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'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

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Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#71

Post by robomartin »

zekrioca wrote: post #64
magduf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warning: I am not a climate scientist. However, I have to disagree that humanity has to leave the planet, or that it's impossible to fix. I will agree that it's very unlikely to be fixed or mitigated to a decent amount before disaster happens, but that's because of politics and human stupidity, not because it's not possible. More CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't have to equal higher average global temperatures. CO2 hold…

In the article mentioned by parent comment, they suggest extracting CO2 from atmosphere and storing it somewhere safe. There is (at time of article's writing) no technology capable of doing so. I guess it is would be "safer" than creating a "solar shade"? I am not a climate scientist either..

The questions nobody answers when it comes to all of these so-called solutions are:

    How much energy will this require?
    How will we generate it?
    Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems?
    What resources are we going to need (chemicals, etc.)?
    How are we going to extract or produce them?
    How much energy is that going to require?
    How are we going to produce that energy?
    Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems?
Conservation of Energy is an ass. It does not care one bit. Which means we can't solve a problem with less energy than what went into creating it in the first place.

A common misconception is that humanity added a bunch of CO2 in a couple of hundred years. That's not true. It took millions, if not billions of years. Sure, in therms of use using petroleum, yeah, we did it in a couple of centuries. However, the reality of this fuel is that it took billions of years to create. THAT is what we burned; billions of years of stored energy.

That was the other revelation I had during my research. We are looking at this with the wrong time scale. In a couple of hundred years we burned millions or billions of years worth of stored energy. And to clean-up that mess you need far more energy than what it took to produce the mess in the first place.

Imagine how many trees, plants, animals and solar energy went into creating the petroleum we burned. That's the start of the scale of the problem we are trying to fix. In other words, we can't fix it. Not without making a much larger mess.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#72

Post by danShumway »

allovernow wrote: post #19

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severe…

There are two possible dangers that you can fall into with science. One is to assume a conclusion with such force that it causes you to avoid certain questions or to suppress certain research. The other danger is to be so fascinated with doubt or so averse to a particular outcome that you ignore consensus, and place less weight than you should on the obvious conclusion that research is pointing to (and yes, I think the author is guilty of this).

I have been hearing for a long time about how scientists are scared to question climate change, or gender differences between men and women. From what I've seen, the reality is that there are pretty clear conclusions that we can draw in those areas: that climate change is human-caused and dangerous, and that purely biological, mental differences between men and women are usually overstated.

Frankly, I don't think that there's a particularly strong culture in science that is scared to ask those questions, and while cancel culture is a real thing, I don't think it's a real problem here. I do think there's a culture at the edge of science that doesn't like the answers researchers have found, and that is aggressively underestating the degree of confidence in those answers in the hopes that certain debates can be prolonged forever rather than used to influence policy changes right now.

In other words, pervasive doubt can be just as dangerous and just as politically motivated as pervasive certainty. There are certain topics (such as climate change) where we effectively know the right answer. Of course we never reach 100% certainty, of course there are areas where we want to learn more, but we're a heck of a lot closer to 100% certainty than we are to 50% certainty.

Because of that, some of the taboos you notice on the far-edges of the scientific community are actually justifiable defensive measures -- because running the clock down while introducing impossible standards of certainty is an effective strategy to circumvent scientific and social progress. We saw this happen with the sugar industry, we saw it happen with the tobacco industry, we saw it happen with race science, and we're seeing it happen today with gender studies, climate science, and anti-vaxers.

If you were to look at the subjects I just listed to pick out a common theme or lesson, I would say that it is, 'beware isolated demands for scientific rigor, particularly when those demands are selectively applied in ways that benefit a political or socioeconomic status quo.'

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#73

Post by flukus »

0xy wrote: post #61
CalChris wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a counterfactual because it hasn't happened. If it did happen, scientists would look at the evidence and adjust their theories because that is what scientists do.

This has happened repeatedly, though. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO#Climate_change_censorshi...

> The debate was called for by opposition parties after evidence came to light that a paper critical of carbon emissions trading was being suppressed

This is disappointing but it's not climate change censorship, it's ETS (as a solution to carbon emissions) censorship.

Edit - And he was probably wrong anyway, look at the results of the ETS in action: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/climate-cuts-cov...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#74

Post by mayniac »

wedn3sday wrote: post #52

> Our list of speakers includes no women. (All declined our invitations.) The fact that every woman they invited declined to give a talk is a huge red flag.

