How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation 770
nerdyalien writes From the article: "Fiction author Michael Crichton probably started the backlash against the idea of consensus in science. Crichton was rather notable for doubting the conclusions of climate scientists—he wrote an entire book in which they were the villains—so it's fair to say he wasn't thrilled when the field reached a consensus. Still, it's worth looking at what he said, if only because it's so painfully misguided: 'Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.'" As a STEM major, I am somewhat biased toward "strong" evidence side of the argument. However, the more I read literature from other, somewhat-related fields (i.e. psychology, economics and climate science), the more I felt they have little opportunity to repeat experiments, similar to counterparts in traditional hard science fields. Their accepted theories are based on limited historical occurrences and consensus among the scholars. Given the situation, it's important to understand what "consensus" really means.
Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
No functioning computers would exist without "Science." Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
True as that may be, people who are absolutely nuts tend to use the perpetual openness of science as an excuse to inject irrelevant, arbitrary insanity into discussions of fact. I'm not just referring to the (particularly common as Slashdot) climate change deniers who dismiss all sorts of careful analysis of data and theory for some unspecified null hypothesis "because we've been wrong before". But crazier people.
Conservapedia's [conservapedia.com] owner cum dictator, Andy Schafly comes to mind as a frequent abuser. Who has made "be more open minded" arguments over things as scientifically established as relativity, which he asserts doesn't exist, or walking on water being scientifically possible.
And creationists do the same.
The point, of course is that while established science can always be wrong, arbitrarily embracing the opposite and asserting the evidentialist structure of the scientific method as a reason is crazy. The proof is in the pudding, if you will.
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Most non-scientists are not in a position to evaluate the claims of any given scientist. So, they rely on scientific consensus in order to decide which scientific proposals they will accept as true. This is their only defense against the insanity that you are proposing. It is not an ideal defense, but it is what we've got.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most non-scientists are not in a position to evaluate the claims of any given scientist.
I'm pretty sure that was the argument the Church had against releasing full, translated copies of its data, a.k.a. the contents of the Christian Bible.
This argument doesn't pass the sniff test. It is the job of a "scientist" to present claim and data that supports said claim in such a way that it may be consumed by anyone and still stand on its own, only then is there "consensus."
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:4, Interesting)
You get some points there. But, I'll remain hung on this bit: " I have explained the expansion of the universe to many lay people without trouble."
If you explain something to 100 laymen, and more than 20% actually understand what you are talking about, then all is good. If another 30 or 60% understand parts of what you are talking about, that's good too. And, if I am among the remaining group that didn't understand a damned thing you said - then so be it. I can look around at my fellow laymen, and realize that they probably have more education and expertise in this area than I have.
If, however, less than 1% of those laymen can understand what you've explained, then we have problems. You might propose that your area of study is simply way over our heads. But, then, I might propose that your own understanding is insufficient to explain the relevancy of your studies.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is you're not in a position to be able to evaluate the evidence - climate science is difficult and specialised.
If you asked your doctor to show you your MRI scans so that you could evaluate the evidence of his/her diagnosis for yourself, where would you start?
This isn't a "you're too stupid to understand" argument, it's a "it's not your area and it's very tricky, beyond basic concepts" argument.
If you're consistently disbelieving the very large majority of climate scientists when they summarise their findings, then you're a denier (assuming you take other scientists in different fields that are no politically sensitive at their word). If you're simply looking for an easy to digest pile of evidence then you're going to be disappointed. The evidence is all there - it's just not easy to understand, beyond simple threads like "land ice melting > sea level rise" or "higher [CO2] > more retained IR" but how those things fit into the whole is not trivial.
It has become very easy to simply distrust what climate scientists are saying because of a large propaganda campaign to demonise them all. It's almost unique to that particular field - but it happens to a greater or lesser extent where money overlaps with science (pharmaceuticals, GM crops, climate science, renewable energy, nuclear science etc) from both sides of the political spectrum.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen an MRI - but I have seen CAT scans. During my EMT training, I did my ER work at Bangor Regional Medical. I stood beside the doctor as he showed us exactly what he was looking for, and how he maneuvered through the "slides" - how the damaged areas differed from the undamaged areas of the brain.
While it is a far leap from my own level of inexpertise to the doctor's level of expertise, the doctor was both willing and able to show us laymen the value of the CAT scans.
The global warming people haven't shown us the value of anything, so far as I can see.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Informative)
The global warming people haven't shown us the value of anything, so far as I can see.
Then you are simply not paying attention. [realclimate.org] That's just one site, and 10 seconds of typing to get to it. Make an effort to read the data, don't bitch because you aren't getting spoon fed.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Temperature is not increasing by one degree per doubled CO2 level. It increases roughly by one degree per 200ppm share. /. It got debunked already hundreds of times, why repeat such a bullshit myth?
