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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
A call to Arms
I'm really excited about Denialism.com and I want to give an overview of some of the things I'd like to start discussing and maybe getting some feedback from the internet hive mind.
In particular, what organizations have you found employ denialist tactics? Examples of exclusively denialists organizations or websites would be the Discovery Institute, or Junkscience.com. I'm interested in others you might know about or organizations that might just employ denialist arguments with some frequency (Cato, Heritage, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page etc.) Which denialists have been pissing you off? Send me links, or post them in the comments. Second I'd also like the blog to discuss some of the motivations for denialism. I have my own opinions, but I can't pretend I've ecountered as many denialists and their arguments as some other esteemed bloggers. I'd like to hear what kind of motivations they think underlie some of these arguments. Right now, based on my contact with them on the scienceblogs and elsewhere, I'd characterize denialists as follows:
Anyway, just some starting thoughts. What do people think? Labels: general discussion |
Denialism (n): the practice of creating the illusion of debate when there is none.
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25 Comments:
Don't forget "The imminent collapse of social security" denialism.
or the "impending Baby boomer slackers in retirement are responsible for the skyrocketing medicare costs" denialism.
March 20, 2007 1:08 PM,
You have to be careful not to let anything that pisses you off become denialism, it is a temptation. It's a matter of tactics of those arguing the points.
While I believe you on the imminent collapse of social security bullshit that's regularly promulgated by everybody (it's more of a myth than real denialism), one could argue over the boomer point. They are expensive those boomers, but just as much fault lies with the drug companies, absence of a single-payer system, and completely abysmal decisions about drug pricing from the Republicans.
When it comes to economics I get a little more careful since so much of the data are unclear, fudged, or simply unknowable. For instance, how we think we know our national debt but the government doesn't take into account budgeting for future obligations. I also have little ability to speak with expertise on economics, other than to know that Milton Friedman was a hack.
March 20, 2007 2:08 PM,
I was being snarky. I don't expect you to add them to your list even though I think that holocaust denialism is mainly a cottage industry for the compulsive pointer-outers.
But, both of those issues have huge socio-political ramifications that spread through Dem and Republican administrations and have the capacity to rearrange society to a greater degree than some of your other denialism bullets.
It's just serious business that should raise more hairs than it currently does. Sometimes we ignore what's close to us because it's convenient.
They are expensive those boomers...
But we're so much richer now than we were before. We had a good rate of return. You saying your generation can't keep up? :-)
March 20, 2007 8:43 PM,
Well it seems the entire MSM has fallen for Iraq casualties "denialism", i.e. the Lancet survey results of something like a half million is accepted by the scientific community, and the rest of the world, but you only hear figure an order of magnitude smaller.
It seems that the denialists who attacked it won, since it got labeled as "disputed", and therefore unusable.
March 22, 2007 4:54 PM,
There's a fair amount of climate change denialism going on at Redstate.com (the biggest conservative blog). It's a little alarming. I stepped into the fray a few months back, but found that there was just too much crazy in one place for me to deal with. Anyway, I had planned to deal with that on my blog, but I haven't gotten there yet.
So many denialists, so little time.
March 22, 2007 5:03 PM,
When it comes to animal testing denialist you say.
"My reasons for doing so include the general dismissiveness I've seen of science by ARAs. For instance, saying things like science can be done without animals (or worse on a computer)"
Lets consider the mouse. We have very detailed information on the mouse from a variety of sources, including microscopy, tissue samples, cell cultures, genetic sequencing, modified genetic sequences, xray studies, NMR studies, and on and on, boatloads of information.
Furthermore the mouse is a system we can easily perturb and monitor how it changes. So in additon to a very detailed idea of how the mouse is built we also have a very detailed idea of how systems within the mouse work.
Yet, as far as you are concerned, even with all of this information about the mouse that is available the worse thing ARAs can suggest is that an accurate
mouse computer model can be built.
Now lets look at the earth. It is a very complicated, very large, chaotic, system, with multiple inputs that we can't control. There are very sparse data sets available for the system and much of the available data is not actually measured but is developed using proxies. Furthermore it is rather difficult, if not impossible to perturb the system and study how it responds.
