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No. Human beings make mistakes. It's a known quantity in any and all research done by human beings. Does anyone have to open up a lecture about geologic featur

by Adam503 17y ago

No. Human beings make mistakes. It's a known quantity in any and all research done by human beings. Does anyone have to open up a lecture about geologic features on Mars with preliminary statement... "At one point during the Mars data gathering process a probe was programmed wrong with incorrect Imperial/Metric conversions, a probe crashed, and therefore none of the measurements we give of anything on the Mars surface can ever be trusted again." No.

cletus 17y ago
That's a specious argument that does nothing other than demonstrate the obvious agenda that you have.
- Adam503 17y ago
  Science has no agenda. Science has what's factual and what is not factual. You have an agenda. Your agenda is to attempt to make facts and opinions carry the same weight in a political debate. Never gonna happen, cletus.
  - cletus 17y ago
    Who said anything about science in general? You attempted to make an analogy between the deliberate destruction of raw data and the metric-Imperial mismatch that caused the failure of the Mars Orbiter mission somehow impugning all data on Mars. Not equivalent. Not even close. If you don't get that you're either blinded by zealotry or simply lack the capacity to formulate or evaluate logic.
    - Adam503 17y ago
      Fail, Cletus. What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree. The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree." While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
      - CWuestefeld 17y ago
        Adam, have you noticed that every time you try the self-righteous "Fail, Cletus", you lose a chunk of reputation? Perhaps if you tried to have a civil discussion without sounding like you're talking down to the rest of us, you might fare better. Another tip: your final, ungrammatical paragraph is nothing but an ad hominem attack, and a snarky unsupported one at that. Cheap digs like that won't help you make allies, they just piss people off.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    >Science has no agenda. Science has what's factual and what is not factual. That's like say English language always has proper grammar and spelling. Or that politicians in a democracy always work for the good of the people.
- patio11 17y ago
  Cletus, mind if we have a quick, public messaging discussion? We're going to be called cranks, and many people are going to be very, very sympathetic to that, so we need to avoid sounding crank-like. Yes, everybody has an agenda, but pointing that out only makes us sound like cranks so we probably shouldn't do it. Besides, it is essentially ad hominem and ad hominem is both invalid in general and stupid tactically, because comparing the men at issue will come down to "respected scientist" versus "guy on Internet" and we'll always lose that comparison. Instead, we should criticize ideas, not people, and point to favorable facts. For example, you could suggest that the Mars example is disanalgous in at least two respects: one, the Mars example involves an honest error rather than actual attempt to defraud, two, the interesting debate in global warming isn't on prospective measurements (which we can do accurately, like you can accurately measure the topology of Mars) but on whether we are drawing the right conclusions from data which has been sliced, diced, and remixed from an error-filled patchwork collection of proxies such as, e.g., a few dozens specimens of a particular type of tree in Russia taken in the 1970s which people believe accurately measure the global climate in 1400 AD. Check that last line out, incidentally: most listeners are going to perceive it to be mocking because it makes the enterprise sound like something which is being built on foundations of sand. However, it is very difficult to be called a crank for mockery of that nature, because to do that people would have to know paleoclimatology better than you do, and it would take an awfully dab hand at explanation to make paleoclimatology sound like something other than a bad joke.

by Adam503 17y ago

cletus 17y ago

That's a specious argument that does nothing other than demonstrate the obvious agenda that you have.

Adam503 17y ago
Science has no agenda. Science has what's factual and what is not factual. You have an agenda. Your agenda is to attempt to make facts and opinions carry the same weight in a political debate. Never gonna happen, cletus.
- cletus 17y ago
  Who said anything about science in general? You attempted to make an analogy between the deliberate destruction of raw data and the metric-Imperial mismatch that caused the failure of the Mars Orbiter mission somehow impugning all data on Mars. Not equivalent. Not even close. If you don't get that you're either blinded by zealotry or simply lack the capacity to formulate or evaluate logic.
  - Adam503 17y ago
    Fail, Cletus. What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree. The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree." While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
    - CWuestefeld 17y ago
      Adam, have you noticed that every time you try the self-righteous "Fail, Cletus", you lose a chunk of reputation? Perhaps if you tried to have a civil discussion without sounding like you're talking down to the rest of us, you might fare better. Another tip: your final, ungrammatical paragraph is nothing but an ad hominem attack, and a snarky unsupported one at that. Cheap digs like that won't help you make allies, they just piss people off.
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  >Science has no agenda. Science has what's factual and what is not factual. That's like say English language always has proper grammar and spelling. Or that politicians in a democracy always work for the good of the people.
patio11 17y ago
Cletus, mind if we have a quick, public messaging discussion? We're going to be called cranks, and many people are going to be very, very sympathetic to that, so we need to avoid sounding crank-like. Yes, everybody has an agenda, but pointing that out only makes us sound like cranks so we probably shouldn't do it. Besides, it is essentially ad hominem and ad hominem is both invalid in general and stupid tactically, because comparing the men at issue will come down to "respected scientist" versus "guy on Internet" and we'll always lose that comparison. Instead, we should criticize ideas, not people, and point to favorable facts. For example, you could suggest that the Mars example is disanalgous in at least two respects: one, the Mars example involves an honest error rather than actual attempt to defraud, two, the interesting debate in global warming isn't on prospective measurements (which we can do accurately, like you can accurately measure the topology of Mars) but on whether we are drawing the right conclusions from data which has been sliced, diced, and remixed from an error-filled patchwork collection of proxies such as, e.g., a few dozens specimens of a particular type of tree in Russia taken in the 1970s which people believe accurately measure the global climate in 1400 AD. Check that last line out, incidentally: most listeners are going to perceive it to be mocking because it makes the enterprise sound like something which is being built on foundations of sand. However, it is very difficult to be called a crank for mockery of that nature, because to do that people would have to know paleoclimatology better than you do, and it would take an awfully dab hand at explanation to make paleoclimatology sound like something other than a bad joke.