The headline says "plants MAY have started glaciation". The summary says "plants created a major ice age". The actual article says that some scientists did some experiments that could potentially indicate that the earliest plants may have been at the root of a positive feedback loop that ended in a major glaciation period. The amount of hedging in the actual article goes so far beyond the statement in the summary that I have to think the summary was deliberately written to mislead.
I look forward to reading years from now how in the teens, scientists were all worried that more plants would turn the earth into an ice ball, and that everyone was told to cut down any green things they find.
So you'd rather live in the times of strife where the poor were abjectly poor (and rather permanently poor), where the rich feared the poor at every turn, and where revolutions were fairly regular? You should put down your rose-colored glasses. Those times sucked for everyone.
Do you know how VC works? It's all about capital investment, with a focus on getting as much out of the invested company as possible, with the destruction of the company being an entirely valid option. If that's how you think the US works.... well I sure hope you're wrong. Furthermore, a president is NOT a CEO. Heck, it's about as far removed from a CEO position as you can possibly get. Do you know what a president can do on his own to influence the economy? He can appoint his man as Chairman of the Fed and put someone in the Treasury department who he trusts. That's it. He doesn't even control the federal budget. State governor has maybe something to do with being President, but no one's hyping Romney's governing of Massachusetts.
Just be careful that the "market" doesn't turn out to be a whole lot of people tired of being poor, sick and with no prospects of moving up taking out their rage on the rich and healthy people who keep talking about how the market will fix everything.
You people ought to investigate why we have a social safety net. Only half of the reason is to protect the poor and the sick. The other half is to protect the rich from the poor getting their pitchforks out.
So yes, it supports what I said that there has been a reversal of opinion. I'm not sure what you are trying to assert.
I'm asserting that you don't read your citations, which is a sign of a terrible scientist. Considering that that particular line, that early in the article, from a place you shouldn't be citing anyway, indicates that Gobal Cooling was never a widely accepted theory of how the climate was going to evolve, I'm right.
My institution prefers people who can argue with reason, rather than ad hominem attacks
You also demonstrate an inability to understand when you're being insulted, and when flaws in your reasoning and problems with your facts are pointed out.
I doubt it would surprise any scientist that policy recommendations have changed over time.
That's almost a truism. However, your list was made up entirely of shrill hyperbole, incorrect assertions and non-sequiturs. Those do not fall under changes in policy recommendations.
What is your specialty, and what do you claim has not happened?
For what it's worth (i.e., very little), computer science and Physics, with publications in both fields. I seem to have at least gotten the ability to properly cite and support my assertions out of it.
Where did you get your PhD - in a box of crackers? You link to Wikipedia (which contradicts you in the third sentence), pop-medical advice books, engage in hyperbole at every turn, and try to expand your authority from your field to areas you have absolutely no clue about. The most damning part really is that every time you link to any source, the actual source at best has a single person advocating your position, but in general states the exact opposite of what you're arguing.
Not to mention that not a single PhD student, post-doc or professor I have ever studied with or worked with referred to themselves as a "scientific insider." While I won't discount the fact that there's an outside chance you actually have a PhD and work in obesity and diabetes research, your citations are so sloppy and your argumentation so full of holes that I'd like to know where you work so I can avoid that place like the plague.
I don't know if you're trolling here, but things get regulated at specific concentrations that are determined to have a significant negative impact on human society. Your method of discussion is to redefine words until you are right. Thanks for playing, though.
Sigh. What a load of crap. 1) Wrong. Never was claimed outside of magazines picking up some hypothetical and highly qualified (i.e. full of could be's and needs more info) journal studies. 2) Wrong. Mammograms are determined to not be required at 35. Different from self-inspection 3) Wrong. Alcohol-based sanitizers are recommended, triclosan ones aren't. 4) I can't even find a reference to that nonsense. Not to mention that it is incredibly unlikely that the reversal happened in 2012 5) The only ones who put SIDS research into such absolute terms are glossy magazines trying to be bought by anxious parents. 6) Wrong. The reason they're not recommended at the level they used to be is the number of false positives. 7) Hyperbole to make a point that didn't exist. Try again. 8) See 7) 9) Wrong year for initial prediction (both author and target) and non sequitur. 10) Hyperbole, non sequitur. 11) Wrong. 12) Hyperbole, and purposeful incorrect attribution of statements.
