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Comment by dryd | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately the title makes a small logical leap.

From the article: "Her team combined data from different species in different places. Since they have little in common apart from living on a warming planet, she says, climate change is the most plausible explanation."

While climate change may indeed be the most plausible explanation, this headline seems to transform from "most plausible" into a causal link.

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Probability is fundamentally all we have in science. The only distinction is in the level of confidence use in inference of the data. 95% is fairly typical though particle physics requires and impressive level >99.9999%

even if one accepts this, which I don’t (what is the probability of mathematics being a quantum ultrafinitist glandular endomorphism of classical electromagnetism? What is the probability that the sun rises tomorrow? What’s the probability the standard model is true? It’s nonsense.) you could totally interpret what he said as “original paper claimed 20-80% confidence, economist article assumed 95%” and that would be a reasonable probabilistic reading

One way of considering the things you describe in terms of probability is to frame them as bets, and then set the probabilities based on what bets you might make (e.g. what odds would you want in a bet on whether the sun would rise tomorrow). Personally I find that makes some of the more difficult statements a little more palatable.

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

> what odds would you want in a bet on whether the sun would rise tomorrow

How would you denominate such a bet? I don't think money would have much value in a world where the sun failed to come up one day.

the point being that IMO the way you understand and come up with and reason about something like “classical mechanics” or “timeless decision theory” or “quantum enlightenment time cube satanic world order simulation” or “risc v architecture” is not about probability, and saying science is about probability totally elides the actual complex information and reasons that go into creating and using those in favor of just saying “they have a probability and we can change them”.

I understand what you’re saying, but I have to highlight a mistake.

In science, what you’re talking about is not a “probability of being right”, but a probability of not getting the same experimental results completely randomly, without any underlying cause. You still might have 0% probability of being right. With “95% confidence” there still could be no measured effect whatsoever, you just made the same experiment multiple times and randomly finally got big enough random numbers to get you 95% confidence.

It’s not a nitpick, it is a serious mistake that 95% social scientists make.

There's a lot of global changes that could be underlying contributing factors. Global air and water pollution, pesticides, microplastics. Things that were regional that are becoming global as Earth's massive interconnected recycling systems chug on our waste. The entire planet has traces of radioactive isotopes that were essentially non-existent before nuclear testing. Light pollution. Global insect apocalypse. You can create a list and rank them by the potential contributions. I didn't read the whole article because paywall, but there are lots of things that are all globally different than a century ago.

> this headline seems to transform from "most plausible" into a causal link.

One of big alternative explanations why animals/humans get smaller closer to tropics is not because of lack of food, but because of too much of it

The quicker the species can grow to maturity, the more food calories can be spent for procreation.

Why do you think this is a relevant critique to the article/paper? The study is about a global trend in increasing appendage size within populations due to warming ("Allen's rule"), not whole body size ("Bergmann's rule"). Secondly, the role of food is acknowledged as a potential factor in the section on causality, but justifiably rejected as the sole factor.

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