58,589 people submitted their say to this thing... this ars*hole politician is proclaiming them as a "special interest group" because it doesn't fit with HIS ideas.
Not really he's proclaiming EB Games, and activist groups, including conservative Christian anti-gaming groups to be "special interest groups" and bemoaning the fact that so many individual submissions merely aped the arguments put forward by those groups.
Remember this isn't a popularity contest or a referendum. It's a process by which the government aims to garner as wide a range of views as possible from disparate sources. If one submissions says nothing different from another it's just a waste of everyone's time, and taxpayer money.
The reason to encourage people to submit prepared submissions en masse is two-fold. Firstly to drown out alternative views, which is in the interest both of the games industry and the anti-games lobby. And secondly, since theoretically each submission must be read in its entirety, to delay any decision by clogging up the system. On the face of it this would appear to be in the interests of the conservative Christian opponents only. That it is the pro-gamers who have done this seems, at least on the face of it, to be a monumental act of stupidity.
As a practical matter, if it is obvious that the vast bulk of submissions are mere dupes, I would think the bureaucrats could treat them as read. As I wrote below, if 86% of them are dupes, then really 86% if the reading has already been done. We really shouldn't let the... ahem... gaming of the consultation system by either side lead to inaction.
I suspect that the truth is as AC wrote below, that they want an excuse to shelve it until after the election. That the fully intend to introduce a R18+ classification, but they are worried about pissing off the Christian vote Rudd has been so careful to cultivate.
Yes it seems very difficult to understand what the hold up here is.
If the claim is true that 86% of submissions "came from retailer EB Games and the pro-R18+ organisation Grow Up Australia" as TFA states, by which I assume that many people submitted the industry's 'standard' submissions, then that should really fast-track the process. Why not simply treat all those submissions as just the two they really are? That's 86% of the reading done right away.
No matter how often the same submission has been made, either the arguments it contains stand up or they don't. This claim of swamping makes no sense at all.
If on the other hand TFA is just BS, and there are somewhere approaching 60k individual submissions, then yes, that could take a while to get through.
A right is something which you are in the right for doing - you can do it with impunity.
No a "right" is a legal concession from the state which an individual can positively enforce in a court of law. A right can be negative, --a concession that the state will not do something to you, eg. legislate against your freedom of expression-- or positive, a concession that the state will do something for you, eg provide you or your children with a adequate minimum level of education.
Rights are neither God given, self-evident, universal nor fixed (though they may be entrenched). If you can't enforce it, it's not a right.
Works well in Australia.... The lower house is more about local issues, whereas the senate is about larger issues that dont necessarily have enough local interest to get a seat in the lower house but enough so that they can have a seat in the upper house.
With all due respect to my compatriot that is a very strange characterisation of the Australian political system. The lower house was always intended to be about inter- and intra-national issues (we are a federation of states), whereas the upper house was intended to represent the interests of the states as a house of review. This is why upper house members are elected (proportionally) on a per state basis. The lower house members being elected on a seat-by-seat representative basis.
That was, historically, the theory, however the fact of party politics means that the Senate (upper house) reflects the interests of the party rather than the state (except perhaps for Queensland where the majority conservative party is the minority partner in federal conservative govts). In effect the lower house is the house of government dominated by the major parties, while the upper functions primarily as a house of review. "Local issues" are handled by state and local government.
It is true, it does work well, if not as designed. Because of the representative nature of the lower house, the two major parties are favoured (even in the face of preferential voting), giving government a measure stability lacking from systems which have proportional representation (PR) in both houses. Whereas the semi-PR nature (ie PR on state-by-state basis), better reflects the diversity of the electorate, giving minor parties a review role. IMO it could be improved by making the upper house PR on a national basis, but the obstacles to achieving that are probably insurmountable.
As to your wordstar files, if they're in a binary format, it's understandable.. for MS docx, or odf etc, it's a zip file with xml...
Now I might be wrong, it's been several decades since I had to work with WordStar files, but weren't they just basically text marked up with control chars? Probably even less of a challenge to write a tool to read them than it would be to xslt docx into a preferred format.
Is a glass jar an accurate model for our atmosphere?
Spoken like a true scientists. Bravo!
So the situation we have is we have gases (incl. CO2) with known physical properties (ie. heat forcing potential). We can show this in an isolated situation (glass jars).
So we expect, as a null hypothesis, that increasing concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere ought to behave similarly.
