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Comment by Crayfish3348 | Hacker News Reader

A book came out in August 2024 called "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola," by Susan Greenhalgh. She's a professor (emeritus) at Harvard. The book is a history. It shows how the Coca-Cola Company turned to "science" when the company was beset by the obesity crisis of the 1990s and health advocates were calling for, among other things, soda taxes.

Coca-Cola "mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity." It was a successful campaign and did particularly well in the Far East. "In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally."

Point being, the science that Coca-Cola propagated is entirely legitimate. But that science itself does not tell the whole, obvious truth, which is that there is certainly a correlation in a society between obesity rates and overall sugar-soda consumption rates. "Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim."

"Trust the science" can thus be a dangerous call to arms. Here's the book, if anybody's interested. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo221451...

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"Trust the science" was also a propaganda campaign.

What they meant was "Don't question our data or our decisions".

Science isn't trusted, it's understood and practiced. Not everyone has enough scientific literacy to understand the difference between being data driven and hypothesis driven, even if they intuit parts of it on a daily basis.

We can easily be misled by data, but when we make decisions by evaluating the probability that any hypothesis is true conditioned on evidence supported by openly collected and evaluated data, we're much closer to doing science.

Glad that this can be openly said nowadays.

The tide seems to be turning, indeed.

This is kind of why I get annoyed at the "facts don't care about your feelings!!!" crowd.

Sure, the raw facts don't care about your feelings, but the way that these facts are interpreted and presented absolutely do care. Two people can look at the exact same data and draw widely different but comparably accurate conclusions out of it.

Using your Coke example, the raw fact that "exercise is good for reducing obesity" is broadly true and not really disputed by anyone as far as I'm aware, but the interpretation of "exercise alone can be a solution to obesity" or "how much exercise vs how much diet restriction is a solution to obesity" is subject to interpretation and biases.

Perhaps not disputed, but exercise’s effect is probably overestimated, and thus, damage was done. https://youtu.be/vSSkDos2hzo?si=3U2UxQOa_ZgdmT37

Exactly. If your objective is to control your weight, changing your diet has probably 5x to 10x more impact than changing your physical activity.

Why is it that people can't wrap their head around the "Facts don't care about your feelings." slogan? I don't agree with everything that movement says, but that slogan means exactly what it's saying; the problem is what everyone like yourself adds to it. What you are adding has originated and lives in your mind, and you project it onto something that has nothing to do with your thought that you are projecting.

The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts. You can try and broaden that statement all you want to pull in other topics, but that slogan says nothing about having a disregard for how facts are interpreted OR presented.

It goes without saying that facts can be subject to multiple interpretations. I think people need to be more honest about what you're really saying: you don't like conservatives and you distorted a basic phrase as you gaslit a group of people and accused that group of doing what you yourself just did.

I am saying that the statement “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a useless statement and it doesn’t make people who say it seem smart. People who say the slogan seemingly universally seem to think it makes them very smart. It doesn’t convey any information to anyone, all it is used for is for morons like Ben Shapiro to automatically dismiss people for being emotional.

You’re right, I don’t like conservatives very much, but I have seen left leaning people fetishizing stoicism and I think those people are dumb too.

ETA:

Also, slightly confused how I “gaslit” anyone. You can go through my post history and I am generally pretty happy to acknowledge I don’t like conservatives very much.

It didn’t take much prodding to make you show your entire hand. Might be time to look inwards.

Sorry, I think I'm missing something? I don't feel like any of my opinions were secret on pretty much anything?

Not the person you replied to, but what? The person you accused of being tricked into showing "their entire hand" was unashamed about their position and didn't try to hide it.

The difference in tone between their former and latter messages is obvious.

They went from a passive aggressive “I don’t understand this idiom” straight to an unhinged tirade of “conservatives are morons” without much provocation.

Of course you share that sentiment, like the overwhelming majority of people on this very left leaning message board, but I still find it funny when it comes out so explicitly.

I didn't say that I "didn't understand it", I said I get annoyed with it because I think it's a stupid statement. I stand by that.

"Unhinged tirade" seems like a bit stretch. I called Ben Shapiro a moron, a statement I also stand by, then I said that I don't like conservatives very much, which I also stand by, and that left-leaning people who fetishize stoicism are also dumb, so it's not really just about conservatives.

I'm genuinely confused how you got "conservatives are morons" out of that. Yes, Ben Shapiro is a moron, but I also called left-leaning people dumb.

