[Coral-List] AGW:Walking the Walk (R.D.)

Ulf Erlingsson ceo at lindorm.com
Mon Nov 29 09:39:31 EST 2010


Good science cannot impose limits on what is to be considered  
relevant, and what is not; nor on who is to be allowed to speak and  
who is not -- only that obvious spam and posts obviously designed to  
disrupt rather than contribute should be filtered out.

As regards the sarcastically described standards, a point was made,  
but it is clearly just a point, as such standards are not relevant  
for the argument.

Ultimately, the only thing that should determine whether to reject a  
particular scientific hypothesis are relevant arguments. It is my  
experience that in most debates - even among scientists - the  
majority of arguments made are in fact irrelevant. For an argument to  
be relevant it has to be logically true, and for it to be valid it  
also has to be based on true facts. I can recommend anyone interested  
in debating to study up the Wikipedia.org article on Logical Fallacy,  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

With that in fresh memory, read some debate (e.g. on AGW) and try to  
detect the fallacies. I think you often will find that entire posts  
contain nothing but fallacious statements. Unfortunately, fallacious  
statements seem to be much more prevalent than relevant arguments (as  
I discovered when debating with a self-declared "skeptical society"  
on another matter).

Ulf Erlingsson

On 2010-11-27, at 11:12, Steve Mussman wrote:

> ...
>
> Few would be willing to live up to the standards that were  
> sarcastically described, but
> we can all do our part to thoughtfully take steps to try and assure  
> that we are making
> things better for the generations that follow.
>
> After all, that is the fundamental reason for exploring this issue  
> in the first place.




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