Forging a Head: The Upside of Scientific Hoaxes 201
An anonymous reader writes "In a very funny piece over at Science Careers (published by the journal Science), scientist-comedian Adam Ruben suggests that a lot of good can come from a well-intentioned hoax. 'Hoaxes have infiltrated science for centuries,' Ruben writes, 'from fake fossils (Piltdown Man, archaeoraptor, Calaveras skull) to fake medical conditions (cello scrotum, the disappearing blonde gene) to fake animals (Ompax spatuloides, Pacific Northwest tree octopus, Labradoodle).' In contrast to fraud, Ruben argues, such hoaxes do a great service to science by illustrating 'failures of our most important tool: our skepticism.'"
Yes but (Score:2, Interesting)
While it's true that we need one of these every so often to remind us of the need for scientific rigor, it also does great damage to science for many. e.g. Climategate gave ammo for global warming deniers, piltdown man gave more credence to creationists, etc.
Re:Yes but (Score:4, Insightful)
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Here is the science in a nutshell (Score:2)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/images/temp-anom-larg.jpg [noaa.gov]
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I see two very similar graphs. What's your point, exactly ?
The small differences are explained on the page where you found it: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/instrumental.html [noaa.gov]
Re:Yes but (Score:5, Informative)
There are relatively few scientists in the field of climate science that question global warming. There are certainly not 'thousands'.
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There are relatively few jobs in the field of climate science that allow questioning global warming. Practically all of the funding for it now derives from global warming alarmism. The people paying for it always want to know, "What are you doing about global warming?" and the answer "Taking a serious skeptical look at whether it actually exists." consistently results in pulled funding.
The field ballooned tremendously with external support and funding, almost all feeding the side that says "the sky is fal
Creationst argument detected... (Score:3)
Re:Yes but (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes but (Score:5, Insightful)
"There are thousands of scientists who question the methodologies and conclusions of the CRU".
Every scientific paper I read has a section on the limitations of the methodologies and conclusions of the study. That's standard thoughtful academic writing. Scientists question *everything*. That doesn't mean their conclusions are wrong. It just means they've carefully considered alternative explanations.
For global warming, the overwhelming consensus makes it unlikely their conclusions are wrong.
It's possible they could be wrong. Anything is possible. But when we're faced with an imminent danger, we have to stop arguing over hypotheticals created by coal and gas industry think tanks and come to a plan of action.
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Even if there were thousands, there'd be millions who didn't.
Not that the majority is always right. Obviously, they've all been [threatened by the Illuminati|brainwashed with orbital lasers|bought off by the all-powerful lentil growers' lobby|other please specify _ _ _ _ _ _]
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There are dozens of scientists who question the methodologies and conclusions of the CRU.
We have to take them seriously on the merits. That's the way science works. But for policy purposes, we should go along with the overwhelming majority.
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Why not?
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On the contrary, making models and predictions based on theories is exactly what science is all about. That's how you test the theories.
Of course, the same models can also be verified with events that happened in the past, such as ice age cycles.
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Agreed. Science would be to design a model and the observe how it fares over the next ten or so years. No changing of model parameters allowed.
That hasn't happened. If I'm allowed to change a model with enough free variables I can fit any history, and any observations-after-the-fact. But it's not science.
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The model doesn't have any free variables, only physical properties and physical laws, plus initial conditions.
And if you don't believe it, you can download the source code, and see for yourself. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelEsrc/ [nasa.gov]
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Funny, but untrue. Your physical properties and laws aren't physical properties and laws, but best guesses.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/HOWTO.html [nasa.gov]
Again, no model has run for any extended amount of time without having had it's variables changed to fit observations. Thus not science.
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Can you give an example of a variable that has been changed to fit observations ?
Obviously some inputs to the model change, as data becomes available. After a volcanic eruption, the aerosol data is plugged into the model, for instance.
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Ugh, Fortran. :P
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Changing the whole model would be one (II to E) - that is why we have no model that has been verified against observations over an extended period of time yet.
As for GISS model E, it's quite a way off observations currently.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/argo-era-nodc-ocean-heat-content-data-0-700-meters-through-december-2010/ [wordpress.com]
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/giss-model-e-climate-simulations/ [wordpress.com]
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/giss-model-e-climate-simulations-part-2/ [wordpress.com]
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From the NOAA website [noaa.gov] where that graph came from:
Both use the same land-based thermometer measurement records from the GHCN, but the records contain some differences. These differences are due to different approaches to spatial averaging, the use and treatment of sea surface temperature data (from ship observations), and the handling of the influence of changes in land-cover (i.e., increases in urbanization). However, both show the same basic trends over the last 100 years. The units shown are departures from the 1960 - 1990 period.
So you either did not read clearly what NOAA said and/or made up your own conclusions based on nothing but your perceptions.
