::shrug:: I'm going off of what the poster is saying - statement is essentially "My business model would be screwed up if this was proved, so I won't consider it unless forced to." You're shifting to the nearest reasonable argument to what he's actually saying, but it doesn't make what he's saying reasonable.
Keep in mind that his comment also has the logical fallacy that people must disprove the space weather theory before they can prove causation, and then ends in a flippant "Let's solve a real problem - like the smell in East Houston!"
Also, given the entrenched interests in opposition to it, and our current faith-reason debate over evolution, I'm not sure we would be having a different discussion in that case.
Well, we've probably got three climate scientists, but they're lurkers, so it's 600 comments trolling, and the remaining 600 are carrying out this conversation:
Player One: Mechanics are all out to screw us because the Bavarian Illuminati collects more taxes!
Player Two: Take your car to a mechanic! Or get twelve opinions from different mechanics! They all fucking agree on this, except that guy who works out of that vacant alley and smells like stale beer!
Short answer: we're actually arguing about reason versus paranoia, which is 100% something Slashdot posters know about; half of the equation at a time, anyway.
Except that legitimate dissenting voices aren't being shouted down - people with actual degrees and research in this field who dissent are being listened to. They're just not being agreed with by the majority, because the majority's findings don't match theirs. That's how science works.
But, again, I'm not debating the science here. I was dealing with a really stupid analogy, and people stop addressing the terms of the analogy.
My whole point here was that science is not a priesthood, and climate scientists are only in a privileged position to argue climate science for the obvious and correct reason of knowing more about it.
Try pulling that shit on someone who didn't grow up in Florida, son. It may not be farmland, but it's damn well habitable. It's inhabited, in fact - generally more so than interior regions.
Also, by inconvenience some real estate owners, you mean move the largest populations interior, where they will have to compete with both existing people and the infrastructure that DOES affect the food supply.
Look, I'm not claiming that this analogy is perfect down to minor detail; all the car sensors represent is "results from measurements that require knowledge to interpret."
The "bill" analogy is different in KIND from the original statement I made, and from the priest statement, and is attached to emotional rhetoric.
Wow! You took out words and replaced them with "rape!"
Your comment has no meaning, and certainly doesn't relate to the above discussion, but I certainly am paying attention to you! See, the exclamation points mean that your attempt to hijack the discussion to feel big about yourself worked!
Now go away. Adults and/or smarter children than you are talking.
Except it's not the bill they're arguing with - it's the readings of the internal engine sensors. It's not arithmetic - it's what a carburetor temperature spike of two degrees means to the long-term functioning of the engine (FYI - I am not a mechanic; these examples are constructed and abstract, rather than actual).
It would be like me, an amateur web programmer, critiquing an operating system kernel. Yes, maybe I'll find an error - but there's a hell of a lot more chance that I'll find something I THINK is an error, that turns out to just be over my head.
To summarize, at no point are we talking about "the bill;" that would potentially be appropriate if we were talking about grant money allocations for climate science. The analogy here refers to the actual process, in this case a high-level analysis of complex climate systems. Trying to sleaze it into some sort of "hur hur mechanics screw ya!" nonsense is just stupid.
Sorry, but I'm not arguing with his science here; I'm arguing with his dubious ethical proposition that, taking as granted man-made global warming, the right thing to do is let it go on and ignore it, because hell, we can afford to survive.
I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to debate you on the science; I'm just taking him to task for his ridiculous social Darwinism.
So, I'm curious - the largely corporate-funded studies "debunking" global warming are legit, while those funded with public money are somehow inherently flawed.
Under what conditions would you believe a scientist who presented findings about man-induced global warming?
And, if that condition is "No money can be involved," then how does the research get done? Science costs money, particularly when you have to gather data over large areas of the world and large periods of time.