What I'm trying to get at, and what you seem desperate to dismiss out of some strange partisanship, is that I think it's really dumb to dismiss emotions as part of an argument. I don't really care if it's a lefty or a conservative or a libertarian or communist or anything else I'm missing; emotions are important, and pretending that you're somehow "above" feeling emotional about a subject doesn't make you smart.

> They went from a passive aggressive “I don’t understand this idiom” straight to an unhinged tirade of “conservatives are morons” without much provocation.

They never said that. Ironically, this is a perfect case of "facts don't care about your feelings" - even though you're upset, it doesn't change the fact that they never said that. It seems like your comments about needing self-reflection and complaining about "gaslighting" actually apply towards you instead.

Edit: regardless, this whole comment subthread is a useless waste of time and only serves as an airing of irrelevant grievances.

Of course concealing one’s true intent just enough to be able to later play dumb and deny motivations when called out is a decent strategy for online arguments, but it’s not foolproof.

Deciphering the commenter’s true meaning wasn’t super hard in this case. From claiming that a highly intelligent conservative pundit is a moron it’s easy to deduce that the person thinks less intelligent conservatives are also morons. They also explicitly said they “don’t like conservatives” which is a pretty silly statement to throw out there in general.

It’s also painfully obvious that the poster doesn’t understand the idiom “facts don’t care about your feelings” from them having now tripled down on trying to explain it or those who use it unsuccessfully.

The idiom’s intended message is as simple as it seems. It says that getting emotional about facts doesn’t change them. It’s not some deeply profound thing to say.

They didn't play dumb.

The "true meaning" you're finding is not accurate.

And they're talking about how the idiom actually gets used in practice.

> Of course concealing one’s true intent just enough to be able to later play dumb and deny motivations when called out is a decent strategy for online arguments, but it’s not foolproof.

I don't see how I "played dumb". I obviously know how to parse a sentence, and in the original comment that you're deliberately misreading, I said "raw facts don't care about your feelings", and then I explain that most discussions aren't really about raw facts but rather how they're interpreted.

> Deciphering the commenter’s true meaning wasn’t super hard in this case. From claiming that a highly intelligent conservative pundit is a moron it’s easy to deduce that the person thinks less intelligent conservatives are also morons.

How exactly is Ben Shapiro "highly intelligent"? Because he went to an Ivy League school? I can promise you that there's almost certainly a politician that you think is stupid that went to an Ivy League school, this isn't exactly a strong filter. Oh, is it because he talks really fast? I do that too, I guess I'm highly intelligent.

I don't think all conservatives are morons, and I don't think conservatives have a monopoly on being morons. I think the considerably-more-left-leaning The Young Turks, for example, are also pretty dumb. I have stated this multiple times now, and the fact that you're not responding to me directly is telling: I think pretending that you're somehow "above" your emotions is stupid. I think fetishizing the idea of divorcing "reason" from "emotion" is a dumb, even if I believed it were actually possible, which I'm not sure I do.

> They also explicitly said they “don’t like conservatives” which is a pretty silly statement to throw out there in general.

It's actually not silly to not like someone for their beliefs. That's dumb, of course if someone believes in something that I think is bad then I'm probably not going to like them very much. I don't really need to go into specifics for this, there's a lot of rhetoric that has caught on in conservative circles that I think is bad. You're obviously free to disagree with what statements are "bad" and that's fine; I'm sure there's rhetoric in more liberal circles that you think is bad.

People are entitled to free speech and to believe whatever they want, I wouldn't take that away from them even if I could, but they're not entitled to me liking them in spite of their beliefs. Life is much easier when you realize that you don't have to be everyone's friend.

> The idiom’s intended message is as simple as it seems. It says that getting emotional about facts doesn’t change them. It’s not some deeply profound thing to say.

I actually pointed this out in the original comment, and I'm arguing that that's not how the idiom is actually used. When I've seen it used (and admittedly I've obviously not seen every argument in which it is), it's always been used as some sort of "gotcha!" to act like an argument is less valid because the person making it is emotional.

> The slogan is directed at fragile liberals who would rather yell like a toddler at a town hall meeting than have an informed discussion centered around facts.

Who created chaos at school board meetings with yelling about trans kids and history books over the last couple of years? I have yet to hear anyone who isn't on the Right freak out about "what they're teaching our kids" the way that conservatives do.

Conservatives also like pretending to be offended by the term "Happy Holidays" every year.

A sizable chunk of “banned” books were sexually inappropriate for school, and some even promoted pedophilia, so I have some serious concerns if you disagree with their removal.

I'm sure some of those banned books are reasonable to be banned, though I do find it amusing that the people promoting these book bans are simultaneously insisting on putting the Bible in the classroom, a book that has a passage about a woman fantasizing about donkey dicks and horse cum. That's not a joke: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2023%3A...

