Idiot Comment of the Day

You also missed my entire point. Nobody should be forced to receive a vaccine that they do not want. It is not your right or anybody else's right insist [sic] upon this.

If I want to "die from cervical cancer" as you allege, that is my business.

You are obviously an idiot-Statis, an apologist for the destruction of individual freedom and human rights (to be left the hell alone, in case you need a primer).

From our own little corner of the Interwebs, even. The ranter brought up, then inveighed against the hypothetical situation of a mandatory vaccination for cervical cancer. He (and I think we can confidently assume it's a he) is strongly against said hypothetical mandatory vaccination. Because freedom!

Judith Curry needs living space!

There's a whole series of these posters. They're pretty great.

I kid, she didn't reference that awful rhetorical precedent, but pretty darn close:

With regards to K-12 education, there is no particular reason to teach ‘climate change’ in the K-12 curriculum.  Climate change is a topic that is more suitable high school ‘science and society’ courses.  In such courses, teaching the controversy would seem to be of paramount importance.

"Teaching the controversy" being of course the rallying cry of the Creationists' drive to forbid the teaching of evolution. What a tradition for a professor of atmospheric science to allude to!

Somebody missed the sarcasm here.

I was interested in how far this particular meme had spread, so here you go:

"Teaching the controversy" "evolution": 38,700,000 hits
"Teach the controversy" & "evolution": 229,000 hits.
"Teaching the controversy" "global warming": 42,900 hits.
"Teach the controversy" & "global warming": 62,000 hits.
"Teaching the controversy" "climate change": 32,700 hits. 
"Teach the controversy" & "climate change": 62,100 hits.

I found some hits for other examples of science denial -- "moon landing" and "vaccines" as well as "Holocaust" -- but they seem to be primarily by people criticizing the denial by comparing their arguments to the anti-evolution malarkey. Only the climate denial crowd, as far as I can tell, is seriously trying to adopt this anti-evolution meme as their own.

As a tactic, this seems . . . not inspired. The denial of evolution, as an analogy for the denial of anthropogenic climate change, is perhaps a little too close for comfort in ways that are not flattering to Curry et al:

Denial of Evolution vs Denial of Global Warming

1. Flies in the face of a massive amount of scientific evidence. Check. Check.
2. Utterly rejected by the vast majority of scientists. Check. Check.
3. Driven by the discomfort of a particular ideology with the implications of the science. Check. Check.
4. In lieu of a compelling alternative hypothesis, portrays the uncertainties and persistent unknowns that attend all science as huge, gaping flaws that falsify the science. Check. Check.
5. Unable to come to terms with the vast body of mutually supporting evidence from multiple fields, employ a fallacy of synecdoche: whatever point, major or minor, that they are critiquing at the moment, is treated as the cornerstone of the theory without which the whole corrupt edifice comes tumbling down. Check. Check.

I could go on, pointing out their mutual love for unreliable online lists of supposedly supportive supposed scientists (see here and here) and their common dependence on short memories and highly mobile goalposts. But you get the point. This is not a flattering comparison for either side.

The reason it is not flattering is really simple: this is a method. It is not spontaneous. It is a battle-tested set of strategies and tactics for attacking science and scientists and confusing the public. For it to work, it can't look like a method; it's supposed to be just a purer, better execution of the scientific method. That lie is hard to sell over and over again, especially when the people who pioneered these tactics have long been outed as an arm of the Christian right.

There's a reason magicians don't do the same trick for the same audience over and over again; there's a reason those Nigerian bankers always include a soonish deadline. Time for the mark to think and reflect is deadly to a con artist, who relies on distraction. Distance and perspective are the enemy of the demagogue, who relies on the emotional engagement of the audience. For all these people, showing their tactics to be at work in another cause, showing the same tired arguments and rhetorical fallacies deployed against another compelling scientific theory, is a terrible, terrible move.

Judith Curry is a scientist. She believes in the theory of evolution. There must be a part of her that understands what advocating "teaching the controversy" implies about the position she's taken and the people she's allied herself with. Is this a cry for help?

Berezow cherry-picked in "Who is antiscience?" smacktown

"I don't care who you voted for."

