That's what I don't get about these demands. If Hollywood wants to scan background actors and reuse them instead of paying them a day rate, then surely almost anyone can be scanned and used in such a process. At that point they aren't even actors, they're just sources of pretty faces for the VFX team. And that isn't even necessary is it because GANs can imagine pretty faces for years now.
Presumably if actors pick this as a hill to die on, well, suddenly there'll be even more surplus supply of actors to demand because the easy roles are VFX, and at that point Hollywood can just break the unions with scabs.
But we're not talking about what you, random HN poster, did twenty years ago. You asked, "Why are weather stations even still a meme in these discussions?" and the answer is "because governments keep announcing records based on them". Why would they not be a "meme" in this discussion, given that fact? If governments didn't use data from weather stations anymore for climatological purposes, indeed, discussion of them would eventually disappear. They will never do that because satellite data only goes back to the early 1970s and they want to talk about trends longer than that, therefore, weather stations will remain a meme.
So there's nothing to try again here. Your question was answered correctly the first time.
No. Error bars on satellite measurements are OK (not sure what they are exactly but not too bad), but for anything before the 1970s the error bars are wide. 0.5 degrees at best but more realistically 1-5 degrees depending on weather station. That's government's own CI estimates btw.
And that's before you get to the way they rewrite the past in the temperature databases. It leads to problems like this:
Jeff Berardelli, WFLA-TV (Tampa Bay) Chief Meteorologist and Climate Specialist: “In case you missed it. The temperature soared as high as 100 degrees in the Northwest Territories on Saturday, the hottest temperature ever measured north of 65 degrees latitude in the Western Hemisphere”. Tough keeping up with all this climate chaos.”
100 degrees, hottest ever measured in north of 65 degrees latitude. A factual statement?
No, because it's not true. It reached 100F at Fort Yukon (66.6 degrees latitude) in 1915, according to government logbooks since erased from their websites:
This happens because climatologists engage in data fraud. They not only constantly change how they combine individual readings into global aggregates, but also rewrite the temperature history of every single weather station too. It leads to constant 1984-esque dystopian events, like trusted news sources claiming a new record has been broken when you can find records of that "record" having been previously already been reached or exceeded in newspaper archives and old documents.
Because governments announce new "records" based on single thermometers that are located on the tarmac of airports, at the moment that jet fighters are landing.
You're conflating telemetry with permissions. macOS doesn't attempt to stop apps reporting how they're used, why would it? Instead Apple gathers such data and then keeps it for itself, requiring devs to go via Apple to get it.
macOS does have stronger security, but it's security in the form of stopping apps accessing files until they need permission and things.
You missed the followup. People investigated BEST and discovered it was doing the same things with the same sorts of mistakes as other climatological temperature datasets. For example they classified the weather stations at Bangkok airport as "very rural". Like always with climatology the process they used to do all this is non-replicable, so people could see the mistakes but not diagnose how they happened or attempt to fix them. Plus, although Berkeley Earth claimed UHI was unimportant, basic checks like comparing the warming of cities vs more rural stations showed huge differences.
There's also the issue that BEST has diverged drastically from satellite observations. It's not possible for both sources to be true simultaneously as they claim to be measuring the same thing.
It's not hugely surprising that they claimed to investigate these concerns and then simply duplicated the bad methodologies that were being criticized in the first place. Berkeley Earth is run by a guy who has said, amongst other things,
"I would love to believe that the results of Mann et al. are correct, and that the last few years have been the warmest in a millennium."
In the same article where he said that he observed that anyone who took issue with the Mann hockey-stick history rewrites were attacked and people had engaged in mass resignations simply because papers disagreeing with it were published.
There's a fundamental philosophy of science issue here that can't be resolved with the "one more study" approach. Climatologists don't attempt to improve their source data quality. They don't build and operate weather station networks, they rely on others that were built for other purposes. Although the changes they claim to be monitoring are very small (like 0.1-0.2 C per decade) they don't set up the instruments they need to obtain such precise and accurate measurements. Instead they suck up data from literally any thermometer they can find and then apply algorithms that they claim correct the bias and corruption. This isn't scientifically valid. If scientists have doubts about their source data they're supposed to use error bars, but when did you ever see a temperature graph that had error bars? They never do because many of the stations they use report uncertainty intervals of anywhere from half a degree C to even 5 degrees C. These CIs are much wider than the size of the claimed trend and would thus destroy any ability to detect warming from the ground station network. So, they rely on this algorithmic approach, but that isn't convincing due to how frequently they decided their previous algorithms were wrong and rewrite the history of the climate.
It is not uncharted. The Vikings were doing agriculture in Greenland, the Romans grew wine in England as far north as Lincolnshire, bison were roaming at altitudes that cannot be found at today.
