6 comments on “The appearance of legitimate debate”

1. 6-19-2010

   where there is no understanding, superstition reigns.
   where there is some understanding, superstition reigns.
   where there is understanding, superstition remains.
   such is humanity.

   

2. 

   Is debating hard-core denialists of any value? It’s not a question of changing their positions – it’s that sharing a public venue with legitimate experts suggests valid standing.

   And the absence of experts willing to debate (their challenge unmet) may be presented as validation: touted as the absence of expert evidence = evidence of absence (of contrary facts).

   There’s nothing “new about the thirst of newspapers, news programs and consumers of social media posts for spectacle and clickbait, facts be damned.” [1]

   As in The Simpsons episode S7 E6 “Treehouse of Horror VI” segment “Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores” – when advertising statues come to life and terrorize the town, there’s only one remedy (as Lisa discovers), “Just don’t look.” (This episode first aired on the Fox network in the United States on October 29, 1995.)

   • LA Times > Column > “Sorry, Joe Rogan: Scientists should never ‘debate’ anti-vaccine quacks. Here’s why” by Michael Hiltzik, Business Columnist (June 22, 2023) – Anti-vaccine and anti-science influencers seek validation via public debates with legitimate experts.

   Key points

   1. Cranks get mileage from the refusal of real scientists to debate.

   2. Scientists seldom have the training to make cogent presentations of their work in an adversarial setting.

   3. Live public debates lack mechanisms to: fact check rapid-fire claims, contain performative misdirection and gaslighting (sowing doubt), or call out cherry-picking (as in selecting outliers).

   3. Live public debates are not a showcase for nuanced positions.

   4. Indulging hard-core denialists puts lives at risk.

   When vaccine expert Peter Hotez tweeted a link to a thorough critique of Kennedy’s [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] lies and misrepresentations by Vice.com, Rogan challenged Hotez to participate in a public debate with Kennedy.

   Hotez refused, though he offered to engage Rogan — whose show he had appeared on before — one on one, a context in which Hotez was prepared to address Rogan’s misconceptions serially.

   There are many reasons why serious scientists should reject these invitations. One is that it gives liars and deceivers legitimacy. “You should never equate, morally or practically, true science and pseudoscience or quackery,” says John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “By just appearing with these people, you give them a stature that implies they’re equivalent, and they’re not.”

   Such debates treat science as a sort of cabaret act, in which “glibness, rhetorical skill and the debater’s charisma” register “far more than facts, logic, reason and science,” Gorski [veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski] says.

   Notes

   [1] Cf. Pierce, Charles P. Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

   • “The First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.”

   • Which leads us, inevitably, to the Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

   • The sheer inertial force created by the effort people are willing to put behind the promulgation of what they believe to be true leads inevitably to the Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

3. 

   While debate is essential to advancing science and applications of that science, there’s a hard lesson in this article. Shades of the cigarette industry’s game plan years ago – FUD it (induce fear-uncertainty-doubt), with a pretense of good faith, fairness, and fact.

   Critiquing denialists’ baseless claims and citing their lack of credibility are easily sidestepped: your attempt to showcase scientific consensus collapses as some type of grand elitist (arcane) conspiracy. And your points are edited out, leaving only evidence-free clickbait (evocative entertainment).

   • Scientific American > Opinion > “Debating Antivaccine Cranks Debases Science and Harms the Public” by David Robert Grimes [1] (June 29, 2023) – For proponents of unevidenced positions, debate is a device for converting nonsense into audience.

   Of all the ways to discuss science, debating debunked antivaccine activists, historically speaking, is an awful idea.

   That’s precisely the circus that vaccine scientist Peter Hotez wisely refused in mid-June, amid a storm of angry invective and even threats on his life.

   The mistake Hotez dodged, and I made – no matter how well-meant – was to participate in an adversarial format that presents science and pseudoscience as equals, creating a false balance between truth and lies.