No delusion here, look at the last five years of these two graphcs . . .
Selectively focusing on the last 5 years and ignoring the larger trend of 145 shows that you don't understand basic tenets of science on interpolation. By your logic, the rent money and bills that I paid yesterday
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The evidence is *much* stronger that burned fuel particles in the atmosphere increase the rate of asthma and bronchitis, causing as I recall 3,000 deaths a year from coal, 3,000 deaths a year from gasoline, and several times as much disability. (Just ask a nuclear power engineer.)
Is that also a multi-trillion dollar heist?
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It is clear you have no idea what they were really talking about.
Enlighten yourself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz8Ve6KE-Us [youtube.com]
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So, in short, they waged a spin-war on the opposition. Regardless of title, they're politicians, and they happen to be on the side of "Global warming is a real problem."
It's a big, important question, with dramatic implications in the long, medium and short term. Deniers have a lot more to gain in the short term than believers, and based on that alone, I find the believers more believable.
Any question that involves Trillions of dollars will generate a political circus around it, with clowns on all sides.
Re:Yes but (Score:4, Insightful)
Deniers have a lot more to gain in the short term than believers, and based on that alone, I find the believers more believable.
"Believers":
For business, we are talking about trillions of dollars in government investment and laws that will favor your bottom line if you play ball. GE, for example made billions in profits and paid zero in taxes. Carbon credit trading companies stand to be the next Enron, except they will be trading government mandated nothings in exchange for real cash.
Government stand to gain unlimited power. They will gain the power to tell citizens what to eat, here to go, what to drive, where to work, what they will do, where to live and what temperature to keep that house at. They will literally be able to control EVERY SINGLE ASPECT of the lives of citizens. This may also go beyond borders as well. A "world eco government" could be set up to set international rules. Of course, companies that play ball will receive government help, so the system is pre set up for corruption.
Scientists can gain because there is so much money and power to be gained, scientists and universities seeking grants will have better luck proposing a study that will "prove that stricter government control is required to prevent global catastrophe" will more likely get a grant than one that will "prove that global warming is not a problem and regulation is not needed".
"Deniers":
Scientist deniers are going nowhere. They do not get grants and get shunned by their peers.
Politicians are being compared to flat earthers and ridiculed by the main stream media. NBC and MSNBC were owned by GE, btw, who made billions in profits, yet paid no taxes.
Businesses gain nothing by being a global warming denier. They lose any "green cred" which would run off an environmentally conscious customers. Oil companies are about to have their taxes raised (or tax brakes taken away, same thing) while gas prices are at a all time high.
So, it appears that "believers" have unlimited power and money to gain. The absolute best anyone can hope for by being a "denier" is the status quo, so absolutely nothing to gain, but everything to lose.
Re:Yes but (Score:4, Informative)
Until th deniers can put up peer reviewed research to discredit the current scientific consensus, then they are just part of the FUD.
Wait a minute. Wasn't that whole climate-gate email scandal because scientists were trying to keep scientists who might disagree with them from getting their word out? Won't you simply accuse any scientist that shows that GW is not a problem or is not happening of spreading FUD and/or working for big oil or (insert evil company here)? So they prevent those that may disprove their work from getting published, attack and credibility and ridicule any who might get the word out otherwise and then use the fact that no published or credible work disagrees with them as proof that their work is correct.
Of course, anyone who disagrees is immediately discredited simply by the very fact that they disagree. Here is a quote that proves it:
However, you miss the fact that most deniers are also attacking science in general.
See, those that disagree are labeled "deniers", as in they are denying the facts. And of course, simply by the fact that they question GW, they are "attacking science in general". In other words, they have no credibility as scientists because a real scientist wouldn't dare go against the "consensus".
Also, "consensus" means nothing in science. Everything that science has proved wrong was once supported by a consensus. Science is not a democracy.
Oil companies will lose their subsidies and tax breaks. Boo hoo. Perhaps then we will finally get a real sustainable energy policy and ditch oil crack habit.that will eventually drive us into the ditch. The longer we wait, the worse it will be.
You do know that companies don't pay taxes, right? Companies, including oil companies, pass any increase in cost directly to their customers.
Your post is a fine example of what I like to call environmental hypocrisy. You will fight tooth and nail to not do so much as take your shoes off to get on airplane. You will fight to the death for the right to not carry an ID card. However, because you believe that there will be an energy shortage one day, you want government to create an artificial shortage today. It doesn't matter that we have enough energy to last us for hundreds of years, you wish to create an artificial shortage by limiting the amount of energy we may produce domestically and you actually believe that it will somehow make us import less. People like you are so happy to punish those who use more than you that you lose your ability to think logically. You really don't care that you have to pay more for food and transportation as long as you know that the rich guy in the SUV has to pay more also. You are happy to make someone else suffer for their lifestyle, simply because you don't like it. And when you see that mother of two have to tell her kids that they can't afford to go to Grandma's house because gas is too expensive, you comfort yourself by saying, “we all have to make sacrifices in order to create the world that I want to live in. Besides, they can see Grandma on Facetime.”
