BigTard, I’ll respond to one aspect of your last post (and just let you be wrong unrejoindered with much of the rest of it): where have I said that opinions can be ignored (or whatever)?
I’ll translate for those that don’t speak CowardlyAsslohlic (I taught English to Cowardly Assholes after highschool):
“Blah-blah-fucking-blah, don’t actually read what I’m saying, Blah-Blah just assume that I’m reasonable, Blah-Blah, I don’t really want to talk about this any more, Blah-blah, because I’m afraid of admitting I’m wrong, Blah-fucking-blah.”
I’m not sure I get it either, then - I’m not seeing a big difference between what you’re saying and what BigT said.
Analysis of facts and conclusions based on facts are considered “opinions,” as in a legal sense. So one can say that global warming isn’t a fact; it’s a scientific opinion well supported by the facts. The confusion might be in mixing up the trivial kind of opinions – I like coke better than pepsi – with the kind of opinion that reliable, decision-capable grown-ups derive from the best information at their disposal.
T–that’s a lot of tge reason for my “facts don’t matter as much as opinions” post earlier.
Lobo–we all fully understand the level you are capable of operating on at this point, so we don’t need further proof, but thanks.
Declaring victory when you’ve pratfalled isn’t as cute as you think it is.
Admit when you’re wrong, you’ll sleep better.
What do you think I’ve said that’s wrong?
You’re right that your opinions are opinions, but your opinions don’t seem to be informed by facts, and the one on global warming is at odds with them.
If the dogshit has more of God’s Healing Love™ in it than the Neosporin does, you’re wrong.
CMC fnord!
I don’t have a lot of time here, but the basic idea philosophically is not the difference between facts and opinion, really, but rather the difference between facts, values and theories.
Someone mentioned earlier, I forget who, that there is a difference between mundane opinions, such as “blue is better than green,” and the analytical sort of thinking that marks legal opinions and expert opinions and the like.
The first kind, the mundane opinion (not a technical term), isn’t, in a sense, an opinion at all; it’s a preference. “Blue is better than green” just means “I like blue more than green.”
To make a very long discussion a lot shorter, facts are more or less the building blocks of arguments, nothing more and nothing less. But what they are the building blocks of can vary. A scientific or legal or otherwise expert opinion is essentially a mini-form of a theory. You’re putting the facts together according to logic, using your judgment to fill in the inevitable missing pieces in order to come up with a broader understanding of the subject at hand.
Public policy, though (and I think that this is where Rand Rover is trying to go) relies on more than facts, logic, and reasoned inferences. It requires values. I suppose that one could argue that values are opinion in and of themselves, but in many cases they are distinct entities that can result from an opinion.
Values tell us what is good and desirable, and they can come from many places. And it is values that help decide between two ore more possible courses of action, that ideally, an expert opinion (also not a technical term) has determined the consequences of. So, if policy A is likely to create millions of deaths and policy B will create universal prosperity, that in itself is not enough to decide between the two choices. You need values to do that. In this case, the values are obvious, but they are nonetheless still necessary.
This is why the “better” issue is, I think, causing issues. That universal health care leads to healthier lives (to use this as an example) according to whatever metric is not enough to merit adopting it. It must also be the case that there is a value on healthier lives, and that this value does not conflict with other values that are held more dear.
Now, remember that values can be shaped by expert opinions and that expert opinions can be shaped by values, and you have a small indication of why everything humanity touches turns into a giant mess.
Well, let’s see. You assert that there is no consensus of professional interrogators who think that waterboarding provides unreliable information. This is after being shown evidence for it. But you don’t care about facts, you want to live in a world where waterboarding, and thus your side of the aisle is on the side of angels.
You assert that I, don’t know the difference between fact and opinion, and you do it by outright lying about the statements I made.
You deny that there is a consensus among professional climate scientists that man-made Global Warming is happening. You also, in a weasel-like fashion, suggest that the consensus is somehow sinister.
You hide behind the idea that “better results” is an opinion, so it has no meaning. That’s clearly the dodge of a stupid person who has nowhere else left to run. As I said, incorporated into the concept of “better” is the idea that you’re measuring something. Neosporin is better for an open wound than a clump of shit. That’s not an opinion. It’s better because what we’re measuring is how well it heals the wound. We’re not measuring how well it infects the would. But you have to hide behind semantic games because reality doesn’t agree with your bullshit, childish beliefs.
But ultimately, I could have simply linked to every post you’ve made in this thread, because they all stem from the libertarian cartoon filter you see the universe through.
I wasn’t accounting for Jesus’ Love Ointment. This is true. 
It aggravates me no end that so many people can’t seem to understand the difference between fact and opinion.
People also don’t seem reluctant to weigh evidence in a reasonable manner.
In a thread here a week or so back I got into with OMG a Black Conservative
about the nature of polls. I made the point that poll numbers do not constitute proof because of the nature of polls. They can be evidence to form the basis of an opinion, and some polls, and consistent numbers may add more weight to an argument but they are hardly considered proof.
People seem very willing to deny evidence or or interpret it trough the lens of their own bias to an unreasonable degree.
