Actually, that's not what I said.

I also want to mention that I don't agree with whoever flagged the above comment. Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.

> Silencing and/or hiding people with different opinions is never the way to go.

I completely agree with this. But looking at the (now dead) comment (not having flagged it myself)...it's not really an example of a differing opinion. It's a cheap rhetorical shot that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. If the commentor had actually expanded on their disagreement, the remark could certainly stand as part of that. There are examples of substantive comments in this thread that disagree with yours. On its own, that one has no merit except to lower the level of discourse here.

My last post was satirical about the stake, but it is exactly why I mentioned it.

I feel like we are in the dark era of Christianity burning witches and dissidents.

The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same.

Nah. It's like having a study come out that shows smoking doesn't cause toenail cancer like the previous ones did. You know the tobacco industry will portray it as "new study shows smoking doesn't cause cancer!" or "scientists cast doubt on smoking-cancer link".

I'm sorry that this is what you got from my comment, because it wasn't my intention.

I was trying to say that the nuance in the article will be completely lost in the media. Even commenters in this thread who "believe in" climate change and claim to subscribe to the scientific orthodoxy are missing the distinction between ice sheets and ice cliffs, which was one of the main points of the article. And HN is one of the rare places on the internet where people actually read things, so imagine what the conversation will look like when someone posts it on facebook.

Ultimately I was trying to raise the question of whether it's even possible to communicate science to the general public. And this thread so far is answering that question with a big fat "NO".

It's inherently impossible to communicate advanced scientific research results in a quick, meaningful way to a layperson.

By definition a layperson doesn't understand any scientific field in depth.

Since they don't, they do not have the tools to truly understand anything in the field's research - you need to understand the field's current state to understand what's going on in the latest research.

Ever tried to explain something highly technical to non-technical management? That's another instance of this problem.

They're both special cases of the general problem that only experts can really understand and appreciate great work in their field, and that a very fortunate person might get to be an expert in four or maybe five fields before they die.