The best part? You accuse others of using fear to force the people to change the way they do things and then turn around use fear to force others to change the way they live their lives. It means nothing to you that real people have really died due to terrorism, and that terrorists really do want to kill more people, you see climate change as a bigger threat even though exactly zero people have died due to global warming, and that climate change has happened since the beginning of time. You want government to force me to live my life the way YOU think I should live it, even though, and I use your words, “There aren't any scientists out there saying we can stop climate change. We passed that point a long time ago. We can only reduce the impact and prepare.”
You won't remove your shoes to stop terrorists from killing the innocent, but you will gladly pay more for your life just to keep me from taking my little girl away from the city lights to see the rings of Saturn through her new telescope.
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None of the 5 whitewashes actually investigated the science, conspicuously so.
For those interested in even more details: http://rossmckitrick.weebly.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/rmck_climategate.pdf [weebly.com]
The sad part here is that had the inquiries been honest, they could have possibly recovered some of their lost credibility. Instead, we now have yet again baseless appeals to authority in order to justify a non-falsifiable hypothesis.
If you want to talk about the "science" of Global Climate Change, posit your fal
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Actually, I didn't just appeal against authority, I provided a citation for exactly what the problems were with the Climategate whitewashes.
Let's take one example, Oxborough. An investigation so thorough that it ended up being 5 pages long. Here's some relevant detail on the 11 so-called representative papers they examined (and you'll of course do me the favor of actually responding to the specific allegations and problems here, rather than appealing again to authority of course):
The Committee did not iss
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Define "us". The scientifically literate are already skeptical. Joe sixpack is going to oscillate between believing everything he hears and believing nothing. While that might sound good to those who believe in shit like crowdsourcing & the gambler's fallacy, in reality it's about as good as a stopped clock.
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I think we can insist on the same degree of rigor from science which is supposed to effect public policy as we do from investment banks.
Uh no. People in investment banks have an obvious motive to deviate from your standard and are in positions where they have to be trusted in a way that scientists do not.
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You don't have to trust scientists. You are free to become an expert on the subject, perform your own research, and publish the results.
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Since this research is conducted with public funds, I would argue they have to publish collected data with all of their conclusions.
At the moment such requirement does not exist. This is actually a problem not only in this particular discipline. It's a problem in all of scientific publications. This is one of the reasons I am skeptical of most academic research in applied science. I know (because I've seen it happen personally) that people on occasion collect data at great expense in academic setting a
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If you don't trust the people, how would you know to trust their copy of the raw data ?
As with any other science, the best way is to redo the whole thing from scratch. Use your own data and calculations. Go drill your own ice cores and trees and collect your own thermometer data.
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You modularize the units which need re-testing. If you separate it into row data, analytics and conclusions, you can attempt verifying any one of those. It has multiple advantages. First, it reduces the cost of verifiability. At the moment someone who can understand the analytics but doesn't have the funds or expertise to reproduce the data can't make a fully informed judgement of validity. Just as someone who is an expert in experimentation isn't able to reproduce the experiments because their cost wo
Moon landings (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh and the Creationist hoax, obv.
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I wish there were a mod up option for this kind of thing. Where a post says the opposite of what the poster intended by logical fault.
Like "+1 unintentionally insightful." It could come with no karma like +1 funny, but allow others to see all.
Sam
Somehow... I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
In contrast to fraud, Ruben argues, such hoaxes do a great service to science by illustrating 'failures of our most important tool: our skepticism.'"
But... was this peer-reviewed?
Fake Dogs?!? (Score:4, Informative)
Wait...
Labradoodle's are fake? I bet all the Labradoodle owners would be shocked to learn their dogs are not real.
Maybe the author should research before he declares what's real and what isn't. I mean, his bad science isn't actually helping here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labradoodle [wikipedia.org]
Re:Fake Dogs?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Labradoodles are both real, *and* a blasphemous abomination before the Lord.
Seriously. Labs and Poodles should never be in the same room together, let alone mated. They're the most disgustingly horrific dog to have ever been successfully bred this side of Lovecraft's fecund imagination.
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They're the most disgustingly horrific dog to have ever been successfully bred this side of Lovecraft's fecund imagination.
No, that would be the cross between an American and a Poodle, the Yankee Doodle.
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It's just the "Labradoodles are fake"-hoax.
Re:Fake Dogs?!? (Score:5, Funny)
One thing the wikipedia article doesn't mention is the distinctive bark of the Labradoodle, an unusual sound often written as 'Whoosh!'
