

Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth - rubinelli
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627606.100-living-in-denial-why-sensible-people-reject-the-truth.html?full=true&print=true

======
thaumaturgy
There is one other commonality amongst "deniers" that NewScientist missed, and
it's one that's especially prevalent on sites like HackerNews and Reddit.
Let's call it "transference of expertise".

That is, you get a group of self-described experts together, and then ask them
to critically analyze some aspect of a field in which they have no expertise
at all, and they'll attempt to apply their expertise in the unrelated field.

For example, "I am a programmer, so I understand systems, and everything is a
system..." Well, yes, but only in the most superfluous way: that a "system" is
a network of causes and effects. Otherwise, programming has very little to do
with, say, quantum mechanics, or with global ecology.

This even happens between sub-fields of expertise; I happen to personally know
more physicists than the average person, and they have the same tendency to
try to apply their expertise in one particular sub-field of physics to some
other field in which they have no specific knowledge.

For yet another example, there's Zed Shaw's "Programmers need to learn
statistics or I will fucking kill them" article from sometime back. There you
have a field that is only slightly mathematical in nature, and because of
that, many of the people with enough expertise in it believe that they know
"enough" math. Except, they don't.

It seems to be terribly hard for someone who is an expert at anything to admit
that they aren't an expert at everything.

~~~
MichaelSalib
Yet another example is the Salem Conjecture which notes that a large fraction
of creationists with advanced degrees are engineers. Obviously, if you
understand differential equations and studied heat transfer, you're perfectly
well equipped to assess genomics and microphysiology!

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis>

~~~
DilipJ
The engineers in question are probably Chemical Engineers. If my college
experience was any indication, Chem Engineers are some of the most right-wing
people you'll ever meet. I guess it's because a lot of them go into the
petroleum industry, and since they don't want to bite the hands that feed
them, they end up swallowing the entire conservative ideology (including
skepticism towards evolution).

~~~
starkfist
I've worked with loads of highly religious Christians, Jews and Muslims in web
startups, both in the Bay Area and NYC.

Chem Engineers are right-wing, though. Just wanted to point out that it's not
just them...

------
wooster
On the flip side, painting critics with the "denialists" label is an easy way
to deflect valid criticism.

In the H1N1 case, there are a lot of critics claiming:

* Press about H1N1 caused a shortage of seasonal flu vaccines. [0]

* H1N1 vaccine supplies were limited during the period leading up to flu season. [1]

* H1N1 vaccine production was not ramped up quickly enough. [1]

* H1N1 vaccine was oversupplied after the 2009/10 flu season, leaving public health agencies with massive surpluses. [2]

So, given that public health agencies massively overstocked their supplies
after they could do any good, it's easy to see why politicians might be angry.
With oversupply in Germany alone at €53.3 million worth of vaccine [2], a
valid concern might be that if there was in fact corporate influence over the
WHO decision to declare H1N1 a pandemic, then that would call their
credibility into question [3]. Another concern might be that given the supply
issues, the world is not able to effectively respond in time to a flu
pandemic.

Rather than addressing those issues, it's a lot easier to paint critics as
denialists.

Or, it could just be that they're wackos.

Whatever.

[0] <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/05flu.html>

[1] [http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-
incr...](http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Health/h1n1-vaccine-deliveries-increase-
manufacturers/story?id=9057889)

[2] <http://www.thelocal.de/national/20100507-27035.html>

[3] <http://www.ihsglobalinsight.com/SDA/SDADetail18082.htm>

~~~
mistermann
Agreed.

From the first paragraph of the article: "Never mind that the flu fulfilled
every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that
declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of
obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now
doing the rounds even in educated circles."

"that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic"

>> WHO officials have always stressed that global spread, not severity of
disease, defines a pandemic. [My comment: so we're not worried about risk or
danger, just spread. Not to mention that this defenition was recently
changed.]

"that thousands died"

>> Tens thousands of people die from the common flu (amongst other things)
every year.

