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Comment by catapart | Hacker News Reader

you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.

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If the side you follow says the science community is political and biased, then "just look at the literature" isn't going to help. It's like telling an atheist they'd believe in Jesus if they'd just read the bible.

We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting

Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization

Unfortunately at some level, as usual, it comes down to game theory

If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?

As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters

please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.

That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.

You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.

Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.

We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.

The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.

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