If Bastardi wins the wager what does he gain, karma points? There will be big wins all around for individuals, businesses and governments.
If Bastardi loses the wager he loses what? It appears if we wait and Bastardi turns out to be wrong we will be behind by one more decade on addressing the issue and a heavy price will be paid by everyone.
And while he has some valuable points as far as the accuracy of climatologists making predictions his analogies seem a bit off.
He claims they are using recent trends but does not define "recent" while the trends I have seen go back several decades or centuries. In geologic time centuries are recent trends but is this what he means? I suspect not because then he questions the use of data in longer trends.
And in another analogy he compares a 0.06% change in your weight form 175.0 lbs to 175.1 lbs over a decade to a 0.6% increase in global temperature from the mean of around 57.563 F to 57.923 F. While the increase in temperature over a decade doesn't look significant his comparison is off by an order of magnitude and that is ignoring the irrational comparison of the complexities of an individuals body weight to that of global temperatures.
Anyhow, it is good to bring up questions but this wager and some of the comments seem rather dubious.
Moderated down as Offtopic?!? WTF, it was TFA that noted a pharmaceutical experiment as the first example of these so called changes in experimental results and it was TFA that noted massive profits from the pharmaceuticals. There is obvious motive for the fudged initial results.
Is there a mob running around with a corporate boner up their butt moderating down slashdot and other forums if somebody says something unpopular about their sugar daddy?
Grow up. If you can't handle the heat of the truth then get off the internet and go cram your head up your sugar daddy's butt and hide.
I apologize and take back the deluded comment. I agree that the conditions leading up to the Iraq war are complicated and convoluted and it is all too easy to point the finger at a few people but I will stand by the claim that the Bush actions and lies are several orders of magnitude above the Clinton actions and lies in their effect and damage.
I did some wiki reading on scientism, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper. Very interesting but I suspect to get a real understanding I would need to read some of their published work. So many good things to read but so little time.:)
From what I've read so far I think there is some basis in the arguments of these philosophers but I also see a lot of straw men attacks and implied redefinitions of established words. So lets be clear on a few things:
Science is not Scientism. Science is simply a process. When the process produces results that some people dislike or shows their unfounded beliefs are false it doesn't automatically convert science into a religion.
Myths may have some foundation in truths but a myth is not the same thing as a truth otherwise it is not a myth. If a truth is based on falsities then it is not a truth. And science is not about absolutes, there are no truths. There is knowledge with some degree of certainty.
Science and religion do in fact become incompatible when each is used outside of their realm of capability. I.E. science will never prove or disprove the existence of any Gods because by definition it is un-testable or, as Karl Popper put it, it is not falsifiable. When religion attempts to prove the earth is flat, is the center of the universe, is motionless and the Sun orbits the earth then they have stepped outside of their capabilities and will be shown to fail as a source of knowledge.
I too am atheist. Note that I do not say "am an atheist" because it is not like being "an Christian" or "an Muslim". Atheist simply means I am skeptical of that which I am expected to believe on faith alone and I refuse to give in to the continuous coercion to fall in line or shut up. There are some slippery uses of the term that attempt to redefine atheism as another belief, i.e. "a belief that God does not exist", when in fact the word means lack of belief.
From my perspective as atheist the fundamentalist attacks are virtually all religion based not science or this so called scientism. Someone who is atheist and speaks out is immediately attacked for speaking out while the constant and incessant public attacks and indoctrination by people who follow one religion or another are acceptable.
There is little foundation for the claims of some growing fundamentalist scientism attacking religion, nobody can seriously look at the world we live in and suggest we are being overrun by some new religion named scientism. And in many cases it appears to me to be more of the usual religious attacks on those who refuse to choose one of the two positions the religious seem to think are the only acceptable positions, accept their religion and fall in line or shut the fuck up.
Expecting scientists to be quiet when their findings contradict religion is not acceptable, expecting scientists to shut up when their findings are attacked without justification and for religious purposes is not acceptable, and labeling them as just another form of religious fundamentalist because you dislike the scientific findings is also not acceptable.