Yet having doubts about the ability to build
planetary climate computer models that will accurately describe the system, let alone accurately model the response of the system in the future renders a person a denialists in your eyes???
It seems pretty clear that if anyone should have a good case of cognitive dissonance it should be you, not global climate model skeptics.
Cheers,
TJIT
March 22, 2007 7:21 PM,
Good post on some of the anthropological issues regarding climate modeling can be found here
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu
/prometheus/archives/climate_change/
000675myanna_lahsens_late.html
Quote from the post
Lahsen observes that in practice climate scientists routinely confused their modeled world with the real world.
Had to break the link into pices because blogger does not allow embedded links
TJIT
March 22, 2007 7:29 PM,
Great idea for a site, though I'm not sure about the inclusion of animal rights extemists as denalists. Don't get me wrong, I agree that they are dishonest with facts and just plain offensive in their rhetorical styles (I've written as much myself, e.g. http://johnmckay.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-dont-get-animal-rights-radicals.html), that isn't the same as denalism.
I think if you keep them in you open yourself to an endless stream of petulant e-mails from people who want their pet peeve included on the theory that anyone who disagrees with them must be in denial.
March 22, 2007 7:31 PM,
"...Basically, I'm calling them assholes."
Holy crap you guys. We're soul mates.
March 22, 2007 8:01 PM,
The blogger Prometheus has had some good posts recently on the thought process of vaccine denialists, specifically the bunch who think that vaccines cause autism.
http://photoninthedarkness.blogspot.com/2007/03/fear-pressure.html
http://photoninthedarkness.blogspot.com/2007/02/power-of-critical-thinking-bias-and.html
http://photoninthedarkness.blogspot.com/2007/02/power-of-critical-thinking-scientific.html
http://photoninthedarkness.blogspot.com/2007/02/word-play-believing.html
This is a great concept for a blog!
March 22, 2007 9:30 PM,
TJIT,
It's funny, most scientists that I suggest that to find it immediately hysterical that someone thinks that computers can model the behavior of a cell. Here's the problems with the argument.
We have 30 thousand genes. We understand the function, fully, of almost none of them. We sequenced them, yes, but that gives us no idea of function.
Say we were able to know the function of every single gene in a cell, think about the number of variables to program a machine to understand how those interact. THen, extrapolate from the cellular level to the organismal level. You're talking about trillions of variables or combinations of variables based on knowledge we probably won't have for another hundred years.
That and a little understanding of chaos theory allow one to see that this is an impossible task. It's not like climate modeling at all, which operates on very different and more generalized principles. It would be like trying to model weather not climate. And not just model it from pattern recognition, like we can do with some accuracy today. It would be like modeling weather based on computations of where all the molecules of air are on earth.
In short, this is impossible. Most biologists would agree, we're not attached to killing things, we just realize it's hard to avoid.
March 23, 2007 7:54 AM,
Good webpage, it's nice to see all the anti-scientific denialisms being brought together, hopefully this blog will help people see the connections that exist between the anti-science movements of right and left.
I also approve of the inclusion of anti-vivisection in the list, though I think that it may be worthwhile to point out that what your talking about is the kind of "scientific" anti-vivisection peddeled by groups such as PCRM, EMP and BUAV. There are anti-vivisectionists who admit that animal testing has been very useful to science and medicine but still oppose it on moral grounds, I disagree with them but I don't consuider them to be denialists.
"Scientific" anti-vivisection on the other hand has many many denialist characteristics. I've spent most of the last year debating with anti-vivs on the Oxford Gossip forum (http://www.oxfordgossip.co.uk/), and I've actually been surprised at just how many anti-viv claims turned out not just to be misrepresentations but out and out lies.
Visigoth
March 23, 2007 7:59 AM,
The whole concept of denialism really fascinates me, and I'm glad to see this new blog.
To understand what denialism is (or what denialisms are), though, we have to also look at our own denial.
As scientists, we're pretty skeptical. But often not skeptical enough.
