“”I wasn’t trying to predict the future”:To prevent the future Bradbury told John Miller in a 2003 Wall Street Journal interview, “I was trying to prevent it.”
I think “if this goes on” was the key consideration that first Earth Day of 1970. A question basic to most science fiction.
And now? ” Almost half the songbirds”:| Nature of Things are gone. Who knew?
Where’s the failure?
Clickbait/misleading title. Unfortunately no links to actual papers/models.
For the most part, the models “failed” for the best possible reason: people reacted and changed behavior: increasing agricultural output (GMOs!), banning certain pesticides and chemicals, regulating pollution, developing new techniques for exploiting resources previously not feasible, etc.
It would be best to see the actual papers, which almost surely have phrasing like “if the present rate of X continues… then Y”. Since the condition fortunately became false, it’s not that the predictions were wrong, they served their purpose!
The other example is just terrible:
That is not a prediction from science, but a personal opinion/bet!
This former science journalist does a good job of presenting what the science (papers) actually says, and clearing up misleading cr@p from clickbait articles, politicians, and “personalities” on all sides of debates:
If you read my post again, you’ll see that I didn’t assert that hypothesis testing accepts claims as true or not true. And I understand confidence intervals and probability, which are beyond the scope of the post I was addressing with my comments.
I can offer you my opinion on that. I have a PhD and worked in academic research for years. I participated on many research project, including medical/clinical research. My PhD is in technical field.
I dont know what people mean when they say “scientific community”. Wast majority of scientists are very narrowly specialised. We all have areas where we are considered “expersts” and unimginably more areas where our knowledge is either superficial or equal to common knowledge. If you ask my opinion on some geological or sociological phenomenon, you likely wont get better answer than if you asked random person.
Now if a comunity of specialists, for example molecular biologist agree on somenthing, it doesnt mean its true. Their idea of what it really is will very likely be much more probable than someones who is not specialist, but it will not necessarily be true.
But wait, there is more. It gets even more complicated when it gets beyond numbers and raw data. As soon as you make a theory, you will definately find other scientists who can have a different explaination that will make as much sense and maybe even more. Doesnt mean any of you is right. I never met a fellow scientist (specialist in my field) with whom I would agree 100% on everything we researched.
So I would be very carefull about putting words like “scientific”, “community” and “consensus” together.
I do believe in research, discovering new things, finding new explanation for old things. I believe in publishing results and data, in reproducibility of results. I believe in truthful and honest diacussion. And I believe in mistakes. Because I sure as hell have made many.
Congratulations guys on some interesting reading. And you didn’t get the thread locked. 
I’m going have to simplify some information as I’m too lazy to write long paragraph
The science revolution occur around 400 years.
Way before Science exist, we used to believe in obsolete medical theory called the Miasma theory
which most people believed that infections were caused by foul odors. Centurys later, the scientific theory called ’Germ theory of disease became
During the Miasama Era, Hand washing washing wasn’t the norm until the 19th century which is the effective way of prevents the spread of many diseases. ”
The guy who discover hand washing effectiveness Ignaz Semmelweis
“Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was treacherously committed to an asylum by his colleague. He died a mere 14 days later, at the age of 47, after being beaten by the guards, from a gangrenous wound on his right hand which might have been caused by the beating. Semmelweis’s practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist’s research, practised and operated using hygienic methods, with great success.”
Galileo Galilei “father of modern science”
Here here!!
@Dr.Phillip:
You don't like this sentence:
"If the scientific community (in 2020) come to a consensus on a subject, I generally believe them."
That's fine.
I'm not a scientist.
How would you better phrase it?
I thought the science was in on some subjects, like the earth being round instead of flat, and vaccines not causing autism, that sort of thing.
Observable, measurable, reproducible results. Yes absolutely.
What I’m getting from all this is that science points us in a direction and over time it is refined.
I think a lot of the difficulty accepting scientific consensus statements is that they offend ’ibertarians by recommending cooperative management of resources rather than market-based freedom to take whatever you can get.
E.g.: https://www.compassscicomm.org/ebm-consensus-statement-download
Disclaimer: following is only my opinion and depends strongly on my experience.
First of all, I get the idea. I think I understand where it is comming from. If you are planing on doing something you dont understand, you will likely consult experts. If you ask 5 plumbers what to do about your problems with plumbing and they all give you the same answer, your best bet would be following that answear.
Secondly, I dont believe there is such a thing as “scientific community” in a way thats represented publicly. You have thousands of scientists working all over the world trying to find a solution to something a theory that explains something or just purely analyzing something as objectively as possible without injecting any opinions into data. Many of these people are working to prove the exactly oposite thing. The information they may be working with may wary and concusions they reach using different methods may wary also as well. Some may just analyze a theory to find if its right of wrong and reach opposite conclusions. There have to be houndreds of thousands contradictory papers published all over the world and so many of them are likely wrong by todays knowledge.
Now there are trends in science, just like there are trends in any profession. Some opinions are held by many scientist and certain approaches to solving problems are popular during certain time periods. A few years ago a large porion of scientists may have believed the HIV may be cured using cerian proceses trigered by some type of medication and few years later most have abandoned it. Many people are looking at what others are doingto come up with ideas for their problems.
Now that I have expressed what I believe the “scientific community” is, how would you define what their “consensus” is. Are we going to study all the different conclusion specific groups reached on a certain topic? You’ll find a lot of contradictory stuff.
