8 ms·

Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth

46 points by rubinelli 16y ago

lucifer 16y ago
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm Smoke gets in one's eyes and that apparently affects accepting "truth".
devinj 16y ago
The Junk Science site is scary, because it's so close to the truth. You really shouldn't take "may" or "possibly" as a statement of fact, and it's true that statistics can be used to manipulate facts and present false ideas. And yet much of the site is about denying ("debunking") real science, not pseudoscience.
- foldr 16y ago
  I think this underlines the fact that distinguishing "real" science from psuedoscience is a matter of professional judgment. It's not enough just to be a reasonable person who knows modus ponens and some statistics. To distinguish good physics from bad physics, you need extensive training as a physicist (and likewise for any other science). This is unfortunate, because it means that independent scrutiny of science is extremely difficult. Virtually no-one outside a particular scientific community is competent to evaluate the quality of the work within that community. An argument that seems obviously flawed to an outsider can seem compelling to someone who has the relevant background knowledge. It would be nice if there were some kind of solution to this problem, but I doubt that there is.
jackfoxy 16y ago
I only skimmed this article, NS is not one of my favorite publications, and publishing an article about "denialism" on a site ostensibly devoted to science journalism does not raise its stature with me. I did find this little gem about halfway into the article "... denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust". I have enough education to follow most scientific arguments at some level. I don't have enough higher math to follow string theory, for instance, but I can understand pandemics, one of the prime examples in the article. When science relies on trust, is it still science? I'm also bothered that this article seems to lump anyone on the "wrong" side of a scientific debate as a "denialist".
- scott_s 16y ago
  Science doesn't rely on trust. But for those that consume the result of science, it sometimes does rely on trust of the scientific method and the scientists themselves. The example given in the article is a good one: we can observe antibiotics in action, so we don't need to trust anyone that they work. We can observe people get better on them. But with vaccines, the point is to not get sick in the first place. Most individuals will never have the opportunity to observe that they work since they are preventative. Again, the science itself does not rely on trust. It's the non-scientists who must trust something they will likely never observe themselves.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - a-priori 16y ago
    To misquote Churchill: "Science is the worst form of learning about the world except for all those others that have been tried." Science isn't perfect. Far from it. But at it's best it's a very effective way of learning about the world we live in. At its worst, it's still better than any alternatives we've found so far.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  I think the issue is that many people don't have the basic science or mathematics skills to even follow along. For example, combinatorial explosion is a very basic concept but I wouldn't have trouble believing that the majority of the US public wouldn't be able to grasp its consequences. However I think that you may be inflating the degree to which we understand other fields a bit. I have taken just enough advanced physics to know that I know absolutely nothing about physics. Similarly for chemistry, biology, climatology, etc. My major is computer science so I would wager that I have a better than average knowledge in that field, but there are even some subfields in computer science (e.g., complexity theory) where I would be completely lost. I think the concept in play here is what I like to call the "hard science condition." That is, people who are a member of the hard sciences or technical fields have a tendency to believe that because they have a good comprehension of a difficult subject they have a good comprehension of many difficult subjects (including other technical fields). This seems to me to be a logical fallacy because very rarely have the exhibitors actually put in the many years of work that would be required to really understand the field. In this way we all have to defer to experts at some point--that is, we must trust their results. This is why I think a scientific consensus is so important. When we must defer to experts it's important to be able to figure out what the experts are saying.
tlack 16y ago
I'm on the fence on this one. I think it is very very dangerous to blindly trust Perfect Science as we've seen with ClimateGate. Scientists are of course humans, and all humans are prone to competitiveness, greed, and deception. Science is fallible. On the flip, though, I become very nervous when I think about what happens when public perception of scientific truth begins to erode..
- keefe 16y ago
  I think part of this issue will be resolved as technology advances - eventually, it will become common practice to release all experimental data publicly, which will reduce the trust requirement. After all, the heart of science is independently confirming experimental results.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    I very much doubt that this is true. Raw data by itself is almost never definitive. Meaningful conclusions often require that data be manipulated in fairly extreme ways. Each one of those manipulations provides fertile ground for denialist critique. To give you one example with which I'm familiar, several research groups have attempted to measure the number of fatalities associated with the Iraq War. One of the standard techniques for doing so involves cluster sampling, i.e., picking a small number of locations and conducting multiple interviews near each cluster site. One research group doing this noticed that the mortality rate from their Fallujah cluster was much much much higher than any of the other clusters. So they purposefully excluded it from their analysis although they kept it as part of their raw data and explained why they removed it. As a result, their total death toll was much lower than it would have