The whole left-antiscience vs right-antiscience dust-up has left me strangely cold. Should be right up our alley here at ITracker ("IT support" when we're at home). Climate denial is anti-science. Climate denial is associated with the far right, and especially prevalent among Tea Partiers. And while it doesn't make them very happy, we've argued on this blog that emphasizing the ideological roots of so-called skeptics is constructive.

So you might say that this is a debate the whole corpus of IT has helped set the stage for. So why the diffidence?

For me I guess the reason why you are antiscience on a given issue is less important than the fact that you are. If it matters what the political, social, and religious motivations of that denial are, it matters because by recognizing the motive, by elucidating the bias, antiscience is less likely to be confused with a legitimate critique of particular science.

Further, this debate seems destined to shed more heat than light. If Nate Silver has taught us anything, it's that when talking heads start debating a point like this, you need to fall back on some sort of objective numeric assessment, with reasonable caveats. Otherwise this is the kind of nonsense you end up debating (from the Alex Berezow blog post at USAToday that started the recent dust-up):

Unfortunately for Democrats, their progressive political allies often hold blatantly anti-science beliefs themselves. And in some cases, progressives actively undermine technological progress.  

Federal health data suggest that anti-vaccine sentiment is more common in progressive areas.

The "left" has been conflated with Democrats, so you would think we are about to hear about the beliefs and activities of Democrats. No such luck: the blogger holds them guilty by association with their "progressive allies." Who are they? How are they defined as progressive? How are you determining them to be the Democrats "allies"?

Guilt by association is all very well -- "Tell me what company you keep and I'll tell you who you are" -- but you need to show the association somehow! And Alex's evidence is, to put it mildly, underwhelming:

Federal health data suggest that anti-vaccine sentiment is more common in progressive areas.  With the exception of Alaska, the states with the highest rates of vaccine refusal for kindergarteners are Washington, Vermont and Oregon — three of the most progressive states in the country.

Unlike denying evolution, refusing vaccinations can be deadly.

Whoa. That's some ironclad reasoning there (*).

So Berezow is calling these states "progressive" and blaming that for their low rates of vaccination. Wouldn't it be more straightforward to poll progressives on their attitudes towards vaccines (maybe because what polling there is shows no connection between progressive politics and vaccine denial)? Other commentators pointed out that the conservative, rural eastern regions of Oregon and Washington had vaccine refusal rates just as high as the liberal west edges. Berezow glosses over the fact that Alaska, one of the most conservative states in the nation, is a top refuser.

So by Berezow's own calculation, he has an n = 4, and of that 4, one state is very conservative while the others are a mix of urban progressive/rural conservative where progressives (or at least Democrats) dominate statewide elections.

Not exactly persuasive. What if you took a slightly larger sample -- the top ten -- and used their votes in a tight national election, like Bush/Gore 2000, to gauge how progressive they are?

Wyoming did not even report its data last year, and no wonder: until 2010, they didn't even require children over the age of nine to be vaccinated. An effort to strengthen the law met with fierce resistance. So let's include Wyoming -- the unreported number is likely high. The top ten:

1. Washington (6.2%) (Gore)
2. Vermont (5.8%)      (Gore)
3. Alaska (5.5%)         (Bush)
4. Oregon (5.4%)        (Gore)
5. Michigan (4.4%)     (Gore)
6. Illinois (4.3%)         (Gore)
7. Utah (3.8%)            (Bush)
8. Nebraska (3.8%)     (Bush)
9. Idaho (3.8%)           (Bush)
10. Wyoming (?)         (Bush)

Five for Bush, five for Gore. "Progressive states are anti-vaccine" turns out to be a massive cherry pick; total nonsense. Seven out of the ten states are western states, both the Gore and the Bush states. That's kind of interesting. Really, all we learn from this is that vaccination rates depend on the strength of the mandatory vaccination law, and laws vary from state to state and region to region for any number of reasons.

I may have more on this anon, but in the meantime: beware of talking heads bearing cherries.

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* It's a bit of a side issue, but I should point out that if doctors and biologists ever came to doubt the theory of evolution, the evolved resistance of bacteria to antibiotics would quickly kill a great many people. And by encouraging their children to see their biology teacher as the enemy of their faith, who knows how many potentially great scientists and physicians never got started on the path to realizing their talent, to the determent of us all.