If there's actually a book in that list that promotes pedophilia, it probably should be banned; which book are you referring to?

She was not fantasizing about bestiality, it very clearly states she “lusted after her paramours”. Paramours being adulterous lovers. And, if you even skimmed the rest of Ezekiel 23, you’d know it was describing her being a prostitute to many, many men. I will concede that this chapter, and the Jewish scriptures in general, tend to be rather excessive and would not be where I would start my children for Biblical teaching.

What list are you referring to? Perhaps I missed something, but I don’t see a list of banned books. However, regarding books promoting pedophilia, the worst example I am aware of (that isn’t Lolita, which I feel is a cop-out) is The Bluest Eye. I won’t link directly to the passage, however searching “Passages Challenged Bluest Eye” should lead you to a website with excerpts. They have not just one, but two characters who prey on the main character, and she is assaulted twice by her father in unnecessarily graphic scenes.

I know she wasn't fantasizing about bestiality, but she is still fantasizing about guys with dicks as large as donkeys and cumshots as large as horses; sorry if I didn't make that clear.

Regardless, most of the old testament is pretty child-unfriendly. Lots of passages about rape and violence with extremely questionable morality (including unambiguous endorsement of genocide), and I do not think it has any place in a classroom, even if we disregard separation of church and state (which we shouldn't).

I didn't mean a literal "list", though I realize it was bad wording on my part.

"Unnecessarily graphic" doesn't imply "promotes". I haven't read the book, and it might not be appropriate for a school library, but your description here doesn't seem to indicate that it's promoting pedophilia.

The point that this is too graphic for children stands, but this is a metaphor for Samaria and Jerusalem. This is stated explicitly in the text.

Sure, I just was giving it as an example because I think it's a pretty funny bible verse out of context, and even a little funny in-context.

Still, the old testament in particular has pretty much every single theme that parents clutch their pearls at; Lot has incestuous sex with his daughters (and it's decidedly not condemned) [1], a man murdering his daughter because she's the first person to enter his house [2], prostitutes getting murdered, butchered, and mailed to her suitors [2].

If the old were accurately made into a movie, it would be right next to Se7en or Saw in categorization, certainly not appropriate for children.

I know that this stuff is probably wrapped in layers of metaphor and social context, that's fair enough, but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot_(biblical_person)

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+11&versi...

[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+19&versi...

> but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.

I‘m not sure what you‘re saying here, as the Bible is almost nationally “banned” from public school libraries due to the belief that so much as including it in a library is a literal violation of our country’s founding principles. If you mean why do parents who request books to be “banned” typically give charity to the Bible, while not giving the “banned” books the same charity, then in major part it’s because they are incomparable. The Bible is the book that has led us to where we are today; it led men to found nations, find unity with their fellows, and strive to create a better world. It is a book that has survived and thrived for over 2000 years, and is possibly as old as 8000 years. Additionally, if we wish to be less charitable, then it is because the Bible is the cornerstone of their worldview, just as many who decry “bans” find said books to be cornerstones of their worldview.

Finally, the majority of children are NOT exposed to the sections of the Old Testament you are quoting, or they have been redone (see Veggietales), and most parents, many who would request certain books be “banned”, would agree that those stories are not appropriate for children. The majority of biblical education is focused on the New Testament, which is historical and lacks many of the “colorful” descriptions that the Old Testament typically provides.

I was referring more specifically to the recent stuff in Oklahoma where they want to mandate that a Bible be placed in every public classroom. Constitutionality be dammed.

I might disagree with some of the finer points you laid out but I think I am more or less in broad agreement with what you said.

I think this related to the “critical thinking” skill that all my teachers always stressed about growing up.

But I still don’t know how to put in useful words what “critical thinking” is because it’s not one thing.

It requires synthesizing a lot of information together in very specific and meticulous ways. And through feedback, collecting your previous thoughts and keeping track of how often you are correct or incorrect.

You can explain critical thinking in many ways but none of it will teach someone critical thinking.

I think of Critical Thinking as a closed loop process that aligns a person's mental model of the world with reality. It is just using the scientific method to analyze information in daily life. When done correctly and consistently it is like a really good spam filter against lies and bullshit.

The real trick is that critical thinking is almost always being critical with someone that's trying to mislead you.

Many people try to do it with many different methods. So you're right it's not one thing. Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret.

Everybody lies.

> Also nobody will teach you all the techniques because they're keeping theirs secret.