been. Denialists immediately criticized them for manipulating data so as to inflate the death toll. How did they do that? Very simply: if you omit the outlier, then the spread of the probability distribution shrinks dramatically. If you include the outlier, then the width of the distribution expands so far out that it encompasses zero excess deaths. Now in either case, the distribution was screaming that there were many excess deaths, but these denialists claimed that scientists were reducing the average fatality count just so they could exclude the minute possibility that the war decreased death rates. Obviously, there is no way these scientists could win: if they include the outlier, then they're deliberately inflating the death toll, but if they exclude the outlier, then they're manipulating data to obscure the possibility that the war saved lives. If the scientists had just quietly dropped their Falujah data, this controversy never would have happened. In this case, releasing data just gave denialists fodor for crazy attacks.
stcredzero 16y ago
So, the price of progress in a free society is the suffering of misguided human beings? If one has been born as a laboratory rat, it's a really good idea to find oneself in the control group. Likewise, while it might be dandy to be the misunderstood genius, the odds are that one is instead the deluded fool. Don't be the deluded fool. Education tends to mitigate this.
mynameishere 16y ago
Replace the word "denialist" with "skeptic" and you have a semantically identical but implicitly reversed rant. Why are people so skeptical? Because they quite sensibly question dictates from institutions/corporations/government bodies/etc which demonstrably do not always have the public's interests at heart. Etc, etc. Any time you hear somebody loading up and firing slur after slur after slur after slur, it's best to look for a different rant. Do vaccines cause autism? Apparently not. But, you know, it is possible and as long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens, we are probably wise to consider possible negative effects. It's not "denialist".
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  Yes, being skeptical about things is generally good. I agree that there should be legitimate testing for those types of things. However, I don't think the vaccine/autism scare is a good example here. The research that was done on that that suggested a link was incredibly biased, poorly done, and sensationalized. Furthermore, the skepticism about vaccines caused far more harm than autism. Children have actually died from people refusing vaccines. www.jennymccarthybodycount.com You can debate whether those statistics are perfectly accurate or not, but even a single death that was purely preventable is too much.
- CodeMage 16y ago
  Regardless of the article itself, what do you call it when people persist in believing in the alleged link between MMR vaccine and autism, after the link has been thoroughly debunked? To paraphrase one of my favorite writers, those people have their feet wet and can see the pyramids really well, 'cause they're standing knee-deep in De Nile.
  - mistermann 16y ago
    "after the link has been thoroughly debunked?" If a relationship between a vaccination and a negative reaction cannot be definitively confirmed, then it does not show up in the statistics...in case you actually are interested in the truth. There is a website somewhere that tracks all of this, but my question is, why wouldn't the official people already involved track fucking everything? It costs exactly zero over and above what they are doing now, so why exclude it? This is where the conspiracy theories come from. You have the means and budget to track everything, but you don't. My question is: why? Combine that with some weird stories I hear, and the fact that it is free for you to counter them with data, but you don't, and there you go, a conspiracy theory.
wooster 16y ago
On the flip side, painting critics with the "denialists" label is an easy way to deflect valid criticism. In the H1N1 case, there are a lot of critics claiming: * Press about H1N1 caused a shortage of seasonal flu vaccines. [0] * H1N1 vaccine supplies were limited during the period leading up to flu season. [1] * H1N1 vaccine production was not ramped up quickly enough. [1] * H1N1 vaccine was oversupplied after the 2009/10 flu season, leaving public health agencies with massive surpluses. [2] So, given that public health agencies massively overstocked their supplies after they could do any good, it's easy to see why politicians might be angry. With oversupply in Germany alone at €53.3 million worth of vaccine [2], a valid concern might be that if there was in fact corporate influence over the WHO decision to declare H1N1 a pandemic, then that would call their credibility into question [3]. Another concern might be that given the supply issues, the world is not able to effectively respond in time to a flu pandemic. Rather than addressing those issues, it's a lot easier to paint critics as denialists. Or, it could just be that they're wackos. Whatever. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/05flu.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/05flu.html [1] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-increase-manufacturers/story?id=9057889 http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-incr... [2] http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100507-27035.html http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100507-27035.html [3] http://www.ihsglobalinsight.com/SDA/SDADetail18082.htm http://www.ihsglobalinsight.com/SDA/SDADetail18082.htm
- mistermann 16y ago
  Agreed. From the first paragraph of the article: "Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles." "that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic" >> WHO officials have always stressed that global spread, not severity of disease, defines a pandemic. [My comment: so we're not worried about risk or danger, just spread. Not to mention that this defenition was recently changed.] "that thousands died" >> Tens thousands of people die from the common flu (amongst other things) every year. "that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering" >> Really??? Canada alone (population ~ 30 million) spent several billion (I don't have the exact number) on vaccine specifically for H1N1...do the math globally. I wonder if, according to the article's author, profiteering is actually possible, under any circumstances? How many billions have to be spent before it is considered profiteering? "Thousands died..." >> WOW!!!!....THOUSANDS.....killed, by flu!!! Unprecedented! (if you ignore every single year for the last how many thousand years????) I mean, how disingenuous can you get?
