Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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Disagree, those two fields are extremely unreliable. It takes a lot of things happening simultaneously to be scientific. Yes, those two do make testable predictions, sort of. But that isn't enough.

Modern (computational) epidemiology is rife with unscientific practices. They ignore data that shows a model was invalidated so the fact they make testable predictions isn't really useful. They also engage in a lot of circular reasoning, buggy coding and logical fallacies. During COVID I wrote a whole report on this topic for some politicians [1]. But the biggest issue is "A problem in theory" again - epidemiologists conflate fitting a curve in R with developing a hypothesis, so the field is overrun with overfit models that aren't based on any refinable theory of disease, just misuses of statistics. Even if you prove a paper's predictions were wrong it changes nothing because nothing built on it anyway.

The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory, e.g.

September 2013: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist...

June 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

[1] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf

> The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory

That is... not remotely true, nor supported by either of the links you shared. (Nor by any cursory look at the state of the world today, with well-anticipated Himalayan glacial floods as front-page news.) You therefore appear to be leaping over the line from healthy skepticism to irrational conspiratorial thinking, so I'm going to stop engaging, sorry.

Feel free to not engage, but for anyone reading the Nepal flash flood was caused by bedrock giving way, which isn't climate related.

https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2026/08/28/new-satellite-i...

The two links I give show the problem in action. In 2013 the IPCC was concerned because temperatures had gone sideways for a decade. Der Spiegel's first sentence is "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted" and the next says they were trying to "hush it up". In 2015 climatologists announced a new temperature record that replaced the entire 21st century with different data, as reported by Nature.

That's an unambiguous sequence of events. You can't make statements about replicability in an environment where they routinely decide their already published data is wrong post-hoc, without retracting the papers built on that data.

Shoosh. And if you won’t shoosh yourself, a handful of The True Adherents Of The Science will down vote you.

Because Down Votes Are Truth.

And that, ladies n gennelman, is How Science Works.

That’s how we end up with Jason Arday: Up Votes.

Disengaging isn’t part of the scientific method.

Disengaging is sticking your fingers in your ears and blurting out “la la la la I can’t hear you!”

And calling that a win.

The problem isn’t science, the problem is that there are adults with the maturity of a four year old acting as sciences hype man.

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