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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

It's a great article.

The real problem with evidence like this is that the "believer" must strive for 100% accuracy; that is really hard.

The "skeptic" only needs to have one single piece of data turn out to be inaccurate, and then can doubt the entire thing; that is really easy.

And, we can hold both things in our heads. I just went to the Newport Aquarium in Oregon. There is a terrific exhibit which shows a paleobotanist discovering fossilized palm fronds in Alaska. The climate has changed radically over time. And, it is still very possible that we are altering it for the worse. And, we should all know we will be impacted whether or not we can find the "right people" to blame for it. Let's not waste time arguing over that, but I suspect the real conspiracy is that we are arguing over that, rather than arguing over how to solve what is inevitable.

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It's a classic red vs. blue attack/defense problem that affects lots of fields.

To make a perfectly secure piece of software it must be flawless. An attacker on the other hand only needs to find a single exploit, a single oversight, to break it.

Defending something is orders of magnitude more difficult than attacking something for that reason.

Like defending your privacy from apps constantly asking for access to your contacts. Once you're a bit distracted and press "allow" by mistake, it's gone

The counterpoint is, good defense (and software) comes from good principles and hard work. Good attack (or hack) on the other hand also requires brilliance and luck to find the exploit.

Over time defense will keep improving , attack on the other hand will become more difficult when common issues are no longer a problem ( say memory safety or SQL injection) when best practices become the norm.

On HN this week something like half of the articles (e: from a Google search) about PHP had SQLi in them.

While SQLi is still quite common, the use of good libraries and prepared statements even in PHP has increased a lot say in last 10 years, the % of projects / services on which SQLi was possible should have also reduced.

In that HN thread you talked about someone had mentioned till sometime back even the official docs used to have examples with SQLi, which of course they don't anymore, making it slightly harder for junior devs to make those mistakes, each step is improvement.

I am not saying they already solved, I am saying it becomes harder to hack with some techniques over time as defenses become more standard and best practices become actually common place.

My old book I wrote on PHP4 had SQLi in it.. heh. And I still ended up in appsec years later. Been doing that for 15+ years but my roots are software dev, so I use that and try to have a lot of empathy for developers. When I got started app sec was nascent and just becoming it’s own thing, and many in infosec had a very blame oriented mindset with developers. So it’s great to see how far we have brought things.

Sure. My issue is that it doesn't help persuade those who agree that climate change is real and happening, but they won't admit that it's caused by humans. The line is "change is constant, the earth is always heating and cooling, there's nothing we can really do about it, you're crazy if you think we caused it and crazier if you think we can prevent it. Better to just adapt."

That apathy is extra frustrating for me.

Would you care to ask them what it is that they doubt, specifically?

It's basically down to two choices. One can doubt the CO2 greenhouse effect, which everyone with a basic education should know the basic principles of, and which can be demonstrated in home experiments.

Or one can doubt that humanity burns the amount of carbon that is reported, but these figures are publicly available in many forms, including the amount that is produced and sold by the oil companies themselves.

It’s hard to do, cause most often it’s my dad and I have trouble staying calm because of that family dynamic. I could try asking though.

My mum is the same. I have never been able to wrap my head around it: if you have no formal (or even self-taught) training in a particular domain, shouldn't you be humble enough to accept that you're not in a position to assess the quality of the science in that domain, and so accept the consensus?

I have never heard the argument - from even the most ardent climate skeptics and deniers - that the consensus (by simple majority of climate scientists) is in fact anything other than that we are living through man-made climate change. The focus of such people is instead usually on the dissenting voices.

But then, how do such people dispose of the views of the majority? Is their belief that the dissenting voices are the correct ones based on some artifice of conspiracy? Do they doubt the bona fides of the majority? Do they think they are all bought and paid for? What exactly is the leap of logic that allows this person - the untrained and only incidentally interested layperson - to dismiss the opinions of this body of people?

Most people are good. They care about others and they have good intentions. Yes, their actions can be distorted by incentives. But on the whole people seek to do good. It seems to me that you'd have to falsify those (in my view, self-evidently fundamentally true) claims in order to dismiss the scientific consensus on climate change.

I look at my kids, then I look at my mum, and it's hard not to get pissed off.

I believe that climate change is real and man-made, but I don't find the "consensus" argument convincing.

It's well known now that science is heavily politicized, most published research is wrong[1], fraud is common[2] and largely ignored[3], and many promising scientists have been excluded from the field for a variety of reasons from politics to prejudice to simple personal conflicts with the superstars. Funding and continued employment can be endangered by publishing politically incorrect results - if those results are allowed to be published at all - while publishing the "correct" results is rewarded.

