Yes, irrelevance is indeed the reason I am most likely to decline to answer a question. I'm not an extremely private person, if I think a personal question is relevant and important I often will answer it. But in general I think far too much is made of personal qualities or situations of people in debate, and those qualities or situations are usually irrelevant, and very rarely highly relevant.
I don't see any relevance here. Not only because even if I was challenging science my personal qualities, history, or situation, would not be relevant to the challenge, but also because I did not challenge science, or make any negative comment about it in this conversations (in other conversations I've made negative comments about how in the real world it is sometimes done, but that's not a failing of science as such, just a recognition that scientists are human, and subject to bias, group-think and error like everyone else. I wouldn't say they are particularly subject to those faults, just that they are not immune, they are real world people, not total paragons of perfection.
But If you can show some relevance to the discussion we where having (about "falsifiable claims", I'll answer the question (or you can find my answer in other posts on SI, its not like I've kept it a secret).
Turning back to that conversation for a moment, if your so hung up on the word "falsifiable" for some odd reason, other words will work just as well.
My original post in this conversation quoted a blog post ( jeffreyellis.org ) which said
"Quite a few skeptics have pointed out that nothing seems to count against global warming. When it’s hot, the true believers in global warming take that as evidence for their theory, but when it’s cold that doesn’t count as evidence against their theory. In fact, they often say that the cold weather simply shows how global warming is upsetting things, leading to blizzards, etc. Apparently, global warming is an unfalsifiable theory."
That could be reworded to something like, "if just about everything is supposed to be evidence for their theory, then really just about nothing is"
Or to use your term "proposing something that can stand the test of reproducibility" - There is no test of reproducibility if any observation is going to be considered proof of the conclusion, no matter what you actually observe. |
