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Comment by chapill | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this problem, but I wouldn't call it a reputation age as much as I would call it an opinion age. People form strong opinions about which they've done no personal study based on the Appeal to Authority logical fallacy.

Take author's moon landing example. If you really care, there are mirrors on the moon. If you want to know we've been there or not, you can devise an experiment, fire a laser at those mirrors, and get a reflected beam back.

People now call things like "climate change" a science (and it's settled!), without doing the fundamental thing science requires: An experiment with a control group. Climate models are statistical correlation, not an experiment with a control group. It is not proof of causality.

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I see it a little differently. I think the world has just gotten too big to comprehend.

In a small town, you could conceivably have firsthand knowledge of every restaurant and person you see each day. As we trade and communicate over longer and longer distances, we rely more on the opinions of things like Zagat/Yelp, intermediaries like booking/expedia, etc. These intermediaries are becoming extremely powerful as growing numbers rely on them, and all business is transacted globally.

In "the olden days", perhaps you could be just good at a craft. Now it feels like every single person has to play this elaborate reputational game, down to the level of individual careers, etc. I think it's always been like this in the law profession but it's spreading to everything as more of what we do is traded.

Blog post on this topic: https://blog.shortbar.com/the-end-of-the-country-developer-7...

If the models have parameters which are tuned purely based on data available up until a certain point in time, and can predict outcomes based on data that is observed after that point in time, then those models can be said to be good predictors.

For example, if a model is trained to calculate the average Earth surface temperature based on recorded CO2 levels up to the year 2000, and then it correctly predicts the average surface temperature of all subsequent years, with just the CO2 levels as input, that would be a very helpful model for deciding what would be a safe level of CO2 to have in the atmosphere if we want the Earth's temperature to have less than some particular amount of warming.

Except that it doesn't work for them. They have continually changed their models to predict the current behavior. They even started calling it "climate change" instead of "global warming" because of that.

To be clear: I'm not saying it isn't happening. (It is.) I'm not saying it's not caused by humans. (I think it probably is.) I'm saying that they have been terrible at proving anything. Everything from modifying the data and then deleting the original data to creating models that fail to predict the future.

These discussions devolve quickly when you use the word "they" as if scientists, politicians, etc are all one big group of people. The same thing occurs when people talk about big tech, big business, politicians, advertisers, homeless people, etc.

My point is that there is no "they" so assigning behavior makes to "them" makes it impossible to counter-argue. You say they did it, but you can't even define they, so how would I prove they didn't do that?

(Which is related to the article - "they" doesn't have a reputation, except for the negative one you just insinuated on the spot)

I don't know which "they" you think changed from calling it "global warming" to "climate change", but the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been pretty consistent in its name for the past 30 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

>If the models

If? I believe you just told me that you didn't build the model yourself. You're validating my statements from your first word. This is my point. It's the information equivalent of hearsay.

Science might not have a perfect understanding of Earth’s climate, but that really isn’t the point. The point is we can detect when humans are behaving in ways that make Earth less hospitable for humans and we can then choose to behave differently. Air quality in Los Angeles is one practical example. We’re not perfect, but we also stopped aggressively poisoning ourselves.

https://www.kcet.org/history-society/how-los-angeles-began-t...

It was always people's opinions but the author is arguing that people's opinions used to based more off of information closest to the matter at hand, but now people's opinions are based more off of reputation of the one claiming the opinion.

'science' is not defined as 'experimenting with control groups'.

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