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I believe that climate change is real and man-made, but I don't find the "consensus" argument convincing. It's well known now that science is heavily politiciz

I believe that climate change is real and man-made, but I don't find the "consensus" argument convincing. It's well known now that science is heavily politicized, most published research is wrong[1], fraud is common[2] and largely ignored[3], and many promising scientists have been excluded from the field for a variety of reasons from politics to prejudice to simple personal conflicts with the superstars. Funding and continued employment can be endangered by publishing politically incorrect results - if those results are allowed to be published at all - while publishing the "correct" results is rewarded. In an environment like this, it would be almost impossible for anyone who openly disagreed with the consensus to stay in the field. And once qualified people are driven out for these unscientific reasons, their opinion is no longer counted among the "consensus" of scientists, because the consensus is usually only measured among people working for a university or government agency. In short, if you exclude everyone who disagrees, it's easy to manufacture any consensus you like (even something as completely wrong as Lysenkoism, to cite a rather extreme example of the principle). 1: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27884233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27884233 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922799

darkteflon 5y ago
Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of those points. I didn’t mean to imply that the consensus is always correct (although my poorly-worded comment above plainly leaves the door open on that), just that as an untrained layman you need to have the humility to refrain from forming an opinion against the consensus. Hot takes unwanted, basically. There is definitely a process of pushback and mediation between consensus and dissenting voices in any complex field that needs to happen, but agree that that is very difficult in the current political climate. I was going to say that there should be some (self-imposed) threshold of expertise to participate in these conversations, but I guess if policies affect peoples’ lives then they should ipso facto have the right to form an opinion on them. Personally, my concerns about the integrity of any scientific consensus generally are in this case, on balance, outweighed by the potential consequences of denying climate change and being wrong about it, versus accepting it at face value, doing something about it, then finding out later that it was wasted effort. But that’s a different (and perhaps better) argument from the one I was making above.

darkteflon 5y ago

Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of those points. I didn’t mean to imply that the consensus is always correct (although my poorly-worded comment above plainly leaves the door open on that), just that as an untrained layman you need to have the humility to refrain from forming an opinion against the consensus. Hot takes unwanted, basically. There is definitely a process of pushback and mediation between consensus and dissenting voices in any complex field that needs to happen, but agree that that is very difficult in the current political climate. I was going to say that there should be some (self-imposed) threshold of expertise to participate in these conversations, but I guess if policies affect peoples’ lives then they should ipso facto have the right to form an opinion on them. Personally, my concerns about the integrity of any scientific consensus generally are in this case, on balance, outweighed by the potential consequences of denying climate change and being wrong about it, versus accepting it at face value, doing something about it, then finding out later that it was wasted effort. But that’s a different (and perhaps better) argument from the one I was making above.