I don't get why you claim the "warming" had stopped recent years. Is that an american thing? I saw that often on
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If you asked your doctor to show you your MRI scans so that you could evaluate the evidence of his/her diagnosis for yourself, where would you start?
You would start by simply asking. Persistent knee pain after a skiing injury caused me to go see a doctor. Doctor suspected that I had a minor tear in my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). I went to a medical imaging facility where I paid for an MRI scan. They provided the resulting data to me on a CD or DVD. I'm fairly sure that the data was in some proprietary format, but it was bundled with a [Windows binary] viewer tool that allowed me to view the resultant dataset graphically. I had no idea how to evalu
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I've never considered myself a "denier", and yet every time I ask someone to point to the evidence, I hear that slur tossed out. I've only briefly attempted to search for evidence online, and had virtually no success except to find things like the 97% consensus page at NASA's site. So, if anyone here has better sources, I'm all "ears".
Start here: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#datdow [uea.ac.uk]
Actually, you'll probably need to start with at least one college degree in meteorology or climatology.
Or, in other words, the raw data is meaningless to a non-expert in the field.
We are guided by consensus a thousand ways every single day,
but it's only climate science where people seem to get bent out of shape.
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Which aspect of the space shuttle are you interested in?
https://encrypted.google.com/s... [google.com]
https://encrypted.google.com/s... [google.com]
https://encrypted.google.com/s... [google.com]
A similar search for climate change? Note that the first hit researches public opinion, the second hit claims it to be a fraud, the third appears to be a treatise on people's understanding modes - and so on.
https://encrypted.google.com/s... [google.com]
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It's not necessarily valid. An appeal to authority can be completely wrong. I'll just copy past wikipedia because it hits the points.
"Fallacious examples of using the appeal include any appeal to authority used in the context of logical reasoning, and appealing to the position of an authority or authorities to dismiss evidence,[2][3][4][5] as, while authorities can be correct in judgments related to their area of expertise more often than laypersons,[citation needed] they can still come to the wrong judgmen
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An appeal to authority is not necessarily fallacious (that would be fallacious reasoning itself). If the authorities in question are generally recognized as actual authorities, then surely it does not follow that accepting, even provisionally, what they say is fallacious.
Look at it this way. The number of people that can actually work in physics, particularly in areas like QM and General Relativity, is by and large very small. Most people simply do not have the training in mathematics and theory to be able
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a valid argument if you're countering the claim that a meaningful set of scientists reject anthropogenic global warming. It isn't a valid argument that AGW is actually happening, true.
A scientific fact is a different thing than an authoritative claim, and you need consensus and political debate in order to create the latter. Science produces testable facts but the question of wether or not we, as a people, must do something in response to these facts, or if these facts are relevant or important, are not questions science can answer.
Implicit in the successive warnings from the IPCC and other bodies is the basic philosophical assumption that AGW is unnatural and hazardous, and must be stopped, because it threatens multitudes of human lives. Science can't really draw a firm line between unnatural and natural, that's metaphysical. Science cannot fundamentally indicate things that are a "hazard," because this is a concept that rests on analytic assumptions that are subjective to human values. And as odious as it is to say, science cannot prove that a human life has value, thus, science cannot justify any action that would save life, on it's own.
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While I am sure the most vocal "deniers" and those with the most camera time are the crackpots who say the earth isn't getting warmer. However, there are many legitimate reasons to doubt how much of the observed warming is caused by humans and how much damage might occur in the future because of the human caused portion of the warming.
The climate is changing (Has the climate ever been constant?)
The current trend is warming (Was it warming before humans started affecting climate?)
It appears that the warming
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They have over 38000 entries there? That makes it the biggest satirical Wikipedia clone I know.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, when someone says, "you should believe what I say because there is consensus," that is a problem too. Science argues from reproducibility and evidence; from ancient times people believed things because they were claimed by an authority. If Aristotle said it, then it must be true, for example, or if the bible says it, then it must be true.
The great advancement of science was to not believe in authorities, but rather to look at the evidence. Nullius in Verba is the motto. Saying, "believe me because we have consensus" is a step back to the dark ages. If the evidence is strong, then present it. If the evidence is not strong, then your consensus will do nothing.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, that doesn't make any sense.
We're not saying that to people who have meaningful evidence. We're saying to to people fixated on irrelevant points raising scientifically absurd objections consistently and repeatedly. There isn't a scientific debate happening here. If we were, we wouldn't see so much "just asking questions" about things with well established answers.
These are people who are trying to assert "my ignorance is equal to your knowledge" out of an implied deference to fairness.
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If we were, we wouldn't see so much "just asking questions" about things with well established answers.
Also worth mentioning, sometimes asking questions about established answers is one of the best ways to find new knowledge. I read a book about neuroscience recently [amazon.com], and the author said, "writing this book made me re-examine the basis of why we believe what we do, to figure out what the evidence is supporting these ideas." If you use their questioning as a motivation to understand more, then it will make you smarter. If you see it as merely an argument, then that's all it will be.