Also - so you're saying that a majority of climate scientists are banding together in a conspiracy to defraud the government, and the government is abetting it.... why? Those grants get spent, genius - any added tax revenue gets spent ON THE SCIENCE. I mean, for fuck's sake - if you'd ever worked in Academia, you'd know that ending up with grant money unspent is a PROBLEM; you have to have a lot of justification, and it probably means your grant getting trimmed next year.
You see, the Emperor's Clothes is a story about the willingness of a crowd to go along with untruths that are socially mandated. This conversation, on the other hand, is about the validity of expert knowledge.
You do realize that your whole argument here is basically "...so fuck the Netherlands!"
Also, I fail to see where "we could survive it" makes "lets just heat up the world for fun" the correct decision. Increasing efficiency and altering our energy-producing technology is a significantly better adaptive strategy than "LET'S BURN ALL THE COAL AND BUILD SOME FUCKING SEAWALLS!"
Also, your understanding of the engineering requirements for whole-country seawalls might need some polishing, buddy.
Just curious - care to back up your broad generalizations about how science in universities works with some credentials, or maybe even actual examples?
Ah, but we only give a good goddamn about thriving ecosystems that are livable for humankind. Furthermore, we'd be pretty pissed about a thriving ecosystem where most of the former coastal regions were under the sea.
Irreversible damage to us is the worst kind of irreversible damage;-)
Well, I would guess that "liberals" are most concerned with the man-made part of the effect because, oh, I don't know... it's the only part of the effect that can be affected by political processes?
I mean, you're welcome to try lobbying geologic processes, but I think you'd get a lot more done concentrating on things with ears.
And as for DRASTIC AND IMMEDIATE; given the amount of time that it's gotten to get even the current, pansy-ass environmental measures going, I'd say starting early is a fucking requirement if you want to get anything done before Florida is underwater. Not that I'd miss it, but my mom lives there.;-)
It's much more like this: "Unless you're a priest or other person trained to understand religion, your religious views don't carry particular weight."
Except, it's actually about something based on known principles, facts, and science - so it's really: "Unless you understand how car engines work, you have no business telling me what's wrong with my car."
It may take a climate scientist to do the original research, and to collect those results into a valid analysis - but it's certainly possible to condense and explain the broad results to lay people. That's, in fact, a large part of the rationale behind having these analyses - people who aren't specialists need to make decisions that cover specialist fields all the time. And wildly differing specialist fields interact on a regular basis - that climate scientist might be on a committee with an agriculturalist, and they may both be making decisions and assumptions based on data outside of their fields. It's not perfect, but it's functional.
The issue is that people who aren't even informed second-hand are continually taking one side or the other because of political, religious, or other rationales.
Dude - if your business model is a primary grounds for your acceptance or rejection of a theory, you have a serious fscking problem with your logic skills.
But... but.... the scientists are paid regardless of findings. In fact, given how much big, money-swollen industries want global warming to be false, I'm pretty sure it would pay better.
The real problem here is that you're putting this in terms of beliefs, when, in fact, this situation is about facts. It's perfectly reasonable to be upset with people who, in a factual debate, do the intellectual equivalent of shouting "NUH UH!" and putting their fingers in their ears.
I never claimed that it's intellectual suicide to believe in God; in fact, it's not an intellectual decision for most people at all. One's belief in God is a matter of faith, not reason, and I say that as someone without a bias against faith.
What I do say is that ID is not and can never be science. Furthermore, ID is fundamentally dishonest - all it is is an attempt to deceptively repackage creationism to make it easier to subvert public schools to religious ends. Period, end sentence. That is its sole point and reason for existing.
This is a problem for many reasons, in secular terms, it destroys the process of teaching science, and in Christian religious terms, it is immoral. "Thou shalt not bear false witness."
*Note that I put it in Christian terms because, despite nominal involvement from other religions, ID is a fundamentalist Christian movement.
Except that the people suggesting that the big bang happened are saying "Based on the physical evidence, we think this happened." Creationists (because, well, ID == Creationism plus a layer of BS) say that there IS GOD, PERIOD.