I believe that a lot of what people consider “scientific community” is a very small group of “celebrity” scientists who get all the media attention. Dont get my wrong, some of them are experts and did a lot to earn the status they have. Anf yes, many of them have reached consensus on many matters, but thats just a few people. You would find that a lot of scientists dont agree with them at all. Or they dont agree with their methodology, or their conclusions. And there will be a large part that will admire them, agree with everything and dream of such a status. Now add selective media/political filter to the small group and you get your “scientific community consensus”.
This might help:
Anyone in science understands what you mean — that scientists are no less human than anyone else, i.e. they have opinions which vary just like anyone else. I doubt that there exists any two people agree who on everything. But that’s besides the point.
Plus, a scientist’s credibility does not transfer to a domain where they lack knowledge.
But for those less familiar with science it’s important to realize it’s not just a collection of arbitrary opinions. Not all opinions have the same weight. Scientific consensus does exist in sufficiently established domains and is like an averaging and stabilizing effect, much like the law of large numbers.
It does not mean that each data point is the same value or on the same side of the average. It does mean that taken collectively, the “community” achieves something more useful than the individual components: a consensus that tends to be more correct and more stable than without it.
The averaging effect also explains why new ideas face resistance. Some might decry it, with the benefit of hindsight, but don’t forget survivorship bias: we note the good ideas that took time to become accepted, but there are also plenty of bad ideas that got kept out of the body of knowledge by the same virtue. It also emphasizes that science does not and should not rely too strongly on any single data point or scientist. In other words this is a feature, not a bug.
So far I think we are in agreement, we both “assume” or “believe” it will.
That just begs the question.
Again we agree that there is order in the universe.
That’s not an answer, that’s really a different way of asking the same question.
But, it’s not science. It begs the question.
Trusting science that has been observed is one thing, but, the scientific community making accurate claims and or predictions for the future is another. Everyone has biases based on their own individual beliefs.
Science is a method by which we seek to reduce as much as possible the biases we have in testing a hypothesis - whether those biases are based on our preconceived beliefs, past traditions and methodologies, or any other type of bias that can be introduced into a test of a hypothesis. It isn’t science to “trust” in past results to be replicated indefinitely, under all possible conditions.
In science, when we discover that some of our past conclusions are not correct, or sometimes not correct, that is not a failure of science - it is a success. That knowledge leads to refinement of the hypothesis, and further testing. Science is a method - not a conclusion or set of conclusions that is assumed to remain inviolable forever and across all changes in the variables we are trying to predict.
Very well said. I should have changed my "monumental flaw" post to reference mostly those within the celebrity group that more often than not post utter nonsense claiming to be facts.
I don’t see how it is begging the question:
Perhaps my word choice could be improved or at least clarified. The “assumption” of consistency of the physics of the universe over time and space is not taken a priori as a premise. It is a conclusion as a result of extensive observation. Though there is no mathematical/logical proof that it can’t be false, everything we know so far suggests it is true.
I could give you some imagined scenarios where it could be false, but as interesting (and uncomfortable) as it might be to think about, there’s just no evidence for it.
That would be called history. The value of science is that it is not just descriptive, but also predictive.
And then the claims and predictions are evaluated for their consistency with reality.
“The future” is not a fixed reference point, and it eventually ends up in the past. We can pick up the bits of evidence left behind. Plus, we are time travellers going at a rate of one second per second. We get multiple ways to check the predictions. They’re pretty damn accurate as well as incredibly precise, in many cases. And when they’re not, they’re refined until they converge with reality.
Yes, and science helps reduce the impact of those biases or incorrect beliefs by having consistency with reality be the final arbiter.
I wonder, what do you understand to be science?
You know what? For sake of argument let us suppose that we know the future will be different. What impact would that have on science? Would physics change gradually? That would perhaps just require adding some time dependence to quantities we thought to be constant—not a huge deal. Would the change be abrupt? Assuming we survived the transition, would there still be order in the universe to understand? If so, then the process of science would be just as valuable and it simply would be a ‘reset’ of previous knowledge and require rechecking everything.
As interesting as these questions may be in a philosophical sense, I fail to see their relevance in practice. I haven’t envisioned any scenario that undermines current scientific efforts or approaches. It’s like trying to conjure up a variable that we haven’t detected and speculate on its impacts.
Meanwhile, in the face of everything which we know suggesting consistency, what reason is there to suggest an inconsistent future? The “assumption” of consistency is falsifiable. Non-consistency is not falsifiable and also introduces unknown additional complexity, much like Russell’s teapot. By Occam’s razor, the former is preferable. None of this is absolutely definitive, but the evidence and probabilities are very much on one side.
Well, I hope at least someone has fun reading all this.
If so, those people consider incorrectly.
The scientific community, and its consensus in particular, is an emergent property. It is not defined by any one person or group, though there is certainly a usefulness to having science popularizers.
The analogy of an average is helpful again. For a six-sided die, averaging out the values of the rolls will eventually converge to 3.5, despite there being no such value on the die. The average is an emergent property. Similarly, the scientific consensus is an emergent property which no one person necessarily holds exactly.
Consensus, like an average, has the benefit of being stable and on average more correct than any individual data point or person.
Science!
Ohh, don’t know about that.
Pretty sure suckers are born every day is consistent throughout history.
World leaders don’t want educated independent thought from the masses, yeah, consistent.
People are too dumb or stubborn to move from areas where things don’t grow well and will starve, but still have no problem making more babies to starve and continue the cycle.
Haters gotta hate and lots of people will still root for the Dallas Cowboys, again consistent 
Alright this one fits into “very short time frames” on a cosmic scale.
It’s all in fun people, lighten up.