• 4 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • True, but also don’t allow perfection to be the enemy of good.

    I recall in Star Wars when the Jedi accused the Trade Federation of having invaded Naboo. Did it really? This needs to be verified, doesn’t it? Oh but wait, it’s the word of “Jedi”, right, not just “some guys”? Yeah but can we really play at favoritism? Wait, how is that favoritism when they have an established mandate to help protect the Republic… and on and on.

    Ironically, they could have sent an entire fleet, and if it turned out to be a simple misunderstanding, then oops, so well, now we know not to trust even “Jedi” in the future.

    People are really bad at measuring the cost of NOT acting. Like yeah, vaccines can cause all kinds of things up to and including death… but then again, so too can a deadly disease?!

    Anyway, the job of science is to figure stuff out and communicate what was found - not even - necessarily, at least usually - including translation to the general public, which is more of a reporting task. Politics doesn’t even begin to enter into that. So I think it’s awesome that this science post is pointing out some facts that may be relevant as people discuss the political ramifications and next steps. Ofc communication is a 2-way endeavor and if politicians don’t understand what the scientist is saying, they can ask questions, but so far the OOP scientist here seems to have done her part, and quite well it looks to me (who admittedly knows next to nothing whatsoever about climate science, but at least this seems to have succeeded at the communicate clearly portion:-).