5 ms·

I didn’t draw a conclusion. This is now the third time that I’ve pointed that out. It seems like you badly need me to do that to make your point somehow. Is thi

I didn’t draw a conclusion. This is now the third time that I’ve pointed that out. It seems like you badly need me to do that to make your point somehow. Is this causing you to not see it when I write it? Secondly I’m not sure I’m “indicting” anyone. Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts. This isn’t an indication of a lack of critical thinking. It’s an indication of a lack of thinking of any kind whatsoever.

thaumaturgy 8y ago
From your first comment: > Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion. That is called a "conclusion", no matter how many weasel-words you salt it with or how many times you say, "no, really, I wasn't drawing a conclusion". You've since walked it back to, "oh, I meant there wasn't a significant trend", and I shrugged and accepted that and replied solely to your criticism of other people. Which was: > Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them. And now, you're choosing to expand from "people aren't critically questioning things" to, "oh, actually, I meant that they aren't thinking at all". Before you do that, you might want to think a little bit more about epistemic learned helplessness. > Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts. Nice, you're doubling down. Well, your "two minute gathering of facts", first, was erroneous, and second, your "observation" was either obvious, or wrong, pick your flavor. Obviously, people accept any manner of statements without personally verifying them. Nobody has the resources to become an expert on every bit of news coming from legions of researchers or journalists, and further, if they spend just two minutes attempting to verify a single factoid in something, they may well get it wrong, as you did. Instead, people rely on other people to develop the specialized knowledge required to gather and synthesize the facts of a subject, and then other people still to report on that. It's imperfect, and sometimes (often) somebody somewhere in that chain gets something wrong, but it's still a better approach than armchairing everything you read, which has a far greater chance of leading you to the wrong ... well, "question", I guess, instead of "conclusion". By the way, re-framing conclusions as questions is such a well-known tactic that it has a name: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
- mbostleman 8y ago
  He said, "Too bad climate change is causing more fires" I said, "I just looked at this data and don't see a big trend. Even if there was a trend, how do you know it's climate change?" He said, "I have no idea, I just assumed that from what I heard" I didn't have a conclusion then, and I don't have one now. If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. And 35 years of reliable data seems a little light to me. One would think we'd need several centuries to get real confidence. But what I really question, are variables that would affect the numbers and size of fires such as how many were created by people, and the amount of effort put towards fighting them. The data we're looking at is not an observation of just nature. But it seems to be treated as if it is.
  - thaumaturgy 8y ago
    > If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. I would love to address each of your statements point by point, but it's been an interminably long week and I don't have the time. But this one I can knock out pretty fast. I pulled the 1983 - 2017 series data from NIFC and created four different data sets from it, and charted each one. Each chart shows the values in red, the simple linear regression from 1983 to 2017 as a single red line, and a 5-year-running average in blue. First, the raw data: https://ibb.co/iNQi8U https://ibb.co/iNQi8U ... there's a negligible change to the running average from 1983 to 1997, but from 1997 to 2009 there is a visually obvious increasing trend. The linear regression shows a 400% increase in acreage burned per year from 1983 to 2017. Now, there are three different ways someone might "take out" 6 of the last 10 years. I think it's completely absurd to make any kind of argument by just deleting 60% of the data you don't like until the result looks the way you want it to look, but I'll play along. For each of the following charts, I just edited the same 6-highest years from 2007 to 2017. One way to do this is to simply delete the years from the dataset. You pretend they didn't happen, and see what the overall data looks like then. And here it is: https://ibb.co/gRuzhp https://ibb.co/gRuzhp ... so here we see that there's still a clear upward trend, even with those years removed. The trend has been reduced to a mere 300% increase from 1983 to 2017, but there it is. You can see the obvious change in the data in the sharp decrease in the 5-year running average line. A slightly more correct way to handle this is to decide that there's something wrong with the data for those years, and replace those years with approximate average values for the time period. This is occasionally done in climate science by people much smarter than me in cases where it's discovered that, say, a weather station sensor malfunctioned for a period of time. This chart looks like this: https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 ... it's fairly identical to the previous one. Now, the other way we can do it, the most dishonest way we can do it, is to replace the values for each of those years with "0". As in, for that entire year, we subtract all wildfire activity, and pretend that the year went by with nary a spark. What does it look like then? https://ibb.co/hEWehp https://ibb.co/hEWehp Ah! Now we finally get the flat trend we wanted. You can see the really obvious negative forcing on the 5-year running average when those years are left in the dataset but with "0" values. There are answers to your other questions. The neat thing about news articles on this subject is that most of them can be traced back to some study, expert statement, or research paper. So if you're really interested in getting your questions answered, it shouldn't take more than a few hours' effort. For example, one of my earlier links, https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bigger-more-frequent-and-longer-since-the-1980s-42993 https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi..., included a nice graph of federal funds spent on fire suppression. At the bottom of that graph is a link to the NIFC data it was sourced from. So, there's a reasonable answer for "the amount of effort put towards fighting them". And then you could look at that graph, and then look back at the increase-in-acreage graphs, and imagine what they would look like if federal spending on wildfire suppression were mostly flat, maybe just tracking with inflation.