An example is found in stem cell research. I am a big advocate of stem cell research, of course, and of ample funding for it. But that doesn't mean science should lower its standards to guarantee "success" to such research. As I see it, this is exactly what happened with the South Korean paper in Science the other year. In my opinion, the journal really "wanted" this paper to be solid. And, along with most scientists in the world, the journal people wanted to stick it to the Bush administration. By publishing this paper, they would vindicate the utility of stem cell research. Even better, it was a South Korean group that did the work...supporting the long-standing claim that lack of funding would push US scientists to the periphery of the field. And so the journal apparently disregarded some red flags from reviewers and pushed the work through.
So there was a certain "denial" that work contradicting our political opponents could possibly be fraudulent. That's not good, not good at all. Because when we as scientists succumb to our own denial, we usually give Denialists a lot of ammo.
Same thing when we overstate our case on any scientific issue. If it's something the media like, they'll exaggerate even more, until we aren't even able to correct them effectively.
While we fight Denialism with a capital D, let's also examine the ways in which each of us is in "denial," for political, financial, personal reasons or anything else.
March 23, 2007 9:13 AM,
Well, it's hard to figure out just where we went wrong with Hwang Woo Suk. I would argue it was the journal's fault for always wanting to have the first major publication. I don't think it was a political motive as much as a "me first" motive.
The bigger source of denialism on stem cells (and I will introduce these denialists as "fake bioethicists") comes from the adult stem cell hypers. They don't want ES cell research to be done so they go about scare mongering about animal-human hybrids and talk about how adult stem cells can do anything (they really can't).
March 23, 2007 9:43 AM,
Gosh, it took me a minute to figure out that TJIT is a global warming denialist. Following those links you end up with Pielke, who's not a denialist but a bit of a fatalist, and then you see he grossly quoted that paper out of context to suggest that climate modelers are all idiots, which certainly wasn't Pielke's intention.
In fact, it was an interesting paper about how climate scientists struggle to maintain proper objectivity about their work, and they seemed to have quite a lot of insight about the problem.
So, right off the bat we get some fake experts, and selectivity/quote mining, not to mention the red herring of "mouse modeling" as an invalid comparison or maybe a straw man. Nice job TJIT, you got a 2/5.
March 23, 2007 10:22 AM,
"I am somewhat uncertain about inclusion of some animal rights activists (ARAs) into the denialism camp."
You shouldn't be. They are the most intellectually corrupt of all.
"My reasons for doing so include the general dismissiveness I've seen of science by ARAs. For instance, saying things like science can be done without animals (or worse on a computer),...animal models say nothing helpful about biology."
You're leaving out the most corrupt thing they do. They will lie to conceal the very thing they claim to oppose. Read descriptions of the "non-animal" polio research done by Enders et al. to win the Nobel Prize, and then go to nobel.se to read their lecture--Figure 1 is a graph of LD50 in mice vs. time in culture. They also paralyzed monkeys.
Another case in which they lie to conceal animal exploitation is with cell culture, which usually uses fetal calf serum, or in the case of serum-free medium, growth factors purified from fetal calf serum. If it is stupid to extrapolate from a mouse to a human, how can any results from human cells grown in an entirely bovine environment a) work, and b) accurately predict human responses?
"Their motivations, for the most part, are more noble, they're interested in alleviating suffering, all suffering."
I disagree. They get their rocks off by demonizing people. If you'd like to test this, confront an ARA with her movement's lies about cell culture.
"That this is impossible, misguided or unwise is not important, and if they have to lie about science then so be it."
Yes, but they lie to conceal the exploitation of animals, not just the science.
March 23, 2007 4:38 PM,
You're dead on about cell culture. It's funny that they think biology can be done at all without animal products.
FCS is one thing, how about antibodies? How about proteins that bacteria can't make? How are we going to study physiology of tissues? How are we going to figure out the basic function of genes without knockout animals?
It's not like we sit around just injecting animals and torturing them while laughing diabolically for shits and giggles which seems to be what they think we do. We use animals at all levels of biological investigation.
All those little things you use in a lab all come from animals, animal products, or are discovered in animals, or need to be tested for relevance. Cell culture results are never trusted fully until confirmation in vivo. That's why they are denialists, they insist we can do everything we do without animals (or on a computer) and it's just inane.
March 24, 2007 1:24 PM,
Mark,
You did an elegant job of explaining why it is impossible to build a mouse model.
