> 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.
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.
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.