Big Science and maverick outsiders can actually greatly benefit from each others' existences, for the mavericks are free to ask questions which might be out-of-bounds in academic circles -- and so, they are much better positioned to start new groundbreaking lines of investigation. We can solve the publish-or-perish problem with this exact approach, but it will require us to care more about long-term innovations than our short-sighted desires to confirm our pre-existing worldviews.
The top-down philosophical approach of specialist science has left us with a sort of vacuum of tools to support the outsider maverick thinkers. To the extent that it is acknowledged that outsiders can contribute in important ways, we will inch closer to creating these tools.
The reproducibility crisis is not confined to any particular domain of science, and it should be obvious that reproducibility is a serious concern when modeling climate. There have in fact been critiques that climate models are sometimes parameterized with values which are selected to produce alarming results, so demanding that the results be reproducible could actually act as a check for such fraud. Your eagerness to "defend" climate science leaves the door wide open for bad actors to flood this domain, and the publish-or-perish problem will predictably drive some percentage of these scientists to do just that. Be very careful what you ask for.
Former Provost John Etchemendy, in a recent speech before the Stanford Board of Trustees, outlined challenges higher education is facing in the coming years. Following is an excerpt from that talk.
"Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we've built around ourselves.
This results in a kind of intellectual blindness that will, in the long run, be more damaging to universities than cuts in federal funding or ill-conceived constraints on immigration. It will be more damaging because we won't even see it: We will write off those with opposing views as evil or ignorant or stupid, rather than as interlocutors worthy of consideration. We succumb to the all-purpose ad hominem because it is easier and more comforting than rational argument. But when we do, we abandon what is great about this institution we serve. It will not be easy to resist this current. As an institution, we are continually pressed by faculty and students to take political stands, and any failure to do so is perceived as a lack of courage. But at universities today, the easiest thing to do is to succumb to that pressure. What requires real courage is to resist it. Yet when those making the demands can only imagine ignorance and stupidity on the other side, any resistance will be similarly impugned.
The university is not a megaphone to amplify this or that political view, and when it does it violates a core mission. Universities must remain open forums for contentious debate, and they cannot do so while officially espousing one side of that debate. But we must do more. We need to encourage real diversity of thought in the professoriate, and that will be even harder to achieve. It is hard for anyone to acknowledge high-quality work when that work is at odds, perhaps opposed, to one's own deeply held beliefs. But we all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise.
I fear that the next few years will be difficult to navigate. We need to resist the external threats to our mission, but in this, we have many friends outside the university willing and able to help. But to stem or dial back our academic parochialism, we are pretty much on our own. The first step is to remind our students and colleagues that those who hold views contrary to one’s own are rarely evil or stupid, and may know or understand things that we do not. It is only when we start with this assumption that rational discourse can begin, and that the winds of freedom can blow."
The pattern is pretty clear: Actual attempts to reproduce research tend to produce shockingly low reproducibility rates. For those who have been paying attention to the situation, this is not actually news. It seems to only be news for those who refuse to track these types of problems.
More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research...
Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology and cancer biology, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence.
When one considers that science owes its success to this concept of reproducibility, it is alarming that anybody would consider reproducibility to be some sort of a partisan issue.
Science is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can't Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed
Henry H. Bauer
Why Has Science Been Successful?
"What explains the enormous successes of science?
... All this knowledge and understanding came from studying phenomena that are regular, where observations can be repeated, and where the basic bits of matter involved are essentially identical and with inherent properties that do not change over time. Astronomy was able to gain understanding that could be expressed mathematically, quantitatively, because heavenly movements repeat themselves with great regularity. Physics and chemistry yielded general laws because atoms and molecules of a particular species (elements or compounds) are all identical within their given species: all atoms of carbon react in the same way, all molecules of water are the same, all electrons are identical, as are all protons and neutrons and other fundamental particles. Such regular behavior, together with being able to group objects into categories within which all the individual objects are identical, is what makes it possible to discover general laws of nature and universal constants. Laws and constants can only exist when phenomena are regular and occur invariably in the same manner...
Popular views about science as a whole were derived largely from the stunning successes of the natural sciences, without explicit recognition that those successes flowed from the study of relatively simple systems of inanimate matter composed of collections of individual bits."
This is truthfully an insanely simple issue: if climate change advocates are suggesting that we need to make fundamental changes to our system of government and economy to save the planet, then the data must be made publicly available.
Re: "Proponents for these radical restrictions purport to raise two sets of concerns: reproducibility and transparency. In reality, these are phony issues that weaponize ‘transparency’ to facilitate political interference in science-based decisionmaking, rather than genuinely address either."