For someone who is bitching about science, you sure don't have a fucking clue what is going on.
A few hundred years? The argument made in the article is at least 2500 years old. See Plato's cave analogy.
But yes, agreed on the recommendation for this guy to take some philosophy. Few things make me disregard someone's opinion more than rehashes of 2 millenia old philosophical theories being peddled as new.
Actually, wrong again. Read up on ocean acidification, which is a DIRECT result of increases in CO2 concentrations. Furthermore, you're stretching the definition of poisonous to fit your argument. CO is poisonous, just in different concentrations. The problem with all the compounds you mention is their concentration in the atmosphere - which is what everyone is worried about with CO2. No one is concerned that someone, somewhere is emitting CO2. What is worrysome is how much CO2 is being put out by everybody that isn't part of a closed loop.
So you're wrong on both counts. The only thing you are right about is that we do not need to restrict it like we restrict SO2. We need to restrict in entirely different fashions, ways and amounts.
If you're talking about the "climategate" stuff, there was a whole lot of mis-representation of basic scientific research going on. There wasn't a single item of fraud that could be pinned on the published articles that were the topics of the emails. And that's what matters in the end.
You're right, it's not a sophism. But it is completely wrong to enter that into the analysis of the impact of increasing CO2 concentrations on global temperature patterns. Why? Because a) it's part of a closed loop system. Or at least part of a closed loop system that operates on scales we can work with in our lifetime. b) the higher local concentrations are quickly mitigated by the mass of the entire atmosphere.
Look up forcing versus result. Furthermore, look up lifespans of the various compounds in the upper atmosphere. You'll find two things: pretty much everything outside of CO2 is either a result of warmer temperatures or unrelated to it, and CO2 stays up far longer than anything else.
This means that CO2 is more important than the other compounds because it is the only compound that sits inside a positive feedback loop for temperatures, and hangs around in the atmosphere long enough that suddenly stopping to produce it is not going to change its concentration for a couple of generations.
Finally, for an engineer, you're working on a lot of gut reactions. Not much of an engineer, in my opinion.
1. I guess we differ on that, and I'm ok with leaving it there for now. 2. This, however, is a position that always irks me. Yes, both sides have vested interests. However, you're stretching the definition of "vested interest" past the breaking point. For you to find someone who doesn't have a vested interest would require finding someone who is incapable of doing climate research on the necessary scale - which means that the data will be so fundamentally flawed to be useless. Furthermore, I'm not sure what fraud you're talking about. The worst things that have happened in climate research is the use of cherry-picked data, application of bad algorithms or other issues with methodology. Outright fraud - i.e. the direct manipulation of data and misrepresentation of experimental results - is really a very rare occurrence, and has little impact on the other research that is taking place.
It's about what people consider success, and what people strive for in business. I'll illustrate it with two small business stories.
These are not analogies. They are examples. Furthermore, they are two personal examples of which I had first-hand experience. There are plenty of apples-to-apples examples that show the same exact attitude. I just chose to put forward two that I knew very well.
Finally, there's no first-mover or network advantage in boot making. You either make good boots, or you don't. As a result, it is idiotic to argue that a particular business that has been around for a long time has better odds of being around than one that has been around for a short time.
This system will need more oversight than Wikipedia, and a more transparent accounting process. All of which costs money.
But yes, the end result will be that overall, publishing and reading costs will drop dramatically on a worldwide scale.
Finally, a little note on your initial invective: an argument from authority is not by definition wrong. It is often misused, but not wrong by definition. Example: science. An authority drawing on their experience to demonstrate their authority in a field is making a valid argument to support a hypothesis. Countering the argument requires a much more careful presentation of data-driven hypotheses than otherwise.
Or, in other words: "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to be believe?"
Thank you for acknowledging your limitations. It's rare, and it means I now need to hold up my end of the bargain. I'll keep it brief, and high-level.