"that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering"

>> Really??? Canada _alone_ (population ~ 30 million) spent several billion (I
don't have the exact number) on vaccine specifically for H1N1...do the math
globally.

I wonder if, according to the article's author, profiteering is actually
_possible_ , under any circumstances? How many billions have to be spent
before it is considered profiteering?

"Thousands died..."

>> WOW!!!!....THOUSANDS.....killed, by flu!!! Unprecedented! (if you ignore
every single year for the last how many thousand years????)

I mean, how disingenuous can you get?

------
jackfoxy
I only skimmed this article, NS is not one of my favorite publications, and
publishing an article about "denialism" on a site ostensibly devoted to
science journalism does not raise its stature with me. I did find this little
gem about halfway into the article "... denial finds its most fertile ground
in areas where the science must be taken on trust".

I have enough education to follow most scientific arguments at some level. I
don't have enough higher math to follow string theory, for instance, but I can
understand pandemics, one of the prime examples in the article. When science
relies on trust, is it still science? I'm also bothered that this article
seems to lump anyone on the "wrong" side of a scientific debate as a
"denialist".

~~~
scott_s
_Science_ doesn't rely on trust. But for those that consume the result of
science, it sometimes does rely on trust of the scientific method and the
scientists themselves.

The example given in the article is a good one: we can observe antibiotics in
action, so we don't need to trust anyone that they work. We can observe people
get better on them. But with vaccines, the point is to not get sick in the
first place. Most individuals will never have the opportunity to observe that
they work since they are preventative. Again, the science itself does not rely
on trust. It's the non-scientists who must trust something they will likely
never observe themselves.

~~~
a-priori
To misquote Churchill: "Science is the worst form of learning about the world
except for all those others that have been tried."

Science isn't perfect. Far from it. But at it's best it's a very effective way
of learning about the world we live in. At its worst, it's still better than
any alternatives we've found so far.

------
mynameishere
Replace the word "denialist" with "skeptic" and you have a semantically
identical but implicitly reversed rant. _Why are people so skeptical? Because
they quite sensibly question dictates from
institutions/corporations/government bodies/etc which demonstrably do not
always have the public's interests at heart_. Etc, etc. Any time you hear
somebody loading up and firing slur after slur after slur after slur, it's
best to look for a different rant.

Do vaccines cause autism? Apparently not. But, you know, it is possible and as
long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens, we are probably
wise to consider possible negative effects. It's not "denialist".

~~~
CodeMage
Regardless of the article itself, what do you call it when people persist in
believing in the alleged link between MMR vaccine and autism, after the link
has been thoroughly debunked? To paraphrase one of my favorite writers, those
people have their feet wet and can see the pyramids really well, 'cause
they're standing knee-deep in De Nile.

~~~
mistermann
"after the link has been thoroughly debunked?"

If a relationship between a vaccination and a negative reaction cannot be
definitively __confirmed __, then it does not show up in the statistics...in
case you actually are interested in the truth.

There is a website somewhere that tracks all of this, but my question is, why
wouldn't the official people already involved track fucking everything? It
costs exactly zero over and above what they are doing now, so why exclude it?

