3 ms·

That's a pretty cavalier attitude to have when so much depends on the results (and I mean research programming in general, not just the CRU case). Maintainabil

by AndrewO 17y ago

That's a pretty cavalier attitude to have when so much depends on the results (and I mean research programming in general, not just the CRU case). Maintainability may not be a concern, but verifiability certainly should be.

cdavid 17y ago
Verifiability in science is not a matter of having one program checked by different people. The reality is much more complex than that. This so called climate-gate says more about the perception of research than climate science (although it has certainly became a PR-nightmare for climate science). I think it is just another case of people have an idealistic, out of reality knowledge of how science works. Verifiability is less a concern than most people meant it to be for research. In an ideal world, it should be, but it isn't how science has been done - I would argue it has never been the case. Scientists are actually very conservative for most parts exactly for this reason: in practice, it is just not possible to rely on consistent repeatability, etc... When you have an established, widely shared view on a topic, it takes great leaps to break it. Most research is not done to break the consensus, but to reenforce it. That's why today, if you want to show that climate is not caused by human activity, you will need to present data which are not as good as the ones one has now, but which are much, much better. So it is most likely true that if you want grants, etc... the easy way, going along the consensus is the right path. That may not be how people think science should be done, but that's how it is done in practice in my experience. I think that for most researchers, all this affair sounds like a storm in a teapot. The behavior may look shady at times, the experiment is not always great, but that's exactly why for a new consensus to be created, you need to have better proof than the existing consensus. And yes, politics come into play, yes a lot of it is mean and some of it is not ethical. But this does not invalidate science in general - it invalidates how people think science works.
cdavid 17y ago
Concerning the practical issue of repeatability, that's why most fields require a new fact to be independently repeated by several people. At last year Scientific Python Conference, A. Martelli made an interesting point about verifiable software: the best way to know for sure if your software gives the right answer is to have several, different implementation done by different people. He gave the example of the space shuttle, which has several independent systems with a vote in case they don't agree (wikipedia has some information on it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems).

by AndrewO 17y ago

cdavid 17y ago

Verifiability in science is not a matter of having one program checked by different people. The reality is much more complex than that. This so called climate-gate says more about the perception of research than climate science (although it has certainly became a PR-nightmare for climate science). I think it is just another case of people have an idealistic, out of reality knowledge of how science works. Verifiability is less a concern than most people meant it to be for research. In an ideal world, it should be, but it isn't how science has been done - I would argue it has never been the case. Scientists are actually very conservative for most parts exactly for this reason: in practice, it is just not possible to rely on consistent repeatability, etc... When you have an established, widely shared view on a topic, it takes great leaps to break it. Most research is not done to break the consensus, but to reenforce it. That's why today, if you want to show that climate is not caused by human activity, you will need to present data which are not as good as the ones one has now, but which are much, much better. So it is most likely true that if you want grants, etc... the easy way, going along the consensus is the right path. That may not be how people think science should be done, but that's how it is done in practice in my experience. I think that for most researchers, all this affair sounds like a storm in a teapot. The behavior may look shady at times, the experiment is not always great, but that's exactly why for a new consensus to be created, you need to have better proof than the existing consensus. And yes, politics come into play, yes a lot of it is mean and some of it is not ethical. But this does not invalidate science in general - it invalidates how people think science works.

cdavid 17y ago

Concerning the practical issue of repeatability, that's why most fields require a new fact to be independently repeated by several people. At last year Scientific Python Conference, A. Martelli made an interesting point about verifiable software: the best way to know for sure if your software gives the right answer is to have several, different implementation done by different people. He gave the example of the space shuttle, which has several independent systems with a vote in case they don't agree (wikipedia has some information on it:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems).