4 ms·

That's called fraud and no it's not how "science" functions.

doitLP 3y ago
It’s absolutely how a dishonest science institution functions. Science itself is nothing more than a method. The disdain is for people who confuse the process with the institution. And at that point it is just blind faith like any old religion. Show me the preregistration, the conflict of interest disclosure and the third party replication and then I’ll “trust the science”.
- adam_smith123 3y ago
  PEOPLE are abusing bad incentives. I'm quite certain that if this lab was exposed for doing what the poster claims it would be a major controversy just like other cases we've seen. That's the institution correctly reacting to bad actors.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Are these bad actors scientists, or not?
    - adam_smith123 3y ago
      How is this relevant? Do these people define what science or is it an established set of principles and methods? You think scientists are the only ones who can do science and what they do, wrong or not, defines what science is??
      - mistermann 3y ago
        > How is this relevant? The topic is related to the quality of science. Science is composed of scientists. >Do these people define what science or is it an established set of principles and methods? Science is defined by the actions and output of the entire system. Perceptions of science, your beliefs (perceived as knowledge) are affected by how scientists (and their fan base) define "it". > You think scientists are the only ones who can do science No. > and what they do, wrong or not, defines what science is?? Yes. If you think otherwise, I would really like you to walk me through your reasoning.
u32480932048 3y ago
See also: Normative vs. Positive analysis
mistermann 3y ago
How science functions is how it functions. You do not have knowledge of the entirety of scientific endeavors, it only seems like you do, presumably due to being trained on propaganda, like an LLM. Maybe you are conflating it with how it is supposed to, and is claimed to function by people who share the same form of faith based epistemology as you.
- adam_smith123 3y ago
  Science is a set of methods. If you abandon those methods and fake data to fit your needs you aren't doing science you are committing various kinds of fraud. Maybe ChatGPT can explain that to you instead of listening to Alex Jones.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    > Science is a set of methods. If you abandon those methods and fake data to fit your needs you aren't doing science you are committing various kinds of fraud. You still have the title "scientist", and still get your paycheque. Like baking, there is the recipe one is supposed to follow, but there is also the how the baking is actually done. If a baker failed to follow the recipe in an instance of baking, would you also believe that they are not a baker, or are not baking? I think it's interesting how people intuitively frame (construct a virtual model of reality, and perceive/present it as reality itself) the practice of science such that it "is"[1] literally impossible for scientists to do wrong, and with such a simplistic method: if it isn't perfect, it isn't science (which opens up a serious ontological problem: because it cannot be known to what degree each potential scientist executes the method with perfection, it is not possible to know how many scientists exist, or if a given candidate actually is a scientist...an individual could be one for decades, and then one off day and Shazam: you "are" no longer a scientist, despite having the title, the income, and the respect and admiration, despite not actually being the thing itself). >Maybe ChatGPT can explain that to you instead of listening to Alex Jones. What's the current scientific consensus on mind reading? Maybe it's not me who has to brush up on my scientific scriptures. And since we're on the topic of who to take advice from: perhaps you should reevaluate the trustworthiness of that Oracle inside your mind, because it's "fact" here is way off: I do not listen to Alex Jones. Do you now wonder how many other facts your Oracle got wrong? My Oracle suspects not, but cannot be sure. [1] here I am using the colloquial, normative meaning of the word "is": how humans believe "reality" "is".
nvm0n2 3y ago
It's not called fraud in climatology and yes it is how "science" functions. There are no universal standards in academia. Climatological norms involve heavy processing of thermometer readings to "clean" them in various ways. They all do it and do not see any problems with what they do. Every claim you've ever read about temperatures from climatologists is based on that kind of procedure. Some of this has good intentions, at least originally. Weather stations aren't normally intended to be used by climatologists. They exist for other reasons. So they get moved around, or not moved even as the environment changes around them, get placed in inconveniently unrepresentative places like airport runways, and more. Climatologists scrape this data from the internet or collect it from logbooks and then try to work out what's happening, but the data is super noisy. Now the way science works is that you characterize the uncertainty in your data and propagate it through any calculations you do, in order to track your uncertainty intervals. Then you communicate those and take them into account when making predictions. But in climatology they don't do this. Instead they use lots of algorithms and manual tweaks to try and "fix" the data to bring it into line with what they know it "should" be, and then report the data without CIs, as having 100% confidence. For example if a time series at a weather station is stable for 20 years, then experiences a short break, then it returns but the average is consistently 0.3 degrees different than before, they infer that it must have moved and they then "correct" it back to the previous baseline. If there are gaps in the data then they generate fake readings by interpolating between the nearest alternative weather stations, and so on. Outsiders might expect that they would investigate and try to improve the quality of their source data but they don't. Like, if their algorithms infer a station move, they don't contact the station operator to figure out if that really happened. They just assume their corrections are fine and move on. Another fun thing they do is alter data that was already published. When they update their algorithms for deciding what data points to include/drop/change, they don't just use it for new data running forwards. They reprocess the entire historical data set. That can yield outcomes that would normally be taken as a clear indicator of scientific fraud, for example where NOAA declared a temperature record, and a few years later declared a new record that was lower than the previous one [1]. Or where scientists invalidated decades of published papers (thousands of them) by deciding that the temperature trend in the first 15 years of the century was totally different to what had previously been reported: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 The underlying data on which those papers were built was announced to be all wrong, but nothing was retracted! That's how science functions. And the best part is that they've trained the public so well that for anyone who calls any of this fraud, as you just did, they are instantly ostracised for being a heretical Denier. [1] https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-record-please-stand-up/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

