
Critique of the recent study on insect decline - simonsarris
https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/2019/02/16/insectageddon-is-a-great-story-but-what-are-the-facts/
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ChuckMcM
My daughter who did her master's thesis in computational biology on modelling
the western pine beetle would agree with this. Her research showed that
western pine beetle populations were expanding (no need to tell Californian's
this but there it is) in part because their available habitat is expanding
with changes in the climate. Her take was that the mix is changing because the
climate is changing. It takes time for ecosystems to adapt and as they do some
species "lose" and some "win".

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jacobolus
“We are replacing all of the pollinators with bark beetles as our forests die
of heat/drought, and the latter don’t seem to be getting wiped out by
pesticides” is not an especially encouraging take. Though I guess it’s better
than “nearly all insects on earth will die out in the next century” or
whatever.

~~~
gizmo686
It the difference between "the entire ecosystem is collapsing" and "the
ecosytem is shifting to a new steady state"

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decasia
So… My first instinct when I read debunking efforts like this is to try to
check out who is doing the debunking. I'm not an ecologist, so I don't have
the necessary background knowledge to evaluate the merits of the studies in
question. But here's the author's CV:

[https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/research/](https://ecologyisnotadirtyword.com/research/)

She got a PhD the same year as me, 2014, so that's pretty early career in
academic terms. She's published a series of pretty standard sounding academic
papers in a range of standard sounding journals, which is a positive
credibility signal for sure. She does a bunch of public outreach work for the
environmental sciences, which is great. I liked her effort to explain in plain
language what scientific evidence is:

[https://theconversation.com/scientific-evidence-what-is-
it-a...](https://theconversation.com/scientific-evidence-what-is-it-and-how-
can-we-trust-it-14716)

So in general, as an academic in social science, I tend to find her post
credible here on general this-looks-like-a-fellow-academic grounds.

This being said, I hadn't heard of the institution where she got her PhD
before (Charles Sturt University), and I find it a little bit interesting that
on google, pretty much the first hit says "#CSU works closely with industry,
ensuring our courses keep pace with change."

Like it or not … when an institution positions themselves like that, it makes
me wonder a little bit about whether they really can support unbiased
environmental science, since industry has huge financial stakes in the
outcomes of environmental research.

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AndrewKemendo
At the risk of sounding like an internet cliche, what you wrote is an almost
perfect ad hominem. Your response doesn't address the study whatsoever, nor by
your own admission, do you claim to be able to.

I think your comment is a good example of a well formed, coherent yet
fallacious argument.

~~~
astine
It's generally unreasonable to expect that people be able to directly fact
check or debunk every argument or thesis put forward be others. We have too
little time and most of us have too little expertise in fields separate than
our own. As a result we have to rely on authority to help us judge whether
arguments make sense. An argument from authority is not by itself considered a
logical fallacy, only an argument from invalid authority.

With that being said, _who_ happens to be saying something changes how one
approaches a discussion. If the author of this paper happened to be a random
crank, it would not mean that she was wrong, but being unable to directly
judge her work for myself (not being an entomologist) I would not be able to
take her word for it and would want to see how the entomological community
responded to her work. If instead she was a widely respected entomologist I
would be inclined to take her word for it until such time that this work was
discredited by the entomological community. If I were an expert in her field,
I would be able to judge her myself, but not being an expert, I must instead
rely on the judgment of experts.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I don't disagree that these socially derived shortcuts can often transfer
confidence of the person into confidence in their work. However the reason we
look for these kinds of reasoning chains is to determine what heuristics and
biases are being used and introduced, and how we can minimize those that are
irrelevant or confusing.

In cases like you describe, where someone can't speak to the validity of the
methods of the studies, the prudent thing would be to refrain completely from
weighing in as all it would do is add some kind of irrelevant or confusing
information. I'm unclear what value such information adds when trying to
evaluate the merits of the work itself.

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rstuart4133
> In cases like you describe, where someone can't speak to the validity of the
> methods of the studies, the prudent thing would be to refrain completely
> from weighing in as all it would do is add some kind of irrelevant or
> confusing information.