Falling into something like scientism would definitely be a bad thing but I see no justification to suggest the theist religions are being replaced by a new religion with a false base in the scientific method.
Are you serious? Many thousands of people are dead simply because a few people were trying to stay gainfully employed to support their families?
I am truly sorry if this comes off as offensive as I think it does but if you believe there would be mass suffering from unemployment if we did not bomb the shit out of Iraq and that was the basis for the lies that resulted in many thousands losing their lives then you are seriously deluded.
As a U.S. citizen I found Clinton's actions and lies embarrassing, but the lies from Bush transferred billions, if not trillions, of public funds into the hands of a few and resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people.
Comparing lies about a blow job to lies resulting in debt and death is absurdity on a grand scale.
It looked to me much more like acknowledgement of widespread difficulties with randomness, scale, and human fallibility. Exactly the kinds of things that would make someone who's a staunch defender of "science as a means to truth" to disregard valuable critical information about it.
The problem is actually the opposite. Note the E.S.P. experiment cited in the article. Rhine's initial experiment suggested to him that E.S.P. was real. Before publishing his results he did the right thing and reran the tests and the results proving E.S.P. were not repeatable.
The next part is his absolute failure to understand the scientific method and statistics. He concluded that "extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline.” In fact what he experienced was Regression toward the mean.
Taking a well understood principle, renaming it with a term that suggests an action is taking place, then arguing that you have found some new phenomenon that proves science doesn't work is not critical information about anything.
It is ignorance that will be dismissed for obvious reasons. Too much time and energy is wasted repeatedly addressing these attacks on science by people who want so badly for their pseudo-science or supernatural beliefs to be true. In a perfect world when somebody stumbles upon regression to the mean without knowing it they would do additional research to understand what it is they are observing rather than conclude that their initial experiment was correct and the supernatural ability they detected was "declining" rather than accept the alternate, it was never there in the first place.
Do not allow this article to shake your hope and trust in science. The article is garbage. Sadly the New Yorker can't even properly proof read their articles before publishing...
"But now all sorts of well-established, multiply [SIC] confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain."
The sloppy editing is accompanied but a sloppy thought process.
The first example in the article suggests corporate fraud with a profit motive.
I'm not sure if the second example was completed with a government grant but it only shows that the scientific process works when followed. Regression to the mean, the initial experiment provided an analysis of a given sample from the population. Further sampling will gradually produce results closer to the true mean.
Replacing science with pseudo-science or the supernatural because the scientific method slowly reveals the truth is absurd.
Is it a Clintoneque 'I did not have sex with that women' kind of lying or is it more of a Bush Junioresque 'There will be a mushroom cloud over U.S. cities if we don't spend trillions on military corporations to bomb the shit out of the people of Iraq first'?
The pharmaceutical example in the article noted some nice corporate profits that resulted from the "science".
Maybe it's just the the truths being presented in the article are the sort of 'truths' that are hard to measure 100% objectively.
For the experiments the author chose as the basis of his claim this may be the case but the pharmaceutical experiments that resulted in billions in profits should be setting off corporate fraud alarms rather than lead to the conclusion that science doesn't work and pseudo-science is just as good. The first question I had was 'How many schizophrenics are there in the population? Am I really surrounded by crazy people?'
The author is begging to drag the United States into the second dark age.
According to John Ioannidis, author of Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls 'significance chasing,' or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. 'The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,'
Before you can question the scientific method through experimentation you first must understand and utilize the scientific process. That last quote is a massive clue that the issue is that they are stepping away from the scientific process and trying to force an answer.
I'll go read the article but before I do I'll just note that in working in semiconductor manufacturing and development both the scientific process and statistical significance are at the core of resolving problems, maintaining repeatable manufacturing and developing new processes and products. And from my 20 years of experience the scientific process worked just fine and when results were not reproducible then you had more work to do but you didn't decide that science no longer worked and that the answer simply changed.
I can guarantee that if we throw away the scientific process and no longer rely of peer review and replication then all those fun little gadgets everyone enjoys these days will become a thing of the past and we'll enter into the second dark age.
