Is the claim here that working in the advertising industry is worse than working on “doomsday devices to incinerate all life on Earth”? What a hot take!
Another way to interpret these results is that HN has gotten more popular as a place to source talent. It would be interesting to see top-level comments by number of total users on the site (as a proxy for popularity).
Unfortunately the title makes a small logical leap.
From the article: "Her team combined data from different species in different places. Since they have little in common apart from living on a warming planet, she says, climate change is the most plausible explanation."
While climate change may indeed be the most plausible explanation, this headline seems to transform from "most plausible" into a causal link.
Probability is fundamentally all we have in science. The only distinction is in the level of confidence use in inference of the data. 95% is fairly typical though particle physics requires and impressive level >99.9999%
even if one accepts this, which I don’t (what is the probability of mathematics being a quantum ultrafinitist glandular endomorphism of classical electromagnetism? What is the probability that the sun rises tomorrow? What’s the probability the standard model is true? It’s nonsense.) you could totally interpret what he said as “original paper claimed 20-80% confidence, economist article assumed 95%” and that would be a reasonable probabilistic reading
One way of considering the things you describe in terms of probability is to frame them as bets, and then set the probabilities based on what bets you might make (e.g. what odds would you want in a bet on whether the sun would rise tomorrow). Personally I find that makes some of the more difficult statements a little more palatable.
the point being that IMO the way you understand and come up with and reason about something like “classical mechanics” or “timeless decision theory” or “quantum enlightenment time cube satanic world order simulation” or “risc v architecture” is not about probability, and saying science is about probability totally elides the actual complex information and reasons that go into creating and using those in favor of just saying “they have a probability and we can change them”.
I understand what you’re saying, but I have to highlight a mistake.
In science, what you’re talking about is not a “probability of being right”, but a probability of not getting the same experimental results completely randomly, without any underlying cause. You still might have 0% probability of being right. With “95% confidence” there still could be no measured effect whatsoever, you just made the same experiment multiple times and randomly finally got big enough random numbers to get you 95% confidence.
It’s not a nitpick, it is a serious mistake that 95% social scientists make.
There's a lot of global changes that could be underlying contributing factors. Global air and water pollution, pesticides, microplastics. Things that were regional that are becoming global as Earth's massive interconnected recycling systems chug on our waste. The entire planet has traces of radioactive isotopes that were essentially non-existent before nuclear testing. Light pollution. Global insect apocalypse. You can create a list and rank them by the potential contributions. I didn't read the whole article because paywall, but there are lots of things that are all globally different than a century ago.
Why do you think this is a relevant critique to the article/paper? The study is about a global trend in increasing appendage size within populations due to warming ("Allen's rule"), not whole body size ("Bergmann's rule"). Secondly, the role of food is acknowledged as a potential factor in the section on causality, but justifiably rejected as the sole factor.
If you live in Washington State, you can help by planting bee-friendly flowers in your garden (if you have one). The Noxious Weed Control Board offers a pack of seeds for free!:
https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify
I really enjoyed "The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910" [1] by Philip Zelikow. He clearly put a lot of thought into developing his lectures -- there's also a part two [2] that picks up where the first leaves off.
It's well done, helpful especially for non-technical folks or beginners. But I'm annoyed with using the dnssimple.com as example site along with name servers at ns1.dnssimple.com . So, a newbie may wrongfully assume that example.com may have name servers like ns1.example.com which is not the case. May sound silly, but any one totally new to the DNS could easily misunderstand it. They could have used example.com to avoid any ambiguity.
Entertaining irony; I couldn’t resolve the A record for that domain from my pi-hole and nearly wrote an embarrassing comment here before I checked another resolver. All sorted now though
