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:
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”.
If that’s the only bit that actually matters for identifying “denialists”, then you can delete everything else from the article. Or put many other things in, e.g. “denialists often have two eyes and a nose”.
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.
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”.
You failed to read the bit with the smoking gun of us knowing who’s paying for the pseudoscience in all three cases.
If that’s the only bit that actually matters for identifying “denialists”, then you can delete everything else from the article. Or put many other things in, e.g. “denialists often have two eyes and a nose”.
The question is: What else fits that pattern? Are there legitimate scientific movements that your filter catches?