Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers?
grist.org
grist.org
If humans can change planetary climate accidentally, we can certainly do it intentionally with a smaller and more directed effort. And if we can "fix" Earth to be optimally friendly to Earth life, those efforts will translate to environments that are more hostile from the beginning.
I just wish that politics hadn't hijacked the science to turn it into a machine for moving money and influence around.
(I'm not sure this can even be discussed objectively; how do you decide between biomass and biodiversity, and so on)
Also, the assumption that the climate change denial comments have any chance of being well supported (not just because they're wrong, but because they're not authored by people with scientific training) is probably misplaced.
The problem I see with "people with scientific training" though is that it's very hard to make a career unless you support the view that the current climate change is man-made, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Climate_science_opinion2.p.... But there should (still) be enough percentage points left to find valid opposing arguments.
Where do you get the facts idea, I don't see anything about facts in the article. What facts are you talking about?
Rupert Sheldrake had a great TED talk on the dogma's of modern science, and was even further legitimized when a private council of TED banned the talk.
hmm... lets check out your link...
> ...be removed from the TEDx archive if the ideas contained in it are wrong to the point of being unscientific...
So who judges this? Did you even watch the video? The whole thing was about questioning things we already THINK we know the answers to. How is the opposite of such not Dogma? Did you even research Constants? He had. But you're right, just plain wrong.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2011/11/fundamental-constants...
Rupert Sheldrake is a parapsychyologist.. really? .... -really-?
Maybe it should have been Venkmann.
So if you were a scientist interested in a field that others called, "stupid", you would just change for fear of peer pressure? I admire following your interest with scientific method... Which is what this man advocates, and not just blind faith to stats... Did you even watch the video before forming your opinion?
Much of this, for example, looks like depak chopra level pseudoscience drivel: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Rupert+Sheldrake+&hl=en&...
Or what about the idea of constants not being so exactly concrete? Just do yourself a favour and watch the video.
And besides, his theory on morphological evolution isn't based on anything but experimentation and theory. If you dismiss it simply because it seems "too crazy"... then I could argue it could be comparable to the scientists of Galileo, dismissing such ridiculous ideas. Not even worth entertaining...
Alright, I'll bite. Can you point me to his papers that describe falsifiable experiments, and to the peers that have repeated his results? Or just some books on Amazon?
http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=Morphic+Resonance&btnG=&h...
More specific: http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/sheldrake-1992.pdf
Again, not saying he's right. I'm saying that to dismiss an actual scientist when they say that in general, the field of science has "believers", and not enough people entertaining the questioning of "facts", is a dogmatic, and bad trend.
This is a good unbiased look on the whole event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SGzu8TJsyo
See also: Venkman and the pretty girl at the beginning of Ghostbusters
I tried to find instances of other scientists
Morphic resonance (and the 'morphogenic field') is an old idea from before we even knew about chromosomes, let alone DNA: it's a lot like how homeopathy was a big thing until we kind of figured out that bacteria caused disease.. A low statistical correlation with no corresponding replication with a high probability of accidental corruption by the original experimenter does not a compelling argument make.
Your 'unbiased look' at the event is by the guy himself. I don't think that really counts..
Agreed lol.
I guess we just don't agree on the merits of materialism. While I definitely think it helps explain the world, and is our best friend when it comes to our perceptions or reality, it is a poor agent in even CONSIDERING non-materialistic characteristics in anything.
I find the whole thing highly ironic. It's almost like the highly educated / scientifically literate persons in our day and age worship materialism instead of the scientific method. Thats all science is. The methods and the steps we take to create reproducible research. Not the institutions and boards that write to editors claiming that the constant of the the speed of light did NOT change during the 20 years between X and Y.
I for one, can hold onto the ideas of constants, without engaging in a flight or fight response in my neocortex that forces me to reject new or creative ideas without even entertaining them.
For instance, could you investigate the possibility that global warming isn't because of human action? I could even thought I dont BELIEVE it. The dogmatic idelogue of modern science would have you act like a religious person regarding it. /rant.
The conclusions he draws are -way- out there. It's like newton comparing the dropping of two objects and their rate of fall, and saying the penny drops at the same rate as the bowling ball because the penny thinks faster. Complete disconnect between results and hypothesis.
He's saying "look, their behavior changes over time (even this is disputable)! Without the chicks talking to each other! IT MUST BE PSYCHIC." God of the gaps, and all that.
Not all TED talks are worth their weight in bandwidth.
On an unmoderated forum like this one, perhaps it is better to keep the discussions restricted to subject like programming languages and operations systems, and avoid inadvertently providing a microphone for those with an axe to grind.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If you're confident in your views and your opponent is incapable of articulating his (and, in fact, may actually be hurting his cause) ... you make sure he has a big audience.
