Denialism

Category: Denialism

  • Deus ex machina

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    MarkH
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    Many of you were too busy trying to ace organic chemistry to know what a deus ex machina is. For those of you who managed to squeeze in a classics course, please stick with me anyway. Deus ex machina (“god from the machine”) is a literary device. In ancient Greek literature, a complicated dilemma was…

  • Compassion? You don’t KNOW compassion!

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    MarkH
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    We’ve often discussed the tactics favored by denialists, and prominent among these is the ad hominem attack. Physicians who speak out against quackery and speak up for science-based medicine are often often accused of lacking compassion. Orac wrote a little bit about the topic today. (OK, Orac never writes a “little bit” about anything, but…

  • Denialist award—Andrew Schlafly, Esq.

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    MarkH
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    I am giving out a previously non-existent award today to a truly great denialist. Andrew Schlafly, spawn of anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly and some long-forgotten sperm-donor (ironic, eh?), was not content just being the legal counsel to the uber-crank Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. No, he had to take it one step further, and clog…

  • One Year of Denialism Blog

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    MarkH
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    Today represents one year since we joined scienceblogs, and I think we’ve had a great deal of success in defining the problem of denialism, establishing a new vocabulary for dealing with the problem of pseudoscience, and establishing uniform standards for what is legitimate scientific discourse and debate. Our first post describes the problem of denialism,…

  • Huffington Post is a denialist website

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    MarkH
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    How else can you describe a site that regularly publishes David Kirby’s anti-vaccination denialism, Jennifer McCarthy’s insanity, and conspiracy theories from the like of Diedre Imus? The latest this weekend is the goalpost-moving from David Kirby, which based on the egregious misinterpretation of the Hannah Poling case, represents the new front of anti-vaccination denialists in…

  • Repeat after me: “Correlation does not imply causation”

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    MarkH
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    The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is one of the great weapons in the arsenal of denialists. The reason it works so well is it makes sense. As my readers know, my daughter is dealing with a nasty respiratory virus. One of the doctors told my wife, who is not a medical professional, that…

  • Psedonymity, anonymity, credibility, and the Overlords

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    MarkH
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    One of the hot topics around here lately is authority and anonymity. It’s a terribly difficult philosophical question—-how can you ever trust a source of information that is second hand? And yet ultimately we all are forced to do it most of the time. A potent weapon in the denialist arsenal is the fake expert.…

  • Authoritah! wars

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    MarkH
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    There has been a terribly pedantic interesting debate going on around here about the nature of authority in science. I won’t bore you with the origins of this debate. OK, maybe I will a little, but I’ll try to make this foray into meta-blogging interesting. First, blogging is not scientific writing as such. It isn’t…

  • Slate parses some crankery

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    MarkH
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    Slate has a series of three articles on what editor Daniel Engber refers to as “the paranoid style”. Starting with A crank’s progress, sliding into a review of Doubt is their product, and finishing with a spot-on review of Expelled he runs the guantlet of modern denialism. He also happens to hit upon the major…

  • Alternative medicne and the straight line to AIDS denialism

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    MarkH
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    In order to bring you your daily dose of science, the Great Seed Overlords must pay the bills. Like any other medium, one of the ways this is done is by selling ad space. Internet ad engines generally have some sort of algorithm that choses ads based on the page content, thereby targeting readers’ interests.…