
The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit - fwdbureau
http://quillette.com/2016/02/15/the-unbearable-asymmetry-of-bullshit/
======
brownbat
The job market right now in the US forces grad students to attempt innovative
research with remarkable conclusions. As a consequence, everyone's trying to
prove more outlandish things while few are bothering with replications.

If the field were sane, you would train all the apprentices on replication
studies. Once they demonstrated dispassionate expertise with the tools, only
then would they be allowed to try to use those tools to test their own ideas,
where they will have a strong emotional preference for how the study will come
out.

If universities hired grad students based on their replication work, not on
their eye-popping original research, we'd have better science and better
scientists.

~~~
Balgair
That is nearly the opposite of what the PhD was designed to do. Modern
academic training comes out of the church and the old guilds of middle Europe
and is still in use today in many fields (chefs and plumbers to name a few).

The Bachelor's degree is loosely similar to an apprentice's role. The young
boy (they were almost exclusively male) worked in a shop or with a priest for
some time. He learned the trade, the tools, and gained some experience from
'level 0'. When you are done with the apprenticeship, you are 'cleared' to
work in other shops and are known to not be a total moron or break tools or
burn down shops.

The master's degree is just that. You are considered a master of the craft
(like plumbing or prinitng) or the discipline (like The Book of Mark or
Crusader History). As such, you typically have a master's level project.
Something that is 'new' or shows that you know your stuff. That might be a
very decorative silver bowl or a thesis.

The Doctorate means you are 'world class.' Not just a mastery in a field, but
a paragon of it. Today, that means that you are _the_ expert in your little
niche of underwater basket weaving. There should be no-one better than you.
This means you MUST have produced something new or novel way of thinking about
the God or something. This has always been the idea, if not the practice.

To change that and say that the doctorate should be the bachelor's is very
big. To suggest that PhDs should just replicate experiments is anathema to the
idea of graduate education and would be a tremendous waste of time and energy.
When you enter the Phd, you are assumed to already know how to do all the
replication and the facts about the field. Granted, fields are exponentially
larger than they were in the 1600's, but you still should know stats and
biology if your PhD is in cancer biology.

I think you are totally wrong about this. What you are suggesting should be
covered in undergrad and I think it largely is.

~~~
bunderbunder
The problem is that nobody's doing replication work in undergrad, either, nor
does it happen in Master's programs.

I do think it makes sense to stick with the PhD meaning you're a world class
expert in some area, but if so then we need to adjust our expectations for
what Master's level work means in the sciences. Right now it seems to just
represent a hurdle you need to whiz past on your way to the PhD.

~~~
marvin
A good Bachelors degree will prepare a good student for replicating science,
and a good Masters degree will definitely leave a motivated and skilled
student with a good advisor a master of his or her specific field.

The problem is that grade inflation means the majority of students will fall
short of these goalposts. I agree with your assessment that undergrad degrees
represent hurdles, regardless of whether a student is planning to stay in
academia or not.

My experience with getting a Masters degree was that it was really tough work
that required my full dedication for two years. But I had a world-class
scientist as an advisor breathing down my neck the whole time and expecting
results, and my experience doesn't seem to match that of many other MScs I
know. Some departments seem to be "degree factories"; it takes an unreasonable
amount of effort to follow up students in the classical "apprenticeship"
tradition described by GP. It would be very strange if every department at
every university managed this level of dedication, with student numbers being
what they are.

~~~
liviu-
> a good Masters degree will definitely leave a motivated and skilled student
> with a good advisor a master of his or her specific field.

I'm having trouble believing this.

In UK, most Masters degrees last 1 year, and there are several degrees
considered good such as Imperial's MSc in Machine Learning, Cambridge's MPhil
in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Technology, Edinburgh's MSc in
Cognitive Science, and others. Is it really possible to become a "master" of
machine learning in one year?

Also, at least in Computer Science, most of the Bachelors degrees considered
good in UK do not seem to focus at all on replicating science. In fact, for my
final year undergraduate project, I was encouraged to find something novel,
and at no point my supervisor hinted towards focusing on replicability.

