[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by RMiller

Have you heard about the object that recently hit Jupiter? Guess who discovered it? An amateur.

Take for example the main reason we post on this site, robotics. I know people who are not trained in any engineering who can design some extremely impressive robots.

I have worked with technicians who understand what is going on in a process much better than an engineer does.

In a company I worked for, after getting a bachelors and going into a research position for five years you were better off than the person who went to get their PhD in those five years. 1) You had experience the company valued. 2) Your five years were on-the-job like training. 3) You netted a whole lot more money than the student did.

How about Henry Ford? What education did he have?

Do you know why an "amateur" can sometimes be better than a "professional"? Because <i>if </i> they have worked with it, studied it, and come to an understanding of it from their own experiences outside of school, they can do just as well as others.

What is that to say? There are definitely some "amateurs" out there who have opinions that should be valued. In addition, if you are reading about a subject over a period of time, you can rightfully draw conclusions when considering the debate. Are you going to be able to write a paper on it in a published journal, unlikely, though there are exceptions, particularly if there is a great insight or discovery.

Those are all exceptions, not the rule.

There will always a few exceptional amateurs that are competent enough in professional fields to do acceptable (or even amazing work, like Dean Kamen or your example of Henry Ford), but the vast majority of amateur people wouldn't even pass basic proficiency standards in specialized professional fields. That's why the average annual incomes of people with Bachelor degrees is higher than those without, and those with Master degrees is higher yet, with PhDs topping the charts. There will always be outliers, but this in general is the rule.

Originally Posted by RMiller

Just remember, "garbage in, garbage out." If I do not give all the data or I give a wrong set of equations or I don't give the right units, I can get something that looks great on paper, but will fail miserably. In the case of human caused global warming, I think an emphasis has been put on the last 25 years, particularly to the public. As IndySam noted, in the 60s and 70s, it was global cooling that was the "problem."

But in the 50s - 70s, the data at the time was showing that the Earth's temperature had stabilized. The decision at the time made sense that the Earth may have been entering a cooling phase. But since the late 1800s however, the temperature has generally "skyrocketed" in terms of the rate of the temperature increase in reference to the nominal fluctuations during the past two thousand years. 84% of scientists [source] agree with the findings that this recent upsurge since the "Little Ice Age" has been propelled to increase faster and to higher levels because of human activity than it would have otherwise occurred naturally.

Originally Posted by RMiller

One thing that frustrates me is that sometimes the evidence is not brought to the table when it doesn't fit with a "scientific theory." For instance, how widely reported is it that since 2001, the average global temperature has remained steady, not an exponential growth.

If there was ever an educational course that singlehandedly changed my life, I would give the honors to statistics. Without statistics, localized variations like that might look like a trend. But sometimes we get "weird" results that point more to the randomness of noise in data than actual trends. An example of this can be said about rolling a pair of dice three times and getting doubles each time (sending you directly to Jail without passing Go in Monopoly!). The odds of this happening are small (1/216), but does it mean the dice are loaded or inaccurate? No, it just means your sample size is too small to be conclusive.

Localized trends (over a few years) can be affected by a number of localized environmental factors. Some factors we know about - such as the case of the Mount Tambora volcano eruption in 1815 causing the Year Without a Summer in 1816 - but others we don't. In general, predicting short term weather and climate variations is much harder than predicting long term ones since more variables come into play in the short term. In the long term, the short term variations are smoothed out (very similar to the Law of Large Numbers), making longer term predictions a lot easier.

Originally Posted by RMiller

Is the earth gradually warming? Yes, but it has for the last 150-200 years since the Little Ice Age. Yes, 200 years at the rate of about a degree F every century. The real question is: is it human caused? If it is, then all of the equations to predict global warming by IPPC are off since none of their predictions line up with reality (oh, you didn't know that? ). This is one of the things that bothers me when science, money, and politics collide (and not just in regards to global warming, but other issues as well that are not on topic). The scientific method goes out the window. One piece of evidence should be enough to cause a significant reworking of the theory at the least, but when money and politics is involved, it becomes more of a tangled web.

