Denialism Blog

Author: MarkH

  • Denialists should not be debated

    Orac has brought up the interesting point that debating the homeopaths at U. Conn might not be a good idea.

    On a related note, in a post derriding attacks on consensus I was asked by commenters if isn’t it incumbent on science to constantly respond to debate; to never let scientific questions be fully settled. And I understand where they’re coming from. These ideas represent the enlightened ideals of scientific inquiry, free speech, and fundamental fairness.

    However, they’re also hopelessly misplaced in regard to the problem at hand. That is, denialists, cranks, quacks, etc., are not interested in legitimate debate or acting as honest brokers trying to bring clarity to a given issue through discussion. Orac dances around this issue a little bit, talking about the challenges of debates with pseudoscientists because they are hard to pin down, but the fundamental problem, simply put, is the absence of honesty and standards. Academia and science are critically dependent on debate, this is true, but the prerequisite for having the debate is having people who are honestly interested in pursuing the truth and operate using the same rules of evidence and proof. It’s not about censoring dissent, which the cranks insist is the issue in their eternal pursuit of persecution. It’s about having standards for evidence and discussion. This is why these debates, when confined to a courtroom, often fare so disastrously for the denialists. In the presence of standards that exist before evidence can be introduced, they are left with nothing.

    In what is probably the best book on denialist tactics Deborah Lipstadt’s “Denying the Holocaust”, are the best arguments for not engaging in debate with denialists. Now, I realize we’re not talking about scum-of-the-earth holocaust deniers here, but the fact is, the tactics and the methods are ultimately the same no matter how noble or evil the motive. Just because the motives or ideologies of the other cranks or denialists are different, doesn’t mean that they don’t have the exact same flaws in their arguments, use of evidence, or fundamental honesty. Lipstadt explains the risks then of entering into debates with deniers:
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  • I'm Back

    Sorry for the absence. Between travel, catching up from travel, and preparing manuscripts, I’ve been slow to blog. I’m back now, but still busy.

    Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying cectic’s comics immensely. I can no longer figure out who in my RSS feed linked these strips, but they are awesome!

    Case in point, anyone want to venture a guess who this refers to?

    Ha!

  • Denialism in Vegas

    Today I’ll be leaving for Las Vegas until Sunday so I’ll leave it to my brother to post the next couple of days.

    Until then, have fun, and don’t let the cranks run wild in the comments.

  • Attacking consensus – a sure sign of a crank

    Sandy Szwarc continues to wage her war against the “obesity myth”, and has fallen into the classic crank trap of the attack on scientific consensus. It’s right up there with attacking peer-review as a sure sign you’re about to listen to someone’s anti-science propaganda.

    She cites this article at the financial times by John Kay which lauds the Crichton view of science.

    Michael Schrage’s comment on politics and science (September 26) struck a raw nerve: and provoked an extended response from the president of the UK’s Royal Society. Lord Rees advocates that we should base policy on something called “the scientific consensus”, while acknowledging that such consensus may be provisional.

    But this proposal blurs the distinction between politics and science that Lord Rees wants to emphasise. Novelist Michael Crichton may have exaggerated when he wrote that “if it’s consensus, it’s not science, if it’s science, it’s not consensus”, but only a bit. Consensus is a political concept, not a scientific one.

    Readers of this blog will remember that line comes from Crichton’s infamous anti-global warming crank speech “Aliens Cause Global Warming”, which is one of the more pathetic crank attacks on science of all time. It’s just one long Galileo gambit that suggests whenever scientists agree, you’re being hoodwinked. This is, of course, total nonsense. Scientists strive for consensus on difficult topics. Review papers essentially are statements of consensus by people familiar with the field. Consensus conferences are routinely held to pour over data and determine things like the best treatments for a disease, or policy recommendations. The attack on scientific consensus is illegitimate, and is more or less, a subtle Galileo gambit. The article also has this great line:

    Often the argument will continue for ever, and should, because the objective of science is not agreement on a course of action, but the pursuit of truth…

    Boy I bet the cranks would love for this to be true. Sorry to burst their bubble but HIV causes AIDS, humans evolved, the CO2 causes global warming, the holocaust happened, and we landed on the moon. This idea that scientific concepts should be debated endlessly is absurd. If the data do not fit the theory, that’s when you have a debate. If new methods and new findings show a theory is limited, that’s when you have a debate. You don’t have a debate because some people don’t like what they hear.

