It needs a serious dose of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science goes through huge upturns and there are intense debates, followed by periods of slow and steady progress, then another upheaval. This is normal and good. We stand on the shoulders of giants, while looking down at all of the wacky things they also believed (Newton believed in alchemy, astrology was all the rage for way too long, all the greats had some messed up beliefs about race).
The whole point of science is that you keep doing science and you keep updating your beliefs based on the results of the method, not that you believe eternally in the findings that come out of a single article in a scientific journal.
The idea that science is always right, dogmatic and scientists are a uniform group that stands apart from the laymen is the reason there is so much distrust in scientists and "experts" and there's conspiracy everywhere. "What they don't want you to know." or using the time a theory was proven wrong as proof that "science" is untrustworthy.
While reality like you say it's much simpler. Science is not about absolute truth that requires blind faith, it is about proving a theory or disproving an established one, with a simple logic process established since the Middle Ages. What we know today is just a pile of theories ready to be disproven and replaced by something better like we did with blood letting, ether filling up outer space and geocentric astronomy.
It's incredibly sad the majority of the people hasn't learned this fact either in life or even in middle school.
Obviously climate change is an important question, but sadly I think this issue suffers from the same problems of binary thinking that so many other things do in our society right now. It's nearly impossible to have a nuanced conversation without getting shut down as "bothsidesism" or risking offending some sacred cow. Climate change is a very real problem, and one that we need to address. I won't beat on this, but if you want to understand the science behind it, as well as one of the greatest stories ever told, I highly recommend Robert Hazen's "The Origin and Evolution of Earth" Great Course or the book version of the material, "The Story of Earth."
Now that said, there is a real problem of incentives in academia. The way funding is procured, and the way peer review currently works, is causing serious issues. Any sort of dissent has also become toxic to one's career, creating a heavy incentive not to challenge any established "knowledge."
It would be cool if Hackernews did some kind of debate / in-depth discussion / podcast / video cast thing where some of these topics could be discussed. I would love to hear a nuanced, technical / economic discussion about this and other topics. Heck, I would even pay to hear it.
I have no real experience with academia, but the fact that I (as a layperson) can’t even get access to published papers is a pretty clear indication that they have little interest in making information available.
Nope, just anecdotal stuff. I could definitely be wrong, but it sure seems like it's a lot more common. It's possible that it's just more visible to me now.
It would be fascinating to see some data on this, although I can't think of how you could quantify it when "dissent" is such an ambiguous and subjective term.
Fascinating! Dumb question, but is there a dye we could inject that goes only to muscle fibres, so we can image all the muscles in the human body in one go?
I'm surprised by 2022 we're still discovering new ones.
I like the answer "right now". We have to assume that we're already, at this moment, wrong about something important. We always find out in the future that our past selves were wrong; hence, we are presently wrong. It's science's mission to figure out what we're wrong about. It's also dangerous to get angry at people who question science, as if we can't question science, we can't really do science. When someone asks for proof or says something isn't real or true, it's science's job to provide the proof.
Sure, but we don't know the 'whats' and that is the rub. But you're right that not many things should be taken as gospel given historically our understanding of fundamentals keep changing or augmenting.
Bitcoin is the current one. Bitcoin is the most important piece of engineering since the Manhattan Project. It's an iterative solver that runs through the world economy, forcing each power station to decide whether to use their energy for local purposes or a shared goal, creating a shared stock market for energy thereby forcing the world into a new economy like in Star Trek by finally yielding a shared consensus on the true cost of energy as an asset.
It really annoys me people aren't as excited by it as I am.
edit: the number of downvotes on this will act as a record of whether people here are interested in the scientific method of discussing things they disagree with, or the nazi method of banning things they dislike
editedit: in this thread, please remember you were looking for the thing everyone else said was wrong
it's a scam and has value only to those who have been tricked into believing it has value.
> the most important piece of engineering since the Manhattan Project
that says it all doesn't it? if you think that a Blockchain is as important as the Manhattan project, you have been "converted" and are almost certainly so far away that logic cannot reach you.
I work in the energy industry and I think people haven’t engaged your points because they’re completely incoherent without you significantly expanding upon them.
Respectfully, the way you’ve phrased your points makes it clear you aren’t an expert in energy markets, which makes someone like me unwilling to engage in a debate without you making your case much more clearly up front. (If this seems arrogant, consider debating somebody who has a rudimentary understanding of Python making declarations about the next revolution in distributed systems, or something like that…)
You can’t call out the other guy for not acknowledging your points and then not acknowledge mine. Your points aren’t coherent, so lay them out better if you want people to engage. They other person isn’t malicious, they just don’t see you as commenting in good faith if we all know you aren’t an expert but are commenting (rather hostilely) as if you are one.
