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Pfft comments on Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Elo 07 March 2016 03:24AM

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Comment author: Viliam 11 March 2016 08:55:30AM *  1 point [-]

Carey's list of publications doesn't look particularly bullshitty.

I looked at a random paper called "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species" and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.

Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:

to understand why glaciers are so inexorably tied to global warming and why people lament the loss of ice, it is necessary to look beyond climate science and glacier melting—to turn additionally to culture, history, and power relations. Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an “endangered glacier” narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.

So again, it's not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.

So it's still the same thing. When talking about "glaciology", I expect something like "here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt", but instead the guy produces something like "here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists". The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.

Technically, "collecting stuff people said about something" could be called science, but then it's not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting "stuff people said about glaciers", I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.

Comment author: Pfft 11 March 2016 04:21:23PM 0 points [-]

He is a historian, studying history of science. That subject is exactly about studying what people (scientists) are saying.