denialism | May 24, 2007The 61st Skeptic's circle is at Skepchick's.
It's a special towel day version. In particular I like Orac's coverage of anti-peer review attitude among cranks.
Like I say, beware the bashers of peer review.
choofnagle | May 24, 2007The Newhour had a debate tonight full of denialism provided by Paul Miller, former head of the American League of Lobbyists. It's an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how the lobbying tactics outlined in the Denialists' Deck of Cards can be employed to fight a proposal without really dealing with the merits of it.
The issue: lobbying reform in Washington that will ban certain gifts by lobbyists to Members, and will provide greater transparency on money provided by lobbyists. The legislation isn't perfect, but check out the tactics used by Miller to kill the proposal:
PAUL MILLER, Miller-…
denialism | May 24, 2007Both Nature and the LA Times this week have articles cautioning against labeling animal-rights extremists "terrorists" in the US. The justification that they're using is that the groups in question, ELF and ALF, are not terrorists because so far they've only destroyed property, and haven't managed to kill anyone yet. Terrorism, in their view, should be limited to instances in which people are actually killed or in which the government is attacked.
I completely disagree.
Take, for instance, the case of Dario Ringach as described in this article from science:
In the United States, however, if…
denialism | May 24, 2007Given that the NYT piece on the Creation Museum was such fluff, I was gratified to read the LA Times' more rigid take.
HE CREATION MUSEUM, a $27-million tourist attraction promoting earth science theories that were popular when Columbus set sail, opens near Cincinnati on Memorial Day. So before the first visitor risks succumbing to the museum's animatronic balderdash -- dinosaurs and humans actually coexisted! the Grand Canyon was carved by the great flood described in Genesis! -- we'd like to clear up a few things: "The Flintstones" is a cartoon, not a documentary. Fred and Wilma? Those…
choofnagle | May 24, 2007
Okay, everyone, practice your sneer, because it's time for the 10 of Diamonds: Bureaucrats! Everyone hates "bureaucrats," whether they ever met one or not. So, the industry denialist often plays the bureaucrat card in order to denigrate proposals that would vest decisionmaking with those fat cats in Washington (Cato has over 3,000 hits for "bureaucrats").
denialism | May 24, 2007How dare Al Gore open his mouth and say things! Here comes the Cato Institute to the rescue, featuring denialist Pat Michaels (Also see Sourcewatch).
What were Gore's great gaffes worthy of scorn from the esteemed think tank?
First he suggested dramatic increases in sea level if significant ice sheets were to melt.
You know, even a one-meter increase, even a three-foot increase in sea level would cause tens of millions of climate refugees.
If Greenland were to break up and slip into the sea or West Antarctica, or half of either and half of both, it would be a 20-feet increase, and that would…
denialism | May 23, 2007The San Francisco Chronicle wrote this article Monday on a recent effort to encourage gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco to foster children. The problem?
They uncritically cited Paul Cameron and his bogus research which is just self-published bigotry and hatred, with no scientific validity.
But there are signs of hope...
Here's the contribution from Paul Cameron, bigot and fraud, to the article:
The campaign, which will include a billboard in the Castro featuring two dads with their teen daughter, is perhaps the first of its kind and sure to be controversial. It comes just two weeks…
denialism | May 23, 2007Seed magazine profiles the recent work from John Ioannidis, author of the groundbreaking article "Why most published research findings are false".
I've written about him before in several contexts and the importance of understanding this research. The counter-intuitive thing is how much his research redeems science as an enterprise and emphasizes how denialists can abuse our literature.
I recommend that scientists take a chance to read some of his work, and ideally watch this video (it's a lot more approachable) I uploaded to google a few months ago. It is a bit long - it's the grand…
choofnagle | May 23, 2007
An industry lobbyist can buy time by becoming petulant. After throwing a temper tantrum, the next step is to play the 10 of Hearts. Play this card by saying that your industry is misunderstood. It is a sophisticated, nuanced entity that needs more understanding before any proposals advance.
choofnagle | May 23, 2007
The denialist is in serious trouble at this point. Whatever problem that didn't exist has continued to capture regulatory attention. It is time to devote serious resources to fighting the proposal being debated.
The denalist should have a fake consumer group or academic group at this point. It will pay off with fake research and fake experts that provide a patina of legitimacy to the denialist's points.
