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The Limits To Skepticism
jamie found a long and painstaking piece up at The Economist asking and provisionally answering the question: "Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?" The author, who is not named, spent several hours picking apart the arguments of one Willis Eschenbach, AGW denialist, who on Dec. 8 published what he called the "smoking gun" — it was supposed to prove that the adjustments climate scientists make to historical temperature records are arbitrary to the point of intentional manipulation. The conclusion: "[H]ere's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further 'smoking gun' claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story. And then I'll probably go ahead and try to investigate the claim and write a blog post about it, because that's my job. Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia."
For some reason I don't think going, "Lalalalalala, I can't hear you" instead of refuting the points they bring up is going to engender somebody to change their viewpoint, rather the opposite. If somebody is already believing there is a cover-up this is about the only thing you could do, besides admit it, that reinforces that idea.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Because it's a waste of time, that's why. Offering evidence to a denialist ostrich
Not every climate skeptic is a denialist ostrich. Many of us can be converted with patience, lucidity and openness.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yes, but you're not trying to convert them, as you said it wont happen. What you're doing is trying to convince the people on the fence. They see, somebody laying out refuting the points of the AGW crowd, which then responds with basically "U STUPID", that isn't going to gain any more fans.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Most of the anti-AGW crowd is simply doing armchair, a-priori reasoning behind why AGW is false. "Humans are too puny to have an effect!" they say, or "The climate has changed drastically fast even without humanity being around!" Often there are political reasons for holding this position--certain arguments on how to deal with GW are certainly political in nature, and may come into conflict with one's own dogma, and thus psychologically one may be predisposed to oppose GW on that basis.
HOWEVER, that does not mean that some people that argue for AGW do not fit into the same shoes. Remember, just because you are "correct" does not mean your reasoning is. Naturally, someone that hates big business and "the man" may also psychologically have a reason to believe in AGW--another reason to rage on about the status quo.
If I was a betting man I'd bet for AGW, but really I know the science behind it is quite complicated and I know I'm nowhere near competent to make a good, solid argument on the matter, so I must approach the issue with a tempered agnosticism while leaning a bit towards the AGW side because that's the verdict by a vast majority of hard-working PhDs, and I highly doubt that climatologists consist of some dark, left-wing communist sect of economy-destroying conspirators. That is what true skepticism is, noncommitance (particularly emotionally) to a position particularly when you are not an expert on it. Many on both sides of the GW debate are not skeptics but reactionaries with their thought ruled by political underpinnings. Most of the people I know that rant about how AGW is a fraud no absolutely nothing about the mechanisms scientists go about acquiring the data on past climate conditions.
It really does weaken the position of those who support the AGW theory. Why? Because it is name calling and over simplification. Pretending that everyone who doesn't agree with you is simply in denial of what is happening and then making up a cute little label is not the sort of thing that speaks to a rational debate. It is the kind of thing a con man would do, and thus makes people wonder, why would you use those tactics?
So as a start, you have to understand that there are some major differences in terms of what people believe who are skeptical of the AGW thing. These are just some examples:
1) There are people who believe the whole thing is a crock, there is no warming, it is all made up, etc, etc. These are the only people who could be called in denial, by any stretch of the imagination.
2) There are people who believe that there has been a warming trend recently, however the trend is entirely natural. It is right in line with the kind of trends seen historically, and thus there is no cause to believe this is anything but a natural occurrence. They are skeptical that humans are contributing in any significant fashion.
3) There are people who believe that there is warming, and indeed man is contributing to it, but that the result will not be problematic, and perhaps beneficial. They do not accept the conclusion that the warming will lead to catastrophe, even though they do accept that humans are at least partly causing it. They are skeptical that a warmer Earth will be bad for humans.
4) There are people who believe that people are causing the warming, and that it will lead to worse conditions, but that it would be even worse to attempt to stop it. They believe that the money spent on trying to stop such a thing could be better spent on other things to improve human life. The sort of thing that while warming might cause X additional deaths per year, spending money on that instead of other things would lead to 5X additional deaths per year. They are skeptical that the proposed solutions are the best.
