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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated
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From: LindyBill11/26/2009 5:04:02 AM
4 Recommendations   of 793891
 
Scientific Red Flags -- By: Jonah Goldberg

By webmaster@nationalreview.com (Jonah Goldberg)

From a reader (with an academic affiliation):

To: Jonah Goldberg, John Derbyshire

I followed with interest your interchange about the recent developments
concerning global warming research. I thought John's point that there will
always be contrarians in any scientific discipline, and that in general it
is likely that the consensus position has more validity than the
contrarian one, is a valid one. Given the recent events, though, it seems
to me that we need to develop methods that can alert us to situations
where the consensus position is faulty. In the case of climate research,
there were numerous such clues that were available five or more years ago
which should have made people look much more carefully at the consensus.
Here are some red flags in the behavior of mainstream scientists that
could be used as prompts for examining more carefully the consensus
position.

(1) Consistent use of ad hominem attacks toward those challenging their
positions.

(2) Refusal to make data public. This has been going on in this area for
some time.

(3) Refusal to engage in discussions of the actual science, on the
assumption that it is too complicated for others to understand.

(4) Challenging the credentials of those challenging the consensus position.

(5) Refusal to make computer code being used to analyze the data public.
This has been particularly egregious here, and clear statements of the
mathematics and statistics being employed would have allowed the
conclusions to be challenged at a much earlier stage.

If one believes in the science one is doing, one should be willing to go
to great lengths to engage those who challenge it or fail to understand
it, and provide various explanations at various levels of technical
detail, rather than attempt to discredit others.
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