3 ms·

>The way to deal with the problem imo is not to appeal to a group of uneducated people for support in the first place, but simply to increase the number of educ

>The way to deal with the problem imo is not to appeal to a group of uneducated people for support in the first place, but simply to increase the number of educated people to the point where such politicizing is no longer effective. There is plenty of effort being put into preventing that [1]. More to the point, evidence suggests that education doesn't make much difference: https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/climate-science-and-scien_b_1956149.html https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/climate-sci... For Republicans, in contrast, increasing education makes virtually no difference in their acceptance of anthropogenic climate change. Roughly 70 percent of Republicans with a high school education (or less) reject climate science, and about the same percentage holds for Republicans with a post-graduate education. [1] https://ssl1.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html https://ssl1.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texa...

jacquesm 14y ago
I guess that puts the lie to 'those without even a single college degree'. That one really hurt because: 1) I don't have a single college degree 2) What does it matter if you have a college degree in some soft science versus a someone without a degree that has tried very hard to keep current with a number of scientific fields? 3) What does support from uninformed / soft sciences people mean when it comes to stuff like this? To me it counts for next to nothing. Plenty of scientists are religious and you could easily find a way to argue that apparently being excellent in one field does not at all qualify you as even moderately informed in another. (and some would go a lot further than that). Scientists apparently have enough trouble dealing with the facts in their own fields, let alone those in other fields or in metaphysics or about something mystical. That doesn't mean that they are bad, but in that sense they may not be much more useful than your average, uninformed layperson when you're looking for support, depending on the area of interest. The only people that should have a say in the debate at all are the climate scientists (the religious ones too), and those versed in analysing large volumes of data with questionable pedigree and discontinuities. We pay those guys to do their jobs, policy should be informed by that and commercial interests should have 0 say in it. And those suckers that massaged their data to make it look more dramatic have done more damage than all the naysayers put together.
- vacri 14y ago
  'soft sciences' are still sciences. I co-majored in psych and neurophysiology, and the psych section dealt a lot with statistics and the scientific method. I'm tired of this continued derision of 'soft sciences' not being 'real science'. There is plenty of 'real science' being done in areas like psychology - and it's flat-out insulting that you term it so that 'soft science' means 'uninformed'. Put it this way: your point 3) implies that 'hard science' people have valid inputs. Why does a materials engineer specialising in ceramics have a greater validity than someone from the 'soft sciences'? What about a mathematician working on better algorithms for wifi comms, why do they have more validity? An astronomer working a radio telescope? The guys in the laser lab in the basement? So on and so forth. Ironically, the 'soft sciences' have more do to with the climate change debate than any of these 'hard sciences' - not because of the scientific findings related to climate, but in order to understand the psychology of the debate itself - there's lots in interesting things going on in terms of how people communicate.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    I think we have a different idea of what 'soft sciences' means. Neurophysiology and psychology are science as much as physics and math. We just don't have the right formulations yet (we never may, but given the progress over the last 200 years I'd say it would be a bad bet to place limits on what we will ultimately find out). To me soft sciences are cultural anthropology (cue cultural anthropologist disagreeing), political sciences and a whole pile of other interesting subjects that are not sciences per se but studies of interesting but ultimately non quantifiable subjects without falsifiable hypothesis. If you want to crack the psychology of the way the debate shapes around subjects that are ultimately important to lots of people and where those people make decisions against their own interest you should study how marketing really works. It is applied psychology with a twist, it's on how to use knowledge about people against themselves (cue marketing guru that is offended, I hope they won't be watching Bill Hicks). Marketing is exactly that, a way to sell people on something that doesn't benefit them and that they do not need.

jacquesm 14y ago

I guess that puts the lie to 'those without even a single college degree'. That one really hurt because: 1) I don't have a single college degree 2) What does it matter if you have a college degree in some soft science versus a someone without a degree that has tried very hard to keep current with a number of scientific fields? 3) What does support from uninformed / soft sciences people mean when it comes to stuff like this? To me it counts for next to nothing. Plenty of scientists are religious and you could easily find a way to argue that apparently being excellent in one field does not at all qualify you as even moderately informed in another. (and some would go a lot further than that). Scientists apparently have enough trouble dealing with the facts in their own fields, let alone those in other fields or in metaphysics or about something mystical. That doesn't mean that they are bad, but in that sense they may not be much more useful than your average, uninformed layperson when you're looking for support, depending on the area of interest. The only people that should have a say in the debate at all are the climate scientists (the religious ones too), and those versed in analysing large volumes of data with questionable pedigree and discontinuities. We pay those guys to do their jobs, policy should be informed by that and commercial interests should have 0 say in it. And those suckers that massaged their data to make it look more dramatic have done more damage than all the naysayers put together.

vacri 14y ago
'soft sciences' are still sciences. I co-majored in psych and neurophysiology, and the psych section dealt a lot with statistics and the scientific method. I'm tired of this continued derision of 'soft sciences' not being 'real science'. There is plenty of 'real science' being done in areas like psychology - and it's flat-out insulting that you term it so that 'soft science' means 'uninformed'. Put it this way: your point 3) implies that 'hard science' people have valid inputs. Why does a materials engineer specialising in ceramics have a greater validity than someone from the 'soft sciences'? What about a mathematician working on better algorithms for wifi comms, why do they have more validity? An astronomer working a radio telescope? The guys in the laser lab in the basement? So on and so forth. Ironically, the 'soft sciences' have more do to with the climate change debate than any of these 'hard sciences' - not because of the scientific findings related to climate, but in order to understand the psychology of the debate itself - there's lots in interesting things going on in terms of how people communicate.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  I think we have a different idea of what 'soft sciences' means. Neurophysiology and psychology are science as much as physics and math. We just don't have the right formulations yet (we never may, but given the progress over the last 200 years I'd say it would be a bad bet to place limits on what we will ultimately find out). To me soft sciences are cultural anthropology (cue cultural anthropologist disagreeing), political sciences and a whole pile of other interesting subjects that are not sciences per se but studies of interesting but ultimately non quantifiable subjects without falsifiable hypothesis. If you want to crack the psychology of the way the debate shapes around subjects that are ultimately important to lots of people and where those people make decisions against their own interest you should study how marketing really works. It is applied psychology with a twist, it's on how to use knowledge about people against themselves (cue marketing guru that is offended, I hope they won't be watching Bill Hicks). Marketing is exactly that, a way to sell people on something that doesn't benefit them and that they do not need.