Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

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> It's important to hear multiple opinions on the topic.

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.

What if reddit was run by people who were the skeptics? Then the science community would be banned.

In silence it's all about who decides who is silent. In this case its reddit but what if it isn't?

Reddit has not banned anti-science denialists. A scientist run sub-reddit about science has banned anti-science denialists, after attempting to talk to them.

People interested in hearing the various view points of climate change scientists and campaigners and denialists could set up a sub-reddit.

Uh... maybe you misunderstand how reddit works.

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".

It's a science discussion subreddit. I think "your statements must be within a standard deviation of reality as measured" is not an unreasonable requirement for posting to a scientific discussion. It actually is quite nice to have, say, young earth creationists denied a chance to show their views when you are trying to have a discussion about reality.

What if reddit was run by people who were the skeptics? Then the science community would be banned.

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.

Reddit isn't run by the /r/science mods. If you want to create a subreddit dedicated to emotional vitriol on subjects which already have scientific consensus, there's an easy way to do that: http://www.reddit.com/subreddits/create

Might I suggest the subreddit name, 'butthurt'?

> Like evolution? It's important to hear that a God created everything, and directs the Universe?

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.

Evolution doesn't lack falsifiability. Evolutionary theories provide falsifiable predictions of future observations -- which (while many have resisted falsification) are, in fact, sometimes falsified, which is why the theories in the field, while much of the broad outline is similar, have evolved over the whole time that the field has existed.

How would one prove that arbitrary mutations don't lead to a consistent decrease of entropy given enough time?

Random changes causing a net decrease of entropy over time? That's a new one.

It's not new. It's how evolution is supposed to work: a simple organism gets some random changes and becomes more complex.

What is the journey from an unicellular ancestor to modern humans if not a decrease in entropy?

> It's how evolution is supposed to work: a simple organism gets some random changes and becomes more complex.

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.

The existence of a fitness function does not explain the increase in complexity. The most successful life forms on this planet are the unicellular ones. Why would the selection process favor anything else?

> The existence of a fitness function does not explain the increase in complexity.

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.)

It's specifically a local decrease in entropy.

So, there are two users.

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.

> Like evolution? It's important to hear that a God created everything, and directs the Universe?

Well, technically Catholic doctrine believes in both

Yes, I used a poor example. Plenty of people believe in a God and in science and math.

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