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Sometimes I feel like there's a bot-army monitoring all channels for new articles invoking the words "climate" or "global warming" and forwarding those pages to

Sometimes I feel like there's a bot-army monitoring all channels for new articles invoking the words "climate" or "global warming" and forwarding those pages to a waiting battalion of troll-soldiers.

radicalbyte 8y ago
It's probably true, the oil companies have enough money to pay for the astroturfing.
amelius 8y ago
Fake-news spreading organizations are not limited to just Facebook.
dhimes 8y ago
It actually seems like several armies. It's like certain groups/companies try to control brand image by discouraging criticisms on this board. Sometimes I wonder if disallowing downvotes without a counterpoint would have an effect on that.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Would a committee evaluate each counterpoint to decide whether it was genuine before counting the downvote?
  - dhimes 8y ago
    That would be pretty difficult. Just discouraging reactionary downvoting would be the point.
300bps 8y ago
Is it so unbelievable that people could just disagree with you that you have to assume they’re espousing a fake or paid for position? I consider myself a conservationist so I think outrageous and easily falsifiable claims like “this was caused by climate change and we can expect more of this” destroy the credibility of the people making the claims and the dangers of climate change in general. The most famous was the 2000 article that claimed snowfall was a thing of the past which was finally deleted after years of mocking: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-running-climate-prediction-blunders-has-disappeared-from-the-internet/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-ru... There are so many more examples including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth being released shortly after Katrina and being advertised with a hurricane coming from the smokestack of a factory saying we can expect hurricanes like that will be much more common going forward. Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- chronotis 8y ago
  Unbelievable, no. I'm making a meta-observation about a pattern of social commenting on this particular subject that spans many sites.
- dhimes 8y ago
  easily falsifiable claims like “this was caused by climate change and we can expect more of this” If it was easily falsifiable we wouldn't be having this discussion. Not much on this board concerning astrology, for example. Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade. Since you're running at 300bps you have apparently missed some news. The fact of the matter is that by the time Al Gore put out his movie (disclosure: I never watched it) even skeptical scientists like myself were taking note. It's not that there was proof, but something happens with scientific measurements when you start sniffing the truth: As you look closer, with better technology and more detailed measurements, the results tend to go in one direction. Not always, and it's certainly not proof, but it's enough to make our spidey senses tingle. The danger in this game is that the system is chaotic (indeed, chaos theory was invented around weather prediction). So there is a point where even a small, incremental change will lead to wildly non-proportional changes. And we still have no idea where that point is. Hell, some politicians are trying to stop people from even talking about it.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Does “hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade” still hold if you look beyond the continental US?
- tzs 8y ago
  > Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade Climate change doesn't predict more hurricanes making landfall (at least not until quite a ways in the future), nor even more total hurricanes. What it predicts is in increase in the average strength of hurricanes.
dmlorenzetti 8y ago
Sometimes, when a climate-denial comment on HN seems especially troll-like, and when I have time to kill, I'll look at the comment history of the apparent troll. Occasionally the person's comments only include political opinions, but I would say that, for the majority of these posters, the technical/programming comments outweigh the political ones. I don't know about other discussion boards. HN is the only forum on which I actively participate -- maybe because it's so good at self-policing that the trolls don't tend to survive long here.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I’m not surprised. It seems like engineers tend to have a strong contrarian streak. Climate change is an ideal target for contrarian tendencies: it’s controversial enough to not feel like you’re just tilting at windmills, but it’s still extremely lopsided. And it’s fuzzy enough that a smart person can dig into it and come up with a lot of good-sounding reasons to hold the contrary position. It’s not just climate change. Another prominent example that comes to mind is dark matter. HN posts about dark matter tend to have lots of comments about how it’s a cop-out, or how MOND is a better theory despite failing to match many observations, or whatever.

Sometimes I feel like there's a bot-army monitoring all channels for new articles invoking the words "climate" or "global warming" and forwarding those pages to a waiting battalion of troll-soldiers.

radicalbyte 8y ago

It's probably true, the oil companies have enough money to pay for the astroturfing.

amelius 8y ago

Fake-news spreading organizations are not limited to just Facebook.

dhimes 8y ago

It actually seems like several armies. It's like certain groups/companies try to control brand image by discouraging criticisms on this board. Sometimes I wonder if disallowing downvotes without a counterpoint would have an effect on that.

maxerickson 8y ago
Would a committee evaluate each counterpoint to decide whether it was genuine before counting the downvote?
- dhimes 8y ago
  That would be pretty difficult. Just discouraging reactionary downvoting would be the point.

300bps 8y ago

Is it so unbelievable that people could just disagree with you that you have to assume they’re espousing a fake or paid for position? I consider myself a conservationist so I think outrageous and easily falsifiable claims like “this was caused by climate change and we can expect more of this” destroy the credibility of the people making the claims and the dangers of climate change in general. The most famous was the 2000 article that claimed snowfall was a thing of the past which was finally deleted after years of mocking: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-running-climate-prediction-blunders-has-disappeared-from-the-internet/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-ru... There are so many more examples including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth being released shortly after Katrina and being advertised with a hurricane coming from the smokestack of a factory saying we can expect hurricanes like that will be much more common going forward. Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0 https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
chronotis 8y ago
Unbelievable, no. I'm making a meta-observation about a pattern of social commenting on this particular subject that spans many sites.
dhimes 8y ago
easily falsifiable claims like “this was caused by climate change and we can expect more of this” If it was easily falsifiable we wouldn't be having this discussion. Not much on this board concerning astrology, for example. Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade. Since you're running at 300bps you have apparently missed some news. The fact of the matter is that by the time Al Gore put out his movie (disclosure: I never watched it) even skeptical scientists like myself were taking note. It's not that there was proof, but something happens with scientific measurements when you start sniffing the truth: As you look closer, with better technology and more detailed measurements, the results tend to go in one direction. Not always, and it's certainly not proof, but it's enough to make our spidey senses tingle. The danger in this game is that the system is chaotic (indeed, chaos theory was invented around weather prediction). So there is a point where even a small, incremental change will lead to wildly non-proportional changes. And we still have no idea where that point is. Hell, some politicians are trying to stop people from even talking about it.
mikeash 8y ago
Does “hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade” still hold if you look beyond the continental US?
tzs 8y ago
> Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade Climate change doesn't predict more hurricanes making landfall (at least not until quite a ways in the future), nor even more total hurricanes. What it predicts is in increase in the average strength of hurricanes.

dmlorenzetti 8y ago

Sometimes, when a climate-denial comment on HN seems especially troll-like, and when I have time to kill, I'll look at the comment history of the apparent troll. Occasionally the person's comments only include political opinions, but I would say that, for the majority of these posters, the technical/programming comments outweigh the political ones. I don't know about other discussion boards. HN is the only forum on which I actively participate -- maybe because it's so good at self-policing that the trolls don't tend to survive long here.

mikeash 8y ago
I’m not surprised. It seems like engineers tend to have a strong contrarian streak. Climate change is an ideal target for contrarian tendencies: it’s controversial enough to not feel like you’re just tilting at windmills, but it’s still extremely lopsided. And it’s fuzzy enough that a smart person can dig into it and come up with a lot of good-sounding reasons to hold the contrary position. It’s not just climate change. Another prominent example that comes to mind is dark matter. HN posts about dark matter tend to have lots of comments about how it’s a cop-out, or how MOND is a better theory despite failing to match many observations, or whatever.