Comment by berikv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by berikv | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the question (which should be on the top, instead of the climate change deniers).

Politicians are chosen by the citizens. So the question could be rephrased to “how do we make a big portion of the world aware of the seriousness?”.

A web search for “how to convince your opponent” gives some great suggestions:

———————————————————— How to Convince Someone Ask them to share their thoughts. Match their type of reasoning -- if they're being emotional, appeal to their emotions; if they're relying on logic, be logical. Get them to lower their guard with a genuine compliment. Pose a counter-argument (without making them defensive). ————————————————————

This is quite counter intuitive: I would think that if you would tell the data and scientific method used to obtain the data you would be able to convince anyone, but not so.

Instead you have to open the discussion and have both sides on the table, which leads to ridiculous situations eg: a TV show gives a scientist who builds upon many years of research equal time to speak on some matter as a fancy vlogger with a quirky opinion.

The more noise you make the more you will be noticed. If people aren’t confronted with their actions, they have little chance to change their opinion and behaviour. It is important to be respectful while also making clear that change is needed, by each and everyone.

Such engagement would be better than how I've generally been treated as an opponent of climate change alarmism. Historically the arguments boil down to, emotional appeals like this story. Buy now or lose the opportunity forever! We are reaching an inflection point! This is a story angle I've seen dozens of times at this point and none of the dire predictions have ever come to pass. The other major one is "you're not qualified to have an opinion on the topic".

There are numerous pieces on how various branches of science have a very broken peer review process. The academic incentives are perverse, publish or perish, and peer review is a low budget method that has lots of issues that crop in.

My main issue is, is modern science reliable enough to make such predictions? All meta science material I've seen says no, they are not. So my preference would be, fix the system so it stops producing sensationalistic garbage and then we can talk about what might need to change about fundamental economic underpinnings.

> “how do we make a big portion of the world aware of the seriousness?”

A big portion of the world is pretty convinced that scientific community is full of shit. It might be the case that what they are saying might be true. But it is the boy that cried wolf at this point. But unlike the story, both the boy and the farmers could end up paying the price here.

Sad.

When has the scientific community really been crying wolf on environmental matters, on a large scale?

It can certainly feel like it has, with warnings about climate change and other ecological issues getting near-constant and having more and more visibility over the last couple of decades. But that's not really the scientific community calling wolf unless they were wrong. That's just people getting jaded. That doesn't mean the warnings have been wrong, it just means things have been going on for a long time with no solution.

>When has the scientific community really been crying wolf on environmental matters, on a large scale?

Obviously I meant the scientific community in general. What is special about the "environmental matters", that make the community around it resistant to various politicisation or frauds?

I was assuming it would be about environmental questions based on the context, but that may have been a poor assumption on my part.

Nothing of course makes environmental research immune to problems.

The question then becomes the same about the scientific community in general. When and about what has it been crying wolf?

You mention fraud, but is it really as prevalent a problem in academic research as it might seem from the headlines? Fraud or other instances of gross misconduct deservedly make the headlines but all the research staff toiling away and trying to do their best don't. (The occasional sexy enough result does, but those are few and far between.) From what little I've seen of academic research, the people in there haven't seemed to be dishonest or intending to defraud. I'm sure outright fraud does happen, but is it really such a widespread problem that it counts as the entire community becoming suspect?

Questionable methodology is of course a problem, and probably a much more widespread one, although it's probably not any worse than what people generally base their opinions and views on.

I really still fail to see how the scientific community has cried wolf. I can easily see how it would seem and feel like it has, but that would be more due to poor journalism and reporting than due to the actions of most of the community itself.

Of course I may be grossly underestimating the prevalence of scientific misconduct, but this has been my impression.

> When and about what has it been crying wolf?

I can give you instances, but that would not be very efficient. Because you can then be apologetic of the examples I provide..

The real question is "can the scientific community be made to have a consensus based on politics rather than science?". I think the answer is a resounding "YES", simply because it is made up of human beings who are not less susceptible to ways of coercion, than the human beings in actual politics or other fields that we can agree that corruption exists.

>From what little I've seen of academic research, the people in there haven't seemed to be dishonest or intending to defraud.

Politicians at a high level being corrupt does not imply, or require, that every government official is corrupt. So I am not sure why you mention it.

> but is it really such a widespread problem that it counts as the entire community becoming suspect?

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...

This is not a justification or proof (as I said earlier, it would not be a very efficient use of my time), but something you can start with if you are genuinely interested and if you really have no idea how bad things are in this regard (Jeez, i wonder how can that be the case!)

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