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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

To my mind, articles like these are why wikipedia can be invaluable at taking together disparate facts into a cohesive whole. If you were to experience this on 2024 twitter, you would get random snippets from any of the 151 sources in the article and people ready to argue and troll you all day with their idiosyncratic interpretations, communicated through a blizzard of insults, subject changes, and self-congratulation.

The missing skill is being able to focus to fit one-off details into big-picture context, and communication styles based on exchanges of small snippets are good at spreading misinformation because they prevent the big picture cohesion from getting off the ground.

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.... but there are number of pearls which are not ambiguous or context dependent at all. They are blatant. Whether we like it or not, even science is a human endeavor, corrupted by human motivations (not excluding prestige, group-think, belonging, etc). This blatant admission of using political position to influence what is or is not science (rather than the facts alone) is not available in the normalized and disinfected summary on wiki.

"Who can forget Phil Jones writing to Michael Mann on 8 July 2004 ‘can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/07/hacked-c...)

I mean this is exactly what I'm talking about. Let's take the wiki article, and lets take your comment, and tell me which of the two would give the average person a more accurate overall assessment of what really happened with Climategate? And if its the former, then to what end are you offering the latter? It's this kind of question that is critical for media literacy imo.

I don't love playing fast and loose on a particular paper, but (1) I don't fault them for not wanting climate skeptics to be able to launder the prestige of being published in the IPCC to lend credibility denier narratives, (2) nothing about this changes the IPCC conclusion or the underlying reality of global warming and (3) if all you present is this one-off without context, it serves to spread the false impression that climate science writ large is uncertain.

Spreading that form of uncertainty without the benefit of context serves the purpose of spreading misinformation. That's the topline, and losing track of that topline is a failure in media literacy.

It seems you are with rationalizing politics to decide the science, especially if you disagree with it; at least based on your points. Regarding 3) I did not attempt to make any larger point on climate science as such (only on climategate itself); These blatant statements simply unethical and unscientific attitudes of the leading manufactures of climate consent. These have well known context, and no need to re-interpret them.

If we stick to the climategate issue rather than commenting on our beliefs in validity of climate science as represented by the conclusions in the IPCC reports; again, these statements are standing on their own as a witness on the attitude of those authors which you cannot get from the sanitized wiki article.

> (1) I don't fault them for not wanting climate skeptics to be able to launder the prestige of being published in the IPCC to lend credibility denier narratives

Yikes. Suppressing scientific skepticism has always gone so well in the past.

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