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Does anyone else see the slippery slope here? Considering history for a moment with regard to science. Do I need to state examples of the scientific community

Does anyone else see the slippery slope here? Considering history for a moment with regard to science. Do I need to state examples of the scientific community being completely wrong? In light of the record of errors, is it not appropriate to fact check the fact checkers? Should we just dismiss the universe of examples of human nature and the willingness to deceive for profit and take the scientists at their word? "After all, Brutus is an honorable man"(sic) So regardless of which side of an argument one falls on, the factual backing for an argument should actually be proven facts. If a person is not required to prove their quoted facts, then they win the argument everytime and we'd still be learning that the world is flat in school.

hedora 4y ago
The article is 404 for me. As with most things; context matters. Where was their funding from, for example? There are well-docmented, coordinated efforts to undermine media and academic integrity in the US (especially regarding climate change). Ignoring them hasn't worked. Now what?
- origin_path 4y ago
  The URL is two URLs concatenated. Grab the archive link from the end and it works. Media and academia are self-undermining, especially on certain topics like this one, COVID stuff, nutrition, social science etc. The average fact checker routinely writes articles that make "fact checking" look biased, foolish and distinctly uninterested in facts. It's thus a good thing that they're getting investigated - it's certainly interesting to speculate about why they're always so one sided. It definitely isn't to do with what's true. There are a some examples of failed fact checks that stick in my mind. One was from some months ago. It was an attempted refutation of an article about a new paper from climatologists which contained a temperature time series collected from weather balloons. That data showed no warming over long periods of time. This is a common problem in climate science: different ways to measure temperatures yield very different trend lines. The "fact check" rested on two arguments: 1. The authors of the paper with the graph never explicitly mentioned the lack of trend in their data. 2. Climatologists say temperatures are rising. In other words, don't look at the newly reported data, only look at what the Right Sort Of People say or don't say about it. That was a pseudo-scientific argument that explicitly refused to check any facts. When this is the quality of fact checking it pretty much makes the skeptics arguments for them and does raise questions about whether this is simple incompetence or if it's motivated reasoning e.g. due to receiving journalism grants from the Gates Foundation.

hedora 4y ago

The article is 404 for me. As with most things; context matters. Where was their funding from, for example? There are well-docmented, coordinated efforts to undermine media and academic integrity in the US (especially regarding climate change). Ignoring them hasn't worked. Now what?

origin_path 4y ago
The URL is two URLs concatenated. Grab the archive link from the end and it works. Media and academia are self-undermining, especially on certain topics like this one, COVID stuff, nutrition, social science etc. The average fact checker routinely writes articles that make "fact checking" look biased, foolish and distinctly uninterested in facts. It's thus a good thing that they're getting investigated - it's certainly interesting to speculate about why they're always so one sided. It definitely isn't to do with what's true. There are a some examples of failed fact checks that stick in my mind. One was from some months ago. It was an attempted refutation of an article about a new paper from climatologists which contained a temperature time series collected from weather balloons. That data showed no warming over long periods of time. This is a common problem in climate science: different ways to measure temperatures yield very different trend lines. The "fact check" rested on two arguments: 1. The authors of the paper with the graph never explicitly mentioned the lack of trend in their data. 2. Climatologists say temperatures are rising. In other words, don't look at the newly reported data, only look at what the Right Sort Of People say or don't say about it. That was a pseudo-scientific argument that explicitly refused to check any facts. When this is the quality of fact checking it pretty much makes the skeptics arguments for them and does raise questions about whether this is simple incompetence or if it's motivated reasoning e.g. due to receiving journalism grants from the Gates Foundation.