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill
That's true, and the world will never be rid of them.
And that's probably a good thing, because every now and then, they might be right. I'm not saying that this is the case with global warming/climate change, but history is full of examples where a contrarian turned out to be correct.
Repressing speech because it is unpopular or simply wrong is ultimately counterproductive, because it establishes a precedent.
People do not pay detailed attention when evaluating two sets of plausible and highly technical claims, when there is emotional loading attached. We get "teach the controversy". This makes it quite easy for the determined and self-interested to manipulate public opinion.
It's like spam: people have long since ceased to argue with spammers, they just remove the spam. "Sunlight" has no effect on it; rather, it risks blocking out the light to other messages.
A valid argument for not banning viewpoints is that it prevents accurate dissent from getting through, and results in the status quo drifting into being wrong because it cannot be critically re-evaluated. But in this case it has been evaluated often and thoroughly enough that we can be confident. They should nonetheless put a sunset date on the policy for future review.
Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield prove this not to be true in all cases.
I don't think you're contributing to this discussion, and in fact, your comment is an example of what drags discourse into the gutter: Emotional, personal attacks coupled with information-free claims contradicting the established body of knowledge in a field.
If I had the power, I'd mod your comment and all like it into oblivion without hesitation, along with being very clear to you and anyone asking why I would make that choice.
I hope that's sarcasm, otherwise you're simply reinforcing my point.
Unmoderated forums end up full of people who have a great deal of time on their hands and a large emotional attachment to arguing online. If that's your bag, you should hang out in such places. If it isn't you should try to avoid comments that come out swinging with insults.
I favour moderated forums, and I favour moderating away comments that are blatant examples of abuse. Your tastes may vary.
p.s. Normally I just downvote and move on, but since this discussion is actually about moderation, I thought that explaining myself was appropriate. But normally, I don;t engage in much of this kind of discussion, because it "feeds the trolls:" People with an emotional axe to grind thrive on arguing angrily about why they should be allowed to argue, angrily.
Regarding reddit, sometimes the internet just doesn't work that way. When the con positions become disruptive instead of debates (and the knowledgeable people tire of having their positions constantly attacked by the unknowledgeable,) you have to weigh banning against transparency.
For now, the only thing they seem to predict is the number of government grants, conference invites, and headlines they'll get from their unproven, dire predictions.
Predicted around 1/3 of a degree, reality is about 1/2 of a degree. So, there's that.
The reality is, there are a small vocal minority of people that will reject every climate change claim out of hand. There is no known standard that will satisfy those folks. They don't assign the probability as .0000000001, they assign it as zero. now and forever zero. That seems irrational to me, but maybe they know something i don't.
I dunno. Me personally, I'd put a high probability on climate changing, and a slightly lower probability on it being caused by humans. I'd put a low probability on us doing anything about it. I'll be dead before the big consequences kick in, so it really doesn't matter much to me. It's kind of ridiculous i'm wasting time commenting about it given my beliefs about any sort of change, but whatever. I'm inconsistent.
He is not so much scientific as scientistic. Science, understood as a type of mathematical empiricism, is not metaphysical. Empirical rigor prevents the authentic scientist from making claims about the existence of God or the proper ends of human life -- or about science itself. When one's gaze turns from the empirically quantifiable to examine the scientific method itself, one has started doing philosophy. One cannot look through the microscope and look at the microscope at the same time.
The idea that science is a metaphysical system rather than a method for modeling the world mathematically is scientism. Scientism makes claims that are not susceptible to mathematical analysis or reproducible experiments; that is what distinguishes it from science. These claims include: the world as perceived by human senses is the primary or ultimate reality; science is the best way of understanding the world; God (the Hebraic, infinite God) does not exist; health (understood as reproductive fitness) is the primary object and standard of value of human life. These are all metaphysical or moral claims and as such do not describe objects in the world or physical matter that can be examined by the scientific method.
Scientism leads naturally to pseudo-science. If you believe in scientism, then you believe that "science" can provide answers to metaphysical and moral questions. If you believe that, then you believe things like <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131217210540.ht... are scientific, rather than pseudo-science. It is pseudo-science because it is based on beliefs concerning what is better as the end of life. Such beliefs are not susceptible to mathematical modeling and are therefore not part of science.
Pseudo-science leads to progressivist political ideologies. Karl Marx is merely the most infamous proponent of "scientific materialism," his term for a baroque and metaphysical religion. It is a religion, based on scientistic historical analysis, atheism, and economics as the valuation of human flourishing. Following the disastrous horrors of the Soviet and Maoist experiments, few today openly fly the Communist banner, but similar ideals persist in more subtle forms.
