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FirmhandKY -> RE: "Scientists: Antarctic ice sheet thinning" (4/4/2007 3:21:08 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
quote:
ORIGINAL: FirmhandKy
"You find me "rude and obnoxious" because I challenge you, and expose your hypocrisy and agenda. "
No she says that because you are...but many of us recognize it as just part of your style and don't pay it much mind,
tompson,
I don't claim sainthood. Far from it. But, generally the way I post and operate is quite easy to determine.
If someone is snarky, dismissive and insulting, I will usually give them a pass and stay straight forward, and ignore their little barbs the first time. Even a second time, if their post has some good points and merit.
However, if they continue to insist on being snarky, dismissive and insulting, I'll sometimes give them a taste of their own medicine back. If it gets their attention, and they drop the BS, then so do I.
It's called "tit-for-tat with forgiveness". It works, except for some people who fail to even comprehend that they are being snarky, dismissive and insulting as a basic paradigm of how they relate to others.
In that case, it's open season.
Just remember our initial conversations. I think I was extermely "nice". I'm even "nice" in this post, because you weren't insulting, snarky or dismissive, but simply stating your opinion in a straight forward manner.
No hidden insults in my response, either. No snarky returns. Because you didn't do that in your post.
Another thing is that many people can't stand being challenged, regardless of how nicely. So I generally just challenge them directly, without worrying about being all "kissy kissy".
Because some are use to stating their opinion as if it were a "pronouncement from on high", and will brook not counter-arguments, they get offended based on the facts, and interpret it as some kind of ad hominen attack, when it's actually just a correction of the facts, or a different possible interpretation of what the facts mean.
Either way, the majority of the error is on their part, not mine.
quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
I find it interesting that in one post you mention that science rightfully deals in probability and in another post you call a scientist who expresses probability as using weasel words.
To my knowledge science has always expressed the mindset that this is their best guess or understanding of any particular phenominea and that when a beter model is developed to explain it then that model is adopted. Religion on the other hand speaks to absolutes and unchanging imutable truths such as a non heliocentric solar system. How long and how convoluted was the religious doctrin that explained the movement of the heavenly bodies verifying the earth as the center of this solar system.
Not exactly accurate, thompson. "Weasel words" is a "technical" term:
American Heritage Dictionary Online:
weasel word: n. An equivocal word used to deprive a statement of its force or to evade a direct commitment.
weasel word synonyms: The use or an instance of equivocal language: ambiguity, equivocation, equivoque, euphemism, hedge, prevarication, shuffle, tergiversation. Informal: waffle. See clear
weasel word etymology: [From the weasel's habit of sucking the contents out of an egg without breaking the shell.]
Wikipedia has a long article about them:
Weasel word
A weasel word is a word that is intended to, or has the effect of, softening the force of a potentially loaded or otherwise controversial statement, or avoids forming a clear position on a particular issue.
...
Weasel words are almost always intended to deceive or draw attention from something the speaker doesn't want emphasized, rather than being the inadvertent result of the speaker's or writer's poor but honest attempt at description.
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Generally, weasel terms are statements that are misleading because they lack the normal substantiations of their truthfulness, as well as the background information against which these statements are made.
... - Weasel words can be used to draw attention away from adverse evidence.
- They are used intentionally to manipulate an audience by heightening audience expectations about the speaker's subject.
- Claims about the truth of a subject at an earlier time when the truth could not have been ascertained because of a lack of hard facts, will become much harder to verify when weasel words have been used in the meantime. This may be seen when a politician, for example, later tries to alter the perception of an original speech.
The problem that some writers use them to describe scientific findings in such as way as to lead the reader to make certain unwarranted assumptions.
The historics about global warming has gotten some scientist publishing their work using such weasel words in order to avoid offending the political correct crowd, and, at the same time, if their conclusions turn out to not be accurate, being able to say "I didn't say it did cause X, I just said it could cause X!"
Translating mathematical findings into language isn't always the easiest thing for a scientist to do, so there are protocols for doing so. They involve statistics and are generally called "confidence levels" and "probability".
For some links and a discussion, you can review the thread I started called "Risk Analysis - Stats and Math Help Sorely Needed"
Absent the mathematical definition of what "likely" or "could cause" mean in any particular study basically means that the study (and article) is worthless in making informed decisions.
The National Geographic article that bluebird gave, and that I fisked is a prime example of just such an error - and one that pushes people not familar with the whole "statistics and math" thing to a false level of certainty about what is being proposed.
National Geographic is not a peer reviewed magazine. It's a popular magazine where they can get away with such stuff. It is an agenda magazine in this particular case, but totally worthless to be drawing scientific conclusions from.
That's what I'm talking about.
quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
So also is the convoluted logic of those who would say that man has no significant impact on the natural functions of the earth. We need look no farther than the impact of DDT; once proported to be quite benign and pimped by the chemical companies who benifited economically by its widespread use. They denied that it had any deliterious effects on the ecostructure, in much the same way that the tobacco companies said that no causal link existed between their product and a host of medical problems.
"The impact of DDT"?!!
Damn, thompson, start another thread if you want to make a claim that DDT is like tobacco smoke.
The banning of DDT is very much like the global warming issue. It was banned not based on any evidence, but on hysteria.
The World Health Organization only rates it as "Moderately Hazardous", and it's banning ensured the death of millions of people, especially in Africa.
Talk about screwing around without good data, the banning of DDT is a great example:
Chemist's killer of a cure
By Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe Columnist
October 15, 2006
In [Rachel] Carson's telling, DDT caused cancer and genetic damage in humans, and wreaked havoc not only on the insects it was intended to kill but on birds and other animals too. It was a poison that grew in concentration as it passed up the food chain, ultimately contaminating everything from eagles' eggs to mothers' milk. Carson recounted frightful tales of DDT's demonic power. ``A housewife who abhorred spiders" sprayed her basement with DDT in August and September -- and was dead of ``acute leukemia" by October. ``A professional man who had his office in an old building" sprayed with DDT to get rid of cockroaches -- and landed in the hospital, hemorrhaging uncontrollably; eventually he too was dead of leukemia.
Such alarming anecdotes were little more than urban legends. In the words of immunologist Amir Attaran, a fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, ``The scientific literature does not contain even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking DDT exposures to any adverse health outcome" in human beings. Yet if Carson's science was shaky, her influence was undeniable. ``Silent Spring" galvanized the emerging environmental movement and fed a rising hysteria about pesticides and other chemicals. Within a decade, DDT had been banned in the United States. Eventually every industrialized nation stopped using it. Under pressure from Western environmentalists and governments, DDT was widely suppressed in the Third World as well.
The results were catastrophic. As the most effective weapon ever deployed against mosquitoes and malaria was taken out of service, the mosquitoes and malaria returned. In Sri Lanka, for example, the spraying of houses with DDT had all but wiped out malaria, which shrank over a decade from 2.8 million cases and 7,300 deaths to 17 cases and no deaths. But when American funds to pay for DDT-based mosquito eradication dried up, malaria surged back, to half a million cases by 1969.
Today, the global malaria caseload stands at more than 300 million. The disease kills well over 1 million victims yearly, the vast majority of them children in Africa. ``Such a toll is scarcely comprehensible," Attaran and several colleagues have written. ``To visualize it, imagine filling seven Boeing 747s with children, and then crashing them -- every day."
No, I certainly don't want global warming to end up like the DDT scare.
FirmKY
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