thaumaturgy 8y ago

From your first comment: > Without getting in to a lot of detail, the source I found was very reliable and did not show any upward (or downward) trend in either count of fires or total acreage on an annual basis since the 1960s. I pointed this out - not as proof that climate change did not affect fires - but as a simple data point that didn't seem to match his assertion. That is called a "conclusion", no matter how many weasel-words you salt it with or how many times you say, "no, really, I wasn't drawing a conclusion". You've since walked it back to, "oh, I meant there wasn't a significant trend", and I shrugged and accepted that and replied solely to your criticism of other people. Which was: > Only that people tend to accept narratives that are repeated over and over without critically questioning them. And now, you're choosing to expand from "people aren't critically questioning things" to, "oh, actually, I meant that they aren't thinking at all". Before you do that, you might want to think a little bit more about epistemic learned helplessness. > Only observing that there was absolutely zero knowledge about facts behind the situation and no ability to respond to my two minute gathering of facts. Nice, you're doubling down. Well, your "two minute gathering of facts", first, was erroneous, and second, your "observation" was either obvious, or wrong, pick your flavor. Obviously, people accept any manner of statements without personally verifying them. Nobody has the resources to become an expert on every bit of news coming from legions of researchers or journalists, and further, if they spend just two minutes attempting to verify a single factoid in something, they may well get it wrong, as you did. Instead, people rely on other people to develop the specialized knowledge required to gather and synthesize the facts of a subject, and then other people still to report on that. It's imperfect, and sometimes (often) somebody somewhere in that chain gets something wrong, but it's still a better approach than armchairing everything you read, which has a far greater chance of leading you to the wrong ... well, "question", I guess, instead of "conclusion". By the way, re-framing conclusions as questions is such a well-known tactic that it has a name: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

mbostleman 8y ago
He said, "Too bad climate change is causing more fires" I said, "I just looked at this data and don't see a big trend. Even if there was a trend, how do you know it's climate change?" He said, "I have no idea, I just assumed that from what I heard" I didn't have a conclusion then, and I don't have one now. If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. And 35 years of reliable data seems a little light to me. One would think we'd need several centuries to get real confidence. But what I really question, are variables that would affect the numbers and size of fires such as how many were created by people, and the amount of effort put towards fighting them. The data we're looking at is not an observation of just nature. But it seems to be treated as if it is.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  > If you take out two 3-year clusters in the last decade there is no trend at all. I would love to address each of your statements point by point, but it's been an interminably long week and I don't have the time. But this one I can knock out pretty fast. I pulled the 1983 - 2017 series data from NIFC and created four different data sets from it, and charted each one. Each chart shows the values in red, the simple linear regression from 1983 to 2017 as a single red line, and a 5-year-running average in blue. First, the raw data: https://ibb.co/iNQi8U https://ibb.co/iNQi8U ... there's a negligible change to the running average from 1983 to 1997, but from 1997 to 2009 there is a visually obvious increasing trend. The linear regression shows a 400% increase in acreage burned per year from 1983 to 2017. Now, there are three different ways someone might "take out" 6 of the last 10 years. I think it's completely absurd to make any kind of argument by just deleting 60% of the data you don't like until the result looks the way you want it to look, but I'll play along. For each of the following charts, I just edited the same 6-highest years from 2007 to 2017. One way to do this is to simply delete the years from the dataset. You pretend they didn't happen, and see what the overall data looks like then. And here it is: https://ibb.co/gRuzhp https://ibb.co/gRuzhp ... so here we see that there's still a clear upward trend, even with those years removed. The trend has been reduced to a mere 300% increase from 1983 to 2017, but there it is. You can see the obvious change in the data in the sharp decrease in the 5-year running average line. A slightly more correct way to handle this is to decide that there's something wrong with the data for those years, and replace those years with approximate average values for the time period. This is occasionally done in climate science by people much smarter than me in cases where it's discovered that, say, a weather station sensor malfunctioned for a period of time. This chart looks like this: https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 https://ibb.co/fvr1v9 ... it's fairly identical to the previous one. Now, the other way we can do it, the most dishonest way we can do it, is to replace the values for each of those years with "0". As in, for that entire year, we subtract all wildfire activity, and pretend that the year went by with nary a spark. What does it look like then? https://ibb.co/hEWehp https://ibb.co/hEWehp Ah! Now we finally get the flat trend we wanted. You can see the really obvious negative forcing on the 5-year running average when those years are left in the dataset but with "0" values. There are answers to your other questions. The neat thing about news articles on this subject is that most of them can be traced back to some study, expert statement, or research paper. So if you're really interested in getting your questions answered, it shouldn't take more than a few hours' effort. For example, one of my earlier links, https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bigger-more-frequent-and-longer-since-the-1980s-42993 https://theconversation.com/wildfires-in-west-have-gotten-bi..., included a nice graph of federal funds spent on fire suppression. At the bottom of that graph is a link to the NIFC data it was sourced from. So, there's a reasonable answer for "the amount of effort put towards fighting them". And then you could look at that graph, and then look back at the increase-in-acreage graphs, and imagine what they would look like if federal spending on wildfire suppression were mostly flat, maybe just tracking with inflation.