Hacker News Reader

Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

It's strange to me that in places full of smart people, it seems to be well understood that this happens and there are lots of anecdotes relating to it; yet the same people will be confused that their political adversaries don't trust "the science" on one issue or another.

Maybe it's the scientists they don't trust?

View on HN

That’s the beautiful thing about science: You do not have to (and should not) trust any individual. And even if you don’t trust “the consensus” of “the scientific community”, you can empirically verify yourself.

Once you move from abstract to practical - like say having legislators or regulators make rules based on The Science, or relying personally on more facts than you have time to independently verify - yes you do need to have trustworthy people.

Can ordinary civilians feasibly measure, for example, global trends in mean temperature without relying on the data of others?

This is a common misconception in discussions about scientific fraud. You don't have to be able to do a thing correctly to detect when it's being done incorrectly.

You shouldn't trust any claims by scientists about global trends in mean temperatures. We can say this with confidence, without being able to compute a better timeseries, by just looking to see if the basics of the scientific method are being followed by those who do it. If we do that check we find that they don't follow the scientific method. Specifically, they edit past observations to bring them into line with theory instead of deriving theory from data believed to be robust.

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

No, but the literature is open for you to read. Thus you can judge the stated reasoning for yourself. You can also assess how many independent groups are making the same (or closely related) claim.

If only one person claims X then it might be fraud. If large numbers of seemingly unrelated people all claim X then you're forced to decide between X and a global conspiracy to misrepresent X.

To your example. Importantly, even if you deemed one of the global mean temperature datasets to be untrustworthy there are other related (but different) datasets. There are also other pieces of evidence related to the downstream claims that don't look directly at temperature.

Are you going to build a competitor to CERN?

There are many things that cannot be feasibly verified empirically without access to rare resources.

I think it's difficult to relay to the public that a lot of this noise in "scientific publications" is not the same category as real research by reputable institutions. Yes, in certain cases the line can be blurry, fraudsters are sometimes caught in big-name institutions, maybe more in some fields than others, but serious researchers of the field know very well which publication venues and research groups are the real deal and what is bullshit. Overwhelmingly, these fraud papers and nonsense LLM-generated fake stuff are not published in serious journals or conferences.

It's a bit like how can we trust online shopping if I get all these emails trying to sell me aphrodisiac pills?

the "political adversaries" (let's not be coy, you mean conservatives) who "don't trust 'the science'" are less equipped to evaluate said "the science" than the scient_ists_ they don't trust. usually said people were one bad day away from rambling about global jewry and such. due to whatever social illnesses or sociopolitical causes, we've normalized this position, and now measles is back from the dead. but let's pretend that climate change isn't real and the earth's flat and vaccines give you autism, because universities too woke or whatever the fuck

(it's very funny to pretend tech is still, or really much ever was, one big libfest. it's funnier to say this here of all places)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com