The exact same arguments apply to climate models.
The models start with a few sparse calibration points, some physical relationships, equations to describe them, and computational methods to solve these relationships. Then you upscale the model to describe globabl climate trends.
In fact climate models are a more difficult problems because
1. We don't have a fraction of the data available we have on a mouse. The available input / calibration / blind testing data for global climate models is coarse, spatially variable, and of limited time span.
2. We can't perturb the system and measure results. In animal research you can knock out a gene and see what happens. We can't do that with global climate.
How you can
1. Maintain the impossibility of building a useful mouse model and in fact find even the idea hysterical
2. Yet have complete faith in a computer model of the climate
Without having a bit of individual cognitive dissonance is beyond me.
I realize computer models are about the only tool available to us for studying and predicting climate behavior. That does not mean they are automatically wrong it means you have greater uncertainty and larger error bars.
It would serve your arguments better if you realized that fact also.
TJIT
March 26, 2007 12:52 AM,
Mark,
OK snark in your post, I've seen better but you didn't do too bad.
You points are in bold
Gosh, it took me a minute to figure out that TJIT is a global warming denialist.
Actually I believe in climate change. In fact as one person noted if you look at the last 15,000 years you had a mile-deep sheet of ice covering most of North America north of the 40th parallel, and a millenium-long drought that had open blowing sand extending from western Wyoming to central Nebraska. None of that climate change can be realistically attributed to anthropogenic causes.
Following those links you end up with Pielke, who's not a denialist but a bit of a fatalist
Your research does not matter just your enthusiasm!
and then you see he grossly quoted that paper out of context to suggest that climate modelers are all idiots, which certainly wasn't Pielke's intention.
I provided an accurate quote, and a link to the post. I certainly did not suggest that climate modelers are all idiots.
Another quote from the paper and a link directly to it is below. Those who read the paper should gain an appreciation for the hard work required to construct Global Climat Models (GCMs) and their limitations.
"Shackley and Wynne suggests that awareness of flaws, limitations, and uncertainties associated with GCM's and their output diminishes as these technologies from the production site to other areas of science and society where they are used" Page 902
That quote is highly relevant to this site and the discussion of global climate change.
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin
/publication_files/resource-1891-2005.49.pdf
In fact, it was an interesting paper about how climate scientists struggle to maintain proper objectivity about their work, and they seemed to have quite a lot of insight about the problem.
The modelers understand the problems and try to maintain their objectivity. People who use the models and their results often don't.
To keep the post from getting to long, the reply will be in two pieces.
TJIT
March 26, 2007 2:18 AM,
Mark, Continuation of the comment above.
your points are in bold
So, right off the bat we get some fake experts,
You've promoted Pielke from a fatalist to a fake, I'm sure he appreciates that.
and selectivity/quote mining,
There is limited space on a blog comment form, and a link was provided to the source material. What would you propose, pasting the whole paper in the comment form?
not to mention the red herring of "mouse modeling" as an invalid comparison or maybe a straw man.
Your were aghast over the idea of a computer model being an acceptable replacement for a lab mouse.
I accurately describe some of the difficulty / complication / uncertainty involved with constructing global climate models (GCMs). I also showed why using computer models to model climate processes is even more problematic then the concept of replacing lab animals with computers. Sauce for goose sauce for gander.
Additionally, I provided a linkt to a paper that further described GCM construction and some of its complications. GCMs are one of the main tools available but they are a long way from a lab measurement. It would be better if more people understood this.
Nice job TJIT, you got a 2/5.
Well since we are grading here I give you a
1. for ad hominem arguments and snark
2. For selectivity / quote mining.
You neglected the parts of the paper that described the difficulties in building GCMs and the uncertainties of their results.
You did not provide a link back to the paper for people to check the accuracy of your quoting.
3. Impossible expectations.
I did not quote fake experts. In fact you had approvingly quoted the linked paper. To get fake experts you moved Pielke from a fatalist to a fake.
This gave you the straw fake experts needed make your false fake expert argument.
Which is some kind of fake expert fu. Or is woo the term I should be using? Or maybe Sicilian argument would be a better description?
