Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!

Tichy · #1 December 18th, 2008, 02:09 PM

Thank you for all of the assumptions, and the cuss words. Object lessons taste like butterscotch.

I was taking issue with your method of arguing with Edi. The fact that that produced an death-rattle of insults and assumptions about my biases from you confirms my impression of your methods. When in doubt, yell louder and call names. The thing is, you sound like an angry ideologue, whereas Max, who I disagree with, actually sounds like he's trying to engage the issue.

Did you miss the fact that I *stopped* responding to the thread because I was afraid that I was arguing from bias, and didn't have time to "do my damn homework" as you so quaintly put it?

I responded now, because something came up that I *do* know something about -- reasoning and rhetoric -- and you kindly backed me up on it by responding with such delicious fervor to my critique.

MaxWilson · #2 December 18th, 2008, 03:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tichy

When in doubt, yell louder and call names. The thing is, you sound like an angry ideologue, whereas Max, who I disagree with, actually sounds like he's trying to engage the issue.

Yeah, well.

Maybe we won't always disagree. Edi's response has given me some new directions to take my homework. (I realized that I need to be as critical of my own skepticism as I wish AGW advocates would be of their theories, which probably means asking my so-called "hard questions" on realclimate.org forums instead of just wishing that AGW advocates would magically address them on their own--maybe the questions *are* well-known and well-answered.) I may be wrong, I frequently am, and when I am I like to think I can change my mind.

-Max

P.S. Obviously what I'll really be hoping for is that someone on realclimate.org will say, "Oh yeah, that's called XYZZY in the literature. A good starting place is FredBob's 2001 paper on it." That's infinitely better than someone's ad hoc response on a forum, but at the same time it's unfair to expect AGW advocates outside the field itself to be able to point out papers like that.