Topic: Public Perception of Science (Read 4054 times)

I wouldn't visit venice if I were you. Its just a huge rat maze.

This one's pretty easy.  Lets begin an experiment by opening our eyes.  Perhaps we can see asphalt, dams, buildings, agricultural land?  Roads?  Houses?  That's all due to humans.  Now adjust the "climate control" knob and notice the effect in your room.. so I think you will agree, humans can affect our climate. 

The interesting questions are in the details.  How fast are our species becoming extinct and what does it mean for our survival?  What is all this extra CO2 in the air going to do?  How much longer can we visit Venice?  By what date will middle USA be a desert?  Could we reverse that trend?  What changes will occur in the oceans that will affect us now that we have killed off almost all the large fish?   


You gotta love people who claim they don't believe in evolution.  Literally this means you don't believe that time passes.  Actually things move, the Earth rotates, things change, and it's called evolution.  Life changes, it can be observed on short time scales in the lab or the greenhouse or on large time scales by looking at the fossil record.

There are certainly many puzzing questions and mysteries about biological evolution, but I feel this is a rant already  

I really like that post  . .  That is  awesome ..    

ok:

Where do I make any claims about climate science in general? This thread is about public perception of science and what the determinants are. If you don't wish to talk about that please explain why?

Furthermore, I judge you as having very limited knowledge about climate science in general, as evident by your own admission of having no general knowledge of things going in the natural world - for example, the record breaking ice melt in the Arctic this year.

In the EDIT I made to my post, I may have answered the question to you for you.

If we get past the rhetoric, that is an interesting question. I will answer it if you answer the OP.

What do you think are your most grievous assumptions and most flagrant errors or oversights that you make in your quest (based on your bias resulting from your political ideology) to pinpoint tiny things which might reduce the credibility of climate science? As you like to come off as someone who claims to be objective, I would hope, but don't have much faith, that you could report on these.

EDIT: I'll be honest here. I think you have an agenda combined with a lack of commons sense. Add to that a mix of selective cherry picking on datasets and you get worthless speculation. I judge your agenda based on posts you've made about governments. I judge your lack of common sense based on continued posts you made in a year old thread. And I judge your cherry picking by the obvious evidence of your personal selection of only a very few datasets.

You could, but it may be time consuming and expensive. Lets take a simple example, convince yourself (or at least design experiments you can plausibly do at home) that gravity has anything to do with mass without any circular logic. Its actually a good exercise for realizing the confusing web of theory, data, and logic that scientists rely on in reality. There are hidden assumptions everywhere. Usually they are recognized by the original proponents, then moved to footnotes by later authors, and finally forgotten altogether leading to "laws".

Also there are many who argue that much of what is commonly taken as "science" is actually not due to the fact that scientists often try to "disprove" strawman null hypotheses rather than disprove (or even make any) predictions.

The above is more crap from the deniers' playbook. Tell me myrkul, if I keep showing that your shit isn't even worth shit, will you shut up with your FUD? Recall your claim about melting ice caps?

Now it's crap from you about a consensus from scientists about an impending ice age in the '70s. You sir, are a brainwashed fool who eats up everything you can from politically motivated sites, rather than scientific sites. I feel sorry for you, because you seem to have a high IQ - but poorly utilized.

Here are some people who will explain it for you.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Bright-Green/2009/0728/were-they-really-predicting-an-ice-age-in-the-1970s

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/the-1970s-ice-age-9-myth/

It appears you think that theories that account for facts that people can't easily observe are worthless? This would be a large majority of the work I do every day and let me assure you that when I diagnose a neonate with a hearing loss, a neonate which is then given early intervention, it makes a huge impact on their life. Even if you don't understand the technology by which I make the diagnosis or the theories underpinning it.

It's nice that evolution is so easily understood by lay-people. But this is an exception, not the rule. Most discoveries that I read about as part of my job would not be understandable by most people outside my field. However, they do have a significant impact on the world.

Don't mistake your inability to understand climate change (don't feel bad, I don't understand it either) with a climate scientists inability to understand climate change. Don't just assume that because you don't fully comprehend something then the people involved must be obfuscating, and involved in some nefarious political conspiracy. I certainly am not.

Is this like the relationship between CFC output and depletion of the ozone layer? You know, where the EPA, and then finally the Montreal Protocol reduced CFC output. All those damned money grubbing scientists getting grants from the nasty governments, showing the detrimental effects of CFCs, and then, god forbid, the passing of regulations which, ahem, reduced CFC production?

Sounds exactly the same to me.

http://www.theozonehole.com/montreal.htm

The vast majority of "the public" lacks the intelligence to understand the intricacies of the Scientific Method, let alone be able to detect when it is improperly used. To them, "Scientist" is a title that commands respect, deference... and obedience - the New Priesthood.

Evolution is a theory that accounts for facts that anyone can observe - that is, the abundance of life on earth. Humans are here, along with monkeys, birds, snails, insects, trees, mold, bacteria, etc. The religious assertion had always been that "God" just *poofed* all our ancestors into being in some cosmic fart, and that is how we all got here. Evolution, however, provides a simple physical processes for generating the biodiversity we observe - eliminating the impetus to accept a supernatural explanation.