BUT, as you so correctly point out, this assumes the atmosphere behave like a glass jar! And after all the atmosphere is far more complex, it may include various negative (or positive) feedback loops &c. &c
That's great scientific instinct, so I'm sure the next step will come as no surprise to you... What we need to do is test whether our expectation that these gases will exhibit similar behaviour in the atmosphere is true or not.
What is needed clearly, is an experiment, where the concentration of gases with forcing potential in the atmosphere are radically raised. Then we need to compare the increase in concentration to changes in the temperature trend. If, say over a century of two, raising the concentration of those gases the average global temperature stays the same, or lowers, this would strongly suggest (other factors like M-cycles taken into account, oceanic absorption &c.), that our null hypothesis was wrong.
You'll be happy to know, that just such an experiment exists. Unfortunately it involves "destructive sampling."
As I write my post was modded up +5 Insightful. Damn you! I was ready to respond the the Troll mod by accusing the moderators on having joined the conspiracy too!
Way to undermine someone's argument guys!!!
Aha!... Right!!... I GET IT!!!!
You deliberately modded me up so that I couldn't complain that my exposing the conspiracy was being censored! That's it isn't it? You guys are fiendishly clever.
In other words the mods ARE in on it, along with Taco, and the whole of the liberal-leaning Slashdot.
This thing just keeps getting bigger and BIGGER! When will it ever end?
1) Do you believe science works through consensus?
Science relies on authority. Most especially when relying on the work from another field of science, in which a practising scientists cannot expect to have sufficient expertise, that scientist must rely on authority.
This is perhaps most obvious in the case of instrumentation. Now there was a time when the scientist who used an instrument probably made it as well and was an expert in the science underlying that instrument. However that has long since ceased to be the case. When we walk into the lab and switch on the GLC we don't spend half the day debating the basic (and not so basic) physics encapsulated in that device, we simply use it and bring our expertise in pharmacology (for example) into the mix. Here the acceptance of authority is tacit. Published methodologies specific the equipment and any disputes as the reliability thereof are left to experts in another field.
As a practical example of this, taken not from science, but computing. If you are old enough, you may, in your computing career have relied (on tacit authority) on a separate floating point processor to do your work. It then turned out there was a very subtle bug in the processor as revealed by someone who knew rather more about the technology than you. Now as it happened the bug was so subtle that it was very unlikely materially to have affected your results, but the point is, you can't be faulted for that reliance. All you can be faulted for is a naive belief that the methods of science (or computing) always work perfectly. In the short run they don't necessarily, in the long run apparently they do. Whatever, embedded as we are in time, unless we are an expert directly involved in the debate, we must always rely on the best scientific authority available to us at the time.
Now instrumentation (or "settled science") is one thing, but there are many times a scientists must make a judgment call about what is the best authority in a field which is actively under development and in which (inevitably) a level of disagreement exists. A basic skill any scientist must possess is the ability to make that call. It involves many things, including, without limitation: A knowledge of which institutions and journals are more authoritative; a knowledge of the reputation of individual scientists; a knowledge of general methodology and statistics which can brought to bear on published work, but always with the humility that comes from the realisation that one is, after all, not an expert in that field; and last, but not least intuition (aka a good bullshit detector).
In fact one of the great disservices we do High School science students is to fill their head with liberal narratives such as "everything I teach in this class you can potentially disprove!" Which whatever the its veracity, is --especially at a time when so much disinformation is being aimed their way --of a limited utility. It should come as little surprise that "creation science," or "climate skepticism," flourish in this climate. It would be far more valuable for students, whether they aim eventually to practise science or not, to equip them with a bullshit detector -- to teach them how to recognise credible and authoritative science from pseudo-science.
So, finally to get to your question of how "consensus" works in science. I think you should see by now, that in the potentially difficult task of establishing what is the orthodox scientific position in another field (and in fields outside our own we ought always to tend to the orthodox), a general agreement among practitioners whose opinions ought to demand respect (aka "consensus"), alleviates the burden somewhat.
Then again CRU could have been one cell in a world wide scientific fraud conspiracy group intent on world domination.
Clearly it was! First it was the environmentalists. We knew they were up to no good because, well there environmentalists!
Then the scientists said the environmentalists were actually correct. Now we knew the scientist (except for the brave few who agree with us) had joined the conspiracy (if they weren't in on it all along.)
Then when our Russian hacker friends in the Kremlin helped us expose these evil conspiring scientists by cracking the email serves. First a UK parliamentary inquiry clears them. So the UK parliament and the independent judges are also clearly in on the conspiracy.
Now an academic inquiry also tries to white wash joins in. So we know all academics (except for the brave few who agree with us), are in on the conspiracy too!
