Before commenting, do NOT miss the disclaimer at the top:
"[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]"
This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not asserting a Bold New Idea.
"[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]"
This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not asserting a Bold New Idea.
This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart people with access to diverse sets of information — and crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the data points to.
> I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas.
When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but rather that questioning things and being open minded to whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible, describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language stating things as they are.
I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also, the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part of said citation.
I've found a conversational trick in saying "But I haven't finished thinking about this yet.". It can sometimes be a bit of a thought terminating cliche, but I find it stops people jumping to contest obvious details in order to get started proving me wrong. People seem to acknowledge that I know I could be wrong, so they're more helpful in the conversation rather than antagonistic or dismissive.