Is it perhaps more common in US?

~~~
marvin
An MSc is not an MSc. It can commonly vary from 1-3 years, depending on
institution. I was thinking of the two-year variety.

Of course, you can define the term "master" to mean pretty much whatever you
like. But I'd say that two years of additional, focused study when you are
already proficient in your field should be more than enough to have a mastery
of the specific skills and knowledge that is _at least_ on a high national
level. I'm from Norway, so the US picture is unknown to me.

------
bikamonki
And then there is the bullshit that permeates from science research into
bullshit blogs that later folk people use to guide their decisions (and
editors/writers use to drive ad prints): what to eat or not according to
recent research, how to raise children or not acording to recent research, how
long a workout, how to be happy, how to this and how not to that. The bullshit
then jumps from blogs into everyday conversations and daily live, into
arguments over coffee (how much coffee is good by the way? According to
quotable recent research that is). The most recent bulshit that really makes
me lose hope is the don't vaccinate children bullshit.

I see an entire civilization confused by a ubiquous mass communication tool
which they invented to do exactly the opposite: enlight them.

~~~
jerf
"I see an entire civilization confused by a ubiquous mass communication tool
which they invented to do exactly the opposite: enlight them."

There was never a stream of pure, refined truth available, that just somehow
lacked a distribution method. All there ever was was a confusing mixture of an
uncountable varieties of different possibilities, theories, and facts of
varying veracity. Now you can have more direct access to that confusing
mixture, with all the attendant privileges and responsibilities.

There were things that _claimed_ to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those
claims didn't become false. They always were false. Now you can tell that
better. It may not feel like progress, but it is.

~~~
nmrm2
_> There was never a stream of pure, refined truth availablem, that just
somehow lacked a distribution method_

Academic educational programs have exactly been the source-without-a-scalable-
distribution-method for at least the past century.

You're unlikely to find a treatment of mathematics or physics or even Computer
Science that is as well-curated, free of coercive bias, and well-presented as
it often is in the undergraduate programs at universities that care deeply
about their educational programs. (Such universities and colleges do exist;
they unfortunately also tend to be expensive, selective, and not always well-
represented in top N lists -- especially in the US.)

The reason the distribution method of university education is lacking has more
to do with economics than anything else. Hiring truly high-quality people to
teach small groups of people difficult content in a rigorous way is expensive.
If you skimp on any of those features, the quality of the end result goes way
down (c.f. typical MOOCs and the university courses to which they are
purportedly equivalent, in pretty much any dimension.)

 _> There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth. Those
claims didn't become false. They always were false._

Again, I fail to see how this critique applies in any meaningful way to high-
quality undergraduate education programs in hard sciences. Nothing is perfect
-- and in fact I doubt any of those programs ever claimed to be "streams of
pure, refined truth". But they come far closer than your comment seems to
suggest.

Now, going back to the contents of the article, universites certainly aren't
"streams of pure, refined, _and new_ truth". Such streams very likely don't
exist.

~~~
renlo
They are talking about how the internet, which was once seen a conduit of
'truth', is just a conduit which also spreads bullshit, and that there is no
'truth'. You are talking about education and scientific rigor as a means of
talking about truth. While what you say may be true it doesn't seem applicable
to their arguments.

~~~
nmrm2
_> They are talking about how the internet, which was once seen a conduit of
'truth', is just a conduit which also spreads bullshit_

That's what bikamonki was saying.

jerf's comment was tangential to the central thesis of bikamonki's post, and
stated _" There were things that claimed to be streams of pure, refined truth.
Those claims didn't become false. They always were false"_

 _> You are talking about education and scientific rigor as a means of talking
about truth_

No, I'm stating directly that there exist educational institutions that,
through educational programs, transfer truth from one person to another.

------
gavanwoolery
' Instead, “It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its
core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before.” You can
both “love science,” he concludes, “and question it.” '

I've noticed that questioning some scientific finding often makes people think
I am either anti-science, anti-intellectual, conservative, religious, or any
combination thereof (I am none of these). To state quite the opposite, I think
not questioning science makes you religious - you are putting faith in the
findings, rather than disputing them or scrutinizing them with the scientific
method (not that I think there is anything wrong with faith or religion,
within their own realm).

