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What about bad-faith skepticism, like cigarettes-cause-cancer skeptics and global warming skeptics? From what I can see, good faith skepticism makes science st

by verall 5y ago

What about bad-faith skepticism, like cigarettes-cause-cancer skeptics and global warming skeptics? From what I can see, good faith skepticism makes science sturdier, but in bad faith it seduces the less knowledgable and burns the time of the more knowledgeable. On the flipside, most flat earthers don't seem to be arguing in bad faith.

ethbr0 5y ago
To me, it seems like there's a failure to differentiate bad-faith skepticism. There's malicious "I know what I'm saying is a lie / broken argument, but I'm willing to make it because my righteousness / beliefs justify winning." (Fixable with... nothing?) But there's also ignorant "I don't understand the foundations of this information, and so arrive at an erroneous conclusion." (Fixable with education) One of the failures of scientific proponents (especially pop scientific proponents) has been to treat the second group as synonymous with the first.
- hnaccount141 5y ago
  This is a great point, and one that I wish was more widely understood. In my anecdotal experience at least the latter group by far outnumbers the former, and treating the "good faith but poorly informed" group as you would the bad faith group is nearly always counterproductive.
sjwalter 5y ago
Your statement that all, for e.g., global warming skeptics are bad-faith shows you don't have a scientific mindset yourself. I live near glacier national park. In the 1990s, some climate model predicted the eponymous glacier would be gone by 2020. Signs around the parks' entrances were erected boldly stating this claim. In January of 2020, the signs were removed because the glaciers hadn't even shrunk. If there were real scientific interest in climate change, there'd be some interest and funding in ascertaining why that prediction was proven incorrect. But there is no such study, no funding for it, no interest whatsoever. The climate change alarmists have zero opposition in all major institutions. Anyone who says their models are bullshit, or who says maybe the Sun is having a larger impact on the climate than are GHGs, is ridiculed without their arguments even entertained. You belie this with your statement that any such skepticism is "bad faith". When it comes to climate change in particular, a field that seeks to study an incredibly complex collection of phenomena, whose leading experts have raised blood-chilling alarmist calls for action for decades and many of whose forecasts have proven totally bunk, who study a system far more complex than even the economy (are economics skeptics bad-faith too?)... Well, if you think YOU have a lock on what's true, and everyone with varying opinions is an obvious quack or a shill, then I think it's you who doesn't understand science.
- eutropia 5y ago
  I searched the internet trying to find a reference to the study regarding the glaciers at GNP and found exclusively news stories and blogspam repeating the "removal of the signs" meme from foxnews, right-wing think tanks, fundamentalist christian organizations, and oil & gas funded "science" web sites. I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it. With respect to Greenhouse Gases: what's hard to understand about conservation of matter? GHGs cause some warming; you can do lab experiments on flux and gas mixtures in identical glass containers to prove this. The Biosphere (that is, the surface of the earth and all its organisms) has some essentially fixed amount of carbon distributed between critters, plants, soil, air, and dissolved in water. It's a closed system. When something dies and decomposes, it releases its carbon into the soil and atmosphere where it is endlessly recycled. Only in rare (and extremely slow) circumstances does the carbon get removed from the biosphere and put deep into the earth as coal, oil, or natural gas. When you dig up carbon that is currently out of that cycle and put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels you are adding additional carbon to the system. It has to go somewhere. Some of it will temporarily become plants (until they die, rot and release the carbon again), some of it will dissolve into the ocean and raise the acidity, and some of it will stay in the atmosphere and cause some warming. This part of "climate change" is very simple to understand. The earth previously did just fine with a higher fixed amount of carbon in the biosphere, but it was a lot warmer, wetter, and humans weren't around.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    > I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it. Don't you and the guy you responded to want the same thing: answers from the scientific community? You can criticize the right wing news sources all you want... the existence of the signs saying the glaciers were going to disappear is pretty indisputable. Clearly, someone at some point had enough belief in that prophesy that they made a sign.
  - burntsushi 5y ago
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
How do you determine someone is arguing in bad faith? I'm not asking how do you determine that a bad faith actor exists somewhere but on the individual level, which is where we all exist, how do you know? Is everyone who disagrees with your individual personal view of science a bad faith skeptic? If not, how do you sort them out? Is based on how much effort was required to convince you of a particular POV? That should be something greater than zero, otherwise you're acting on faith not science. Should everyone require the exact same amount of evidence? And what about the situations where you believed something to be true but later found out you were wrong? Were you acting in bad faith all that time or were the people who were ultimate correct acting in bad faith until you agreed with them, at which point they were arguing in good faith? Bad faith actors exist but the bad faith label appears to be an overused and a lazy way of shutting down debate. Not everyone who was skeptical about the link between smoking and cancer worked for the tobacco companies or were addicted to smoking. How often are medicines we're told are safe taken off the market because it turns out they're not? Are people who were skeptical of that safety bad faith actors until they were proven correct? Why are there "scientific" subjects for which skepticism automatically bad faith? What is the criteria for being able to question the mainstream dogma and still be considered arguing in good faith? The people who proposed the possibility of a lab leak were not long ago considered to be arguing in bad faith. How did those arguments one day suddenly stop being bad faith arguments?
- sjwalter 5y ago
  > How did those arguments one day suddenly stop being bad faith arguments? I know you're asking this to demonstrate, but I'll answer anyways, because it's obvious: The elite who have very effectively captured the press, big tech, and the scientific institutions used their leverage to ensure that all such skepticism was "bad faith", even though it very clearly was not.
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > How do you determine someone is arguing in bad faith? You can tell when someone is arguing in bad faith by the fact that he disagrees with The Science. Duh. (I'm being sarcastic here, but that's what a frightening fraction of the population actually thinks.)

