General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsArguing the Science of Models
I have been arguing with a longtime Conservative friend about the models. His criticisms are all across the board.
I have been trying to keep him straight on how to interpret science and not fall victim to other people with ulterior motives explaining it to him.
Long story short is that I have a simple approach. Criticism of science is desired and necessary as long as the goal is to improve the science for future use. It is not OK to criticize science with the goal of discrediting science as a whole.
Anyway, I stumbled on this blogger that almost perfectly aligned with what I was trying to explain to him.
Starting with a defending models against the anti-science crowd.
https://windypundit.com/2020/04/a-brief-and-unnecessary-defense-of-epidemic-models/
Then explaining why some criticism is different than other criticism.
https://windypundit.com/2020/05/how-to-criticize-an-epidemic-model/
From this second post...
Unlike some of the nuttier tweets I quoted in my previous post, these criticisms come from the epidemiological community.
...
I dont want to fall into the fallacy of appeal to authority, but since most of us are not expert enough to understand the subject completely ourselves, authority certainly helps make the criticisms more credible. But there are other reasons to take the criticisms in the STAT article seriously.
Credible scientific criticism tends to have certain recognizable characteristics. Most importantly, in order to credibly criticize a piece of science, you have to actually understand the science. The great scientific revolutionaries, such as Albert Einstein, thoroughly understood the system they were seeking to overthrow. Failing to meet this obligation is a common problem with cranks and people driven by ulterior motives.
I thought it was interesting and could be of use to some of you trying to explain to your brainwashed kin why some of those facebook posts are not credible
Wounded Bear
(58,666 posts)It's their primary argument against climate science. "That is just a model. It's not real."
Happens when your beliefs are not based on anything factual or logical.
genxlib
(5,528 posts)I had to tell my friend that Climate Change was where we have seen this BS playing out for decades.
To this day, many people dismiss the entire field of climate science by pointing to a single one page magazine article from 1975. https://www.factcheck.org/2015/03/cruz-on-the-global-cooling-myth-and-galileo/ Never mind that it wasnt even the consensus then and that we have learned a few things since then including decades of accumulated actual data.
I had actually hoped that this episode would help give science a boost in the Climate Change argument. Since it had many similarities but is playing out at 1000x the speed, it gives us the opportunity to actually compare the value of what the scientists say versus pundits and politicians. Boy was I naive.
Wounded Bear
(58,666 posts)Squinch
(50,955 posts)genxlib
(5,528 posts)The administration pointed to it because it was the most optimistic and fit their narrative.
Now that it has been proven to be too optimistic, it serves the dual purpose of being a huge target for them to spin their anti-science BS.
rampartc
(5,410 posts)the goal of science is to improve or replace with a better model.
no model is perfect. newtonian mechanics falls short at speeds approaching c, but i can still tell what speed i need to drive to travel 60 miles in 1 hour.
Newest Reality
(12,712 posts)"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
- Isaac Asimov
kairos12
(12,862 posts)dalton99a
(81,515 posts)(Science, 24 April 2020)