principles were actually being debated by scientists. The unfiltered information about important scientific subjects allows the science deniers to use a false equivalence to make it appear that the often minority, and scientifically unsupported viewpoint is equivalent to the scientific consensus which is based on huge amounts of published evidence.
From listening to the screaming and yelling, you would think that scientists aren’t sure about evolution, vaccines, global warming, and the age of the earth (or even the age of the universe). There are even those who think there’s a debate that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. It’s because some news sources think there’s a debate, so bring one person to represent one side, and one for the other, and the person screams the loudest often wins.
Part of the problem is that some people think that science is unapproachable and too hard to comprehend. It isn’t. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s easy, because it shouldn’t be. Answering questions about the natural universe requires, demands that scientist approach it with the least amount of bias and the most amount of evidence. And sometimes it is complex and nuanced, but why do people give false balance to someone, without the expertise or education in the field, as if they know more about the issue than does the scientist.
To become a world class architect and to design a skyscraper isn’t easy, but we non-architects can observe what we see, and accept that the building isn’t going to topple over in a hurricane. Do we presume to know how the foundation has to be built to support the building? Or what materials are used to give flexibility in a wind, but strong enough to not collapse? Mostly, we don’t, we trust that there isn’t a massive conspiracy to build unsafe skyscrapers because architects are being paid off by Big Concrete to use cheaper materials. We don’t question the architects’s motives or whether there are solid engineering principles, probably outside of most of our understanding, that were employed to make that skyscraper.
It’s the same with science. We can accept scientific principles without doing the research ourselves. But, and it’s a big but, if you want to dispute accepted science, then you have to bring science to the table not a false debate. Science isn’t hard, but it isn’t easy either. You cannot deny basic scientific facts without getting a solid education, opening a scientific laboratory staffed with world-class scientists, and then publishing peer-reviewed articles that can help move the prevailing scientific consensus.
You cannot spend an hour or a day or even a week Googling a few websites and then loudly proclaim that the scientific consensus is wrong; no, you need to do the hard work. Until you do, those of us who are skeptics and scientists get to ignore you, and we get to continue with the current consensus.
Part of the problem is that the public falls for the false equivalence logical fallacy. Presenters, whether it’s the news or giving us a pseudo-debate, think that to be balanced, both sides of a scientific argument are equivalent in quality of opinion and evidence. Just watch a presentation on any of the major news outlets on anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change (ACC).
They’ll have one talking head, usually a scientist who is trying to present nuanced data, usually uncomfortable with public “debate,” going up against a photogenic, possibly a scientist (but in a field totally unrelated to climate studies), who uses logical fallacies and manipulated data to make a point. And the viewer might think that half the world’s scientists are equally split between both sides of the “debate” regarding ACC. However, the real balance would give us 97 scientists supporting anthropogenic climate change and 2-3 against. Yes, a high impact factor, extremely well respected journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, analyzed climate change science, and determined that 97-98% of researchers in climate science supported the tenets of human influenced climate change.
Katie Couric and false balance reporting
In December 2013, Katie Couric, a fairly popular USA-based journalist did report, on her own eponymous, recently-cancelled, TV talk show, Katie, about Gardasil (formally known as the HPV quadrivalent vaccine and also called Silgard in Europe). Essentially, Couric interviewed several individuals who claim, without any evidence (and lacking any clue about statistical analysis that is necessary to determine correlation and causation) that Gardasil harmed their children.
Then, Couric gave about a minute of time to ONE physician to explain the safety and effectiveness of Gardasil, as opposed to the heartbreaking, but ultimately anecdotal (and therefore, scientifically irrelevant), stories from parents who needed to blame something for what had happened, and chose Gardasil as the guilty party. As opposed to depression, diet soda, bottled water, air pollution, bad TV shows, or that fake butter that the movie theaters use. In other words, I could find literally hundreds of environmental causes for these children’s symptoms that appear to be superficially correlated, but statistically, just random coincidence.
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How science deniers use false equivalence - Skeptical Raptor
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