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What is your degree of confidence in an alert coming out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that warns of a Category 5 Hurricane making land

What is your degree of confidence in an alert coming out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that warns of a Category 5 Hurricane making landfall in the next 6 hours, with accompanying dangerously high winds and a record-setting storm surge? Is that enough to warrant forced evacuations from homes? This isn't a hypothetical. Do you, or do you not, think that we as a society should immediately act upon information from the NOAA about hurricanes?

teakettle42 4y ago
I’m sure I’ll regret wading into the epistemological debate over your faith-based belief system, but here we are. Over the past few months, I have received two completely incorrect fire evacuation notices from our local emergency services. This occurred as a result of complaints after our last major fire; people complained that the alerts were insufficiently broad. In response, our emergency operations center sent out over-broad alerts that inaccurately geo-targeted recipients. Should I have immediately acted on those alerts, loading my possessions and pets into the car and hightailing it out of the area? Should we be forced to evacuate based on the invalid geotargeting? Should communication providers and social networks censor contrary information? I’m just trying to gauge what degree of uncritical trust and faith you think we should place in fallible authorities and institutions, and how strictly we should enforce your orthodoxy, rather than requiring presentation of evidence and leaving open the door for critical scientific examination. To be very clear, I’m on the local fire department and the invalidity of the evacuation notices is beyond question. They were incorrect and counterproductive.
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  I'm honestly sick of you calling my beliefs "uncritical." Of course I'm critical. Of course authorities and institutions are fallible. Of course authorities and institutions should present their evidence. Of course there should be peer review and examination of their methods and claims. But are you also aware that "anecdote" is not the plural of data? I'm sorry you were incorrectly geo-targeted. That's very different from the question I asked, where the NOAA clearly indicates the areas under threat. But all else being equal, when government needs to decide how to act, it should look first to the scientific authorities and institutions to gather and assess the data. You're not going to launch your own weather satellites, and you are not equipped to evaluate the raw data, or to evaluate the comments of the peer reviewers. People should trust in the alerts from the NOAA. And they should want the review processes inside the NOAA to be as strong as they can. And they should want government oversight of the NOAA, and they should want a free press to report about negligence, incompetence, corruption inside the NOAA. But the government should rely on the NOAA to determine when to issue an evacuation order, and citizens should follow those orders. Among other things, it endangers rescue crews if they don't.
  - teakettle42 4y ago
    Nothing the NOAA presents is without evidence and it is not taken on trust and faith. Their models, data, and analysis are available for evaluation, e.g. https://mag.ncep.noaa.gov/ https://mag.ncep.noaa.gov/ External meteorologists perform their own analysis (locally, and globally). Local analysis can and does supersede previous reports out of the NOAA. Nothing of what they do requires a faith-based enforced orthodoxy. We trust in the science, not the scientists — up until you try to enforce orthodoxy.
    - VikingCoder 4y ago
      We trust in the humans to implement the science. Because the science itself is often wrong in ways that we trust humans to correct. You also do not have a nozzle labeled "scientific results" which come out whole formed from an abstract machine. It's a messy, human process. Variously helped and hindered by awful human politics. You trust humans to get the truth out, as close as they can, as quickly as they can. You have this romanticized version of "science" which is just not the real world at all. Do you have any idea how many times scientific reports were censored? How often scientists had to risk their livelihood to publish results? So you paint trusting scientists as a straw-man orthodoxy. You treat it as though it's uncritical, when nothing could be further from the truth. It's because we recognize that we're forced to rely on scientists, that we are especially critical of them. That we worry so much about how they are funded and influenced. That we watch out for their results being censored. Science itself doesn't provide legal protections for whistle-blowers. But those legal protections are critical to protect scientists. Because science is messy. And you honestly seem to not get that. I don't trust government. I trust my representatives. Because I can hold them accountable. In the abstract, sure, you can trust the Constitution. But you're forced, by reality, to trust human agents to uphold the Constitution.
      - teakettle42 4y ago
        You seem very confused about what the scientific method is, and how it eliminates the need to trust scientists instead of science. I doubt we’ll ever establish shared meaning between us, much less agreement. It’s like trying to argue with any other deeply religious individual — we disagree too much on the fundamental nature of truth, and trying to reconcile that epistemological disagreement is a waste of everyone’s time. You can prosthelytize whatever faith-based belief system you want — just don't call it science. Attempts to enforce orthodoxy in the name of science is eliminating falsifiability, and is inherently anti-science. I’ve suggested “sciencism” as a label for your belief system. You’re welcome to propose an alternative, but it’s clearly not science.