You seem to be confused and that is okay, there is an almost concerted effort lately among the faithful to confuse the scientific method with faith.
You can remedy your situation with some mild education. There is a nice paragraph in the Wikipedia article on the scientific method that I will plagiarise here to give you a jump start...
A scientific theory hinges on empirical findings, and remains subject to falsification if new evidence is presented. That is, no theory is ever considered certain. Theories very rarely result in vast changes in human understanding. Knowledge in science is gained by a gradual synthesis of information from different experiments, by various researchers, across different domains of science. Theories vary in the extent to which they have been tested and retained, as well as their acceptance in the scientific community.
In contrast, a myth may enjoy uncritical acceptance by members of a certain group. The difference between a theory and a myth reflects a preference for a posteriori versus a priori knowledge. That is, theories become accepted by a scientific community as evidence for the theory is presented, and as presumptions that are inconsistent with the evidence are falsified.
The fact that we hear no end to complaints about adhering to environmental regulations, including in this case where Molycorp accepted the cost of updating the environmental controls but not without whining about it, suggest that while it is not perfect and free from corrupting influence it does at times have the desired impact.
But I will say that I agree with your sentiment in the original post, we do need to be reasonable with our decisions on regulations and environmental controls. But they must not be solely based on the profitability of one corporation that protects the environment versus another that freely pollutes without concern.
You've been spending way too much time in a French cave.
The Russians left Communism behind around 1991 and have managed to leap past the United States to Mafioso Capitalism. Though the U.S. is trying hard to catch up.
shipping all the manufacturing out of what used to be a great country
Quit being a whiny pussy and move. Each Foxconn suicide is just one more opportunity for you.
Stop being a cry baby and move. The Chinese share your 'screw the environment, profits rule' and 'screw human beings, profits rule' mentality.
Just get it over with and move your ideology to China and your suffering under environmental regulation will be over, you will be in a blissful heaven of pathetic wages, poisoned rivers and pollution choked skies, Your fantasy world come true.
There is no reason to piss and moan endlessly about the rest of the populace who want nothing to do with your crap, your vision of a perfect world is already practised in China, just move already.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't a wager normally involve an ante?
If Bastardi wins the wager what does he gain, karma points? There will be big wins all around for individuals, businesses and governments.
If Bastardi loses the wager he loses what? It appears if we wait and Bastardi turns out to be wrong we will be behind by one more decade on addressing the issue and a heavy price will be paid by everyone.
And while he has some valuable points as far as the accuracy of climatologists making predictions his analogies seem a bit off.
He claims they are using recent trends but does not define "recent" while the trends I have seen go back several decades or centuries. In geologic time centuries are recent trends but is this what he means? I suspect not because then he questions the use of data in longer trends.
And in another analogy he compares a 0.06% change in your weight form 175.0 lbs to 175.1 lbs over a decade to a 0.6% increase in global temperature from the mean of around 57.563 F to 57.923 F. While the increase in temperature over a decade doesn't look significant his comparison is off by an order of magnitude and that is ignoring the irrational comparison of the complexities of an individuals body weight to that of global temperatures.
Anyhow, it is good to bring up questions but this wager and some of the comments seem rather dubious.
Moderated down as Offtopic?!? WTF, it was TFA that noted a pharmaceutical experiment as the first example of these so called changes in experimental results and it was TFA that noted massive profits from the pharmaceuticals. There is obvious motive for the fudged initial results.
Is there a mob running around with a corporate boner up their butt moderating down slashdot and other forums if somebody says something unpopular about their sugar daddy?
Grow up. If you can't handle the heat of the truth then get off the internet and go cram your head up your sugar daddy's butt and hide.
Sorry to everyone else for the crude comment.
I stand corrected. :)
It still looks and sounds strange to me.
I apologize and take back the deluded comment. I agree that the conditions leading up to the Iraq war are complicated and convoluted and it is all too easy to point the finger at a few people but I will stand by the claim that the Bush actions and lies are several orders of magnitude above the Clinton actions and lies in their effect and damage.
I'll just leave it at that.
