> Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.
> I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.
One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-physic...
Judging by the consequences for those public figures who made a mistake of doubting these believes, it's a whole totalitarian sect.
Sure, scientists make mistakes. Their models need adjustment. They ignore variables because they don't have the computational power to model every electron in the universe. Yeah, imprecise models make imprecise predictions. No one has accuracy of 100%. Sometimes it's 90%, sometimes it's 50%. Sometimes it's 99.9%. It's rarely, rarely ever 0%. People just don't publish scientific results that are 100% wrong with no checking whatsoever.
But that's not the level of conversation we are having. We usually aren't talking about adjusting and tinkering or adding sub-models for systems that aren't fully understood yet. We aren't asking what we missed, we aren't examining the assumptions from the outset, trying to get to something that works. We aren't talking details of climate models or pointing to something in the inner guts of their computer simulations that we can fix up, remove, replace, etc. All of that is really complicated and hard! And we aren't doing that specifically because you frame that stuff as "Sacred Knowledge" which you reflexively and categorically reject--it's a shortcut thinking that doesn't require you to understand math, code, or read a goddamn paper. It's a shortcut that allows you to keep reasoning in a vacuum and go about your daily life because you actually hate the idea of being an (xyz) scientist.
As such, we end up in a situation where you are forced to argue a position that results from all-or-nothing thinking, and have to start accusing them of being a religion, a totalitarian sect, usually because one of them got pissed off at some really outrageously stupid disinformation spread deliberately by politicians. But you are forced there because you either can't or don't want to cede any rhetorical ground of being fully and utterly more right than "they" are, because you have no idea what will happen if you cede any ground at all. So instead the othering intensifies. Reject everything they say! We must throw them out! It's a religion! Look, one of them got pissed off one day! They were wrong that one time! I don't trust a word they say!
And you only frame things this way because that's how you think--in terms of religion and power. Moreover, it's how you think they think.
No. I absolutely and unequivocally reject the framing of your comment. It's lazy and it's a lie.
There is no "Sacred Knowledge." Go dig. Scientists welcome it. But don't be a denialist moron. There are too many of those. Denialist morons reject even the basics of what scientists do. Sometimes they couch it in more-scientific-than-thou-art framing like yours, sometimes they don't. But they come out in anger and denial. You know what? That pisses off anybody. To have your work shat on, you better believe that pisses people off. We end up circling back over and over and over again to the same basics and it's just exhausting, because people aren't motivated by a desire for the truth, they are motivated by their tribal instincts which underpin your framing, whether you recognize it or not.
You do nothing to help your argument by resorting to this type of language.
terse catharsis.
Doesn't sound healthy, or wise.
Now the yin problem has revealed itself as an existential threat to the growth-centric way of life built upon the work of the great minds of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly they and their disciples are reluctant to accept this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...
That was your SPECULATION.
Dyson is exhibiting a pathology common among physicists, a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect along the lines of “physics is hard, therefore everything else is easy for me”. We see it often when they dabble in social sciences, or biology, or economics. The complete opposite of intellectual humility and the scientific method.