Incidentally, I have no i
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The problem, of course, is that "my" evidence is subtle, nuanced, quite voluminous, and requiring a reasonable level of backing in the details of atmospheric science to tackle.
This doesn't work well in an environment where dozens of people will post fairly identical posts that draw attention to one easily noticeable thing that doesn't actually demonstrate their point, but can appear to without examination of how that point is selected.
So... you see a couple dozen primary coping strategies in the climate cha
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.
Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.
A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2.
B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife.
C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing.
D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.
None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism [rationalwiki.org]) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.
Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.
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A) CO2 accumulates [skepticalscience.com]. Plants absorb it, they also release it. So does the ocean. And even though the ocean is absorbing more than it releases (making it more acidic), the amount we have been releasing into the atmosphere is still pushing CO2 levels higher and higher. This is easily measured.
B) CO2 historically has not driven temperatures, it's acted as a feedback, making warming temperatures even warmer. Orbital cycles or other factors cause some initial warming, which triggers higher CO2 concentrations, whic
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Skeptical Science [skepticalscience.com] does a good job of explaining the science behind climate change and answering about every objection there is with cited sources. It also answers each question at three different levels of scientific fluency.
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The thing with "consensus" is that consensus is what happens when scientists are out of (reasonable) questions to ask and answer. You put forth your measurements and say "we believe this is caused by X." And somebody else says "Ah, but it could be caused by Y!" So you devise an experiment (or set of observations) to test whether the results are from X or Y. Once that's established and no one has any other questions on the X-Y issue, then consensus has been achieved.
That's what happened with climate science.
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They didn't use the word "consensus" once in that editorial.) But I can see how you take that from it. That a consensus exists is not by itself an indictment of the science. If it just develops organically when they (nearly) all realize they agree about something then it's healthy. In any scientific field if more than 90% of the practitioners agree about something I'm going with them.
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| The problem with the AGW consensus is that prediction has yet to coincide with observed reality. The Solar cycles hypothesis do coincide.
That's simply empirically false.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
| Once folks start actually (or accidentally) start "performing" science and investigate all possible theories instead of FOTM (or FOT decade) we might get greater clarity. As soon as we start to remove lies from reports, get equal peer review time and
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Seriously, do you understand what the words, Nullius in Verba signify?
Yes, I do. But even the members of the Royal Society who first came up with that motto understood that, taken to an extreme, the idea is STUPID.
We don't trust a person who says "X is the case" just because he says it. But if that person has reported "X is the case" along with details of his procedure, results, analysis, and interpretation of the data, we can start to say, "Hmm... that's interesting." And when a BUNCH of people do that and find similar results, we say, "Yes, the evidence is stronger."
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is, of course, silly.
Because discussion is essential to education, and we cannot possibly expect everyone to do all science on their own. The walls of pragmatism and human lifespans stand block the avenue.
Whatever happened to scientific discussions then? (Score:5, Insightful)
True as that may be, people who are absolutely nuts tend to use the perpetual openness of science as an excuse to inject irrelevant, arbitrary insanity into discussions of fact.
You seem to be missing the point of TFA. Science doesn't need you to discuss it - it stands on it's own.
If this were true, we wouldn't have multiple physics/cosmological theories trying to explain observed phenomena or expected attributes on the nature of time and space.
If you have to discuss/debate it you have moved well out of the realm of science and into politics.
Kinda like the time when physicists were divided between those who theorized the Universe to be eternal and immutable vs those who thought of it as having a dynamic nature (expanding/shrinking with a creation starting point)?
Science not only relies on explanations of observations already taken. It also relies on PREDICTIONS (and the theories that proposed them) that are thought to be logical/inevitable based on what is has already been observed. Further experiments take place until these theories are debunked, reaffirmed or revisited. The process by which this takes place is strongly based on debate.
Even mathematical proofs are open to debate. You submit your proof. Peers attack it. If they find a chink in the armor, they send it back to you, and you now have to prove that the error is not fundamental, that your original proof can still be revisited and salvaged.
All politics are discussions. Not all discussions are politics - or are you not familiar with scientific discussions? If discussions have no place in science, then we pretty much close the door in the creation and presentation of scientific theories (which are just discussions and proposals which only become facts when experiments corroborate their predictions.) There is no exception to that and frankly it's disgusting you claim affinity for scientific knowledge and understanding and can't grasp such a basic concept.
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People believe what they want to believe. Humans are fallible and will act in their self-interest.
True, but non sequitur to the nature of scientific debate (true scientific debate, not just "debate").
The question are:
(1) Is science and are scientists responsible for "explaining" themselves and their discoveries?
A) Yes they are responsible for explaining, and B) yes, they do explain themselves. But just because a explanation for a complex thing exists, that does not mean the explanation can be made to simple enough to reach a large untrained audience. Try creating an explanation to Wiles's proof for Fermat's Last Theorem that can reach anyone without any exposition to Algebraic Number Theory.
