Category Archives: Philosophy

General Science, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The “97%” Nonsensus

18 Comments

As I noted on Twitter:

Judith Curry explains:

I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. Verheggen’s 82-90% number is more defensible, but I’ve argued that this analysis needs to be refined.

Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community, and this is one reason why I found Kahan’s analysis to be interesting of people who scored high on the science intelligence test. And why the perspectives of scientists and engineers from other fields are important.

As I’ve argued in my paper No consensus on consensus, a manufactured consensus serves no scientific purpose and can in fact torque the science in unfortunate ways.

And José Duarte is appropriately brutal:

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Philosophy, Science And Society, Technology and Society

In Which I Disagree With @Instapundit

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I agree that neurosuspension is better than nothing, but I disagree that whole body is for suckers. This is a topic that’s been going on for years in cryonics discussions.

We simply don’t know how much of our identity is in our body, as opposed to simply our brains. For instance, I suspect that there is a lot of distributed motor intelligence in athletes and musicians — when I play an instrument (or for that matter, simply type on a keyboard) I have a sense that my hands aren’t being directly controlled by the brain, but are rather receiving higher-level commands issued by the brain that are implemented at a lower level, based on local memory. I don’t know that to be the case, but if you can afford to keep the whole body, it might end up being worth not having to reacquire old skills.