denialism | April 22, 2008With the news that in addition to John McCain both Clinton and Obama have now pandered to anti-vaccine denialism I think it's time to reiterate there isn't a political party in this country that has a truly sound grasp on sound science. And in this instance it is clear that both sides are more than happy to pander to the denialists.
The fact is that there is no link between vaccines and autism. As time has gone on the denialists move the goalposts further and further back as the evidence for a link becomes increasingly unlikely. First it was thimerosal, and now 6 years after its removal…
choofnagle | April 22, 2008An oped in today's Journal by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, argues that he left the organization because it abandoned scientific justifications for its advocacy. Moore argues:
At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs.…
choofnagle | April 21, 2008...because today, the first lobbying disclosure reports are due to be filed with Congress under new rules that flowed from the Jack Abramoff scandal. The new law requires quarterly reports, lowers the dollar amount of activity that triggers reporting requirements, and (my favorite), requires trade associations to identify their members in certain circumstances.
Let me expand on this last requirement--trade associations and coalitions (such as the American Chemistry Council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the like) now have to identify the actual companies behind lobbying efforts when their…
choofnagle | April 21, 2008John Schwartz reports in the Times that PETA:
...said it would announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."
I love it! This, in my opinion, is great news. Now the question is, how will the left accept it? Will they call PETA's petri-dish meat "frankenfood?" Is laboratory-designed food made by lefties more healthy than laboratory-designed food by big agribusiness?! Only time will tell, but it will be fun to watch.
choofnagle | April 20, 2008The financial services industry pumps a huge amount of money into politics. So much so that the industry has special status and gets pretty much what it wants. Things are a bit different now, because the downturn in the economy and mortgage screwup has given Washington some leverage to examine some of the industry's worse practices, and look at what happens--
Imagine that you were invited to Washington DC to testify at a hearing on the "Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights." You travel to Washington, probably on your own expense, to share your frustrations with the one-sidedness of credit…
denialism | April 18, 2008Yes, that's right, the Holocaust denier who brought us the international meeting of Holocaust deniers has slipped naturally into trooferism.
Earlier Wednesday, Ahmadinejad called the 9/11 attacks a "suspect event" in a speech at a public rally in the holy city of Qom.
"Four or five years ago a suspect event took place in New York," Ahmadinejad said, in an address carried live on state television.
"A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed, whose names were never published."
"Under this pretext they (the United States) attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then a…
denialism | April 17, 2008Slate has a series of three articles on what editor Daniel Engber refers to as "the paranoid style". Starting with A crank's progress, sliding into a review of Doubt is their product, and finishing with a spot-on review of Expelled he runs the guantlet of modern denialism. He also happens to hit upon the major commonalities between all pseudoscientists, which of course I find gratifying. For instance, read his description of Berlinski and how he nails the truisms in detecting the false skeptic:
Forgive me if I don't pause here to defend the conventional wisdom on evolution and cosmology. (…
denialism | April 17, 2008One of the most salient features of cranks is their inconsistency. A major difference between someone who is trying to reason scientifically and someone who has a fixed belief they are trying to defend against rational inquiry is the scientific thinker is looking for synthesis. They want things to fit together nicely, to make sense, and incorporate as much of the data as possible into a cohesive picture or theory that is convincing to ones peers so they adopt your view.
A crank, on the other hand, doesn't care about internal consistency, presenting a cohesive picture of any kind, or…
denialism | April 15, 2008Sometimes I just can't get too angry about some particularly insane rant from a denialist. In this case, HIV/AIDS denialist, scientific medicine denialist and all-around crank Mike Adams rants about the prospect of food sterilization by irradiation:
Let's be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don't want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don't want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole…
denialism | April 6, 2008I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Maher. He is a funny guy, he is good at mocking some of the more ludicrous aspects of politics, and he has been an effective critic of this administration and some of its more egregious policies.
However, I've also long held the position that both liberals and conservatives alike must own up to their own extremists. Liberals must own up to the fact that they don't have a universally-solid grasp on scientific truth, and just like the right wingers, we have people and movements within the left wing that are cranky and denialist. I would…
denialism | April 2, 2008Part III of our discussion of the history of denialist movements is on one that should tie things together and one I hope some of my fellow sciencebloggers will realize speaks to the necessity of challenging denialists on every front.