"Abstract: Growing concern that most published results, including those widely agreed upon, may be false are rarely examined against rapidly expanding research production. Replications have only occurred on small scales due to prohibitive expense and limited professional incentive. We introduce a novel, high-throughput replication strategy aligning 51,292 published claims about drug-gene interactions with high-throughput experiments performed through the NIH LINCS L1000 program. We show (1) that unique claims replicate 19% more frequently than at random, while those widely agreed upon replicate 45% more frequently, manifesting collective correction mechanisms in science; but (2) centralized scientific communities perpetuate claims that are less likely to replicate even if widely agreed upon, demonstrating how centralized, overlapping collaborations weaken collective understanding. Decentralized research communities involve more independent teams and use more diverse methodologies, generating the most robust, replicable results. Our findings highlight the importance of science policies that foster decentralized collaboration to promote robust scientific advance."
Introduction:
Concern over reliability (1) and reproducibility (2, 3) in science calls into question the cumulative process of building on prior results published by others. In a publication environment that rewards novel findings over verifications (4, 5), scientists remain uncertain about the published claims they assemble into new research designs and discoveries. In this paper, we demonstrate a claim replication strategy that repurposes high-throughput experiments to evaluate the replication likelihood for tens of thousands of scientific claims curated from a wide range of research articles.
Your system should not be designed to favor particular truths. Your rewards system should be designed to favor rational, coherent, concise discussion that is devoid of bad behaviors (e.g., calling somebody a "nutter").
In science education circles, this debate is known as the positivist/constructivist debate. People who design social networks where science is discussed should never design their system in such a way that it favors establishment science over competing claims, for the simple reason that science is provisional -- and in fact, it is this provisional nature of science which is the source of its power. If you design your social network to penalize people for disagreeing with textbook theory, you have removed the very thing which makes science special, and much like the problems which plague Reddit, you will favor a community which is hyper-focused upon specialist knowledge of existing theory, without much awareness of the long-term trends that define where science is going.
Re: "Exhibit A: your "argument" that the large size of dinosaurs is evidence that gravity is fake"
The argument that has been put forward is that dinosaurs violate Galileo's square-cube law, by analogy with human powerlifters. The divergence is not small: Galileo's square-cube law, parameterized by very generous values adopted from observations of human powerlifters, suggests a maximum weight for land-walking animals of around 21,000 lbs. Galileo's square-cube law works for all current land-walking animals in existence today, yet the largest dinosaur that we know of weighed in at a stunning 150,000+ lbs.
Why does Galileo's square-cube law work for today's animals, but then fails by a 7x margin for dinosaurs?
That's not even a complete description of the problem, for there is also the issue of how the sauropods were able to transport blood to their necks, and also the issue of how the largest flying creatures managed to fly. I'm fully aware that there have been many attempts to explain the paradox. In fact, The Dinosaur Heresies and How Dinosaur Ran - and Other Scientific Insights are apparently two excellent resources which summarize these attempts.
If you prefer to keep the question open -- without the suggestion of any hypotheses -- then that's fair. But, when people suggest that those who communicate the paradox are somehow practicing fake science for the sin of quoting this famous Galileo claim which works for all land-walking animals today, what you are really doing here is to suggest that independent, critical thinking should not be a part of our online social activities.
There are many pain points happening here, but one thing that I have noticed is that if an overhaul were to occur, the new system needs to penalize people who misstate other peoples' claims. Nobody was claiming that "gravity is fake" (follow the link; this was never stated); what was claimed is that -- somehow -- the gravitational constant may change.
A social network's rewards system must be able to accommodate the most challenging situations. Questioning Relativity is a test for the social network. Can a rational conversation occur? The dinosaur weight paradox is exactly the kind of conversation which the Slashdot rewards system should be redesigned to accommodate: These conversations bring out all sorts of misconceptions, name-calling and other bad behaviors, and the social network's infrastructure is failing to address these anti-patterns.
Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of [HackerNews] hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat.
There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.
Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid.
The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.
Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. [5] So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these.
Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.
Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower. [6]
And this...
It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.
It all sounds remarkably similar for me to what's happening here, honestly. Hopefully the Slashdot moderators are listening and thinking about ways to value contributors who introduce comments which inspire critical, independent thinking. My own personal experience has been that Slashdot's karma system is not at all rewarding people who introduce novel arguments. Arguments are generally rated according to whether or not they diverge from that which we've all been taught, and there is no emphasis upon the inherent value of critique which inspires thought -- and over time, change.
"That 'paper' contains no reference to Corbyn's wins by gambling, merely a claim. There are no other mentions of this gambling anywhere. Considering the quality of the rest of the paper, I will conclude it was made up or overheard in a pub."
What I observe is that you seem to have some aversion to contacting the author of this paper in order to determine whether or not there is a valid source for these claims -- yet, no problems at all with going online to label the paper's author as a fraud. I have to imagine that he'd be interested to at least know that you're lodging these claims against him, and I feel obligated to point him to your comments, so that he can have a chance to answer your question -- and if necessary, defend himself.
Re: "Piers Corbyn does not make the kind of predictions you claim. You're putting forth something he has not done as factual."
