Cherry Picking: When People Ignore Evidence That They Dislike | Hacker News Reader

Cherry Picking: When People Ignore Evidence That They Dislike

effectiviology.com

18 pointsEndXA13 comments

Of course they use the example of focusing on climate change studies that are opposed to consensus, but what about when consensus is actually wrong? For example, high fat diet advocates were accused of cherry picking many years ago, but now we're swimming in cherries and there is no real consensus on high fat diets or the cholesterol theory of heart disease, we're in a transitional period. I think soon there will be a consensus that the prior consensus was morbidly incorrect. So was that really cherry picking?

> Of course they use the example of focusing on climate change studies that are opposed to consensus, but what about when consensus is actually wrong?

Even funnier is that their claim is flat out wrong, based on the study linked in the article.

Claim: For example, a notable study on climate change examined thousands of scientific papers on the topic, and found that approximately 97% of them support the consensus position that humans are causing climate change.

Relevant text from the study: We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

Fact: ~32.6% of the 11,944 peer-reviewed climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics 'global climate change' or 'global warming'peer-reviewed scientific literature endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

This is one of my favorite memes.

And yes, I realize if we were to contact all of these folks who didn't realize their studies would become fodder for propagandists, many of them would likely change their stance in support of the "consensus" (but not actually, based on this study), but that's no excuse for literally lying. And people genuinely wonder why there is a distrust of media and science.

"found that approximately 97% of them support the consensus position"

versus the more correct

"found that among abstracts expressing a position, approximately 97% of them support the consensus position"

Doesn't strike me as particularly 'wrong' or 'literally lying'. They are looking at where the consensus position lies on a particular idea that doesn't need to be mentioned in every abstract in the field. A paper to do with global warming can analyze reality without stating a cause for global warming in the abstract; that doesn't mean that the paper should count against one consensus position or another.

Those two statements are not equivalent.

And the "fact" that is usually printed in the news is 97% of scientists.

The distrust, of the media at least, is well earned.

At the time, the consensus opinion of Einstien's special relativity theory was that it was wrong. The Nobel committee gave him the prize for Brownian Motion, not relativity.

Galileo also went against the "consensus opinion" when he supported Copernicus’s heliocentric theory.

I knew this was a AGW piece when I read the headline.

"The Nobel committee gave him the prize for Brownian Motion" This is not true.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/summary/

Einstein explanation of Brownian motion served as convincing evidence that atoms and molecules exist and was further verified experimentally by Jean Perrin in 1908. Perrin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926 "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter".

Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1926/perrin/lectur...

* or when picking commits they do like

For those wanting to discover more cognitive biases:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

And for a decent introduction to critical thinking in general, I can highly recommend Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World".

Among many other good things in this book, there is a chapter called “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” which is the best primer in detecting bad thinking I've seen.

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Fine_Art_of_Baloney_Detect...

It's interesting to note that some time after writing this, Sagan became aware of the work of Jim Tucker, at the University of Virginia, attempting to validate the "past life" reports of children who've offered verifiable details in their accounts. Many children make such claims, but, as Sagan observed, “Young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”

I won't assert the truth of it, and I can think of a couple plausible vectors that don't involve consciousness surviving death and into another body (however unlikely they might be), but if it's compelling enough for the author of The Demon Haunted World to suggest it deserves "serious study", I'm the last person in the world to gainsay him.

The complete paragraph is in https://www.reddit.com/r/carlsagan/comments/5q2hub/is_this_a...

I think he is not asking a "serious study" because he think it's real, but because at some point we must make the experiments to verify or falsify the theories. (I think that the problem is that there is finite time and finite money for the experiments, so we must select only some of them.)

I think we're in agreement. This is him saying, "I think it's interesting enough to expend that effort." No one else has to agree, but that a mind like his thinks so, and based on what I've read of these accounts, I'm inclined to agree.

I have no idea how to go about falsifying that, though. You'd at a minimum have to strictly monitor the information flow into a child's environment, probably from birth, to control for any other vectors for verifiable details. All in the hopes that some of the study population's children will mention something you can confirm they didn't overhear, or whatever, which turns out to comport with the life of someone who's passed. That's perhaps a tough sell to the ethics committee.

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