One of my favorite examples of the bogus research group was presented by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, on Georgetown University's "Credit Research Center:" "I make only a simple…
choofnagle | May 22, 2007Some followup from the earlier post:
If Gonzalez thinks ID is science, and not religion, he may have an even harder time arguing that there is discrimination here. Professors, rightly so, have freedom of religion and can believe whatever they want in their personal lives. However, if he thinks ID is science, I don't think it is discrimination to count that fact against a candidate, just as it wouldn't be discrimination to give a student a lower grade for having a wrong answer on a test. Writing a book about DI applied to astronomy would be exactly the type of extramural statement that…
choofnagle | May 22, 2007First, a disclaimer: I don't know much of anything about this controversy surrounding Guillermo Gonzalez, but I do know a fair amount about academic freedom. I wrote an article several years ago on legal protection for professors' speech. Legally, professors have the same rights as ordinary public employees, and so only a small spectrum of academic speech is protected by the First Amendment. As a result, many institutions have been successful when they decided to fire a professor based on their expression.
Of course, most of these disputes never make it to the courts. Internal rules at…
denialism | May 22, 2007People with good reasoning skills don't fall for stupid things like spun arguments and advertising.
I always suspected that if we taught a basic reasoning class in public schools in which kids were taught about logic and critical thinking it might lead to a decrease in the efficacy of advertisement.
Reasoning abilities are influenced by intelligence and socioeconomic status, but they are also skills that can be learned and honed with practice, says a "decision scientist" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Many people are affected by the way that information is framed, marketed or…
denialism | May 22, 2007
This new paper from Stem Cells is a wonderful example of the potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to treat diseases like Type I diabetes.
The reason type I diabetes is such an obvious target for hESC therapy get a little complicated, but I'll walk you guys through this paper, and recent results in islet cell transplantation to give you an idea why this result is very promising.
Type I diabetes results from the destruction of the pancreatic islet cells, or specifically the beta cells in the islets which are responsible for insulin production in response to rising blood sugar. As a…
choofnagle | May 22, 2007
At this point, the consumer advocate has proceeded far along the path of moving some type of proposal. It's time to sacrifice a high-value card--the joker. The denialist throws a temper tantrum. This may sound distasteful, but it actually works.
There is a certain tone that an industry lobbyist can generate when truly pressed. It sounds porcine, and if you hear it, you'll know that the Joker has been played.
denialism | May 22, 2007It just makes it too easy to show your dishonesty.
UD continues to harp endlessly about Gonzalez' tenure case as they have nothing else to do, like original research. But I have to give them a piece of advice. If you're going to cherry pick, either don't cherry pick the first line of an article, or don't provide a link, or worse, don't then quote in full the paragraph you've just misread. It just gets too easy to show you're full of it.
Here's DaveScot's quote from this Chronicle of Higher Ed article in his post "The Chronicle says of Gonzalez 'a clear case of discrimination'":
At first…
denialism | May 21, 2007They were just at a charity walkathon.
They left you a message. Didn't you get it?
denialism | May 21, 2007Has anyone else seen that Al Jazeera's mainpage has a section devoted to conspiracy theories? It prominently features 9/11 conspiracy garbage about WTC7 which has been debunked.
This is something that is neglected about 9/11 conspiracy mongering. When 9/11 denialists like William Rodriguez encourage anti-American sentiments in foreign countries by suggesting Islamic radicals weren't behind the attacks it doesn't do anyone any good. I'm not supportive of the US occupation of Iraq, but that doesn't mean that we should allow the religious radicals that attacked us off the hook. It is…
denialism | May 21, 2007With nothing of any substance to actually talk about, like bench research, original ideas etc., the evolution denialists continue to harp on Guillermo Gonzalez, the ISU professor who failed to get tenure.
However, my question for Casey Luskin remains unanswered. They have accused science of a conspiracy (surprise surprise) because we don't accept ID as science (neither do the courts, anyone with a brain ... ). DaveScot, never one interested in consistency, has even suggested they leverage Dover against the tenure decision, because if ID is religion, they can't discriminate again Gonzalez…
denialism | May 21, 2007Who are the global Warming Denialists?
A tougher question is, in a discipline as complex as climate science, how do you tell who the legitimate skeptics (those that ignore the reporting at the Independent for instance) are versus who are the denialists?
Again, it's simple, because denialism is about tactics. Which global warming critics are the ones alleging conspiracies, cherry-picking data, and incessantly moving the goalposts? Which organizations hire these hacks to denigrate legitimate science?
The most obvious example of a hack anti-science global warming denialist would have to be…