    And remember what I said about not trusting people who attack peer review?

    Peer review is a valuable part of the apparatus of scholarship, but carries a danger of establishing self-referential clubs that promote each other’s work.

    And if that wasn’t enough:

    Statements about the world derive their value from the facts and arguments that support them, not from the status and qualifications of the people who assert them. Evidence versus authority was the issue on which Galileo challenged the church. The modern world exists because Galileo won.

    And there we have a Galileo reference! Of course, on these topics it’s the denialists who use status and qualifications rather than data and evidence.

    Kay Ends with this stunning piece of naivete:

    The notion of a monolithic “science”, meaning what scientists say, is pernicious and the notion of “scientific consensus” actively so. The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad. There is no room in this process for any notion of “scientific consensus”.

    Again we have the annoying appeal to some perfect ideal of debate club. The problem is that some people are liars. They are not honest brokers in the debate. They aren’t interested in providing evidence and data for their point of view. Instead, they lie, cherry-pick evidence, and smear the opposition. This idea that consensus isn’t real and instead we need to debate denialists, and cranks as if they have something to contribute is absurd. What we need is to arm people with the knowledge to detect nonsense when they hear it, and accept that the expertise of bodies of scientists is preferable to the ramblings of hacks paid by groups like AEI or CEI. One recognizes, also, a conspiratorial tone in these attacks on consensus. As if scientists, when they have conferences on such topics, aren’t actually evaluating data but trying to figure out how to attack political enemies. This is absurd. When scientists gather to debate a consensus they do just what Kay advocates, they fight it out and argue over what the data says. When cranks respond by covering their ears and yelling “Al Gore is fat!”, that’s not an alternative presentation of data, it’s just useless bullshit, and is rightly impugned and ignored.

    Now, this is not to say that increasing obesity or its links to morbidity is even one of those difficult questions that we need to have consensus conferences on. We’re way past that. It is known, it is real. It causes illnesses like diabetes and hypertension, increases morbidity and mortality, and we should pursue methods to prevent obesity from developing because, as we’ve discussed, once obesity has developed it is difficult to reverse. No one seriously doubts the link between obesity and these consequences, and Sandy’s latest foray into the classic crank realm of attacking consensus is just another great example of why she’s not a real skeptic at all. Like her fellow CEI fake skeptic Steven Milloy, her site exists to muddy the waters on the science rather than clarify it. They would love for us to believe that it’s our duty as scientists to perpetually debate them as if they honestly had something to say. I think we’ve made the point with this blog that this is not a wise course of action or a good use of time.
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    P.S., I’m heartbroken Reasic has disappeared and his beautiful take down of Michael Crichton’s speech is gone with him. If you’re still out there Reasic, forward me that post and I’ll preserve it here.

  • Another monkey put in charge of the zoo

    WaPo reports on the appointment of Susan Orr:

    The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.

    Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

    In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

    The Family Research Council. Why should I be surprised? When they’re not sending Charmaine Yoest out to lie about Plan B, or trying to hide where their chief Tony Perkins looks for political support (*cough* David Duke *cough*), they’re bashing gays or women’s rights.

    Yes, fertility is not a disease, but it is a problem. Women simply don’t want to push out a baby a year for their entire reproductive lifetime. And who can blame them?

    The motives of the FRC are pretty clear, disempower women, suggest they’re bad parents if they don’t stay home at the beck and call of their rugrats, keep them pregnant for 30 years, out of the workplace, and subservient to men. Think I’m kidding? Why the vehement opposition to birth control? It prevents conception – you’d think they’d approve. Why should they oppose contraception if not to tie women down by the uterus? Or to deny them from possessing sexual power equivalent to men?

  • Quote Mining from the 9/11 Loons – NIST needs to learn to anticipate this crap

    Pat at Screw loose change brings us the latest dishonesty (or carefully reinforced self-delusion) from the 9/11 troofers.