thaumaturgy 16y ago
There is one other commonality amongst "deniers" that NewScientist missed, and it's one that's especially prevalent on sites like HackerNews and Reddit. Let's call it "transference of expertise". That is, you get a group of self-described experts together, and then ask them to critically analyze some aspect of a field in which they have no expertise at all, and they'll attempt to apply their expertise in the unrelated field. For example, "I am a programmer, so I understand systems, and everything is a system..." Well, yes, but only in the most superfluous way: that a "system" is a network of causes and effects. Otherwise, programming has very little to do with, say, quantum mechanics, or with global ecology. This even happens between sub-fields of expertise; I happen to personally know more physicists than the average person, and they have the same tendency to try to apply their expertise in one particular sub-field of physics to some other field in which they have no specific knowledge. For yet another example, there's Zed Shaw's "Programmers need to learn statistics or I will fucking kill them" article from sometime back. There you have a field that is only slightly mathematical in nature, and because of that, many of the people with enough expertise in it believe that they know "enough" math. Except, they don't. It seems to be terribly hard for someone who is an expert at anything to admit that they aren't an expert at everything.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  Yet another example is the Salem Conjecture which notes that a large fraction of creationists with advanced degrees are engineers. Obviously, if you understand differential equations and studied heat transfer, you're perfectly well equipped to assess genomics and microphysiology! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
  - DilipJ 16y ago
    The engineers in question are probably Chemical Engineers. If my college experience was any indication, Chem Engineers are some of the most right-wing people you'll ever meet. I guess it's because a lot of them go into the petroleum industry, and since they don't want to bite the hands that feed them, they end up swallowing the entire conservative ideology (including skepticism towards evolution).
TotlolRon 16y ago
A: "You are in denial" B: "No, I'm not" A: "Told you"
gord 16y ago
I think its due to conditioning and the inertia of the surrounding environment. Many [most?] smart people work 9 to 5 even though this clogs the roads at those times, so is optimally bad resource usage. Even more so for religion or political affiliations, due to social circle. It might be a rational response - the cost associated with overcoming these environmental factors is high, they are at a local minimum ?
ffff 16y ago
As a non-scientist but one who takes their work seriously, I am still often in denial is because so much of the work in statistical validation seems to be trying to compress a multidimensional model to fit on a one dimensional scale that, even using accepted/established methods, always gives you a very flat understanding of the topic at hand. Even those working most closely with the data sometimes seem somehow unable to present anything beyond the oversimplified model, but are dying to even take further than one dimensional and draw a line so they have a false dichotomy so they can paint things black and white. This is practiced on both sides making results inherently useless despite scientific techniques and credentials of the researchers. And so, for example, neither side in the climate change debate provides the public with anything remotely resembling a model they can develop faith in by subjecting it to reasonable scrutiny or trying to decide whether it smells right based upon ongoing critical analysis.
lionhearted 16y ago
> There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu. One thing that seems strange to me - whenever there's one of these pan-denier arguments, the arguer tends to choose topics that the Starbucks crowd would agree with, and nothing that the Starbucks crowd might deny in the face of evidence. For instance, we know really firmly that there's a larger standard deviation in intelligence and success in men than women - men are overrepresented at the top and the bottom. That is, men reach the highest levels of business, science, and leadership more often than women, but also are victims of homicide, suicide, and are incarcerated more often than women. This is thoroughly proven, but even at Harvard the university president lost his job for saying something like this! So how come these "look at these idiot deniers!" arguments never look at denial of the fact that men and women have a different hormonal mix, different cognitive mix, and that leads to different patterns of behavior and results. I mean, that's so bloody obvious just from a casual observation of the world, but it's now also proven, at least to a much higher standard than global warming is. Or hell, the New Scientist article uses evolution/creationism - yet a lot of people who believe in evolution reject the fact that natural selection and sexual selection would make groups evolving in different circumstances evolve differently... that comes hand-in-hand with evolution, but people are often deniers about that, thinking that everyone evolved to be the same in all meaningful ways, and any differences in wealth, aggression, preferred behavior, even musical ability must be due to culture. Which is obviously nonsense - but this kind of denial of something obvious is never mentioned in a pan-denier argument, it's always a bunch of mostly proven things with a vocal, ignorant minority, plus global warming.
- moultano 16y ago
  This seems like an interesting proposition to me. Are there true things that society as a whole is better off not knowing? For instance, one epidemiologist estimated that 75% of SIDS cases are actually homicides. http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html That strikes me as a fact that could fall into this category.