Sounds more like people who like to use propaganda who keep their methods in shadows (not always, though). I try to teach critical thinking all the time. I bet you do too. Do you not try to inform loved ones how detect spam or scams? How to evaluate what's true in their inbox or on a webpage? Do you have anything to withhold in such a scenario?

I go with critical thinking being thinking about thinking, or meta thinking. Which is to say have a thought, doesn’t really matter what, and then analyse it. Example is throw a dart at the board and then evaluate it compared to your expectations and desires. Feel free to throw a bullseye right away but that’s a different thing. Which is to say, imo, that critical thinking isn’t about being perfect all the time.

Critical thinking is one thing but that "thing" is a process rather than an individual item. Critical thinking, like science, is a process that iterates upon itself. You analyze the information you have and make a conclusion based on that information. The "critical" part comes in when you take a step back and then use that same process to analyze your conclusion and poke holes in it, checking to see if the information you have supports that hole or supports the conclusion.

It's like saying that a computer is one thing despite the fact that the one thing is made up of multiple pieces.

This is how propaganda works, you don't spread falsities and untruths, but change the mix of what signals get amplified.

This is how propaganda can still work. However, if a propagandist can get away with falsehoods, they will use those just as well.

The interesting/newer things start when propagandists have multiple outlets and can distribute a number of mutually incompatible falsehoods to different audiences.

Enhanced by algos that promote those falsehoods in a way that ensures widest possible spread

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

Disinformation is so much easier when truth is not a dimension you care about.

There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism, not trust.

Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too).

This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

> This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.

I think the problem with this idea is that thinking can be corrupted by emotional bias. Ideologies and power differentials(People with powerful incentives to control narratives) can have a lasting effect on perception, when you pair this with modern media, it can create a cascade effect that can drown out the truth. The psychology of group-think also plays a part in this as well. Its a very complicated topic and your conclusion is one small part of the puzzle.

There is this great YouTube [0] video that describes this problem perfectly in my book. They interviewed people with some data that was math based and what they found is people would skew there own thinking to support there own political ideologies. This can be used against the population to create perceptions that don't line up with facts.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_OApdxcno

For example, it is too tired to prove mitochondria generate energy.

Unlike what you say, I think the real issue is people who have been studying something for a long time still being wrong about a subject. It’s not uncommon in any human endeavour. You can go to the gym for 20 years and never make any gains. You can also play badminton for 20 years without ever learning some essential strokes. You can study any subject without learning, it’s the default setting actually.

This becomes problematic since low quality experience is easily used to make arguments from authority with very high confidence.

If you run 200 studies trying to show nonsense that protects your industry, and you set a statistical significance level of p>0.05 in seeking statistical correlation, you will find 10 studies that achieve statistical significance without fudging any numbers. Then you will announce that an exhaustive meta-analysis of ten studies supports your contentions about your profitable activity.

You cannot entirely separate intention from the merit of the science. Those 200 studies are an elaborate propaganda campaign, and they always were, each and every one of them, regardless of the fact that they had an internal logic.

Scientists should react with violent disgust and ostracism at clear attempts to attain a specific result without a lot of very explicit framing (eg: pre-announcing, announcing the other 190 studies, having a third party independently replicate the 10, etc), but they can't, because this sort of industrial campaign is funding such a huge percent of scientific research.

The NSF is doling out 9 billion dollars a year to run at least semi-objective science, and if this was 90 billion or 900 billion, things would be quite a bit different, and motivated "research" would not have the same place. We are dramatically over-supplied on researchers, to the point that a lot of them are making sub-minimum wage working as adjuncts, postdocs, "grad students", baristas. We built a system of university research that is the envy of the world, that exports knowledge and culture en masse, and we're not using it for more than 0.03% of GDP because some Congressperson has a poster of researchers "Spent $1.5M studying the mating habits of fruit flies, like some kind of pervert", and because Reagan hated government and wanted Coca-Cola to do our science for us.

And this is exactly the problem we face now in so many aspects of life.

If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out, because of all the lobbying and armies of scientists paid to find and publish a very narrow version of truth

> If cell phones or microwaves or a hundred other things were harmful we would not find out

While I agree that there may be things which have subtle but cumulatively harmful effects over time, the two specifics that you cited (cell phones and microwaves) are very poor examples because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.

Also, trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found.

If you thought the tobacco and silicone breast implant settlements were impressive...

just jump on the two examples instead of actually considering the point being made, i guess.

Think "leaded gasoline" if you need a concrete example

> trial lawyers would rapidly become the wealthiest people on Earth if genuine, reproducible evidence of harm from non-ionizing radiation could be found.

Probably not, as electronics manufacturers would quikly take that into consideration. Liability comes from both knowing and continuing.

