Is free thinking dead?

bjack on 25/3/2015 at 02:02

Tony_Tarantula, yes I too went to that same article link. One of the best parts was in the comments. One went something like this, "You mean they had a play room with free cookies and only a few went?" Gee, I would expect the fumigated college kids would be in there in a second, scarfing down the munchies! The student complaining that the Hebdo speaker made her fell threatened is an example of perceived vs. real threat. The used to call it paranoid and put you in a rubber room. Hey, that is sort of what those special rooms are. The difference is there are no white coated goons to throw the student in. Instead, they demonize the speaker.

faetal on 25/3/2015 at 09:23

Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula

So now today's millenials are so resistent to having to think that they have to retreat to a play room with coloring books and play-do because they are exposed to ideas they don't like?

Kind of reminiscent of people who are convinced vaccines are unsafe tend to hang out in forums and facebook groups which post memes about mercury in vaccines etc...
At least colouring books are fun.

Ditto climate change deniers, 9/11 truthers, moon landing deniers etc...
Everyone has their safe place they like to hide out to avoid cognitive dissonance. I'm weird in that I genuinely seem to enjoy having my views challenged (if the challenge has substance anyway), but every so often, I still need to kick back and avoid the forums for a bit and just put myself in a place where I don't have to hear opinions which make my brain have to do stuff.

faetal on 25/3/2015 at 09:49

Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula

Can agree with where you're headed, and that's my tentative(NOT final) conclusion about the issue and why it's going to be difficult to find a solution to this. It's probably that the most effective solution won't be the cheapest which will make it difficult to implement.

Solution to what though? The issue with toxicology I mentioned might be to its greatest extent that if a competing paradigm is found in the research (backed up with good studies), then legislation based on it may be held up by industry. Likewise, lack of acceptance by industry of the research may be strong if it threatens to increase operating costs. This does not mean that industry is suppressing research and the jury is out on e.g. vaccine / additive / other toxicology. It's like climate change - the actual studies and data already tell us what the state of affairs is (with variation in the exact details of modelled projections). The "controversy" is something which is happening at an executive level in terms of acting on the research and in ideological echo chambers of deniers deciding that anything which runs contrary to the consensus of their reality, gets ignored and/or posited as a conspiracy or The Loony Left etc...

Chimpy Chompy on 25/3/2015 at 11:40

Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula

So now today's millenials are so resistent to having to think that they have to retreat to a play room with coloring books and play-do because they are exposed to ideas they don't like?

I think you know full well you're extrapolating in a lazy manner, here. That article was about facilities for women getting upset at a debate about cultural infuences on sexual assault. Not everyone has the luxury of being easily able to treat these topics in an intellectually detached manner.

bjack on 25/3/2015 at 18:16

Did you read the article in full Chimpy Chompy? That was pretty much the whole point of the article. If you did not get a chance to, here is a link:

(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html?_r=0)

And faetal,

There are very few outright climate change deniers. Very few deny that the climate is changing. What is in contention is by how much and by what cause. There are deniers that AGW is the primary cause, which is not the same as denying climate change altogether. It is a straw man argument to call everyone that questions AGW a climate change denier.

I am not arguing the point of the religious that have faith God will make it all right in the end. If there are complete climate change deniers, then they would be in that camp. It is unfortunately politically advantageous (albeit for the short term) for the rightists to go into league with these people. These people are lost to all debate. If science shows they are right in any way, they will latch onto that, but only as long as it supports their world view. If science shows they're wrong, then they deny the science. Nothing new here, right? Already said.

However, there are credible people poking holes into claims made by the AGW believers. This is peer review. There is not as strong a consensus as promoted as true by politicians. More about that later.

The left on the other hand there is an agenda, which is to redistribute wealth. People don't really like to give up their goodies, so you have to shame them out of them, or take them by force. Having a nice tort such as AGW and destruction of habitat occur, even as a threat, is a convenient reason to show cause for redistribution. I'm getting to the point… If AGW were true, then one could make a moral case for the redistribution, but for this case to be acceptable, it has to be pretty much incontestable. When there are significant numbers of questioning scientists, the left will resort to "The Science is Settled" to end all debate. You do know that there are leftist in the USA calling for criminal charges and/or censure for any office holder to speak out against AGW? So much for freedom.

