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Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

thehill.com

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Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#251

Post by sqldba »

general_ai wrote: post #196
bobwaycott wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's really not. Because you can't see the distance. And from this vantage point, tricks of perspective make the immediately close crowd the only thing one focuses on. I can see empty ground coverings way off in the distance of the pic. It's not an outlandish claim to make that based on their distance from the camera, seeing the empty space as visibly as one can must mean it's a very large empty space. That's wha…

I see. "I refuse your reality and substitute my own". If you can't see that Gigapixel shows radically more people, then I'm afraid I can't help you. :-)

I'm not anti-Trump. In fact, I don't think less people showing up to inauguration means anything significant or negative.

It's just about comparing two photographs. Everything the other person said I agree with. One is about distance, and distance isn't visible in one of the photographs.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#252

Post by dnautics »

FLGMwt wrote: post #154
dnautics wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peer review most certainly does not determine scientific truth.

Arguable, but lack of peer review certainly should inspire a lack of confidence in results.

Do you not believe grigori Perelman's proof of the poincare conjecture? Do you believe in arsenic life? The first is still not peer reviewed, and the second very much was so.

These are some more well known cases. Having been there I'd say probably about 40% of peer reviewed material in chemistry and biology is seriously flawed.

We really have this problem where peer review is held up as a scientific standard. It shouldn't be. The scientific standards are independent replication and confirmation through prediction of a derivative result.

That is not to say all scientific peer review is flawed. If it appears in the journal organic syntheses I'll believe it, every time. (In order to get published an editor has to repeat the experiment in their lab, there are often liner notes)

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#253

Post by camel_Snake »

ColanR wrote: post #79
kafkaesq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is different than every Presidential transition of power, how? It's the aims of the control, and the utter brazenness with which the new administration attempts to manipulate facts and reality in general that are different. There's never been an administration (well, maybe in the 19th century; but I mean, not since the dawn of modern journalistic reporting) that blatantly and transparently lied about such public…

Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election. If your source on disproving the "millions of illegal votes" is one of the same sources that thought Hillary was going to win in a landslide, then you have nothing to say. I'm not going to say I agree there were illegal votes, but I am holding out for better evidence.

So you exclude any pollster that's been wrong once? Doesn't that strike you as very un-statisticianlike?

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#254

Post by dnautics »

lucajona wrote: post #187
cantankerous wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a vacuous statement. Science is an inductive exercise and suffers from the problem of induction. It's difficult to make the case that real truth can come from it at all. In lieu of this, peer review is a very good heuristic for sifting out bunk science.

I don't think it's fair to call a correct statement vacuous. More nuanced than it appears, and easily misinterpreted maybe. I think it's fair to point out that peer review doesn't determine scientific truth, because that would get the causal relation in reverse. Consensus has little to do with objective truth, but it is a useful heuristic as you say.

It's not a useful heuristic any more. I'd say about 40% of the 'reputable' scientific literature in chemistry and biology is flawed to the point of uselessness.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#255

Post by marklgr »

lucajona wrote: post #246
marklgr wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let's put peer review into perspective. In a topic about Trump, censoring scientists. I can see the "give science back to the people" anti-intellectual slogans coming up.

Those "anti-intellectual slogans" I think you mean can also be seen as arguments for a return to enlightenment values instead of an entrenched, elitist dogmatism. Behind those slogans is the idea that intellectual life doesn't belong to a chosen few, but to everyone who's interested and willing to engage their capacity for independent thought and critical thinking, and those who are willing and eager to engage with o…

A lot of arguments can be seen as sensible until one realizes they were pushed by people with a hidden agenda. It's often just the motte part of motte-and-bailey arguments.

That's why there are people (eg. in Europe) who aggressively promote secularism, and many agree with that, until you find out they belong to some hateful anti-islam organization. And that's why some people put science into question, like, how can we be sure of anything, which is defensible from an epistemological standpoint, until you discover they are creationists.

So you want to be careful before giving random people the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#257

Post by chmaynard »

skynode wrote: post #245

Why was this even posted here on HN? I don't think it's okay that HN should become a microcosm of the political economy of the United States. Well, for whatever it's worth, I hope California gets serious about secession.

> Why was this even posted here on HN?

That's why YC added the Hide button. With one click, you can simply hide posts that don't interest you.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#258

Post by BryantD »

monksy wrote: post #27
some-guy wrote: post #9

Also happening with the National Parks Service [0]. [0] http://gizmodo.com/national-park-service-banned-from-tweetin...

Not sure I disagree with that order. The NPS intentionally retweeted a political statement. (Showing the crowds for Obama's inauguration and Trumps) It was a very stupid thing to do.

Voice of America factchecked the claim that Trump's inauguration was bigger: http://www.voanews.com/a/factcheck-size-of-trump-inaugural-c...

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#259

Post by dnautics »

marklgr wrote: post #255
lucajona wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "anti-intellectual slogans" I think you mean can also be seen as arguments for a return to enlightenment values instead of an entrenched, elitist dogmatism. Behind those slogans is the idea that intellectual life doesn't belong to a chosen few, but to everyone who's interested and willing to engage their capacity for independent thought and critical thinking, and those who are willing and eager to engage with o…

A lot of arguments can be seen as sensible until one realizes they were pushed by people with a hidden agenda. It's often just the motte part of motte-and-bailey arguments. That's why there are people (eg. in Europe) who aggressively promote secularism, and many agree with that, until you find out they belong to some hateful anti-islam organization. And that's why some people put science into question, like, how can…

does 'being pushed by people with a hidden agenda' automatically invalidate something? I'd say that that the American (and presumably European) political establishment (both the right and the left) have a 'hidden agenda' of pushing science because it creates a higher authority that they can appeal to justify questionable policy choices. That doesn't mean I think all science is wrong.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#260

Post by true_religion »

bobwaycott wrote: post #179
true_religion wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If yesterday I thought the sky was going to be blue, everyone else swore the sky would be blue, and this lone fellow told me it'd be a blood red sky---and he was correct right down to the particular shade of crimson it would be, then yes I would take him a little more seriously. No one thought Trump would win. Even in the states he lost in, he lost be lesser margins than was predicted. Hiliary seemed to be inevitable…

There is a rather huge expanse of land where that "sea of red" is very, very few people compared to the rest of the country. The color maps are silly and deceptive.

Perhaps, but if a geographical area of your country produces most of your food, and contains nearly all of your natural resources, you can't look at the citizens who choose to live there and say "sorry guys, there's too few of you so we're going to ignore your wants and desires".

Such is the path to resentment, secession and violent revolution.

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