Divorce lawyers are generally the most profitable. $750/hr if you’re good.

>cell phones

Well, as far as direct physical harms, yes, but as far as mental harms that translate to physical harms, the jury's still out:

'“Given that the increase in mental health issues was sharpest after 2011, Twenge believes it’s unlikely to be due to genetics or economic woes and more likely to be due to sudden cultural changes, such as shifts in how teens and young adults spend their time outside of work and school.'

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/03/mental-healt...

> the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small

I don't think this statement is true.

Long-term effects can only be observed over the, well, long term which makes it hard to compare with the baseline. It was measured differently and with very different external factors. Then even if we do by chance manage to observe the harm today it could be very hard to identify the reason — we would see the factual result but neither the process nor the cause.

Take any unexplained health issue we have today, e.g. decline in male fertility estimated at 50% in western counties since 1970s, a dramatic change. Could it be microwaves? Well possibly, can't be ruled out at this point, among many other candidates. Furthermore, with the new research saying that 1) microwaving food in "microwave-safe" plastic containers releases huge number of microplastic particles into the food and 2) microplastic accumulates in testicles — it's not even a fringe science anymore but a normal theory to be studied and be proven or disproven.

Do we have any other health issues that increased over the past 50 years? Yes. What caused them, is it something recent that became popular in the past 50 years? Very likely, yes. Do we know it? Not yet.

It took us a very long time to figure out cigarettes. Or leaded fuel, even though we knew in advance that lead is poisonous.

> because they've been deployed so broadly for so long, the chances there is some significant medical harm still undetected is vanishingly small.

Cancer rates continue to rise, and will be well over 50% of all people in my lifetime.

There is no doubt our current world is making us very sick.

If you don't die of something else first, cancer is what will get you. Increased cancer rates are merely a side effect of improvements in other aspects of health and longevity.

That's part of it, but there legitimately has been a significant increase in cancer rates among younger people. There's something going on but we don't know whether it's radiation or food or something else.

That would be a good time to remind people that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Being skeptical does not mean embrace the conspiracy theory as probably true but not proven yet.

Intentionally leaving out important or key information is still lying and deception, and is harmful, and can be really harmful if it's a big thing, even in cases when it's done with good intentions.

I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change? The pressure to ignore or minimise inconvenient facts would be overwhelming (career at stake situation).

what's the bellwether for climate change? Rising temperatures, rising CO2 concentrations?

There's strong evidence there actually isn't warming going on. The "warming trend" may be due to the temperature sensor locations. Originally the sensors were put in remote, rural, unpopulated and unused locations (ideally!). As communities grew... you understand that the sensors now are no longer rural, remote, unpopulated areas. What happens to the air in a city? If you're unsure, "urban heat island". This is extremely localized "weather" - the sort of thing that i've been yelled at "IS NOT CLIMATE".

I'm only going to link 1 thing here, because doing this sort of thing on my lifelong handle has never done me any favors:

> Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 23:105015 (20pp), 2023 October

> Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850

> https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18

Great example of what I was talking about!

I looked at the paper you referenced.

Interestingly, it does not say that the warming trend is not happening, rather they argue that the evidence is insufficient to say for sure if the warming is caused by human-driven causes or natural ones (e.g. volcanic activity or solar changes). They mention the heat island effect as one of the issues that may complicate the attribution of the contribution of different factors to the warming trend.

To quote from the paper:

“To summarize, by varying ST and/or TSI choice and/or the attribution approach used, it is possible to conclude anything from the long-term warming being "mostly natural" to "mostly anthropogenic" or anything in between. While each of us has our own scientific opinions on which of these choices are most realistic, we are concerned by the wide range of scientifically plausible, yet mutually contradictory, conclusions that can still be drawn from the data.”

okay, and whats your point? The point is "97%" or "99%" of "climate scientists agree" that "anthropogenic causes" are the reason for climate change. But this study questions the foundations (and i mentioned i am only linking one, that i downloaded a few weeks ago to save, there are of course other papers that each chip away at the political and media narrative about the whole field). Please refer to the GP:

> I wonder how much of this same kind of manipulation/distortion is going on when we are told to "trust the science" with regard to climate change?

"climate science" is all models, this paper (among others) implies that the data fed in to the models may be influencing the output of the models in a way that isn't conducive to actually understanding the "climate". How can i make this assertion? I read the IPCC reports. both the pre-release and the official releases. I don't recommend it, unless you feel like being Cassandra.

You're not sufficiently parsing causality versus predictivity. The global warming hypothesis matches the projections. So it's a food enough model. The causal attribution does take time, but recall we can estimate the global greenhouse emissions with reasonable accuracy and can compare to benchmarks in history.