46 points by rubinelli 16y ago

http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm Smoke gets in one's eyes and that apparently affects accepting "truth".

devinj 16y ago

The Junk Science site is scary, because it's so close to the truth. You really shouldn't take "may" or "possibly" as a statement of fact, and it's true that statistics can be used to manipulate facts and present false ideas. And yet much of the site is about denying ("debunking") real science, not pseudoscience.

foldr 16y ago
I think this underlines the fact that distinguishing "real" science from psuedoscience is a matter of professional judgment. It's not enough just to be a reasonable person who knows modus ponens and some statistics. To distinguish good physics from bad physics, you need extensive training as a physicist (and likewise for any other science). This is unfortunate, because it means that independent scrutiny of science is extremely difficult. Virtually no-one outside a particular scientific community is competent to evaluate the quality of the work within that community. An argument that seems obviously flawed to an outsider can seem compelling to someone who has the relevant background knowledge. It would be nice if there were some kind of solution to this problem, but I doubt that there is.

jackfoxy 16y ago

I only skimmed this article, NS is not one of my favorite publications, and publishing an article about "denialism" on a site ostensibly devoted to science journalism does not raise its stature with me. I did find this little gem about halfway into the article "... denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust". I have enough education to follow most scientific arguments at some level. I don't have enough higher math to follow string theory, for instance, but I can understand pandemics, one of the prime examples in the article. When science relies on trust, is it still science? I'm also bothered that this article seems to lump anyone on the "wrong" side of a scientific debate as a "denialist".

