Comment by SapporoChris
4 hours ago
"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days." Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
4 hours ago
"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days." Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
I'm confused by how that is speculation.
The key word is possibly. Any statement with possibly in it could be true or false, it is speculation.
Rather, the word “possibly” indicates uncertainty, the very foundation of science.
Fair, but does that mean that the entire article is speculative? They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days, but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed (although as another reply said, the motivation for staying could be different than ours).
You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
1 reply →
They are indicating a range (hours to days) for a value, and the “possibly” qualifier indicates some uncertainty in the range’s upper bound.
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I'd say it instead makes it more precise, indicating that they are uncertain but the range is from several hours to days.
But they need to explain why the range is so large. Did they witness whales at the site on day 2? It's unnecessarily ambiguous.
Your pedantry and rigid lack of any insight is not representative of science just your own intellectual flaws
I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
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