“This is not science” - you keep saying that as if an online forum should be a peer reviewed, etc. thing. It makes you sound childish. You haven’t laid out any coherent points and continue not to.
The "shared goal" is burning electricity for no good reason. Bitcoin did the same calculations with 10 WHr that it does with 100 TWHr.
The true cost of energy was already known before Bitcoin. It's the amount of money people are willing to exchange for some unit of electricity. All Bitcoin did was raise this known cost a little higher for computing redundant calculations.
The energy that you put into Bitcoin can never be gained back. It's a consumer of electricity, not a store.
Star Treks economy was a utopian communist system. How is a hypercapitalist system ever going to approach that?
Finally, this whole question is not a scientific question in the first place. It is a mathematical one.
Mathematically, is the cash flow within bitcoin the same as a ponzi scheme? The answer is yes, since there is no source of net revenue and older investors are paid off using newer investors money
The energy was already generated. Imagine you're a power company. You gotta sell your energy. Who do you sell it to? Locally? To that price-fixed monopoly who have exclusive control simply because they happen to be physically located near your very heavy and hard-to-move power station? Or do you mine Bitcoin?
As long as a free market exists, for whatever stupid ass reason, a fair economy will result from those economic pressures.
This is fundamentally not how power markets work. You offer to sell the grid power before it is produced - you have this backwards.
You sell it to anybody you want (some regulations aside). The grid operator makes it available to anybody who wants to plug into the grid. There are many regulations that make it such that anybody who wants to plug into the grid can do so as long as it’s not destabilizing, and even then, they’ll often work with you.
If you were an expert in energy markets, you’d see that you can go to an ISO and see which entities are market participants - of which utilities are just a few.
I could, and regularly do, sell some random company power that the grid / transmission operator HAVE to transport for me as long as I’m not physically destabilizing the grid by messing with frequencies, etc.
You also have the location of the power stations backwards. We choose to build power stations in an area because we see unmet or growing demand, not because some utility showed up and demanded we do it…
Pretty much all of your arguments so far are based on premises that simply aren’t true.
> The energy was already generated. Imagine you're a power company. You gotta sell your energy.
You do realize that power stations can increase and decrease production to scale with demand?
> Who do you sell it to? Locally? To that price-fixed monopoly who have exclusive control simply because they happen to be physically located near your very heavy and hard-to-move power station? Or do you mine Bitcoin?
If you re-route 50% of your power output to a server farm and jack up prices for everyone else because free market, the costs of all the goods and services that you require to maintain your power plant and your server and the salary that your staff requires to feed, bathe and house themselves will all go up.
Crypto bros are 21st century gold hoarders. The idea that the value of crypto/gold is 100% intrinsic to the commodity itself and not related to the social and economic context in which it exists myopic and a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of value itself.
Scientists agree that there's man-made climate change. There's no nuance of what the implications will be (e.g. rising sea levels, failing crops, mass migration), or what the solution should be (e.g. carbon tax).
It feels insanely difficult to say "climate change is real, but it's not something we should [overly] worry about; humans are getting better at combating natural disasters, our food yields are getting better, and the best we can do for the 3rd world is [for them] to continue to use gas [for the time being]"
> or what the solution should be (e.g. carbon tax).
There's a ton of nuance around what the solution should be. a carbon tax is one, but far from the only one, and it has a lot of downsides. It's difficult to measure and enforce, and creates ripe breeding ground for corruption. It's harmful to the economy, harmful (in some ways) to the development of alternative energies, and it's mainly the developing nations that are the biggest problem, but the carbon tax either doesn't apply to them or it would stifle their development, which is bad for humanitarian reasons (and pretty damn unfair given that the US was allowed to develop restriction free)..
I'm not saying we shouldn't consider a carbon tax, because it might be one of the better options. But there's definitely nuance around it and plenty of important ideas to debate and discuss.
I think when "science" has been infused with power, so that it is no longer the truth of an idea that gives it legs (the "marketplace of ideas") but an idea's ability to produce power, then "science" will get all sorts of weird results. Power corrupts even "science."
We began infusing science with power in the early 1900s. Over time, the ideas that win are those that are powerful (politically), even if untrue (or only weakly true, relative to what is being claimed).