teakettle42 4y ago

I’m sure I’ll regret wading into the epistemological debate over your faith-based belief system, but here we are. Over the past few months, I have received two completely incorrect fire evacuation notices from our local emergency services. This occurred as a result of complaints after our last major fire; people complained that the alerts were insufficiently broad. In response, our emergency operations center sent out over-broad alerts that inaccurately geo-targeted recipients. Should I have immediately acted on those alerts, loading my possessions and pets into the car and hightailing it out of the area? Should we be forced to evacuate based on the invalid geotargeting? Should communication providers and social networks censor contrary information? I’m just trying to gauge what degree of uncritical trust and faith you think we should place in fallible authorities and institutions, and how strictly we should enforce your orthodoxy, rather than requiring presentation of evidence and leaving open the door for critical scientific examination. To be very clear, I’m on the local fire department and the invalidity of the evacuation notices is beyond question. They were incorrect and counterproductive.

VikingCoder 4y ago
I'm honestly sick of you calling my beliefs "uncritical." Of course I'm critical. Of course authorities and institutions are fallible. Of course authorities and institutions should present their evidence. Of course there should be peer review and examination of their methods and claims. But are you also aware that "anecdote" is not the plural of data? I'm sorry you were incorrectly geo-targeted. That's very different from the question I asked, where the NOAA clearly indicates the areas under threat. But all else being equal, when government needs to decide how to act, it should look first to the scientific authorities and institutions to gather and assess the data. You're not going to launch your own weather satellites, and you are not equipped to evaluate the raw data, or to evaluate the comments of the peer reviewers. People should trust in the alerts from the NOAA. And they should want the review processes inside the NOAA to be as strong as they can. And they should want government oversight of the NOAA, and they should want a free press to report about negligence, incompetence, corruption inside the NOAA. But the government should rely on the NOAA to determine when to issue an evacuation order, and citizens should follow those orders. Among other things, it endangers rescue crews if they don't.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  Nothing the NOAA presents is without evidence and it is not taken on trust and faith. Their models, data, and analysis are available for evaluation, e.g. https://mag.ncep.noaa.gov/ https://mag.ncep.noaa.gov/ External meteorologists perform their own analysis (locally, and globally). Local analysis can and does supersede previous reports out of the NOAA. Nothing of what they do requires a faith-based enforced orthodoxy. We trust in the science, not the scientists — up until you try to enforce orthodoxy.
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
    We trust in the humans to implement the science. Because the science itself is often wrong in ways that we trust humans to correct. You also do not have a nozzle labeled "scientific results" which come out whole formed from an abstract machine. It's a messy, human process. Variously helped and hindered by awful human politics. You trust humans to get the truth out, as close as they can, as quickly as they can. You have this romanticized version of "science" which is just not the real world at all. Do you have any idea how many times scientific reports were censored? How often scientists had to risk their livelihood to publish results? So you paint trusting scientists as a straw-man orthodoxy. You treat it as though it's uncritical, when nothing could be further from the truth. It's because we recognize that we're forced to rely on scientists, that we are especially critical of them. That we worry so much about how they are funded and influenced. That we watch out for their results being censored. Science itself doesn't provide legal protections for whistle-blowers. But those legal protections are critical to protect scientists. Because science is messy. And you honestly seem to not get that. I don't trust government. I trust my representatives. Because I can hold them accountable. In the abstract, sure, you can trust the Constitution. But you're forced, by reality, to trust human agents to uphold the Constitution.
    - teakettle42 4y ago
      You seem very confused about what the scientific method is, and how it eliminates the need to trust scientists instead of science. I doubt we’ll ever establish shared meaning between us, much less agreement. It’s like trying to argue with any other deeply religious individual — we disagree too much on the fundamental nature of truth, and trying to reconcile that epistemological disagreement is a waste of everyone’s time. You can prosthelytize whatever faith-based belief system you want — just don't call it science. Attempts to enforce orthodoxy in the name of science is eliminating falsifiability, and is inherently anti-science. I’ve suggested “sciencism” as a label for your belief system. You’re welcome to propose an alternative, but it’s clearly not science.