   Key points

   … specious debates saw atrocious bad-faith techniques, like “Gish gallops” where a speaker utters as many misrepresentations, false claims and outright lies as possible. [2]

   Anti-vaccine activists don’t care whether they lose the debate; they win by amplifying their message.

   … noting that bad-faith debate serves as a poor vehicle for scientific understanding is in no way equivalent to a call for its censorship.

   Notes

   [1] David Robert Grimes is a scientist and author of Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (The Experiment, 2021). His work focuses on health disinformation and conspiracy theory, and he is an international advocate for the public understanding of science. Grimes is a recipient of the Nature/Sense about Science Maddox Prize and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

   [2] Sort of a rhetorical rope-a-dope, inciting you to exhaust yourself (and the allotted time) trying to counter the overwhelming number of specious points.

   As also noted in this article.

   • LA Times > Perspective > “RFK Jr. gets his turn for real-time quackery” by Michael Hiltzik (7-2-2023)

   The program served largely to underscore a lesson that the media world should have absorbed … Trying to fact-check anyone who pumps out misinformation and disinformation via a verbal fire hose is a fool’s errand.

   … the lesson remains: There’s no way that even a determined interviewer can fight back against deception and deceit when it’s dispensed by the torrent.

   The greater danger is that our news programs, desperate for attention, can’t learn that lesson … or don’t want to learn.

4. 

   Image: Creative Commons license

   As previously noted, debate may be “a device for converting nonsense into audience.” So, when facts are sidestepped …

   • The Collector > “Is Quantum Mechanics a Science? Here’s What Karl Popper Thinks” by Viktoriya Sus, MA Philosophy (Aug 11, 2023)

   One of the problems that essentially determined the development of the philosophy of science at the beginning of the 20th century was called the problem of demarcation … about defining the boundaries between science and non-science.

   At the time, Popper was not interested in the question “when is a theory true?” nor in the question “when is a theory acceptable?” Popper posed a different problem for himself – he wanted to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, knowing full well that science is often wrong and that pseudoscience can accidentally stumble upon the truth.

   Popper … argued that relying on empirical facts was not enough to distinguish science from pseudoscience.

   Popper argued that science should be based on falsifiable hypotheses and that pseudoscience is based on unfalsifiable hypotheses.

5. 

   Debate need not be about “winning” or fooling anyone; but creating room for doubt.

   Pseudoscientific arguments are designed not so much to win the argument as to force an intellectual stalemate: to create a controversy that regular people feel incompetent to adjudicate. For years, the tobacco industry deployed pseudoscience to cast doubt on the link between smoking and lung disease. The goal was not so much to convince anyone that smoking was safe as to generate enough doubt and confusion about the question to muddle and slow down efforts to regulate smoking. – Naím, Moisés. The Revenge of Power. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 2022.

6. 
   Caption: “not seeing is believing?”

   How do we better understand the unreasonable confidence of consipracy believers? At a personal and social (group) level. Is adoption of false beliefs related to aversion to ambiguity? To preserving a partisan identity?

   Do those who favor conspiracy theories “think too much or too little” (or do both)?

   • Caltech > News > “Caltech’s New Center for Science, Society, and Public Policy Hosts Research Conference on Conspiratorial Thinking” (October 10, 2023) – What began with more narrowly focused questions related to the pandemic became more general concerns.

   … conspiracy is its own narrative genre with a consistent set of characteristics that have persisted over time and across a very wide variety of conspiratorial theories. Key to this genre is a certain flexibility and resilience that allows believers to fill in details, connect the dots in various ways, and talk their way around even logical contradictions.

   “How do we prevent the spread of conspiracy theories? How can we help prevent them from going down the rabbit hole? And if they have gone down these rabbit holes, are there ways we can persuade them to at least be open to new information?” are all questions Alvarez [Mike Alvarez, co-director of CSSPP and professor of political and computational social science] hoped to raise when designing this conference.

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