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Comment by gesticulator | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Pielke’s credentials are a BS in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Political Science. Regardless of what you think of his points, he presents himself very much as a climate scientist in these slides, yet I don’t think that he really is one. There may be more to this than just some ties to Wikileaks, does any one else that studies the climate take him seriously?

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I think he fairly represent his credentials. Looking at his list of publications [1], he has several publications in venues like Climate Change, Weather Forecast, and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Most of his work is clearly on climate policy (including publications in Nature and Science on policy), however, and not strictly climate science.

[1] https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/publications/searchResult...

Fair enough! I was not familiar with his background, and found him more partisan than the innocent kid studying the effects of the climate on hurricanes after googling :)

You don't end up at NCAR doing post-doc work if you don't have a good handle on climate science.

IIRC Jeff Sessions, former GOP senator and not a scientist, quoted him extensively for congressional hearings for climate skeptics' point of view to oppose the US government panel on climate change. He complains here on twitter about extreme politics so that should make politics fair game in the discussion here - but isn't climate change denial only seriously brought up in the USA/UK by conservatives and fossil fuel company representatives (same thing a lot of the time)?

Credentialism is one of the worst forms of intellectual laziness. Judge a person's ideas by their quality, not the piece of paper some institution saw fit to sign.

Some institutions may have significant expertise on a subject where you don't, making such credentials occasionally very useful.

Occasionally very useful? It’s crazy useful, like when you go to an accounting firm, law firm, or medical firm, who will also judge credentials on your behalf anyway. We are all enjoying the bounties of this productive prejudice. Even mathematicians will judge.

That’s exactly the point and why it’s laziness. If you lack the knowledge to judge someone’s work then intellectual honesty requires foregoing an opinion on its quality. Saying “well I don’t understand, but his degree doesn’t have climate in its name so he must not know what he’s talking about” is gross laziness. And if you do have the expertise to accurately judge the work in question, then it stands or falls on its own and the credentials don’t matter.

> requires foregoing an opinion on its quality

So how do you decide whom to rely on for medical care? Surely you don’t just roll a die.

This is actually something I have a serious problem with, especially considering the prevalence of iatrogenic injuries. For some reason doctors don't list actual useful metrics that could help with decision making, like how many people they've accidentally killed or maimed, how many times they've failed to win malpractice suits, and how much time they spend with a patient on average per visit to name just a few examples. There's an old joke that makes fun of medical credentialism: Q: What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom of the class in med school? A: Doctor.

The same goes for hiring a lawyer. How do I know that I'm getting a good one? Is the one whose daddy paid his way into Stanford really better than the striver who worked his way through some second tier law school? At least with a lawyer I have some ability to judge his verbal intelligence through conversation, but I'm still basically blind as to his actual legal ability.

So you tell me, what's the foolproof technique to hire a top decile professional in a field where you aren't equipped to judge the candidate's quality?

Perhaps I have some meta-expertise on judging the correlation between credentials and credibility.

Exclusive first-hand observation is a cripplingly restrictive epistemology. Even much of our own first-hand expertise is based on us learning from and believing sources, professors, textbooks etc.

Expertise isn't one of those words that metas all that well. Expert tends to sound a lot more, well, expert, than meta-expert. If someone tried to reassure me by saying that they were a meta-expert, I'd probably try and shoo them out of the building with a broom before they damaged anything.

You have some meta expertise? Have you studied industrial or organizational business and psych literature? You should just come out and say it, as opposed to hinting that you have mysterious credibility.

The first paragraph should probably have had a /sarcasm tag. To rephrase with less snark, I don't believe anyone can become an expert without trusting prior experts.

Excellent point, I'll be back in 8 years once I've got my PhD in climatology so that I can personally assess this person's ideas rather than trusting some well established educational institution's say-so.

Edit: But wait, just because I'd have the credentials doesn't mean I'd know what I'm talking about! To assume so would be intellectually lazy!

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