David_Gerard comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 15 February 2011 02:22:00PM *  3 points [-]

In retrospect I became aware that my 'skepticism' was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same tecyhniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said "Our product is doubt".

RW has a three-way chart (tobacco, creationism, climate change) so you can learn to spot this sort of argument:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A_comparative_guide_to_science_denial

Work in progress, please feel free to extend.

Comment author: cousin_it 16 February 2011 03:33:07AM *  20 points [-]

Hmm. So if someday I find that some scientists make conclusions that don't follow and these conclusions are used to make harmful policy decisions, I must not point out that certain scientific problems are unsolved or gather other scientists to write petitions, because that would make me match the RW pattern of "denialist". Also apparently I must not say that correlation isn't causation, because that's "minimizing the relevance of statistical data".

Comment author: Alexandros 17 February 2011 08:58:11AM 3 points [-]

The question is: What else fits that pattern? Are there legitimate scientific movements that your filter catches?

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