This is where the conspiracy theories come from. You have the means and budget
to track everything, but you don't. My question is: why? Combine that with
some weird stories I hear, and the fact that it is _free_ for you to counter
them with data, but you don't, and there you go, a conspiracy theory.

~~~
CodeMage
_why wouldn't the official people already involved track fucking everything?
It costs exactly zero over and above what they are doing now, so why exclude
it?_

I'm not really sure who are those "official people already involved", but what
I would _really_ like to know is how you're so sure that "it costs exactly
zero and above what they are doing now" to track "fucking everything"?

First, let's go with the simple thing: _how_ this tracking is supposed to be
done. I'm just extrapolating here, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I've had no doctor follow my kid around after vaccination 24/7 to monitor
whether he's suddenly developed a symptom, so I suppose it's not by direct
observation. Therefore, it must depend on some doctor connecting the dots
("oh, so you vaccinated your kid 3 months ago and now he has X?") and
reporting it to some tracking body.

Which leads me to the next issue. To put it like you did: how the fuck do you
track "fucking everything"? I can understand that the doctors would be
informed about a suspected link between A and B and would therefore report any
cases of A and B happening "together", where "together" is defined as a
parameter of this suspected link. But for that, you need to at least suspect
that there's a link between A and B.

Maybe I'm too naive, but to me it stands to reason that tracking "fucking
everything" does not cost "zero", because otherwise someone would have been
doing it already. Whenever someone claims that it would be easy to do
something someone's not doing already, I remember Yegge's post "Have you ever
legalized marijuana?": [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-
legali...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-
marijuana.html)

 _Combine that with some weird stories I hear, and the fact that it is free
for you to counter them with data, but you don't, and there you go, a
conspiracy theory._

Okay. Here's how that reads: "I hear _stories_ from people and nobody seems to
counter that with _data_ , so I choose to believe in a conspiracy. Especially
because I believe it would be 'free' to come up with data."

 _...in case you actually are interested in the truth._

In case _you_ are, here's a dose of it:
<http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html>

~~~
mistermann
This: ("oh, so you vaccinated your kid 3 months ago and now he has X?") and
reporting it to some tracking body.

Why is this not done? Doesn't that seem a bit odd?

And yes, I was exaggerating, it wouldn't be free. But it could be done for
very little cost.

~~~
CodeMage
Okay, I see the message is not getting through. What makes you claim it could
be done for very little cost? I mean, I don't work in the medical field, so I
don't have any insider information on the existing infrastructure. If you have
some -- or any other argument to support your claim, for that matter -- please
share.

For example, what tracking body would the doctors report to? Is it CDC? If so,
will existing staff take on their new duties, meaning that they will now have
less time for other duties? Or will they have to hire new staff for that? If
not CDC, which organization? Who pays their wages? How to disseminate
information (to all doctors) on what to report to the tracking body? Do
doctors now have a legal duty to inform themselves? Or is it someone else's
duty to inform the doctors? Can I sue for malpractice if my doctor doesn't
report? Or is it voluntary for doctors to report? What channels do they have
for reporting: phone, Internet, some other? Who will pay for establishing
those channels? I could go on, but there should be no need to, hopefully.

------
tlack
I'm on the fence on this one. I think it is very very dangerous to blindly
trust Perfect Science as we've seen with ClimateGate. Scientists are of course
humans, and all humans are prone to competitiveness, greed, and deception.
Science is fallible. On the flip, though, I become very nervous when I think
about what happens when public perception of scientific truth begins to
erode..

~~~
alsomike
But isn't it strange that many climate deniers are skeptical of global
warming, yet have total faith in a much more implausible idea: a coordinated
group of scientists are systematically suppressing dissent to further their
ideology.

~~~
brc
I don't deny the climate. It exists, I can see that out the window.

I don't deny that the climate has gotten warmer on trend for the last 150
years.

I don't deny that humans have increased the c02 concentration through the
activities of forestry clearing and fossil fuel burning.

I am skeptical of the proven link between c02 and large temperature rises.

I am extremely skeptical of the climate models developed.

I am extremely skeptical of the climate alarmism promoted through science and
quasi-science publications, and on through the regular media. People have made
these predictions for 30 years, and not one has come close to being true.

I am extremely skeptical that the current costs associated with ineffective
present-day solutions (cap & trade, carbon tax, wind power etc) are going to
be less than long-term adaption if climate change proves to be a problem.

Yet, for most of the climate change cheer squad, I am filthy denier who
probably believes that cigarettes don't cause cancer and who probably doesn't
believe in evolution.

The blanket 'with us or against us' attitude developed by many is the worst
thing : denying criticism or outright rejection of alternative views is the
worst kind of denial.

Solid scientific concepts don't need to be packaged, managed and sold to the
public.

