Denialism
choofnagle | September 17, 2008Yesterday, I posted about the rabid, pro-free-market rhetoric present in Washington, DC over the past decade. When Congress had the opportunity to consider privacy laws that would limit marketing of financial products, it chose to side with bank lobbyists, who invoked the idea of the "miracle of instant credit." Basically, they argued that any incursion on the free market would harm credit markets. They promised that this miracle would lower credit prices, make credit more convenient, and manage the risk involved in lending. Congress sided with the banks. As a result, many financial…
sb admin | August 10, 2008To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted: you must also be right.
--Robert Park
I used to spend a lot of time on the websites of Joe Mercola and Gary Null, the most influential medical cranks of the internets (to call them "quacks" would imply that they are real doctors, but bad ones---I will no longer dignify them with the title of "quack"). I've kept away from them for a while in the interest of preserving my sanity. Unfortunately, Orac reminded me this week of the level searingly stupid and dangerous idiocy presented by these woo-meisters.
In light of this, it…
sb admin | July 16, 2008How bad is the economy?
Really fucking bad. My patients are losing their jobs, the restaurants are empty, businesses are shuttered, houses empty.
Really, really fucking bad.
What does the government have to say about it? Not so bad. Chill.
There are some good reasons for this. As the recent Indymac debacle shows, a statement from a politician can destroy a bank (although, to be fair, the bank was a dead man walking before Schumer's letter came out).
So, when our leaders continue to downplay the economic disaster in this country, are they being denialists, or responsible public servants?…
sb admin | June 11, 2008Many of you were too busy trying to ace organic chemistry to know what a deus ex machina is. For those of you who managed to squeeze in a classics course, please stick with me anyway.
Deus ex machina ("god from the machine") is a literary device. In ancient Greek literature, a complicated dilemma was sometimes solved by having one of the gods literally pluck the unfortunate protagonist off the stage from the arm of a crane. It's sort the ancient version of the Superman gambit---don't like the ending? Just turn back time by reversing the rotation of the Earth. In either scenario, an…
sb admin | May 29, 2008We've often discussed the tactics favored by denialists, and prominent among these is the ad hominem attack. Physicians who speak out against quackery and speak up for science-based medicine are often often accused of lacking compassion. Orac wrote a little bit about the topic today. (OK, Orac never writes a "little bit" about anything, but it's worth the read.)
The basic argument is that "conventional" doctors ignore patients' experiences, deny them care that may work simply because science says it won't, and a whole bunch of other things I don't really understand. And while they whine…
sb admin | May 26, 2008I am giving out a previously non-existent award today to a truly great denialist. Andrew Schlafly, spawn of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and some long-forgotten sperm-donor (ironic, eh?), was not content just being the legal counsel to the uber-crank Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. No, he had to take it one step further, and clog our precious intertubes with Conservaepedia, a repository of all things stupid. In fact, there is so much stupid there, an entire wiki is devoted to documenting it. I was newly enraged when a commenter over at the "blogging on peer-reviewed…
pharyngula | May 11, 2008Climate change denialists have something in common with evolution denialists: they have a list of "500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares," just like the Discovery Institute's list of hundreds of 'scientists' who "Dissent from Darwinism". There is a difference, though: the DI got it's list by asking crackpots and specialists in irrelevant disciplines to volunteer to sign on, so it is a real (but silly) list that exposes the existence of a tiny minority of loons within science.
The Heartland Institute, a think-tank for right-wing denialists, isn't even that…
denialism | April 30, 2008Today represents one year since we joined scienceblogs, and I think we've had a great deal of success in defining the problem of denialism, establishing a new vocabulary for dealing with the problem of pseudoscience, and establishing uniform standards for what is legitimate scientific discourse and debate.
Our first post describes the problem of denialism, and our subsequent posts on cranks, and the 5 tactics of denialism - Conspiracy, Selectivity, Fake Experts, Moving Goalposts, and Fallacies of Logic - have stood the test of time. They accurately describe the types of argument that fail…
denialism | April 28, 2008How else can you describe a site that regularly publishes David Kirby's anti-vaccination denialism, Jennifer McCarthy's insanity, and conspiracy theories from the like of Diedre Imus?
