by Plutor
In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum…:
[Via Respectful Insolence]
I realize that I’m possibly stepping into proverbial lion’s den with this one, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn’t like what Chris and Sheril had to say and has spent considerable verbiage trashing them (in particular Chris) wherever they’ve appeared promoting the book and getting in flame wars with Chris, who (foolishly, in my opinion)responded in kind. It became personal. Or maybe it was personal before the book was ever released. Of course, P.Z. wasn’t the only one who really, really didn’t like what Chris and Sheril had to say; almost overnight the science blogosphere in general and the science blogosphere in general appeared to become divided along the lines of those who agreed with Chris and Sheril’s thesis and those who were really, really hostile to it.
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Yes, Orac pulls a head-fake but provides a very good dissection of how denialists just do not seem to understand how science works and appear to hold onto myths long after they have been disproven.
When the myth is a supposed fake moon walk, no one is really hurt. When it is a vaccine, many in society can pay the price.
I guess this shows that denialism of science, of reality, when it is inconvenient for one’s personal beliefs is a human trait and not a conservative/liberal one.
A scientist actually likes being wrong (because we are so often!) because it often leads to the truth about Nature much more rapidly. Eliminating the possible means the real is arrived at faster. They are reality-based.
Denialists react to being wrong by hugging their myths even closer, by creating conspiracy theories of ever increasing complexity. As each theory is shown to be incorrect, they launch theories that are harder and harder to falsify.
As Orac mentions:
Yet, as I have explained time and time again, personal experience and anecdotes are inherently misleading. As Richard P. Feynman so famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.” That’s lesson number one in the scientific method, but those who are not steeped in doing science often find this warning hard to accept, even though the ease with which all humans–you, Ginger, and, yes, I–are fooled is the very reason science is necessary.
Humans often deal with the world by so-called ‘rules of thumb’ or heuristcs. It is often easier and safer to follow some of these than to actually think. Unfortunately, in a complex world, some of these rules of thumb are flat out wrong because our brains did not evolve to really deal with that problem. Math is one area where many rules of thumb are incorrect and higher orders of thought and reason need to be used.
A successful lottery is based on the inability of most people to understand the math of probability. No one makes consistent money at roulette, because it is an individual against a machine, and the odds favor the machine. But one can make a living playing cards. Professional poker players make money based on the inability of most people without significant training to properly understand the odds.
Scientific training provides us with similar advantages that untrained people do not have. It helps us learn how to more accurately identify our own bias and determine real evidence, not just what we hope to find. It provides us with a process to remove ourselves from the heuristics that can mislead us. It gives us reason, not feelings, in order to understand the world around us.
Few would go up against a card shark head-to-head without a lot of practice and training in order to understand the task at hand. Because they would lose a lot of money.
But denialists do this all the time with science. It can be, in fact, a lucrative field, one where people can parlay their views into book deals, think-tank positions, etc. There really is little negative payback for people who cater to denialist thought, who feed the incorrect heuristics used by many, many people
Remember, heuristics may be based upon hardwired connections. It can be tremendously difficult to alter them without a huge, directed effort. Logic, or other higher ordered thought processes, just do now easily work.
Using a more primitive, deeper hardwired approach can. Social pressures have been know to be effective. Ridicule could be used. It has reduced the Flat Earthers to a negligible group, as well as the Moon Walk deniers.
But it is a multiple-edged sword and one that can push back in harmful ways. Spending significant time and effort providing real training for each of these individuals might be useful for some but many would rebel against what they saw as ‘brainwashing.’
Denialists may just be a part of the landscape. Their thinking may be based on hardwired processes so altering the frame could just be impossible.
As a scientist, I can only believe that continuing to provide real facts that accurately describe the real world will eventually alter things for the better. Because I know for sure that denialists will never accomplish that.
Ultimately, denial of reality is a failure heuristic. It may not be as maladaptive as before (‘There is no lion there.’) but eventually its negative aspects will cause it to fail. It just may take a long, long time.
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Peter Aldhous has 
Anyone who has traveled out of the US has been told horror stories of the disgusting creatures that await them. Take a nice trip to Brazil for some sightseeing, for example, and you might find yourself at the mercy of a small, intracellular protozoan parasite of the genus Leishmania.