5) There are people who believe that people are causing the arming and that it needs to be stopped, but that reducing output won't do that. We need a different solution like geoengineering or something. Reducing CO2 output wouldn't help, at least not enough to matter, so we've got to find another solution. They are skeptical that the proposed solutions would do anything.
6) There are people who believe that people are causing the warming, and that it will be bad, but there is fuck-all we can do about it. We are too far along, shit is going to happen anyhow, so we might as well apply our energies and money to surviving the change, not to trying to prevent it, since that it impossible. They are skeptical anything can be done at all, other than to try and survive the change.
So a big part of the problem with trying to frame everyone as a "denialist" is the simplification of the argument, to try and say "Oh they all just ignore everything that is said." No, in fact, many don't. They simply come to a different conclusion. Also they may well find enough evidence to sustain part of the argument, but not all of it. You find people who say "Sure, I'll buy the world is getting warmer. We've got pretty good instrumental data on that. However I'm not so sure about CO2 being the cause. The data on that is more shaky. Either way I'm really skeptical that a warmer Earth will be a bad thing, there's essentially no data to support that." They aren't just saying "La la la, I can't hear you!" They are just not convinced by all the arguments.
Well, when you simply dismiss them as a "denialist" and act as though they are a moron, that does nothing to convert them. In fact, it may do the opposite. They say "Hmmm, this is the kind of thing con men do. When someone questions them, they just attack and shout down their questioner. They are afraid of scrutiny. They want you to accept what they say, unquestioningly. Why are AGW proponents acting like this? Could they be con men?"
So seriously, knock it off with the label. You are doing nothing to help.
Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.
Aye, there's the rub...
I think the author is overlooking two simple facts: not everyone with a website is an "average guy", and that there are more than a few people in the world who are capable of understanding advanced mathematics and statistical methods who don't have the related PhD that apparently enables one to do so.
Thanks for the link. I know that on Slashdot you're not actually supposed to read the articles, but nonetheless, I found the Economist post and the author's response illuminating. The author raises good points about the dangers of over-reliance on the peer review system. It's a good system but it is not doesn't always work - crap gets through and good articles aren't published. Simply ignoring any non peer-reviewed work puts far too much faith into the system.
Now, you can choose to rely on the opinions of scientists to form your opinions, and often that is enough, but if you really want to be sure of any particular topic, you should investigate it yourself. It might take a lot of work, but you will be rewarded with knowledge.
That said, global warming isn't all that inaccessible. If you have a basic background in math and physics, you can get close to the cutting edge just by reading the IPCC report since its such a great summary of the field. I guarantee you will quadruple your understanding of the topic just by reading that alone, and it will give you a good launching point to dig deeper, because everything it talks about is directly referenced to real peer reviewed papers.
Some interesting things I found reading the IPCC report:
Every self-respecting geek who is willing to opine on the subject of global warming should read that report. Otherwise they are leaving themselves uninformed.
Qxe4
I am very sceptical with regards to a "not named" author claims... ;-)
Before everyone starts putting down the author for being anonymous, please observe that this is The Economist. For those of you not familiar with that particular publication, one of its distinguishing traits is that it does not publish bylines. Ever. Editorials in The Economist are backed by the reputation of the editorial staff of The Economist, not of any individual writer.
Breakfast served all day!
The article's point isn't to ignore all that. It's that to say that some random blogger likely doesn't have the tools to correctly analyze the data, and may well be doing their own shaping of the facts. And proving that to yourself is going to take a couple of hours (at least) of research and your time. The end result of which is probably going to be that the people who posted the data were aware of the factor in question, went and checked what the source was, and have a good explanation for what's going on with the data and why they did what they did.
All of which is public record, and has been analyzed six ways from tuesday, by people with far better credentials than you or the blogger is likely to have.
So, in this writer's opinion, it's not worth his time. If someone can get into the peer-reviewed journals, where the standards of competence and knowledge are much higher than on a random blog, he'll pay attention. Because every time he's gone and done the background check on some blogger's new climate data scandal, he's found it isn't a scandal at all, and quite often (like in this case) the blogger already knew that. But was posting it as a scandal anyway.
So it was a waste of time, both to read the blog and to take it seriously.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.
