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Before commenting, do NOT miss the disclaimer at the top: "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]" This is Scott having a conve

by seanc 5y ago

Before commenting, do NOT miss the disclaimer at the top: "[Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this]" This is Scott having a conversation with his readership, not asserting a Bold New Idea.

gnicholas 5y ago
Wish this were more common. This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart people with access to diverse sets of information — and crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the data points to.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking while reading the article. Particularly at > I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas. When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but rather that questioning things and being open minded to whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible, describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language stating things as they are. I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also, the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part of said citation.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    The pdf format is partially to blame for the lack of hyperlinks. Hopefully we'll see more html-first papers in the future.
- ehnto 5y ago
  One of my pet peeves about the internet and modern rhetoric in general is how people are forced to write defensively, for fear of any omissions being construed as something you explicitly said, or a not fully finished thought as a binding contract. There's very little wiggle room to be wrong, and I don't mind being wrong, but you don't really get the chance to be constructively wrong in that format. I've found a conversational trick in saying "But I haven't finished thinking about this yet.". It can sometimes be a bit of a thought terminating cliche, but I find it stops people jumping to contest obvious details in order to get started proving me wrong. People seem to acknowledge that I know I could be wrong, so they're more helpful in the conversation rather than antagonistic or dismissive.
deleted 5y ago
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by seanc 5y ago

gnicholas 5y ago

Wish this were more common. This is how knowledge is created: in communities of smart people with access to diverse sets of information — and crucially, with an open-mindedness to whatever conclusion the data points to.

Aachen 5y ago
Exactly what I was thinking while reading the article. Particularly at > I realize it’s awkward to propose two different mechanisms for the general heat/cold-death relationship and the African extreme, but I don’t have any better ideas. When do you ever read that in a scientific paper? In a podcast by some (self-proclaimed) science communicators, they mention from time to time how the media gets it backwards and that asserting absolute truths is not very scientific, but rather that questioning things and being open minded to whatever the data tells you is how science works. And then you open a paper that, as obscurely worded as possible, describes that given X you get Y. And the next paper claims the opposite. No doubt indicated, just business language stating things as they are. I dunno, I like blog posts a lot better than trying to get useful info from scientific papers and weighing diverging conclusions based on methods used and other factors. Also, the lack of hyperlinks in papers. It's 2021, people, try clickable words or links in footnotes rather than having to DDG for (and then pay 40 bucks for or sci-hub) the citation mentioned somewhere on page 7 while you were in the middle of a paragraph on page 3 and then still find the relevant part of said citation.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  The pdf format is partially to blame for the lack of hyperlinks. Hopefully we'll see more html-first papers in the future.
ehnto 5y ago
One of my pet peeves about the internet and modern rhetoric in general is how people are forced to write defensively, for fear of any omissions being construed as something you explicitly said, or a not fully finished thought as a binding contract. There's very little wiggle room to be wrong, and I don't mind being wrong, but you don't really get the chance to be constructively wrong in that format. I've found a conversational trick in saying "But I haven't finished thinking about this yet.". It can sometimes be a bit of a thought terminating cliche, but I find it stops people jumping to contest obvious details in order to get started proving me wrong. People seem to acknowledge that I know I could be wrong, so they're more helpful in the conversation rather than antagonistic or dismissive.

deleted 5y ago

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