~~~
Chris2048
If the science has "social" before it, it always needs to be questioned - too
much political interference. The entire field is low in actual results, high
in political tooling..

~~~
fapjacks
It seems that's the case with more than just science, but possibly a good rule
to follow with anything.

~~~
Chris2048
True. But social science is where the uncertain standards, and political gains
are. No one can, or cares to, taint research into fundamental particles.
Studies into any kind of demographic is a different case...

------
philh
I find it vaguely amusing and ironic that he cites rationalwiki on the gish
gallop, given that my impression is they do this themselves a bunch.

(Note that running a gish gallop doesn't mean you're _wrong_ , it just means
you're intellectually dishonest.)

(I try not to pay too much attention to them, and I'm not super interested in
refuting their bullshit, so this comment is going to be pretty unsatisfying.
Sorry.)

~~~
knowaveragejoe
I haven't read much on rationalwiki, but nothing I did struck me as gish
gallop. They might have a lot of angles on attack on some bunk concept, but
they expand upon all of them.

~~~
rudolf0
I haven't found them guilty of gish gallop, but some of their articles are
very biased and one-sided. They seem to be a reliable source on most issues of
philosophy, science, and "woo", but anything political, societal, or remotely
controversial usually isn't given a balanced view.

------
jimbokun
"In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies,
misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements —
at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful
scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who
do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with
their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma.
Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on
hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses."

So the scientific debate equivalent of the Trump campaign.

~~~
newman314
I was just coming here to cite the Trumo campaign as an example. The
unfortunate thing is that the amount of effort to counter this bullshit is
significantly higher than the initial utterance and most likely will not reach
the same audience.

For instance, Trump utters something completely off the wall. Retweets galore.
Everybody gets spun up. Let's say it reaches 1million people which some
portion now repeats the soundbite. Someone like Politifacts comes along after
the fact and points out the discrepancy after fact checking. Reaches a much
smaller follow up audience.

This is the sort of informational asymmetry that I find infuriating...

------
trav4225
"There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science."

Amen to that. :)

I'm a bit tired of seeing critics of various hypotheses being dismissed out of
hand simply "Because Science".

~~~
hellofunk
Yes but in fairness there is a fair amount of BS in any area of human
endeavor. There are BS movies, BS politicians, BS music, BS programming
languages; it's certainly not unique to science.

~~~
bcook
But isn't science supposed to be, by definition, the anti-bullshit?

~~~
rimantas
science is supposed to be self-correcting.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
It is. This is just a very slow process.

------
apo
>... He Who Shall Not Be Named predictably rejects all of the studies that do
not support his position as being “fatally flawed,” or as having been “refuted
by experts”—namely, by himself and his close collaborators ...

This speaks to part of the problem - the undue weight that non-scientists
place on expert opinion. Trained scientists see appeal to authority arguments
for what they are: bullshit.

I see this most frequently in areas for which few controlled studies are
available to light the way. Human nutrition and toxicology come to mind. Oddly
enough, these are the areas that are most likely to be of interest to non-
scientists, setting up a vicious cycle of guru-ism complete with economic
incentive to continue spouting nonsense.

~~~
breischl
>>the undue weight that non-scientists place on expert opinion

Speaking as a non-scientist, I can recognize an appeal to authority probably
just as well as a scientist. But having recognized one, what do I do? I lack
the training, knowledge, and time necessary to evaluate the research directly.
I can choose to only trust studies that are peer reviewed, or in major
journals, or backed by whatever relevant government body there might be, or
that my friend who knows about this thinks are right. And maybe that's a good
idea, but it's still just appealing to different kinds of authority.

Most of the time laypeople have no realistic alternative to expert opinion.

~~~
noelsusman
The alternative is consensus. As part of my research I found that a particular
method of estimating disease prevalence in small geographic areas performed
better than this other method when tested on real data from schools.

The tendency of the general public would be to look at that study and say the
first method is better than the second method (assuming the general public
would care at all, which they don't). That's incorrect. I would only conclude
that method is actually better if several other people found similar results
for similar methods in separate studies.

People tend to place far too much importance on one paper or one study. In
theoretical research this can be okay sometimes, but in applied research this
is almost always the wrong way to go.

~~~
astine
"The alternative is consensus."

That's still an appeal to authority. It's just the authority of a group rather
than an individual.

