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Comment by nrr | Hacker News Reader

I was asking more what argument you had hoped to add to this thread. The fact was quite clear, but the additional exposition around it made me raise an eyebrow.

You had made a remark in another post somewhere that there was an unfalsifiable claim in asserting that people will die from both extreme cold and extreme heat, and that claim is one I don't really find all that interesting. Mathematically, it's verging on vacuously true, very firmly in "Yeah, so what?" territory.

I'm more curious if there's some (minimally associative but preferably causal) relationship between those extremes that you might know about; e.g., for every linear step increase in heat deaths, we realize some exponential step increase in cold deaths.

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> You had made a remark in another post somewhere that there was an unfalsifiable claim in asserting that people will die from both extreme cold and extreme heat, and that claim is one I don't really find all that interesting. Mathematically, it's verging on vacuously true, very firmly in "Yeah, so what?" territory.

Your feels are not proof.

Starting from a situation where nine times more people die from cold than heat each year, then asserting that not only will those numbers somehow flip, but that actually, they’ll also both go up? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.

> Your feels are not proof.

No, but it's how I formulate hypotheses for testing. It's why that claim I labeled as verging on vacuously true is uninteresting: how the fuck do I even go about testing that?

> The “mathematically uninteresting” claim would be the parsimonious one: as low temperatures go up, cold deaths will decrease, for a net reduction in temperature-related deaths.

I fear I may be misunderstanding what you mean by parsimonious here. There's a scientific sense wherein there's an explanation that requires fewer assumptions, and in this sense, I'm still not understanding the argument you're proposing. Simplest hypothesis under what model? I think is the question I want to ask here???

The unfortunate part is that it's prima facie unclear that the climate system would be conservative in this way. I'll admit that's due to some ignorance on my part about how climate systems work, but it's also that ignorance that fuels an understanding that there are variables that I can't account for, let alone control for, which limits the kind of modeling that I can undertake to understand this problem (and, as a consequence, your argument, whatever that happens to be).

Forgive me if it seems like I'm asking stupid questions, but I'm legitimately trying to understand your contributions as positively contributory. I have no real priors for this that I'm trying to validate or invalidate.

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