That’s not my experience. Most scientists are already specializing from First Year at uni. By the time they graduate, I wouldn’t trust them to know what’s what in the other specialties in their own field, never mind one far removed from their own specialty. The day when the common scientist was a polymath are long gone - such scientists are the rare exception, rather than the rule.
As for you lumping engineers in with scientists… they’re even more highly-specialised. I wouldn’t expect them to know the background just because they know how to read a graph…
No, but you need to be at least widely read on the topic, and preferably doing research in the field before your opinion (which is all that assessment is) counts for anything to anyone else.
More than nothing, but less than everything. A person of reasonable intelligence and critical thinking ability is well equipped to learn what needs to be learned to assess most scientific claims or arguments.
That’s a different problem. And the solution is very simple: Give both sides an opportunity to be heard. The person who stated that (and his supporters) are free to offer whatever context or explanation they wish.
Which is part of the reason my country has mandatory education and public support of colleges and universities. It doesn’t work in every case, of course. But there are plenty of people out there, without specialized training in science, who are well equipped to assess most scientific claims and arguments.
But would you say that they are the “best qualified to assess the causes of male/female differences in behavior?” Over a feminist scholar? A psychologist? A biologist? A statistician?
A good idea is a good idea but that doesn’t mean I pick random folks as my go-to people before those more qualified on the grounds that the random fellow might have a coherent, persuasive argument.
Of course, in the case of the petition in the OP, I don’t have arguments from any of those people, much less coherent and persuasive ones. I just have a list of names from people largely well outside the field.
Maybe yes and maybe no. A botanist might be better qualified to assess the causes of male/female differences in behavior than a feminist scholar. The field of feminist theory might be infected with agenda-driven partisanship; sloppy thinking; and pressure to conform to a dominant dogma in order to receive faculty appointments, funding, and other goodies that scholars crave.
My spouse is an academic, and I know for a fact that in her field, it’s very difficult to get publications; jobs; etc, unless you insert certain politically fashionable ideas into your work.
What you do is you pay most attention to the actual argument.
Absolutely. The whole petition thing is, to me, rather silly. However, it’s a two-way street. When I hear people claiming that thousands of climate scientists have endorsed the CAGW hypothesis, I become skeptical.
The term you used was “best qualified”. Now I’ll grant that any one specific botanist might be better qualified than any one feminist scholar. I don’t buy that, out of the entire field of academia, you’d first head to the botany department to hear what they have to say about m/f differences because you feel the people there will be better qualified than anyone else.
Given that I don’t have time to listen to 500 arguments daily from every everyone with an opinion and decide which are best, academic credentials seem a good way of narrowing the field.
The point is that feminist scholars might very well be worse qualified, on average, than other scholars – even botanists.
If somebody claimed to me that feminist scholars are the best qualified persons to opine on the causes of male/female differences in behavior, I would be somewhat skeptical of that claim.
There is plenty of time to review the best arguments both for and against CAGW, so it’s not a matter of efficient use of time, in my opinion.
I disagree. As a trained scientist, I disagree.
Just like I wouldn’t want a climate scientist operating on my dog, neither do I want my vet assessing GCC. Science isn’t something any untrained person can do, any more than medicine or flying planes, and I have no idea where you come by that idea.
“Science” is a collective noun for a set of specialties linked by a common methodology. Nobody does “science”, or has training in “science” - they do obscure little esoteric things, half of which laymen couldn’t pronounce the name of. “People without scientific training” aren’t able to assess the data, you’ve already admitted they’re not trained for it. If they’re not trained for it, what, exactly, is it that makes them “equipped”, never mind “well equipped”? Pluckiness? Street smarts? An education system that leaves some of them unable to find their own country on a map?What?
Plenty of time? Maybe if you are retired with access to good university libraries, but not if you have a real job. I’m sure that, given time, I can understand the arguments pro and con, and the statistics, and the models. But it would take ages to read the fundamental papers with the fundamental knowledge that those working in the field assume.
