bar of proof. Remember, in science, new papers are not de-facto gospel until proven wrong- they must be repeatedly supported by successive studies & challenges before they are accepted as truth.

Consider, for example, datasets. There is a certain amount of implicit trust in the dataset provided in some new paper. The dataset can be fudged in ways which are undetectable, and no logical argument can refute- data is not argument. Therefore until you are prepared to replicate the dataset, you are trusting the author.

Right, I feel better about doing this now!

> Remember, in science, new papers are not de-facto gospel until proven wrong- they must be repeatedly supported by successive studies & challenges before they are accepted as truth.

Yet we read that the findings in most published research are either never reproduced, or not reproducible.

Absolutely, this is useful context, thanks!

I completely agree there's a lot of danger of ad hominem analysis in these kinds of cases. From my perspective, I probably would not post about this sort of thing at all, if it were a more mundane issue. But there seems to be a lot at stake in the climate crisis issues, so I'm trying harder than usual to figure out how to get my bearings.

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