The main paper in question was a literature review paper (funded by the Marshall Institute and the American Petroleum Institute) full of bad science, where the actual authors of the papers cited claim to have been profoundly misintepreted, and in which severe methodological flaws have since been found. One of the authors doesn't even believe that CFCs affect the ozone layer. It should have stood as a textbook example of why we have the peer review process to begin with - it's not a platform for anyone to publish scientific nonsense.
Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature, those who seem to be saying "I'm a skeptic! I don't know the science, but I'm absolutely certain it's a liberal hoax and we're all being lied to"... not so much. Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.
I believe that the climate science isn't the problem in terms of AGW; the problem is that the solutions to AGW are arguably economically questionable. Hence the issue has become intensely politicized. People who strongly oppose the proposed solutions to AGW are often the same ones who tend to argue aainst AW as a whole regardless of their actual knowlede of the topic. People need to be able to separate the two issues from one another, that is to say that the existence of AGW is a separate issue than any solutions to AGW. However, it will never ever happen. Both ends of the issues will not yield ground and everyone ends up losing something in the bickering.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The "birthers" would say the same of themselves. Most irrational people don't think of themselves as irrational, of course that's just another example of them being unable to face reality.
Some of them are different, but when I come across them... let's just say I'm skeptical.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
More to the point, peer review is NOT theory validation -- it is supposed to be a final edit by an impartial party to find errors of fact, reason, and presentation. It is never supposed to be the "Stamp of Approval" about the topic, it is only a filter to weed out papers not yet ready for publication.
Theory validation comes from those who read the papers and use the information to test, retest, or modify their own experiments to either confirm, deny, or suggest alternatives to the information presented.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
I would love to see the US become a leader in green technology. I'm not convinced that the best way to accomplish that is to impose new taxes that dramatically raise the cost of living for American citizens while increasing the size and scope of government. I don't see how you build a green economy by gutting the current one and diverting much needed capital into Uncle Sam's coffers.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The moment you demand all skeptics believe "just because", it stops being science. global warming is a perfect example of something with questionable science reaching the point it's being treated as a religion, and anyone questioning it is a heretic.
If you *know* it's questionable, then send your explanation to a peer-reviewed journal for all of us to see.
You can't? pity, but chances are then you're no different from the thousands of other "armchair scientists" making outrageous claims with no actual backing, as the guy analyzed in TFA. And making actual scientists try and reason with all of you is an utter waste of their time, which we'd rather they spent doing their actual job.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
This is interesting to me:
"One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand."
Emphasis mine. I'm a math major, granted, but I can understand it just fine. It's just basic statistics. It's numbers, if you will. Being a meteorologist doesn't enter you into some magical realm where you have special magical numbers that behave completely differently than the number systems everyone else uses in mathematics. And certainly being a Ph.D. meteorologist doesn't require you even be a bachelor in Math, does it? So how would even having a doctorate degree in meteorology or any number of RELATED FIELDS result in one being capable of understanding statistics? Honestly, this absurd statement made by the author sums up what I felt reading the entire article. It's rife with the rantings of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, clearly admits he doesn't understand the math, yet wants to chime in and put his $.02 in while discrediting someone else just as unaccredited as himself. This is sheer lunacy.
Any undergraduate student taking a statistics course can tell you when you're biased or hinted at what a dataset OUGHT to look like (expectations, or beliefs), the decisions you make on manipulations and adjustments to the graphs are almost dedicated to proving those correct, even if they're wrong. Just like when you sit down with a postulate you need to prove. You have the end result, and you are given some basic facts, now you're trying to force your way through definitions, techniques, tricks and the like to get the result that's on the paper. But when someone hands you an equally difficult proposition and says: "prove or disprove the following," the difficulty goes up tenfold if it in fact is not specifically chosen because it's easy to see that it's provable or easily disproved by counterexample. The same exists here. And I know that being a graduate math student I know that even I, my classmates, and even professors make more subtle mistakes than accidentally adjusting data in an incorrect fashion (even if your reason for doing so is 100% valid). I can assure anyone who's uneducated in mathematics that unless they are literally a doctorate in statistics, they can make those mistakes just as easily.