One's a hypothesis, the other's a declaration of faith. One is appropriate in a science class, the other in a church.
I don't do prescriptivist "grammar" (I'm a linguist and value language as it is actually used, and many prescriptivists "rules" don't even make sense)
I'm curious - if "prescriptivist" grammar isn't valuable, than how would you propose written language be taught, paying specific attention to the problematic requirement of readability and precision between people with different dialects, upbringings, and educations.
Also, a version that doesn't end up with the U.S. speaking in txt-speak would be nice.
In my own experience, this statement is somewhat inaccurate. At minimum, you'll need some level of knowledge of meta-document stuff (author, etc) and you'll need to know enough to choose a style, unless your campus provides a default LaTeX style for documents produced. I know that I had to override several aspects of the standard MLA style in order to produce a document that conformed to my teacher's specifications.
And if we're talking about raw LaTeX, there's a learning process needed for just producing output - given that many of the students coming into these programs won't have ever interacted with a computer through the command line. LyX and other such solutions can ameliorate some of this, but there are still a fair amount of gotchas.
Again, it's not rocket science, and it's not out of the reach of non-technical users; but it's also not the zero-effort instawin that it's being portrayed as. And, given that the main benefits of LaTeX are, as I previously stated, either not germane to the field or not obvious/usable without deeper knowledge, any amount of extra effort is going to kill adoption.
So you mostly agree with him by stating my point?;-)
LaTeX is a much better piece of software than Word. It's infinitely superior to Word in most presentational aspects; but most of the advantages are immaterial to Literature and Humanities subjects. We don't use many figures or tables, work tends to be single author (this becomes slightly less true on the faculty level, but is still true in the main), and large simple documents of primarily text are much handled much more adroitly by Word than complex documents of any size.
All I'm saying is what you say here - that it's much easier for a non-technical person to just use WYSIWYG, which they've generally already been trained on, than to pick up unrelated technical skills they don't have yet.
Slashdot Mirror
::shrug:: I'm going off of what the poster is saying - statement is essentially "My business model would be screwed up if this was proved, so I won't consider it unless forced to." You're shifting to the nearest reasonable argument to what he's actually saying, but it doesn't make what he's saying reasonable.
Keep in mind that his comment also has the logical fallacy that people must disprove the space weather theory before they can prove causation, and then ends in a flippant "Let's solve a real problem - like the smell in East Houston!"
Also, given the entrenched interests in opposition to it, and our current faith-reason debate over evolution, I'm not sure we would be having a different discussion in that case.
Heh.
Well, we've probably got three climate scientists, but they're lurkers, so it's 600 comments trolling, and the remaining 600 are carrying out this conversation:
Player One: Mechanics are all out to screw us because the Bavarian Illuminati collects more taxes!
Player Two: Take your car to a mechanic! Or get twelve opinions from different mechanics! They all fucking agree on this, except that guy who works out of that vacant alley and smells like stale beer!
Short answer: we're actually arguing about reason versus paranoia, which is 100% something Slashdot posters know about; half of the equation at a time, anyway.
Except that legitimate dissenting voices aren't being shouted down - people with actual degrees and research in this field who dissent are being listened to. They're just not being agreed with by the majority, because the majority's findings don't match theirs. That's how science works.
But, again, I'm not debating the science here. I was dealing with a really stupid analogy, and people stop addressing the terms of the analogy.
My whole point here was that science is not a priesthood, and climate scientists are only in a privileged position to argue climate science for the obvious and correct reason of knowing more about it.
Really?
Try pulling that shit on someone who didn't grow up in Florida, son. It may not be farmland, but it's damn well habitable. It's inhabited, in fact - generally more so than interior regions.
Also, by inconvenience some real estate owners, you mean move the largest populations interior, where they will have to compete with both existing people and the infrastructure that DOES affect the food supply.
Look, I'm not claiming that this analogy is perfect down to minor detail; all the car sensors represent is "results from measurements that require knowledge to interpret."