In an environment like this, it would be almost impossible for anyone who openly disagreed with the consensus to stay in the field. And once qualified people are driven out for these unscientific reasons, their opinion is no longer counted among the "consensus" of scientists, because the consensus is usually only measured among people working for a university or government agency.

In short, if you exclude everyone who disagrees, it's easy to manufacture any consensus you like (even something as completely wrong as Lysenkoism, to cite a rather extreme example of the principle).

1: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27884233

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922799

Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of those points. I didn’t mean to imply that the consensus is always correct (although my poorly-worded comment above plainly leaves the door open on that), just that as an untrained layman you need to have the humility to refrain from forming an opinion against the consensus. Hot takes unwanted, basically.

There is definitely a process of pushback and mediation between consensus and dissenting voices in any complex field that needs to happen, but agree that that is very difficult in the current political climate. I was going to say that there should be some (self-imposed) threshold of expertise to participate in these conversations, but I guess if policies affect peoples’ lives then they should ipso facto have the right to form an opinion on them.

Personally, my concerns about the integrity of any scientific consensus generally are in this case, on balance, outweighed by the potential consequences of denying climate change and being wrong about it, versus accepting it at face value, doing something about it, then finding out later that it was wasted effort. But that’s a different (and perhaps better) argument from the one I was making above.

You're right, those of us reviewing evidence must strive for 100% accuracy. One of the issues with the cherry blossom data is that it's difficult to be 100% sure that we can accurately keep track of the Japanese calendar 1200+ years into the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar

Fortunately, df(a x)/dx = 0 when f = C for all a.

It seems beyond obvious that we also aren’t accounting for selective breeding of cherry trees. Humans have had a hand in everything else, why wouldn’t we assume here too.

Japan traditionally used the lunisolar calendar - so if any record says "blossoms peaked at the fifth day of the fourth month," then it means it peaked at the fifth day after some day of the new moon, which can be calculated with very good precision. It should severely constrain potential calendar conversion errors.

I think there's more to it than that. It reminds me of JBS Haldane's four stages of acceptance:

1. This is worthless nonsense

2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.

3. This is true, but quite unimportant.

4. I always said so.

I think many former 'skeptics' are now at stage 3.

Skeptics = deniers in your mind?

I changed the wording to more closely respond to the parent comment.

I don't often debate the topic with skeptics, but one tactic one can use is to position the problem in the larger framework that is the absolute environmental disaster of human civilization.

Meaning, you can hardly deny mass deforestation. Wiping out the vast majority of wildlife and most of its habitat. The emptying of the oceans, desertification, pollution, plastics, over-population, over-consumption, the list goes on.

With this I mean to say that our entire way of life is unsustainable regardless of climate change. We have to radically change our ways in any case.

Most people intuitively agree that we are holistically unsustainable. Few would argue against it. This doesn't necessarily make people an advocate for change, but it's a start.

> The "skeptic" only needs to have one single piece of data turn out to be inaccurate

“The great tragedy of Science–the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” –British biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895)

This is the scientific method - theories must explain/not contradict any known facts, and must predict unexpected new facts that can be verified by experiment.

Those fossilized palm fronds don't represent the climate of Alaska in its present latitude. Alaska was positioned in the tropics 250 million years ago when the dinosaurs were still wandering about. Alaska started heading North 160 million years ago.

Source:

- https://www.gi.alaska.edu/alaska-science-forum/equatorial-al...

I see very few skeptics. A true skeptic would be truly skeptical, including own ability and Dunning-Kruger effects. We mainly don't see that.

It would be a breath of fresh air for people to be open-minded and curious. Seek out cutting-edge information from experts now and then, and share that.

There's room for being concerned, but more than that, may not be too helpful for anyone.

There are tens of thousands of papers published each year about climate change, there is a 100% scientific agreement. The peanut gallery in the comment section knows better, but can't be bothered to contribute to the discussion.

https://www.hull.ac.uk/special/blog/why-people-still-believe...

It is denial or ignorance. They are not sceptical of anything, they wouldn't know what to be sceptical of.

I worship climate change too but palms In Alaska actually sounds nice.

Some people are literally willing to die rather than wear a mask or get a vaccine and do you think that this kind of people care about climate change or anything else?

If you find yourself saying or thinking "It's so simple why don't people understand" with regard to a political or social issue, there's a good chance you don't fully understand the issue.

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