There's every reason to believe that "climate science"[0] is weakly true, but that its ability to attain scientific consensus is primarily that it is much more powerful than competing theories that explain the same evidence. Climate science gives you control over multi-trillion dollar economies. Other theories do not.[1]
One way to gauge the trustworthiness of "climate science" purely as an idea is to imagine an alternative: suddenly, the Sun starts putting out less energy and the Earth cools. In fact, enough less energy that we are expecting a 1.5 deg Celsius decline in global temperature in ten years.
Ask yourself: what is your confidence level that additional man-made CO2 emissions will be able to counteract this so that the average temperature doesn't actually drop? If I'm honest, it's extremely low. I don't trust "climate scientists" to be able to warm the Earth on demand by injecting more CO2 into the air.
[0] "Climate science" is basically the idea that CO2 (functionally) acts like a thermostat for the Earth's climate at the extremely low concentration levels we see today (due to hypothesized "positive feedback loops" interacting badly with man-made CO2-induced warming). Man is a significant cause of the increased CO2 we see today.
[1] A (powerless) competing theory (because it gives no control over multi-trillion dollar economies) is that the Sun functionally acts like a thermostat for the Earth, that CO2 is incapable of heating the Earth at the extremely low concentration levels we see today—or levels 20x as high we've seen in the past 100,000 years—and that we see more CO2 in the past during warm periods (again: caused by the Sun heating the Earth) because the CO2 capacity of the oceans is lower when the temperature is higher, meaning CO2 is released into the atmosphere as the Earth warms, and moves back into the oceans as it cools. Also, there are no "positive feedback loops" in the Earth that would cause is to uncontrollably heat up due to tiny changes in CO2 levels. The only thing that actually heats or cools the Earth at the level of "climate" is the Sun. Man is a significant cause of the increased CO2 we see today, but that increased CO2 is too insignificant to cause warming by itself. If the Earth is warming (or cooling), it's because of the Sun.
Science is infused with power because it has been consistently shown to work, not because of the Machiavellian maneuvers of scientists. Unless you have hard proof stop with your climate denialist nonsense, your word is utterly meaningless
No, science was infused with power for that reason 100+ years ago, back when it really was a "marketplace of ideas" and truth was the only way for an idea to win. (That's why it "worked" back then.)
Now that "science" has been infused with power, it has become political and powerful ideas that are wrong (or only weakly right) beat out true ideas that aren't as powerful. It is what is.
Science 100+ years ago was like a large, pristine, clean lake, and it took a long time for the toxic waste that is power to pollute it. Today, though, power wins every single time.
> Carbon dioxide content in air is only 0.03%, but it is highly soluble in water unlike oxygen and one volume of CO2 dissolves in equal volume of water, the solubility being higher at low temperature.
> The Progressive Era (1896–1916) was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States of America that spanned the 1890s to World War I.
> Some Progressives strongly supported scientific methods as applied to economics, government, industry, finance, medicine, schooling, theology, education, and even the family.
> The Progressives were avid modernizers, with a belief in science and technology as the grand solution to society's flaws.
The Progressive Era is when the social sciences were created and then used to inform the actions of government. This gave those "sciences" power, and moved power to experts (which come from academia) and away from politicians. (At least, that was the goal.)
Broadly speaking, any academic discipline with the word "science" tacked onto it is a social science, though harder sciences (e.g. biology) can be infused with power as well (c.f. Lysenkoism in the USSR).
The Progressive Era goal makes intuitive sense: if you need to know what to do about a problem, ask the experts. The experts are in academia, and academia has this great track record for discovering the truth (aka the "marketplace of ideas").
Unfortunately, adding power to academia polluted that marketplace so that now ideas with power (that are only weakly true) outcompete strongly true ideas that do not confer power. Consider today how difficult it is for anyone to go against The Science™. I mean, who would even want to?
If "science" truly still was a "marketplace of ideas", no one would. Now that it's actually become a "marketplace of powerful ideas", everyone should be suspect: Is this idea really true? Or is it merely powerful (and only weakly true)?
Actually, there are science disciplines that aren't infused with power. Those disciplines have no policy component, i.e. politicians can (and do) ignore them. Astronomy is a good example.
In the USSR, all of their hard sciences were still useful after the USSR fell. But those Progressive Era "social sciences" from the USSR? They're all garbage. Useless. Because they were "science infused with power", which doesn't reliably produce truth—only power.
Rassenkunde (study of human races) was very much in vogue pretty much 100 years ago. This pseudo science is very much also infused by politics and power (to justify suppressing fellow humans).
> Science 100+ years ago was like a large, pristine, clean lake, and it took a long time for the toxic waste that is power to pollute it.