~~~
effie
I think he meant consistent experimental results by "consensus" there.

------
bshimmin
For anyone thinking, "The words in the title sound sort of familiar, but I'm
not sure why", it's a reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", a
great book by Milan Kundera which translated into Daniel Day-Lewis' worst
film.

------
daveguy
Author mentions difficulty of reproducing research as one of the issues in
passing. There was a recent Nature special edition on the subject:

[http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-1.17552](http://www.nature.com/news/reproducibility-1.17552)

I believe this is the _primary_ issue and the cause is from one of two causes:

1) secret sauce in research -- details are lacking because there is a push to
commercialize things that come out of academia

2) insufficient experimental design -- small sample size, poor controls, etc.

I would like to see an open publication that as a part of publication the
result must be reproduced in a separate independent lab or two. This would
almost double the required funding (maybe less because you eliminate false
starts). Maybe just a few institutions could handle many reproductions.

There is a bit of a self-healing aspect in that the non-reproducible and non-
interesting/advancing studies just get dropped on the floor. However, it would
lend a lot of credibility to a journal that required an independent research
confirmation.

------
sevensor
Another tactic I've seen from the Lord Voldemorts I know is to cite loads of
references that aren't readily available online. Such a citation can be used
to prop up _any_ argument, whether or not the citation actually supports the
argument, or even has any bearing on it at all. It's the same trap, though. To
disupte the citation, you have to wait months for an inter-library loan, read
the cited work in detail, and then decide what it really has to say about the
argument.

I personally fell into this trap, not because I was trying to refute
something, but because I was trying to back up one of my own assumptions and I
found that Lord Voldemort was citing Obscure Reference X to back up the same
assumption. The joke was on me when I actually tracked down Obscure Reference
X in the 30-years-out-of-print proceedings of a symposium on Y. Obscure
Reference X had nothing at all to say about my assumption! Needless to say, I
no longer trust Lord Voldemort or anyone who publishes with him.

~~~
simplemath
Why can't we name these people? Libel?

Pastebin?

Fuck these frauds.

~~~
sevensor
The problem is that saying "Professor Lord Voldemort is a liar and a fraud"
puts an end to scientific discussion and forces people to assume nakedly
partisan positions. Publicly at least, we have to assume good faith in our
counterparts, even if we know in our hearts that they're self-inflated
gasbags.

The tactics I and the original article were describing allow Lord Voldemort to
clothe any assertion he likes in the robes of science. The root of this
problem is a broken incentive system for publication. We're required to
publish a lot to show productivity, and we're trained to put in lots of
citations to back up our work. This creates an unmanageable avalanche of
worthless papers and makes it easy to build a false trail of scammy citations.

Compare this to the situation 50 years ago, before publication inflation had
set in. John Nash wrote a 30 page dissertation, and cited two works at the end
of it. Simon's classic "Behavioral Model of Rational Choice" cited 5 works.
The entire Cowles commission report on Activity Analysis devoted only 4.5 of
its 418 pages to citations, and that included a detailed lit review in its
introduction. Nothing makes it to press these days without five to ten times
as many citations.

------
return0
I heard a well known neuroscientist suggest that studies should be required to
be replicated by at least another lab before being published/ established.
That may sound impractical for some fields, but especially in
biology/neuroscience most projects are small enough to make this feasible. Is
it worth the money? I would say absolutely, not only for the validation of the
science, but for the shift in culture, to finally stop designing studies
chasing minute (but statistically significant) effects just to make another
publication.

I think its also about time we have post-publication peer review and about
time scientists get off their high horses and start responding to it.

~~~
argonaut
But why would that other lab care enough to replicate? I suspect this would
only exacerbate the "rich getting richer" effect whereby well-known
labs/professors would have an easier time getting replicated (and thus
published).

------
haberman
Science is an organism that needs an immune system. At a systemic level, it
needs to be hard to get away with this kind of thing.