~~~
brazzy
_Solid scientific concepts don't need to be packaged, managed and sold to the
public._

Many people understandably belive that they do need that when such concepts
are opposed by well funded industry lobby groups _and_ everyone's preference
for not having to change their lifestyle.

~~~
brc
Please, enough with the well funded industry lobby groups line. I'm sure you
can come up with better arguments that this talking-point line which has no
basis in truth.

There is no evidence, none, that there is a well funded industry lobby group
in operation. The large mass of skeptical enquiry into climate science is done
by amateurs and/or people with tenure in universities. It is done on low-rent
blogs and in pay-per-visit speaking tours, and all done on a comparative
shoestring. I remember reading an article somewhere that breathlessly revealed
that a climate skeptic had been paid $100,000 for a speaking tour to spread
the no global warming line. $100,000 is a drop in the bucket, an absolutely
meaningless figure. This was the best they could come up with, when it's quite
simple to see, say, $1.4 million dollars being spent to explore the link
between malaria and climate change when there have been plenty of scientific
papers to say there's no link at all, or such a small link it is drowned out
by the noise.

Compared against the billions spent by governments, NGOs, lobby groups, and
yes, oil companies, to promote climate alarmism, it is an ocean compared to
the bits and pieces of fuding that well known sceptics. You've only got to
compare the heartland institute's climate seminar in chicago - a two bit
affair, to the grandiose climate-alarmism conferences in Indonesia,
Copenhagen, and later this year, Cancun to really see the difference.

I will agree with you that nobody wants to change their lifestyle, and that is
a major problem for the adoption of policies. But then, in democracies, the
burden of proof lies with the person proposing the changes, and they should be
self evident. This is a sup-optimal solution, no doubt, by the inertia
involved means that it prevents making too many mistakes. If all of the
various scare campaigns of the last 100 years were all enacted straight away,
we'd have seen millions of human lives, and billions of man-years of effort
wasted making the planet a worse-off place.

By all means continue to argue to your passion, but I would advise coming up
with a new meme over the 'industry funded lobby groups' one.

~~~
brazzy
Actually, the 'industry funded lobby groups' are very much a well-documented
truth:

[http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-
and-e...](http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-
energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries-secretly-fund)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore%27s_Penguin_Army_video_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore%27s_Penguin_Army_video_controversy)

[http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/local_govtpolit...](http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/local/local_govtpolitics/article/letters_sent_to_perriello_called_fakes._area_advocates_names_forged_by_d.c./43439/)

[http://www.businessgreen.com/business-
green/news/2247933/gre...](http://www.businessgreen.com/business-
green/news/2247933/greenpeace-uncovers-astroturf)

~~~
brc
You've made my point - absolute drops in a bucket.

Your links contain: -6 forged letters to a congressman -a youtube spoof of Al
Gore -lobby group organizing political rallies (up to 1100 people!) -$24
million from Koch's company (link to the greenpeace site, really?)

Again, against the tide of NGO and Government money spent to promote alarmism,
it's like a water pistol against a firehose.

If this is the best evidence available, it's a very weak case. If the industry
funded lobby groups have managed to sway the opinion of the voting public
against climate charge alarmism, then they have gotten very good value for
money.

~~~
brazzy
Can you give numbers to substantiate that "tide of NGO and Government money
spent to promote alarmism"? Note that this cannot include money spent on
measures against climate change, since that's a different matter.

How much money was spend on pure PR to "promote alarmism"?

And yes, industry lobbyism is widely known to give extremely good value for
money (especially when, as mentioned before, its aims line up with what the
voting public wants to believe out of convenience). That's why there is so
much of it.