Karl Popper wants to discuss this "consensus" thing you're talking about with you.
I very much doubt that, he died in 1994;)
Since you raise the matter, let's look at this discussion through a Falsificationist lens. A claim was made that in the 1970s there existed a general consensus among expert scientists of imminent global cooling somewhat of the order of the consensus that exists now in regard to AGW. In Popperian terms, inasmuch as this claim is falsifiable, it is a "scientific" statement (it is, of course, no such thing, but that's Popper for you). It can be falsified by a study of published papers, and in fact it is (falsified).
There is moreover nothing inconsistent with scientific consensus and falsifiability. An hypothesis can be both falsifiable and the subject of consensus, as AGW, for example, is. And if it is both, I would suggest that more than likely not it is also correct. The idea of the lone scientist struggling against the blind authority of entire profession is a romantic narrative (and thus a compelling subject for fiction), but it is not the way science ordinarily advances.
You do know it has absolutely nothing to do with science... ?
Formally, I would prefer the term 'authority' over 'consensus,' but by whichever name we call a rose, what I do know, is that authority, every bit as much a the making of falsifiable claims, is a sine qua non of science. Now while I wouldn't go so far as dismiss the importance of falsifiability, it is clear that a naive falsificationism (as if Popper were the only philosopher of Science, or as if any philosopher of Science has adequately described it), has been corrosive to the popular understanding of science. Indeed I'm rapidly coming to the view that the mention of the name 'Popper' in an online discussion about the PoS, ought be treated in much the same way as the mention of the name of that other Austrian fellow.;)
"In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s?"
Because in the 70's, climate scientists pretty thoroughly established that if the patterns of the previous 36 ice ages still holds.
No, that is most certainly not why denialists throw around the "climate scientists in the 70s warned us about global cooling and it never happened" meme. You are answering a rhetorical question put in response to the notion that the lack of papers in the 70s speculating about sudden glaciation (which would bare this myth out) is due to the fact that glaciation periodicity was already established science several decades before that.
But sure, although I've been led to believe that the margin of error here is a little larger than you make out, that's kind of what I was saying. As I recall this area of science was very topical even in the late 70s as dendochronology and ice core sampling were starting to take off. That's what I was pointing out.
The thing is, it was settled science by the 70s, so it's not surprising that you wouldn't find many articles about the topic.
In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s? If they were then surely there should be some literature. The clear implication being made is that a majority of experts in the 70s believed an ice age was approaching (quickly). The facts, as you cited them 7 papers predicting cooling, 44 warming give the lie to that.
Secondly, while Milankovitch obviously did his work earlier (he died in 1958), it is far from true that even the periodic nature of glacials, and how those periods are determined, was "settled science" by the 70s. The work on ice ages was very alive in the 70s (you'll find more than 7 papers which don't predict an "immient" ice age) and certainly not settled until after the publication of this paper in 1976.
There was an article in Time magazine about it 40 years ago.
If there were not a several hundred papers in peer reviewed ISI journals proving (or even raising the possibility) that an ice age was on the doorstep, then it can hardly be said that anything approaching the current consensus on warming existed, can it? Can you cite several hundred? Can you cite one hundred? How about a dozen? Half a dozen...
No you can't! And you can't because the notion that any consensus existed in the 70s (or 80s) among expert scientists that an ice age was imminent is a myth. Or, to call a spade a spade, it's a lie.
Now it's true that some scientists mused about the possibility (after all 3 were quoted in the Newsweek article). And you know one the bases for their concern? It was the that relative to the emerging paleo record, the C20th showed unusually pronounced warming. It looked like we were a the peak of a cycle! Now, of course, we know exactly why that warming had taken place.
So how can you say it was a myth?
Easy. There was an article in Time magazine (or Newsweek) about it!:P
And this is my problem (as a Protestant, Lutheran to be more precise) with the Catholic Church. They focus on certain bits of the Bible which are convenient to them, rather than taking it as a whole.
To be fair, Luther himself, in pursuing his sola fide theology famously dismissed James in its entirety as "an epistle of straw," and along with Hebrews and Jude, sought to expurgate it from the cannon. Now there are also good historical reasons for Luther, who witnessed the corruption which the system of indulgences had fallen into, to adopt this position. But it is clear is the scriptural selectivity is not the province of the Church of the Apostles alone.
