Apr 18, 2023 02:56 PM
The Myth of Objective Data
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-13977-...l#pid57641
The notion that human judgment pollutes scientific attempts to understand natural phenomena as they really are may seem like a stable and uncontroversial value. However, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have established, objectivity is a fairly recent historical development.
Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates why debating cranks is a horrible idea
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2023...ible-idea/
EXCERPT: . . . All this is why I was so shocked and alarmed to see this earlier this month:
That’s right. The most famous science communicator in the world [Neil deGrasse Tyson] had agreed to appear on the podcast of one of the most influential and rabid antivaccine activists and propagandists in the world. Regular readers know what my reaction would be, but for those who are not, let’s just say that alarm would be a mild description of my reaction, and right then, right there,
I knew that I would have to make an exception to my usual rule about videos, even though I knew that watching Del Bigtree’s hypercaffeinated, sometimes unctuous, and utterly overconfident televangelist-like schtick would be painful. The reason?
Basically, everyone knows that it is my position that it is almost always a really bad idea for science communicators, scientists, physicians, and actual experts to agree to appear in “debates” with science deniers like Del Bigtree, much less in what turned out to be a segment lasting over one hour and 45 minutes. There’s a saying about debating cranks that’s applicable: Debating someone like Del Bigtree is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon will knock over the pieces, shit on the board, and then strut and preen as if he had won the match.
I’ll explain in more detail near the end of the post why I have argued over the years that it is almost always a bad idea, a no-win proposition, to debate cranks, but the TL;DR version is because
(1) you can’t have an honest scientific debate—or any evidence- and reason-based debate—with bad faith actors like Bigtree, who can distort, Gish gallop (or firehose), and misrepresent data and science to their heart’s content in such a way that even the most skilled disinformation debunkers will be hard pressed to keep up and, more importantly because
(2) the crank controls the narrative, which makes it incredibly unlikely that you will persuade anyone in the audience and, worse, you will be used as a propaganda tool by the host to demonstrate that his positions are worthy of being heard on the same platform as him, side by side.
Also, no matter how much you might have science, evidence, and facts on your side, in a televised debate format like this it often doesn’t matter. Again, the science advocate is the foil that the propagandist uses to spin his propaganda.
This is not a real debate, and it is the incredibly rare person who can go “into the lions’ den,” so to speak, successfully. Such people are so rare, in fact, that their existence does not change my general position that “debates” of this sort are useful only to science-deniers as a means of promoting their message and falsely elevating their status. If you don’t think that NDT’s status didn’t rub off on Bigtree, at least a little bit, because NDT had been willing to appear on his podcast, think again.
When the show featuring the “debate” between NDT and Del Bigtree finally hit the web over a week ago, I knew that Bigtree, at least, believed he had accomplished his mission just from the introduction to the segment, in which Bigtree was even more hypercaffeinated and chipper than usual, even saying how “pumped” he was...
[...] What I am getting at here is that, however the debate between Bigtree and NDT were to turn out, Bigtree had expertly set it up with segments promoting antivax disinformation, the key message being that the “consensus” about COVID-19 had been not just wrong but disastrously wrong. (It’s almost as if Bigtree knew that NDT would appeal to scientific consensus a lot, which he, in fact, did!)
If I were one to advise NDT (an arrogant dream on my part, I know, but let me run with it for a moment), I would, after advising him not to do it, have advised him that, if he were bound and determined to ignore my advice not to do it, he should at least make sure that the debate was a standalone video, not just part of Bigtree’s weekly three hour podcast.
Why? Because context matters, and the context set up by Bigtree was that there is a real debate to be had about vaccines, worse, a debate on antivax terms, complete with antivax propaganda segments with some of the usual characters before NDT’s segment aired.
Moreover, unlike Bigtree, who had clearly done his research on the arguments that NDT uses in favor of COVID-19 vaccines, NDT gave no appearance of having done much, if any, homework about the sorts of bogus arguments and conspiracy theories that Del Bigtree routinely employs, other than Bigtree’s tendency to appeal to his own “experts” (the brave maverick quacks who support the sorts of antivax conspiracy theories that he spreads and the more reputable doctors who became “COVID-19 contrarians”)... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-13977-...l#pid57641
The notion that human judgment pollutes scientific attempts to understand natural phenomena as they really are may seem like a stable and uncontroversial value. However, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have established, objectivity is a fairly recent historical development.
Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates why debating cranks is a horrible idea
https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2023...ible-idea/
EXCERPT: . . . All this is why I was so shocked and alarmed to see this earlier this month:
That’s right. The most famous science communicator in the world [Neil deGrasse Tyson] had agreed to appear on the podcast of one of the most influential and rabid antivaccine activists and propagandists in the world. Regular readers know what my reaction would be, but for those who are not, let’s just say that alarm would be a mild description of my reaction, and right then, right there,
I knew that I would have to make an exception to my usual rule about videos, even though I knew that watching Del Bigtree’s hypercaffeinated, sometimes unctuous, and utterly overconfident televangelist-like schtick would be painful. The reason?
Basically, everyone knows that it is my position that it is almost always a really bad idea for science communicators, scientists, physicians, and actual experts to agree to appear in “debates” with science deniers like Del Bigtree, much less in what turned out to be a segment lasting over one hour and 45 minutes. There’s a saying about debating cranks that’s applicable: Debating someone like Del Bigtree is like playing chess with a pigeon. The pigeon will knock over the pieces, shit on the board, and then strut and preen as if he had won the match.
I’ll explain in more detail near the end of the post why I have argued over the years that it is almost always a bad idea, a no-win proposition, to debate cranks, but the TL;DR version is because
(1) you can’t have an honest scientific debate—or any evidence- and reason-based debate—with bad faith actors like Bigtree, who can distort, Gish gallop (or firehose), and misrepresent data and science to their heart’s content in such a way that even the most skilled disinformation debunkers will be hard pressed to keep up and, more importantly because
(2) the crank controls the narrative, which makes it incredibly unlikely that you will persuade anyone in the audience and, worse, you will be used as a propaganda tool by the host to demonstrate that his positions are worthy of being heard on the same platform as him, side by side.
Also, no matter how much you might have science, evidence, and facts on your side, in a televised debate format like this it often doesn’t matter. Again, the science advocate is the foil that the propagandist uses to spin his propaganda.
This is not a real debate, and it is the incredibly rare person who can go “into the lions’ den,” so to speak, successfully. Such people are so rare, in fact, that their existence does not change my general position that “debates” of this sort are useful only to science-deniers as a means of promoting their message and falsely elevating their status. If you don’t think that NDT’s status didn’t rub off on Bigtree, at least a little bit, because NDT had been willing to appear on his podcast, think again.
When the show featuring the “debate” between NDT and Del Bigtree finally hit the web over a week ago, I knew that Bigtree, at least, believed he had accomplished his mission just from the introduction to the segment, in which Bigtree was even more hypercaffeinated and chipper than usual, even saying how “pumped” he was...
[...] What I am getting at here is that, however the debate between Bigtree and NDT were to turn out, Bigtree had expertly set it up with segments promoting antivax disinformation, the key message being that the “consensus” about COVID-19 had been not just wrong but disastrously wrong. (It’s almost as if Bigtree knew that NDT would appeal to scientific consensus a lot, which he, in fact, did!)
If I were one to advise NDT (an arrogant dream on my part, I know, but let me run with it for a moment), I would, after advising him not to do it, have advised him that, if he were bound and determined to ignore my advice not to do it, he should at least make sure that the debate was a standalone video, not just part of Bigtree’s weekly three hour podcast.
Why? Because context matters, and the context set up by Bigtree was that there is a real debate to be had about vaccines, worse, a debate on antivax terms, complete with antivax propaganda segments with some of the usual characters before NDT’s segment aired.
Moreover, unlike Bigtree, who had clearly done his research on the arguments that NDT uses in favor of COVID-19 vaccines, NDT gave no appearance of having done much, if any, homework about the sorts of bogus arguments and conspiracy theories that Del Bigtree routinely employs, other than Bigtree’s tendency to appeal to his own “experts” (the brave maverick quacks who support the sorts of antivax conspiracy theories that he spreads and the more reputable doctors who became “COVID-19 contrarians”)... (MORE - missing details)