David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: It does not take a bible fanatic to question the global warming train > wreck. Some of us have worked with complex systems before and realize just > how difficult it is to separate out the various important parameters.
Unless you have worked with this particular complex system, day in and day out, for many years, you are not qualified to render a valid professional opinion of it. Not even slightly qualified. I worked with extremely complex computer programs for 20 years. I know a lot about software. In some ways, I know more than programmers trained nowadays, since I had to deal with hardware limitations, assembly language and so on. I also have a degree in language and linguistics, so I know a lot about translation, text processing and so on. I read Chomsky, and I studied with professors who thought Chomsky is a fool. I have translated papers and books. I can read and understand some of the complicated papers published by Google about their machine translation. I can probably understand those papers better than 99% of the reading public. HOWEVER, I would not -- in a million years -- show up at a conference and claim that I know better than the experts at Google. I am a knowledgeable amateur in that field. Since you have worked with complex systems, you are entitled to an opinion. No doubt you are better at evaluating climatology claims than 99% of the reading public. But that still does not mean you are anything more than a gifted amateur. You really have no business claiming you know better the experts, or asserting that the research is a "train wreck." At best, you can say you have some doubts. Why not? After all, many aspects of the research are doubtful. There are many open questions. You are probably well qualified to discuss them. Many aspects of machine translation are doubtful or unresolved. If you want to know how and why they are doubtful you could do worse than to ask me. I probably know better than most science journalists. But that does not begin to make me an expert! - Jed