In any case, my point however was political, not theological. The Church was at one time the arbiter between conflicting claims to Europe's crowns, the ex-communicated disobedient kings, &c.. There is a gate in the Vatican which is opened but once every millennium. For an institution with this temporal perspective [pun very much intended], the fact that it is "the people" and not they, who get to determine who administers the state, must still be a bitter pill. It is in this light that one must appreciate the Vatican's reluctance to submit to secular authority.
Forgiveness is not freedom from consequences, or freedom to continue acting in sinful ways.
Quite, but absolution is a rather stronger concept than mere forgiveness.
That these priests continued to (and their bishops and cardinals allowed them to) continue to work in areas where they were known to struggle with sin is disheartening. Similarly, a priest who struggles with alcohol should not be giving a tavern and bar outreach ministry.
Well that seems pretty darn obvious to me, yes. But then I understand the behaviour of humans through the lens of a modern scientific worldview, in which people have psychological propensities towards certain behaviour which are not necessarily cured by the magical recitation of certain texts which believers construe as sacred. (Although I leave open the possibility of these effecting an hypnotic cure in rare cases).
The rights and wrong of this whole matter, after all, ought to be obvious to anyone. What I'm trying to do here is to understand the mindset which led the Church so deeply into error.
The problem is that the hierarchy worked hard to cover for them.
What do you mean by "cover up?" This is Holy Mother Church, it is answerable directly to God, not to any mere secular authority! Irony aside there are historical reasons why the Church would be reluctant to recognise the authority of states over them (after all they think themselves the authority over states), much less hand their people over to them. Please note, I'm not attempting to justify the inexcusable, but explain the reluctance of this religious body, foremost among all religious bodies (excepting perhaps the Orthodox Church), to submit to secular authority.
If it had stopped at the priests in question then the church as a whole would be squeeky clean but it did not.
Again, just put yourself in the mindset of the Church. These guys genuinely believe they have a license from God to absolve the sinner of their sin. If the pervert priest in question confessed, said his Hail Marys or whatever, then it was all fixed, wasn't it?
Now while a materialist like me might explain the propensity (which anecdotally at least seems unduly high among catholic clergy) of priests to interfere which children, as the product of an ideology which posits sex as bad, thereby associating the transgressive with arousal, alloyed with an unrealistic expectation of chastity, that's not how the Church sees it. There are probably otherwise sober men who believe it is a manifestation of demonic influence. This is a church that still appoints exorcists. Perhaps they repaired the priests before sending them out for a fresh start.
After all we are, so I'm informed, all born as sinners. And Catholicism is all about forgiving sin.
In other words, the foregone conclusion they were ordered to come up with
Can you please produce the secret memo that demonstrates they were ordered to reach a certain conclusion?
"nothing to see here, move along folks" clashes with reality.
In the denialsphere reality clashes with you! You are right to an extent. The result was a "foregone conclusion." But only because it was clear to any reasonable person reading the emails, who was not already working on the assumption of fraud, that they disclosed no evidence of misconduct. The published emails were a small selection of all those stolen and the best they could come up with was nothing much at all.
Of course if you are predisposed to believe that science is a vast elitist conspiracy, words like "trick" and phrases such as "hide the decline" are guaranteed to feed your viewpoint. But that is not "reality."
I would like to move the balance the other way, even just a little.
In times past Copyright and associated law (the term 'IP' is itself an ideological frame), was seen, theoretically at least, as a balancing act between the livelihood of cultural creators and the general public's right to access cultural product. You don't hear that much any more.
Apparently a new balance, that between the rights of content producing corporations, and between the rights copying technology producing corporations has been put foremost in the minds of legislators world-wide. Working within this new frame, DRM provides just the solution required to achieve "balance."
To be fair the problem with carbon dating is not merely curve fitting. A larger problem is the when God created the universe in Oct 4004BC (or thereabouts), He created Adam with a belly-button.
Interestingly, I have observed a correlation between people who cite that "correlation != causation" and those who ignore "causation implies correlation" in their arguments.
Ah yes, but can you suggest any causal relationship between those two observations?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately gamers aren't the right "interest groups". The christian lobby is by the seems of things...
Indeed. In the Rudd vs Abbott battle for souls one suspects the Christian lobby will get a sympathetic hearing from both sides.
58,589 people submitted their say to this thing... this ars*hole politician is proclaiming them as a "special interest group" because it doesn't fit with HIS ideas.
Not really he's proclaiming EB Games, and activist groups, including conservative Christian anti-gaming groups to be "special interest groups" and bemoaning the fact that so many individual submissions merely aped the arguments put forward by those groups.