Corbyn is an astrophysicist who makes his money by making long-range forecasts about extreme weather events -- predictions which are then literally purchased by the people who need to know this information in the regions in which he currently covers. He literally sells predictions for a living, and people continue to buy them for the very reason that they are accurate. From his website:
WeatherAction will develop and extend Piers Corbyn's revolutionary world-leading Solar based method* of Long Range forecasting to include all countries of the world months and years ahead particularly for extreme and dangerous events. The background physics principles behind the method are available in presentations** and will be published in full in due course.
*Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique
**see eg PiersCorbyn Uni Exeter Go Green Week 25 Feb 2016 http://bit.ly/1LLdfuf
The quote which contains the claims which you suggest have been made up come from a paper which appeared in Proc. Eighth Intl. Conf. on Risk and Gambling, London, July 1990, and was apparently republished later in a journal named Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy. The author, Robin Dale Hanson, is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He received his degree from Caltech.
Which part of this are you claiming has been made up?
Re: "his biggest piece of evidence being that some sand is red."
You've managed to leave out all of the convincing parts. This is how you should have explained the problem:
Sand's color comes from iron, but iron is not involved in the process of creating or transporting the sand. When sand is colored, simple microscopy reveals that the color comes from a thin varnish of iron-oxide which is glued onto the quartz with clay. That little detail poses a very serious problem for the existing attempts to explain where these deserts come from. It would seem to disrupt most of these existing theories, because they generally rely upon transport over big distances -- which would necessarily remove this thin iron-oxide varnish.
Geologists tell us that the vast 100,000 cubic km navajo sandstone bed started out as sand that was transported across the entire United States mainland from the Appalachians by a massive river (ha!). Yet, somehow it managed to end up as 90% pure quartz, and evidence for this hypothetical river has never emerged. The algebra suggests that the Appalachians must have reached 28 km (17 mi) in height to create this amount of sand.
The Sahara and Arabian deserts both lack a confirmed origin. The Sahara sand is thought to be millions of years old -- yet, excavated bones are from water-adapted creatures and human settlements. People just a few thousand years ago thrived in these regions, and they were wet. Sand theorists like to propose mass migrations for sand, but it's not difficult to discount their claims. It really doesn't matter whether or not a person agrees with the hypothesis put forward in Garry Gilligan's Extraterrestrial Sands. I definitely don't agree with everything he said in that book. But, he seems to be one of the few people who are systematically reviewing the mainstream sand theories, and he has proposed an alternative atmospheric plasma chemistry process for how sand condenses into granules from meteorite vapor.
Nobody should be pretending that they know what should be happening in these regions at this point. It's too early even today for all of that posturing; it was even more so back in the 80's.
Re: "maybe tell us why the OBVIOUS cause of AGW that has a mountain of evidence, theory, experimentation and is based on the same science that makes the thing you use everyday work down to the quantum level, is wrong."
I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here, but prediction markets are an incredibly effective way to test theories.
Re: "An easy test for bullshit is to ask if the potential bullshitter requires you to reject everything you can learn and observe in favor of their extraordinary and unproveable alternative."
The leading quantum theorists of the day said the same thing when Charles Townes suggested that he had created a maser (the precursor to the laser). When radio waves were observed coming from space by radio engineers, the astronomers of the day thought it was either a mistake or a hoax. When Robert Goddard first suggested that a rocket could be sent to crash into the Moon, he was widely ridiculed (even by some physics professors) for not understanding that the rocket would have nothing to push against in space (a lot of people did not understand F=ma); in fact, this ridicule played a part in Germany and Russia becoming fluent in rocketry at the same time as the U.S. The Germans landed 3,000 V2 rockets in Europe -- a rocket built with each of Goddard's key innovations. The V2 was the first true "American" rocket... built by Germans... aimed at our allies... because the American public decided to ridicule Goddard.
The pattern of the environmental movement somehow continues to go unnoticed by the public: Environmentalists start paying attention to X, notice that their expectations for what X is like were wrong, then suggest that X is in danger from humans. But, in each case, the decision to announce a catastrophe can be shown to either be technically questionable, or simply premature.
"... a compilation of monthly averages in a suggestive sequence of time-lapse stills, also from Cambridge’s Centre for Atmospheric Science, reveals the expansion of the violet blotch almost appear from nowhere in about 1983, when it was first detected..."
The discovery of the Antarctic 'ozone hole' by British Antarctic Survey scientists Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin (first reported in a paper in Nature in May 1985) came as a shock to the scientific community, because the observed decline in polar ozone was far larger than anyone had anticipated."
In terms of process, it is historically important to observe that the ozone hole was declared an emergency before a full solar cycle was observed with satellite.
"I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the 'science' claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.
Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical. These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.
By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening."