This is how they are operating. We go to trial, defense gets overruled on all objections , the jury is skipped, the few pro AGW witnesses get to make the verdict, then we go right into the sentencing phase. Sounds like 15th century Europe to me.

Just for laughs, here are a few "97% agreement" threads that make a nice case that shows it to be BS:

(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/about-that-overwhelming-98-number-of-scientists-consensus/)
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/)
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/)

There are many more. If the science is so perfect, why do they have to lie to make it look like there is a much larger consensus? Not only do they cook books to make the data fit, but they cook the polls too. If they clean up their "science" and stop the lies, maybe more people will start to listen? One thing they really need to do is muzzle Kerry. He is doing NO favors to the AGW cause.

Chimpy Chompy on 25/3/2015 at 18:50

I did read the article, and I get the point about how a Safe Space sometimes can't also be an intellectually rigorous space, or how debate can be stifled if the whole thing is required to be Safe.

I was responding more specifically to Tony being thoughtless about a rape victim, and to his silly generalisation.

faetal on 25/3/2015 at 23:22

Quote Posted by bjack

We know that greenhouse gases cause climate change, we know that humans have greatly increased greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere and that there is an unprecedented rate of warming which can only be tied to human activity. The scientific consensus on this, which is based on decades now of swathes of research and honing; is tight. So anyone contending the parts which are not contentious are ideological deniers, yes. Where the science is still developing is on ellucidating the finer minutiae of the mechanisms and in trying to refine the models to predict the rate and extent of the changes.

Basically, anyone who doesn't understand the scientific position on AGW and climate change, yet talks as if they do and that they know better than the experts, despite having done ZERO research, then they are a denier. They are not a refuter, they are not a refiner of ideas, they just find their own voice more compelling than evidence.

Quote:

The left on the other hand there is an agenda, which is to redistribute wealth. People don't really like to give up their goodies, so you have to shame them out of them, or take them by force. Having a nice tort such as AGW and destruction of habitat occur, even as a threat, is a convenient reason to show cause for redistribution. I'm getting to the point… If AGW were true, then one could make a moral case for the redistribution, but for this case to be acceptable, it has to be pretty much incontestable. When there are significant numbers of questioning scientists, the left will resort to "The Science is Settled" to end all debate. You do know that there are leftist in the USA calling for criminal charges and/or censure for any office holder to speak out against AGW? So much for freedom.

This is how they are operating. We go to trial, defense gets overruled on all objections , the jury is skipped, the few pro AGW witnesses get to make the verdict, then we go right into the sentencing phase. Sounds like 15th century Europe to me.

Just for laughs, here are a few "97% agreement" threads that make a nice case that shows it to be BS:

(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/about-that-overwhelming-98-number-of-scientists-consensus/)
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/)
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/)

There are many more. If the science is so perfect, why do they have to lie to make it look like there is a much larger consensus? Not only do they cook books to make the data fit, but they cook the polls too. If they clean up their "science" and stop the lies, maybe more people will start to listen? One thing they really need to do is muzzle Kerry. He is doing NO favors to the AGW cause.

Seriously. Three clickbait articles, none of which are referenced or reviewed. I'm not sure I can hold back after reading this from just saying that you're a fucking idiot.
You are the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect - you have no idea about how the scientific method works and you seem to have no idea how the media works and no idea about the basics of climate science or even the basic principles underlying it. You also have some very childish notions of the motivations behind the science.

Until you can be bothered to educate yourself in the subject you are making over-confident assertions about, then any further character of text I write is a complete waste of my time. It's like you've ignored or not understood almost everything I've already written.

Tony_Tarantula on 26/3/2015 at 00:28

Quote Posted by Chimpy Chompy

For starters, the quote in question wasn't about being "triggered" by a memory of rape, it was about being "triggered" by exposure to others who "challenged my deeply held beliefs".