Remember this isn't a popularity contest or a referendum. It's a process by which the government aims to garner as wide a range of views as possible from disparate sources. If one submissions says nothing different from another it's just a waste of everyone's time, and taxpayer money.
The reason to encourage people to submit prepared submissions en masse is two-fold. Firstly to drown out alternative views, which is in the interest both of the games industry and the anti-games lobby. And secondly, since theoretically each submission must be read in its entirety, to delay any decision by clogging up the system. On the face of it this would appear to be in the interests of the conservative Christian opponents only. That it is the pro-gamers who have done this seems, at least on the face of it, to be a monumental act of stupidity.
As a practical matter, if it is obvious that the vast bulk of submissions are mere dupes, I would think the bureaucrats could treat them as read. As I wrote below, if 86% of them are dupes, then really 86% if the reading has already been done. We really shouldn't let the ... ahem ... gaming of the consultation system by either side lead to inaction.
I suspect that the truth is as AC wrote below, that they want an excuse to shelve it until after the election. That the fully intend to introduce a R18+ classification, but they are worried about pissing off the Christian vote Rudd has been so careful to cultivate.
One hurdle after another, it seems.
Yes it seems very difficult to understand what the hold up here is.
If the claim is true that 86% of submissions "came from retailer EB Games and the pro-R18+ organisation Grow Up Australia" as TFA states, by which I assume that many people submitted the industry's 'standard' submissions, then that should really fast-track the process. Why not simply treat all those submissions as just the two they really are? That's 86% of the reading done right away.
No matter how often the same submission has been made, either the arguments it contains stand up or they don't. This claim of swamping makes no sense at all.
If on the other hand TFA is just BS, and there are somewhere approaching 60k individual submissions, then yes, that could take a while to get through.
A right is something which you are in the right for doing - you can do it with impunity.
No a "right" is a legal concession from the state which an individual can positively enforce in a court of law. A right can be negative, --a concession that the state will not do something to you, eg. legislate against your freedom of expression-- or positive, a concession that the state will do something for you, eg provide you or your children with a adequate minimum level of education.
Rights are neither God given, self-evident, universal nor fixed (though they may be entrenched). If you can't enforce it, it's not a right.
Works well in Australia. ... The lower house is more about local issues, whereas the senate is about larger issues that dont necessarily have enough local interest to get a seat in the lower house but enough so that they can have a seat in the upper house.
With all due respect to my compatriot that is a very strange characterisation of the Australian political system. The lower house was always intended to be about inter- and intra-national issues (we are a federation of states), whereas the upper house was intended to represent the interests of the states as a house of review. This is why upper house members are elected (proportionally) on a per state basis. The lower house members being elected on a seat-by-seat representative basis.
That was, historically, the theory, however the fact of party politics means that the Senate (upper house) reflects the interests of the party rather than the state (except perhaps for Queensland where the majority conservative party is the minority partner in federal conservative govts). In effect the lower house is the house of government dominated by the major parties, while the upper functions primarily as a house of review. "Local issues" are handled by state and local government.
It is true, it does work well, if not as designed. Because of the representative nature of the lower house, the two major parties are favoured (even in the face of preferential voting), giving government a measure stability lacking from systems which have proportional representation (PR) in both houses. Whereas the semi-PR nature (ie PR on state-by-state basis), better reflects the diversity of the electorate, giving minor parties a review role. IMO it could be improved by making the upper house PR on a national basis, but the obstacles to achieving that are probably insurmountable.
As to your wordstar files, if they're in a binary format, it's understandable.. for MS docx, or odf etc, it's a zip file with xml...
Now I might be wrong, it's been several decades since I had to work with WordStar files, but weren't they just basically text marked up with control chars? Probably even less of a challenge to write a tool to read them than it would be to xslt docx into a preferred format.
Is a glass jar an accurate model for our atmosphere?
Spoken like a true scientists. Bravo!
So the situation we have is we have gases (incl. CO2) with known physical properties (ie. heat forcing potential). We can show this in an isolated situation (glass jars).
So we expect, as a null hypothesis, that increasing concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere ought to behave similarly.
BUT, as you so correctly point out, this assumes the atmosphere behave like a glass jar! And after all the atmosphere is far more complex, it may include various negative (or positive) feedback loops &c. &c
That's great scientific instinct, so I'm sure the next step will come as no surprise to you ... What we need to do is test whether our expectation that these gases will exhibit similar behaviour in the atmosphere is true or not.
