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 c

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.