(2) Is the scientific community responsible for calling out charlatans that pose to use the scientific method, but don't?
Of course.
(3) Are scientific discoveries constantly open for debate?
Most of the t
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Funny)
They do, actually. It has lead to some very amusing graphs. [sciencedaily.com]
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Talk about setting up a straw man to knock it down.
If you prefer, we can do it this way:
1. Set limit on total carbon budget into the atmosphere. Humans can net-emit 1 trillion tonnes and have a 50/50 chance of staying under 2 degrees Celsius global temperature rise . We are a little over half way through the trillion tonnes now, but our pace of emitting is still increasing.
http://www.wri.org/blog/2014/0... [wri.org]
2. Set a function for carbon pricing (carbon tax, taxed at source) so that the price will increase expo
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Are you sure? [worldwatch.org]
Absolutely positive [frontpagemag.com]?
Seems to be quite a few [examiner.com].
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You have any citations that aren't from lunatics?
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Wow, you even selected a fixed font to help you seem crazier. The way it invokes someone one a typewriter trying to convince their editorial board of a conspiracy is perfect. Nice satire. A+ work.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:4, Interesting)
Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
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And you have landed on an important problem in the scientific world. There's an understanding among academics that they need to make attempts at reproducing results. And for "big" things that make a splash, someone is usually going to step up to the plate.
But sometimes things take a while. Like just a month ago, someone just published an analysis undermining the, frequently believed, and popularly widespread, notion that women measurably like more masculine faces at the height of the fertility. That's
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Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
It's not just that verifying somebody else's results in not sexy. There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation. Eventually it was discredited against fierce opposition from some of the big names in science at the time and there are many other examples of this from other scientific fields. Scientific consensus about some theory or other sometimes has a tendency to be imposed
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.
I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.
And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.
Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.
So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.
Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score:4, Insightful)
This always struck me as a funny part of the "Harry Potter" series. They were all in a school for magic, verifying and repeating using experimentation. Though it sounds silly to say, it impressed me as "the science of magic."
Science is the way of thinking and the framework, not the topic.
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Unfortunately, it was a very poor kind of science, and that's one of the things that really irked me about the series. The potions (chemistry) class was especially bad. They were taught things by rote, and they learned only that if they didn't follow the procedure then they'd get bad results. Often, interestingly bad, but they thought of them as simply "the wrong thing" to be discarded rather than investigated.
The wizards looked down on "muggles", but they had an awful lot to learn from them. Applying muggl
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Science may be good and pure and free of politics.
BUT SCIENTISTS ARE NOT. They depend on funding and getting tenure and in general are dependent on institutions and where institutions are, there is a boat load of politics.
A hard science like physics has it relatively easy, but everything down the ladder can be and are muddied to one degree or another.
For the record, I'm convinced of anthropogenic global warming.
Worse than that... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's actually much worse than that.
Studies in economics and psychology tend to suffer from certain problems which limit their real-world application and the likelihood that they actually mean what people think they mean.
First, they are often based on correlation rather than causation. This is especially true with psychology studies, and readily allows confirmation bias, incorrect interpretations of data, and interpretations of data which are heavily influenced by the perspective of the researcher.
Second, t
Re:Worse than that... (Score:4, Informative)
Any study's results are only generalizable to the population from which the sample was derived. Thus if the sample was taken from a population of Ohio State university students, those results are only generalizable to that population. Your complaint is with the media and how they report the results no the study's principle investigator.
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Correlation or causation depends on the design of the study. When it comes to surveys, those would be correlational studies. When it comes to studying animal behavior, those would be causation.
Absolutely. Most of the studies I have seen discussed or come across in psychology have been correlation-based. While many people are good at saying they don't know for sure what the study means, most people looking at it interpret it to have meaning that fits with their preexisting biases.
Any study's results are only generalizable to the population from which the sample was derived. Thus if the sample was taken from a population of Ohio State university students, those results are only generalizable to that population.
Yes, hence the problem with conducting so many experiments on college students.
Your complaint is with the media and how they report the results no the study's principle investigator.
Not only them. You also see a lot of the same problems in psychology textbooks, for example, and among psychologists. Psychologist
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Okay, let's just take a second and review this idea.
What on earth makes you think non-preliminary studies in psychology/sociology study correlation? People in the field take those correlations you reference, and develop causative experiments all the time. Expose groups to two different stimuli, and measure the behavioral differences. Have you never even browsed the abstracts of a psychology journal [sagepub.com]?
I know it's popular among engineers to dismiss the soft sciences for, being, well soft. But the fact that
Re:Worse than that... (Score:5, Informative)
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any data that refutes a well-reasoned logical argument is considered incomplete.