I did some wiki reading on scientism, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper. Very interesting but I suspect to get a real understanding I would need to read some of their published work. So many good things to read but so little time. :)
From what I've read so far I think there is some basis in the arguments of these philosophers but I also see a lot of straw men attacks and implied redefinitions of established words. So lets be clear on a few things:
Science is not Scientism. Science is simply a process. When the process produces results that some people dislike or shows their unfounded beliefs are false it doesn't automatically convert science into a religion.
Myths may have some foundation in truths but a myth is not the same thing as a truth otherwise it is not a myth. If a truth is based on falsities then it is not a truth. And science is not about absolutes, there are no truths. There is knowledge with some degree of certainty.
Science and religion do in fact become incompatible when each is used outside of their realm of capability. I.E. science will never prove or disprove the existence of any Gods because by definition it is un-testable or, as Karl Popper put it, it is not falsifiable. When religion attempts to prove the earth is flat, is the center of the universe, is motionless and the Sun orbits the earth then they have stepped outside of their capabilities and will be shown to fail as a source of knowledge.
I too am atheist. Note that I do not say "am an atheist" because it is not like being "an Christian" or "an Muslim". Atheist simply means I am skeptical of that which I am expected to believe on faith alone and I refuse to give in to the continuous coercion to fall in line or shut up. There are some slippery uses of the term that attempt to redefine atheism as another belief, i.e. "a belief that God does not exist", when in fact the word means lack of belief.
From my perspective as atheist the fundamentalist attacks are virtually all religion based not science or this so called scientism. Someone who is atheist and speaks out is immediately attacked for speaking out while the constant and incessant public attacks and indoctrination by people who follow one religion or another are acceptable.
There is little foundation for the claims of some growing fundamentalist scientism attacking religion, nobody can seriously look at the world we live in and suggest we are being overrun by some new religion named scientism. And in many cases it appears to me to be more of the usual religious attacks on those who refuse to choose one of the two positions the religious seem to think are the only acceptable positions, accept their religion and fall in line or shut the fuck up.
Expecting scientists to be quiet when their findings contradict religion is not acceptable, expecting scientists to shut up when their findings are attacked without justification and for religious purposes is not acceptable, and labeling them as just another form of religious fundamentalist because you dislike the scientific findings is also not acceptable.
Falling into something like scientism would definitely be a bad thing but I see no justification to suggest the theist religions are being replaced by a new religion with a false base in the scientific method.
The comment about religion was not for you. The slashdot comment system seems to be cracking under pressure.
That comment was in response to haruchai who seemed to be suggest that people were not following Christianity.
Are you serious? Many thousands of people are dead simply because a few people were trying to stay gainfully employed to support their families?
I am truly sorry if this comes off as offensive as I think it does but if you believe there would be mass suffering from unemployment if we did not bomb the shit out of Iraq and that was the basis for the lies that resulted in many thousands losing their lives then you are seriously deluded.
As a U.S. citizen I found Clinton's actions and lies embarrassing, but the lies from Bush transferred billions, if not trillions, of public funds into the hands of a few and resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people.
Comparing lies about a blow job to lies resulting in debt and death is absurdity on a grand scale.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Just in case the joke is missed ;)
The problem is actually the opposite. Note the E.S.P. experiment cited in the article. Rhine's initial experiment suggested to him that E.S.P. was real. Before publishing his results he did the right thing and reran the tests and the results proving E.S.P. were not repeatable.
The next part is his absolute failure to understand the scientific method and statistics. He concluded that "extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline.” In fact what he experienced was Regression toward the mean.
Taking a well understood principle, renaming it with a term that suggests an action is taking place, then arguing that you have found some new phenomenon that proves science doesn't work is not critical information about anything.
It is ignorance that will be dismissed for obvious reasons. Too much time and energy is wasted repeatedly addressing these attacks on science by people who want so badly for their pseudo-science or supernatural beliefs to be true. In a perfect world when somebody stumbles upon regression to the mean without knowing it they would do additional research to understand what it is they are observing rather than conclude that their initial experiment was correct and the supernatural ability they detected was "declining" rather than accept the alternate, it was never there in the first place.