What is needed clearly, is an experiment, where the concentration of gases with forcing potential in the atmosphere are radically raised. Then we need to compare the increase in concentration to changes in the temperature trend. If, say over a century of two, raising the concentration of those gases the average global temperature stays the same, or lowers, this would strongly suggest (other factors like M-cycles taken into account, oceanic absorption &c.), that our null hypothesis was wrong.
You'll be happy to know, that just such an experiment exists. Unfortunately it involves "destructive sampling."
Alright ... WHO DID THIS?!!
As I write my post was modded up +5 Insightful. Damn you! I was ready to respond the the Troll mod by accusing the moderators on having joined the conspiracy too!
Way to undermine someone's argument guys!!!
Aha! ... Right!! ... I GET IT!!!!
You deliberately modded me up so that I couldn't complain that my exposing the conspiracy was being censored! That's it isn't it? You guys are fiendishly clever.
In other words the mods ARE in on it, along with Taco, and the whole of the liberal-leaning Slashdot.
This thing just keeps getting bigger and BIGGER! When will it ever end?
1) Do you believe science works through consensus?
Science relies on authority. Most especially when relying on the work from another field of science, in which a practising scientists cannot expect to have sufficient expertise, that scientist must rely on authority.
This is perhaps most obvious in the case of instrumentation. Now there was a time when the scientist who used an instrument probably made it as well and was an expert in the science underlying that instrument. However that has long since ceased to be the case. When we walk into the lab and switch on the GLC we don't spend half the day debating the basic (and not so basic) physics encapsulated in that device, we simply use it and bring our expertise in pharmacology (for example) into the mix. Here the acceptance of authority is tacit. Published methodologies specific the equipment and any disputes as the reliability thereof are left to experts in another field.
As a practical example of this, taken not from science, but computing. If you are old enough, you may, in your computing career have relied (on tacit authority) on a separate floating point processor to do your work. It then turned out there was a very subtle bug in the processor as revealed by someone who knew rather more about the technology than you. Now as it happened the bug was so subtle that it was very unlikely materially to have affected your results, but the point is, you can't be faulted for that reliance. All you can be faulted for is a naive belief that the methods of science (or computing) always work perfectly. In the short run they don't necessarily, in the long run apparently they do. Whatever, embedded as we are in time, unless we are an expert directly involved in the debate, we must always rely on the best scientific authority available to us at the time.
Now instrumentation (or "settled science") is one thing, but there are many times a scientists must make a judgment call about what is the best authority in a field which is actively under development and in which (inevitably) a level of disagreement exists. A basic skill any scientist must possess is the ability to make that call. It involves many things, including, without limitation: A knowledge of which institutions and journals are more authoritative; a knowledge of the reputation of individual scientists; a knowledge of general methodology and statistics which can brought to bear on published work, but always with the humility that comes from the realisation that one is, after all, not an expert in that field; and last, but not least intuition (aka a good bullshit detector).
In fact one of the great disservices we do High School science students is to fill their head with liberal narratives such as "everything I teach in this class you can potentially disprove!" Which whatever the its veracity, is --especially at a time when so much disinformation is being aimed their way --of a limited utility. It should come as little surprise that "creation science," or "climate skepticism," flourish in this climate. It would be far more valuable for students, whether they aim eventually to practise science or not, to equip them with a bullshit detector -- to teach them how to recognise credible and authoritative science from pseudo-science.
So, finally to get to your question of how "consensus" works in science. I think you should see by now, that in the potentially difficult task of establishing what is the orthodox scientific position in another field (and in fields outside our own we ought always to tend to the orthodox), a general agreement among practitioners whose opinions ought to demand respect (aka "consensus"), alleviates the burden somewhat.
argh ... they're
Then again CRU could have been one cell in a world wide scientific fraud conspiracy group intent on world domination.
Clearly it was! First it was the environmentalists. We knew they were up to no good because, well there environmentalists!
Then the scientists said the environmentalists were actually correct. Now we knew the scientist (except for the brave few who agree with us) had joined the conspiracy (if they weren't in on it all along.)
Then when our Russian hacker friends in the Kremlin helped us expose these evil conspiring scientists by cracking the email serves. First a UK parliamentary inquiry clears them. So the UK parliament and the independent judges are also clearly in on the conspiracy.
Now an academic inquiry also tries to white wash joins in. So we know all academics (except for the brave few who agree with us), are in on the conspiracy too!
I'm telling you man, this is BIG!
Karl Popper wants to discuss this "consensus" thing you're talking about with you.