Another possibility is that the "well-reasoned logical argument" wasn't actually well-reasoned. For example, I've seen a perversion of the Austrian School axiom of action in which it is claimed that humans and only humans can act.
That bolded part can be refuted easily by observing non-human actors such as computer trading programs and animals. The latter can make economically relevant decisions without having a human involved anywhere in the process, for example, bees harvesting honey and incidentally po
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That bolded part can be refuted easily by observing non-human actors such as computer trading programs and animals. The latter can make economically relevant decisions without having a human involved anywhere in the process, for example, bees harvesting honey and incidentally pollinating plants or a host of scavengers and predators taking turns on a large carcass.
A computer trading program is a tool used by humans. Animals "act" in the vernacular sense but the Austrian school's idea of action derives from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org] which is the study of *human* action.
In thinking of economics, while it certainly makes sense to consider the actions of animals as you noted, the only relevance is in guiding the actions of humans. It's irrelevant to consider what honeybees are going to do outside of how that impacts humans and how we must react to them.
Re:Worse than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Rejects empirical data" is another way of saying "taking it on faith", i.e. the Austrian school is a religion by another name.
Scientific Consensus (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is about provability, consensus is about getting majority or even a plurality of opinions. These two things are mutually exclusive.
Piltdown Man was once "consensus". We know how that turned out.
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Science is not about provability. Provability is the domain of pure mathematics.
Science is about falsification, which is quite different. All scientific knowledge is "until seen". The best theories survive, but they might not survive forever. Science proves nothing, it only provides us with empirical evidence for or against a certain hypothesis.
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No, mathematics and logic are about provability. Real-world phenomena can't be proven; they can only be shown to have worked a certain way every time we've observed them so far. (I've dropped this rock 100,000 times, and every time it has fallen ... but I can't prove that it will next time.) If you want absolute proof you need to stick to theoretical phenomena. Or chuck it all and just believe something with absolute faith because it's written in an old book, like the other people who are afraid of their
Re:Scientific Consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
As an experimental scientist, I can, with certainty, state that you are wrong when you claim "science is about provability."
It is extraordinarily difficult to prove something experimentally. Most advances come about because we (both individually as experimentors, and collectively as members of a given scientific field), think we've accounted for most potential confounds and artifacts, not because we've conducted perfect experiments. Biological sciences, especially, suffer from a huge number of uncontrolled variables that often we are not aware of, but impinge mightily upon our results. Biology, to continue, is noisy. Very, very noisy. In my lab, we measure phenomena related to visual perception, and I can tell you unequivocally that individual variation usually swamps any underlying phenomenon we examine (meaning, we need to measure with lots and lots of individuals to make sure we aren't being fooled, and even then, we can easily get fooled).
Rarely, if ever, do we prove something experimentally. It's only through the consensus of reproducibility that scientific facts get established.
Piltdown Man, to discuss your example, was due to observational error (ie, a hoax), not experimental evidence demonstrating provability. Observational science, as opposed to experimental science, is rife with missteps and re-interpretations. Look up the history of shooting stars, as one example -- they were considered purely terrestrial phenomena well after the establishment of the United States as a country. It took repeated observational events, not experiments, to establish that meteors are astronomical in origin.
Reproducibility is the cornerstone of modern science. Everything else is consensus. We think we know things, and mostly, we've been correct with a high degree of probability, since we've been able to take given conclusions and build, predictably, upon them. But, every now and then, even firmly-held beliefs with eons of structural experimental integrity are demonstrated to have been mistaken. There is very little scientific truth, merely scientific certainty. If you want absolute truth, look to mathematics instead.
Re: (Score:3)
Of course, this is a lot like saying "I hypothesize that a kilogram masses 1000 grams."
Not much of a hypothesis if it reduces to "I suspect strongly that X is defined to be X"
if you're not reading science.. (Score:2)
why do you except scientific methods to be part of it?
economics can have some science to it, but mostly it's psychology and mostly it's guesswork. some better, some not so good. there's psych medicines that you can test with science and need science to produce, but the results in an individual can vary.. free will and all that. the other side of economics is just pure math, but that's just a side. you can calculate interest rates all you want but you can't really know if someone can pay it to you..
you can s
Re: (Score:2)
Really? So addiction is a matter of free will? Might want to tell that to all the heroine addicts.
Somebody is irretrievably stupid.
The fantasy of the "rogue" that was right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Consensus is something that helps us keep crackpots and bad actors (Say, those that pay for fake/biased studies that support their political or financial position) from pushing their agenda. Charisma and slick marketing are dangerously effective so the practice of gathering the collective opinion of all the experts in a given field is important.
It's not perfect. Occasionally the community is slow to move on new evidence, but science should be a careful and methodical practice.
We enjoy stories about underdogs and misunderstood geniuses or the rogue new guy that goes up against the "establishment" but in reality actual true stories of this nature are quite rare. Statistic noise rare. Real breakthroughs are nearly always the culmination of decades of work from hundreds of researchers.