Second thing is that(in no small part due to the "War" on terror) there has recently been a massive amount of research done on PTSD the results of which I am familiar with due to occupational demands. It turns out that older generations had it much better. The summarized conclusions are that the best treatment is gradually and compassionately discussing the experiences involved (much like how they use docile tarantulas to treat arachnophobia) while trying to censor every potentially "triggering" experience, image, or idea is extremely counterproductive and tends to worsen PTSD symptoms.

Finally....yes, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to mock the stupidity of the individuals quoted in that article.

For Faetal: It's not a "peer reviewed" science link, but interesting nonetheless: (http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/18/are-we-headed-back-to-an-ice-age/)

The correlation does raise a question in my mind because it's one that (amazingly) nobody else seems to have noticed. In case you haven't been following the social sciences most of the economic models that people have previously relied on are becoming obsolete and for a simple reason: they simply did not incorporate enough factors into their analysis, or did not incorporate a long enough time period(most only go back to the 1960's or 1920's). Thinking back to my time in undergrad (at a well known research school with "Tech" in the name) that complaint applies to a lot of the studies we used in our projects. What data they had was good, but they typically only analyzed correlations between a single-digit number of factors.

Tony_Tarantula on 26/3/2015 at 00:31

Continuing to read, one of the sub-links contains this blurb.

Again, not "peer reviewed", but I looked up the author's qualifications and he is not a scientific "dilettante"

Quote:

So… case closed, right? It is greenhouse gases, and not solar activity, that are the main cause of climate changes this past century?

Well, not so fast. Because when sunspot numbers rise and fall, there’s more going on than simply changes in solar brightness. Periods of reduced sunspot activity correspond to periods of reduced magnetic activity on the sun, and reduced outflows of charges particles from the sun (the so-called solar wind). The solar wind whizzes past the Earth and deflects cosmic rays from deep space from hitting our atmosphere.

A recent proposal from Danish scientists suggest that when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere, they create tiny aerosol particles that lead to increased cloud formation and less sunlight hitting the Earth. So it’s a double whammy… fewer sunspots mean a dimmer sun, which also means more cosmic rays into the atmosphere and more cloud cover which further cools the Earth. And vice-versa when there is more solar activity.

Another recent theory suggests increased UV light from the sun drives energy flow from the upper to lower atmosphere by disrupting a layer of ozone high in the atmosphere. How this affects climate is unclear.

As it turns out (as far as we know), computer models of the climate do not take these indirect effects of solar activity into account when calculating the change in global climate. And while human activity counts for only 5% of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year, the sun accounts for ALL the energy striking the Earth and driving its dynamic and enormously complex ocean currents and atmosphere.

So you see, despite what you hear in the media, there is still much uncertainty about how the Earth’s climate really operates and changes over time, and how changes in solar activity drive climate change. Healthy and open skepticism, as always, is appropriate.

And remember… the Earth is so complex that even the best computer model in the world can’t tell you with any certainty whatsoever whether you’ll need an umbrella when you head out the door to go the office a week from today.

zombe on 26/3/2015 at 04:51

Holy fuck, please refrain from quoting obviously ~~biased idiots~~ intentionally misleading twats. The language use is just eerie ...

... that quote looks too well crafted to me to be explained by just stupidity ... cannot be sure though.

-------------------------------------------
Solar irradiance with its 11 year sunspot cycle (random google image, just for the numbers):
(http://www.aip.org/history/climate/images/solar_irradiance.jpg)
* The difference between minimum and maximum is less than 0.15%.
* Atmospheric lifetime for water vapor is thousands of times shorter than that of CO2.
* CO2 builds up, water vapor does not - that 5% goes over the equilibrium point with a hefty net increase, yearly. The excess 40%+ of current total atmospheric CO2 is our fault ... and that 40%+ does have an effect on climate (well, our climate lags behind the actual, shifted, equilibrium).

A long time ago (NOT recent) cloud formation due to cosmic rays (specifically what effect changes with our sun can have) was investigated (and will be continued) and it, somewhat expectedly, does not seem to have much effect. However, it could have a multiplicative effect on ongoing climate change ... not heard much from it since though, dunno. Don't care.

Anyway, nothing worth to add to models as far as i know.