Similar arguments can be made about climate change arguments, because the Sun itself is still not well understood, and in particular, we do not even know what happens to the solar plasma which enters into the Earth's ionosphere. In fact, Piers Corbyn's successes at predicting long-range extreme weather events is highly suggestive that environmentalists have failed to understand certain crucial solar, plasma and magnetic parameters which may be externally altering climate parameters in ways that are difficult to untangle:
Could gambling save science? Encouraging an honest consensus
Robin Hanson
"Consider the example of Piers Corbyn, a London astrophysicist who has been unable to get academic meteorologists interested in his unusual theory of long-term
"It was particularly Galileo who realised that mathematics provided the most effective terms in which to express physical observations, and it was he who contributed most to the introduction of those terms into science. The book of nature, he wrote, 'is written in the mathematical language'. But there are two things that should be said about this oft-quoted aphorism. The first is that 'nature', or 'the universe', as Galileo conceived it was a much more restricted concept than that which we hold and that with which modern science is concerned. It comprised only what we study in mechanics; all other phenomena — sights, sounds, smells, etc. — belonged in his view not to the external world but to the observing subject, and it was not at all his idea that mathematics played the all-comprehensive role in science that it is nowadays often assumed to do. Secondly, a language is a medium for expressing ideas, and it is just as capable of expressing false ideas as true ones. The fact, therefore, that something can be expressed with rigorous mathematical exactitude tells you nothing at all about its truth, i.e. about its relation to nature, or to what we can experience.
The most dangerous intellectual error of modern science... lies in the fact that this has been overlooked. Mathematics is an immensely more powerful tool than the Aristotelian syllogism, and its use as a language in which to express the facts of experience has been so successful that the idea has crept unperceived into the minds of physicists that whatever it says must be true. This is openly expressed in the statement already quoted, that everything that is not mathematically forbidden is necessarily observable. Accordingly the habit has developed of assuming that a physical theory is necessarily sound if its mathematics is impeccable: the question whether there is anything in nature corresponding to that impeccable mathematics is not regarded as a question; it is taken for granted.
The fact is, however, that mathematical truths are far more general than physical truths: that is to say, the symbols that compose a mathematical expression may, with equal mathematical correctness, correspond both to that which is observable and that which is purely imaginary or even unimaginable. If, therefore, we start with a mathematical expression, and infer that there must be something in nature corresponding to it, we do in principle just what the pre-scientific philosophers did when they assumed that nature must obey their axioms, but its immensely greater power for both good and evil makes the consequences of its misapplication immensely more serious.
There are so many instances, even in the most elementary uses of mathematics, in which its indications are obviously false, that it may seem strange that this fact is almost automatically overlooked in the more advanced uses of the tool. But there is a universal tendency, not only in science but in everyday life as well, to pay exaggerated attention to predictions that are realised and to ignore those that are not...
Suppose we want to find the number of men required for a certain job under certain conditions. Every schoolboy knows such problems, and he knows that he must begin by saying: 'Let x = the number of men required.' But that substitution introduces a whole range of possibilities that the nature of the original problem excludes. The mathematical symbol, x, can be positive, negative, integral, fractional, irrational, imagina
The Electric Universe apparently sins for trying to address the unresolved problems of mainstream science. If your preferred set of ideas is so great, then why are theorists struggling to apply these models to explain so many basic observations? The mainstream offers us ever more complex, less empirical, more hypothetical ideas as answers, while positioning the application of laboratory observations of the only other candidate force as somehow out-of-bounds. This is the definition of an anti-science approach. You've been convinced that the answers are not to be found in laboratory study, and you point to ideas rooted in a creation event -- as if you are talking about science just because equations were used. Get a grip, and take a look at the big picture of what you are pitching.
Re: "... and requires us to throw away the last 100 years of progress..."
This is really the crux of the debate: You view cosmology, the planetary sciences and astrophysics as functioning domains of science devoid of any persistent mysteries even as the scientists themselves admit the problems...
The discovery of thousands of star systems wildly different from our own has demolished ideas about how planets form. Astronomers are searching for a whole new theory.
The stubborn elusiveness of dark matter has left many scientists both surprised and confused. We had what seemed like very good reasons to expect particles of dark matter to be discovered by now. And yet the hunt continues, and the mystery deepens.
In many ways, we have only more open questions now than we did a decade or two ago. And at times, it can seem that the more precisely we measure our universe, the less we understand it. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, theoretical particle physicists were often very successful at predicting the kinds of particles that would be discovered as accelerators became increasingly powerful. It was a truly impressive run.
But our prescience seems to have come to an end -- the long-predicted particles associated with our favorite and most well-motivated theories have stubbornly refused to appear. Perhaps the discoveries of such particles are right around the corner, and our confidence will soon be restored. But right now, there seems to be little support for such optimism.
In response, droves of physicists are going back to their chalkboards, revisiting and revising their assumptions. With bruised egos and a bit more humility, we are desperately attempting to find a new way to make sense of our world."
Based on theoretical studies of how magnetism is generated in stars, it’s thought that the fully convective interiors of ultracool dwarfs can’t support large-scale magnetic field formation. This should prevent these stars from exhibiting activity cycles like the Sun. But recent radio observations of dwarf stars have led scientist Matthew Route (ITaP Research Computing, Purdue University) to question these models...
