Matt Berkley

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We can view this edit by BBC management - and misleading presentation of the censored version as the full lecture - in the context of the BBC treating the edit of the Trump speech as a highly serious matter.

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If the BBC chose to mislead the public that they were hearing the whole lecture:

That is very poor, and a bad sign of an aspect of the culture at least among some at the BBC.

If it did not occur to those in charge that they would mislead the public:

Ditto.

If the BBC chose to mislead the public that they were hearing the whole lecture:

That is very poor, and a bad sign of an aspect of the culture at least among some at the BBC.

If it did not occur to those in charge that they would mislead the public:

Ditto.

We can view this edit by BBC management - and misleading presentation of the censored version as the full lecture - in the context of the BBC treating the edit of the Trump speech as a highly serious matter.

bsky.app/profile/did:...

It's worse than just censorship, because:

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For the BBC to say "this is an edited version of the lecture" would be one thing.

To present the censored version as if it is the whole lecture is not only censorship, but adds another layer of deception in public statements about the broadcast.

The BBC spliced two recordings from a speech together, making it sound like the part in the middle didn't exist?

Does that sound familiar?

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If we also consider the unpredictability of effects on temperatures of

sudden changes in ocean currents,

huge wildfires driven by higher temperatures, and

melting permafrost,

what level of trust is reasonable in claims to predict global temperatures for 10, 25 or 75 years' time?

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In a field where evidence suggests that a high proportion of papers have serious flaws, a database of "potentially important" papers which appear *not* to have serious flaws might be useful, as well as identifying those that do.

We can ask when citation is justified, and also what is justifiable to say about the earlier work when citing it.

Should researchers note a general apparent level of reliability/unreliability within the field, or which papers they have checked for comments on post-publication peer review sites?

"Adding up some domestic emissions that your largely service economy causes and going on about "net zero"

without

telling people each time what you are talking about

is a bit like

paying your poorer neighbour to burn your rubbish and implying you haven't caused any smoke."

Is that fair?

I'm wondering if academic papers might usefully include a "Due Diligence Declaration" to the effect that authors have taken reasonable, perhaps for some purposes specified, steps to try to ensure both their own work and the work they cite are adequate.

bsky.app/profile/matt...

If we also consider the unpredictability of effects on temperatures of

sudden changes in ocean currents,

huge wildfires driven by higher temperatures, and

melting permafrost,

what level of trust is reasonable in claims to predict global temperatures for 10, 25 or 75 years' time?

"Climate "predictions" are unreliable, as they are based on assumptions about largely unpredictable weather - in temperatures with largely unpredictable effects: in particular, the natures, extents, timings, locations, altitudes, reflectance and heat-trapping effects of cloud cover."

Is that fair?

Draft comments on public claims

School exam papers, academics, Oxford Reference books and others mislead the public on UN goals

web.archive.org/web/20221026...

Draft comments on public claims

How many universities are teaching correctly on the basis of

- what the UN resolutions actually say,

rather than wrongly on the basis of

- what civil servants and politicians have claimed about global goals?

web.archive.org/web/20221026...

I'm envisaging a diagram of the argument, with % confidence labelled by the authors for every step.

Perhaps what is commonly the earliest stage of research could also benefit from the kinds of thing we are talking about here - the stage of making choices to rely on existing work when deciding what to research.

If people have better heuristics to avoid dodgy literature, that might help.

Some related thoughts:

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How far are rules for this teachable/transferable?

Is it often largely a matter of judgement which combines, for example, knowing about flaws within subfields, in particular journals or types of journal, from particular institutions, and/or particular methods?

What is the role of intuition here?

Suppose everything in the Stockholm Declaration is done well and relatively quickly.

Could we end up with a harmful and regret-inducing amount of good work on bad foundations?

(Good research - apart perhaps from the lack of enough suspicion of earler work - built on seriously flawed work.)

The First Millennium Development Goal The first MDG and its public celebration among the affluent hides the largest (though not the gravest) crime against humanity ever committed, argues Thomas Pogge in this paper presented at the Carnegi...

I failed to work out that the easier 1990 baselines in the misleadingly-named "Millennium Development Goal" targets publicised in 2001 were not in the historic document of 2000 which national leaders called their "pledge". I realised this in 2013, from the work of @tpogge.bsky.social.

Matt Berkley

The "paper of record": In 2000 the New York Times printed the Millennium Declaration - agreed in New York - in full.

Like others, it later kept falsely claiming world leaders had agreed an easier baseline of "1990".

It did so even after being told of the falsehood.

web.archive.org/web/20231003...