Category: General Discussion
-
Take Denialism 101
John Cook, of Skeptical Science fame, has created an online course through the University of Queensland and edX, on denialism and climate change. Easy to access and free to take, I found it simple to join from their facebook page, and if you don’t want to join you can still see the lectures from their…
-
NYT Helps in Typical Rape-victim Smearing
We should have predicted this when we discussed the UVa Rape story in Rolling Stone last week, it was just a matter of time before people would start suggesting the central figure in the story, Jackie, might be fabricating. I would be surprised if this response did not occur, because sadly it is so typical.…
-
New homebirth statistics show it's way too dangerous, and Mike Shermer on liberal denialism
Two links today for denialism blog readers, both are pretty thought provoking. The first, from Amy Tuteur, on the newly-released statistics on homebirth in Oregon. It seems that her crusade to have the midwives share their mortality data is justified, as when they were forced to release this data in Oregon, planned homebirth was about…
-
Talking Gun Control At Scienceblogs
Matt Springer has written a post Against the gun control that won’t work, and he correctly points out that previous gun control efforts have been little more than shameless demagoguery, including the totally-worthless assault weapons ban. People must understand that the previous major legislation the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was an atrociously-stupid piece…
-
Rebecca Watson's Skepticon talk is NOT an example of science denialism
I was recently pointed to this post by Edward Clint which purports to show Rebecca Watson using the 5 tactics of science denialism during her talk “How Girls Evolved to Shop” which was critical of evolutionary psychology at Skepticon. I watched her talk, found it entertaining, informative, wondered why I haven’t been invited to Skepticon,…
-
Tribalism, Cultural Cognition, Ideology, we're all talking about the same thing here
From Revkin I see yet another attempt to misunderstand the problem of communicating science vs anti-science. The author, Dan Kahan, summarizes his explanation for the science communication problem, as well as 4 other “not so good” explanations in this slide: He then describes “Identity-protective cognition” thus: Identity-protective cognition (a species of motivated reasoning) reflects the…
-
Scientific American addresses denialism in politics – says it jeopardizes democracy
Scientific American evaluates the candidates on their answers to Sciencedebate 2012 and evaluates ideology-based denialism as a whole: Today’s denial of inconvenient science comes from partisans on both ends of the political spectrum. Science denialism among Democrats tends to be motivated by unsupported suspicions of hidden dangers to health and the environment. Common examples include…
-
The Crackpot Caucus
Timothy Egan nails it, the Republican caucus is composed of crackpots and cranks. Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s…
-
Mooney now agrees with us – Denialists deserve ridicule, not debate
He had to realize Nisbett’s framing was worthless and write a whole book on defective Republican reasoning to realize it but it sounds like Chris Mooney has come around to the right way to confront denialism: The only solution, then, is to make organized climate denial simply beyond the pale. It has to be the…
-
Are Liberals really more likely to accept science than conservatives Part II?
About a month ago I asked if denialism is truly more frequent on the right or is it that the issues of the day are ones that are more likely to be targets of right wing denialism? After all, one can think of slightly more left wing sources of denialism like GMO paranoia, 9/11 conspiracies,…