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220 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 19 Dec 2025 \ 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.)

The truth of the matter and the motives of the people involved have no necessary connection.

That's for fucking sure.

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54 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 19 Dec 2025
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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150 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 19 Dec 2025
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.

I believe that. Maybe a better way of saying what I intended:

  1. There are idiotic wrong arguments that are recognizable as such by people with no particular expertise.
  2. There are non-idiotic wrong arguments that are recognizable as such by people with no particular expertise.
  3. There are non-idiotic wrong arguments that are not recognizable as such by non-experts.

The amount of effort required to identify wrong arguments probably goes up an order of magnitude with each class. I'd put what you discussed in class #2.

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54 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 19 Dec 2025

There’s definitely a lot of class #3.

There’s a lot that I’ve come across and probably much more that I haven’t.

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