Here's my suggestion. Open the data. Don't funnel it to some government bureau or tightly controlled data collection agency, just PUBLISH IT and let everyone scoop up all the data for themselves. Then let people with math backgrounds or anyone really to sit down and mess with the data. Let everyone see it and if the entire community agrees that data from one node looks fishy or wrong, then we can discount it as a community, not as someone who believes "well damn, if just the data between dates A and B from this place would go away, the result would be clear... hmm.. well these do look off a bit.. maybe it's an outlier, i'll just delete this data here." Keep the thermometers used, keep notes about what's being done, publish that as well. If we believe there's an outlier, we should test the thermometers and if those are defunct, then we can throw out the data without bias. If a mistake like recording temperatures in kelvin is made, well we can adjust for this, but we don't need to discard it. Let's have some common sense people. It's PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE. Well, not technically. In peer reviewed science, we can do the SAME experiment over again and get the exact same result in a predictable fashion. In this, the data we get is from YOU, so of course it could be doctored to provide a guided result. It can ONLY be peer reviewed if absolutely ANYONE can take the RAW data and come to the same conclusions you did. This entire debate is just silly. I won't believe anyone is correct until this happens. How about we give transparency a try with this global warming crap for a change?
I don't think there's any danger of modern science being "reformed" the way you describe. We're in far more danger of the masses infusing science with baseless conjecture due to the overall poor level of scientific education, resulting in the tainting of our scientific institutions with populist hokus. Witness NASA having to put together a press release reassuring the public after the movie 2012.
The idiotic "everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and nobody's opinion is inherently better" idea is resulting in homeopathy being immune from criticism because their opinions are equal to the opinions of qualified doctors. Here we have climate change skeptics, on the payroll of big oil getting the same weight as scientists with real, irrefutable data, thanks to this misguided "we are all entitled to an opinion and the right to promote it".
This is one of the fundamental flaws in the concept of free speech for all; it does not account for relative differences in resources. One wealthy liar can out-campaign ten poor truthful scientists.
I'm not against free speech, nor do I think censorship is the answer. I don't have a clue what the answer is, nor can I even suggest a solution.
I only want people to recognize that "free speech" as an absolute principle, while being all nice and cuddly as a concept, has very grave problems.
I hate printers.
You're right that non-PhDs can certainly do PhD-level work from time to time. But how do the rest of us know whether to trust the work without expert-level knowledge ourselves? Allowing us to know who to trust to make technical claims is part of the function of the academic degree as a social institution. Peer-review serves a similar purpose. So, yes, I think lay people generally should ignore the contributions of people without "credentials" until someone with credentials can give it their seal of approval (note that this does not mean I think that non-credentialed researchers should be ignored by the credentialed, only by laypeople), not because they are sure to be worthless, but because most of us just have no tools with which to evaluate the work other then just looking to the letters behind the author's name. Sad but true.
So, I agree with your criticism of his implied claim that non-credentialed scientists can never contribute to advanced fields. But I think the thrust of his article (and, even, of the quote you selected) is quite correct.
caritj.org
Ah yes, it doesn't take long for someone to post a link to the fully qualified blogger Anthony Watts whenever the word skeptic appers in conjunction with climate, but if you call yourself a skeptic then consider the following...
Well before Watt's stared his website scientists had already explained how adjustments are made to compensate for the urban heat island effect but that didn't stop our pluckly little weatherman from building a website to show those ivory tower dwellers where they were sorely mistaken. As Watts fame (and income) grew, NOAA thought it might be a good idea to try and add some clarity so they took 70 weather stations that Watt's himself had rated as the best. They re-ran their analysis with just those stations and compared the result to the original analyisis using all 1200+ stations. Lo and behold the two curves were virtually identical as can be seen on the first graph in NOAA's response to Watts. Why? - Because the trend does not rely on the abolute temprature, it relies on the changes in temprature. Such systematic errors in measurement have long been known and handled by mathematicians and scientists alike.
Observant readers may note that a fully qualified political scientist by the name of McIntyre did manage to get a paper on the subject published in an obscure journal which was subsequently hyped so much that the US senate held an inqusition (err, inquiry) into Mann's 1997 hockey stick paper.
The inquisition called on the US National Acedemies of Science to proffer an opinion on McIntyre's claims. Their testimony came down heavily in favour of Mann's conclusions but also made some minor crticisims of his confidence levels. Mann being the leading scientists he is took those critcisims seriously and subsequently published an extended study in the journal Science, yes that's right, the world renowned journal published by the very same organisation who critcised his confidence levels.