The latest this weekend is the goalpost-moving from David Kirby, which based on the egregious misinterpretation of the Hannah Poling case, represents the new front of anti-vaccination denialists in their war on reason. In the never-ending quest to pin autism on vaccines no matter what the evidence, the anti-vaccine denialists now are trying to make autism a mitochondrial disorder in order to fit their latest…
sb admin | April 22, 2008The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is one of the great weapons in the arsenal of denialists. The reason it works so well is it makes sense. As my readers know, my daughter is dealing with a nasty respiratory virus. One of the doctors told my wife, who is not a medical professional, that kids with this virus go on to develop asthma. My wife was not pleased to hear this. What the doc didn't tell my wife was whether or not there is a causal relationship between the infection and asthma. It is also true that kids who get RSV end up going to school.
Asthma is a common illness. RSV is more…
sb admin | April 21, 2008One of the hot topics around here lately is authority and anonymity. It's a terribly difficult philosophical question----how can you ever trust a source of information that is second hand? And yet ultimately we all are forced to do it most of the time.
A potent weapon in the denialist arsenal is the fake expert. The profusion of these charlatans makes identifying trustworthy sources even more important. We have many ways of doing this. We often use our intuition, a powerful but notoriously dicey skill. Sometimes we go by word-of-mouth. Sometimes, we go to established sources of…
sb admin | April 17, 2008There has been a terribly pedantic interesting debate going on around here about the nature of authority in science.
I won't bore you with the origins of this debate. OK, maybe I will a little, but I'll try to make this foray into meta-blogging interesting.
First, blogging is not scientific writing as such. It isn't peer reviewed, it isn't a systematic presentation of research---it's whatever the author feels like writing about that day. Now for various reasons, many bloggers write under a pseudonym. There are many reasons for this. First, most of us are not professional writers by…
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. (…
sb admin | April 10, 2008In order to bring you your daily dose of science, the Great Seed Overlords must pay the bills. Like any other medium, one of the ways this is done is by selling ad space. Internet ad engines generally have some sort of algorithm that choses ads based on the page content, thereby targeting readers' interests. If you doubt the sophistication of these methods, check your amazon.com suggestions, or your google search page.
For a skeptical blogger, this can make for some interesting ads. One of mine is for a book called Water: For Health, For Healing, For Life, by F. Batmanghelidj, M.D. I've…
sb admin | April 9, 2008My recent post on a local "holistic" doctor brought a number of considered and interesting comments (all of whom are quite polite and patient, even when I disagree with them).
Some of the issues deserve fleshing out.
Heart disease is a major killer. Hypertension is one of the strongest risk factors for heart disease. In some people, salt contributes to hypertension, and reduction of salt intake reduces bad outcomes. In people with congestive heart failure, salt-restriction is crucial.
The statement of this idea led to some interesting objections, with a good helping of goalpost-shifting…
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…
sb admin | April 6, 2008Politically, I'm a leftie. That should be no surprise to anyone who knows me. But when it comes to science and medicine, my politics are irrelevant. Given that John McCain has already made some questionable public statements regarding vaccines and autism, this seems like a good time to see what the democrats are saying.
Over at Hillary's website, we can examine her positions on health care. She makes special mention of autism. Some of her recommendations sound quite reasonable and good, such as improving access to services for autistic children. But she repeats the questionable though…
sb admin | April 5, 2008I generally enjoy Bill Maher. I mean, he seems like an ass, but I enjoy his shows---except when he talks about medicine. As any regular viewer knows, he regularly spouts the usual denialist canards about medicine. This week, he was interviewing Senator Arlen Specter, who, among other accomplishments, has survived Hodgkin's Disease, a form of blood cancer. Maher had the bad taste to ask him is he was disgusted that health care is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Had he said this to me, I would likely have responded, "Look, asshole, the American health care system just saved my…
sb admin | April 2, 2008Scientologists apparently have the answers to mental illness. HIV denialists swear that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. But very few people are actually buying it---enough to cause trouble, surely, but the Tom Cruises and Peter Deusbergs of the world aren't winning any Nobel Prizes. Why not?
Because they offer nothing. HIV researchers and clinicians have emptied out the AIDS wards, but the denialists have done nothing. Psychiatrists (and yes, their medications) have helped people lead normal lives. Scientologists have done, well, nothing but sue critics.
The difference between the scientific…
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…