Cheers,
TJIT
March 26, 2007 2:44 AM,
Six forms of denialism were mentioned at the start of this blog. Five of the six have clear physical measurements, lab results, and field processes (antibiotic resistence) to show they are real.
The evidence for global warming consists of computer models and little else. Climate change was ongoing long before homo sapiens showed up. This makes the problem even more difficult because how do we differentiate what is anthropogenic overprint and what is natural process?
This is not impossible expectation that is reasonable error bars on the output of computer model.
Clearly, discussion of global warming science does not belong in the denialism camp.
The global climate change is highly politicized (denialist / goracle). This is not good for science or for policy.
Further polarizing the discussion with the denialism slur has a real risk of swamping the science with ugly rhetoric. In the end this will reduce the chances of climate scientists being able to transfer needed knowledge to citizens and policy makers.
My thoughts FWIW.
TJIT
March 26, 2007 3:33 AM,
Animal models are not comparable to climate models. They do not model climate by modeling the molecules in the atmosphere, I described a bad example of how to make a model which is what would be required to make models of genetics in mice. The fact that you don't get this point makes it pretty clear you don't understand how climate models are constructed.
You're right about the fake expert bit, that was clumsiness on my part, Pielke is not a fake expert, but he is a bit of a fatalist about climate and think this is unrealistic. I erroneously included that critique before checking the cite, then forgot to remove it. However, the way you used the citation was a complete misrepresentation of what that article was about, sorry, it was.
Finally, I'm sorry but ultimately global warming denialism is just that, denialism. You guys sound just like the creationists. Just listen to Inhofe, listen to Monckton. They're regularly torn to pieces by the climate scientists, and they just keep on trucking, not because they have some data or great argument that supports their view (Inhofe, after all, is widely known as the dumbest man in congress and uses the most embarrassing denialist canards). There might be people who have doubts about the extent, or about specific aspects of the field, but the deniers, like the ones I linked, are out there. Maybe they're not you, but they're there.
Further global warming isn't only, based on climate models, this is a mischaracterization. And climate is not impossible to model and is not impossible to predict (Real climate on climate modeling http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/). This is the problem, people confuse climate with weather. They are very different. Climate models have actually been pretty accurate, except when misrepresented by denialists like Pat Michaels. If you live in a temperate zone, next year you're not going to be in the tundra, and that's because climate, for the most part, is similar year to year, the average of weather patterns.
Sorry, the methods are the same. There might be legitimate "skeptics" out there, but as long as they use the denialist tactics of distorting the science, creating fake experts to sow doubt, and insane analogies, I'm calling you denialists. I realize that no one wants their pet denialism theory to be called that, and global warming is politically divisive at the moment, but it's about the methods, not the politics.
March 26, 2007 9:22 AM,
They're regularly torn to pieces by the climate scientists, and they just keep on trucking, not because they have some data or great argument that supports their view (Inhofe, after all, is widely known as the dumbest man in congress and uses the most embarrassing denialist canards).
There's a reason and Chait get to the core of it (kinda).
March 26, 2007 9:38 AM,
TJIT wrote:
"You did an elegant job of explaining why it is impossible to build a mouse model."
Mark didn't explain anything of the sort. He explained why it is impossible to do biology WITHOUT animal models.
We build and find mouse models all the time.
"The exact same arguments apply to climate models."
I can't see why, since climate models are done on computers, and mouse models are done in mice. We already know that most biological phenomena are nearly identical, given the relatively small amount of time since the divergence of mice and men from a common ancestor.
"The models start with a few sparse calibration points, some physical relationships, equations to describe them, and computational methods to solve these relationships. Then you upscale the model to describe globabl climate trends."
Then it clearly has nothing to do with mouse models, and much more to do with computer models of cells or organisms. Do you normally make such intellectually vapid comparisons?
"1. Maintain the impossibility of building a useful mouse model and in fact find even the idea hysterical ..."
Perhaps you should invest in a remedial reading course.
March 26, 2007 11:26 AM,
Uggh, I know. I think TJIT knows too little about climate models, or animal models to understand he's making an apples to kiwis comparison.
March 26, 2007 11:33 AM,
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