I see no evidence to show that it is worse today then it was in the future. In fact due to things like preregistration of studies, double blind procedures the reliability has probably increased. It becomes harder and harder to cheat.
An interesting thing about the linked quora question is that they do show a few examples of times scientists were generally wrong about something. If you look at them, they seem to have certain commonalities: they involve some deeply perplexing observation (either practical or theoretical), generally made by those with a deep experience of related subjects.
By contrast, the instances where scientists were all wrong do not, it turns out, look like wildly simplistic, obvious ideas conjured by those who apparently never even skimmed the wikipedia article on the subject.
Lol no, 'imagining the alternative' is not science. Climate science is the study of weather and temperatures. You are thinking 'Greenhouse effect'. Just because science is not impervious to corruption by money doesn't invalidate it or the vast amounts of data gathered in support of man made climate change. As far as your [1] theory how can you claim that the atmosphere has no effect on the ability to capture the heat from the sun? The moon has no atmosphere and because of this reaches -183 degrees Celsius at night.
I'm not making any claim beyond the claim that "science" has become infused with power, and as a result, powerful ideas (that are only weakly true) beat true ideas that aren't powerful. I believe "climate science" in particular has observably more power than truth.
No one was ever promoted for saying that CO2 emissions won't destroy the Earth, despite their homeopathic levels in the air. In fact, you can be the head of a climate research laboratory, respected for decades, and get fired if you do say that. The CO2 idea is so powerful it gets its enemies fired.
That's power in action, and "climate science" absolutely has it, whereas equally plausible alternatives do not.
Atmospheric CO2 level is a couple hundred ppm, which is way more concentrated than many homeopathic remedies at like 1e-60. I think you are basically making emotional arguments instead of evidence based arguments, at least on the climate science thing.
I’m not arguing that science is free from politics though, but I don’t think you’ve presented any plausible alternatives in this discussion
I agree with science is prone to corruption. As far as climate science having power...it was opposed by every giant oil, gas, extraction corporation and actively suppressed for decades, with these companies funding rival fake science. Science is still science, science minded people will hear you out provided evidence. If someone wants to claim CO2 doesn't cause climate change and they have a good argument I still believe someone will listen. Einstein was ridiculed for years about his ideas, you could say he had majority of 'institutional-science power' against him, but ideas still won out.
We know for a fact that both the theory of General Relativity and the Standard Model are both "wrong" in the sense that they model reality piecewise with no overlapping scope, and no clear way to arrive at a unified theory that covers that gap. It's like approximating a single function with two wildly different methods, and just ignoring the bit in the middle where the two methods clearly don't agree.
Similarly, there is no consensus agreement for much of what quantum mechanics covers, despite the theory being over 100 years old and used in practical applications.
The lead one at least is untrue, assuming you are talking about adding it to gasoline. They knew it was dangerous at the time, just business reasons overrode the scientists who complained, and other scientists were on the payroll and so lied.
Another interesting parallel is that they actually had a better alternative to addihg lead at the time, but the industry vetoed it because it was also a fuel in its own right and threatened their monopoly.
0. For that answer in particular, it's several years old. The best answers have bubbled to the top, rather than consisting of a bunch of hot takes, which is all you get on HN.
1. They started with a strong focus on Silicon Valley, which attracted a bunch of well-educated people early on. It got a reputation as a place for good, intelligent writing, which spawned a virtuous circle as other good writers came to each other.
2. For a while they continued to attract that with rewards for good writers. It was more about appreciation than paying them, so what they got was enthusiastic volunteers.
3. Their rating system is a deliberate black box but it does do a decent job of finding the better content. Poor quality content gets downvoted and hidden. Not always, and it's far from perfect, but there is another virtuous cycle where the good writers get more votes. The further down you go on the page, the worse the answers get, and the collapsed ones are pretty bad.
4. The moderation is also deeply imperfect, but they've done an OK job of pushing down some of the silliness.
They used all of that to get themselves good SEO, and for the past few years they've been capitalizing on that to better monetize the site. A lot of people feel that the site has gone downhill, as seems to be the way of all flesh/bits. But it has a large number of really great writers who continue to produce good, interesting things.
It needs a serious dose of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Science goes through huge upturns and there are intense debates, followed by periods of slow and steady progress, then another upheaval. This is normal and good. We stand on the shoulders of giants, while looking down at all of the wacky things they also believed (Newton believed in alchemy, astrology was all the rage for way too long, all the greats had some messed up beliefs about race).
The whole point of science is that you keep doing science and you keep updating your beliefs based on the results of the method, not that you believe eternally in the findings that come out of a single article in a scientific journal.
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