Scientific consensus shifts public opinion on climate change. People are more likely to believe that humans cause global warming if they are told that 97% of publishing climate scientists agree that it does, a new study has found.
Despite overwhelming evidence showing that human activity is causing the planet to overheat, public concern is on the wane, said the study, titled The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science and published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday. “One reason for this decline is the ‘manufacture of doubt’ by political and vested interests, which often challenge the existence of the scientific consensus. The role of perceived consensus in shaping public opinion is therefore of considerable interest,” the study’s authors said.
Overall, participants in the study greatly underestimated the level of scientific agreement on the issue, the study said. The second study involved surveying 100 Perth pedestrians – half in a control group and half in a ‘consensus group’. Pus.sagepub.com/content/9/2/85.full.pdf. The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.
Public representations of scientific uncertainty about global climate change. Es.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf. Is medical science built on shaky foundations? - opinion - 17 September 2012. More than half of biomedical findings cannot be reproduced – we urgently need a way to ensure that discoveries are properly checked REPRODUCIBILITY is the cornerstone of science.
What we hold as definitive scientific fact has been tested over and over again. Even when a fact has been tested in this way, it may still be superseded by new knowledge. Newtonian mechanics became a special case of Einstein's general relativity; molecular biology's mantra "one gene, one protein" became a special case of DNA transcription and translation. One goal of scientific publication is to share results in enough detail to allow other research teams to reproduce them and build on them. Pharmaceuticals company Bayer, for example, recently revealed that it fails to replicate about two-thirds of published studies identifying possible drug targets (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, vol 10, p 712). Psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf. How Should We Make Hard Decisions? We live in a world filled with difficult decisions.
Are complex decisions better left to the unconscious? Further failed replications of the deliberation-without-attention effect. Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 4, no. 6, October 2009, pp. 509-517 The deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflecting on the alternatives.
This effect has been explained (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) by the claim that people engage in unconscious deliberation when distracted and that unconscious thought is better suited for complex decisions than conscious thought. Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B in this study included a dominant alternative and failed to find evidence for this effect. Experiment 3 removed the dominant alternative and manipulated mode of thought within-subjects to eliminate alternative explanations for the failed replication. Keywords: decision making, conscious thought, unconscious thought. The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking Edge Master Class 2011. We ended up studying something that we call "heuristics and biases".
Those were shortcuts, and each shortcut was identified by the biases with which it came. The biases had two functions in that story. They were interesting in themselves, but they were also the primary evidence for the existence of the heuristics. David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page. David Spiegelhalter's Personal Home Page The Norm Chronicles The Norm Chronicles (with Michael Blastland) was published by Profile Books in June 2013.
Cambridge Ideas - Professor Risk. Articles appearing in other places. Bacon sandwiches and middle – class drinkers: the risk of communicating risk - Spiegelhalter - 2008 - Significance. The Met Office thinks August will be wet. Buy futures in sun cream now. Response: Weather forecasts are not pseudo-science. Simon Jenkins' tirade against weather forecasters (The Met Office thinks August will be wet.
Buy futures in sun cream now, 31 July) shows a misunderstanding of what science can deliver. Jenkins contrasts "scientists who lecture ministers on the exactitude of their calling" with "public predictions so smothered in caveats and qualifiers as to be drained of significance". He seems to expect precise predictions of the future despite deriding such claims in the light of "the probabilistic nature of life". In fact, there is a middle way between a demand for certainty and fatalistic resignation. I am a member of a rich community – including insurers, statisticians, doctors and bookies – who use probability theory for prediction. Jenkins' view that predictions should be left to "astrologers, ball-gazers and seaweed" was, at least in the medieval period, very respectable. Why managing risk is a risky business - opinion - 17 August 2009. THE British players in the unfolding swine-flu drama are providing a riveting case study of different responses to risk.
While the government tries to look cool, controlled and consistent, tabloid newspapers hunt sensation and citizens exhibit every emotion from nervous anxiety to stoical acceptance. Understanding Uncertainty.