~~~
entwife
The immune system of science is the peer review system and other mechanisms to
reduce faulty science. This author points out published papers that made it
past that immune system, and it some cases became part of it (e.g. as peer
reviewers). What analogous structure in the immune system could repair
problems with the system itself?

~~~
haberman
Yes, the article describes how certain "viruses" have learned how to beat the
current immune system. That just means the immune system needs to evolve to
address the new threats.

In nature, immune systems evolve based on natural selection. We need to keep
trying new things and see what works. Maybe "peer review" needs to extend not
only to individual papers, but to scientists and institutions themselves.
Maybe their reputation needs to be evaluated over time so that a scientist who
has been "infected" then has a standing presumption against their work until
they can overwhelmingly demonstrate they are "healed."

This idea might be good or might be terrible, but I believe that we should be
trying things like this to see if any of them stick and cause more good than
harm.

------
Eupolemos
Well, it is still a variation "On Bullshit" (Harry Frankfurt's excellent
article). If someone in science is more interested in a position than whether
the presented arguments individually holds up or not, that person is
unscientifically invested and we should have some kind of mental allergic
reaction to that.

The "Publish or Perish" has made Gish Gallops much harder to catch and almost
impossible to punish.

~~~
n4r9
There's also the entertaining "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs" by David
Graeber, although it has less to say specifically about science:
[http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

------
dahart
There is indeed a lot of bullshit in the practice of science. But that doesn't
mean science is flawed, it means people are flawed. Remember Sturgeons Law:
90% of everything is bullshit. [1]

It would be great if we could fund science purely for science' sake, and if
scientists didn't have egos or careers or reputations or children, but despite
the objections, I will expect a certain amount of bullshit to continue
unabated. In the mean time, the author's most important point, IMO is " _if_
you love science, you had _better_ question it, and question it well, so it
can live up to its potential." This is true, and always will be, regardless of
how much bullshit is involved!

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

------
a77jk153
Alan Sokal's 'Beyond The Hoax' and 'Intellectual Impostures' are good reads
about the subject.

------
studentrob
Bullshit is a byproduct of a highly incentivized research market. This is what
respected journals are supposed to help curate. There are opportunities to
create better forms of curation with less bullshit and I would bet people will
pay for it.

------
mrcactu5
this is a great time to bring up Bullshit as a topic of study in and of its
self.
[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html)

We routinely say things that aren't quite true -- sometimes with the best
intentions or out of necessity. The truth can be a very complicated thing.

What we are calling "bullshit" may go under more serious names (and serious
discussions) if we look at specific cases - e.g. finance, medicine, game
theory, biology, etc... My back-of-the-envlope definition is that of an
"approximation to the truth".

------
thallukrish
That's the reason why theory should be backed by hard evidence or a product
that can be experienced. Without this, a theory of any sort whether it turns
out to be right or if it is pure bullshit should not be given undue credit.

------
agentgt
In other professional disciplines particularly ones that require some sort of
certification there are ethics tests and ethics committees. For example if
your trying to get a CFA half of the test is ethics. Likewise for becoming and
being a lawyer.

Given the importance of academia and its impact on policy in general perhaps
something similar should exist?

I'm not sure if ethical tests and committees curb bad behavior but it could be
a start or at least improve awareness. Maybe there is even something like the
above already in place for academia that I'm unaware of?

------
RyanMcGreal
This phenomenon may help to explain the two solitudes in the research on
whether salt is harmful:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/17/scien...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/17/scientists-
cant-agree-whether-salt-is-killing-us-heres-why/)

------
astazangasta
I take issue with Brandolini's maxim: "The amount of energy necessary to
refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

This assumes that we know, a priori, what is bullshit and what is not.
Sometimes bullshitters know they are bullshitting, but most often they do not.

What I think is really going on here is that the scientific method is crap for
this sort of thing, there is no such thing as "empirical truth" that exists in
the real world, and subjective debate, reasoning, and so on, is hard and
requires enormous effort on all parts.

Let's consider another hypothetical work of bullshit by one Maleficent. I, an
oblivious third party, come across her published work. How am I to know that
this work is bullshit?

The traditional response is that we use the scientific method, verifiability
and empiricism, to test the bounds of a proposed model against observation.
"You said Planet X should be at y, but it is actually at z, therefore
bullshit." To quote Laurence Laurentz: 'Would that it were so simple.'

