Comments on: Has global warming stopped? Sceptics’ many distortions; at least one U.N. exaggeration https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/14/has-global-warming-stopped-sceptics-many-distortions-at-least-one-u-n-exaggeration/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:19:12 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Ethan Zuckerman https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/14/has-global-warming-stopped-sceptics-many-distortions-at-least-one-u-n-exaggeration/#comment-313 Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:58:20 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=407#comment-313 Alister, you’ve done a very thoughtful job of unpacking rhetoric to find the scientific studies behind it. What makes this piece particularly successful, to my eyes, is a willingness to point out that both sides of a debate are engaged with some levels of oversimplification to get key points across. It might be worth a deeper dive into the rhetorical challenges around asking scientists to make definitive statements… and the challenges of getting political actors, like the WSJ editorial page, to acknowledge degrees of certainty and uncertainty.

I also think that you’ve touched on a great technique for lying with statistics – choosing a length of time that makes a convenient argument. This is a truly powerful tool – pick the right time period and you can convincingly argue for the economic benefits of the NY Giants winning the Superbowl. It might be fun to catalog some of these techniques and bring them to bear on science/psuedoscience journalism in an automated form, as Dan Schultz is trying to do with his semi-automated political factchecking.

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