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'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

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Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#41

Post by benmmurphy »

scythe wrote: post #22
sandoooo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since twitter is horrible on mobile, here's a summary: # Nasorg sounds like NAS and could be mistaken for it. # Nasorg is conservative and have published material with conservative slant. # 7 out of 21 speakers are climate denialists. # Therefore it is righteous to deplatform them.

># Therefore it is righteous to deplatform them. It's not "deplatforming" when your objection to someone speaking is about what they're saying. An organization pushing climate change denial should not be treated as credible because climate denial is not science . Anyone who has even the faintest experience with physicists -- anyone who has sat in a room full of them -- knows that there are thousands upon thousands of…

Lubos Motls is a theoretical physicist and is probably classified as a denier. Though, I think this definition is applied too liberally. In his latest blog post he claims there is 1-2 deg of warming per century and this from contributions by mankind (he doesn’t break down the proportion). He doesn’t think the warming will be an issue for 200 years.

https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/12/rss-amsu-acceleration-of-...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#42

Post by rhino369 »

scythe wrote: post #10
alevskaya wrote: post #4

Some relevant context here contesting this view: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738

Key quotes: >The @NASorg [National Association of Scholars] sounds like the National Academy of Science, but it's not. >The conference they are organizing has 21 speakers. Of them, 7 are hard core climate change deniers and 0 are climate experts. Sounds like a pretty shady group to me.

What does a "hard core climate change denier" look like according him though?

I took an environmental law seminar at Northwestern, and one of the invited guests was read the riot act by faculty who accused him for being a climate change denier. But he didn't actually deny climate change, he just had a model that predicted 50% as much increase in temperate at IPCC average models. And, for that, many called him a denier.

So just because Teytelman makes this claim, doesn't mean its true. Teytelman might also be 100% correct.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#43

Post by triceratops »

natalyarostova wrote: post #36
bsder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

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.

You are right. That's because muddying the waters, obfuscation, saying "the science isn't settled" has been used in bad faith in the past. It's tainted an entire branch of scientific thought.

There are certainly individual claims of climate change that are probably not entirely correct. That's how science works - hypotheses are made, experiments run, some are disproved and others continue to stand. Anyone who works to disprove those claims runs the risk of being tagged a denier due to the actions and motives of those who came before them. I don't have much sympathy.

EDIT: Apparently this isn't even true. Individual claims are rebutted all the time and the theory is adjusted according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050728. I'll leave my original comment up for posterity.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#44

Post by acollins1331 »

natalyarostova wrote: post #36
bsder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

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.

This is not true. Things are published all the time that show we are wrong in previous estimates of climate change.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#45

Post by wedn3sday »

natalyarostova wrote: post #36
bsder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

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.

Absolutely not. This actually happens all the time, and it just get incorporated into the literature. Thats what science is. Climate research is actually very competitive between the modeling groups, everyone trying to show off that their model is better then the other guys. Everytime someone comes up with a new method that disproves a previous assumption, its just folded into the models to make them better. See this recent publication from one of my colleges: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/the-latest-generatio...

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#46

Post by RickS »

bsder wrote: post #35
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…

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

Parent comment:

> 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 severely one sided science for decades.

Your comment:

> Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility

I am a firm believer in climate science, but this reaction suggests that the post you're replying to is correct.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#47

Post by magduf »

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…

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 holds in energy from the Sun. So the answer is simple: decrease the amount of sunlight. There's already ideas of how to do this, such as "solar shades". Basically, put a bunch of things in orbit that block some of the Sun's light, so less of it strikes the atmosphere. Now, even with the higher levels of CO2, less energy is entering the system that will be retained by the greenhouse effect. Of course, planetary engineering ideas like this are megaprojects and would require huge amounts of money to do, and probably international coordination, which seems unlikely given the terrible state of world politics at the moment.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#48

Post by CalChris »

natalyarostova wrote: post #36
bsder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

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.

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.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#49

Post by Fishysoup »

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…

This is complete nonsense. First of all, there has been and still is plenty of research on gender differences and even differnces within the LGBT spectrum from biochemistry to psychology. Genetics is the same with all kinds of insights coming up about alleles related with personality changes, autism, OCD etc. We even know about genetic factors that contribute to different drug efficacies between people of different racial backgrounds. (edit:) And that's just the stuff I know about. There's so much more out there.

What this article and other "dark web" people are doing is trying to play the victim and contriving a boogeyman. Just because science isn't shouting "omg women are inherently submissive" and "oh black people are better suited to manual labor", "dark webbies" make it sound like someone is suppressing research into any such area. Finally, climate change is real and people should get over it. If you look within the scientific community there's a huge range of diversity on opinions on every issue, including climate change. It's just not of the type "dark web" enthusiasts would like it to be because it's constrained by actual facts and not fantasies.

By the way, scientists tend to be left-leaning in general. It's not like there's some force out there "pushing them" to act like lefties. And no, the general leftward tendency of scientists doens't negatively impact research, because science isn't political. Climate change isn't a political issue, and neither are any of these other so-called "points". Science is about learning how nature works. The scientific establishment certainly has some flaws, most notable being the publish-or-perish regime that dominates many fields. But this dark web stuff is total nonsense that's only there to justify shitty beliefs or make people feel special and part of some "cool", "rebel" outsider group without having to put any work in.

Edit: oooh looks like i made some dark webbers salty. Downvote as many comments as you want, everyone is onto this charade. If you care about objectivity, fairness or justice then stop looking for boogeymen and easy narratives and focus on trying to make a difference for people who need help.

Re: 'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?

#50

Post by bsder »

natalyarostova wrote: post #36
bsder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument might be okay when you only used social "sciences". Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility. This is something that has MOUNTAINS of evidence that is quite clear and gets even clearer with the passage of time.

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.

> 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.

Not if backed up by data. I believe that we had this recently with the fact that one of the temperature measurements was off and stuck out. Eventually they traced it back to calibration on sensor platform.

There is a VAST difference between the science of climate change (does it exist and what caused it) and the politics of climate change (what should be done about it). The deniers always want to conflate the two because the science is basically unassailable.

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