What we have right now isn't perfect, but it is consisting of small steps in the right direction. Journals are providing a certain amount of vetting that allows researchers to spend more time doing novel research, instead of poring over bad research others are doing. It has problems, in that journals are essentially extracting rents from their monopoly on reputation, which in turn limits distribution of good data.
The monopoly is currently being broken by arxiv, which is undermining the funding of the journals. This is going to not cause problems short-term, because the researchers who have established a reputation for solid work will continue to have that reputation on arxiv. In the long-term, there has to be a mechanism for reputation building that isn't as narrow as the Nobel prizes, or as wide as "I got money to fund the research behind this paper".
At some point, I expect there to be the equivalent of a social network for publishing, that still consists of peer review. I'm pretty sure that in the end, it will end up very much like Slashdot or Wikipedia: a set of articles generally visible that have been approved by the set of recommended peer reviewers. Who gets to be peer reviewer is a thorny problem, and I suspect we will stick for a while with the system of author-suggested peer approvers. The un-approved articles are freely browsable. There will be a system for commenting on each article. There will be a system for rating an article - most likely some kind of rating based on initial assessment of the reviewers, the amount of references in other peer-approved articles, as well as the importance of the people doing the rating.
There will be the problem of funding this system. NAS? Ads? Donations? Contributions from institutions that submit papers to it? Maintenance, abuse of rating system and clique establishment will always be a problem. It won't even be as transparent as you like. But anyone can publish, data is freely accessible, and the peer review system is alive.
That's the best you can hope for, because everything else basically means you're drowning in data. How does it go? The best way to hide a diamond is in a pile of glass.
One major difference I can tell you that exists between the US and Germany: scope of thinking. And no, not long-term vs short-term. It's about what people consider success, and what people strive for in business. I'll illustrate it with two small business stories.
Scene: Munich, Germany. 300 year old apartment building with a shop on the ground floor. The shop is a custom boot maker.... who got started about 300 years ago. It's still the same shop, it still makes custom boots, and it has been family owned ever since it got started. Not always the same family, but it's a family business, and doing well enough to support a family for the last 300 years. The current owner has no interest in expanding, of offering funky colors, outsourcing manufacturing to China, or to establish a brand and open branded stores. He just wants to make boots and support his family doing so. Heck, he still works with custom-built wooden boot molds to make his boots, some of which are as old as the shop.
Scene: Silicon Valley, USA. A friend is starting an online business. It's very niche, but it's pretty much the only one of its kind, with pretty much a monopoly on the market and an owner who knows the market like the back of her hand. She is talking to one of her friends, who is an architect at a very large, very successful, pre-IPO startup. Who proceeds to tell her that unless she is going to take on loans and VCs and try to take over the world in the next two years, she is just engaging in a hobby and might as well call it quits.
Guess who is going to be around in a hundred years? My money's on the bootmaker.
Yes, it could be like Minitel. Shudder. DARPA worked magic in the case of the Internet, and it certainly didn't have to be as awesome as it turned out to be.
But I am a human being. I know how humans work. Scientists can't escape their own humanity or the inherent weaknesses of human social structures.
I'll ignore for a second the fallacy that belonging to a group means you automatically know how it works. But, the sentiment is largely correct. But if you make suggestions for improvement, please make sure you understand the field you're commenting on.
Keep a log of all rejected papers, who, what, when, and why... and another record for accepted papers listing the same criteria... and I am content. You could do it with a spread sheet or a ledger. I don't need anything fancy here. Just a record open to all.
Please read what you wrote again. And then compare it to your own record keeping. And then note your requirement "open to all". What you listed is neither simple, nor easy, nor straightforward to track, nor quick to implement or process.
The problem with a free forum is signal to noise. It would have to have some kind of reputation system, such as scientists rating/flagging each other's contributions. That way, you could add some respected scientists to your 'trusted' list, and things that they trust would be highlighted/promoted to you. Essentially a web of trust model. This has obvious downsides, such as scalability and the inherent formation of cliques and the like.
Those who do not understand the Slashdot moderation system are doomed to reinvent it.
Slashdot Mirror
The headline says "plants MAY have started glaciation". The summary says "plants created a major ice age". The actual article says that some scientists did some experiments that could potentially indicate that the earliest plants may have been at the root of a positive feedback loop that ended in a major glaciation period. The amount of hedging in the actual article goes so far beyond the statement in the summary that I have to think the summary was deliberately written to mislead.