Push all we want against the sun, it continues to shine regardless of our efforts.

global warming hypothesis! Have you seen the temperature graph for earth's history? Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

It's actually remarkably cold on earth, colder than it's been in over 450mm years. but if you look at the graph, it's not a diagonal or straight line, it goes up and down over millions of years.

so, with these two facts: Will it get warmer or colder?

Knowing that, why do i have to listen to this claptrap?

The core of the concern about climate change is what it’s going to do to human society. Nobody gives a shit what the climate looked like a million years ago - complex human society reliant on large scale agriculture didn’t exist a million years ago, and that’s all we care about. We worry about droughts because they affect our crops and cause famines, we worry about heat waves because they kill our people and livestock, we worry about sea level rise because it damages our cities, we worry about hurricanes of increasing intensity because they kill people and damage our cities. We don’t give a shit if we’re in a relatively cool period in earth’s history or if the whole thing will shift in a hundred thousand years because that’s totally fucking irrelevant to what’s going to happen in the next hundred years and how we’re going to adapt our cities, crops, and cultures to it, because that’s what actually matters to us, because we’re actual living people in a complex society and we’d like to stay that way on both counts.

Ok, arctic sea ice.

Ice exists at temperature below 0C or 32F at 1atm AND at system energy levels below the enthalpy of melting for liquid water, or latent heat for this first order phase change.

Thermodynamics uses temperature and pressure to explain system energy of molecules for liquid vapor solid phase systems. Latent heat is the esoteric part of this phenomenon because it requires a scientific education to understand calculus and work. Understandably, everyone can grasp temperature.

I think your comment is a perfect example of misdirection and people using “data driven methods” to attack a “first principles” explanation of physical phenomena.

Here’s a link because that gives my idea more weight.

https://earth.gsfc.nasa.gov/cryo/data/current-state-sea-ice-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05686-x

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj8469

Computer people talk about scientific methods and their “home lab” stuff, ai and inherent structure of data then absolutely fall for the facebook-grade-misinformation arguments to not trust something that is too mainstream. Jfc

you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year? Or a different sea ice, perhaps the one they always trot out around January? you know, when it's summer in the southern hemisphere?

The sea ice data isn't 1:1 with the seasons, so "data scientists" and "climate scientists" pick the cutoff date that makes the best headline. Even this year they were saying the ice was lower than average, but they cutoff 3+ weeks early, the ice was above average a few weeks later.

https://usicecenter.gov/PressRelease/ArcticMaximum2024

Besides all this, i am unsure if you're supportive or not of what i said.

I admit data collection is imperfect, especially looking back 200 years. But to attack a fairly sound hypothesis that is multi factorially demonstrated in physical geological behavior, I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Just because US weather stations in the 70’s were more rural than urban does not in itself gives credence to the idea that climate change/warming/ greenhouse gases is a nonissue or somehow a totally misunderstood non-warming phenomenon. Even a climate that tended to one mean value zero standard deviation throughout the year would be devastating coming from our current temporal and geographical distribution.

Your point about weather stations is a technical detail in data collection while there are several other corroborating methods indicating a warming ocean and atmosphere, albeit not geographically uniformly distributed. But you have this gotcha fact about weather stations ambient baseline temp vs some platonic ideal temp that reflects what’s going on in the abstract notion of a climate.

The sea ice has satellite photo analysis (area) dating to 70’s or 80’s with daily or weekly granularity.

I cannot convince a climate change denier or skeptic but am leaving that comment and this one hoping that observers don’t just take your initial counter-fact to be a valid falsifying argument.

As everyone says weather is not the climate, spurious yearly data do not nullify long form trends, and I’d just look at low pass filtered or line fit or yearly average of granular image data to argue that there is a time localize trend since the 80’s consistent with a warming ocean.

I disagree with you I think you used logical fallacies to misdirect and cause skepticism about something that is fairly corroborated and the debate needs to focus on mitigation or investment or policy changes.

Edit I shouldn’t have used word geological bit meant ‘worldwide’

> you mean the sea ice, that had the highest extent in 20 years this year?

Your link says it's "the seventh highest recorded since 2006 when this metric from IMS was first tracked consistently". Where are you getting "highest extent in 20 years"?

This is cherry-picking. There is a raft of solid science from a large number of independent researchers looking at many different indicators that corroborate well with each other. The evidence is overwhelming, global warming is happening. Picking one thing that says we haven't always gotten it 100% right doesn't mean it isn't happening.

all the models that they use as evidence use the temperature sensor data so i am not sure what you're trying to convince me of. Also: Judd et al., Science 385, 1316 (2024)

I have yet to see a convincing motivation for doing something like that. There's more money to be made in denying climate change it seems, so what's the driving factor then?

