America : Good while it lasted

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Originally posted by Rosuav
I wouldn't look at where something's published as proof or otherwise of its quality.

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I think you are confusing the statement "peer-review process enforces a standard of quality on papers through their evaluation by experts in the related fields" with "if a paper appears in a peer-reviewed journal then it is definitely true".

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I wouldn't look at where something's published as proof or otherwise of its quality. Internal evidence is more useful, including hard data about what was done and what the results were, is more useful. And while it's true that someone could just make all that up, it's no more likely they'd do that on their own web site than in a p-r jour. *shrug*

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And why do you think you can make sense of the data in unrelated fields? In most fields, the data and the ways to analyze are so complicated that you would need to take a bunch of graduate courses to understand how to look at the data. Since we cannot hope to do that with all the scientific fields, the best option is to trust the experts who have done those studies to evaluate the papers.

I'll have to add that as laymen we can see the big picture though. We can understand the basic ideas and the basic pieces of evidence for or against a position but it is extremely difficult for us to do any kind of verification.

Finally, it is definitely more likely for someone to make up data in a unrefereed medium. Academic frauds have high costs and very scandalous. On other hand, just look at the amount of garbage produced in unrefereed mediums such as books, popular journals, websites and so on. For instance, just look at all the creationist materials. A lot of people are making money by making up stuff about science and evolution.

Climategate.

Yeah I said it.

Google that shit.

Is that supposed to be some sort of argument?
What's your point?

Actually, I'm curious. Can anybody point to something specific rather than new skeptic buzzword "climategate"?

Edit:
I'll have to add. This whole climategate is some guy (possibly a fanatic) doing some criminal activity of stealing a lot of data and personal emails with the rest of the denialists cherry-picking out of context quotations in of a pool of 1000 emails to presumably argue that "the whole scientific community is going a global conspiracy".

This is ridiculous. The supposed skeptics have reached new lows I guess, somewhere near the 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, and moon-landing hoaxers.

Yes Xywalan, this incident truly shows how reprehensible the skeptics are.

As Malacasta said, no argument has been provided yet. I have no problem changing my opinion and in fact I do it all them time. The problem with "skeptics" is that most of the time they give no arguments. They give no substance that can make me change my opinion. For example, in this case, throwing in the phrase "climategate" is not an argument. Throwing in somebody's opinion is not argument. There is nothing here that can convince me to change my opinion.

The 'hacker' is no doubt going to be either a whistle-blower or a criminal depending on which side of the debate you're on. At the least it may force these scientists to have to release their data for review and hopefully put and end to the farce that is anthropogenic global warming. Or is it now man-made climate change because the predicted temperature rises their computer models haven't quite panned out?

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Originally posted by Xywalan
As Malacasta said, no argument has been provided yet.

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Mate, it's real simple.

What should be happening.

data collection -> data examination -> conclusion -> presentation

What is happening.

conclusion -> data collection -> data selection and adjustment -> presentation

I know you won't bat an eye no matter what comes to light, it's comedy to me now.

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Originally posted by Rilthyn
Mate, it's real simple.

What should be happening.

data collection -> data examination -> conclusion -> presentation

What is happening.

conclusion -> data collection -> data selection and adjustment -> presentation

I know you won't bat an eye no matter what comes to light, it's comedy to me now.

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The latter is what happens probably 95% of the time. Possibly more, but I don't know how cynical I want to be. With legit scientific analysis, it's probably more like:

conclusion -> data collection -> data selection -> conclusion adjustment if necessary -> presentation

It would be extremely rare that an experimenter does not have a fairly good idea of what's likely to happen, at least within some boundaries. The difference between legit research and propaganda/advertising/position-pushing pseudoscience is that real science allows for the possibility that the original estimate was outright wrong.

You guys are confusing a lot of things. As far as I can tell, most of the time this is how it works, in very simplistic terms.


Scientific hunch, based on experience, knowledge, literature review, common sense, intuition, etc. -> formulation as precise theory ->
-> designing experiments to distinguish between the proposed theory and the competing ones -> experiment and data collection ->
-> adjustment of the theory if necessary (repeat) -> submission for publication -> evaluation of the submission by peers, sometimes anonymous sometimes not ->
-> application of the reviewers comments, modification etc. -> resubmission -> acceptance in the journal (if lucky of course, it might get rejected with bad reviews) ->
-> wait to see how it is received by the community:
-> others will repeat experiments trying either to disprove or to obtain a detailed understanding. They start from a scientific hunch -> ....