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Comment Re: This is a MAJOR problem (Score 1) 127

Indeed. The difference is that everything you assume (not believe) to be a fact needs to come with evidence and need do be falsifiable (i.e. evidence that proves it is wrong could be obtained if it is wrong). Obviously, you, personally, cannot verify everything. But you can verify some things and it is expected that you did, usually in school. The only assumption that you need to be able to make is that all the other facts were verified by somebody.

In contrast, with faith/belief, there is no verification. Nobody has ever successfully verified that God (which ever one) does exist. There are some plausibility arguments, but they are all weak and many are basically not even argument but just serve to confuse the question by adding complexity. None of these meet scientific standards. And that claim is not falsifiable either: You cannot disprove God exists. What ever proof you have, it would be limited, because in some dark corner of the universe, God could be hiding away, ignoring everybody. Hence "God exists" does not even need the requirements for a scientific claim, regardless of whether that statement is true or not. This is the reason why Atheists say things like "God does almost certainly not exists".

In short, you can "believe" scientific facts (or not), but in doing so you do not participate in Science and you are not using the scientific method. Any claim to Science being about belief is simply a direct lie though.

Comment Re:My honda does that now (Score 1) 249

It’s crazy! Here in London, UK, there’s a massive jumble of cars, everything from a Citroen Ami (very rare) or Smart car (pretty common) through to superminis (ten-a-penny), saloons and a bunch of SUVs of varying sizes. But the largest we have is something like a Range Rover, and the smallest SUVs are things like my own car, a Mercedes EQA, which is only 4.4m long. Pickup trucks are super-rare.

Comment We screwed up, but we're still right (Score 1) 127

I don't know what the definition of "accountability" is in climate research, but a threefold error is terrible science, it should have been caught in peer review, and everyone involved owes the scientific world an apology.

"We're still right, it's a terrible problem," only shows clear bias towards demonstrating there is a terrible problem, and that's how they missed this. All of them, peer review, everything. It's a massive methodology screw up that can easily be accounted for in STATA or whatever they're using. It is a solved problem to identify statistical outliers and compensate for or eliminate them.

What's "terrible" is this is more fodder for climate deniers and people with general scientific trust issues.

The only appropriate answer is, "We all made an egregious mistake." Don't tell us you're right, because that tells us that you went into statistical analysis with a foregone conclusion. Even if it's the correct conclusion, and it is, it reflects badly on the entire scientific community if you fuck up the evidence. Worse, some will assume you fucked with the evidence.

Mea culpa and STFU. Let the adults cover your butts and your reputations.

Comment Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score 1) 127

Indeed. And the issue was detected by looking at the data, finding fault with it and that is perfectly fine. Now, if the MAGAs and other denier-idiot assholes were right, the correction would never have happened. But it did. And that means things work and deliver good results. The process is just a bit more complex and takes a bit longer than their tiny brains can handle.

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