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology released this letter (PDF) in response to the troofers, but failed to realize that the troofers will stoop to pretty pathetic lows to misrepresent what they say.

    I’ll present this as a quiz. Here’s the full section from letter, guess which sentence the troofers quoted out of context to suggest that NIST failed to explain the collapse of the buildings.

    The final section of your request asserts that the WTC Report’s stated goal and overal analysis violates the Data Quality Act and OMB/NIST Information Quality Standards. The basis given for this assertion is that NIST did not fulfill its responsibilities under the NCST Act because the focus of the investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. The NCST Act, as you note in your letter, requires NIST to “establish the likely technical cause or causes of the building failure.” In the case of the WTC Towers, NIST has established that the failures initiated in the floors affected by the aircraft impact damage and the ensuing fires resulted in the collapse of the towers. This conclusion is supported by a large body of visual evidence collected by NIST. Your letter suggests that NIST should have used computer models to analyze the collapse of the towers. NIST carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of the deflections and the number of failures occuring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution.

    Your letter contends that NIST’s report violates the Information Quality Standard of “utility.” NIST believes that the report has utility. In fact, the codes and standards bodies are already taking actions to improve building and fire codes and standards based on the findings of the WTC Investigation. As we mentioned previously, we are unable to provide a full explanation- of the total collapse.

    See for yourself their read of the letter.

    It’s amazing that they can read a letter that is essentially a laundry-list of reasons why their crank nonsense is being summarily dismissed as the product of diseased minds, and they read it as a victory because they were able to select a single sentence that out of context that suggests NIST doesn’t have an explanation for the collapse. Further, this non-admission then logically (ha ha) points to controlled demolition. I think their tinfoil hats are too tight.
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  • Al Gore and the Attack of the Global Warming Cranks

    I’ve postponed writing about Gore/IPCC Nobel largely because I wanted to see how the denialists would respond, and it has been interesting.

    The problem is worsened by what Paul Krugman called Gore Derangement Syndrome:

    So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

    He makes a few mistakes in the essay. For one he repeats the myth about Hansen rather the the corrective information. Hansen’s ethics can were impugned wrongly, and the smears were immediately falsified. Krugman also neglects to mention a lot of people on the left are pissed at Gore for backing down too easily in Florida, and not running more aggressively throughout the 2000 race. But he’s mostly correct.

    We should start our coverage of the inevitable Gore smears with the most recent myth which Tim Lambert and DeSmogBlog have really stayed on top of. That is, that a UK court found nine errors in Gore’s film. In reality, the decision was an overwhelming endorsement of the film. It does have some errors, for instance, Kilimanjaro is a poor example of a real problem. Glaciers are shrinking, yes, but the Kilimanjaro mechanism is thought to be different. No big deal, unless you’re a crank that is more interested in celebrating every perceived instance of scientific fallibility rather than communicating the truth. Even 9 real errors would be relatively minor in such a data-rich presentation. But when you actually read the decision, rather than quote-mine it (or repeat the quote-miners credulously), you see the judge was putting “errors” in quote marks, and was saying they may be points of contention, while not judging them to be actually incorrect. From DeSmogBlog:

    Justice Burton says, “I have no doubt that Dr. Stott, the Defendant’s expert, is right when he says that: ‘Al Gore’s presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate.”

    We also find, not surprisingly, that this court case wasn’t just a spontaneous incident, but a yet another orchestrated attack from denialist organization linked to the George C. Marshall institute and the “Great Global Warming Swindle”.

    Continued…
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  • Weirdest Headline Ever

    Archbishop apologizes for giving Communion to Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

    And what a great article too! PZ would love this group.

    On Oct. 7, Archbishop George Niederauer delivered the Eucharist to members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – an activist group whose motto is “go forth and sin some more” – prompting cries of outrage from conservatives across the country and Catholics in San Francisco.
    …
    The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in San Francisco in 1979, are known for their white face paint, outrageous costumes, theatrics and support of the gay community. They adopt names such as Sister Chastity Boner and Sister Constance Craving of the Holey Desire and have mottos such as, “It is not wise to say no to free drinks, cheap jewelry, discount cosmetics or pretty boys.”