McIntyre's paper failed to stand the test of time but rather than having another crack at science he went off to become yet another fully qualified blogger and created the popular front site "climate Audit", I say front site because both Watt's are McIntyre are stongly associated with the anti-science lobbyists at the CEI and the Heartland Institute (now there's a couple of targets for an email hack if I ever saw one).
McIntyre used his site to continue pushing the claim that Mann had hidden his data (where have we heard that before?). To put it politely, I am highly skeptical of that claim. If it was true then how did NAS come to it's conclusions in their testimony, and how is it that many others have also replicated Mann's work? Why is it that both Watts and McIntrye take selective quotes from the testimony to loudly declare that they "discredited Mann's hockey stick"? - You would think that if the testimony actually came to that conclusion then they would want you to read it. Yet nowhere on either site will you find an link to the testimony because...well...skeptical people might actually go and read it.
Considering the above farcical chain of events I don't blame Mann for expressing his desire to keep McIntyre's discredited paper out of the IPCC reports, I would have said the same thing. However this does not change the fact that the paper was subsequently included and discussed.
For those who don't like to read scientific papers and abhore pdf's there is an excellent summary on the youtube channel Climate crock of the week, unsurprisingly Watt's abused the DCMA in an attempt to have the video removed.
The skill of genuine skepticisim starts by learning to be skeptical of ones own ideas and beliefs. It's siad that a great scientist starts every day by
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Not every climate skeptic is a denialist ostrich. Many of us can be converted with patience, lucidity and openness.
That's a fair enough argument. The question then becomes, what's the cost/benefit trade-off?
Take another example - 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Yes, some of them can be deprogrammed and brought back into mainstream society. I've done it a few times myself. But how much time and effort should we really be putting into this? Do we REALLY need multi-million-dollar studies which 90% of them will ignore anyway? How do we approach the problem? Even if we put all our time and energy into it, how do we know when we've reduced the movement down to just those who are unable to listen to reason? Do we continue the effort for the next thousand years, or is there a point at which we can say "enough is enough"?
Honestly, I was never 100% convinced that AGW is a problem that we should to be worrying about right now. Probably not even 80% convinced. What I do know that this "climategate" manufactroversy is complete fucking nonsense. If anything, it's put me further into the mainstream camp simply because it's exposed the sheer lunacy and ignorance of the other side. If you're at all swayed by the release of the CRU e-mails, you seriously need to re-examine how you discriminate between good and bad data.
Yet you have fallen prey to the same black and white thinking the GP was criticizing. Assuming all climate change skeptics are on the payroll of big oil is ludicrous, as is your suggestion that all scientists who are not skeptical have irrefutable data even when they refuse to disclose that data.
Having a PhD does qualify you to hold an opinion, but it doesn't magically make that opinion valid, just as not having a PhD does not disqualify you from having a valid opinion. The problems you see in free speech pale in comparison to the problems with censorship.
The answer is to engage in critical thinking no matter the source, and not to give too much weight to any authority or lack thereof.
THIS.
Having something published in a journal is not the be-all, end-all, it does not mean that a theory is now correct one and for all time. It means it is time to start wider discussion and testing. The way science works is by trying to prove things wrong. You see phenomena in nature, and you come up with what you think is an explanation for them. You refine said explanation to the point that it makes testable predictions, the sort of thing like "If X occurs, Y will also occur," or whatever. You then set out to try and prove your theory wrong. You test those predictions. You say "Ok, well then let's try making X and see what happens, if we don't get Y, we know that we are wrong." Each time you fail to falsify your theory, you are more sure it is true.
Others join in, they re-try your experiments, make sure you didn't fuck up. They find alternate explanations and test those (well maybe Z could also cause Y, not just X). The more times that everyone tries and fails to falsify your theory, the more sure you are it is the right one. Only by repeated testing by yourself and others, only by actively trying to figure out what is wrong with your theory can you reach one that you are certain (or at least as certain as we can be) is right.
So publishing an article is NOT the last step in that, it is the first. You do some work, your write it up, you publish it. Some reviewers look at it to make sure there is nothing obviously wrong, and it then goes out to the larger community. That's when things start.
