Why people go anti-science

Mark Hoofnagle at Denialism Blog hits the hail on the head:

In fact, if there is a unifying theme of denialism, it is that any extreme of ideological thinking leads to the necessary denial of fact. When one considers the causes of denialist worldviews, one sees again and again some form of fundamentalist belief. Fundamentalist religion leads to the rejection of evolution. Free-market fundamentalists are the leading source of anti-global warming denialism. On the liberal side, a mixture of technophobia and neo-luddism leads to paranoid suspicions about everything from GM crops causing non-existent illnesses to fear of harmless radio technology such as wifi to the fear of vaccines and medicine innovations exemplified by the HuffPo cranks and the evidence-based medicine/HIV/AIDS denialists like Mike Adams and Gary Null.

Any dogma that gets any followers is likely to be (a) simple and (b) emotionality satisfying, at least to some people. In fact any belief system must be simpler than reality, since reality is vast and probably not fully comprehensible to the human mind anyway. Once people become adherents of a dogma, they are likely to hold tight to it, since it’s their intellectual comfort blanket. And when reality proves that their dogma is at least partly wrong — as all dogmas must be, even though they are probably partly right, too — then the adherent is drawn into conflict with reality, and resolves that conflict by simply pretending that the uncomfortable truth isn’t there. And then the more serious of the adherents erect whole intellectual edifices, founded on bullshit and wish-fulfillment fantasy, as to why reality isn’t real.

What’s the cure for this? Simply to realise that any simple, pat, belief system isn’t going to be the whole truth, even if it does have good points. Put simply, no belief system about how the human world works is entirely correct, or is any widely-held belief system likely to be entirely nonsense. For example:

Religion: God may not exist, but nevertheless it is still bad for people to murder or steal from each other.

Free markets: are an efficient way of allocating scarce resources, under many circumstances, but they are not the solution to all human-organisation problems.

Medicine: some medicines have genuinely harmed patients, but most do good, and by spreading panic about vaccines etc one is almost certainly doing more harm than good.

Technology: most technology leads to humans living longer, more fulfilled lives; but some technologies have lead to a diminution of human happiness (e.g. telemarketers and spammers)

Under-mentalists kill their child

Dale Neumann and Leilani Neumann are contemptable subhuman filth. Why? Because they killed their child, through denying her medical care which would have saved her life. Why would anyone do that, you ask? Because their religious beliefs told them to:

Wisconsin authorities will consider filing charges in the case of an 11-year-old girl who died on Easter Sunday of complications from diabetes that went untreated because police say her parents’ obscure religious beliefs do not allow medical intervention.

(via Balloon Juice)

Israel = Nazis, says Israeli minister

Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatens Palestinians with “Holocaust”:

An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a “holocaust”.

“The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, told army radio.

Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.

The minister’s statement came after two days of tit-for-tat missile raids between Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli army. At least 32 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed since the surge in violence on Wednesday.

I guess that means that Israel has no right to complain any more when others compare them to Nazi Germany. (Not that people have, in general, any right to complain when others make unflattering analogies about them. In general when people respond to criticism with outbursts of synthetic rage, it’s a sign that the criticism was well-founded.)

Paper industry linked to suicide

Paper industry linked to suicide, after many victims leave notes!

Obviously, paper should be banned.

Get a degree in teaching creationism

According to New Humanist:

The state of Texas may be about to approve an online master’s degree in science education provided by the Texas-based Institute for Creation Research. The “degree”, which has already been given preliminary approval by a Texas state advisory group, is now awaiting the final go-ahead from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Events like this make it more plausible that China will be running the world in 50 years time.

Britain may be dumbing down its educational system but at least we’re not teaching this ridiculous nonsense (mostly not, anyway).

Get an A-level in burger flipping

From the people who brought you McJobs, Mc A-Levels:

McDonald’s has won approval to offer courses which could form part of an A-level standard qualification.

The fast-food giant, airline FlyBe and Network Rail are the first three firms to be approved to offer courses equal to units of the new diplomas. It means students could combine units from in-house courses with others to obtain the government’s flagship new vocational and academic qualification.

Ministers are keen to involve business in attempts to boost workforce skills. It follows concerns raised by business leaders that schools, colleges and even universities are failing to equip youngsters for the world of work. But critics complain that the diplomas they see as the answer to the issue are not sufficiently academically rigorous.

Personally I think there should be an A level in Erotica Studies, which would involve watching porn and wanking over it, and maybe creating a porn movie or website; I’m sure this would be every bit as worthwhile and academically rigorous as the new “diplomas” the government is introducing.

Incidently if you want to know how good these diplomas are, consider what university admissions officers think of them:

Just last week, four out of 10 university admissions tutors said they would not accept students who had taken the new diplomas which are being introduced next autumn.

Economic illiteracy

Tim Worstall has a go at the economic illiteracy of some campaigners:

Sigh, spotted this insane idea again in a piece about wind farms.

And 20 years of wind projects would give Britain a tremendous opportunity for more jobs, manufacturing and investment.

This is a cost, not a benefit, of such schemes. We lose all of the other things that such manufacturing capacity, such investment and such labour could have been making for us if we weren’t making windmills.

Sadly, there’s a lot of it about. In fact it is almost de rigeur for advocates of various policies to deploy this economic fallacy. For example, when banning fox hunting was being debated a few years ago, advocates of hunting claimed that it was both the cheapest way of keeping down vermin, and that it created jobs. Well, it might have been one or the other, but both couldn’t be true!

Western Digital commits commercial suicide

I’ve just made a mental note not to buy anything from hard disk manufacturers Western Digital, ever again (or at least, not for a long time). Why? Because they are selling a remote hard disk that won’t less you copy sound and video files to other computers.

According to Boing Boing:

This is the most extreme example I’ve seen yet of tech companies crippling data devices in order to please Hollywood: Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication’. Just wondering — who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?

Wired say there they have a workaround for this. I have a better workaround: to never buy any Western Digital products ever again, and to advise all my friends to do the same.

(via Jack Schofield)

BBC gets it wrong about Wi-Fi

Earlier this year, the BBC screened a documentary, “Wi-Fi: A Warning Signal“, which made misleading claims that it was harmful to health.

Now they’ve admitted they got it wrong:

The BBC has upheld complaints against an edition of the current affairs programme Panorama.

Two viewers said Wi-Fi: A Warning Signal exaggerated the evidence for concern about the potential health hazards of wireless technology.

The BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU) said the programme “gave a misleading impression of the state of scientific opinion on the issue”.

I’ve some advice for the BBC: when making science programmes, employ presenters who know a bit about science. The BBC wouldn’t employ football commentators who don’t know what the penalty spot is, or political commentators who don’t know who Gordon Brown is. Similarly, people presenting science programmes — including documentaries with significant science content — should know enough about science not to make a complete tit of themselves.

UPDATE: Bad Science is covering this here.

Mad Mel on Annapolis

Melanie Phillips has written a piece on the Annapolis conference. In it she talks about how threatened she thinks Israel is and how important it is that Israel is defended. I may discuss Annapolis later, but consider: Phillips, a British Jew, was 22 years old during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. She did not at the time or later, go to Israel and join its armed forces. Surely the rational and honest thing to do would be to fight for what she believes in?

But I doubt if rationality and honesty are her strong suits. How can they be when she flirts with creationism (which she thinks should be taught in schools), when she believes in the media’s MMR hoax, when she — without the scientific background to understand the evidence — thinks global warming is a “fraud” and a “con-trick“? Indeed the only talent Phillips has shown in her entire worthless life is talking bullshit.