Since climate change is a very popular topic, so popular that a person's belief or non belief in it will cause people on the other side to strike them down without hesitation... There's power, community, and social acceptance to drive people.

The downvotes to the above comment's parent comment prove my point.

That's completely correct and valid but also in order to see this as a problem one has to presume that that the belief in it, or anything else you might care to put in it's place, is itself flawed. I don't believe in climate change because it's beneficial or not beneficial: I have read numerous things on the subject, all of which paint a consistent, reproducible, and relatable-to-my-life situation which happens to be about a decades-long propaganda campaign on the part of the fossil fuel industry to downplay the harms their products were doing to our atmosphere since the goddamn 1950's, one that, as the parent says, happens to make them shitloads of money. Just like leaded gasoline did. Just like cigarettes did, which led the tobacco industry to do similar things previously until they were outlawed in the developed world, which has caused them to simply shift focus to developing countries where they're now poisoning a whole new generation of people.

I'm highly skeptical of folks who take issue with something like "trust the science" because, while I fully cosign that as a slogan it's lacking and one doesn't "trust" science so much as learn about it and see if it holds up, the sort of people who say things like that invariably follow up with something like questioning climate change, or questioning the handling of the COVID pandemic. And that's not to say that there weren't mistakes made, we made a shitload of them, but too many bad actors in that space will take legitimate problems with the response to COVID and use that to launch into things like saying vaccines cause autism or are a plot on the part of China to kill all the white people, or other such ridiculous fuckin nonsense.

And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

I would also put forward that something I've observed as we've gotten further and further into the social media age is the conflation between skepticism and ignorance, which are different things, and people who are doing the second thing will reliably say they are doing the former. To be skeptical is not a bad thing, even an uninformed skeptic like a member of the general public is fully capable of being at least somewhat informed, vetting sources, and coming to reasonably accurate conclusions without a formal education, however, it is also extremely, trivially easy for a layman to find stuff that corroborates whatever they think is already the truth, stated in professional-looking formats, that looks like science but just isn't credible or worthy of being taken seriously, and then go "look, see, I found this thing. I'm right!" If you find one, single academic, who has an entire rest-of-their-discipline shouting at them about how wrong they are, which is more likely: that you found one truth teller in a sea of liars, or that you found one liar?

To the downvoters (and ToucanLoucan), I never claimed what I believed in, and you don't have enough information to know anything about it. I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one. Can you walk away from this conversation with your eye opened to how your belief is driving you to strike? [0]

Here's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

[0] >And maybe that's wrong of me to assume, but also if you consistently find yourself on the same side of a debate as the worst people imaginable, maybe that's something you should sit with and figure out how you feel about it, and if it points to you possibly being skeptical about the wrong things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Masliah

> To the downvoters (and ToucanLoucan), I never claimed what I believed in, and you don't have enough information to know anything about it.

I didn't say anything about your beliefs. I said other people who say similar things believe these things, and when people say things like them, I tend to assume they're about to drop anti-vax nonsense. That's not an accusation, it's the statement of an observed correlation.

> I'll continue to neither confirm nor deny my stance, for the point Im making is IMO an important one.

I mean, again, I wasn't referencing your specific beliefs so I don't really care if you confirm them or not. But I would also say, again as a statement of a correlation not an accusation against you, that the people who espouse the anti-science sentiments I've been discussing also will refuse to lay down specific confirmations of their beliefs, as part of a larger "just asking questions" fallacious argument, in which they take the position of an unconvinced centrist but consistently espouse "questions" that favor one side of it.

Again, to be clear, not accusing, merely observing. You may indeed be someone who is genuinely just asking questions, the problem is a whole lot of shitty people out there corroborate that position to advance bunk. And assuming you're being truthful, which I have no reason to assume you aren't, for that you have my sympathies.

> ere's a near-equivalent real world example: Alzheimer's research has been led in the wrong direction for decades, due to people chasing after power. [1]

Well sure. Science isn't perfect, it's only as good as the people who are doing it. It's the same way that basically every anti-vax sentiment, measure, study, etc. that you can find leads in one way or another back to former-doctor Andrew Wakefield and his junk study about vaccines and autism from back in the 90's. There are still medical practitioners who believe he was correct, there are multiple organizations that are built off of his research who oppose vaccines, we've had numerous outbreaks of various preventable diseases because of vaccine hesitancy. This shit has real consequences.

