“Denialism is not Skepticism”

Yet more propaganda about “The Science”

This won’t be a long post, but I want to draw your attention to the following article, which isn’t disturbing at all.

Two Tactics Effectively Limit the Spread of Science Denialism

What have we come to that the scientific community and the media are throwing around words like “denialist”? This seems entirely unscientific and unobjective.

The two tactics are listed as “Arguing can Help” and, strangely, “Better to Cancel than to Debate.” The particular “contentious scientific issues” mentioned are vaccines, global warming (I thought we were calling it climate change now?), and evolution, but that’s not super important. Oh boy. Let’s get into it.

Schmid and Betsch gathered some participants and asked them about their attitudes toward vaccines and intention to vaccinate and then played them two different vaccine denialism arguments. One group of the participants then listened to a topic rebuttal delivered by a science advocate, another to a technique rebuttal, and a third group to a combined topic and technique rebuttal. A fourth group had no rebuttal (although they did have a debrief at the end of the experiment). Afterward, participants were asked again about their attitudes and intentions.

Dismayingly, exposure to the denialist arguments had an overall negative impact on attitudes and intentions, regardless of the rebuttals the participants heard. But the rebuttals did successfully mitigate this negative impact.

[…]

The results did vary somewhat. In particular, the experiment that focused on climate change found that neither topic nor technique rebuttals resulted in a significant difference from no rebuttal. But when the results of all six experiments were combined to create a larger, more-powerful data set, the overall picture was that both topic and technique rebuttals worked equivalently well. The researchers also discovered that the combined rebuttals had no additional benefit.

In other words, it's effective to either present audience with accurate facts or describe the rhetorical techniques that had been used to spread misinformation.

Question: How does one qualify for a position as “science advocate”? Asking for a friend. I don’t know what to say about this, because it just seems like so much nonsense.

Regarding “cancelling”:

It’s difficult to know how these results might translate to the long term—attitudes. Intentions aren’t perfect measures of people’s beliefs, and these studies can’t say whether the effects of the rebuttals would wear off over time. Still, rebutting in the context of a debate is just one small segment of what ideally needs to be a “multilayered defense system,” writes Sander van der Linden in a commentary on the research. Research into “cognitive vaccines” suggests that teaching people how to spot misinformation before it occurs holds a lot of promise, and it’s possible that rebuttals could be more effective in an “inoculated” audience, suggest Schmid and Betsch.

But one thing seems clear: it could be better to turn up and debate a denialist than to stay away, a tactic that is sometimes advocated out of fear of legitimizing the denialism. There’s an important exception to this, though: “if the advocate’s refusal to take part in a debate about scientific facts leads to its cancellation,” the researchers write, “this outcome should be preferred.” No amount of rebuttal can make up for exposure to misinformation.

No amount of rebuttal can make up for the exposure to misinformation. Wow. Just wow. If that isn’t an explicit call for censorship, I don’t know what is.

This might be a good time to remind ourselves of the concept of Lysenkoism, a political campaign in the former Soviet Union that went so far as to imprison and even execute dissenters. I won’t say much about this; let it marinate. From Wikipedia:

Lysenkoism (Russian: Лысенковщина, romanized: Lysenkovshchina, IPA: [lɨˈsɛnkəfɕːʲɪnə]; Ukrainian: лисенківщина, romanized: lysenkivščyna, IPA:[lɪˈsɛnkiu̯ʃtʃɪnɐ]) was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting.

More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.

Something that continually troubles me is the absolute hubris of the scientific establishment and the media to assume that we are somehow at the apex of knowledge right now and that we can’t possibly be wrong, when the entire history of science is essentially a litany of things we believed to be true that later turned out not to be true. Why should the present day be any different? Why would we presume that new, more timely, more accurate knowledge won’t come along later on, as has been true throughout history?

I’m not even sure how to wrap this up except to say that I’m sad to say that I’m not surprised that it’s come to this. There is no longer any pretension to scientific impartiality at all; those that keep the gates decide what is “science.” But we should all be very disturbed that ideas like this are getting such a wide audience.

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