[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

[Bear Giles]

You have to be skeptical about 'skepticism', if that makes sense.  Ask a
question once and it's reasonable to expect an answer.  Ask the same
question for the third time even after two separate in-depth reviews have
cleared the researcher?  That's harassment, pure and simple.  That's why
Hawaii has passed a law specifically to deal with all of the tea baggers
wanting copies of Obama's "real" birth certificate - there were so many
requests that it kept them from doing real work.

Same thing with access to data.  Work should be transparent but it can be
turned into a weapon.  E.g., would the person be satisified with anything
short of high-resolution tiff images of the tree cores, available via a
thick data pipe within hours of them being collected?

Some of the other points are even worse.  How many people have been
'discredited' by the facts and their own ability to learn something.  E.g.,
ask any compsci person if they've ever had to deal with somebody furious at
their inability to grasp that, yes, it is possible to always compress
arbitrary data.  (No it's not.  It's called the pidgeonhole principle.  Look
it up.)  It seems like a lot of people have decided that listening to Rush
for a few weeks is comparable, no better than, spending years of study at
graduate school.


On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Carl Wagner <carl.wagner at verbalworld.com>wrote:

> Maxwell Spangler wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-05-26 at 09:11 -0600, Carl Wagner wrote:
> >
> >
> >> So in essence, I don't trust the raw data, and without that, garbage
> >> in->garbage out.
> >> And I am concerned with anything that will cut my standard of living in
> >> half or worse. Remember Cap and Tax is just the start.
> >> What if we spend 30 Trillion dollars and it turns out to be a naturally
> >> occurring event.  How do we get the money back?
> >> Don't believe the above?  What would it take to get back to 1850 carbon
> >> emissions levels?  Kill off 80% of the population?
> >>
> >
> > Skepticism is healthy but organizing too much effort to fight change for
> > the sake of fighting change is not healthy.
> >
> > I won't debate your long list of ideas and suppositions because of how
> > unproductive it would be overall.  What matters is that we have a common
> > ground to discuss things overall such as pollution is bad (but a
> > necessary by-product of our lives) and nature is good (but we will
> > impact it as long as we live.)  I trust science instead of my opinions
> > or yours in order to guide us to recognizing problems and suggesting
> > courses of action.
> >
> > What I truly appreciate about the scientific process is that its only
> > goal is truth.
> >
> Usually, or at least it should be.
> > If the process is applied correctly, from nothing you will get an
> > initial theory, then law about science.  Later, another application of
> > the scientific process will disprove that law and replace it with
> > something more accurate.  Repeating this has given us a world of nuclear
> > power, solar powered mars rovers, ships as big as tall buildings that
> > float more resources than some small towns and planes that fly at the
> > speed of sound.  It is layers upon layers of work searching for truth
> > that has provided this.
> >
> I love science and the products it produces.  I just have issues where
> science is corrupted by politics/personalties.
> What I have seen in the last year reaffirms my belief that AGW is
> science corrupted by politics/personalities.
> The truth, one way or the other, will come out in the end.
>
> But I missed the part of the chapter on the scientific method where it
> is acceptable to:
>    fight fredom of information requests
>    discredit people of different opinions
>    fudge data
>    hide everything you can, that was paid for by tax payers
>    etc.
> > You can live a life of skepticism but you must be willing to ultimately
> > be open to accepting scientific fact.  Also, you must be willing to
> > accept that human beings are flawed and make mistakes: along the way of
> > learning truths about science we may make mistakes and go in the wrong
> > direction.  You can't dismiss science because along the way some
> > scientific beliefs have been proven wrong.  It's the process you must
> > respect and support.
> >
> I am more than willing to accept scientific fact.  I just don't believe
> that AGW has been proven to be a fact, yet.
> To be a fact it must be testable to determine it's truth.  Gravity can
> be dis-proven when an apple ceases to fall.
> I have never see an experiment where that is the case so it remains a fact.
>
> How do you test AGW?  Everything is caused by it:  Droughts, floods,
> extreme cold, extreme warmth, tornadoes, hurricanes, lack of tornadoes,
> lack of hurricanes.
> > BTW, for all this talk about science, I believe it has to be balanced
> > with more spiritual interests as well.  Science will give us nuclear
> > bombs but it won't tell us when it is right or wrong to use them.  For
> > that we need religion, philosophy, etc.  That's a big part of the
> > environmental debate as well, but as most of your list dealt with
> > skepticism over what others say are facts, I thought I'd write about my
> > trust in science to help us with our path forward.
> >
> >
>
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