My work in this instance is made extremely easy as Naomi Oreskes has done it all for me. Please watch her discussion on the history of global warming denialism, it takes a bit of time, but it is dead on and is one of the best discussions of the methods and strategy of denialism (not to mention free-market fundamentalism) I have seen to date.
For those of you…
denialism | March 31, 2008The Independent has yet another hysterical article about the potential link between cell phones and brain cancer. And I've been asked, what are we seeing here? Is this the early reporting of a potential public health threat? Or is it just more nonsense from a newspaper that wouldn't know good science if it sat on it's head? Both Ben Goldacre and I have felt the need to take on some piece of nonsense from the Independent, and their previous writing on "electrosmog", a repeatedly disproven piece of crankery, diminishes their credibility on this issue.
And guess what else diminishes their…
denialism | March 31, 2008To continue to explain how terribly misguided Mooney and Nisbet are about ignoring denialist campaigns I think it's time to go over the history of one of the most effective denialist campaigns ever. That is the concerted effort by the major tobacco companies (RJ Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, Phillip Morris, and British American Tobacco) to spread misinformation about the health risks associated with smoking.
Fortunately for those who study denialism, one of the results of the Tobacco Master Settlement all the internal memos of four of the largest tobacco companies have been…
denialism | March 28, 2008At long last I have finished my surgical requirements. After 12 weeks of nonstop surgery rotations, despite enjoying it thoroughly, I'm ready to try something else for a while. Or at least I'm looking forward to waking up at 6AM rather than 4AM for a few months. It seems like such a small difference, but it's literally the difference between night and day. Especially during the winter, starting at 5 on the wards and finishing usually well after dark, you begin to wonder if you'll see the sun again. Being able to walk into work when it's actually light out is very appealing.
My traffic…
choofnagle | March 24, 2008By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O'Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade:
Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically. These emotional pleas made the Council rescind its previous resolution.
Ah, California! There's good stuff out there explaining this breed of woo, but these…
denialism | March 24, 2008This week I think I'm going to spend some time discussing denialism throughout history. In part inspired by the recent attacks on some of the most effective scientific communicators we have by by Mooney and Matthew Nisbet, and PalMD's post on some modern thinking by "ancients" I feel like it's time to provide some more historical context to debunking bullshit, and the long and honorable tradition of debunking by the world's greatest thinkers and communicators. We're going to start a little bit light with my nomination of Plato as history's first debunker.
You see, Plato had to deal with…
denialism | March 24, 2008One of the problems with medical education is that while you are intellectually trained to deal with medical problems and emergencies, actual experience with how to respond to emergent clinical situations is difficult to teach and usually only comes with experience. Further, real clinical experts make medical decisions almost by reflex. You see this in medical school that while you as a medical student have to actively think about what is going on in any given situation, medical experts act more by pattern recognition and have an instant reflexive response to clinical situations. And how…
denialism | March 20, 2008Everyone please welcome PalMD of WhiteCoatUnderGround.
I've been enjoying his writing for quite some time and think that he gets what the mission of denialism blog is all about.
He has of course introduced himself, and I think in just a few posts you'll see why he's a wonderful asset to the sb team.
denialism | March 20, 2008Well, since we first wrote about losing Plan9, Higher Grounds, Satellite Ballroom and Just Curry for a worthless CVS, the C-Ville has picked up the story (here too) as well as the Hook. Good for them. I take back my sniping comments about them ignoring the Corner district.
A few things are clear from these articles. One is that Terry Vassalos is using weasel-talk. He says in the C-Ville article:
"They look at the space, yes," says Vassalos. "I cannot go into the details. There are a lot of people involved, the people that are there, the new people, and I cannot say anything about the…
denialism | March 20, 2008
The NYT reports on a this article by Tomas Grim of the Dept of Zoology at Palacky Univ purporting to show a negative effect on numbers of scientific publications for scientists correlated with increasing beer consumption.
According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper's quality and importance.
The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to…