scott_s 16y ago
Science doesn't rely on trust. But for those that consume the result of science, it sometimes does rely on trust of the scientific method and the scientists themselves. The example given in the article is a good one: we can observe antibiotics in action, so we don't need to trust anyone that they work. We can observe people get better on them. But with vaccines, the point is to not get sick in the first place. Most individuals will never have the opportunity to observe that they work since they are preventative. Again, the science itself does not rely on trust. It's the non-scientists who must trust something they will likely never observe themselves.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- a-priori 16y ago
  To misquote Churchill: "Science is the worst form of learning about the world except for all those others that have been tried." Science isn't perfect. Far from it. But at it's best it's a very effective way of learning about the world we live in. At its worst, it's still better than any alternatives we've found so far.
Locke1689 16y ago
I think the issue is that many people don't have the basic science or mathematics skills to even follow along. For example, combinatorial explosion is a very basic concept but I wouldn't have trouble believing that the majority of the US public wouldn't be able to grasp its consequences. However I think that you may be inflating the degree to which we understand other fields a bit. I have taken just enough advanced physics to know that I know absolutely nothing about physics. Similarly for chemistry, biology, climatology, etc. My major is computer science so I would wager that I have a better than average knowledge in that field, but there are even some subfields in computer science (e.g., complexity theory) where I would be completely lost. I think the concept in play here is what I like to call the "hard science condition." That is, people who are a member of the hard sciences or technical fields have a tendency to believe that because they have a good comprehension of a difficult subject they have a good comprehension of many difficult subjects (including other technical fields). This seems to me to be a logical fallacy because very rarely have the exhibitors actually put in the many years of work that would be required to really understand the field. In this way we all have to defer to experts at some point--that is, we must trust their results. This is why I think a scientific consensus is so important. When we must defer to experts it's important to be able to figure out what the experts are saying.

tlack 16y ago

I'm on the fence on this one. I think it is very very dangerous to blindly trust Perfect Science as we've seen with ClimateGate. Scientists are of course humans, and all humans are prone to competitiveness, greed, and deception. Science is fallible. On the flip, though, I become very nervous when I think about what happens when public perception of scientific truth begins to erode..

keefe 16y ago
I think part of this issue will be resolved as technology advances - eventually, it will become common practice to release all experimental data publicly, which will reduce the trust requirement. After all, the heart of science is independently confirming experimental results.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  I very much doubt that this is true. Raw data by itself is almost never definitive. Meaningful conclusions often require that data be manipulated in fairly extreme ways. Each one of those manipulations provides fertile ground for denialist critique. To give you one example with which I'm familiar, several research groups have attempted to measure the number of fatalities associated with the Iraq War. One of the standard techniques for doing so involves cluster sampling, i.e., picking a small number of locations and conducting multiple interviews near each cluster site. One research group doing this noticed that the mortality rate from their Fallujah cluster was much much much higher than any of the other clusters. So they purposefully excluded it from their analysis although they kept it as part of their raw data and explained why they removed it. As a result, their total death toll was much lower than it would have been. Denialists immediately criticized them for manipulating data so as to inflate the death toll. How did they do that? Very simply: if you omit the outlier, then the spread of the probability distribution shrinks dramatically. If you include the outlier, then the width of the distribution expands so far out that it encompasses zero excess deaths. Now in either case, the distribution was screaming that there were many excess deaths, but these denialists claimed that scientists were reducing the average fatality count just so they could exclude the minute possibility that the war decreased death rates. Obviously, there is no way these scientists could win: if they include the outlier, then they're deliberately inflating the death toll, but if they exclude the outlier, then they're manipulating data to obscure the possibility that the war saved lives. If the scientists had just quietly dropped their Falujah data, this controversy never would have happened. In this case, releasing data just gave denialists fodor for crazy attacks.

stcredzero 16y ago

So, the price of progress in a free society is the suffering of misguided human beings? If one has been born as a laboratory rat, it's a really good idea to find oneself in the control group. Likewise, while it might be dandy to be the misunderstood genius, the odds are that one is instead the deluded fool. Don't be the deluded fool. Education tends to mitigate this.

mynameishere 16y ago

Replace the word "denialist" with "skeptic" and you have a semantically identical but implicitly reversed rant. Why are people so skeptical? Because they quite sensibly question dictates from institutions/corporations/government bodies/etc which demonstrably do not always have the public's interests at heart. Etc, etc. Any time you hear somebody loading up and firing slur after slur after slur after slur, it's best to look for a different rant. Do vaccines cause autism? Apparently not. But, you know, it is possible and as long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens, we are probably wise to consider possible negative effects. It's not "denialist".

