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Comment by febeling | Hacker News Reader

But some are blatantly:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

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Might be. If trick means what you think it means. If hide means what you think it means.

I have often seen people use "trick" meaning "useful change" and "hide" meaning "doesn't show incorrect results". Without context there is no way to tell. Such a statement is somewhat worrying, but not exactly blatant in any way.

Here's an explanation of the "trick". Warning, the site is getting hammered at the moment:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810

Seriously? The level people will go to blindly defend these guys is astounding. I just had flash backs to "it depends what the meaning of is is".

I’m not people. I’m one person. And this is me at my most normal. I generally hate jumping to conclusions. (I could be misjudging myself now, don’t want to exclude that possibility :)

Try approaching the quote without trying to prove any pre-conceived notions. Similarly, I might say "I used John's useful hack in the logging module to hide errors (from the user)".

Try approaching the quote without any pre-conceived notions on the meaning of the English language. Similarly, I might say "I used John's hovercraft to hide the fact (from my date) that mine was full of eels."

I wouldn't call ugh's response either blind or a defense. I've used almost that exactly line (here I used a trick to hide the trend) for perfectly legitimate uses — what if you're trying to analyze the fast signal?

The volume of leaked correspondence does begin to form a context, but before the heavy and severe claim of scientific misconduct is really substantiated it's going to require scientific analysis of the fault. Cherrypicked quotes appearing on a news site is often known as researcher bias and it's just as big a flaw.

From RealClimate (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=953454):

> Scientists often use the term "trick" to refer to a "a good way to deal with a problem", rather than something that is "secret", and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the "divergence problem" - see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

"hide" meaning "doesn't show incorrect results".

I have no doubt that this is exactly what the author meant by "hide". That doesn't mean that it was a good idea.

If something is both Important and True, then the fact that the current data seems not to show the truth clearly might be thought a good reason to fix it. I mean, it's not like other people have to do this -- we can assume that everyone else's results are straight, so that means that there's something wrong with the data, and we can just fix that up so that it provides the correct correlation with what we already know is true...

In this case I'd interpret "trick" to be more like a skateboard trick, i.e. a non-obvious, but probably skillful manipulation of the data. If Tony Hawk pulls off something cool, nobody thinks he's trying to pull a fast one on his spectators or sponsors. I'd want to look at the Nature paper in question to see whether that interpretation is correct, though.

I'd like to point out that "Nature" possibly refers to the high impact scientific journal. If this is the case, then "trick" can be understood as roughly equal to "hack" (clever manipulation) in programmer terms. This Mike person used, and documented, his hack in a peer reviewed publication and someone else found it useful. How is this damning? Please don't assume experts in other fields are dumb. They probably arn't.

This is the obvious interpretation. You'd have to be trying to libel someone if you were to interpret it any other way...

Could you explain to me exactly what that sentence means in its original context, because it's certainly not clear to me that it's "blatantly" anything.

Sure, it looks like it's pretty damning. But what is the context, and what did he actually do?

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