I look forward to reading years from now how in the teens, scientists were all worried that more plants would turn the earth into an ice ball, and that everyone was told to cut down any green things they find.
So you'd rather live in the times of strife where the poor were abjectly poor (and rather permanently poor), where the rich feared the poor at every turn, and where revolutions were fairly regular? You should put down your rose-colored glasses. Those times sucked for everyone.
Do you know how VC works? It's all about capital investment, with a focus on getting as much out of the invested company as possible, with the destruction of the company being an entirely valid option. If that's how you think the US works.... well I sure hope you're wrong. Furthermore, a president is NOT a CEO. Heck, it's about as far removed from a CEO position as you can possibly get. Do you know what a president can do on his own to influence the economy? He can appoint his man as Chairman of the Fed and put someone in the Treasury department who he trusts. That's it. He doesn't even control the federal budget. State governor has maybe something to do with being President, but no one's hyping Romney's governing of Massachusetts.
Just be careful that the "market" doesn't turn out to be a whole lot of people tired of being poor, sick and with no prospects of moving up taking out their rage on the rich and healthy people who keep talking about how the market will fix everything.
You people ought to investigate why we have a social safety net. Only half of the reason is to protect the poor and the sick. The other half is to protect the rich from the poor getting their pitchforks out.
He might know PDEs, but what does running a VC firm have to do with being qualified to be president? The two have almost nothing in common.
So yes, it supports what I said that there has been a reversal of opinion. I'm not sure what you are trying to assert.
I'm asserting that you don't read your citations, which is a sign of a terrible scientist. Considering that that particular line, that early in the article, from a place you shouldn't be citing anyway, indicates that Gobal Cooling was never a widely accepted theory of how the climate was going to evolve, I'm right.
My institution prefers people who can argue with reason, rather than ad hominem attacks
You also demonstrate an inability to understand when you're being insulted, and when flaws in your reasoning and problems with your facts are pointed out.
I doubt it would surprise any scientist that policy recommendations have changed over time.
That's almost a truism. However, your list was made up entirely of shrill hyperbole, incorrect assertions and non-sequiturs. Those do not fall under changes in policy recommendations.
What is your specialty, and what do you claim has not happened?
For what it's worth (i.e., very little), computer science and Physics, with publications in both fields. I seem to have at least gotten the ability to properly cite and support my assertions out of it.
Where did you get your PhD - in a box of crackers? You link to Wikipedia (which contradicts you in the third sentence), pop-medical advice books, engage in hyperbole at every turn, and try to expand your authority from your field to areas you have absolutely no clue about. The most damning part really is that every time you link to any source, the actual source at best has a single person advocating your position, but in general states the exact opposite of what you're arguing.
Not to mention that not a single PhD student, post-doc or professor I have ever studied with or worked with referred to themselves as a "scientific insider." While I won't discount the fact that there's an outside chance you actually have a PhD and work in obesity and diabetes research, your citations are so sloppy and your argumentation so full of holes that I'd like to know where you work so I can avoid that place like the plague.
I don't know if you're trolling here, but things get regulated at specific concentrations that are determined to have a significant negative impact on human society. Your method of discussion is to redefine words until you are right. Thanks for playing, though.
Sigh. What a load of crap.
1) Wrong. Never was claimed outside of magazines picking up some hypothetical and highly qualified (i.e. full of could be's and needs more info) journal studies.
2) Wrong. Mammograms are determined to not be required at 35. Different from self-inspection
3) Wrong. Alcohol-based sanitizers are recommended, triclosan ones aren't.
4) I can't even find a reference to that nonsense. Not to mention that it is incredibly unlikely that the reversal happened in 2012
5) The only ones who put SIDS research into such absolute terms are glossy magazines trying to be bought by anxious parents.
6) Wrong. The reason they're not recommended at the level they used to be is the number of false positives.
7) Hyperbole to make a point that didn't exist. Try again.
8) See 7)
9) Wrong year for initial prediction (both author and target) and non sequitur.
