I don't think you're saying anything here that longtime community members do not understand. Most here have discussed the basic human biases you're describing ad nauseum. The pushback you've received is not because we do not understand the biases you're describing. The pushback you've received is sourced in disagreements that scientists are doing the things that your analogies imply they are doing.

In this post you're just reasserting the things that people have disagreed with you about. I recommend directly addressing the points that people have brought up rather than ignoring them and restating your analogies. A brief perusal of what people have commented on your posts seems to show remarkably little effort by you to address any particular feedback other than to hand wave it away.

This is particularly the case when most people's priors are that the person disagreeing with the scientific establishment is the one who has a very strong burden of proof.

Nixtaken, I think it would be great if you responded to the substance of Dustin's point rather than replied with meta-commentary about how many people agreed with Dustin. For example, you could give a brief summary of the counterargument you've received, and explain where you think it's mistaken. I would upvote that.

[Insofar as it's relevant, I'm one of the people who works full-time on building this site and supporting this community.]

o I did that in this post, but then I was told by dustin that I've written something too glaringly obvious yet clearly incorrect and controversial.

No, I'm not qualified to gauge whether you are clearly incorrect. I am qualified to comment on whether you're making a convincing argument. Your arguments are not convincing largely because you do not really engage with people who question you.

The Ghost of Joseph Weber, the response was a series of gish gallops by gjm in which he argued that organizing random data according to a criteria called 'weirdness' was scientific. (It is not.)

And this is the problem. You could, for example, have a good and through discussion with gjm about this specific point. But you won't, and I find it disappointing.

Look, here's the deal for me:

1. Bringing up that human bias could be the cause of a scientific result is not sufficient nor necessary to negate that result...the bias is beside the point of whether they are right or not. You have to engage the results.
2. Most people, no matter how smart, do not have the background, time, or energy to engage on specific points of the technical subjects you have raised in your series of posts. (Of note, this is why you would do better to focus on single, specific technical points rather than shotgunning a non-physics-expert audience with every single technical thing you think is wrong with advanced physics experiments.) (This is also why, to most observers you are the one who started out with a gish gallop.)
3. These technical points are the only thing you have to hang your hat on.
4. gjm, to all appearances, seems to actually have the background to engage you on these points.
5. Instead of engaging on any point gjm raised, you basically just dismissed all of them out of hand.
6. Because of this, to an outsider of the field, you are now the one who looks like the one who has succumbed to unknown-to-us biases.
7. As far as any outsider can tell there are a lot of plausible explanations for your position, and only one of them has to do with you being right...and you lowered my priors in the "this person is right about all of this physics stuff" explanation for your posts by rejecting engagement with the main person trying to engage you on a technical level.
8. gjm could be full of shit. I don't know, but I do know that it doesn't seem like he's full of shit. I do know that a few of the factual things he brought up that I do have the background to check on...like him saying you were misquoting others seemed spot on. Add on to that your refusal to engage, and you're obviously going to be in the position you're in now.
9. You may very well be correct but you're doing us all a disservice by arguing your points poorly.

When someone makes several comments that are longer than the post itself, and when the reasoning is demonstrably fallacious (weirdness criterion!?), I think it is fair to call the comment a gish gallop when that is the most economical way to express what happened.

You could have engaged on whether this was "demonstrably fallacious". That would have been interesting to read and I would've upvoted a good comment of this sort.

Again, you are the one who seems to be arguing in bad faith. It is very frustrating because LW has a long history of criticizing the practice of science, and it'd be interesting to see another good discussion in that vein.

All in all, I find myself really disheartened by this whole saga since, 1) I find it, in the abstract, plausible that there are areas of modern science that have went down the wrong road because the practitioners have misled themselves, 2) some of the best content for me on LW over the many years has been of the type that highlights such deficiencies, and 3) I can see no progress being made on resolving our disagreements here.

As such, I'm not sure how much more value we can get out continuing these discussions. That really makes me sad since being willing to continually engage until disagreements are resolved is something I often enjoy.

gjm gave specific definitions of what he meant by "weirdness". I've yet to see you seriously engage on what he meant using the principle of charity and trying to figure out why you two were so far apart on this issue. That would be great to read and an effective way of convincing other people of your righteousness!

This willingness to engage is the core of good content on this site. Newcomers often have a hard time adjusting to this not-normal way of discussing issues.

As has been your wont in these threads you almost immediately fall back to accusing whomever you're arguing with to being biased in some way and saying "nuh-uh".

…a series of gish gallops by gjm…

What you, nixtaken, wrote [LW · GW] was a Gish gallop. What gjm wrote [LW(p) · GW(p)] was a refutation. You have ignored gjm's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] about how you misapply the word "Gish gallop". This shows "remarkably little effort by you to address any particular feedback other than to hand wave it away."

So I did that in this post, but then I was told by dustin [sic] that I've written something too glaringly obvious yet clearly incorrect and controversial. Instead of using specific examples from published papers, I used analogies and I was criticized for that as well.

You have not refuted Dustin. You have not even failed to refute Dustin. You misrepresented Dustin's comment and then did not even contradict your self-contradictory misrepresentation of Dustin's comment that your post is "glaringly obvious yet clearly incorrect". In this way, your writing continues to demonstrate "remarkably little effort by you to address any particular feedback other than to hand wave it away."

