Peer review, especially in the social sciences has been found to be wholly lacking recently. One group of people recently published an excerpt from Mein Kampf, but rewritten in the language of intersectionality, and had it published in journals. They've found that the vast majority of studies can not be repeated and that in many cases the original study did not hold up to the basic scientific method when scrutinized. The publish or die mentality at research universities is the root problem here. They've focused too much on the prestige gained from published research and it's come at the expense of their core mission, which is to teach.Dilbert_X wrote:
However doubting thoroughly researched, peer reviewed and published papers is not normal scepticism. The 'what my snake handler says is as valid as a paper in the Nature because they're both belief systems' argument holds no water.Jay wrote:
Many people, the majority really, take what is published about science as fact. They take it on faith that what some expert is telling them is indeed true. Faith is the premise upon which religions are founded. Unquestioning belief. No, what science is supposed to be is skepticism. Doubt. If someone tells you the sky is blue you test it, you theorize it, you investigate it. You don't take what they have to say on faith. There have been far too many times that the media has published reports based on faulty research and caused hysteria.
What the media says, and which media says it, is important. Retweets carry no weight and don't give weight to the argument 'some science reported on by the media is faulty therefore we can assume its all faulty'.But it is something easy and simple we could do to eliminate a wholly wasteful use of resources.The push for straw bans is simply the latest hysteria. Nevermind that when you look under the covers you see that the research was conducted by a 9 year old boy doing a telephone survey to arrive at his numbers, or that only 2% of the plastic trash that ends up in the Pacific Ocean originates in the US, with those very same straws making up a microscopic fraction of the total pollution. That skepticism to hysteria where the underlying facts were rooted out is where the real science was performed.
And because a small subset of environmentalists ideas occasionally seem a little trivial doesn't mean all climate theory is therefore wrong.
As I said previously, I'm not denying climate change. There's enough evidence to suggest it is real. The problem is that the proposed solutions are all political in nature, and the proposed political solutions have been mostly of the hard-left variety. What's necessary is the boring incremental improvement approach, but that doesn't get headlines. What gets headlines is things like banning all internal combustion engine sales by a certain date, even though the technology is raw and has it's own pollution concerns, and that the electrical grid can not support such a large increase in load. I know you resent unreasonable clients as much as I do, and politicians act worse than any others.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
-Frederick Bastiat
