My problem - they each often post about things I know and understand little about and read like very confident expert opinions. My default is to trust and appreciate their explanations. I don’t know enough to doubt it and I can usually mostly follow the explanations they post ..
But then they each occasionally post on things I know and understand extremely well. A smaller set than what I don’t know much about to be sure! They sound equally as confident. But, well … in those cases … sometimes … the confidence has been unearned. (I don’t have ready examples, sorry.)
Which of unavoidably makes me less sure that they are reliable sources for answers on the larger set of things I am ignorant and eager to learn about.
Take the thread that this petty pitting was inspired by. Compare both of their answers to the Munroe “What if” that @RitterSport linked to. I’m taking the link as more likely a more definitive answer to the question and neither of their answers were quite on the money or as clear.
So it becomes interesting to read the answers they post, I can’t argue against, but I hold my doubts now.
To use a rather oxymoronic Reagan quote: ‘Trust but verify’.
They could both be classified as ‘Village Explainers’… someone who knows rather more than the run-of-the-mill local person but is not really an expert in the world sense.
Like (though not as bad) my brother-in-law who, at the drop of a hat will give you a long, detailed, and almost completely wrong ‘explanation’ of a topic he knows nothing about.
No, not that bad: they both seem to have a fairly good scientific education.
But an honest scientist is never afraid to say “I don’t know”. The next sentence would be: Hmm, let’s see how we could find out about that…
The great physicist Rutherford had a saying: if you can’t explain what you’re doing in terms that make sense to the person who cleans your lab, you probably don’t really understand it yourself.
We all have to start from what we already know from first hand experience, I guess. If the question is strictly factual or numerical, Wolfram Alpha is often useful. I think it can probably be trusted to give correct answers about physical constants, material properties and mathematical calculations.
And there are things like the ‘Keye and Laby’ lab book, or the Rubber Company handbook.
But of course we should cross-check answers from posters to decide how much we trust their pronouncements.
I don’t know if there’s necessarily bad blood between them. What I do know is that Stranger reacts very badly to being corrected. I once corrected him when he was just plain wrong about the effects of adding more water vapor to the atmosphere (like from burning hydrogen fuels) and was met with raging hostility and the remarkable accusation that I was “stalking” him (IIRC, I had just made one post correcting a common misconception).
I don’t mean this to be critical or dismissive. Stranger is a very knowledgeable poster who just isn’t accustomed to being wrong because he usually isn’t, and doesn’t take it graciously.
You’re not the only one! I had the same thing. The hostility was way out of proportion.
You should be. Maybe I should be more, too, but Stranger is one of those board darlings that is beyond criticism. Me, I think his writing come across like an advanced AI - bot. Too much unfiltered, unimportant and probably unnecessary information that almost feels cut and pasted from other sources. Explaining in minute detail the basic things relating to a question most people here already know.
Yes, that was my first guess too. But it’s not quite the same thing.
D-K seems to refer to people who aren’t really any good at anything, while ultracrepidarianism affects those who are actually expert in a particular field but overestimate how much that transfers to other fields. I am susceptible to it myself though I try to restrain it…
Nope. My objection was to this statement of yours that triggered my comment:
If we were able to utilize hydrogen as a combustion fuel at a scale comparable to current use of petrofuels (especially at high altitude) it would have a substantial continuous impact on global heating because water vapor is a potent if not persistent greenhouse gas.
Water vapor is absolutely not persistent, except for trace amounts in the stratosphere from CH4 oxidation. Otherwise it is never considered a forcing in climate assessments but always treated as a feedback. I was not “intentionally” misquoting, “truncating”, or trying to play some stupid game as you seem to think.
I don’t want to derail this thread with this digression, but I just wanted to be clear. The proper response would be to admit you were wrong and move on.
I enjoy Stranger’s posts immensely, and Chronos has been Chronos for decades and has many good posts. This feels like a storm in a teacup to me, but I understand when people have hurt feelings.
You literally truncated the part of the post where I addressed the issue that you disagreed with, to wit:
You brought up this digression as a specific example of how I “react[ed] very badly to being corrected”, and then when the example is cited to see exactly what I objected to––specifically, your practice of quoting out of context sentence fragments to try to bolster your argument—you want to avoid discussing it.
I’m not “avoiding” anything except that I sense this thread going off the rails with yet another one of your whinings.
You made a simplistic and misleading statement about what is potentially a complicated issue, and calling water vapor a “greenhouse gas” is itself very misleading and is a typical talking point of climate denialists. And by saying “especially at high altitude” you imply that water vapor would have a lasting effect on climate everywhere, but even worse at high altitudes. This is blatantly false as the global tropospheric water budget is so enormous that artificial emissions would be negligible even if they were relatively long-lived, and they’re absolutely not.
There may be some nuggets of truth here but the significance is far from certain. The effects of contrails haven’t been well quantified, though H2 powered aircraft would probably create bigger ones, but it depends on so many other factors (altitude, humidity, and atmospheric microchemistry) that the net effect is largely unknown.
A large hydrogen economy could potentially affect methane and ozone levels and induce H2 leakage into the stratosphere, where oxidation could create H2O that is longer lived than at lower altitudes, which is potentially the single biggest concern.
Are these things important? Maybe, maybe not. These are all largely unknowns. But you didn’t say any of that despite your penchant for verbosity. You made a simple blanket statement that is simply unsupportable. And then roared at me like a deranged lion when I pointed out the inaccuracy.
