We’re introducing a new section to the Daily Sceptic today: Reviews. (You can find it at the bottom of the right-hand menu.) We’re also publishing our first ever book review in which Bo Winegard, an American with a PhD in Psychology, writes about How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre. The problem with the book, as Bo explains, is that McIntyre’s understanding of science is naive and idealistic and bears little relation to how actual science is practised. Not only that, but nearly all the examples McIntyre gives are of right-wing science denialism, not left-wing science denialism. Here is an extract:
McIntrye begins by contending that “for a number of years it has been fairly clear – at least in the United States – that truth is under assault. Our fellow citizens don’t seem to listen to facts anymore” (p.xi), an observation which motivated his previous work such as Post-Truth. This is a common claim, of course, and one that I have almost certainly made myself, but it’s not at all clear that it is accurate. Is the truth more under assault now than it was during the Vietnam War? During the era of pushback to claims about a causal link between smoking and cancer? During the rise and temporary triumph of Freudian psychology? I’m sceptical. Probably the claim that truth is uniquely under assault is like the claim that Western Civilisation is collapsing: it feels true to every generation because there are always challenges to truth, to science, to civilisation.
And there are always challenges because science, like civilisation, is very unnatural. This doesn’t mean that it requires completely suppressing human proclivities and, as it were, reshaping the human mind. Rather, it means that it requires the appropriate (and historically rare) norms and institutions to flourish. Like a diligent landscaper, science guides and disciplines nature. And its fruits should be as astonishing as Kew Gardens or green lawns in the desert of Arizona. Like those miracles of human attention and ingenuity, science requires constant vigilance lest the jungle of human impulses overtake the truth with a thicket of myth, superstition, and ideologically useful flapdoodle. Put shortly, the truth is always under assault, not just by liars, charlatans, cranks, and millionaire profiteers, but by human nature. The hackneyed movie line that the real enemy is inside is appropriate because the struggle for science is mostly a struggle against innate emotions and biases. And the surprising thing is not that many people misunderstand, misrepresent, and opportunistically attack the truth, but rather that we care about the truth at all.
This is important because to understand ‘science denialism’, we have to understand science. And this is a major problem with McIntyre’s book. His understanding of science seems simplistic and unrealistically unambiguous. I should confess that I have not read his earlier book, The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience, so it is quite possible that he has a more sophisticated and nuanced view of science than I can discern from How to Talk to a Science Denier. But if so, then I wish he had made those views more obvious in this book. After all, if one is going to call a person a “science denier”, then one should be clear about what the person is denying.
Instead, readers can find only hints and intimations of what science actually is (and thus what a science denier is denying). For example: “In my earlier book, The Scientific Attitude, I had argued that the primary thing that separates science from nonscience is that scientists embrace an attitude of willingness to change their hypothesis if it does not fit with the evidence.” (p.10.) And: “But this is quite simply not how science works. Scientists do not merely look for support for what they hope to be true; they design tests that can show whether their hypothesis might be false.” (p.35.) And: “Scientific consensus is the gold standard for rational belief.” (p.137.)
It’s laudable, of course, to be humble, skeptical, and willing to change one’s mind, but I don’t think that embracing these qualities is the sine qua non of science. I’ve met quite a few practicing scientists, and I’d wager their propensity for dogmatism is about the same as anybody else’s. And in fact, many revered and consequential scientists were dogmatic, arrogant, and steadfastly (and even irrationally) committed to proving their own theories despite strong evidence to the contrary.
Worth reading in full.
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“McIntrye begins by contending that “for a number of years it has been fairly clear – at least in the United States – that truth is under assault. Our fellow citizens don’t seem to listen to facts anymore””
A characteristic view on the part of the elite leftist dogmatist, based on a characteristic error made by elite leftist dogmatists – mistaking the opinions of respectable (ie, well regarded by the aforementioned elites) scientists for “facts”, and even worse, mistaking speculations based on modelling for “facts”.
“Scientific consensus is the gold standard for rational belief.”
Of course, scientific consensus will usually remain within the dogmas and biases of the societal elite, because while science can be undertaken outwith those dogmas, it first struggles to get funding, and then finds it hard to get published and hard to get anything approaching a fair hearing. Scientists are human beings and members of society, and generally respond to social pressures as much as anyone else does.
So scientific consensus should be mistrusted more, the more it supports the established elite position on controversial issues. When there are issues that are taboo in a society (the political correctness issues in our society, and resisting coronapanic recently), scientists and scientific consensus absolutely cannot be trusted when it supports those taboos.
