by Robin Burk Who are you going to believe – my academic paper/editorial/meme or your lying eyes? It’s a pressing question in today’s world of artificial intelligence, machine learning, faked videos, and tendentious scientific claims – and particularly pressing in light of ambitious, far-reaching policy proposals based on data analytics and models. Perhaps you remember Climategate 1.0, when emails from the UK’s East Anglia Climatic Research Unit were hacked (or leaked). Many who read through them saw clear evidence that climate researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States worked to suppress legitimate research results and data that mitigated against their claim of catastrophic human-caused global warming. Among those researchers was Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael E. Mann, who was accused of having deliberately cherry-picked tree ring data in order to assert a “hockey stick” shaped graph in which global temperature spiked over the last century or so. That cherry-picked data, it was said, served to “hide the decline” in overall global temperatures that others saw using different data sets, leading to this satirical video. What followed were two investigations which sort of, kind of, exonerated the participants of offenses that would otherwise cut off their research funding from government agencies.…
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