The "bill" analogy is different in KIND from the original statement I made, and from the priest statement, and is attached to emotional rhetoric.
Wow! You took out words and replaced them with "rape!"
Your comment has no meaning, and certainly doesn't relate to the above discussion, but I certainly am paying attention to you! See, the exclamation points mean that your attempt to hijack the discussion to feel big about yourself worked!
Now go away. Adults and/or smarter children than you are talking.
Except it's not the bill they're arguing with - it's the readings of the internal engine sensors. It's not arithmetic - it's what a carburetor temperature spike of two degrees means to the long-term functioning of the engine (FYI - I am not a mechanic; these examples are constructed and abstract, rather than actual).
It would be like me, an amateur web programmer, critiquing an operating system kernel. Yes, maybe I'll find an error - but there's a hell of a lot more chance that I'll find something I THINK is an error, that turns out to just be over my head.
To summarize, at no point are we talking about "the bill;" that would potentially be appropriate if we were talking about grant money allocations for climate science. The analogy here refers to the actual process, in this case a high-level analysis of complex climate systems. Trying to sleaze it into some sort of "hur hur mechanics screw ya!" nonsense is just stupid.
Sorry, but I'm not arguing with his science here; I'm arguing with his dubious ethical proposition that, taking as granted man-made global warming, the right thing to do is let it go on and ignore it, because hell, we can afford to survive.
I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to debate you on the science; I'm just taking him to task for his ridiculous social Darwinism.
So, I'm curious - the largely corporate-funded studies "debunking" global warming are legit, while those funded with public money are somehow inherently flawed.
Under what conditions would you believe a scientist who presented findings about man-induced global warming?
And, if that condition is "No money can be involved," then how does the research get done? Science costs money, particularly when you have to gather data over large areas of the world and large periods of time.
Also - so you're saying that a majority of climate scientists are banding together in a conspiracy to defraud the government, and the government is abetting it.... why? Those grants get spent, genius - any added tax revenue gets spent ON THE SCIENCE. I mean, for fuck's sake - if you'd ever worked in Academia, you'd know that ending up with grant money unspent is a PROBLEM; you have to have a lot of justification, and it probably means your grant getting trimmed next year.
Really? I'd be fascinated to know how.
You see, the Emperor's Clothes is a story about the willingness of a crowd to go along with untruths that are socially mandated. This conversation, on the other hand, is about the validity of expert knowledge.
You do realize that your whole argument here is basically "...so fuck the Netherlands!"
Also, I fail to see where "we could survive it" makes "lets just heat up the world for fun" the correct decision. Increasing efficiency and altering our energy-producing technology is a significantly better adaptive strategy than "LET'S BURN ALL THE COAL AND BUILD SOME FUCKING SEAWALLS!"
Also, your understanding of the engineering requirements for whole-country seawalls might need some polishing, buddy.
Just curious - care to back up your broad generalizations about how science in universities works with some credentials, or maybe even actual examples?
Ah, but we only give a good goddamn about thriving ecosystems that are livable for humankind. Furthermore, we'd be pretty pissed about a thriving ecosystem where most of the former coastal regions were under the sea.
Irreversible damage to us is the worst kind of irreversible damage ;-)
Well, I would guess that "liberals" are most concerned with the man-made part of the effect because, oh, I don't know... it's the only part of the effect that can be affected by political processes?
I mean, you're welcome to try lobbying geologic processes, but I think you'd get a lot more done concentrating on things with ears.
And as for DRASTIC AND IMMEDIATE; given the amount of time that it's gotten to get even the current, pansy-ass environmental measures going, I'd say starting early is a fucking requirement if you want to get anything done before Florida is underwater. Not that I'd miss it, but my mom lives there. ;-)
It's much more like this: "Unless you're a priest or other person trained to understand religion, your religious views don't carry particular weight."
Except, it's actually about something based on known principles, facts, and science - so it's really: "Unless you understand how car engines work, you have no business telling me what's wrong with my car."