It is probably implicit in your statement but I'll spell it out anyhow. And peer reviewed.
Do not allow this article to shake your hope and trust in science. The article is garbage. Sadly the New Yorker can't even properly proof read their articles before publishing...
"But now all sorts of well-established, multiply [SIC] confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain."
The sloppy editing is accompanied but a sloppy thought process.
The first example in the article suggests corporate fraud with a profit motive.
I'm not sure if the second example was completed with a government grant but it only shows that the scientific process works when followed. Regression to the mean, the initial experiment provided an analysis of a given sample from the population. Further sampling will gradually produce results closer to the true mean.
Replacing science with pseudo-science or the supernatural because the scientific method slowly reveals the truth is absurd.
Is it a Clintoneque 'I did not have sex with that women' kind of lying or is it more of a Bush Junioresque 'There will be a mushroom cloud over U.S. cities if we don't spend trillions on military corporations to bomb the shit out of the people of Iraq first'?
The pharmaceutical example in the article noted some nice corporate profits that resulted from the "science".
For the experiments the author chose as the basis of his claim this may be the case but the pharmaceutical experiments that resulted in billions in profits should be setting off corporate fraud alarms rather than lead to the conclusion that science doesn't work and pseudo-science is just as good. The first question I had was 'How many schizophrenics are there in the population? Am I really surrounded by crazy people?'
The author is begging to drag the United States into the second dark age.
Before you can question the scientific method through experimentation you first must understand and utilize the scientific process. That last quote is a massive clue that the issue is that they are stepping away from the scientific process and trying to force an answer.
I'll go read the article but before I do I'll just note that in working in semiconductor manufacturing and development both the scientific process and statistical significance are at the core of resolving problems, maintaining repeatable manufacturing and developing new processes and products. And from my 20 years of experience the scientific process worked just fine and when results were not reproducible then you had more work to do but you didn't decide that science no longer worked and that the answer simply changed.
I can guarantee that if we throw away the scientific process and no longer rely of peer review and replication then all those fun little gadgets everyone enjoys these days will become a thing of the past and we'll enter into the second dark age.
You seem to be confused and that is okay, there is an almost concerted effort lately among the faithful to confuse the scientific method with faith.
You can remedy your situation with some mild education. There is a nice paragraph in the Wikipedia article on the scientific method that I will plagiarise here to give you a jump start...
The fact that we hear no end to complaints about adhering to environmental regulations, including in this case where Molycorp accepted the cost of updating the environmental controls but not without whining about it, suggest that while it is not perfect and free from corrupting influence it does at times have the desired impact.
But I will say that I agree with your sentiment in the original post, we do need to be reasonable with our decisions on regulations and environmental controls. But they must not be solely based on the profitability of one corporation that protects the environment versus another that freely pollutes without concern.
Who let you out of your bunker?
You've been spending way too much time in a French cave.
The Russians left Communism behind around 1991 and have managed to leap past the United States to Mafioso Capitalism. Though the U.S. is trying hard to catch up.
Actually these people are following their Christian faith. That is the problem with religion and faith, it is open to interpretation...
If you don't make a profit for your master you will be cursed by the Christian God
Environmental damage by humans is impossible because God said so in his promise.
Environmentalism is deadly to the gospel of Jesus.
Quit being a whiny pussy and move. Each Foxconn suicide is just one more opportunity for you.
Stop being a cry baby and move. The Chinese share your 'screw the environment, profits rule' and 'screw human beings, profits rule' mentality.
Just get it over with and move your ideology to China and your suffering under environmental regulation will be over, you will be in a blissful heaven of pathetic wages, poisoned rivers and pollution choked skies, Your fantasy world come true.
There is no reason to piss and moan endlessly about the rest of the populace who want nothing to do with your crap, your vision of a perfect world is already practised in China, just move already.
Move to China, their policies seem to suit you.
<HECKLER> If they were Incorporated then they would be legal individuals! Instead they prefer to be commie unincorporated human beings. </HECKLER>
Why is it that people like you don't move to China to live and work in their factories?
Ssssshhh, you'll burst the bubble that is keeping the stupidity contained to themselves.