There seems to be no winning with a crowd that doesn't like to see their favorite team (science) painted in a less than glowing light. I think that some of the elders of your community might be needed to help teach these people that science isn't about team loyalty, it is about a method, and that is what I've been writing about. [emphasis mine]

Thank you for not making personal [LW(p) · GW(p)] attacks [LW(p) · GW(p)] this time. Your overly-derogatory tone continues to violate the social norms of this website.

When someone makes several comments that are longer than the post itself, and when the reasoning is demonstrably fallacious (weirdness criterion!?), I think it is fair to call the comment a gish gallop when that is the most economical way to express what happened.

You still have not refuted gjm's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], which remains childless. I am not referring to the comment you handwaved away with the term "Gish gallop". I am referring to the comment where gjm explains why you are Gish galloping and ze is not. Once again, this demonstrates "remarkably little effort by you to address any particular feedback other than to hand wave it away."

…we (rational scientists)…

You continue to misrepresent the statements of others. Dustin did not claim to be a scientist nor member of the scientific establishment.

You have not refuted Dustin.

You have not even contested my statement "You have not refuted Dustin." This corroborates Dustin's claim "A brief perusal of what people have commented on your posts seems to show remarkably little effort by you to address any particular feedback other than to hand wave it away."

That is not a citation.

Let me dig up that list of a hundred US and Russian papers from the 1970s...

Please do. A single citation pointing to that list ought to suffice.

You write that

In the case of gravitational waves, back in the 1970s, hundreds of independent research groups constructed simple devices to measure them and they all compared their results. Each research group thought that it had measured gravitational waves, but when the results were combined, they all had to conclude that no one had been measuring gravitational waves. They had all been measuring different sources of noise.

So far as I can tell, this is not in fact true. E.g., this article about Joseph Weber says that Weber claimed to have measured gravitational waves, lots of other labs tried to replicate his results, and they all said they hadn't been able to. So does this one. The latter cites this paper in Physical Review Letters in which one pair of collaborators say exactly that. Here's another article saying the same. I haven't found anything that claims that everyone thought they had found gravitational waves, or that combining everyone's results made it plain that that wasn't so.

(I also remark that the story you tell in this paragraph is awfully similar to the one you want to debunk. Lots of scientific observations so noisy that you can't get anything reliable from any of them, but when you put them together you get something usable. This is exactly what you poke fun at at, e.g., the start of your "Weber's ghost" post. Surely you can't consider that approach valid when it says "no gravitational waves here" but invalid when it says "gravitational waves here"...)

I've not taken the time to read your posts, but it looks like you're trying to make some arguments about the feasibility of certain physics research programmes relating to gravitational waves, and that sounds cool. Physics is a difficult but very important (and just plain fascinating) area, and I myself am pretty disappointed with a lot of modern academia – including the physicists, and the string theorists, and so on. We discuss physics regularly and in depth on the site (e.g. the quantum mechanics sequence [LW · GW], the physics tag [? · GW]) and I appreciate you joining in humanity's effort on this front by being another person who takes the time to write up and explain their opinions on the subject, it's a virtuous effort – and it's nice that you came to our corner of the internet to talk with us :)

Overall, you've been downvoted a bunch, and gjm, dustin and Isusr have been pretty critical of your arguments, and you talked in intercom with Habryka where he also took Gjm's side in a specific technical disagreement. For me, these in combination mean I'm not going to set aside the 45+ minutes it would take for me to read your posts to double check whether the critiques are accurate.

I don't expect the reception will suddenly improve if you just change a little thing, so overall I'd suggest you cease posting, and lurk a bunch for at least a couple of months to get a better sense of how to engage with the site. If you like! You're not obligated to keep talking with us, especially if you don't find it fruitful.

In the case of gravitational waves, back in the 1970s, hundreds of independent research groups constructed simple devices to measure them and they all compared their results. Each research group thought that it had measured gravitational waves, but when the results were combined, they all had to conclude that no one had been measuring gravitational waves. They had all been measuring different sources of noise.

…

A hundred other researchers say, "We have used the same device to measure gravitational waves and found that it is too sensitive to local sources of noise to be able to conclude that anything it measures is cosmic in origin."

Please provide a citation for this claim.

When someone makes several comments that are longer than the post itself, and when the reasoning is demonstrably fallacious

By this criterion, your original post is a gish gallop since it also included demonstrably fallacious statements.

On the other hand, we could take the charitable reading and say "maybe I don't understand the point they're trying to make and we should discuss it".

Thanks for the nice reply :)

I somewhat share your perspective that parts of physics academia are 'to keep certain types of people busy'. I think I agree, though I might put it in different words. Here's a transcript of a podcast from Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel [LW · GW] that talks about some of these things, that I think is a valuable perspective. I do expect that further major advances in physics will probably come from outside of physics academia and education, inside of which things seem kind of stuck and unproductive.

Goodbye, and good luck with your future.

Your comments would benefit from the use of hyperlinks and blockquotes. If WISIWYG is a problem you can enable the markdown editor from your "Edit Account" [? · GW] page.