Taboos make respectable science dishonest and untrustworthy.
Another point to make is that no-one uses the “gold-standard” anymore.
It’s only been out of use a few decades, so even academics should know that by now.
For anyone who jolts at the phrase settled science…. watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAEAWyfuEWY
For Christ’s sake stop waffling on about your equally ill-informed alternative religious belief that all aberrations are ‘leftist’.
It’s another form of denial.
the marxist faithful have directly killed so many many, you have to wonder how anyone who sees anything in that charlatan cannot be seen s anything other than worse than deluded.
One day you might step up from ranting personal abuse to actual discussion. Then you might be worth taking seriously.
Until then try to recall the basics of civilised online discussion, that you have been informed of before here but seem too intellectually incontinent to manage to follow:
If you see an opinion you disagree with you have two civilised choices:
1 Ignore it
2 Engage it
Doing what you usually do when you encounter certain kinds of opinions that you particularly hate – the equivalent of calling the person a stupid poopoo head in as many ways as you can think up – does not count as either.
In other words, grow up.
Nutcase nonsense is ALWAYS leftist.
It’s the law.
Yes, I heard there was a degree of consensus about Piltdown Man at one time.
“Looking for some unique attitude or marker of science, in my view, is a bit like looking for the attitude or marker that distinguishes market capitalism from other economic systems. Science, like capitalism, is a real ‘thing’ (or process). We can talk about it usefully. But it is incredibly complicated and fuzzy and is not easily demarcated from other human activities. Furthermore, it is not distinguished by a particular, unique attitude, but rather by norms and institutional constraints. “
Nice parallel.
As Michael Crichton wrote:
“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.”
I’m not sure that consensus has much to do with “consensus”. Real observational science is not politics (or history for that matter).
Yikes – I shall never recover the minutes wasted reading through that!
On man made climate change, remind me again, what is it that makes trees green?
Chlorophyll – you didn’t think it was CO2 by any chance?
I knew as soon as I wrote that there’d be a smart a$$.
Yes, chlorophyll, but I’m pretty sure they like sun, rain and CO2
Absolutely true – within limits. Also many other things depending on the species.
But climate scientists don’t deny this.
The ones on which side? Or are you saying they all agree?
On this issue – yes. I challenge you to find a climate scientist who denies that plants need CO2.
Yes. But many Greenie “scientists” would rather stick needles in their eyes than admit that more CO2 and / or warmer temperatures undoubtedly have some benefits.
Yes, CO2 is plant-food, not pollution…
the “barometer” is used more in analogy than at home now but it does show that shows how the public can be hoodwinked, the 0.001% change in atmospheric content would have near zero change in temperature an be barely measurable using any barometer but you can predict temperature change using a barometer, something the “models” based on CO2 fail at.
Maybe temperature has something to do with how much atmosphere there is, and that means water vapour and that’s self limiting as clouds over the sea stop more water vapour .
I wonder why the “science” picked something that could be used to rent-seek upon all economic activity instead???
something the “models” based on CO2 fail at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zul0BuO8A
or you can go straight to the paper
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019GL085378
I’m not sure I agree with that. Nature will do what nature always does. Technology and engineering protects us from the nasty things that nature does to us.
The funny thing about those that shout ‘science-denier’ is that nearly all of the time they appear to be scientifically illiterate.
What we actually have is a cult of science. People believe in science like they believe in God — evidence and familiarity with the theory are not required; all that is needed is belief.
And of course, as in any religion, those that go against the orthodoxy are heretics and deserving of the punishment that comes, no matter what the logical/scientific rationale behind their position.
I actually have rather a lot of respect for the flat Earthers. They are, of course, wrong — but their position is sort-of reasonable. All they say is that they have no evidence for the Earth being a globe, and they’d like to have some. The response from the ‘cult of science’ is always that they should look at photos of the Earth from space, or the non-Euclidean geometry of the surface of the Earth over long distances, or of the way that the horizon shifts with viewing height on the sea, etc — but the members of ‘the cult of science’ will never actually have done any of those things — they are merely repeating mantras handed down by others. Now, those ‘flat Earthers’ might have taken things too far, in that they’re arguing against some rather sound evidence, but they started with the right approach — don’t just accept scientific statements without question, but try to understand the science behind the truth. It is those members of ‘the cult of science’ that are the problem, belittling those who question without actually having any understanding of the science themselves.