See here, here, and here (two pdfs links are linked from first link) for evidence.



Let's see, current "proven" reserves of crude oil are around 50 years worth. That doesn't include shale oil (estimated 2x proven reserves), oil that is not economically/technically feasible at the moment, and crude oil that is unproven. Suffice to say, I think we have enough for a while. Your statement about it becoming too expensive might be true, but I think that will be more because a cheaper (that oil today even) technology comes along.

As you pointed out, there is a lot of oil left. But we use petroleum for more than just making our cars go and supplying power plants. Fertilizer, plastics, lubricants, and many more various hydrocarbon-based products all depend on various byproducts of the oil distillation process. When the price of oil goes up, all those prices go up as well, resulting in very volatile pricing. And real economic growth does not like volatile pricing - that's why you see so many companies with price guarantees to sell anything for their competitors price if it's cheaper. This isn't to save you money, it's because stable pricing leads to higher profit margins for them.

Switching from oil to more stable sources of sustainable or renewable energy (non-corn* ethanol, biodiesel, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc) results in steadier prices (e.g. wind is always free!), which results in more stable economic growth and higher profit margins for industry. Thus, weening ourselves off oil is a smart and sensible long-term goal both economically and environmentally. The problem is the short term - volatile pricing can lead to massive short term profits for shareholders and executives then lead to a period of minimal profits at best or massive red ink at worst, as the financial industry is in now. These people are more interested in sticking around for five years, getting rich, and leaving the company rather than sitting in for 20, 30, even 40 years at the company and guiding it down the path of long term, stable, moderately-high profits.

* Corn is actually a pretty poor source of ethanol. Plants like plain prairie grass yield much higher returns, while not driving up the food and livestock feed prices for everyone else.

Originally Posted by JesseK

Be very careful here Art. There are many people who devote their lifetime to a specific narrow-minded piece of work who then fail to see the larger picture. In pop-culture they usually become stuck in the 'doomsday sayer' group and simply wait out the rest of their lifetimes to say 'I told you so'.

You don't need a degree to be able to analyze data. If I were to judge it, I'd say that most people who can finish a Sudoku puzzle have enough logic and reasoning to analyze this data. Combine that with the plethora of news, evidence, and life experiences that sway the argument either way and even Joe Sixpack can make a logical, valid argument from his perspective.

I'm not disagreeing with you. There are a lot of people who become close-minded to the big picture, both people with and without college educations. I've seen college professors with PhDs try to read deeper into things which don't really exist. Sometimes a joke or saying is just a joke or a saying. Others fall victim to confirmation bias after becoming attached to something, and fail to have the ability to see why or how an opposing group holds their particular point-of-view.

In general, pretty much everyone in society as you pointed out in a great example who can solve a Sudoku puzzle, can form qualified opinions about data, so long as they keep an open mind. Most of these decisions though, focus on a small perspective. What's directly good for them, their family, their community, their church, their friends, etc. There is nothing wrong with this, and most people live happy, satisfied lives.

But sometimes their decisions have implications that don't directly affect them - such as throwing garbage into a local stream - but may have larger negative externalities on society. The water carries it away, and unless they have a personal connection to something downstream, it doesn't affect them anymore. Or what about someone who eats a lot of junk food and doesn't exercise? They seem to be happy, even though being obese leads to greater health problems, which causes health care costs across the board to increase due to more people having health problems. Do either of these make this person bad? No. In their point of view, their decisions are perfectly rational. But sometimes it's things like this where scientists, or their doctors respectively, need to give them a helping hand towards better decisions.

We're all human, we all make mistakes, and we all need someone there to remind us when we begin making bad decisions. And as long as we all remember to keep an open-mind that we may be unintentionally making bad decisions, and actually change on recommendations from their doctors or other experts, we're all fine.