However, it's worth noting that both that story and the one you're referencing are notable because on the whole, most of the time, science does get it right, and more importantly, if it gets it wrong but it is being done honestly, it is also self correcting.

If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… *checks notes* win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

Maybe the Nobel Committee is in on… no, that'd only affect whether they awarded the prize, not whether people expect them to. They must be suppressing the evidence at the source: the instruments themselves. … No, they'd have to alter everything, and there's no way they got to my weather station. Maybe there's some way to remotely manipulate all the weather station reading at once? Think, what do all the weather stations have in common?

I've got it! They're doing something to the atmosphere, to make it seem like there's anthropogenic climate change, and trick all the scientists into publishing studies showing that it's real and happening, but actually it's just people altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere en-masse for unspecified nefarious reasons, likely personal profit. Or, maybe it's a byproduct of some industrial process, that they don't want us to know about. I bet that's what chemtrails are.

>If you publish new evidence in favour of a popular theory, your paper gets published – sometimes in a prestigious journal. Whereas if you demonstrate compelling evidence overturning a high-profile scientific dogma of international import, you… checks notes win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hm.

The last time a Nobel Prize was awarded to someone overturning a long-held charged dogma was in 2005 when Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They demonstrated that Helicobacter pylori bacteria, not stress or excess stomach acid, were the primary cause of peptic ulcers.

Whereas the inverse--suppression of findings that invalidated long-held scientific dogmas--are numerous throughout the last 150 years. Stegener faced ridicule and suppression for continental drift. So did Semmelweiss for germ theory. And Mendelian inheritance. And Lemaître's expanding universe. And Prusiner's prion theory. And Margulis's endosymbiotic theory. And horizontal gene transfer.

Beyond Marshall and Warren, Prusiner was the only one to receive a Nobel for their findings and that was fifteen years after consensus had emerged from below.

And in the case of Marshall and Warren, the findings of a bacterial origin of ulcers had been published in 1906, 1913, 1919, 1925, 1939, 1951, 1955, 1958, 1964, 1971, 1982, and 1983. With this 1983 paper being authored by... Marshall and Warren. They will not receive a Nobel Prize for their findings for another 22 years.

Science is moved forward in spite of dogmatic consensus, not because of it.

Here, let me drop this mic for you

And a fun addendum: In the mid-1990s the patents expired on the vast majority of acid-reducing drugs which were, as you can probably guess, the first line "treatment" for PUD over antibiotics.

I have grown grumpier as the last decade has gone on and it is probably me just getting older but there is a point where you say enough is enough. You are starting with the premise that researchers are manipulating things and ignoring things so you have already 'won' by bringing doubt where there isn't any. 'I wonder how much of horrible terrible evil conspiratorial thing x is happening...' isn't a discussion opener, it is a statement that a thing is happening and now we just need to find out how much of that thing is happening. This is a terrible 'discussion' point and it needs to be called out, and stopped.

That's a good point. I tend to stay away from negative thinking about hot topics like this for that very reason. Even though I have my doubts about something, I tend to keep it to myself because I don't want to bring people down and anyway someone might come up with a way to look at, or take action in a positive light.

But I still feel its important for people to act from their own values, right or wrong, and not from a "hey trust the science" mentality which reminds me of majority thinking. Just because a lot of people have come to the conclusion that the science is sound, it doesn't make them right. There are plenty of situations where decided by majority viewpoints have been wrong.

Science done well is distrustful of its own results. The key is to trust science practiced by trustworthy institutions and individuals and reported on in an accurate and informative way. Similar to good journalism, trust should be earned and verified at every level. Not every time, that isn't reasonable, but enough that you aren't surprised at what you find when you do additional checking. Check sources. Look for conflicts of interest. Survey the field. These are all basic things that people think they do but often don't.

I'll also say that that 'I don't trust science' implies that the scientific method is somehow corrupt. The scientific method is a thing that can be used well or badly. 'I don't trust science' is like saying 'I don't trust statistics'. The wrong person can use out of context science, done well, to imply totally absurd things.

If you want to deny climate change you have to deny basic physics and chemistry, that's the problem with what you are saying.

Either you need to somehow show we've gotten the molecular properties of Carbon Dioxide wrong so that it doesn't absorb the wavelengths of light we think it does, or you need to show that we've gotten basic chemistry wrong, and that the reactions involving hydrocarbons and oxygen do not produce carbon dioxide.

These are all very basic things and have been known for about two hundred years. It was even possible, well over a century ago, to reason from these basic principles and conclude that mass burning of fossil fuels would result in a global temperature rise.

It just basic science, and if you want to deny it, you have to deny almost all of modern physics.

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