Inspired by this possibility, Route conducted an investigation of the long-term magnetic behavior of all known radio-flaring ultracool dwarfs, a list of 14 stars. Using polarized radio emission measurements, he found that many of his targets exhibited similar polarity flips, which he argues is evidence that these dwarfs are undergoing magnetic field reversals on roughly decade-long timescales, analogous to those reversals that occur in the Sun.
If this is indeed true, then we need to examine our models of how magnetic fields are generated in stars...
Planetary scientists have admitted that they have no idea how to construct the vast majority of the exoplanetary systems which have been observed using existing theory. Cosmologists have admitted that they cannot -- using your cherished approach -- explain basic observations for how galaxies rotate.
Solar scientists cannot even explain how it is that the solar wind fails to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth's orbit (in the lab, we accelerate such particles w/ electric fiel
You're completely whitewashing the history of gravitational lensing. I've reviewed the actual history of lensing claims in former Slashdot posts. For example, here is a quote by one of the astronomers who discovered the first lens:
"All that can be said in rebuttal is that it would be even more remarkable if the 4 images, all with the same redshift, existed for some other reason, in a configuration which can be so well modelled by the lensing hypothesis"
Notice the obvious implication: No alternative inferences were considered.
You might consider your process for evaluating science, and contrast it with mine. What I am doing is seeking out the best critique I can find. In this case, that involves reading books by Halton Arp, the world's most vocal and knowledgeable critic of the lensing hypothesis. He presents a critical perspective of the origin of this idea in his many books.
Now look at what you're doing: You've gone online to defend the gravitational lensing hypothesis without ever seeking out strong critiques. You learn about these critiques as you are "debunking" those who have taken the time to understand both sides of the debate.
The EU's math is extensive, and has also been posted into Slashdot comments. At this point, you're now creating a serious problem for your own community, because you are creating an unfounded bias against electricity in space in the tech community. I mean, it's really hard to put into words just how wrong these behaviors are. You are posting ideas which are literally centuries old and conceived at a time when space was assumed to be an empty vacuum, and shouting down ideas which were conceived as a reaction to unexpected Space Age discoveries that actually there are charged particles and enough ionization wherever we look that most of what we are actually seeing is matter in the plasma state (99%+). Your approach is also directing your community towards a dead-end: the dark matter problem. The EU offers a simple physical solution to this problem which you repeatedly ignore at your own peril.
The Slashdot community needs to distance itself from people who get emotional each time that the idea of electricity in space is brought up. The crux of the issue has already basically been settled, and the astrophysical community has already acknowledged that electricity in space happens. The debate at this point now centers around whether or not there are consequences. This is not something that a person can judge without putting any effort at all into learning about the debate. The only way to judge the debate is to track it over many years. It foremost takes listening and reading, then some thinking, and perhaps interactions with the theorists involved with the claims. You've done none of these things which would qualify you to have an opinion on the issue. You've decided that you can judge the debate without actually immersing yourself into both sides, and in terms of process, it's a horrible approach which will have a very predictable outcome for yourself.
It is getting ahead of the observations to label the observation as gravitational. If we were looking down the barrel of a plasma filament, Weâ(TM)d probably see something similar.
Also, it would seem to better explain what we actually observed with the extinction event being discussed than the hypothesis put forward by the submitted article: All of the creatures far beyond a particular weight of around 20,000 lbs completely disappeared, and it would seem that of the creatures that did survive, they became considerably smaller. That's more-or-less precisely what one would expect if gravity was to suddenly change. The cutoff would seem to almost perfectly correspond to the square-cube ratio of a human powerlifter, and there would seem to not be any explanation for how former dinosaurs could (1) weigh so much; (2) fly at such large weights; and (3) have such long necks.
It's a fascinating argument. I would love it if somebody would find a hole in this logic. I completely realize that it's not the type of evidence that people are generally looking for when it comes to evaluating theories for gravity or cosmology, but it honestly seems air-tight to me. We seem to have a completely authentic paradox here.
Re: "You try to turn every slightly-related story into your own crazy EU blog, and it's really fucking annoying."
The real problem is that people have decided that they are dead-set against the EU without actually learning what it is and why other people do believe it. Most of what people think they know about the topic here comes from error-filled, unreviewed critiques by debunkers.
Slashdot Mirror
Big Science and maverick outsiders can actually greatly benefit from each others' existences, for the mavericks are free to ask questions which might be out-of-bounds in academic circles -- and so, they are much better positioned to start new groundbreaking lines of investigation. We can solve the publish-or-perish problem with this exact approach, but it will require us to care more about long-term innovations than our short-sighted desires to confirm our pre-existing worldviews.
The top-down philosophical approach of specialist science has left us with a sort of vacuum of tools to support the outsider maverick thinkers. To the extent that it is acknowledged that outsiders can contribute in important ways, we will inch closer to creating these tools.
The reproducibility crisis is not confined to any particular domain of science, and it should be obvious that reproducibility is a serious concern when modeling climate. There have in fact been critiques that climate models are sometimes parameterized with values which are selected to produce alarming results, so demanding that the results be reproducible could actually act as a check for such fraud. Your eagerness to "defend" climate science leaves the door wide open for bad actors to flood this domain, and the publish-or-perish problem will predictably drive some percentage of these scientists to do just that. Be very careful what you ask for.
