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It strikes me that the people who crow about "facts" the loudest are the ones most likely to be conflating facts with their own opinions. I'm a scientist. I do
by gydfi 10y ago
It strikes me that the people who crow about "facts" the loudest are the ones most likely to be conflating facts with their own opinions.
I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences.
Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.
- veidr 10y agoPerhaps, but good luck getting people to do that. I don't think the climate change "argument" the American society is currently having is about whether the probability of its existence is 0 or 1; it's about whether it's 0 or not 0.
- gydfi 10y agoNot at all, it seems to me it's more like whether it's 1 or not 1. Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier". Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.
- flukus 10y ago> Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier". Usually I see (and throw out myself) these terms when someone bandies around any of the common denialist talking points like "we used to be concerned about global cooling" or "it hasn't cooled since '98". Unfortunately the "ladder of knowledge" is more of a mouse wheel and the same people will end up using the same arguments, even when they're shown to be wrong.
- thomasahle 10y agoWhile I support this sentiment while doing science, I also think it is one of the reasons scientists have a relative small influence on public debate. If the scientist says climate change will be a big problem with probability between 95% and 98%, what most people hear is that "We don't know if it will be a problem, so we might as well not do anything about it." It is as if it doesn't really matter if you say the chance is 0.01 to 0.99 or 0.99 to 0.999. It is all just probabilities and it comes out as not actionable.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThat's exactly why politics is a mind killer. The sad thing is, you either have to join this idiocy or accept that your opinions will have negligible impact, because asking people to think in probabilities for half a second loses the competition with strongly-worded soundbites.
- croon 10y agoThis is also why "every statistician/expert is wrong for predicting Hillary would win". In a binary mind, a 70% likelyhood of an outcome (more than 50%) means that if the opposite happens, everything that went into the prediction was wrong.
- areyousure 10y agoIn case anyone was curious to review what election "expert" predictions were: they were Hillary to win with 85% chance (NYT), 71% (538), 98% (HuffPost), 89% (PW), >99% (PEC), and 92% (DK). But all of these sources made more detailed predictions than a simple binary winner. For example, the probability that Hillary received <=232 electoral votes (as was her pledged total) was ~4.3% according to the New York Times.
- thomasahle 10y agoHow big were the error bounds on the predictions? These things tend to be +-5 or 10%-points, considering the statistical model is even sound, which it is only assumed to be "approximately" however much uncertainty that adds. Do you have any articles where the statisticians analyze what happened?