10) Hyperbole, non sequitur.
11) Wrong.
12) Hyperbole, and purposeful incorrect attribution of statements.
For someone who is bitching about science, you sure don't have a fucking clue what is going on.
A few hundred years? The argument made in the article is at least 2500 years old. See Plato's cave analogy.
But yes, agreed on the recommendation for this guy to take some philosophy. Few things make me disregard someone's opinion more than rehashes of 2 millenia old philosophical theories being peddled as new.
No worries. I'll just take it under advisement that such a thing may exist. If you do find sources, please post.
Actually, wrong again. Read up on ocean acidification, which is a DIRECT result of increases in CO2 concentrations. Furthermore, you're stretching the definition of poisonous to fit your argument. CO is poisonous, just in different concentrations. The problem with all the compounds you mention is their concentration in the atmosphere - which is what everyone is worried about with CO2. No one is concerned that someone, somewhere is emitting CO2. What is worrysome is how much CO2 is being put out by everybody that isn't part of a closed loop.
So you're wrong on both counts. The only thing you are right about is that we do not need to restrict it like we restrict SO2. We need to restrict in entirely different fashions, ways and amounts.
If you're talking about the "climategate" stuff, there was a whole lot of mis-representation of basic scientific research going on. There wasn't a single item of fraud that could be pinned on the published articles that were the topics of the emails. And that's what matters in the end.
You're right, it's not a sophism. But it is completely wrong to enter that into the analysis of the impact of increasing CO2 concentrations on global temperature patterns. Why? Because
a) it's part of a closed loop system. Or at least part of a closed loop system that operates on scales we can work with in our lifetime.
b) the higher local concentrations are quickly mitigated by the mass of the entire atmosphere.
Look up forcing versus result. Furthermore, look up lifespans of the various compounds in the upper atmosphere. You'll find two things: pretty much everything outside of CO2 is either a result of warmer temperatures or unrelated to it, and CO2 stays up far longer than anything else.
This means that CO2 is more important than the other compounds because it is the only compound that sits inside a positive feedback loop for temperatures, and hangs around in the atmosphere long enough that suddenly stopping to produce it is not going to change its concentration for a couple of generations.
Finally, for an engineer, you're working on a lot of gut reactions. Not much of an engineer, in my opinion.
1. I guess we differ on that, and I'm ok with leaving it there for now.
2. This, however, is a position that always irks me. Yes, both sides have vested interests. However, you're stretching the definition of "vested interest" past the breaking point. For you to find someone who doesn't have a vested interest would require finding someone who is incapable of doing climate research on the necessary scale - which means that the data will be so fundamentally flawed to be useless. Furthermore, I'm not sure what fraud you're talking about. The worst things that have happened in climate research is the use of cherry-picked data, application of bad algorithms or other issues with methodology. Outright fraud - i.e. the direct manipulation of data and misrepresentation of experimental results - is really a very rare occurrence, and has little impact on the other research that is taking place.
It's a blog, but it has a few more informative links in it: http://desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7817
Reading comprehension. Get it.
It's about what people consider success, and what people strive for in business. I'll illustrate it with two small business stories.
These are not analogies. They are examples. Furthermore, they are two personal examples of which I had first-hand experience. There are plenty of apples-to-apples examples that show the same exact attitude. I just chose to put forward two that I knew very well.
Finally, there's no first-mover or network advantage in boot making. You either make good boots, or you don't. As a result, it is idiotic to argue that a particular business that has been around for a long time has better odds of being around than one that has been around for a short time.
I think you need LESS coffee.
This system will need more oversight than Wikipedia, and a more transparent accounting process. All of which costs money.
But yes, the end result will be that overall, publishing and reading costs will drop dramatically on a worldwide scale.
Finally, a little note on your initial invective: an argument from authority is not by definition wrong. It is often misused, but not wrong by definition. Example: science. An authority drawing on their experience to demonstrate their authority in a field is making a valid argument to support a hypothesis. Countering the argument requires a much more careful presentation of data-driven hypotheses than otherwise.
Or, in other words: "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to be believe?"
Thank you for acknowledging your limitations. It's rare, and it means I now need to hold up my end of the bargain. I'll keep it brief, and high-level.