by verall 5y ago

ethbr0 5y ago

To me, it seems like there's a failure to differentiate bad-faith skepticism. There's malicious "I know what I'm saying is a lie / broken argument, but I'm willing to make it because my righteousness / beliefs justify winning." (Fixable with... nothing?) But there's also ignorant "I don't understand the foundations of this information, and so arrive at an erroneous conclusion." (Fixable with education) One of the failures of scientific proponents (especially pop scientific proponents) has been to treat the second group as synonymous with the first.

hnaccount141 5y ago
This is a great point, and one that I wish was more widely understood. In my anecdotal experience at least the latter group by far outnumbers the former, and treating the "good faith but poorly informed" group as you would the bad faith group is nearly always counterproductive.

sjwalter 5y ago

Your statement that all, for e.g., global warming skeptics are bad-faith shows you don't have a scientific mindset yourself. I live near glacier national park. In the 1990s, some climate model predicted the eponymous glacier would be gone by 2020. Signs around the parks' entrances were erected boldly stating this claim. In January of 2020, the signs were removed because the glaciers hadn't even shrunk. If there were real scientific interest in climate change, there'd be some interest and funding in ascertaining why that prediction was proven incorrect. But there is no such study, no funding for it, no interest whatsoever. The climate change alarmists have zero opposition in all major institutions. Anyone who says their models are bullshit, or who says maybe the Sun is having a larger impact on the climate than are GHGs, is ridiculed without their arguments even entertained. You belie this with your statement that any such skepticism is "bad faith". When it comes to climate change in particular, a field that seeks to study an incredibly complex collection of phenomena, whose leading experts have raised blood-chilling alarmist calls for action for decades and many of whose forecasts have proven totally bunk, who study a system far more complex than even the economy (are economics skeptics bad-faith too?)... Well, if you think YOU have a lock on what's true, and everyone with varying opinions is an obvious quack or a shill, then I think it's you who doesn't understand science.

eutropia 5y ago
I searched the internet trying to find a reference to the study regarding the glaciers at GNP and found exclusively news stories and blogspam repeating the "removal of the signs" meme from foxnews, right-wing think tanks, fundamentalist christian organizations, and oil & gas funded "science" web sites. I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it. With respect to Greenhouse Gases: what's hard to understand about conservation of matter? GHGs cause some warming; you can do lab experiments on flux and gas mixtures in identical glass containers to prove this. The Biosphere (that is, the surface of the earth and all its organisms) has some essentially fixed amount of carbon distributed between critters, plants, soil, air, and dissolved in water. It's a closed system. When something dies and decomposes, it releases its carbon into the soil and atmosphere where it is endlessly recycled. Only in rare (and extremely slow) circumstances does the carbon get removed from the biosphere and put deep into the earth as coal, oil, or natural gas. When you dig up carbon that is currently out of that cycle and put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels you are adding additional carbon to the system. It has to go somewhere. Some of it will temporarily become plants (until they die, rot and release the carbon again), some of it will dissolve into the ocean and raise the acidity, and some of it will stay in the atmosphere and cause some warming. This part of "climate change" is very simple to understand. The earth previously did just fine with a higher fixed amount of carbon in the biosphere, but it was a lot warmer, wetter, and humans weren't around.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > I'd love to have a look at the original publication that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I can't find it to even analyze it. Don't you and the guy you responded to want the same thing: answers from the scientific community? You can criticize the right wing news sources all you want... the existence of the signs saying the glaciers were going to disappear is pretty indisputable. Clearly, someone at some point had enough belief in that prophesy that they made a sign.
- burntsushi 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

How do you determine someone is arguing in bad faith? I'm not asking how do you determine that a bad faith actor exists somewhere but on the individual level, which is where we all exist, how do you know? Is everyone who disagrees with your individual personal view of science a bad faith skeptic? If not, how do you sort them out? Is based on how much effort was required to convince you of a particular POV? That should be something greater than zero, otherwise you're acting on faith not science. Should everyone require the exact same amount of evidence? And what about the situations where you believed something to be true but later found out you were wrong? Were you acting in bad faith all that time or were the people who were ultimate correct acting in bad faith until you agreed with them, at which point they were arguing in good faith? Bad faith actors exist but the bad faith label appears to be an overused and a lazy way of shutting down debate. Not everyone who was skeptical about the link between smoking and cancer worked for the tobacco companies or were addicted to smoking. How often are medicines we're told are safe taken off the market because it turns out they're not? Are people who were skeptical of that safety bad faith actors until they were proven correct? Why are there "scientific" subjects for which skepticism automatically bad faith? What is the criteria for being able to question the mainstream dogma and still be considered arguing in good faith? The people who proposed the possibility of a lab leak were not long ago considered to be arguing in bad faith. How did those arguments one day suddenly stop being bad faith arguments?

sjwalter 5y ago
> How did those arguments one day suddenly stop being bad faith arguments? I know you're asking this to demonstrate, but I'll answer anyways, because it's obvious: The elite who have very effectively captured the press, big tech, and the scientific institutions used their leverage to ensure that all such skepticism was "bad faith", even though it very clearly was not.
quotemstr 5y ago
> How do you determine someone is arguing in bad faith? You can tell when someone is arguing in bad faith by the fact that he disagrees with The Science. Duh. (I'm being sarcastic here, but that's what a frightening fraction of the population actually thinks.)