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Comment by endorphone

8 years ago

Isn't it an agenda to call the consensus reality an "agenda"? I'm not being facetious, but that discourse has fallen the point where simple statements of reality are politicized has dumbed the entire discourse.

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endorphone

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lr4444lr  8 years ago

I can only speak for myself, but analogously, I have no disagreement when the anti-vaccination contingent paints the rest of us as having an "agenda" when we post stories about horrible flu outbreaks. Herd immunity and total extinction of certain viruses are definitely an "agenda" I will own up to supporting.

averagewall  8 years ago

Calling it a consensus reality is also showing an agenda - trying to make it sound more certain than it is, which is to push the agenda of saving people from possible harm of future climate change by fooling them into believing it's certain because they're not competent enough to assess the risk of uncertain things. I'm not complaining about trying to do good, but it's not science, it's belief and it might be wrong.

The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently because people don't care if the general public believes it or not. If you're interested in understanding, not politicizing, then it doesn't matter if there's a consensus or not. Look at the history of consensuses about how nature works to see how unhelpful they are at determining what reality is.

  • rxhernandez  8 years ago

    > The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently

    Um what? I feel like you haven't spent 10 minutes in a physics class. As someone who spent many years studying physics, you have to get within range of the quantum level before people in that field start feeling a little shaky in their beliefs.

    The history of consensuses? Yes, please, you should do that, because it has gotten us quite far given the constraints of time. There are so many crackpot ideas that are thankfully rarely explored due to consensus.

    • late2part  8 years ago

      Things that were described confidently for centuries (or less):

        1.  The earth is flat.
  2.  The sun revolves around the earth.
  3.  Fire is an element.
  4.  They have chemical/nuclear weapons.
  5.  No one can enter the search market; AltaVista owns the market.
  6.  Pets.com can't fail - look at who is invested and how big is the market.
  7.  Noone will ever need more than 640K of ram.
  8.  There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.

      etc. Who cares how solid the consensus is - what matters is facts and truth.

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    • averagewall  8 years ago

      Scientists were widely confident about the correctness of Newton's 2nd law and the universal law of gravitation up till the late 1800s/early 1900s. Then Einstein showed their limitations/incorrectness. You can't look at contemporary modern consensuses because if it's a consensus, it'll look like it's right until the future when/if it's proven wrong.

      Philosophy of science says we can't prove theories (of a certain type, which includes most of physics), only disprove them. So there aren't scientific truths, just current best theories.

      Many cultures had religious myths about the history of the world which they widely believed.

      I'm not saying that people who disagree with the consensus are necessarily right, or even that we should bother to listen to them - just that sometimes they might be so consensus isn't a reason to judge something as true.

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  • throwaway5752  8 years ago

    How uncertain should man-made global warming sound, in your opinion? You're speaking in gross generalities, perhaps getting some hard numbers. What I've read is that nearly 100% of publishing researchers in the area agree on it (high 90's).

    ...Actually, it's 97%. I found the paper, which describes the data set and their methodology: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048...

    • averagewall  8 years ago

      More helpful than the percentage of scientists who think it's true (a bizarre metric in science) would be the confidence they place on that conclusion. It can't be exactly 100%. Showing causation is notoriously hard, especially when you can only look at historical data, and even more so when there's only one example (one case of humans causing global warming).

    • Banthum  8 years ago

      This figure gets trotted out all the time and it's tiresome because it is so unconvincing to anyone who is even a bit sceptical.

      That's a bit like asking what percentage of Christian priests believe God exists. There's kind of a selection bias there.

      More helpful are broader surveys including earth scientists, geologists, etc, which (as I recall, not having the source handy) come up much more conflicted, close to 50% disagreement on various critical questions.

      There also the issue of what questions are asked. It's easy to ask, 'is the climate changing', get a near-unanimous response to this near-tautological statement, and declare victory. But that question has nothing to do with any real disagreements real people are having.

      The actual questions at hand are much more delicate. First among them is the question of what question we should even be asking.

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