My problem isn't so much what's in the peer reviewed journals (maybe there are problems with the data, if so I assume we will eventually see that), most of the stuff I've seen in peer reviewed journals seems ok.
It's the dramatic hysteria and propaganda that you hear outside of the peer reviewed journals that really gets to me. The idea that if we don't stop emitting CO2 the oceans will rise, flooding out ocean front cities. There is no peer reviewed article proving that, quite the opposite, actually.
When you read peer reviewed articles, scientists are careful to put in qualifications and caveats, as they should. What I object to is the propaganda that comes after that fact, ie: "CO2 is a positive radiative forcing component (verified fact)..........therefore if we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere the results will be disastrous (wild conjecture)." Carefully watch what politicians say when they start talking. Very often they will start with something that is verified in a scientific way, then extrapolate in ways that no good scientist would dare to do. The fact is, global warming as presented in scientific journals is not nearly as disastrous as the event presented in the news.
In a way it reminds me of Y2K. At the time I would read articles in journals like Communications of the ACM, studying how much it would cost to fix various things, and estimating the number of computers that might have issues. Then I would look at the news and hear predictions of power plants exploding and airplanes crashing and wild unrest. At some point there was a disconnect between the science and the propaganda.
I object to the propaganda.
Qxe4
This is the situation we are in: we may or may not have a very serious problem. Most of the people who would have to do the work, and pay the price, of solving the problem do not have the time or the interest to study the matter deeply enough to know whether the situation is bad. So we have to choose who to trust. Do we trust the person who is telling us what we want to hear, or do we trust the peer-reviewed science?
We don't have the third choice that you propose, where we figure out whether the guy who wasn't peer-reviewed is telling us something we need to know, because we don't have the time or the interest to check his or her work. We can *hope* that if what he is saying is valid, and can be verified, that it will make it through the gauntlet of scientific skepticism. But until it does, we simply don't know whether or not to listen to it.
If we listen to everything that might be true, before it passes through this filter, then we *inevitably* are going to be guided by our own prejudices, because we simply have no other way to decide who to listen to.
So yeah, I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying here. I'm in the same boat you are. But I just can't buy your argument, because it leads nowhere. And if enough people buy your argument, and refuse to use the tools that they actually have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if this really is the serious situation that we are being told it is, then we are going to be begging our children for forgiveness, because it is they, and not we, who will pay the price for our choice.
While I agree with you're basic premise of opening up the data, I think your view of the statistics is a bit limited. Anyone can draw a trend line and calculate error bars, but when multiple data sets have conflicting data, it requires to a great deal of understanding of experimental methods, theoretical models, etc. to determine which datasets are most relevant to make what kind of conclusions. The "tricks" come from matching up tree ring data, ice core data, satellite data, direct measurements and many others. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses these methods is where an expert is needed and why your undergraduate math major is less than useful.
The author raises good points about the dangers of over-reliance on the peer review system. It's a good system but it is not doesn't always work - crap gets through and good articles aren't published.
And neither of you understand the peer review system. It's actually a very complex system, and one full of competition on many levels.
First, there are many scientists trying to get their work published. Second, there are many journals. Third, each journal has a journal impact factor. Fourth, papers mention other papers. Fifth, journals and papers are not the only means for how scientists communicate their work or collaborate. There are conferences, groups invite speakers, etc.
A journal impact factor is a simple calculation. On average, a paper published in Nature gets X number of mentions in other journal's papers. A paper published just about anywhere else gets much less. So people want to get published in Nature, obviously. But people are also realistic, and their PIs help them with finding the right places to get published. And if you don't, you can try again. Sound research is likely to be resubmitted, often times elsewhere.
When a paper is submitted, you don't just get a "we're publishing it!" or a "DENIED!". You get questions from the reviewers, sometimes requests for more data. If it's rejected, often times it's rejected with some helpful, useful suggestions on how the reviewers feel the paper could be improved, and sometimes it's said between the lines that if you resubmit after taking some of those suggestions, you'll get the thumbs up from that reviewer.