Anyone who uses [http://www.sourcewatch.org/](http://www.sourcewatch.org/) or
prefers Britebart over MSN or visa versa is probably going to disagree. They
evidently consider the source of information a useful indicator of its
quality.

Speak for myself I aggressively filter the Internet fire hose using all sorts
of techniques that don't involve considering the substance of the story at
all. I'll look at stories with good HN scores, I'll pause to see listen what
Leonard Susskind has to say about something he admits he does not know a lot
about long before I'll listen to anti-vaxer's argument about something they
say they some expertise. Past performance matters, as does the opinions of
others who think like me.

And I've also done exactly what this person did - not here but on
theconversation. It was on an article about the benefits of coal, which like
all articles on theconversation comes with a side bar listing affiliations and
interests the author has that might influence their opinion. (Apparently the
theconversation also thinks things outside of what is said in the article can
be used to judge its validity.) In that case the said bar said the author had
no notable affiliations. I pointed out he was occupying a chair paid for the
Koch brothers.

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iheartpotatoes
For a rebuttal, the author lists numerous facts with no citations. Am I wrong
for wanting citations in a rebuttal that is adamant about misleading facts in
another paper? Why believe one set of uncited facts over another? It is clear
that the search terms were problematic (what an awful regex!), so I can
understand the issues there. And the author does a great job emphasizing
science is complex. However, it seems a tad hypocritical to criticize a paper
and make the same sins.

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sgc
I did not expect the issues brought up about this study to be basic undergrad
level research errors. Since all it takes is some db access and a short time,
it would have been nice to get more info on studies that would have been worth
including.

Of course the study in question is inconclusive because done very sloppily,
but there is no indication by the critic as to whether there is reason to
believe the data is available to reach a more verifiable conclusion.

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fallingfrog
She's right, the media does tend to pick up anything that spurs the amygdala
and run with it. I would consider insectageddon to be nowhere near the kind of
established science as say, climate change. We have some suggestive studies,
but no clear and definitive proof, so further study is very important right
now.

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DyslexicAtheist
from the comment section of this article:

> Might this be a case of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy? I notice the lead
> author on the paper relates a windshield anecdote in The Guardian article.
> Is it possible that his observation of fewer insects on the windshield led
> to the original biased search terms?

> There’s at least one paper describing localized declines along busier
> roadways. It makes sense that day after day, year after year, road traffic
> will cause a lot of mortality.

> Martin, Amanda E., et al. “Flying insect abundance declines with increasing
> road traffic.” Insect Conservation and Diversity 11.6 (2018): 608-613.
> [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/icad.12300)

pretty interesting article altogether (sadly so).

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ars
It seems too preposterous to be real, did this meta study really only search
for studies containing the word decline?

If that's actually true then obviously the results would show a decline. It
doesn't even make any sense. Why would they do that if they want a real study?

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johnny313
> We don’t know anything about most insect species on Earth. Only about one-
> fifth of the estimated number of insect species are known to science.

This is simultaneously incredible and unsurprising. There is still so much to
discover about the world!

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b_tterc_p
I believe something like 80%+ of them are exclusive to tropical rain forests,
with a massive chunk living only in the Amazon rainforest.

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tedunangst
Was expecting this to be about the great insect robbery:
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2018/09/06/st...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2018/09/06/stolen-insects-7-000-animals-vanish-philadelphia-museum-
heist/1211887002/)

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vixen99
'...an ecologist who works on insects: this study simply does not show
evidence that global insect declines are happening, nor does it provide
evidence that insects will be extinct in 100 years... but it is a wakeup
call.'

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pvaldes
I wonder why nobody has though in the obvious wordplay: "artropogeddon".

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nkurz
Not a bad suggestion, but maybe better in English as "arthropogeddon"?

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iceninenines
This article is predicated on a strawman: it's not all the insects that have
declined, and not all insects that splatter into moving vehicles, but a
limited subset of _flying insects._

