7 ms·

Whilst I weakly agree with this characterisation, it's not at all fair or accurate to put epidemiology and climatology in the same category as your other exampl

Whilst I weakly agree with this characterisation, it's not at all fair or accurate to put epidemiology and climatology in the same category as your other examples. Yes they have some weaknesses in replication practices (especially for purely computational work), yes the feedback loop for self-correction can be slow, but it would be a mistake to conclude or imply that the major results of those fields are therefore unreliable. That's because those fields do still make objective empirical predictions about the world, which might take years to be testable but are still ultimately testable. For example, it's been convincingly shown that climate models from decades ago predicted our current climate pretty well. [0] These fields are more comparable to subfields of physics which only get to do big experiments a handful of times, e.g. because they can only observe so many planets/supernovae/universes, or because they have to spend decades building a new billion-dollar machine to test new hypotheses. We should also not confuse these arguments with uselessness - soft social science work can still be societally valuable without being easily empirically testable. [0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...

mike_hearn 16d ago
Disagree, those two fields are extremely unreliable. It takes a lot of things happening simultaneously to be scientific. Yes, those two do make testable predictions, sort of. But that isn't enough. Modern (computational) epidemiology is rife with unscientific practices. They ignore data that shows a model was invalidated so the fact they make testable predictions isn't really useful. They also engage in a lot of circular reasoning, buggy coding and logical fallacies. During COVID I wrote a whole report on this topic for some politicians [1]. But the biggest issue is "A problem in theory" again - epidemiologists conflate fitting a curve in R with developing a hypothesis, so the field is overrun with overfit models that aren't based on any refinable theory of disease, just misuses of statistics. Even if you prove a paper's predictions were wrong it changes nothing because nothing built on it anyway. The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory, e.g. September 2013: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists-face-crisis-over-global-warming-pause-a-923937.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... June 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 [1] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf
- tomnicholas1 16d ago
  > The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory That is... not remotely true, nor supported by either of the links you shared. (Nor by any cursory look at the state of the world today, with well-anticipated Himalayan glacial floods as front-page news.) You therefore appear to be leaping over the line from healthy skepticism to irrational conspiratorial thinking, so I'm going to stop engaging, sorry.
  - mike_hearn 16d ago
    Feel free to not engage, but for anyone reading the Nepal flash flood was caused by bedrock giving way, which isn't climate related. https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2026/08/28/new-satellite-images-reveal-surprise-cause-of-nepal-floods-not-just-a-glacier.html https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2026/08/28/new-satellite-i... The two links I give show the problem in action. In 2013 the IPCC was concerned because temperatures had gone sideways for a decade. Der Spiegel's first sentence is "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted" and the next says they were trying to "hush it up". In 2015 climatologists announced a new temperature record that replaced the entire 21st century with different data, as reported by Nature. That's an unambiguous sequence of events. You can't make statements about replicability in an environment where they routinely decide their already published data is wrong post-hoc, without retracting the papers built on that data.
    - rightnutwingjob 16d ago
      Shoosh. And if you won’t shoosh yourself, a handful of The True Adherents Of The Science will down vote you. Because Down Votes Are Truth. And that, ladies n gennelman, is How Science Works. That’s how we end up with Jason Arday: Up Votes.
  - rightnutwingjob 16d ago
    Disengaging isn’t part of the scientific method. Disengaging is sticking your fingers in your ears and blurting out “la la la la I can’t hear you!” And calling that a win. The problem isn’t science, the problem is that there are adults with the maturity of a four year old acting as sciences hype man.

mike_hearn 16d ago

Disagree, those two fields are extremely unreliable. It takes a lot of things happening simultaneously to be scientific. Yes, those two do make testable predictions, sort of. But that isn't enough. Modern (computational) epidemiology is rife with unscientific practices. They ignore data that shows a model was invalidated so the fact they make testable predictions isn't really useful. They also engage in a lot of circular reasoning, buggy coding and logical fallacies. During COVID I wrote a whole report on this topic for some politicians [1]. But the biggest issue is "A problem in theory" again - epidemiologists conflate fitting a curve in R with developing a hypothesis, so the field is overrun with overfit models that aren't based on any refinable theory of disease, just misuses of statistics. Even if you prove a paper's predictions were wrong it changes nothing because nothing built on it anyway. The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory, e.g. September 2013: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists-face-crisis-over-global-warming-pause-a-923937.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientist... June 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 [1] https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf https://plan99.net/~mike/epidemiology.pdf

tomnicholas1 16d ago
> The problem in climatology is that when the models don't fit the data they just change the data and claim victory That is... not remotely true, nor supported by either of the links you shared. (Nor by any cursory look at the state of the world today, with well-anticipated Himalayan glacial floods as front-page news.) You therefore appear to be leaping over the line from healthy skepticism to irrational conspiratorial thinking, so I'm going to stop engaging, sorry.
- mike_hearn 16d ago
  Feel free to not engage, but for anyone reading the Nepal flash flood was caused by bedrock giving way, which isn't climate related. https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2026/08/28/new-satellite-images-reveal-surprise-cause-of-nepal-floods-not-just-a-glacier.html https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2026/08/28/new-satellite-i... The two links I give show the problem in action. In 2013 the IPCC was concerned because temperatures had gone sideways for a decade. Der Spiegel's first sentence is "Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted" and the next says they were trying to "hush it up". In 2015 climatologists announced a new temperature record that replaced the entire 21st century with different data, as reported by Nature. That's an unambiguous sequence of events. You can't make statements about replicability in an environment where they routinely decide their already published data is wrong post-hoc, without retracting the papers built on that data.
  - rightnutwingjob 16d ago
    Shoosh. And if you won’t shoosh yourself, a handful of The True Adherents Of The Science will down vote you. Because Down Votes Are Truth. And that, ladies n gennelman, is How Science Works. That’s how we end up with Jason Arday: Up Votes.
- rightnutwingjob 16d ago
  Disengaging isn’t part of the scientific method. Disengaging is sticking your fingers in your ears and blurting out “la la la la I can’t hear you!” And calling that a win. The problem isn’t science, the problem is that there are adults with the maturity of a four year old acting as sciences hype man.