I very much doubt that, he died in 1994 ;)
Since you raise the matter, let's look at this discussion through a Falsificationist lens. A claim was made that in the 1970s there existed a general consensus among expert scientists of imminent global cooling somewhat of the order of the consensus that exists now in regard to AGW. In Popperian terms, inasmuch as this claim is falsifiable, it is a "scientific" statement (it is, of course, no such thing, but that's Popper for you). It can be falsified by a study of published papers, and in fact it is (falsified).
There is moreover nothing inconsistent with scientific consensus and falsifiability. An hypothesis can be both falsifiable and the subject of consensus, as AGW, for example, is. And if it is both, I would suggest that more than likely not it is also correct. The idea of the lone scientist struggling against the blind authority of entire profession is a romantic narrative (and thus a compelling subject for fiction), but it is not the way science ordinarily advances.
You do know it has absolutely nothing to do with science ... ?
Formally, I would prefer the term 'authority' over 'consensus,' but by whichever name we call a rose, what I do know, is that authority, every bit as much a the making of falsifiable claims, is a sine qua non of science. Now while I wouldn't go so far as dismiss the importance of falsifiability, it is clear that a naive falsificationism (as if Popper were the only philosopher of Science, or as if any philosopher of Science has adequately described it), has been corrosive to the popular understanding of science. Indeed I'm rapidly coming to the view that the mention of the name 'Popper' in an online discussion about the PoS, ought be treated in much the same way as the mention of the name of that other Austrian fellow. ;)
"In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s?"
Because in the 70's, climate scientists pretty thoroughly established that if the patterns of the previous 36 ice ages still holds.
No, that is most certainly not why denialists throw around the "climate scientists in the 70s warned us about global cooling and it never happened" meme. You are answering a rhetorical question put in response to the notion that the lack of papers in the 70s speculating about sudden glaciation (which would bare this myth out) is due to the fact that glaciation periodicity was already established science several decades before that.
But sure, although I've been led to believe that the margin of error here is a little larger than you make out, that's kind of what I was saying. As I recall this area of science was very topical even in the late 70s as dendochronology and ice core sampling were starting to take off. That's what I was pointing out.
The thing is, it was settled science by the 70s, so it's not surprising that you wouldn't find many articles about the topic.
In that case why does the disinformation machine sprout the line about scientists arguing for an imminent ice age in the 70s, rather than say the 40s? If they were then surely there should be some literature. The clear implication being made is that a majority of experts in the 70s believed an ice age was approaching (quickly). The facts, as you cited them 7 papers predicting cooling, 44 warming give the lie to that.
Secondly, while Milankovitch obviously did his work earlier (he died in 1958), it is far from true that even the periodic nature of glacials, and how those periods are determined, was "settled science" by the 70s. The work on ice ages was very alive in the 70s (you'll find more than 7 papers which don't predict an "immient" ice age) and certainly not settled until after the publication of this paper in 1976.
There was an article in Time magazine about it 40 years ago.
If there were not a several hundred papers in peer reviewed ISI journals proving (or even raising the possibility) that an ice age was on the doorstep, then it can hardly be said that anything approaching the current consensus on warming existed, can it? Can you cite several hundred? Can you cite one hundred? How about a dozen? Half a dozen ...
No you can't! And you can't because the notion that any consensus existed in the 70s (or 80s) among expert scientists that an ice age was imminent is a myth. Or, to call a spade a spade, it's a lie.
Now it's true that some scientists mused about the possibility (after all 3 were quoted in the Newsweek article). And you know one the bases for their concern? It was the that relative to the emerging paleo record, the C20th showed unusually pronounced warming. It looked like we were a the peak of a cycle! Now, of course, we know exactly why that warming had taken place.
So how can you say it was a myth?
Easy. There was an article in Time magazine (or Newsweek) about it! :P
And this is my problem (as a Protestant, Lutheran to be more precise) with the Catholic Church. They focus on certain bits of the Bible which are convenient to them, rather than taking it as a whole.
To be fair, Luther himself, in pursuing his sola fide theology famously dismissed James in its entirety as "an epistle of straw," and along with Hebrews and Jude, sought to expurgate it from the cannon. Now there are also good historical reasons for Luther, who witnessed the corruption which the system of indulgences had fallen into, to adopt this position. But it is clear is the scriptural selectivity is not the province of the Church of the Apostles alone.
In any case, my point however was political, not theological. The Church was at one time the arbiter between conflicting claims to Europe's crowns, the ex-communicated disobedient kings, &c.. There is a gate in the Vatican which is opened but once every millennium. For an institution with this temporal perspective [pun very much intended], the fact that it is "the people" and not they, who get to determine who administers the state, must still be a bitter pill. It is in this light that one must appreciate the Vatican's reluctance to submit to secular authority.
