Post by nautonnier on Jan 31, 2013 0:43:59 GMT
Jan 30, 2013 19:25:26 GMT tsh said:
The saddest thing about all this bull is that as a layman I am unable to believe anything that a scientist says anymore. Mr scientist you have consistently lied to us for your own benifit., shame on you. Previously my ears would prick up with a CSIRO announcement, now there is a very good chance it's just all bollocks. May you rot in hell.
What you neglect is that the majority of scientists are honest in their investigations, and are not going to be making a very good effort to communicate any uncertainties or alternatives to their audience. Certainly they are an order or magnitude more honest than the average white goods salesperson who makes a commission from selling an extended warranty with the product.
To some extent, scientists are trying to please their public. The message is further lost in translation when the news media and PR goons get hold of a story. Most of this mess is not the fault of the individual scientists. When you look at the detail close up, it's easy to get caught up in the mass hysteria and not see the bigger picture.
When it comes to climate 'science' then I am not sure that I agree that 'scientists are an order of magnitude more honest'. Some of them are demonstrably frauds - a newspaper blogger in the UK was taken to the press tribunal for saying so and was cleared. The entire point of the 'climategate' emails was that the coterie of scientists that call themselves 'the team' dissemble at every opportunity, hide data and results and collude in peer reviews and threaten and pressure editors to only let 'the team' views become published papers.
I believe that there is significant peer pressure within some scientific communities to conform to the group-think. If you want tenure, if you want that post doc appointment, if you want the funding for your department - then you bend your results to meet the group think and your funding source. This is really a case of scientific ethics and unfortunately, in most cases they have failed. A lot of this is due to the way tenure is handled. I agree with the idea of academic freedom so that a professor's job cannot be lost for his point of view. However, I also think that the professor should ONLY receive the standard payments and terms of employment even if he is working in a highly funded area what we are seeing is 'scientists' effectively accepting bribes - better posts, more money etc etc if they provide the 'right' results (that is results that bring in more funding). A professor with tenure should be immune from both the carrot and the stick. Many of them have sold their 'ethics' to the highest bidder.