There were periods in the past warmer than it is today. Climatologists once knew this, it was uncontroversial. But when they realized they could raise the importance of their field by predicting disaster, this history became problematic and was erased.
I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.
The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."
> But I'd still say it's really bad and we should try to figure out in advance how to minimise this outcome.
For sure. But I don't see what's AI specific about it. If the AI doom scenario is a super smart AI tricking people into doing self destructive things by using clever words, then everything you need to do to vaccinate people against that is the same as if it was humans doing the tricking. Teaching critical thinking, self reliance, to judge arguments on merit and not on surface level attributes like complexity of language or titles of the speakers. All these are things our society objectively sucks at today, and we have a ruling class - including many of the sorts of people who work at AI companies - who are hellbent on attacking these healthy mental habits, and people who engage in them!
> Not seen academics get stick before, except in history books.
For academics you could also read intellectuals. Marx wasn't an academic but he very much wanted to be, if he lived in today's world he'd certainly be one of the most famous academics.
I'm of the view that corporations are very tame compared to the damage caused by runaway academia. It wasn't corporations that locked me in my apartment for months at a time on the back of pseudoscientific modelling and lies about vaccines. It wasn't even politicians really. It was governments doing what they were told by the supposedly intellectually superior academic class. And it isn't corporations trying to get rid of cheap energy and travel. And it's not governments convincing people that having children is immoral because of climate change. All these things are from academics, primarily in universities but also those who work inside government agencies.
When I look at the major threats to my way of life today, academic pseudo-science sits clearly at number 1 by a mile. To the extent corporations and governments are a threat, it's because they blindly trust academics. If you replace Professor of Whateverology at Harvard with ChatGPT, what changes? The underlying sources of mental and cultural weakness are the same.
That sort of thing sounds OK for primary/elementary school. You'd expect science at that level to be focused on soft stuff. Expecting kids of that age to do real experiments or care about the philosophy of science is too much, if you can get them out into the garden and looking at insects and flowers then that's a good start.
I think there's a subtle difference between viruses/bacteria and what government officials mean when they talk about infectious diseases. Obviously any good biology curriculum will cover viruses and bacteria at the microscopic level. But when governments talk about "infectious diseases" what they really mean is the macro scale of epidemiology and other social sciences, because they're constantly being told by rich NGOs that we now live in an age of pandemics, and they think about disease purely through the lens of social policy and enforcement. The response to COVID was widely condemned as un-scientific because link between what academics/civil servants recommended to governments and what was actually scientifically known about viruses was nearly non-existent.
I understand where you're going with this but I always found environmentalists to be quite keen on woodworking tbh, in the sense that they much prefer things made of wood to things made of plastic.
You must be right that there's an element of that, but I still think most of it especially at the lower levels of the orgs is that these people genuinely have adopted the "if a civil servant says it, it must be true" way of thinking.
The threat of more aggressive tax audits or regulations or whatever is always there. It doesn't have to be spelled out. Piss off the government and they have a billion ways to make you feel pain. It would be absurd if the government could "suggest" you do something and this was considered not an abuse because they didn't literally, at that exact moment, spell out the penalties they would impose for non-compliance.
Of course in a theoretically ideal system laws are precise enough that governments can't simply make your life worse for getting on the wrong side of them. But nobody seems willing to stomach the level of rigor that would require from lawmakers. Three Felonies A Day and such.
Yeah that works great up until the people who distribute memos act like Facebook, and then the people who sell you ink, and then the phone companies, and then ....
Really why is this so hard to understand. There's nothing special about tech firms in this story except the naivety of their executives, who have ended up looking like utter tools in this whole sorry charade. These idiots systematically suppressed discussion of the lab leak hypothesis for over a year and then once the Biden admin started taking it seriously decided, whoops, maybe it wasn't misinformation after all and stopped banning it. Twitter was systematically banning stuff even whilst expressing serious reservations internally because they knew the claims were true. Yet these firms are nonetheless still doing better than Google, at least Facebook and Twitter realized they were wrong in the end.
This thread seems to be full of FAANG employees desperately trying to come up with some reason why their employers are not in fact easily duped rubes who would sew the mouths of their own mothers shut if a 100% conflicted mid-level nobody at the CDC suggested it.
By foreign actors do you just mean foreign people in general or something more specific. Because using the word "actors" give what you say an ominous overtone, but I can't figure out how it's not that you believe in some generic but wide ranging conspiracy of non-Americans to disrupt America with .... opinions. Those things that Americans are famously lacking and reluctant to espouse.
Can you? Let's say tomorrow they reduced the amount of, I dunno, woodworking class and replaced it with more physics or maths. Those topics are pretty neutral. I'm not sure how anyone could argue it's a form of indoctrination unless you think science is itself an ideology, but clearly, the whole purpose of science is to be the opposite of that.