------
devinj
The Junk Science site is scary, because it's so _close_ to the truth. You
really shouldn't take "may" or "possibly" as a statement of fact, and it's
_true_ that statistics can be used to manipulate facts and present false
ideas. And yet much of the site is about denying ("debunking") real science,
not pseudoscience.

~~~
foldr
I think this underlines the fact that distinguishing "real" science from
psuedoscience is a matter of professional judgment. It's not enough just to be
a reasonable person who knows _modus ponens_ and some statistics. To
distinguish good physics from bad physics, you need extensive training as a
physicist (and likewise for any other science).

This is unfortunate, because it means that independent scrutiny of science is
extremely difficult. Virtually no-one outside a particular scientific
community is competent to evaluate the quality of the work within that
community. An argument that seems obviously flawed to an outsider can seem
compelling to someone who has the relevant background knowledge.

It would be nice if there were some kind of solution to this problem, but I
doubt that there is.

------
ffff
As a non-scientist but one who takes their work seriously, I am still often in
denial is because so much of the work in statistical validation seems to be
trying to compress a multidimensional model to fit on a one dimensional scale
that, even using accepted/established methods, always gives you a very flat
understanding of the topic at hand.

Even those working most closely with the data sometimes seem somehow unable to
present anything beyond the oversimplified model, but are dying to even take
further than one dimensional and draw a line so they have a false dichotomy so
they can paint things black and white.

This is practiced on both sides making results inherently useless despite
scientific techniques and credentials of the researchers.

And so, for example, neither side in the climate change debate provides the
public with anything remotely resembling a model they can develop faith in by
subjecting it to reasonable scrutiny or trying to decide whether it smells
right based upon ongoing critical analysis.

------
gord
I think its due to conditioning and the inertia of the surrounding
environment.

Many [most?] smart people work 9 to 5 even though this clogs the roads at
those times, so is optimally bad resource usage.

Even more so for religion or political affiliations, due to social circle.

It might be a rational response - the cost associated with overcoming these
environmental factors is high, they are at a local minimum ?

------
stcredzero
So, the price of progress in a free society is the suffering of misguided
human beings?

If one has been born as a laboratory rat, it's a really good idea to find
oneself in the _control group_. Likewise, while it might be dandy to be the
misunderstood genius, the odds are that one is instead the deluded fool. Don't
be the deluded fool.

Education tends to mitigate this.

------
lionhearted
> There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco
> research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu.

One thing that seems strange to me - whenever there's one of these pan-denier
arguments, the arguer tends to choose topics that the Starbucks crowd would
agree with, and nothing that the Starbucks crowd might deny in the face of
evidence.

For instance, we know really firmly that there's a larger standard deviation
in intelligence and success in men than women - men are overrepresented at the
top and the bottom. That is, men reach the highest levels of business,
science, and leadership more often than women, but also are victims of
homicide, suicide, and are incarcerated more often than women. This is
thoroughly proven, but even at Harvard the university president lost his job
for saying something like this!

So how come these "look at these idiot deniers!" arguments never look at
denial of the fact that men and women have a different hormonal mix, different
cognitive mix, and that leads to different patterns of behavior and results. I
mean, that's so bloody obvious just from a casual observation of the world,
but it's now also proven, at least to a much higher standard than global
warming is.

Or hell, the New Scientist article uses evolution/creationism - yet a lot of
people who believe in evolution reject the fact that natural selection and
sexual selection would make groups evolving in different circumstances evolve
differently... that comes hand-in-hand with evolution, but people are often
deniers about that, thinking that everyone evolved to be the same in all
meaningful ways, and any differences in wealth, aggression, preferred
behavior, even musical ability must be due to culture. Which is obviously
nonsense - but this kind of denial of something obvious is never mentioned in
a pan-denier argument, it's always a bunch of mostly proven things with a
vocal, ignorant minority, plus global warming.

~~~
moultano
This seems like an interesting proposition to me. Are there true things that
society as a whole is better off not knowing? For instance, one epidemiologist
estimated that 75% of SIDS cases are actually homicides.
<http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html> That strikes me as a fact that
could fall into this category.

------
TotlolRon
A: "You are in denial"

B: "No, I'm not"

A: "Told you"