Michael Crichton, frankly, was a hack that enjoyed the above fantasy a bit too much. He did do a bit of research for his projects but it was always just dressing for the same plot over and over again.
That man has done more damage to the world than he ever knew. When he fell in to the climate change denial camp he provided legitimacy to the anti-intellectual nonsense that we're struggling to deal with today.
Scientific Consensus is: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Scientific Consensus is: (Score:5, Insightful)
Consensus (Score:3)
A consensus is a bunch of people who share an opinion. You can have a consensus of scientists, but not a scientific consensus. Crichton was right (about that): science is about consistent, reproducible results, not opinions or consensuses. Politics often involves consensus.
Climate science doesn't care how many people, scientists or not, vote for a particular hypothesis. Climate politics do, and that's what's involved when we try to decide what to do. Unfortunately, people confuse the two.
Some people are missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
It's absolutely true that science is not about consensus. Science is not a body of knowledge, but a process of (roughly speaking) formulating an explanation of phenomena, devising a means to test the explanation, and then using that test to determine whether the explanation adheres to the "real world". One of the criteria of a good test is that it must be reproducible, but nothing in the process of science actually requires "consensus".
However, you have a bunch of different scientists with different specialties studying different phenomena, so much so that no single person can actually be aware of it all. Certainly no single person can actually reproduce all of the tests and experiments. In the face of such complexity, we've developed another system which, speaking strictly, is not "science". It's more of a social/political system whereby the various experiments are reviewed by other scientists who attempt to determine whether the tests were good, and whether the tests actually tested the explanation/phenomena they were supposed to. In a formal setting, this process is called "peer review", but it also happens informally (i.e. scientists read each others' work, challenge it, devise other tests).
The upshot of this social system is that, if you aren't enough of a climate scientist to review the existing knowledge of global warming and evaluate its validity, then you should probably just trust the consensus. You trust that there are a lot of smart people working on the problem, and if 95% of the climate scientists agree, then the safe guess is that they're probably at least on the right track. It doesn't mean that they're absolutely correct-- no scientific or social process can guarantee absolute correctness-- but you're going to find more success going with the overwhelming consensus than going against it.
Of course, every once in a while, there is some genius who figures out that the overwhelming consensus is wrong. Most of the time, the scientific community catches on pretty quickly and the consensus changes.
"soft" science (Score:3)
The notion that climate science or economics can't repeat experiments is not entirely fair. While it's true that we can't conduct isolated double-blind experiments under identical conditions, we can conduct tests under analogous conditions to determine whether a given model is accurate or not, which is the real goal of such science. Given enough instances in which the accumulation of carbon compounds in the atmosphere leads to an overall increase in temperatures, or in which an increase in government spending or low-end wages stimulates economic activity in a market economy, we can make the inference of a correlation, and start looking for a mechanism of a causal connection.
What consensus means: (Score:5, Insightful)
'Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.'"
The phrase "One investigator who happens to be right" assumes one would be able to tell who is right and who is wrong immediately as it happens. The consensus is agreeing who got reproducible provable results.
People who do not understand science, who want to game the system are intentionally gaming the system. They bring in rules used in philosophical debates and legal arguments into science. Equal time for both sides works ok in philosophy and in courts. But not in science. Let us say one side has tons and tons of data and the other side is waving hands. Giving equal time to both is doing a great injustice to the side with data.
If one side is just asking questions, raising doubts, etc and the other side is actually answering the questions and clearing the doubts, it is a great injustice to give equal time to both. It takes much longer to answer questions than to raise them.
One should gain standing to raise doubts. Getting funding from industry groups with vested interests is not getting the standing. Must publish in the relevant field, get peer reviewed papers. Must risk reputation gained by hard long work to raise questions.
I disagree with the premise... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
Scientific consensus is an group of scientists agreeing on a proven theory or the proof of a theory.
Political consensus is a group of people ganging together to push their opinions on others.
The latter has a negative connotation which Mr. Crichton is using to taint the former.
Scientific Consensus can be challenged (Score:3)
Scientific consensus is like "you cannot exceed the speed of light." If you happen to demonstrate that you exceeded the speed of light, you want to be careful about how you present it--e.g. "we have this interesting result and can someone help show what we did wrong?"--but the community will take notice if you actually show that the consensus is wrong. The more consensus there is, the better the evidence you need to posit the question, but the community still listens.
Consensus and Burden of Proof (Score:3)
No, consensus isn't needed for science to progress, but it is an inevitable result of science. A theory comes out, it is tested, peer-reviewed, and people see that it best describes the data. So more and more scientists in that field will accept that theory until something better comes along.
Now, you can be that one guy who says "here is my theory which contradicts prevailing views." This has happened a lot in the past. However, the key point is that those contradicting theories need an extraordinary amount of evidence to prove them. If your radical new theory was that relativity wasn't actually true and you could explain everything with X, then you'd need a TON of reproducible proof to convince your peers that X is true. This is because we have so much evidence that relativity is true that it would take a lot to unseat it.
