> I'm content with the ground we've covered, but I still wanted to address your specific request for a reply--I'll try to winnow a bit.

I'm extremely glad you did, for reasons revealed below.

> Regardless of what you thought, or suspected, or meant to say, you said you harbor the same suspicion as the poster's coworkers--and the poster said their coworkers think the scientists are making up the data because their jobs depend on it. Where do you see enough daylight--between the initial poster's assertion, your statement, and my "cooking the books" metaphor--to assert that my interpretation is inconsistent with what you said?

Ok, this is extremely interesting, to me.

--- My initial (incorrect) response to that question ---

Well that's easy.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suspicion

Definition of suspicion

1a : the act or an instance of suspecting something wrong without proof or on slight evidence : mistrust

b : a state of mental uneasiness and uncertainty : doubt

--- My updated (less incorrect) response to that question ---

I got to thinking....here I am talking to a person who is clearly (I suspect) intelligent, articulate, and intellectually honest - not unlike how I imagine myself to be. And yet, we've somehow come to completely opposite conclusions on a matter that is somewhat complicated, but not all that complicated. Being curious about how you came to this misunderstanding (or so I thought!), I reviewed the conversation and came across this previous exchange:

>> I have a bunch of coworkers that think scientists are making up this data and skewing results because their jobs depend on it and they want to continue to get funding.

> (ME): FWIW, I also happen to harbor this suspicion. How might one actually know whether there is an element of truth to it?

Here is where the "contamination of the conversation" (and subsequent misunderstanding, on matters specifically related to this point) occurred, and it is 100% my fault. Due due to lack of disciplined preciseness, my literal words unmistakably convey something I don't actually believe (well, to be completely honest, my mind is open to the possibility, but I internally assign this a very low certainty/likelihood/magnitude score): that scientists are making up this data and skewing results.

I literally said that I am suspicious (consider it possible) that scientists are making up this data and skewing results. So NO WONDER you've been replying to me as if I hold "high level" conspiratorial beliefs, because I said just that!

FWIW, to add some color, my actual beliefs were more accurately communicated in a subsequent comment:

>> Climate science is so unnecessarily controversial at this point, that if any evidence existed that scientists were lying to make more money, business leaders would be touting it at every turn.

> (ME):Sure, and nothing I said directly contradicts this, I am merely pointing out that we do not have evidence either way that it is "wise career advice" to pursue climate change only from a particular angle, or that there might be a kind of "overton window" in play, to some degree. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

> Again, I am not saying this is the case, I am simply saying:

> a) the conclusive, absolute truth on these matters is unknown

> b) a behavior can be observed where climate change advocates seem extremely unwilling to simply acknowledge that some things are unknown

[...that there might be a kind of "overton window" in play, to some degree...] is something that I assign a much higher certainty/likelihood/magnitude score, but (obviously) an espistemic status of [Unknown - Incomplete Data].

If I had an infinite amount of time, I'd go back through the entire conversation thread and try to determine how much of that which I found completely baffling might be explained away by this one mistake - it would be funny if the whole thing might have been one giant misunderstanding due to an unintentional, seemingly minor error on the part of one well-intentioned person - a core idea in my overall theory-in-progress on the underlying causes of societal disharmony and polarization, by the way.

I wonder....is this the first time such a thing has occurred within [HN] > [The Internet] > [Planet Earth] > [The History of Mankind]?

I suspect not. And if not, I then wonder....how often might this sort of thing occur, and with what consequences (if one takes into the consideration the nature of human beings, including current knowledge on how they perceive reality based on (~recursive) interpretation of new input, that is modified based on infinitely complicated mental models of reality built from previously consumed (and interpreted) input)?

But I digress. I think this likely takes care of most of the rest of your comment, except for:

>>...I don't understand what you mean by this...

> You expressed skepticism (to be clear, as I said previously, I have no intrinsic objection to skepticism) of the scientists and their data, but also separately expressed interest in how we move forward from the misunderstanding. If your skepticism of the scientists and the data is serious, it's not clear to me why you're motivated to figure out how we move forward from the misunderstanding.

Ok, this is mostly covered by the above, but not completely: I think this in particular was mostly just plain old no-fault communication error/confusion. I was (imprecisely) referring to one kind of of misunderstanding (that of people interacting on HN, this conversation being one such example, except here we're both acting in good faith), and you took it as another (people "not understanding" (or so it seems), science).

This exchange will easily make the top 5 of my "Most Enlightening Internet Arguments of 2019", so thanks for your persistence.

Two final questions, just for fun:

1. Within this overall ridiculous conversation, do you get any sense of a kind of a ~"general theme, loosely related set of ideas" that drives my curiosity?

2. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being highest confidence), how crazy do you think I am?

EDIT: I also just realized I owe at least two people some sort of an apology.