Forgiveness is not freedom from consequences, or freedom to continue acting in sinful ways.
Quite, but absolution is a rather stronger concept than mere forgiveness.
That these priests continued to (and their bishops and cardinals allowed them to) continue to work in areas where they were known to struggle with sin is disheartening. Similarly, a priest who struggles with alcohol should not be giving a tavern and bar outreach ministry.
Well that seems pretty darn obvious to me, yes. But then I understand the behaviour of humans through the lens of a modern scientific worldview, in which people have psychological propensities towards certain behaviour which are not necessarily cured by the magical recitation of certain texts which believers construe as sacred. (Although I leave open the possibility of these effecting an hypnotic cure in rare cases).
The rights and wrong of this whole matter, after all, ought to be obvious to anyone. What I'm trying to do here is to understand the mindset which led the Church so deeply into error.
The problem is that the hierarchy worked hard to cover for them.
What do you mean by "cover up?" This is Holy Mother Church, it is answerable directly to God, not to any mere secular authority! Irony aside there are historical reasons why the Church would be reluctant to recognise the authority of states over them (after all they think themselves the authority over states), much less hand their people over to them. Please note, I'm not attempting to justify the inexcusable, but explain the reluctance of this religious body, foremost among all religious bodies (excepting perhaps the Orthodox Church), to submit to secular authority.
If it had stopped at the priests in question then the church as a whole would be squeeky clean but it did not.
Again, just put yourself in the mindset of the Church. These guys genuinely believe they have a license from God to absolve the sinner of their sin. If the pervert priest in question confessed, said his Hail Marys or whatever, then it was all fixed, wasn't it?
Now while a materialist like me might explain the propensity (which anecdotally at least seems unduly high among catholic clergy) of priests to interfere which children, as the product of an ideology which posits sex as bad, thereby associating the transgressive with arousal, alloyed with an unrealistic expectation of chastity, that's not how the Church sees it. There are probably otherwise sober men who believe it is a manifestation of demonic influence. This is a church that still appoints exorcists. Perhaps they repaired the priests before sending them out for a fresh start.
After all we are, so I'm informed, all born as sinners. And Catholicism is all about forgiving sin.
I'm unconvinced. I've met several law-abiding people who would likely be murderers if they had easy access to guns.
Yeah, and if they committed murder with those guns they would be criminals, no? So you see it's true, "only criminals use guns to commit murder."
You are not the sharpest stick in the wood are you Lord Pillage?
Well he's obviously several orders of magnitude sharper than that dullard AC he was responding to.
Why are essential systems connected to the internet?
Yeah, who let the military on the internet in the first place?!
Yes, its dangerous to protect yourself and your property. But if you don't, you'll get chewed up anyway.
So let me get this right. You are in all seriousness proposing the the Army responds to physical attacks against the country?! Wow, just wow!
In other words, the foregone conclusion they were ordered to come up with
Can you please produce the secret memo that demonstrates they were ordered to reach a certain conclusion?
"nothing to see here, move along folks" clashes with reality.
In the denialsphere reality clashes with you! You are right to an extent. The result was a "foregone conclusion." But only because it was clear to any reasonable person reading the emails, who was not already working on the assumption of fraud, that they disclosed no evidence of misconduct. The published emails were a small selection of all those stolen and the best they could come up with was nothing much at all.
Of course if you are predisposed to believe that science is a vast elitist conspiracy, words like "trick" and phrases such as "hide the decline" are guaranteed to feed your viewpoint. But that is not "reality."
I would like to move the balance the other way, even just a little.
In times past Copyright and associated law (the term 'IP' is itself an ideological frame), was seen, theoretically at least, as a balancing act between the livelihood of cultural creators and the general public's right to access cultural product. You don't hear that much any more.
Apparently a new balance, that between the rights of content producing corporations, and between the rights copying technology producing corporations has been put foremost in the minds of legislators world-wide. Working within this new frame, DRM provides just the solution required to achieve "balance."
*Ahem* Cue carbon dating.
To be fair the problem with carbon dating is not merely curve fitting. A larger problem is the when God created the universe in Oct 4004BC (or thereabouts), He created Adam with a belly-button.
Interestingly, I have observed a correlation between people who cite that "correlation != causation" and those who ignore "causation implies correlation" in their arguments.
Ah yes, but can you suggest any causal relationship between those two observations?