What you can't do is insist that a theory with broad consensus is wrong because you have a different theory, offer up little to no proof, and demand that those "in the consensus" provide extraordinary proof that they are right.
Consensus is not a scientific method (Score:3)
That's what my math prof at the university said after he asked people who thought this or that answer was right (and the majority was wrong): Science is not a democratic process.
Sadly, it has turned into one.
Peer review sadly doesn't mean what it used to mean: That a lot of others who are experts in your field took a look and nodded their heads. What it means to day: A lot of other people in your field of study think likewise.
Scientists are humans, as much as they try to sit on high horses and claim they ain't. They don't like being wrong. They don't like to give someone else the satisfaction of coming up with some paradigm shifting discovery. And most of all they certainly do not want to admit that they wasted their life hunting the rabbit down the wrong hole.
Imagine we'd only discover today that the sun, not earth, is the center of our solar system. You think any of the scientists who invested their whole life perfecting deferent and epicycle calculation would budge to the overwhelming proof that they're wrong?
Consensus is about the process (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there is a subtle difference between being right (in the usual sense of providing a model that happens to accurately represent measurable stuff) and the process of scientific discussion. Consensus is just an outcome of a process, ie collaboration. That process is extremely important but does not guarantee being right.
In the end, without resorting to unnecessary complicated terms, if a bunch of people who are supposed to know what they are saying all agree on something that is not immediately testable (say, long-term human impact on the climate), odds are they are more likely to be right than some random wacko or idiot reporter because they spent some time discussing together and have highlighted potential errors.
In the absence of definitive hard data, which will only be available in retrospect, we have to pick sides. Consensus seems a safer bet than the probability that some random guy is the new Galileo or Einstein.
Wavefunction collapse (Score:3)
This whole discussion is distorted by the framing around "belief." As long as the result of a scientific inquiry is "belief" it's reasonable (in the "sound reason" sense) to hold the issue open and speculate that Einstein's General Theory (or the current version of Darwin's) might in fact be totally wrong.
But that's where the denialists play word games. They talk about open minds, and how consensus isn't dispositive, etc. and then use that as an argument against teaching evolution in schools or taking steps agains AGW. Or, for that matter, against teaching heliocentrism or plate tectonics.
The "scientific consensus" may not be dispositive in any epistemological sense, but when it comes time to collapse the waveform and make a decision it's certainly the way to bet.
Playing the man and not the ball. (Score:5, Insightful)
For climate change skeptics are always attacking the science and the scientists. But they never deal with the known facts.
1. CO2 concentration is measurably increasing year on year and accelerating. If you want a running tally have a look here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
This is one of a number of different high quality analytical chemistry studies that all tell the same story. CO2 concentration is increasing significantly.
2. We know this is because of release of fossil fuel sequestered CO2. By careful investigation of the change in carbon isotopic ratios, and by simply accounting for the CO2 released. Human release of CO2 more than enough accounts for the CO2 increase in the atmosphere, and actually shows that a significant proportion is actually getting absorbed into the ocean and other carbon sinks. But clearly no where near all of it.
3. CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat due to the wavelengths of light it does and does not absorb.
This is all hard chemistry measurement, and are known with a high degree of confidence. These are not up for debate!
The only debatable point is what do these facts mean for the climate and the environment going forward. And here we get into prediction and modelling. The best models and predictions shows that the climate will increase in temperature, and that will have significant and mostly detriment effect on most of the worlds environments and sustainability of human populations going forward.
If you are a climate change skeptic scientist, what you have to come up with is a model that sensibly and scientifically shows why this increase in CO2 won't have any significant detrimental effects. Then put it up for publication in peer reviewed journals. And if your scientific argument has any legs it will change the scientific consensus. All the other stuff being thrown around is political motivated bull shit, with no scientific basis and should be simply ignored.
Playing the ball... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here are some more facts. The atmospheric co2 concentration is increasing by about 2 ppm per year. The world currently produces about 4.9 x 10^13 kg of co2 per year from the combustion of fossil fuels. Therefore, the small total amount of
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Picking the "20 years of no warming" is simply cherry picking, and ignoring a time period 15 times longer that does show warming.
Science is not consensus (Score:3)
What scientists mean by consensus is different (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there is a difference between what scientists mean by a consensus in the scientific community and how it is understood by the wider public.