Could be a red flag but it's not possible to know unless you can find out the number of women who were invited, the number of men who were invited, and the ratio of men/women in the field. Maybe they invited a reasonable number of women but they all had scheduling conflicts. Depends on the numbers.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#75

Post by pje »

MockObject wrote: post #69
pje wrote: post #54

>An unhappy side effect of the digital age is “cancel culture.” i.e. "I am uncomfortable with large amounts of people telling me I'm an asshole."

Cancel culture is when people are actually canceled: when accounts are shut down, people are fired, bank accounts closed, people are blacklisted. Actual material damages. Trivialization does not serve your point.

Yes it does

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#76

Post by not2b »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #25
wayoutthere wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been sad to watch such a storied institution reduced to another Murdoch mouthpiece over the last 10 years. The WSJ never had much of an ideological bent other than "capitalism" until News Corp took over.

Murdoch could’ve spiked the Theranos story that led to its collapse and cost him millions, but he didn’t.

Spiking that story would have delayed Theranos's collapse a bit (it isn't like if one news organization doesn't report a story no one else will ever find it), but had Murdoch spiked the story and unloaded his stock while it was still worth a lot, he could have been in legal trouble for trading on inside information, something only sources within the company knew.

This kind of spiking backfires badly when discovered (NBC blocking Ronan Farrow because they had their own related problems, he wound up taking the story elsewhere).

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#77

Post by etrautmann »

allovernow wrote: post #19

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severe…

No, this particular example is a group of partisan trolls looking to discredit science through quasi intellectual seeming “conferences” which bait this particular response

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#78

Post by robomartin »

robomartin wrote: post #37

Not saying for a moment that this conference is authoritative at all. Let's get that out of the way first. Is it possible for both sides of this matter to be right and wrong? Absolutely, and that is mostly the case. This, because of how f'd-up this climate change thing has become. It's a mess of indescribable proportions. Why are deniers right? Well, they are not. There's no denying this. Where they are right is in t…

I live for the day when a single down-voter actually comes back with a cogent argument and engages with the topic rather than cowardly hiding behind a down-vote. I never down-vote anyone. It's lazy, dishonest and contributes nothing to a conversation. If it were up to me I would permanently eliminate the ability to down-vote.

If I am wrong, don't down-vote me, put forth a sound and valid evidence-based argument showing me, and others, how it is I am wrong.

We don't learn with down-votes, we learn through honest intellectual engagement.

That's the problem with this whole climate change thing, both extremes are living in unshakable states of delusion and refuse to look at reality.

The Allegory of the Cave, all over again.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#79

Post by philipkglass »

robomartin wrote: post #71
zekrioca wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article mentioned by parent comment, they suggest extracting CO2 from atmosphere and storing it somewhere safe. There is (at time of article's writing) no technology capable of doing so. I guess it is would be "safer" than creating a "solar shade"? I am not a climate scientist either..

The questions nobody answers when it comes to all of these so-called solutions are: How much energy will this require? How will we generate it? Will generating that energy produce CO2 or other problems? What resources are we going to need (chemicals, etc.)? How are we going to extract or produce them? How much energy is that going to require? How are we going to produce that energy? Will generating that energy produc…

In a couple of hundred years we burned millions or billions of years worth of stored energy. And to clean-up that mess you need far more energy than what it took to produce the mess in the first place.

That would be true if the only way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere were to run "combustion in reverse" to turn carbon dioxide back into hydrocarbons.

That is not the only way, though. Enhanced silicate weathering is attractive because it turns atmospheric CO2 into chemically stable condensed phase compounds, without the huge thermodynamic cost of reversing combustion. The energy cost of enhanced silicate weathering (though still large in absolute terms) is greatly reduced compared to combustion-reversal because it's just accelerating the kinetics of a thermodynamically favorable natural process.

MgSiO3 + CO2 => MgCO3 + SiO2

This is a sketch of the geological carbon cycle [1], the same thing that eventually (100,000 years from now) would remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere. The idea is to accelerate the drawdown by pulverizing silicates so the above surface-area-limited reaction goes faster.

See e.g. "Enhanced weathering strategies for stabilizingclimate and averting ocean acidification"

https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/...

[1] "The Global Carbon Cycle: Geological Processes" Section 3.6

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Wallman.pdf

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#80

Post by ratsmack »

alasdair_ wrote: post #56
allovernow wrote: post #19

While this explicit cancel culture has been slow to arrive, this is exactly the kind of traditionally left leaning activism which has gradually come to infest almost all of academia (and to a lesser but growing extent, industry). The result is an extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severe…

>I'm not suggesting choosing between left and right, only pointing out that the bias is pervasive and undeniable. Can you point to specific examples of this where the science is actually robust and well documented but has somehow been blocked from being published or otherwise stopped due to this pervasive bias?

How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.
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