Progressivism, because it is inherently a metaphysical system based on mythological pseudo-science, views Christianity as infidels. As in Islam, the infidel is sometimes tolerated, sometimes more aggressively attacked. Militant atheism distinguishes itself from science by, again, making metaphysical claims about the nature of reality instead of mathematically modeling certain phenomena, and further by enacting legislation (or more thug-like vigilantism) enshrining its particular mythology (scientism). The infidel, as again in Islam, is not argued with but attacked in a jihad, whether through official legislation or "activism."
Now, politics is a different beast altogether. It has nothing to do with observable reality and everything with who you know or can get to float your boat. Anyone who does not believe this is advised to read Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses and then come back. Climate change deniers are playing politics. That, or they are being played at politics.
> Climate change deniers ... are being played at politics
I wholeheartedly agree with this. And the same thing goes for the supporters as well. Once politics enters the landscape, it's there. It affects who gets considered a 'peer', which publications are considered 'objective', who gets funded, and scientists' standings at their employers.
One of the key tenets of science is that by repeatably checking predictions, we can put a damper on humans' standard tribal behavior. The harder these predictions are to check (in this case, due to timescale and noisefloor), the less science actually works. When the results are then repeated dogmatically instead of questioned skeptically, it starts to seem an awful lot like religion.
Like evolution? It's important to hear that a God created everything, and directs the Universe?
Or like Earth sciences? It's important to hear that God created the world 6,000 years ago and all those scientists have got it wrong?
It's pretty clear why they were banned. It's not for presenting opposing views, but for aggressively dismissing real science without scientific evidence to support them.
> After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking. They had no idea that the smart-sounding talking points from their preferred climate blog were, even to a casual climate science observer, plainly wrong. They were completely enamored by the emotionally charged and rhetoric-based arguments of pundits on talk radio and Fox News.
[...]
> Over and over, solid peer-reviewed science was insulted as corrupt, while blog posts from fossil-fuel-funded groups were cited as objective fact. Worst of all, they didn’t even get the irony of quoting oil-funded blogs that called university scientists biased.
In silence it's all about who decides who is silent. In this case its reddit but what if it isn't?
Might I suggest the subreddit name, 'butthurt'?
People interested in hearing the various view points of climate change scientists and campaigners and denialists could set up a sub-reddit.
Here's how it works. Any redditor create their own subreddit. Subs are self-moderated. If a redditor doesn't like the current science sub, then they can make their own. There's plenty of paranormal and conspiracy theory subs that coexist with /r/science. The admins don't ban anything, so it's not like the entire science subreddit could just disappear. If admins actually moderated subs, then I doubt reddit would have things like /r/braveryjerk. If you wanted to seriously debate climate change with deniers, there's a sub called /r/cmv for "change my view".
No, they wouldn't. A skeptic can be reasoned with, a hardliner in skeptic's clothes isn't. Or, more specifically, a "climate skeptic" is not skeptical about climate research.
If it makes people realize that the strongest critique against creationism is its lack of falsifiability, then yes.
At some point they might realize that evolution has the same defect which might lead to a much more interesting discussion on the subject of falsifiability as a requirement for scientific theories.
One believes in a god and believes that god created everything and drives the universe forward. That user is polite and calm, but mentions his god in many posts.
The other has the same beliefs, but angrily rejects the science and provides links to idiotic blog posts to "support" his position that the scientists are wrong.
The first hasn't been banned, the second has. At least, that's how I read the submission.
What is the journey from an unicellular ancestor to modern humans if not a decrease in entropy?
Er, no, that's not how evolution is supposed to work.
There is nothing in evolutionary theory that indicates a necessary preference for increasing complexity.
If (and this is a premise outside the scope of evolution) life starts with the something very close to the simplest form which can be "alive", it is unsurprising and consistent with evolution for evolution to produce some forms which are much more complex, and for the average complexity to increase over time -- especially if its not constrained by an upper bound on viable complexity.
But you, for instance, start with a bag of zeroes, periodically randomly add or subtract 1 to each number in your bag and then throw out any that are less than zero, over time the highest number and the average number in your bag is going to increase -- the change process isn't biased, but the selection process is.
That would be an interesting rebuttal if I calimed that the existence of a fitness function explained the increase in complexity.
Since that's not what I said, it's just a non-sequitur.
What I said was that if you start with a collection of items all uniformly near one boundary and then vary the collection randomly rejecting things that fall outside of the boundary, both the maximum and mean distance from the boundary will increase over time, until and unless that behavior is constrained by a boundary on the other end.
(In the case of life, I'm talking about a strong, "outside of this you don't have anything that counts as life" boundary, not a fitness function in the evolutionary sense, which addresses the relative reproductive success among viable life forms.)
Well, technically Catholic doctrine believes in both
> Anybody who uses the word "denier" to denigrate their political opponents is employing dishonest tactics that only a fool would find convincing.
and
> fake environmentalists