If a climatologist says "there is a consensus" (s)he hardly means that a bunch of people came together to have a popular vote on the issue. Rather, it suggests that the majority of fellow climatologists have examined some evidence each and found the collection of all that evidence (and their respective analysis) to be conclusive (as far as statistically possible). However, no individual alone can "convince themselves by looking at the evidence" because the evidence consists of more data than anybody could study in a life time. So we have to put a certain degree of trust into our colleagues. An individual only has partial evidence, which by itself is insufficient to come to far-reaching conclusions about global climate developments. These conclusions can only be reached collaboratively -- in this sense it requires a consensus. Fortunately though I don't even have to trust any individual climate scientist or their data, just that there is no conspiracy by the majority. Furthermore, I know that I could examine any evidence if I wanted to, I just can't examine it all because there is simply too much of it. This applies similarly to other large-scale observational endeavours.
However, to a non-scientificially minded person "consensus" might indeed suggest something weaker (people sharing an opinion) and therefore mistrust the conclusions. And then they can't look at the evidence themselves because there is too much data and that data comes from exactly the people whom they mistrust in the first place. So instead they look at the evidence they can see and understand, which explains why acceptance of climate change drops on snowy days.
Controversy and Ignorance (Score:3)
So consensus forms on topics that feel like they have pretty much been studied to death. It should be noted though that contrarians may remain active even when a consensus exists. That may look like controversy, but really the contrarian's arguments have all been addressed to everyone's satisfaction except the contrarian's. So, basically, the contrarian is the guy who does not get it. The faster a field moves, the more likely a contrarian will still be professionally active.
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Informative)
Me neither:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind... [realclimate.org]
Re: (Score:3)
If there is no way to set up a test to and verify the results it falls more into the field of pseudoscience rather than science. If there is a way to test and verify but the data to do so isn't provided then it is more likely that it falls into the category of scam rather than science. (e-cat anyone?)
Climate science is given as an example. I don't see any reason to why results based on a model can't be backed up by providing said model or even the source code for verification.
Peer review is an important part of the global scientific progress. "Piltdown Man" is an excellent example of the need for peer review, which keeps true psuedo science such as perpetual motion and quackery like so-called "Cold Fusion" at bay. I find it rather astonishing at s-called open source advocates who praise the peer review mechanism to spot out bad code yet downplay it's importance in any other field.
Re: (Score:2)
Those models are tested heavily, but they are very complex - atmospheric modelling is one of the most computationally expensive things to do, and it's still not perfect.
The models are tested by comparing known data to what the model predicts based on past data and the system you're using. For example, you have data for time x to y to z, but you only give the model the data from x to y and you see if it's able to get close to the real data from y to z (which it doesn't know).
This is a simplification, but it
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thankfully, you can get climate data here http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov
And even more thankfully, you can see how both satellite and balloon data for atmospheric temperatures have consistently tracked each other since satellite data became available in 1980:
Graph of satellite, balloon, and climate model temps since 1980 [googleusercontent.com]
You'll also note how climate model temps don't agree with reality.
funny you should mention the ocean (Score:3)
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=57
The ocean heat content is a better (though delayed) measure of global warming than the atmosphere for the obvious reason it has a larger heat capacity and so 'physically' integrates over many fluctuations.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, and it too shows that the warming is real.
Re:Crichton is an idiot. (Score:5, Informative)
A consensus is a bunch of people who share an opinion. It has nothing to do with right or wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Your point?
Re: (Score:3)
>"Science requires only one investigator who happens to be right, "
The one investigator publishes a paper, his work is confirmed by many others, he wins the Nobel Prize, and a new consensus is created. This differs from one loud voice who disagrees with the current consensus. For a handy metric for differentiating the two, see John Baez's Crackpot Index. [ucr.edu]
Re:Crichton is an idiot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Who profits from West slowing down? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, sure...
Utter nonsense. What's settled is that the climate is changing at the hands of man, what's open to debate is what the impact on us will be in the short and long term. The "consensus" is the same as the "consensus" that supports the modern understanding of evolution - it is a refinement and agreement across the field on the gross mechanism for something, and all the arguments lie in the details.
Kudos for tossing in the pinch of anti-government paranoia, it has to be that and not the desire for massively profitable fossil fuel corporations to defend said profits.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, sure. And every time I jump, the Earth moves (a little bit) in the opposite direction. Right... No, what is far from settled, is whether the humanity's impact is anything to speak of — or whether a single volcano's eruption produces more "greenhouse effect gases", than the Earth's entire bovine population and thus there is little justification in limiting beef-consumption on that account.
In other words, what's very far from being
Re:Gotten? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You are misinformed. American English is not English, it's not about the number of speakers, and never will be (you will find that the form of English spoken on the Indian sub-continent outnumbers your "largest group of English speakers" - maybe time to notice the world outside your borders?). English refers to the form of English spoken in England. Yes there are dialects within this, but the fact of the matter is, the originating country gets to set the baseline.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Consensus is not Correctness (Score:5, Insightful)
There wasn't a learned man in Europe who believed the Earth was flat. It may have persisted much longer in China, but in Europe and among Arab geographers, there was no one who seriously believed in the flat Earth. The Greeks had figured that out nearly 2000 years before Columbus ever accidentally ran into the Americas on his way to China.