The threat from within
February 21, 2017
Former Provost John Etchemendy, in a recent speech before the Stanford Board of Trustees, outlined challenges higher education is facing in the coming years. Following is an excerpt from that talk.
The pattern is pretty clear: Actual attempts to reproduce research tend to produce shockingly low reproducibility rates. For those who have been paying attention to the situation, this is not actually news. It seems to only be news for those who refuse to track these types of problems.
Nature article from May 2016
When one considers that science owes its success to this concept of reproducibility, it is alarming that anybody would consider reproducibility to be some sort of a partisan issue.
Science is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can't Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed
Henry H. Bauer
This is truthfully an insanely simple issue: if climate change advocates are suggesting that we need to make fundamental changes to our system of government and economy to save the planet, then the data must be made publicly available.
Re: "Proponents for these radical restrictions purport to raise two sets of concerns: reproducibility and transparency. In reality, these are phony issues that weaponize ‘transparency’ to facilitate political interference in science-based decisionmaking, rather than genuinely address either."
Centralized "big science" communities more likely generate non-replicable results
Message to moderators:
Your system should not be designed to favor particular truths. Your rewards system should be designed to favor rational, coherent, concise discussion that is devoid of bad behaviors (e.g., calling somebody a "nutter").
In science education circles, this debate is known as the positivist/constructivist debate. People who design social networks where science is discussed should never design their system in such a way that it favors establishment science over competing claims, for the simple reason that science is provisional -- and in fact, it is this provisional nature of science which is the source of its power. If you design your social network to penalize people for disagreeing with textbook theory, you have removed the very thing which makes science special, and much like the problems which plague Reddit, you will favor a community which is hyper-focused upon specialist knowledge of existing theory, without much awareness of the long-term trends that define where science is going.
Re: "Exhibit A: your "argument" that the large size of dinosaurs is evidence that gravity is fake"
The argument that has been put forward is that dinosaurs violate Galileo's square-cube law, by analogy with human powerlifters. The divergence is not small: Galileo's square-cube law, parameterized by very generous values adopted from observations of human powerlifters, suggests a maximum weight for land-walking animals of around 21,000 lbs. Galileo's square-cube law works for all current land-walking animals in existence today, yet the largest dinosaur that we know of weighed in at a stunning 150,000+ lbs.
Why does Galileo's square-cube law work for today's animals, but then fails by a 7x margin for dinosaurs?
That's not even a complete description of the problem, for there is also the issue of how the sauropods were able to transport blood to their necks, and also the issue of how the largest flying creatures managed to fly. I'm fully aware that there have been many attempts to explain the paradox. In fact, The Dinosaur Heresies and How Dinosaur Ran - and Other Scientific Insights are apparently two excellent resources which summarize these attempts.
If you prefer to keep the question open -- without the suggestion of any hypotheses -- then that's fair. But, when people suggest that those who communicate the paradox are somehow practicing fake science for the sin of quoting this famous Galileo claim which works for all land-walking animals today, what you are really doing here is to suggest that independent, critical thinking should not be a part of our online social activities.
There are many pain points happening here, but one thing that I have noticed is that if an overhaul were to occur, the new system needs to penalize people who misstate other peoples' claims. Nobody was claiming that "gravity is fake" (follow the link; this was never stated); what was claimed is that -- somehow -- the gravitational constant may change.
A social network's rewards system must be able to accommodate the most challenging situations. Questioning Relativity is a test for the social network. Can a rational conversation occur? The dinosaur weight paradox is exactly the kind of conversation which the Slashdot rewards system should be redesigned to accommodate: These conversations bring out all sorts of misconceptions, name-calling and other bad behaviors, and the social network's infrastructure is failing to address these anti-patterns.
I submit that your own comment is Exhibit B.
The situation with Reddit is in some regards similar to what happens on Slashdot.
And this ...
It all sounds remarkably similar for me to what's happening here, honestly. Hopefully the Slashdot moderators are listening and thinking about ways to value contributors who introduce comments which inspire critical, independent thinking. My own personal experience has been that Slashdot's karma system is not at all rewarding people who introduce novel arguments. Arguments are generally rated according to whether or not they diverge from that which we've all been taught, and there is no emphasis upon the inherent value of critique which inspires thought -- and over time, change.
You said ...
What I observe is that you seem to have some aversion to contacting the author of this paper in order to determine whether or not there is a valid source for these claims -- yet, no problems at all with going online to label the paper's author as a fraud. I have to imagine that he'd be interested to at least know that you're lodging these claims against him, and I feel obligated to point him to your comments, so that he can have a chance to answer your question -- and if necessary, defend himself.
Re: "Considering the quality of the rest of the paper, I will conclude it was made up or overheard in a pub."
Did it occur to you to ask the paper's author for more information, before you went online to assert that he's a fraud?