I get papers from some other countries in my field where the author, and academic, clearly has not read the basic papers, and either reinvents a 30 year old wheel or offers ideas long since. invalidated. I’ve also seen reviews for papers sent out to those in the field but the wrong specialty, where the reviewer gets it totally wrong. Many review forms have a place to specify how much confidence you have in your review. I bet most of these signatories, if honest, would have to mark very low on CAGW.
Any good and experienced engineer or scientist knows how much work and research is required to even offer an informed opinion.
Might be but I doubt it. I can think of a couple obvious reasons why a feminist scholar would, on average, be better qualified. I can’t really disprove “might” though, so there we are.
I’d be skeptical as well. But I’d consider botanists even further down the scale of plausibility.
In the same vein, I’m more interested in what someone even somewhat related to climate sciences has to say about climate change than an aerospace engineer or a guy who studies obese rats.
In my opinion, one of the sure signs that one group of scientists has lost the scientific argument with their peers is when they appeal for the science to be argued directly before the public (or some subset of the public, like those who have scientific training of some sort or whatever). In fact, this is exactly the same approach as is used by those challenging evolution. It is much easier to bamboozle the public than it is to bamboozle your scientific peers in the peer-reviewed literature.
And, most politicians understand this, which is why there is a widespread approach in the federal government and public policy community to use organizations such as the IPCC and the NAS to give the public and the policymakers a summary of what the science says rather than have scientists present all the science directly to them and letting them reach the conclusions on what the science says (or having them be presented with petitions from scientists or what have you). Those who want to change how science is used to inform public policy have to make a compelling case for why the current system is failing and how their system would be better. So far, I think it is quite clear that their case is simply based on not liking the outcome. This really is simply a case of wanting to change the rules of the game because you don’t like the result, plain and simple.
Read my post carefully. I’m not claiming that a non-scientist can “do science.” Instead, I am claiming that a layperson is potentially able to evaluate most scientific claims or arguments.
And if you disagree with me, then perhaps you should inform the IPCC that they can cut their “Summary for Policymakers” down to a couple sentences.
The question is not whether someone can spend enough time to decide to their satisfaction the merits of a scientific claim. People are easily capable of deluding themselves.
I don’t see how that follows. The IPCC summary is not longer in order to allow the policymakers to independently determine the merits of the scientific claims regarding AGW. It is simply to set forth what is and is not known about the science in sufficient detail (and perhaps to give them in little inkling of how what is known is known and why the things that remain uncertain are uncertain).
Anybody can evaluate claims, but it’s a lot harder to get that evaluation right if you don’t have a background in the field. I’m a hydrologist, and I can’t imagine having an informed opinion on a question specific to the field of semiconductors, for example. Once it gets past the physics of electricity, I simply wouldn’t have the knowledge to follow the discussion.
The Summary for Policymakers exists specifically because a layperson cannot reliably evaluate most scientific claims and arguments. It’s not itself a scientific paper - instead, it’s a synthesis of all the research that went into the full report. The summary describes the current state of the environment and the anticipated impacts of a few different scenarios - as jshore says, what we do and don’t know. It focuses on the things that we (ok, they) can control and the potential results of our actions rather than on the science itself.
I have lurked in many of those threads, and the people who have experience in the field seem more credible to me. You only truly find out what you don’t know when test results or reviewer comments rub your face in your ignorance. That’s a generic you - my face got rubbed in my ignorance plenty.
More relevantly, I wonder how many of the 31,000 signatories studied the issue anywhere near as thoroughly as you have, or even went beyond politically influenced articles. Do you think this list is any more valid than the one of “scientists” doubting evolution?
That’s correct, however it’s possible for a critical thinker to evaluate a hypothesis in his spare time without deluding himself. It’s also possible for a trained scientist to delude himself in what he thinks is his area of speciality.
It’s not a matter of time invested, it’s a matter of critical thinking ability.