Which is true.
It may take a climate scientist to do the original research, and to collect those results into a valid analysis - but it's certainly possible to condense and explain the broad results to lay people. That's, in fact, a large part of the rationale behind having these analyses - people who aren't specialists need to make decisions that cover specialist fields all the time. And wildly differing specialist fields interact on a regular basis - that climate scientist might be on a committee with an agriculturalist, and they may both be making decisions and assumptions based on data outside of their fields. It's not perfect, but it's functional.
The issue is that people who aren't even informed second-hand are continually taking one side or the other because of political, religious, or other rationales.
Dude - if your business model is a primary grounds for your acceptance or rejection of a theory, you have a serious fscking problem with your logic skills.
But... but.... the scientists are paid regardless of findings. In fact, given how much big, money-swollen industries want global warming to be false, I'm pretty sure it would pay better.
The real problem here is that you're putting this in terms of beliefs, when, in fact, this situation is about facts. It's perfectly reasonable to be upset with people who, in a factual debate, do the intellectual equivalent of shouting "NUH UH!" and putting their fingers in their ears.
^ is moronic.
I never claimed that it's intellectual suicide to believe in God; in fact, it's not an intellectual decision for most people at all. One's belief in God is a matter of faith, not reason, and I say that as someone without a bias against faith.
What I do say is that ID is not and can never be science. Furthermore, ID is fundamentally dishonest - all it is is an attempt to deceptively repackage creationism to make it easier to subvert public schools to religious ends. Period, end sentence. That is its sole point and reason for existing.
This is a problem for many reasons, in secular terms, it destroys the process of teaching science, and in Christian religious terms, it is immoral. "Thou shalt not bear false witness."
*Note that I put it in Christian terms because, despite nominal involvement from other religions, ID is a fundamentalist Christian movement.
Except that the people suggesting that the big bang happened are saying "Based on the physical evidence, we think this happened." Creationists (because, well, ID == Creationism plus a layer of BS) say that there IS GOD, PERIOD.
One's a hypothesis, the other's a declaration of faith. One is appropriate in a science class, the other in a church.
It's available as an option on Macbook Pros 15" and more, but not on the 13" ones. I think it's ~$50.
I'm curious - if "prescriptivist" grammar isn't valuable, than how would you propose written language be taught, paying specific attention to the problematic requirement of readability and precision between people with different dialects, upbringings, and educations.
Also, a version that doesn't end up with the U.S. speaking in txt-speak would be nice.
In my own experience, this statement is somewhat inaccurate. At minimum, you'll need some level of knowledge of meta-document stuff (author, etc) and you'll need to know enough to choose a style, unless your campus provides a default LaTeX style for documents produced. I know that I had to override several aspects of the standard MLA style in order to produce a document that conformed to my teacher's specifications.
And if we're talking about raw LaTeX, there's a learning process needed for just producing output - given that many of the students coming into these programs won't have ever interacted with a computer through the command line. LyX and other such solutions can ameliorate some of this, but there are still a fair amount of gotchas.
Again, it's not rocket science, and it's not out of the reach of non-technical users; but it's also not the zero-effort instawin that it's being portrayed as. And, given that the main benefits of LaTeX are, as I previously stated, either not germane to the field or not obvious/usable without deeper knowledge, any amount of extra effort is going to kill adoption.
So you mostly agree with him by stating my point? ;-)
LaTeX is a much better piece of software than Word. It's infinitely superior to Word in most presentational aspects; but most of the advantages are immaterial to Literature and Humanities subjects. We don't use many figures or tables, work tends to be single author (this becomes slightly less true on the faculty level, but is still true in the main), and large simple documents of primarily text are much handled much more adroitly by Word than complex documents of any size.
All I'm saying is what you say here - that it's much easier for a non-technical person to just use WYSIWYG, which they've generally already been trained on, than to pick up unrelated technical skills they don't have yet.