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'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

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Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#91

Post by 0xy »

flukus wrote: post #73
0xy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Given he was bullied and harassed, do you think someone could oppose climate change at CSIRO and not be bullied and harassed?

ETS and climate change are inextricably linked and related.

If the establishment cannot even handle dissent on solutions, how could they handle dissent on the actual problem?

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#92

Post by robomartin »

philipkglass wrote: post #79
robomartin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my research of the domain I did come across this. It is one of the scariest proposals out there. These people risk causing irreversible damage to the oceans and all life within them. It's hubris to think we can do something like that and actually control it at a planetary scale. Also, refer back to my questions about the energy and resources required to do this, to do anything.

While you are right in that the process is not combustion in reverse, the reality of the matter is that it much worse than that. Massively worse.

We haven't even gone to the other elephant in the room: Australia. I hope someone eventually publishes an honest accounting of the CO2 that was released into the atmosphere through these fires. My guess is it easily negates decades of clean energy and other mitigation technologies.

I didn't get into it in my original comments. There are two questions everyone should ask when looking at the 800,000 year CO2 concentration chart:

1) How/why did CO2 levels rise?

2) How/why did CO2 levels drop?

These are fundamental questions anyone with a science background should ask almost immediately. The answers, at a basic level, are simple:

1) Massive continental scale fires burning for thousands of years. Remember, no fire dropping helicopters.

2) Storms, rain, water, hurricanes and, yes, trees and vegetation growing over thousands of years.

So, stuff burned for approximately 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase and stuff grew and rain fell for about 50,000 years to capture the CO2 that was created.

The bottom line is that anyone claiming that we can do 1000x better than if humanity left the planet they are going to have to explain, in great detail, how it is that they know Zeus so intimately that he will grant them magical powers. And I don't think this is an understatement at all.

BTW, the only intelligent proposal I've seen is to plan trees like our lives depend on it. Seriously. Simple tech. We know how it works. We know what it does. And, if we have the water, we know how to grow them. This won't solve the problem any faster but it is likely to make things better. All we have to do is figure out how to prevent our massive new forests from burning, because, in that cases, once again, we will have made the problem een worse. Here's an article on that one:

https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-clim...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#93

Post by jacobmoe »

What appears to have happened here was that a climate denialist group that deliberately use "NAS" to confuse people into thinking they are receiving an invitation to speak at a conference by the National Academy of Sciences, was called out by an open science advocate who himself felt mislead. Then the Wall Street Journal was snookered into publishing an editorial because they'll publish pretty much anything that claims to be about "cancel culture". And now we're here debating how some tweets mean science has been ruined by cancel culture warriors or whatever. The irony is that the person being "canceled" is exactly the person being accused of it.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#94

Post by barry-cotter »

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?

You’re asking people to prove a negative, and also assuming that there’s no chilling effect as people learn that certain topics are not a good idea if you want a career.

The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go out of their way to muddy the waters by giving space to alternative theories of intelligence to g with fuck all empirical backing like Gardner’s or Sternberg’s. If they had similar standards in other areas of psychology everything would be as bad as social.

For suppression there was an article in Third World Quarterly withdrawn due to credible threats of violence because a mob didn’t like the topic. Note it wasn’t retracted and it passed peer review. David Graeber recently led a campaign to have Noah Carl’s offer of a postdoc withdrawn at Cambridge, successfully. And there was a campaign at Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal to have an article withdrawn for discussing trans racialism in the context of transsexuality.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#95

Post by belorn »

magduf wrote: post #40
natalyarostova wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone came up with novel and valid research that disputes some specific claims of climate change I'd wager the research would have a difficult time being published and the author would be considered to be a denier.

We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years (from core samples). There really isn't any room left for debate, because the facts are clear, the only question is "just how bad will it be with all this extra carbon in the atmosphere?".

Debates on climate change is not just about the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. One very active part of the on going debate is the role of methane, and if increase methane leaks from natural gas is acceptable trade for decreased CO2 emissions from coal. To name other common debates, we see people argue over the effectiveness of carbon emissions trading, nuclear vs renewable, cows vs cars, boats vs airplanes, and the effectiveness if planting trees. A common theme here is that what get disputed is usually the strategy to combat climate change rather than the fact of climate change.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#96

Post by catalogia »

allovernow wrote: post #85
magduf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years (from core samples). There really isn't any room left for debate, because the facts are clear, the only question is "just how bad will it be with all this extra carbon in the atmosphere?".

>We have plenty of evidence already showing the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere going back many thousands of years Excellent example! I'm no climate scientist, but I am a former geoscientist, and as it happens, all of our estimates for historic atmospheric conditions are based on various proxies which in turn are rooted in assumptions. Let's take a look at ice cores, for example. The theory is that bubbles…

> a very strong assumption is that gas ratios do not change through processes like diffusion

It seems to me this should be an easy matter to analyze in detail. Diffusion would blur two distinct bands into each other, right? A sharp change in gas composition would appear more gradual with time, as diffusion blurred the boundary. So, are there sharp changes in the old ice? Lack of sharp changes might not prove anything, but the presence of sharp changes in very old ice should be informative. I'm no statistician but it seems to me a statistician should be able to look at the data and give you an upper bound on diffusion.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#97

Post by traverseda »

dtoma wrote: post #86
ratsmack wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G.

I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though.

I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with.

A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#98

Post by allovernow »

barry-cotter wrote: post #94
alasdair_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You’re asking people to prove a negative, and also assuming that there’s no chilling effect as people learn that certain topics are not a good idea if you want a career. The premier example of robust, well documented science with vociferous opposition has to be intelligence. Besides scholars with a fiercer attachment to their politics than the truth like Gould you also have introductory psychology textbooks that go o…

Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject. Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four. Find me one credible media outlet which even questioned such treatment!

Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#99

Post by barry-cotter »

dtoma wrote: post #86
ratsmack wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

If we’re not going to find research because it’s useless that’s the humanities gone. All of the topics you mentioned have been done and are being done.

The point of IQ research is that it effects real life outcomes that we care about, like health, education, social status, criminal behavior, STI status, having children outside marriage, many others.

If two groups are assumed to be identical but they have different outcomes one possible reason is discrimination. If they are not actually identical the difference can be real and not due to discrimination. East Africans are crushingly dominant in marathon running. This is not due to discrimination against non East Africans. If similar differences exist between different ancestry groups in intelligence you’ll see dramatic differences in outcomes. If they’re due to discrimination we can fix that. If not pretending they’re due to discrimination will just lead to a great deal of wasted effort.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#100

Post by roenxi »

dtoma wrote: post #86
ratsmack wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

> What's the use about [a study]

It's academics. Whether or not there is a use isn't really an important factor. It is enough to be agglomerating facts.

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