crankery
denialism | January 5, 2012Seth Mnookin has reasons to hope. It has been clear though for years that Huffpo was a clearinghouse for what I would describe as liberal crankery, which includes things like Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine crankery, or Bill Maher's anti-pharma paranoia.
But now they have a new site, Huffpo Science, and after my head stopped ringing from that particular oxymoron I went and checked it out.
A lead article on going to Mars by Buzz Aldrin was interesting. An article on Frankenmeat came out relatively clean without getting all paranoid about GMO foods or lab-grown nutrients being less pure…
denialism | June 8, 2009Our recent discussions of HIV/AIDS denial and in particular Seth Kalichman's book "Denying AIDS" has got me thinking more about the psychology of those who are susceptible to pseudoscientific belief. It's an interesting topic, and Kalichman studies it briefly in his book mentioning the "suspicious minds":
At its very core, denialism is deeply embedded in a sense of mistrust. Most obviously, we see suspicion in denialist conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories grow out of suspicions about corruptions in government, industry, science, and medicine, all working together in some grand…
denialism | February 10, 2009I have to admit I'm somewhat surprised (even if Orac isn't). We all knew that Andrew Wakefield's research was bogus and the link between vaccines and autism was engineered by ideologues who fear vaccines irrationally. But fabrication of data? Sloppy research is one thing, but the need for cranks to be correct, no matter what reality reflects, has resulted in yet another example of egregious dishonesty.
This is in line, however, with what we know about cranks. Mark Crislip recently wrote an interesting piece on mathematics crankery which bears upon just this phenomenon. Mathematics is a…