jokermatt999 16y ago
Yes, being skeptical about things is generally good. I agree that there should be legitimate testing for those types of things. However, I don't think the vaccine/autism scare is a good example here. The research that was done on that that suggested a link was incredibly biased, poorly done, and sensationalized. Furthermore, the skepticism about vaccines caused far more harm than autism. Children have actually died from people refusing vaccines. www.jennymccarthybodycount.com You can debate whether those statistics are perfectly accurate or not, but even a single death that was purely preventable is too much.
CodeMage 16y ago
Regardless of the article itself, what do you call it when people persist in believing in the alleged link between MMR vaccine and autism, after the link has been thoroughly debunked? To paraphrase one of my favorite writers, those people have their feet wet and can see the pyramids really well, 'cause they're standing knee-deep in De Nile.
- mistermann 16y ago
  "after the link has been thoroughly debunked?" If a relationship between a vaccination and a negative reaction cannot be definitively confirmed, then it does not show up in the statistics...in case you actually are interested in the truth. There is a website somewhere that tracks all of this, but my question is, why wouldn't the official people already involved track fucking everything? It costs exactly zero over and above what they are doing now, so why exclude it? This is where the conspiracy theories come from. You have the means and budget to track everything, but you don't. My question is: why? Combine that with some weird stories I hear, and the fact that it is free for you to counter them with data, but you don't, and there you go, a conspiracy theory.

wooster 16y ago

On the flip side, painting critics with the "denialists" label is an easy way to deflect valid criticism. In the H1N1 case, there are a lot of critics claiming: * Press about H1N1 caused a shortage of seasonal flu vaccines. [0] * H1N1 vaccine supplies were limited during the period leading up to flu season. [1] * H1N1 vaccine production was not ramped up quickly enough. [1] * H1N1 vaccine was oversupplied after the 2009/10 flu season, leaving public health agencies with massive surpluses. [2] So, given that public health agencies massively overstocked their supplies after they could do any good, it's easy to see why politicians might be angry. With oversupply in Germany alone at €53.3 million worth of vaccine [2], a valid concern might be that if there was in fact corporate influence over the WHO decision to declare H1N1 a pandemic, then that would call their credibility into question [3]. Another concern might be that given the supply issues, the world is not able to effectively respond in time to a flu pandemic. Rather than addressing those issues, it's a lot easier to paint critics as denialists. Or, it could just be that they're wackos. Whatever. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/05flu.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/05flu.html [1] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-increase-manufacturers/story?id=9057889 http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-incr... [2] http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100507-27035.html http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100507-27035.html [3] http://www.ihsglobalinsight.com/SDA/SDADetail18082.htm http://www.ihsglobalinsight.com/SDA/SDADetail18082.htm

mistermann 16y ago
Agreed. From the first paragraph of the article: "Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles." "that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic" >> WHO officials have always stressed that global spread, not severity of disease, defines a pandemic. [My comment: so we're not worried about risk or danger, just spread. Not to mention that this defenition was recently changed.] "that thousands died" >> Tens thousands of people die from the common flu (amongst other things) every year. "that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering" >> Really??? Canada alone (population ~ 30 million) spent several billion (I don't have the exact number) on vaccine specifically for H1N1...do the math globally. I wonder if, according to the article's author, profiteering is actually possible, under any circumstances? How many billions have to be spent before it is considered profiteering? "Thousands died..." >> WOW!!!!....THOUSANDS.....killed, by flu!!! Unprecedented! (if you ignore every single year for the last how many thousand years????) I mean, how disingenuous can you get?