"Anthropogenic global warming", on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. It began as speculation in search of facts, or put another way, a bias in search of confirmation. It doesn't seek to explain a past, but to predict a future. It also has the unfortunate feature of being a warped political justification for increased wealth confiscation - something all States fundamentally seek to gain. And wouldn't you know it; the State is the single biggest provider of grants and funding research (confirmatory only) into the potential goldmine. "The end is nigh... unless you pay up!"

People forget that even Galileo recanted when he saw what the political apparatus had in store for him. Nowadays that lesson is lost while the threats are much more subtle - public ridicule, loss of funding... being "blackballed" for anything less than fully-endorsing a politically-backed consensus. One minute you're in the game; a 'respected scientist' and the next minute you're a joke who will be mocked by the media and shunned from academia. Written off as a kook on par with flat-earthers and republicans.

In other words, the observation and scientific discovery surrounding evolution is orders of magnitude above the statistical shenanigans that support AGW. They are no more alike than dermatology and phrenology.

That's my observation. 

No idea if anybody thought of this before, but how about just apply the scientific-method ? Essentially what im suggesting here, is to do opposite of what unscientific "career-scientists" such as Richard Dawkins is doing.

This> You try to prove wrong whatever you tried to believe. = science
Not this> You try to prove whatever you believe to be right. = religion

Like in most other sciences, most people don't understand evolutionary theory.  People feel these concepts are easy to understand, but scientists devote a significant amount of their lives to understand these things, and most of the time they are wrong.  If you ask people's opinion of theoretical quantum physics and most people will say "oh I don't understand that stuff."  If you ask them their opinion about climate change or evolution, then they have the answer.

It pisses me off these ignorant people that claim they can understand these complex topics and yet have no idea how to run a statistical test.  They post links to articles that they them self could never reproduce.  "Hey this paper is peer-reviewed, and it says that XXX is not true."  Wow, now can you explain each statistical test of their data that they did?  Did they remove any data points, if so why?

I once met a guy that asked what I do.  I told him I was an evolutionary biologist.  This guy had the nerve to tell me, "Oh I read this book by this scientist, Dr. Bebe, that said evolution was not real."

My reply was, "Wow, that is interesting, what do you do for a living?"

He said, "I am a musician."

"You know music doesn't exist, right, it is just noise in the air?"



While I sympathize with the person that said this, nevertheless, it is a very incorrect statement.  Darwin didn't prove anything.  He laid out a hypothesis with evidence based on morphological data.  He had no idea what hereditary factors that was required.  A few decades later biologists and statisticians combined Mendel and Darwin's theories which now allowed for a genetic ability for change.

This is what is wrong with trying to educate non-scientists.  They have a preconceived bias and they read other reports that fulfill this bias.  There is a deeper reason why people take beliefs and it has nothing to do with the scientific method.  It is based on emotion.

Darwin's theory was not enough though because biologists did not understand the concept of mutation.  The true hero of evolution is Motoo Kimura who developed the neutral theory of evolution that proved mathematically that most changes at the DNA level is have neutral effects.  Unlike Darwin that said that these characteristics of living systems arise due to their beneficial nature.  Kimura, on the other hand, explained that these characteristics arose because of neutral mutations and genetic drift.  Genetic drift is the change in gene frequencies overtime due to random sampling.

What is important about Kimura's theory is that it allows for the possibility of Darwin's theory to be tested.  Before, Darwin's theory was just a proof-in-concept.  It was just an idea that had never been tested.  It would be like if the bitcoin white paper was published 100 years ago.  Sure the concept could work, but no one could make it work because we didn't have the necessary tools to make it work.  Kimura's theory now allowed evolutionary adaptation to be a testable hypothesis.  For example of some tests that allow for this see the the McDonald-Kreitman test and the Ka/Ks ratio.

Sorry, been on holidays and afk for a while.

I'm still coming to terms with your ideas - PM me?

Evolution is true because it has been proven and demonstrated through hypothesis and experiment to be true through several papers and scientific experiments.

As to whether climate change is a natural occurrence or man-made, I do not know because most of the evidence is correlative, not causative.

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/false-cause

The burden of proof lies with the person who asserts a hypothesis, and thus, the default is to be skeptical and not necessarily believe any hypothesis that is not proven.

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

However, just because of the correlative fallacy, this doesn't mean that the assertion is false. There may come a day when there is better evidence or there may be evidence I am not aware of that can prove that climate change is caused by man.

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy

As to your mention of personal experience that proved evolution to you, I can read medical or scientific papers about other people's experiences and studies that are properly performed and then benefit from the knowledge they have garnered without experiencing the event first-hand.

So.. what did you think of this OoC? Is it worth moving forward with? The code is actually really inefficient now but may be worth fixing up and publishing.

Expand it to ANOVAS and if my preliminary results hold it will mean far worse for scientists who assume normal distributions, etc when drawing conclusions from data.

It really is possible that the last 50 years of science has been "experts" measuring their own opinions.