There’s a great article over at the BBC, about what happens when you give the climate change denialists a chance to present their side of the argument. You get
The sum total of evidence obtained through this open invitation, then, is one first-hand claim of bias in scientific journals, not backed up by documentary evidence; and three second-hand claims, two well-known and one that the scientist in question does not consider evidence of anti-skeptic feeling.
While I’m not surprised that these people complete failed to back up their claims of systemic bias in the scientific community, I don’t share Mark’s view that the whole exercise was a waste of time. Sure, we knew they wouldn’t come up with the goods, but it’s worth doing the legwork to prove that to the public at large, especially if you can get that result published on a hugely popular site like the BBC.
Also, if someone goes through these motions every once in a while, then it gives the denialists less scope to claim they’re being oppressed. Of course they won’t stop; they’ll just claim that this a piece of establishment propaganda, but for every article like this that is published, the public at large will be less inclined to give those claims credence.
A little while ago, I indulgently fisked an idiot commenter at the Guardian, and in doing so outlined my reluctance to resort to such tactics:
I try to avoid fisking because it makes me feel nit-picky; I’d rather address the substance of someone’s argument or position, than hope that knocking enough little holes in it will have the same effect.
The other thing I should have said, of course, is that it’s basically an argument of the gaps. That is, shredding someone else’s position doesn’t necessarily make me right; why waste time showing the flaws in someone else’s argument, when I could be explaining and promoting my own position?
Aside from the obvious reasons above, Denialism has reported on some new research that introduces an interesting angle. The research isn’t directly about the practice of fisking, but it applies, I think:
When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.
Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.
So, all those rational blogs out there, whenever they quote old crank canards, in order to shred them in the next paragraph, might actually be re-enforcing belief in those lies in their target audience? That’s a pretty big deal if it’s true, and it might force a lot of bloggers to change the whole way they present their arguments.
Of course, the research is not widely applicable; it deals specifically with widely held, and often repeated myths, rather than the sort of totally out-there crankery that occasionally surfaces on the internet. So, I’d guess we’re still fine to quote some crank claiming that we all go through a balloon animal phase during early development, but we might want to think twice when we’re opposing some other crank arguing that Darwinism leads to Nazism, or that the American founding fathers were all practising, mainstream Christians.
It’s worth bearing in mind, at any rate.
I want to link to this article on the ethics of stem cell research from the excellent Denialism blog for a few reasons; it’s well written, it’s topical, I agree with it entirely, but most importantly it’s relevant to an argument I had a with a good friend on the train a couple of weeks ago, and I and only wish I’d got my point across nearly so effectively.
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