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220 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 7h \ parent \ on: What Happened to Climate Change? Politics_And_Law
As best I can tell the issue is complex enough that a person can pick and choose data and argumentation to make whatever case they want to make (theory under-determined by data, as per Quine), and even aside from that metaphysical limit, only a true expert has the sophistication to detect bullshit arguments made by non-idiots, yet in contemporary culture nobody who's not an expert cares what experts think.
This same dynamic is an annoyance in my area of science, which is two orders of magnitude less complicated and three orders less contentious than climate science. So basically there is no hope. (See above wrt learned helplessness.)
That's for fucking sure.
only a true expert has the sophistication to detect bullshit arguments made by non-idiots
This isn't quite right. There are patterns that an intelligent lay person can learn to recognize in the climate literature. A lot of bad arguments are placed in articles by non-idiots for the purpose of pandering to either grant reviewers or journal editors.
However, as we've discussed before, someone making a bad argument for something isn't evidence that the thing isn't true anyways.
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