thaumaturgy 16y ago

There is one other commonality amongst "deniers" that NewScientist missed, and it's one that's especially prevalent on sites like HackerNews and Reddit. Let's call it "transference of expertise". That is, you get a group of self-described experts together, and then ask them to critically analyze some aspect of a field in which they have no expertise at all, and they'll attempt to apply their expertise in the unrelated field. For example, "I am a programmer, so I understand systems, and everything is a system..." Well, yes, but only in the most superfluous way: that a "system" is a network of causes and effects. Otherwise, programming has very little to do with, say, quantum mechanics, or with global ecology. This even happens between sub-fields of expertise; I happen to personally know more physicists than the average person, and they have the same tendency to try to apply their expertise in one particular sub-field of physics to some other field in which they have no specific knowledge. For yet another example, there's Zed Shaw's "Programmers need to learn statistics or I will fucking kill them" article from sometime back. There you have a field that is only slightly mathematical in nature, and because of that, many of the people with enough expertise in it believe that they know "enough" math. Except, they don't. It seems to be terribly hard for someone who is an expert at anything to admit that they aren't an expert at everything.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
MichaelSalib 16y ago
Yet another example is the Salem Conjecture which notes that a large fraction of creationists with advanced degrees are engineers. Obviously, if you understand differential equations and studied heat transfer, you're perfectly well equipped to assess genomics and microphysiology! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
- DilipJ 16y ago
  The engineers in question are probably Chemical Engineers. If my college experience was any indication, Chem Engineers are some of the most right-wing people you'll ever meet. I guess it's because a lot of them go into the petroleum industry, and since they don't want to bite the hands that feed them, they end up swallowing the entire conservative ideology (including skepticism towards evolution).

TotlolRon 16y ago

A: "You are in denial" B: "No, I'm not" A: "Told you"

gord 16y ago

I think its due to conditioning and the inertia of the surrounding environment. Many [most?] smart people work 9 to 5 even though this clogs the roads at those times, so is optimally bad resource usage. Even more so for religion or political affiliations, due to social circle. It might be a rational response - the cost associated with overcoming these environmental factors is high, they are at a local minimum ?

ffff 16y ago

As a non-scientist but one who takes their work seriously, I am still often in denial is because so much of the work in statistical validation seems to be trying to compress a multidimensional model to fit on a one dimensional scale that, even using accepted/established methods, always gives you a very flat understanding of the topic at hand. Even those working most closely with the data sometimes seem somehow unable to present anything beyond the oversimplified model, but are dying to even take further than one dimensional and draw a line so they have a false dichotomy so they can paint things black and white. This is practiced on both sides making results inherently useless despite scientific techniques and credentials of the researchers. And so, for example, neither side in the climate change debate provides the public with anything remotely resembling a model they can develop faith in by subjecting it to reasonable scrutiny or trying to decide whether it smells right based upon ongoing critical analysis.

lionhearted 16y ago

> There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu. One thing that seems strange to me - whenever there's one of these pan-denier arguments, the arguer tends to choose topics that the Starbucks crowd would agree with, and nothing that the Starbucks crowd might deny in the face of evidence. For instance, we know really firmly that there's a larger standard deviation in intelligence and success in men than women - men are overrepresented at the top and the bottom. That is, men reach the highest levels of business, science, and leadership more often than women, but also are victims of homicide, suicide, and are incarcerated more often than women. This is thoroughly proven, but even at Harvard the university president lost his job for saying something like this! So how come these "look at these idiot deniers!" arguments never look at denial of the fact that men and women have a different hormonal mix, different cognitive mix, and that leads to different patterns of behavior and results. I mean, that's so bloody obvious just from a casual observation of the world, but it's now also proven, at least to a much higher standard than global warming is. Or hell, the New Scientist article uses evolution/creationism - yet a lot of people who believe in evolution reject the fact that natural selection and sexual selection would make groups evolving in different circumstances evolve differently... that comes hand-in-hand with evolution, but people are often deniers about that, thinking that everyone evolved to be the same in all meaningful ways, and any differences in wealth, aggression, preferred behavior, even musical ability must be due to culture. Which is obviously nonsense - but this kind of denial of something obvious is never mentioned in a pan-denier argument, it's always a bunch of mostly proven things with a vocal, ignorant minority, plus global warming.

moultano 16y ago
This seems like an interesting proposition to me. Are there true things that society as a whole is better off not knowing? For instance, one epidemiologist estimated that 75% of SIDS cases are actually homicides. http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html That strikes me as a fact that could fall into this category.