    It’s also great to see all the shock and horror for what is, in the end, the accidental deliverance of a holy cracker.

    Conservative Fox news commentator Bill O’Reilly, who has disparaged “San Francisco values,” called the latest flap another example of how the city is run by “far-left secular progressives who despise the military, traditional values and religion.”

    On his Friday news show, O’Reilly called San Francisco “a disgrace on every level.”

    You’d think Bill would be down with San Fran, but then, it’s quite likely he’s desperately repressing his urge to be violated with a falafel, whatever. Let’s hope the sisters open up a chapter in every state!

  • Will the ID cranks ever tire of the appeal to consequences?

    Short answer, no.

    The latest is Dembski laughing with glee at the latest bigoted ramblings of James Watson who apparently has gone and said Africans are stupid and that’s why Africa suffers. This is not the first, or last time that Watson will say something dumb, offensive, and backwards. Like some people who have received enough accolade that they are safe from any repercussions for their actions, he seems to just revel in being an ass. Like, as Zuska points out, his recent diagnosis of Rosalind Franklin as autistic, as if she was the asshole in that conflict.

    As if Watson’s shenanigans aren’t embarrassing enough for humanity, Dembski has to then weigh in with the usual numbskull analysis and say, “See! If people believe in Darwinism we’ll have racist eugenics again“. No I’m not kidding. He asks:

    Anybody willing to offer predictions about when Darwinists will be getting back big time into the eugenics business?

    Let’s make this abundantly clear, eugenics was nothing but the use of science to justify pre-existing racist ideas scientists had about other races. These ideas were not scientifically valid. Dembski, and others with their historically indefensible “From Darwin to Hitler” nonsense, seem to be suggesting there is some scientific validity to this idea of inferior races. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that this is inadvertent, but it makes it no less tiresome.

    The idea of inferior races, is, of course, nonsense, and the attempts to pin the ills of racism and the holocaust has even raised the ire of the Anti-Defamation League . Anyone who has read Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man realizes that in the case of eugenics the researchers were biased, the theories flawed, and the science manipulated to favor the outcome of a specific ideology. They started with their conclusions, and made the science fit their racist beliefs.

    The IDers should be careful. The real similarity isn’t between modern evolutionary biologists and eugenicists, but between ID and the eugenics movement.
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  • The Road to Sildenafil – A history of artifical erections

    The inability to achieve erection has been a source of consternation for men for, well, a really long time. But the recent history of treatments for impotence, wait, I mean Erectile Dysfunction, oh no, now they’re calling it Male Sexual Dysfunction, represents a medical revolution. In the last 100 or so years, we’ve gone from nonspecific and largely ineffective treatments, to progressively more successful treatment, finally resulting in a highly specific and effective pharmaceutical solution to the problem. The goal of this post is to share a history of this unique field of medical endeavor, the medical and biological insights we’ve gained, and the rather interesting characters involved along the way.

    Erectile dysfunction is reported in about one out of five of all men and increases with age. It is therefore a serious problem for millions of American men (and their spouses a fair amount of the time), and hundreds of millions worldwide.

    Our story starts with one of the earliest “medical” treatments for male impotence. Starting in the late 1800s, sheep testis extract was injected as a source of testosterone (although they didn’t know it at the time). This was the standard of care until testosterone was purified in the 1940s. However, testosterone as a treatment for impotence was pretty poor. The inability to obtain an erection has little to do with levels of androgens, and in studies at the time testosterone fared no better than placebo.

    Thus, this was the treatment that failed for Geddings Osbon in 1960, leading to the next great leap forward in treatment of male erectile dysfunction. Osbon, a successful owner of a tire-retreading business, did what doctors dread their patient will do. He went home and looked around his shop and home and tried to come up with a solution to his medical problem. Usually, this results in disaster, and many doctors have hilarious stories of the attempts of such patients to cure less mechanical disorders with household materials. However, in this case, Osbon invented a device which he called the “YED” or “youth equivalence device” that is still today one of the most effective solutions to erectile disfunction. It’s also known as the penis-pump.

    I’m afraid the rest must continue below the fold. I think it’s safe for work, but you never know…the description of probably the most infamous urology lecture of all time might be a bit much.

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