It’s absolutely how a dishonest science institution functions. Science itself is nothing more than a method. The disdain is for people who confuse the process with the institution. And at that point it is just blind faith like any old religion. Show me the preregistration, the conflict of interest disclosure and the third party replication and then I’ll “trust the science”.

adam_smith123 3y ago
PEOPLE are abusing bad incentives. I'm quite certain that if this lab was exposed for doing what the poster claims it would be a major controversy just like other cases we've seen. That's the institution correctly reacting to bad actors.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Are these bad actors scientists, or not?
  - adam_smith123 3y ago
    How is this relevant? Do these people define what science or is it an established set of principles and methods? You think scientists are the only ones who can do science and what they do, wrong or not, defines what science is??
    - mistermann 3y ago
      > How is this relevant? The topic is related to the quality of science. Science is composed of scientists. >Do these people define what science or is it an established set of principles and methods? Science is defined by the actions and output of the entire system. Perceptions of science, your beliefs (perceived as knowledge) are affected by how scientists (and their fan base) define "it". > You think scientists are the only ones who can do science No. > and what they do, wrong or not, defines what science is?? Yes. If you think otherwise, I would really like you to walk me through your reasoning.

u32480932048 3y ago

See also: Normative vs. Positive analysis

mistermann 3y ago

How science functions is how it functions. You do not have knowledge of the entirety of scientific endeavors, it only seems like you do, presumably due to being trained on propaganda, like an LLM. Maybe you are conflating it with how it is supposed to, and is claimed to function by people who share the same form of faith based epistemology as you.

adam_smith123 3y ago
Science is a set of methods. If you abandon those methods and fake data to fit your needs you aren't doing science you are committing various kinds of fraud. Maybe ChatGPT can explain that to you instead of listening to Alex Jones.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > Science is a set of methods. If you abandon those methods and fake data to fit your needs you aren't doing science you are committing various kinds of fraud. You still have the title "scientist", and still get your paycheque. Like baking, there is the recipe one is supposed to follow, but there is also the how the baking is actually done. If a baker failed to follow the recipe in an instance of baking, would you also believe that they are not a baker, or are not baking? I think it's interesting how people intuitively frame (construct a virtual model of reality, and perceive/present it as reality itself) the practice of science such that it "is"[1] literally impossible for scientists to do wrong, and with such a simplistic method: if it isn't perfect, it isn't science (which opens up a serious ontological problem: because it cannot be known to what degree each potential scientist executes the method with perfection, it is not possible to know how many scientists exist, or if a given candidate actually is a scientist...an individual could be one for decades, and then one off day and Shazam: you "are" no longer a scientist, despite having the title, the income, and the respect and admiration, despite not actually being the thing itself). >Maybe ChatGPT can explain that to you instead of listening to Alex Jones. What's the current scientific consensus on mind reading? Maybe it's not me who has to brush up on my scientific scriptures. And since we're on the topic of who to take advice from: perhaps you should reevaluate the trustworthiness of that Oracle inside your mind, because it's "fact" here is way off: I do not listen to Alex Jones. Do you now wonder how many other facts your Oracle got wrong? My Oracle suspects not, but cannot be sure. [1] here I am using the colloquial, normative meaning of the word "is": how humans believe "reality" "is".

nvm0n2 3y ago

It's not called fraud in climatology and yes it is how "science" functions. There are no universal standards in academia. Climatological norms involve heavy processing of thermometer readings to "clean" them in various ways. They all do it and do not see any problems with what they do. Every claim you've ever read about temperatures from climatologists is based on that kind of procedure. Some of this has good intentions, at least originally. Weather stations aren't normally intended to be used by climatologists. They exist for other reasons. So they get moved around, or not moved even as the environment changes around them, get placed in inconveniently unrepresentative places like airport runways, and more. Climatologists scrape this data from the internet or collect it from logbooks and then try to work out what's happening, but the data is super noisy. Now the way science works is that you characterize the uncertainty in your data and propagate it through any calculations you do, in order to track your uncertainty intervals. Then you communicate those and take them into account when making predictions. But in climatology they don't do this. Instead they use lots of algorithms and manual tweaks to try and "fix" the data to bring it into line with what they know it "should" be, and then report the data without CIs, as having 100% confidence. For example if a time series at a weather station is stable for 20 years, then experiences a short break, then it returns but the average is consistently 0.3 degrees different than before, they infer that it must have moved and they then "correct" it back to the previous baseline. If there are gaps in the data then they generate fake readings by interpolating between the nearest alternative weather stations, and so on. Outsiders might expect that they would investigate and try to improve the quality of their source data but they don't. Like, if their algorithms infer a station move, they don't contact the station operator to figure out if that really happened. They just assume their corrections are fine and move on. Another fun thing they do is alter data that was already published. When they update their algorithms for deciding what data points to include/drop/change, they don't just use it for new data running forwards. They reprocess the entire historical data set. That can yield outcomes that would normally be taken as a clear indicator of scientific fraud, for example where NOAA declared a temperature record, and a few years later declared a new record that was lower than the previous one [1]. Or where scientists invalidated decades of published papers (thousands of them) by deciding that the temperature trend in the first 15 years of the century was totally different to what had previously been reported: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 The underlying data on which those papers were built was announced to be all wrong, but nothing was retracted! That's how science functions. And the best part is that they've trained the public so well that for anyone who calls any of this fraud, as you just did, they are instantly ostracised for being a heretical Denier. [1] https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest-month-on-record-please-stand-up/ https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...