Tag: denialism
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Bill Maher is an astonishingly anti-science anti-vax crank
This week’s Realtime with Bill Maher was just about the most perfect example I’ve seen yet that maybe reality doesn’t have a liberal bias. Due to the measles outbreak becoming a hot-button issue, and the realization that his smoldering anti-vaccine denialism would not go over well, our weekly debate host decided to instead unleash all…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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The Heartland Documents, Doubt is their Product
Everyone is writing about desmogblog’s leak of internal documents from the Heartland Institute. But to me I think leaked documents are nothing compared to their fully public, out-in-the-open history of being openly contemptuous of science, funding cranks with advanced degrees (though not in climate) to disparage the field, and their hosting of denialpalooza. James rightly…
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Are liberals really more likely to accept science than conservatives?
Today’s NYT has Thomas Edsall’s What the Left Get’s Right, the follow up piece to last week’s What the Right Get’s Right, and what’s fascinating is how even conservative commentators think liberals get science right more often than conservatives. Or at least they are less likely to view it ideologically: A few conservative concessions to…
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In case you missed it, some denialism mentions of note
Being inactive for the last couple of years I still read about denialism being mentioned in some interesting places. Two in particular I thought I share. Peter Gleick in Forbes write on “The Rise and Fall of Climate Change Denial is interesting largely because it’s in Forbes. And predictably, for publishing in a right-wing magazine,…
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Duesberg Strikes a blow for HIV/AIDS denialism
When Duesberg was recently given space in Scientific American I think the blogosphere was rightly chagrinned that they would give space to a crank whose crackpot ideas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. But it seemed at the time he had been keeping his denialism on the down low,…
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Denialism in the Literature
It’s good news though! A description of the tactics and appropriate response to denialism was published in the European Journal of Public Health by authors Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee. It’s entitled “Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?” and I think it does an excellent job explaining the harms of deniailsm, critical…