Re: "Piers Corbyn does not make the kind of predictions you claim. You're putting forth something he has not done as factual."
Corbyn is an astrophysicist who makes his money by making long-range forecasts about extreme weather events -- predictions which are then literally purchased by the people who need to know this information in the regions in which he currently covers. He literally sells predictions for a living, and people continue to buy them for the very reason that they are accurate. From his website:
The quote which contains the claims which you suggest have been made up come from a paper which appeared in Proc. Eighth Intl. Conf. on Risk and Gambling, London, July 1990, and was apparently republished later in a journal named Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy. The author, Robin Dale Hanson, is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He received his degree from Caltech.
Which part of this are you claiming has been made up?
Re: "his biggest piece of evidence being that some sand is red."
You've managed to leave out all of the convincing parts. This is how you should have explained the problem:
Sand's color comes from iron, but iron is not involved in the process of creating or transporting the sand. When sand is colored, simple microscopy reveals that the color comes from a thin varnish of iron-oxide which is glued onto the quartz with clay. That little detail poses a very serious problem for the existing attempts to explain where these deserts come from. It would seem to disrupt most of these existing theories, because they generally rely upon transport over big distances -- which would necessarily remove this thin iron-oxide varnish.
Geologists tell us that the vast 100,000 cubic km navajo sandstone bed started out as sand that was transported across the entire United States mainland from the Appalachians by a massive river (ha!). Yet, somehow it managed to end up as 90% pure quartz, and evidence for this hypothetical river has never emerged. The algebra suggests that the Appalachians must have reached 28 km (17 mi) in height to create this amount of sand.
The Sahara and Arabian deserts both lack a confirmed origin. The Sahara sand is thought to be millions of years old -- yet, excavated bones are from water-adapted creatures and human settlements. People just a few thousand years ago thrived in these regions, and they were wet. Sand theorists like to propose mass migrations for sand, but it's not difficult to discount their claims. It really doesn't matter whether or not a person agrees with the hypothesis put forward in Garry Gilligan's Extraterrestrial Sands. I definitely don't agree with everything he said in that book. But, he seems to be one of the few people who are systematically reviewing the mainstream sand theories, and he has proposed an alternative atmospheric plasma chemistry process for how sand condenses into granules from meteorite vapor.
These comments demonstrate an overt disregard for the value of predictions in science.
Re: "Ozone measurements go back to balloon studies in the 1930s."
It sounds like you're fine with ringing the alarm bell even without the satellite imagery. That's where you and I differ, sir.
Re: "Are you truly suggesting that we shouldn't have banned CFCs because of... solar cycles?"
Please observe this image detailing the structure of the electrical currents which travel in and out of the Earth's poles. There is a lot of complexity to the Earth's magnetosphere, and the poles are where all of this electrical plasma activity interacts with the Earth.
Nobody should be pretending that they know what should be happening in these regions at this point. It's too early even today for all of that posturing; it was even more so back in the 80's.
Re: "maybe tell us why the OBVIOUS cause of AGW that has a mountain of evidence, theory, experimentation and is based on the same science that makes the thing you use everyday work down to the quantum level, is wrong."
I'm not really sure what you are trying to say here, but prediction markets are an incredibly effective way to test theories.
Re: "An easy test for bullshit is to ask if the potential bullshitter requires you to reject everything you can learn and observe in favor of their extraordinary and unproveable alternative."
The leading quantum theorists of the day said the same thing when Charles Townes suggested that he had created a maser (the precursor to the laser). When radio waves were observed coming from space by radio engineers, the astronomers of the day thought it was either a mistake or a hoax. When Robert Goddard first suggested that a rocket could be sent to crash into the Moon, he was widely ridiculed (even by some physics professors) for not understanding that the rocket would have nothing to push against in space (a lot of people did not understand F=ma); in fact, this ridicule played a part in Germany and Russia becoming fluent in rocketry at the same time as the U.S. The Germans landed 3,000 V2 rockets in Europe -- a rocket built with each of Goddard's key innovations. The V2 was the first true "American" rocket ... built by Germans ... aimed at our allies ... because the American public decided to ridicule Goddard.
You might take the time to think carefully about this situation. Learn the story. Once you know these details, it completely alters the lesson of the Space Race.
The pattern of the environmental movement somehow continues to go unnoticed by the public: Environmentalists start paying attention to X, notice that their expectations for what X is like were wrong, then suggest that X is in danger from humans. But, in each case, the decision to announce a catastrophe can be shown to either be technically questionable, or simply premature.
Here's an example:
1979: First satellite measurements of ozone
1983: Ozone hole first detected
1985: Ozone hole declared a threat to the world
In terms of process, it is historically important to observe that the ozone hole was declared an emergency before a full solar cycle was observed with satellite.