Of course, all this wouldn’t matter if the scientists in the background could be relied upon to be forthright about the situation. But they can’t. Through a mixture of scientific tyranny of those in senior position, dogma in those who follow and fear in those who might dissent, poor scientific theory is maintained even where evidence emerges that challenge the orthodoxy. Typically, science maintains the position until evidence against it becomes overwhelming, at which point science immediately changes position, and never again refers to the previous orthodoxy — the great example of this is Plate Tectonics, which is the new standard theory of the Earth’s surface, even though ‘science’ vilified its proponents for decades.
Science behaves far more like a religion than most people would accept. Once this is understood much of the nature of scientific progress becomes easier to understand.
I think flat Earth is fascinating – and I don’t care what anyone says – they have solid arguments based on the scientific method – observable, repeatable, measurable. Water, for example, sits flat and level. Water does not cling to balls. To accept that trillions of tonnes of water are held to a giant ball by an undetectable theoretical force of gravity is a stretch for me.
To believe in the cult of NASA is to be a willing fool. NASA is clearly, irrefutably and most definitely involved in fraud, occultism and criminality. The Apollo Lunar Lander for example is so amateurish – parts of it are literally made of paper and sellotape – NASA wants you to believe they got this thing to the Moon and back. You have to be completely brainwashed to believe in that and I have shown images of it to someone who is totally brainwashed about Covid etc and even in the face of such clear evidence that the Moon Lander is a fraud, he said he was 100% sure it had been to the Moon and back. Watch the vids below to see images of the Moon Lander and make up your own mind about that. I would be interested if people are willing to defend this piece of absolute garbage, cue MTF and the like – defending the indefensible.
Denis Rancourt who I will hasten to add has never mentioned flat Earth so this is not intended to associate him with it – did an interview where he said that NASA’s data is very dodgy.
Here are a couple of links about the Moon Lander, so people can see how unbelievably ridiculous it is. I don’t put blind faith in proven liars, and NASA are proven liars.
My view is this – this is unsettled science. All I want is for it to be proven either way by agencies of intregrity. The problem is we don’t have any. We have a world controlled by criminals, liars, deceivers and occultists. Therein lies the problem. Event Covid has exposed them as such.
If you believe in NASA, you have to believe in this piece of shit. You can’t have it both ways.
Moon Lander Fabrication Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6vAiyUIQog
NASA’s Laughable Apollo Lunar Lander
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDbUgd3MWSI
Eva Bartlett’s Interview With Prof. Denis Rancourt (7 July 2021)
https://www.bitchute.com/video/1g9ThqKgw2cG/
The downvoters believe this went to the Moon. It’s hilarious how cognitive dissonance works. Official NASA image of the Lunar Lander>>>
I’ve been a lookout post for the German navy in the past and I assure that the mast heads of ships become visible on the horizon before the lower parts of the hull.
Stimmt
A nice, interesting piece, with some very good observations, but I think constrained by a rather superficial approach in some of the key areas.
“I suspect, for example, that my view of denialism (not a term I like, but one I will use for this review) is quite different from Lee McIntyre’s and Mark and Chris Hoofnagle’s.”
Denial is a hugely problematic term, and almost invariably is used merely to try to silence dissent. I am a denial denier, perhaps, because I almost only ever see it used for abusive ends.
Winegard’s overcredulity with regard to it as a concept is illustrated by his implicit acceptance here that it should apply to “climate change denial”.
But criticism of “denial”, where it has any substance and is not just smearing, is only criticism of particular tactics used by those arguing a case, not legitimately of the overall position, and many of the cases that are regarded as “scientific consensus” are frequently pushed using exactly the same bad or dishonest techniques. See the pushing of covid panic to see that in operation. And in many cases it is very much open to dispute whether even a tactic is “denial” or not. “Models” are routinely misrepresented as far more significant than they should be, in particular in areas such as covid and climate alarmism which fundamentally have no other real bases, and those who correctly question the credibility of these models are routinely accused of “denial”, when in fact they are being legitimately sceptical.
It is inherently problematic therefore to talk of “denialism” and apply the label “denial” to entire categories of opinion.
I agree with Mark but am a little surprised that no-one discusses the origin of the abusive term ‘denier’ in the context of Climate Science.
Maybe not the originator of the use of ‘Climate Deniers’ to insult those with other well grounded scientific opinions, but certainly the main early promoter of the term, was James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Scientists. Clearly a scientist (albeit one who eventually left NASA to become a full time “Activist”). Hansen also coined the terms “Death Trains” for coal trains, heading towards “Death Factories” (or Coal Power Stations.) This, I suggest, puts the ‘denier’ term into context.