What we have right now isn't perfect, but it is consisting of small steps in the right direction. Journals are providing a certain amount of vetting that allows researchers to spend more time doing novel research, instead of poring over bad research others are doing. It has problems, in that journals are essentially extracting rents from their monopoly on reputation, which in turn limits distribution of good data.
The monopoly is currently being broken by arxiv, which is undermining the funding of the journals. This is going to not cause problems short-term, because the researchers who have established a reputation for solid work will continue to have that reputation on arxiv. In the long-term, there has to be a mechanism for reputation building that isn't as narrow as the Nobel prizes, or as wide as "I got money to fund the research behind this paper".
At some point, I expect there to be the equivalent of a social network for publishing, that still consists of peer review. I'm pretty sure that in the end, it will end up very much like Slashdot or Wikipedia: a set of articles generally visible that have been approved by the set of recommended peer reviewers. Who gets to be peer reviewer is a thorny problem, and I suspect we will stick for a while with the system of author-suggested peer approvers. The un-approved articles are freely browsable. There will be a system for commenting on each article. There will be a system for rating an article - most likely some kind of rating based on initial assessment of the reviewers, the amount of references in other peer-approved articles, as well as the importance of the people doing the rating.
There will be the problem of funding this system. NAS? Ads? Donations? Contributions from institutions that submit papers to it? Maintenance, abuse of rating system and clique establishment will always be a problem. It won't even be as transparent as you like. But anyone can publish, data is freely accessible, and the peer review system is alive.
That's the best you can hope for, because everything else basically means you're drowning in data. How does it go? The best way to hide a diamond is in a pile of glass.
One major difference I can tell you that exists between the US and Germany: scope of thinking. And no, not long-term vs short-term. It's about what people consider success, and what people strive for in business. I'll illustrate it with two small business stories.
Scene: Munich, Germany. 300 year old apartment building with a shop on the ground floor. The shop is a custom boot maker.... who got started about 300 years ago. It's still the same shop, it still makes custom boots, and it has been family owned ever since it got started. Not always the same family, but it's a family business, and doing well enough to support a family for the last 300 years. The current owner has no interest in expanding, of offering funky colors, outsourcing manufacturing to China, or to establish a brand and open branded stores. He just wants to make boots and support his family doing so. Heck, he still works with custom-built wooden boot molds to make his boots, some of which are as old as the shop.
Scene: Silicon Valley, USA. A friend is starting an online business. It's very niche, but it's pretty much the only one of its kind, with pretty much a monopoly on the market and an owner who knows the market like the back of her hand. She is talking to one of her friends, who is an architect at a very large, very successful, pre-IPO startup. Who proceeds to tell her that unless she is going to take on loans and VCs and try to take over the world in the next two years, she is just engaging in a hobby and might as well call it quits.
Guess who is going to be around in a hundred years? My money's on the bootmaker.
Yes, it could be like Minitel. Shudder. DARPA worked magic in the case of the Internet, and it certainly didn't have to be as awesome as it turned out to be.
I am not a scientist.
But I am a human being. I know how humans work. Scientists can't escape their own humanity or the inherent weaknesses of human social structures.
I'll ignore for a second the fallacy that belonging to a group means you automatically know how it works. But, the sentiment is largely correct. But if you make suggestions for improvement, please make sure you understand the field you're commenting on.
Keep a log of all rejected papers, who, what, when, and why... and another record for accepted papers listing the same criteria... and I am content. You could do it with a spread sheet or a ledger. I don't need anything fancy here. Just a record open to all.
Please read what you wrote again. And then compare it to your own record keeping. And then note your requirement "open to all". What you listed is neither simple, nor easy, nor straightforward to track, nor quick to implement or process.
The problem with a free forum is signal to noise. It would have to have some kind of reputation system, such as scientists rating/flagging each other's contributions. That way, you could add some respected scientists to your 'trusted' list, and things that they trust would be highlighted/promoted to you. Essentially a web of trust model. This has obvious downsides, such as scalability and the inherent formation of cliques and the like.
Those who do not understand the Slashdot moderation system are doomed to reinvent it.