Similar critiques have been made about these coral claims:
Similar arguments can be made about climate change arguments, because the Sun itself is still not well understood, and in particular, we do not even know what happens to the solar plasma which enters into the Earth's ionosphere. In fact, Piers Corbyn's successes at predicting long-range extreme weather events is highly suggestive that environmentalists have failed to understand certain crucial solar, plasma and magnetic parameters which may be externally altering climate parameters in ways that are difficult to untangle:
So, what you're saying -- repeatedly -- is that since the math of Relativity works, then there can be no other explanation. I mean, just stunning.
The irony is that Herbert Dingle, history's most outspoken critic of Relativity, eloquently argued against just this claim back in 1972 in his famous Science at the Crossroads. The following quote comes from pages 15 - 18:
The Electric Universe apparently sins for trying to address the unresolved problems of mainstream science. If your preferred set of ideas is so great, then why are theorists struggling to apply these models to explain so many basic observations? The mainstream offers us ever more complex, less empirical, more hypothetical ideas as answers, while positioning the application of laboratory observations of the only other candidate force as somehow out-of-bounds. This is the definition of an anti-science approach. You've been convinced that the answers are not to be found in laboratory study, and you point to ideas rooted in a creation event -- as if you are talking about science just because equations were used. Get a grip, and take a look at the big picture of what you are pitching.
Re: "... and requires us to throw away the last 100 years of progress ..."
This is really the crux of the debate: You view cosmology, the planetary sciences and astrophysics as functioning domains of science devoid of any persistent mysteries even as the scientists themselves admit the problems ...
Planetary scientists have admitted that they have no idea how to construct the vast majority of the exoplanetary systems which have been observed using existing theory. Cosmologists have admitted that they cannot -- using your cherished approach -- explain basic observations for how galaxies rotate.
Solar scientists cannot even explain how it is that the solar wind fails to appreciably decelerate even as it passes the Earth's orbit (in the lab, we accelerate such particles w/ electric fiel
You're completely whitewashing the history of gravitational lensing. I've reviewed the actual history of lensing claims in former Slashdot posts. For example, here is a quote by one of the astronomers who discovered the first lens:
Notice the obvious implication: No alternative inferences were considered.
You might consider your process for evaluating science, and contrast it with mine. What I am doing is seeking out the best critique I can find. In this case, that involves reading books by Halton Arp, the world's most vocal and knowledgeable critic of the lensing hypothesis. He presents a critical perspective of the origin of this idea in his many books.
Now look at what you're doing: You've gone online to defend the gravitational lensing hypothesis without ever seeking out strong critiques. You learn about these critiques as you are "debunking" those who have taken the time to understand both sides of the debate.
The EU's math is extensive, and has also been posted into Slashdot comments. At this point, you're now creating a serious problem for your own community, because you are creating an unfounded bias against electricity in space in the tech community. I mean, it's really hard to put into words just how wrong these behaviors are. You are posting ideas which are literally centuries old and conceived at a time when space was assumed to be an empty vacuum, and shouting down ideas which were conceived as a reaction to unexpected Space Age discoveries that actually there are charged particles and enough ionization wherever we look that most of what we are actually seeing is matter in the plasma state (99%+). Your approach is also directing your community towards a dead-end: the dark matter problem. The EU offers a simple physical solution to this problem which you repeatedly ignore at your own peril.
The Slashdot community needs to distance itself from people who get emotional each time that the idea of electricity in space is brought up. The crux of the issue has already basically been settled, and the astrophysical community has already acknowledged that electricity in space happens. The debate at this point now centers around whether or not there are consequences. This is not something that a person can judge without putting any effort at all into learning about the debate. The only way to judge the debate is to track it over many years. It foremost takes listening and reading, then some thinking, and perhaps interactions with the theorists involved with the claims. You've done none of these things which would qualify you to have an opinion on the issue. You've decided that you can judge the debate without actually immersing yourself into both sides, and in terms of process, it's a horrible approach which will have a very predictable outcome for yourself.
It is getting ahead of the observations to label the observation as gravitational. If we were looking down the barrel of a plasma filament, Weâ(TM)d probably see something similar.
Also, it would seem to better explain what we actually observed with the extinction event being discussed than the hypothesis put forward by the submitted article: All of the creatures far beyond a particular weight of around 20,000 lbs completely disappeared, and it would seem that of the creatures that did survive, they became considerably smaller. That's more-or-less precisely what one would expect if gravity was to suddenly change. The cutoff would seem to almost perfectly correspond to the square-cube ratio of a human powerlifter, and there would seem to not be any explanation for how former dinosaurs could (1) weigh so much; (2) fly at such large weights; and (3) have such long necks.
It's a fascinating argument. I would love it if somebody would find a hole in this logic. I completely realize that it's not the type of evidence that people are generally looking for when it comes to evaluating theories for gravity or cosmology, but it honestly seems air-tight to me. We seem to have a completely authentic paradox here.
Re: "You try to turn every slightly-related story into your own crazy EU blog, and it's really fucking annoying."
The real problem is that people have decided that they are dead-set against the EU without actually learning what it is and why other people do believe it. Most of what people think they know about the topic here comes from error-filled, unreviewed critiques by debunkers.