Some may accept this use of language but I do find it unnecessarily offensive, especially when used to insult those scientists like ‘Richard Siegmund Lindzen [] an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.’ (Wiki) who happens to be Jewish.
Hansen was also the ‘star turn’ in Sen.Timothy Wirth’s US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, 23 June 1988 which is often taken as the start of the climate scare. The GWPF published an interesting and balanced paper 30 years after Hansen’s testimony. In fairness to Hansen, he has rejected the so-called “Paris Agreement” of 2015, not least because it permits India & China (both nuclear powers with space programmes) to effectively produce as much CO2 as they want. And he has correctly pointed out that “Renewable Energy” is virtually useless, if lower CO2 is desireable and that nuclear energy at least works.
The other point I don’t see mentioned, is the fact that this is far from the first attempt to conflate climate crisis scepticism with crackpot theories like ‘flat earth’ and ‘fake moon landing’. The leaders in this niche field are, of course Stephen Lewandowski, ex University of Western Australia, now Bristol University Chair in Cognitive Psychology in the School of Experimental Psychology and John Cook of “Skeptical Science”, a cartoonist with a penchant for dressing up in SS gear.
I’m afraid I find neither Lewandowski nor Lee McIntyre are even remotely persuasive of anything other that venality and charlatanism. Interested readers can find much more information online, especially if (as usual) the first two or three dozen links thrown up by Google are ignored.
“Scientists do not merely look for support for what they hope to be true; they design tests that can show whether their hypothesis might be false.”
Indeed – a poor grasp of how Popperian method works, which requires a hypothesis to have a required level of probability for it to stand.
That’s ‘rigour’ – not waffling nebulously when your ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny.
In the case of vaccines, we now have the absurd situation where the search for convincing probabilistic evidence was simply abandoned because the hurdle was too high!
Indeed – a poor grasp of how Popperian method works, which requires a hypothesis to have a required level of probability for it to stand.
Can you enlarge on this or give a reference? I have always thought that Popper advocated adopting the most improbable theory that was not falsified. see https://www.jstor.org/stable/3748472
In any case, these days few scientists would regard as being right about the scientific method.
This guy Lee McIntyres has a PhD in the “Philosophy of Social Sciences”. Whatever that is. So a guy who writes about the “Philosophy” of Sociology and such like which have been basically little more than Marxist pseudo-sciences for the last five decades.
McIntyres qualifications to write about real science, the hard sciences, are about the same as an astrologer with intellectual pretensions to write on the philosophical foundations of theoretical astrophysics.
So another academic charlatan. A politically motivate left wing polemicist masquerading as a disinterested scholar.
The author is not talking science he is talking ad hominem. It is not about scientific issues it about the “bad people” who question the technocracy. It is the standard “quack-busting” technique promoted by James Randi and his followers over many years.
Bo Winegard is not laying all his cards on the table. First, he says this:
he [the author of the book under review] focuses almost exclusively on anti-GMO attitudes and completely ignores what, in my view, is the biggest and most consequential domain of leftwing denialism: human variation, especially in socially important traits such as cognitive ability and criminality
He later makes a reference to “sex differences and population differences” as areas of legitimate scientific inquiry. What he is referring to, rather crypticaly, is race-based “science”, promoting theories of racial differences in intelligence and propensity to criminal behavior. He has written on this topic himself; see On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism.
While I am thoroughly in sympathy with the view that the dominant narrative around Covid-19 is in many ways a form of science denialism, it is clear that Winegard has a rather different agenda. When he gives an example of someone being maligned or silenced because of their scientific views, who does he pick? Not a thoroughly reputable scientist like Sunetra Gupta, but “prominent intellectual” Jordan Peterson – a second-rate hack and utterly shallow thinker.
Just testing the Comment function.
Most, if not all of the science that people are taught in school is over simplified and out of date. Even if it wasn’t there is no way to really know if it is true or not. Our theories just fit the observable facts and allow us to make predictions about the future.
Religion, dominant ideology? Call it what you will but even science as we are taught it is nothing like “the science” that has been peddled in recent months.
The ideas are hardly new – the best book written about the way science does not progress so much as be promoted is Feyerabend’s ‘Against Method’ – basically that anything goes in science if you can sell it hard enough – of course he was vilified for years – Popper’s falsification might be the basis for independent research and theory but reality is patently different ( pun intended). Khun’s shifting paradigms are closer to reality I believe but you need to look carefully as his theories shift as well – closer to anarchy I believe – This review and the book strike me as glib given that anything goes is pretty much the overt reality these days,