Got into a long discussion on another board that has more conservatives about the Jon Stewart interview on Fox and his response to Politifact declaring Jon’s claim to be false.
Jon expressed an opinion that Fox is more of a political activist than other networks. I agree with Jon but it’s still just an opinion. There are a lot of variables and ways to weigh available evidence, but ultimately it’s just an opinion, and not one that can be proved right or wrong in an absolute sense.
Jon also said Fox viewers are consistently the most misinformed in every poll. That was the claim that politifact called false, mainly because of his use of consistently every, and most. Turns out they are consistently more misinformed, but not the most and not in every poll.
Chris Wallace accused Jon of being a strong political advocate for the left. Also a matter of opinion, but many conservatives wanted to insist it was factual. I also saw people repeating the statement that Jon said Fox was bias and other networks weren’t. Watching the interview it was clear that that’s not what he said, but it kept circulating.
Often I see people arguing motive. I figured out a long time ago that we can’t really know people’s motives although, here again, evidence can accumulate and be pretty convincing. It still irritates me though when people want to insist on applying negative motives to others and repeat it as if it’s factual rather than an opinion based largely on their own bias.
Brand name!
I think there’s a third option here, but I’m not exactly sure how to define it.
There’s fact, which is empirically proven, reproducible and clear.
There’s opinion, which is a person or person’s personal interpretation of facts and other opinions.
Then there’s the third option, which is neither one of the above, but seems to get confused for both.
This third option is things that are unproven, but likely to be true. For example, it is NOT a fact that neosporin is always better at inhibiting bacteria than a clump of dogshit. It’s entirely possible that some clump of dogshit has really high PH or lots of a particular beneficial bacteria or something, and is actually better at inhibiting harmful bacteria than neosporin. However, it is extremely likely that the neosporin is better at it than a random clump of dogshit.
This works for global warming- temperature records, ice cores, etc… all show that global temperatures have risen quite a bit (in climate terms) in the recent past.
However, that particular fact doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Most climate scientists hold the opinion that it’s caused by man’s activities, due to their interpretation of the facts and their opinions.
Based on their studies, it’s likely but not yet proven, that global warming is a man-made trend.
In a court of law, both prosecution and defense will bring in “expert witnesses” that each provide their opinion based on how they interpret available facts.
What subsequently happens is that people choose to treat the winning opinion as a fact, forgetting that in reality it was an interpretation of facts.
When it comes to global warming, there aren’t as many facts as people think there are. Instead, there is data, and data has to be interpreted, which then becomes opinion. It’s this process that results in multiple experts arriving at slightly different conclusions.
There is data showing a rise in global temperatures, but measuring temperature globally isn’t as easy as people would like to believe. Try measuring the temperature in your fridge or oven and you’ll notice huge discrepancies. Experts in the field then sift through the data to draw conclusions, which in actuality are opinions based on our they interpret the data.
So what happens when 99 scientists all say the data suggests the Earth is getting warmer, but 1 disagrees? What if it’s 85 to 15, or 51 to 49?
From there we see another opinion formed based on the question, “what caused it?”
And a subsequent and possibly more important question, “is it bad?”
All are opinions, based on the interpretation of data.
The lesson here, in my opinion, is that not all opinions carry the same weight. I’m more likely to trust a climate scientist’s opinion over a politician’s or business executive. But then how do we compare the opinion of various climate scientists? What does it even mean to have a consensus?
And what really muddies the water is that there are a damn lot of opinions between the data showing rising temperatures, and the federal policy to combat green house gases. The word “fact” really don’t apply to that discussion, when what there is are a collection of interpretations of data, that give a best guess as to a course of action.
If you are lost in the woods, a compass will provide data, that you can use to interpret as “it is a fact north is that way.” But that fact is only as reliable as the compass and the person reading it. Based on that information, a lot of opinion goes into deciding which way to walk. If there is a ranger with a bunch of kids, the ranger will most likely have the best opinion. But what happens when it’s a bunch of rangers?
No, what muddies the waters is that a lot of people are lying about the data because any intellectual honest interpretation of the data hurts their bottom line. When it comes to energy the western world is like an alcoholic who’s lost his job, watched his marriage fail, and has declining health. Every one of those things is due to multiple factors, sure, so one can overemphasize the other factors and minimize the role of alcoholism because it allows one to keep drinking. So it is with global warming – so much easier to rationalize the data and try to find other explanations or insist on its unreliability than give up the addiction.
What also muddies the waters (and this is my personal peeve) is 99 climate scientists say AGW is what is happening, and one schmuck with no credentials will say it isn’t, and both sides are called opinions and given equal weight. I move that we call this the Jenny McCarthy Effect for her disastrous work in the field of childhood disease vaccination (that one uneducated mother’s ill-informed opinion has been given equal weight to damned near every medical doctor and medical researcher in the world).
ETA: Good post, RadicalPi. That explains a lot. 
And you know of course that objectively the statement is false, because the sky is black and only appears blue due to refraction, right?
…and that one schmuck is part of some sham think tank funded completely by Exxon Mobil.