The problem here is that observation is fraught, and is usually based on its
own assumptions. For example, let's say Maleficent is studying treatments for
depression; to do so she must observe whether an individual is "depressed" or
"not depressed". How the fuck should she do this? Frequently people use
questionnaire measures like the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Is this a
valid tool? I have been heavily depressed when I scored low on the BDI, so I
would say not. But what IS a valid tool? Is there any objective criterion we
can bring to bear, here? What is it? Does "depression" even exist as a thing?

This problem, that observations are themselves laden with assumptions and
based on pre-existing models, is a mire that all science is forced to wade
through. Before we make decisions about anything, we must have a lens with
which to view the world - but that, itself, is a decision!

More broadly speaking this is a problem with deductive reasoning, and because
empiricism claims to be based on deductive reasoning it falls into error as a
result. Because it is impossible to begin with truth, any scientific
observation must be riddled through with approximations. And usually, we are
unaware of the approximations that are blinding us when we build flawed models
on top of them.

This is the main reason we get bullshit: _there is no good way to do science._

~~~
davidw
Brandolini's quote is brilliant. Going through evidence and conducting studies
and doing research and looking through it with a critical eye is orders of
magnitude more difficult than spouting some BS like "vaccines cause
autism!!11!!111".

~~~
astazangasta
I am more concerned about how bullshit operates within the house of science.
Creationism is a canard and I wish the OP had not mentioned it.

------
ArkyBeagle
"Science advances one funeral at a time." \- Max Planck

------
nsns
Instead of a sisyphean refutation of every attack, wouldn't a better strategy
be to research and prove the attacker's conflict of interests (and thus
discredit them)?

~~~
sharkjacobs
Arguing against the speaker instead of the argument itself is bullshit too.

Having a vested interest doesn't automatically discredit the things one says
for their cause.

~~~
mike_hearn
It is, but where do you draw the line?

In an ideal world where everyone was a rational, disinterested superhuman who
devoted themselves to a scientific pursuit of truth, only ever focusing on
arguments would be the perfect approach.

Unfortunately there do exist people who deliberately and knowingly bullshit
other people in order to get what they want. Such people absolutely win from a
policy of "attack the argument, not the person" because their goal is not to
further understanding or even win arguments, it's to confuse people into
acting a certain way ... often paralysing them into inaction by creating the
appearance of an unending debate.

Thus refuting one bullshit argument simply results in two more popping up to
replace it. Even if some people remember the first argument that was refuted,
this doesn't help, because:

• Lots of other people _won 't_ remember the names of who was involved, or
won't be aware of the previous arguments at all.

• Of the people who do remember, the fact that a debate was happening at all
may be taken as evidence that the people involved must be "experts", and thus
the fact that they lost the argument doesn't necessarily reduce their
credibility.

• If someone was a good enough bullshitter to require a response in the first
place, they will probably be good enough at it a second time to ensure that if
they get no response, some people will start to assume they must be correct.

This can rapidly turn into complete defeat by the people who are actually
making reasonable points because they simply become exhausted and burn out
faced with an unending wall of plausible sounding nonsense, which then
eventually replaces reality with itself.

I've seen this problem play out in brutally sharp detail not so long ago. The
people involved _knew_ they were bullshitting, but didn't care because in
their eyes it was all for the greater good.

The only solution to this is, in fact, to attack the credibility of the people
doing it once they have repeatedly made absurd or invalid arguments, because
otherwise it's much harder for people to learn to tune them out.

~~~
etherael
Gee, I can't imagine the event to which you might be referring here.

------
superpope99
/offtopic

That 2.8mb .jpg is Bullshit

------
basicplus2
so true! and when you you reward the bullshit artists with money and grants..
it multiplies the bullshit a thousand fold

------
awl130
this belongs on medium.com

------
bazine
hi

------
leroy_masochist
I read this as a thinly-veiled attack on prominent climate-change activists. I
thought the author ended a bit abruptly; was expecting a comparison of the
tactics used by the fictitious "Voldemort" to the real-life actions of Bill
McKibben, Michael Mann, etc.

~~~
stillsut
So meta...

Notice how a couple Voldermorts have gone through the comments and down-voted
anyone who questioned catastrophic global warming predictions. As Voldermorts
are wont to do.