Yes, Nature and the like are the holy grail. But many, many people don't look only in Nature. They read the journals dedicated to their little niche, because they know that sometimes good, fresh thinking doesn't make it into Nature just because so many people submit. And guess what? So are all their true colleagues. So while you don't get your name in the newspaper or a mention on the nightly news, your research still sees the light of day, and often times, with more 'useful' eyeballs. And if it's good, you impress people, they collaborate with you, present your paper at their group's internal meetings, or hell, just toss the paper across the lunchtable and say to their colleages, "you should give this a glance." It's extremely common for labs/groups to have two weekly presentations- one presentation is the work of someone inside the group, and often someone in the same group presents research OUTSIDE the group. And often, it's presented regardless of how sound it is; it's meaningful to say "here is what so-and-so found" and then show why they were wrong, or what they did badly.
Now, I'm on the outside of all of this as an IT person, but I've made many scientist-friends and their lives revolve around this stuff. "Willis" clearly doesn't understand it. The peer-reviewed journal system is complex, but also remarkably free of collusion. After all, if someone presents solid research that something widely believed to be true is not, it helps the journal because controversy sells copies, generates debate and discussion, generates mentions in other papers in other journals (hellooooo impact factor!), etc. The primary concern of a journal is not looking stupid by publishing something that isn't sound and well supported, not suppressing controversial research.
Show me a scientist who bitches and moans publicly about his anti-global-warming research not being published, and I'll show you someone whose science wasn't sound enough to cut the mustard. Every day thousands of papers are submitted to journals and rejected partially or fully, and it's not a conspiracy. It's people doing research that isn't supported enough. There is certainly a dark side, namely, reviewers who don't recuse themselves or aren't qualified to evaluate a particular paper, but that's one reason multiple reviewers are involved, and you can always submit your work to another journal.
Please help metamoderate.
All people are equal.
All opinions are not equal.
Sometimes we are not entitled to an opinion - to be taken seriously. If I walked into a heart surgery theatre (suitably sterile) and gave my opinion about the appropriate treatment, the surgeons there would be entitled to say "Throw the idiot out".
The problem is, most of us humans know we don't understand heart surgery. Many of us humans don't realise how ignorant we are about other subjects too.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Isn't this precisely the risk of overreliance on the peer review system? Unpopular opinions get silenced.
That's a common myth. You see, there are many journals. All want to grow their subscribership, increase their impact factor (the scientific journal measurement of notoriety.) They do that by publishing the most interesting research they can.
Doing research that mirrors what's already been done isn't very popular; grad students and postdocs, for example, have to clear what they're doing with their PIs. That's not likely to happen unless they've got some angle. This isn't apparent to the layman- or even someone who has "PhD" in their title, but even a minor difference in premise can be a big deal.
Identical research also doesn't get published. New, fresh, interesting research is what journals want. So while Willis thinks there's a massive groupthink, there's actually little of the kind. It may LOOK like groupthink, because on the surface, yes, there's the gross layer of widely-accepted-fact. The devil is in the details, and that's where research is taking place.
It's a special kind of arrogance to think that you can just stroll in and understand, much less analyze, a field where people dedicate years, if not decades, to their research.
Please help metamoderate.
If you were a scientist with a relevant education in the field, you could answer all of those questions.
Why did the dentist use a UV light on your teeth? Why did the doctor's hammer have a rubber coating on it when he hit your knee? What are your brake pads made out of? Why?
There are lots of questions. But if you're not going to try to answer them the right way, by finding out on your own, you're just another Troll (aka Glenn Beck).
The way it works (in the US) is that Congress allocates funds for research in general. Agencies like the NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA, etc actually administer the grants. They take applications and decide which are the best ideas that should be funded. The people running these agencies are academics, not politicos. For example, the National Science Board, which oversees the NSF, is listed here. While these groups control which projects get funded, they do not control the results of the research. If a funded project disproved existing theory, it is up to peer reviewed journals to publish or not.
A common criticism of the system is that it encourages a sort of orthodoxy in research. So if the NSF things "dark matter" is a great explanation, then projects which try to find alternative explanations may receive less funding because it is viewed as a waste. This is unfortunate, but there is not enough money to fund all the possible projects so some sort of prioritization must be made. It is much better to have experts do this, even though they have biases.
