Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaik | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about the direction of causality here. Anti-vax people or climate change deniers also object to well-replicated results and would believe what they want to believe anyways.

View on HN

It does give them some ammo for low-brow dismissal of the entire field of science. Which the more extreme may use to convince the more reasonable people. Even though the argument is rarely done in good faith, we do need some strategy for dealing with it...

Being perfect is not really a realistic option though - mistakes will be made in such a complex endeavour as science. But if we can no longer legitimately say "it only _a few_ bad apples", then we must improve things drastically - or risk loosing all the credibility.

There's an interesting documentary about flatearthers called "Behind the Curve" that gets into individual flatearther origin stories. The interesting thing is they are not stupid it's more than they have learned to not trust people in positions of authority on topics of science (often due to an experience in grade school).

Towards the end there are a few funded research projects that are erily more similar to the social dynamic of actual "legit" academic science than the film makers probably realize.

Can you please define terms so that I can understand exactly what you mean? Meanwhile I decided to check Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial says

Climate change denial (also global warming denial) is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change.

I cannot assume this corresponds with your own use of the term which is why I suggest defining terms but I'm wondering if anyone reading this sees some slight problem in the Wiki wording? Let's assume any disputation will have to include peer-reviewed evidence if it's to be seriously considered though according to Wiki, it won't be, whatever the evidence. This is science - according to an anonymous editor of Wikipedia? As described by Wiki, this is a religion.

The fact that there is even a term like "Climate change denial", means that it feasible to deny "the science" (science is about doubt), because the climate scientists actually can't prove anything, fundamentally. They only have stats, and stat models, and there is no way, at our technological level to even model a single mole of carbon 12 (12 grams of atoms), so you think they can model an entire planetary system? Accurately? No, it's not possible.

They also like to muddy the waters, climates change, because climates aren't even a thing, but an aggregate, obviously. Anthropogenic climate change, is what's being questioned, and that there is no certainty that it will cause disasters any more so than if there was still 300ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Maybe 400ppm is bad, doesn't seem so tho, we are living the experiment.

BUT also, I would bet Air Conditioners are far worse for the planet than 400ppm CO2, even if they act together. ACs, are, absolutely abysmal thermodynamically. Heating up one space to make another space colder temporarily, with high likelihood of CO2 release.

Slight tangent. Have you heard the sixth Dimmu Borgir album? Good stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFRwNYPsHwY

I wonder will it generate any discussion, or just be castigated via downvotes, your choice.

We also can't model every single one of the atoms splitting in a nuclear reactor core, but thanks to stats and models, we can predict how they behave to very high precision.

Knowing whether or not anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions impact global climate can be reasonably achieved with some modeling assumptions.

We may not be able to predict the weather in each location for the indefinite future, but we certainly can and do understand the general impact of bringing billions of tonnes of new greenhouse gas into a system.

Similarly, “We can’t even model the inside of a proton. How can you possibly know when a pot will boil?”

Turns out you can get pretty far modeling the macro behavior without perfect knowledge of the micro details.

> The fact that there is even a term like "Climate change denial", means that it feasible to deny "the science" (science is about doubt), because the climate scientists actually can't prove anything, fundamentally.

There are people out there denying the shape of the planet, despite that it has been observed directly.

Am I talking about those people?

You're conflating things that are empirically verifiable with things that are not.

I was responding to what you wrote:

> The fact that there is even a term like "Climate change denial", means that it feasible to deny "the science"

This is clearly untrue. Some people, such as the 'flat Earthers', deny plain facts.

Yeah good point, I'll try better

"Psychology can't produce real results because we can't even model a single brain cell perfectly. They only have stats, and stat models."

You want people to think you're a specious disingenuous person? It's of your own doing.

> Anti-vax people or climate change deniers also object to well-replicated results and would believe what they want to believe anyways.

Accusing your enemy of being beyond argument is just an underhanded way to avoid making an argument.

There will always be bad beliefs, we will not always know at the time which beliefs are bad, and the response to what we think are bad beliefs should be good science, not massive fraud studies on hydroxychloroquine published in one the most prominent journals in the history of medicine.

Replicable is not a synonym for correct even though some discourse about the science crisis treats it that way. It's necessary but not sufficient. The academic literature is full of studies that will replicate every time but the methods are lacking rigor or are just outright invalid. The classic correlation/causation fallacy pops up everywhere, to pick one example. A paper that shows a correlation then declares a causation will replicate just fine but still yield wrong conclusions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com