I get your objections to my objections. I appreciate your points and the general atmosphere around the discussion. So now it's pretty well-established that neither of us is gonna change the other one's mind, so it's fine if it ends here.
But I'm curious about something you said and would be interested in hearing you expand a bit on it if you're willing. You say (and I believe you) that you don't think there's a giant conspiracy; and you give an example of the Honda never revving past 3000, which, if one were to make the error you describe, is basically an illustration of a linear model with insufficient leverage to support the conclusions that are drawn from it. The Honda example is a good illustration of that problem, and I will steal it in the future.
For now, though, based on this example, and your point #2, I'm wondering how you think these kind of fundamental statistical and logical errors could be made on such a massive scale, by a huge group of scientists, distributed around the world?
The only way I can imagine such a thing being feasible is via some serious groupthink / path dependency; like if Einstein, Maxwell, and von Neumann were raised from the dead, transformed into climate scientists, and then, at the very start of the very first climate conference, one right after the other got up and loudly and confidently expressed certainty that climate change was caused by X. Such an event could theoretically lead subsequent scientists to parrot the new party line, and to have difficulty getting funded for research that diverted from these pre-conclusions about X.
That scenario obviously didn't happen. It seems exceedingly unlikely that anything comparable could happen on this scale. Of course, from time to time certain topics of inquiry go in or out of fashion, like the neural winter of the 90s and 2000s, which has ironically now reversed itself with the whole deep learning thing. But that happened because funding was coming principally from US funding agencies, the computational power and data was inadequate to demonstrate the value of the nascent techniques, and the body of research was overwhelmingly produced in US institutes, none of which apply here.
So I'm interested to know by what mechanism you think so many smart people who are also engineers and scientists, except also specialists in this very topic, are making fundamental logical and statistical errors?
But I'm curious about something you said and would be interested in hearing you expand a bit on it if you're willing. You say (and I believe you) that you don't think there's a giant conspiracy; and you give an example of the Honda never revving past 3000, which, if one were to make the error you describe, is basically an illustration of a linear model with insufficient leverage to support the conclusions that are drawn from it. The Honda example is a good illustration of that problem, and I will steal it in the future.
For now, though, based on this example, and your point #2, I'm wondering how you think these kind of fundamental statistical and logical errors could be made on such a massive scale, by a huge group of scientists, distributed around the world?
The only way I can imagine such a thing being feasible is via some serious groupthink / path dependency; like if Einstein, Maxwell, and von Neumann were raised from the dead, transformed into climate scientists, and then, at the very start of the very first climate conference, one right after the other got up and loudly and confidently expressed certainty that climate change was caused by X. Such an event could theoretically lead subsequent scientists to parrot the new party line, and to have difficulty getting funded for research that diverted from these pre-conclusions about X.
That scenario obviously didn't happen. It seems exceedingly unlikely that anything comparable could happen on this scale. Of course, from time to time certain topics of inquiry go in or out of fashion, like the neural winter of the 90s and 2000s, which has ironically now reversed itself with the whole deep learning thing. But that happened because funding was coming principally from US funding agencies, the computational power and data was inadequate to demonstrate the value of the nascent techniques, and the body of research was overwhelmingly produced in US institutes, none of which apply here.
So I'm interested to know by what mechanism you think so many smart people who are also engineers and scientists, except also specialists in this very topic, are making fundamental logical and statistical errors?