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Experts in drilling oil wells agree with 95% certainty that oil wells are beneficial and we should have more of them. There's a consensus of specialists, so you

Experts in drilling oil wells agree with 95% certainty that oil wells are beneficial and we should have more of them. There's a consensus of specialists, so you have to accept this is true and adopt their position, right? "[consensus means] the specialists of the subject overwhelmingly agree ... Science is just knowledge + logic" So is science what specialists say it is, or is it just knowledge+logic? If the latter then what specialists say doesn't matter, because anyone can obtain knowledge and apply logic.

henearkr 4y ago
Experts in drilling oil wells do not have an extended knowledge on Earth's climate mechanisms, and usually they don't even make reports about this subject. When they do, it is seen suspiciously because it is not their domain of expertise. So, people expressing themselves outside their domain of expertise are not to be trusted. In your example "that oil wells are beneficial" means probably "also beneficial for the climate"? "for our future as Humanity"? "for health"? So you see, it is vague and probably wrong.
- origin_path 4y ago
  Ah, but I didn't say anything about the climate. I understand why you extrapolated that given that it's the example of "not pro-science" that you originally picked, but in my example they were merely certain that oil wells are beneficial and we should have more of them. Beneficial for whom? Well, our straw oilmen could easily argue that human progress has always increased energy usage, oil wells deliver energy, therefore more oil wells are beneficial for humanity. The point here is you can't go from "specialists assert something about their field" to "and therefore it's true and we should do it". But this is how you're defining science - an unquestioning belief in whatever specialists say, as long as seems to be about their specialism. That's a mental shortcut and it often fails. All scientists - climatologists included - have to master all kinds of skills from outside their own field. For example scientists routinely use statistics and programming yet they aren't specialists in those fields. In the early days, the Daily Sceptic carried a series of articles by a software developer who showed that the COVID models were full of ordinary coding bugs. They didn't generate correct results because they were doing things like using buggy random number generators, they had buffer overflows, race conditions and other stuff. So in that dispute over models who wins? Is it the specialist in programming or the specialist in the thing the model is supposed to represent? In reality, although academia strongly encourages this kind of silo-ization you can't actually do it. You always need multi-disciplinary teams, you need people who have different incentive structures to poke and prod at claims. The platonic ideal of an unbiased scientist specialized in one domain who issues proclamations of consensus is all too often a fantasy that we try to cling on to even when it becomes untenable. If you use counting experts as a way to decide what's true you can't resolve disputes correctly. If you apply rational skepticism, you can. Although the Daily Sceptic is nowadays mostly just news, it's historically focused on dispelling this fantasy in the realm of COVID science, where "specialists" often turned out to have no deep understanding of disease, and be amateurs in skills you'd think were essential.

henearkr 4y ago

Experts in drilling oil wells do not have an extended knowledge on Earth's climate mechanisms, and usually they don't even make reports about this subject. When they do, it is seen suspiciously because it is not their domain of expertise. So, people expressing themselves outside their domain of expertise are not to be trusted. In your example "that oil wells are beneficial" means probably "also beneficial for the climate"? "for our future as Humanity"? "for health"? So you see, it is vague and probably wrong.

origin_path 4y ago
Ah, but I didn't say anything about the climate. I understand why you extrapolated that given that it's the example of "not pro-science" that you originally picked, but in my example they were merely certain that oil wells are beneficial and we should have more of them. Beneficial for whom? Well, our straw oilmen could easily argue that human progress has always increased energy usage, oil wells deliver energy, therefore more oil wells are beneficial for humanity. The point here is you can't go from "specialists assert something about their field" to "and therefore it's true and we should do it". But this is how you're defining science - an unquestioning belief in whatever specialists say, as long as seems to be about their specialism. That's a mental shortcut and it often fails. All scientists - climatologists included - have to master all kinds of skills from outside their own field. For example scientists routinely use statistics and programming yet they aren't specialists in those fields. In the early days, the Daily Sceptic carried a series of articles by a software developer who showed that the COVID models were full of ordinary coding bugs. They didn't generate correct results because they were doing things like using buggy random number generators, they had buffer overflows, race conditions and other stuff. So in that dispute over models who wins? Is it the specialist in programming or the specialist in the thing the model is supposed to represent? In reality, although academia strongly encourages this kind of silo-ization you can't actually do it. You always need multi-disciplinary teams, you need people who have different incentive structures to poke and prod at claims. The platonic ideal of an unbiased scientist specialized in one domain who issues proclamations of consensus is all too often a fantasy that we try to cling on to even when it becomes untenable. If you use counting experts as a way to decide what's true you can't resolve disputes correctly. If you apply rational skepticism, you can. Although the Daily Sceptic is nowadays mostly just news, it's historically focused on dispelling this fantasy in the realm of COVID science, where "specialists" often turned out to have no deep understanding of disease, and be amateurs in skills you'd think were essential.