Comment by tagfowufe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tagfowufe | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm definitely not educated enough to answer with nuance and certainty to some of the questions you posit. Nevertheless, I'd be interested, actually, in your opinion of what constitutes 1) evidence and 2) consensus. I, personally, have an intuition for it, but it's not very reasoned out. I'd love to develop it more in the future.

You argue that consensus is not really required in "hard science judgements". While I haven't studied proper philosophy of science, I'd say "measure things or do an experiment and be done with it" is, precisely, among the best ways to produce/allow consensus; or rather, the capacity of 'hard' science(s) to reason about a series of phenomena in such a way that consensus is 'easy'. One could argue that precisely the phenomena that 'hard' science inspects lends itself more to be inspected under a strict scientific method, too.

I'd say that any 'fact' is dependent on consciousness and intersubjectivity; yet at the same time, some things are more factual than others. Gravity as a phenomenon is more factual than, say, the Stendhal Effect. One can be more and better reproduced under more stringent conditions, thus having more predicting power and being more likely to be 'true' regardless of who interacts with the phenomenon, or reasons about it and its implications.

>I'd say that any 'fact' is dependent on consciousness and intersubjectivity; yet at the same time, some things are more factual than others. Gravity as a phenomenon is more factual than, say, the Stendhal Effect. One can be more and better reproduced under more stringent conditions, thus having more predicting power and being more likely to be 'true' regardless of who interacts with the phenomenon, or reasons about it and its implications.

Yes, this is my point. The question of, for example, measurements of gravity (at the basic Newtonian level for non-relativistic speeds) is more factual and less nuanced than the question of "climate change" or the question of "quantum explanations of gravity".

Reducing these more nuanced (or "less factual") issues to "people who don't think those are clear and settled are mentally affected" is a psychologization of dissagreement, turning it into a pathology.

It's worse when the proposed solutions / policies are also bundled with the facts (so you need to accept both to be "within the consensus").

While I understand the idea (there are nuances) I wonder if we treat things fairly. I have never measured gravity directly. I can notice effects which I know are attributed to gravity (things falling), but then again I can see effects attributed to human CO2 emissions (weather getting warmer and crazier).

The scientific concept of gravity (as I remember it from high school) involves two bodies and the distance between them. I can't measure that at all, so someone could claim gravity does not exist, but things fall because of some other reason.

What I think it's more important is the system's complexity. Describing gravity as "two objects, bigger one attracts smaller one" is simple. Climate system is very complex and even if you describe "CO2 (a transparent and 0.04% part of the atmosphere) causes a warming of couple of degrees" sounds harder to picture.

Yes, the complexity of verifying/checking is a major factor of that "nuance".

In the end, Newtonian gravity's complexity can be boiled down to a few formulas, and those describe the phenomenon (and are quite simple). Something like climate change causes, progress, rate, and so on, even with many basic assumptions taken for granted, is still a huge and multivariate issue.

One can see that "weather's getting warmer", but it could be a process repeating every N centuries or millenial, and we're just at that point, others might argue the effects are not as dire as argued, or the rate not as fast (e.g. many public climate doomsday predictions have failed to arrive when the dates came and went). Or one might totally disagree about the proposed solutions (or with who and how gets to implement and impose those solutions, another can of worms).

That's more like string theory level nuance (which theoritical physicists still debate variants off, and some hardcore scientists even believe is speculative crap, and which in any case is nowhere near settled), than Newtonian gravity level nuance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com