The acronym FLICC describes techniques of science denial and alludes to a lot of dark side epistemology:
F—Fake Experts (and Magnified Minority): you’ve got your scientists and I’ve got mine (and even though There’s No Consensus, mine are right and yours are wrong, that’s for sure).
L—Logical fallacies
I—Impossible expectations. This refers to an unrealistic expectation of proof before acting on evidence. It tends to be paired with very low demands of evidence for the contrary position (confirmation bias). This is often unnecessary because if the goal is inaction (e.g. don’t bother to lower emissions or get vaccinations) you can just have an unreasonable standard of proof for both sides and take no action as a default. Nevertheless this heavily lopsided analysis occurs in practice.
C—Cherry picking of data (perhaps this is just another logical fallacy, but it is more central to science denial than other logical fallacies)
C—Conspiracy theories. One “dark side” thing about conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality—evidence contrary to one’s position can always be explained by assuming it was generated by the conspiracy, so the conspiracy theory tends to grow larger over time until it is a massive global conspiracy with untold thousands of actors hiding the hidden truth. An even more interesting and common dark-side trick, though, is to believe in a conspiracy without ever thinking about the conspiracy. Most people aren’t dumb enough to believe in a massive global conspiracy, but they use an assumption of some amount of conspiracy as a “background belief”: they rely mainly on FLIC, and just use Conspiracy Theory as a last resort, so Conspiracy serves as a window dressing to cover any remaining issues that otherwise wouldn’t make sense in their version of “the truth”. Or maybe it just looks that way: the science denier may know that talking about their conspiracy theory would make them sound more nutty, so they outwardly prefer to rely on other arguments and fall back on conspiracy as a last resort.
The acronym FLICC describes techniques of science denial and alludes to a lot of dark side epistemology:
F—Fake Experts (and Magnified Minority): you’ve got your scientists and I’ve got mine (and even though There’s No Consensus, mine are right and yours are wrong, that’s for sure).
L—Logical fallacies
I—Impossible expectations. This refers to an unrealistic expectation of proof before acting on evidence. It tends to be paired with very low demands of evidence for the contrary position (confirmation bias). This is often unnecessary because if the goal is inaction (e.g. don’t bother to lower emissions or get vaccinations) you can just have an unreasonable standard of proof for both sides and take no action as a default. Nevertheless this heavily lopsided analysis occurs in practice.
C—Cherry picking of data (perhaps this is just another logical fallacy, but it is more central to science denial than other logical fallacies)
C—Conspiracy theories. One “dark side” thing about conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality—evidence contrary to one’s position can always be explained by assuming it was generated by the conspiracy, so the conspiracy theory tends to grow larger over time until it is a massive global conspiracy with untold thousands of actors hiding the hidden truth. An even more interesting and common dark-side trick, though, is to believe in a conspiracy without ever thinking about the conspiracy. Most people aren’t dumb enough to believe in a massive global conspiracy, but they use an assumption of some amount of conspiracy as a “background belief”: they rely mainly on FLIC, and just use Conspiracy Theory as a last resort, so Conspiracy serves as a window dressing to cover any remaining issues that otherwise wouldn’t make sense in their version of “the truth”. Or maybe it just looks that way: the science denier may know that talking about their conspiracy theory would make them sound more nutty, so they outwardly prefer to rely on other arguments and fall back on conspiracy as a last resort.