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Comment by tshtf | Hacker News Reader

What is the best way to deal with skeptics of generally accepted ideas?

As a thought experiment, I'm going to throw out the worst possible analogy I can think of: How should historians deal with holocaust revisionism?

Is it better to censor, criminalize, and ignore the deniers, or should their claims be refuted with discussion and evidence (if available)? Ken McVay and the Nizkor Project has been doing this with holocaust revisionism since the USENET heyday of the 1990s. Refutation of claims from revisionist texts is openly presented by Nizkor.

Open dialague hasn't proven to be horribly effective, but marginalization and not responding openly to skeptical claims is certainly less effective. Humans are social animals. We need to interact and talk, even if it sometimes seems the guys on the other side of the fence are the bad ones.

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> What is the best way to deal with skeptics of generally accepted ideas?

As a creator of a "NoSQL" database (CouchDB), I think I understand the skeptics that climate researchers must deal with, and how it's difficult. In our case, there are a great deal of skeptics who deny there are any advantages to something that isn't SQL. No amount of arguing can convince them otherwise.

So I don't argue with them, it' a waste of my time. That's not to say it's a waste of time, but it's a waste of my time. I continue to work on the project, make it better, grow the user base, etc. But I don't engage the skeptics, I let the code and real successes stand on it's own, and others can argue in it's defense if they are so inclined (and many are).

Anyway, for climatologists, the easiest way to deal with the skeptics is make as much data and methodology as possible public and easily accessible. Skeptics will still argue against it, but others will take up the fight of arguing for it. If it's possible that people will argue passionately about a new style of database, it stands to reason there's a whole army of people ready to take up the fight of supporting your data, methodologies and conclusions when it involves the entire Earth's climate.

And if the skeptics finds something in your research people can't defend, maybe your data or methods are flawed and need improvement. That's a good thing regardless if it came from skeptics or supporters.

Effective towards what goal? Finding the truth or making sure that everyone agrees on the same generally accepted ideas?

AGW is not generally accepted by all scientists. Judging from the leaked documents some of the scientists have to do very un-scientific things like manipulation of, deleting and hiding data.

Criminalizing dissenting points of view sounds like a horrible idea.

The problem is that making every single conclusion open for debate (while good in theory of course) lacks a mechanism for the crackpot problem.

Is it a good use of your time to argue with people who believe in astrology? How do you draw the line between a crackpot or idiot, and a serious dissenter?

One reason why holocaust revisionism is so popular is because of laws. With laws in Germany and Canada that forbade even questioning the number of people that was killed, one begins to wonder if that debate ever happened. The question comes up: "What are they trying to hide with laws?".

I personally think that Holocaust happened - but I am not so convinced that the "official" number is accurate.

The best antidote for any skepticism is clear and open debate.

> What is the best way to deal with skeptics of generally accepted ideas?

You know, this could be read very, very wrongly.

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