Trust and skepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
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When a scientist commits fraud and is discovered, he's discredited for life.
When a politician commits fraud and is discovered, he just goes on like nothing happened. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html [foxnews.com] Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq
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When a scientist commits fraud and is discovered, he's discredited for life.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38127084/ns/us_news-environment/ [msn.com]
Apparently not.
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Apparently, there was no fraud.
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Similarly, MSNBC didn't investigate the
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You've had your chance to argue once again that global warming is bad science. I'm not convinced. You're using a standard debater's trick, which is to go through an enormous document and find details to disagree with. You're entitled to try, but it doesn't hold up. You're reduced to an ad hominem attack on Phil Jones rather than addressing the merits.
I think it's good science. More important, most of the top scientists in the world think it's good science.
The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, OTOH, don't
Epigenetics is Saving the Blonde Gene (Score:3)
Fortunately the disappearance of the blonde gene in females cannot happen due to a interesting epigenetic phenomenon.
As is well known, blondeness is fairly prevalent at birth in both males and females but fades as the individual matures, with most blondes turning brunette before the end of adolescence. But a remarkable phenomenon, evidently involving the modification of the blonde gene possibly through environmental effects, often occurs soon after whereupon the prevalence of blondeness starts to increase again. Most remarkable, individuals whose innate blondeness was never expressed as a child (they were always brunette), begin to express the blonde gene in early adulthood. For reasons that so far remain unexplained this phenomenon, though not avoiding males entirely, is almost entirely seen in females.
It appears then that this epigenetic phenomenon will act to restore blondeness to the female population offsetting any long-term trends to the gene's underlying extinction.
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I'm sorry, are you sure it's epigenetics and not hydrogen peroxide?
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I thought about citing research data that exposure to the far more toxic cousin of dihydrogen monoxide produced by industrial economies - dihydrogen dioxide - might be the environmental factor causing this remarkable epigenetic phenomenon, but that seemed to be "gilding the lily" as they say.
The Common House Hippo (Score:2)
I can't believe it wasn't in the list. I love the common house hippo.
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Labradoodle is fake? (Score:2)
Last time I checked there was a breed called Labradoodle.
Re:I did not evolve from an ape.... (Score:5, Funny)
So I get you are still an ape? Fortunately I evolved away from that. :-)
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Evolution does not suggest that man evolved from apes. You fail at trolling.
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Are you suggesting that early Hominidae [wikipedia.org] were not apes?
If you mean that evolution doesn't suggest that we evolved from modern apes, then I see your point. But I think it's more accurate to say evolution suggests that we are apes.
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You can either go with that (we are apes, I would agree) or that we didn't descend from apes (but a common ancestor).
humans didn't descend from apes
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/evolution/humans-descended-from-apes.htm [howstuffworks.com]
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The common ancestor would also be classified as an 'ape'. It's just semantics.
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Evolution does not suggest that man evolved from apes. You fail at trolling.
Aren't humans classified as great apes? Does evolution suggest that humans became apes directly from monkeys? Wouldn't it make sense for evolution to suggest an ape progenitor?
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2117354&cid=35990920 [slashdot.org]
Re:I did not evolve from an ape.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is more evidence in Creationism - as well as it making more sense.
But if we take Bronze Age myths as evidence, then there's much more evidence for theories other than Judeo-Christian creationism. There are hundreds, thousands of different creationist myths out there.
If you think an old book is evidence enough you have to consider all other old books as equally valid, don't you?
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Man, that is bad. At the fist two comments I thought you was just joking, but that one has a quite serious tone. Really, we did learn a thing or two at the last couple of millenniums, take a loot at it.
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Seriously, evolution is unproven.
Ok, so, please, show us your evidence that proves where we really came from? And no, a book written over the course of a few centuries and edited by a large group of men centuries after the events it describes took place is not valid as evidence.
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Well, an amoeba is a single-cell organism.
At the moment of conception you really were an amoeba.
Your point is invalid.
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File under "Undistributed Middle, Fallacy thereof".
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Nonsense. Evolution can be easily demonstrated in the lab by observing viruses of bacteria for several generations. Or where did you think the next influenza strain comes from each year?
Re:It goes both ways (Score:5, Informative)
Most skeptics reject everything outright
Those people are not skeptics.
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Most skeptics reject everything outright
Those people are not skeptics.
Agreed, but they usually label themselves as such
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Agreed. A skeptic will say "show me the evidence." A denier says "that's impossible."
Pure deniers operate on faith, just like true believers.
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Re:Skepticism (Score:3)
Most skeptics reject everything outright.
I'm inclined to dismiss that statement out of hand ...
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Re:Forging (Score:2)
I hear we're making some head over at Sourceforge.
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Neither the tornado season nor any floodings are outside of historial norms. Don't let mass media educate you on science.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-tornadoes-climate.html [physorg.com]
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