If the political parties really had that much control of research funding and the results of that research, you would expect that over the last several years you would see lots of peer reviewed research disproving human caused climate change. After all, Republicans were running congress and the White House for a long time.
That is very well said. The bottom line is that if I became King of the World and had to make decisions affecting the environment, I really only have three choices:
1. Become an expert myself. This is totally impractical because it takes too long and I have a huge range of other responsibilities.
2. Listen to lots of random people and make decisions based on which things I hear sound right. The upside is that I will hear an extremely diverse set of opinions and that the best option will likely be submitted to me. The downside is that many of the opinions are baseless claims by crackpots or people with selfish interests.
3. Listen to the opinions of experts whose sole job is to study and test these issues. Baseless ideas will not pass this filter and so I will be presented with a narrower range of views, but the best options should still be present. The major issue here is making sure the experts are really experts and that they have no other axe to grind.
Of these options, it seems like 3 is the most reasonable option and that is what our current peer review process is. It is always reasonable to question the expertise of the experts, but that same questioning should be targetted at random bloggers, too.
I think there is actually a very easy way to solve this problem...show us the code. Give out ALL the raw data, every little scrap, along with the source code for the programs they are using to manipulate it.
I have to go with RMS and his traditional view on data, which is probably the one and only time I'll ever agree on ANYTHING with that guy, but in this case I see no other way. if you want to prove to me that AGW isn't a scam, and considering how much leaches like Goldman Sachs will make off of carbon credits it is hard not to be a little skeptical at this point, then share the code.
I may not be able to read this data myself, but there are a LOT of really smart guys out there that can, so share it. Hiding from FOI requests is NOT the way to get anyone but the most fervent Koolaid drinkers to go along with your beliefs. After all we have had the creationists trying to debunk evolution for quite awhile now, but most folks won't believe them because the data is there for all to see. Considering that the changes required by the AGW bunches will cost the working poor untold mountains of money, can cause another bubble and enrich parasites like GS, and can cause the loss of many more jobs and folks falling deeper into poverty, I think having transparency with regards to the data, both raw and adjusted, is not too much to ask, wouldn't you agree?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You don't have to provide an alternate explanation to falsify a theory, you simply have to show that it doesn't do a good job of explaining what is going on. The "You can't explain it!" crap is precisely what the religious nuts try to pull. They say "Science can't explain everything about this, thus you have to accept our explanation." No, sorry, not how it works. Just because there isn't a scientific explanation at this point doesn't mean you are right.
Well same deal here. You don't have to provide a perfect climate model to falsify an existing one, you only need to show how the existing one is wrong.
Science isn't about being fair, it isn't a case of "Well YOU explain it better than me, or accept I'm right." It is a processes for learning about the natural world, and for separating what works from what doesn't. Showing something doesn't work is an important part of science. Ideally you'd be able to present a theory that doesn't but that's not always the case.
Cold fusion was a good example. Group claimed to do cold fusion, other labs falsified their research, since their experiments were not repeatable. None of those labs provided a theory for working cold fusion, none had to. All they did was show that this particular theory was wrong.
You are missing the point; if everyone's idiotic claims have to be subject to point by point analysis, then intelligence can be overwhelmed by stupidity when it has superior numbers. At a certain point you've got to say "My time as a scientist is costly, and not worth spending on such an obvious cretin"
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Yes, you are very lucky to have scientists to think for you. Thats our job. It takes time, dedication, and specific talent to become an expert in a field of science. Most people lack the talent and/or won't put in the time/dedication.
Society has outsourced its heavy-duty thinking to scientific specialists, and so shouldn't be complaining when those specialists consider each others (peer reviewed) conclusions to be inherently more valuable than the rants of some-twat-on-tinternet.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
On the contrary, if the raw data is available and the method used to massage it, then the tools are readily available. It's interesting to me that when Prof Mann produces a paper where he's fiddled with the data (as shown by Wegman, McIntyre/McIntrick and as verified by Dr North of the NAS in congressional testimony), the paper is not retracted, it's `defended' (mostly by use of blogs). The same is true of Briffa's Yamal chronology and Steigs choice selection of PC's in his Antarctic Warming paper. We aren't talking particle physics here; you don't need a billion dollar accelerator to reproduce this kind of analysis.