Mommy, PhD has an excellent long summary of common fallacious arguments advanced by anti-scientists.
Mommy, PhD has an excellent long summary of common fallacious arguments advanced by anti-scientists. The specific examples concern vaccines but the general principles are equally relevant to climate change denial, anti-GMOery and other forms of antiscience.
Originally shared by Mommy, PhD
Most of the criticisms I get on my posts fall into the categories described here.
http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/11/30/12-bad-reasons-for-rejecting-scientific-studies/
http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/11/30/12-bad-reasons-for-rejecting-scientific-studies/
Originally shared by Mommy, PhD
Most of the criticisms I get on my posts fall into the categories described here.
http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/11/30/12-bad-reasons-for-rejecting-scientific-studies/
http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/11/30/12-bad-reasons-for-rejecting-scientific-studies/
Sometimes scientific studies are used in the debate in 'unscientific' ways. For example in debates about GMO crops and animals, studies showing it's safe to eat the stuff often pop up, even if that particular issue wasn't the cause for concern. Bit like if people are worried about pollution and someone pulls out a study on NCAP crash test result trends.
ReplyDeletepaul beard it is logically invalid to blindly assume that it is wrong just because it has been wrong before.
ReplyDeleteMommyPHD argues that we should all look at a large body of work and judge that. Unfortunately the body of work is often so large that only those doing so as a full time can realistically look at it all. So a system of review has been developed. I trust the Cochrane reviews a lot.
ReplyDeleteBut science is specific in what questions it answers. Is a treatment extending life or prolonging suffering? That's not a scientific question but a personal one. Is feeling better an acceptable result of treatment even if there is no measurable benefit from the treatment? The way we choose to represent science (OK medicines) is open to interpretation.
Do statins work? Yes there's lots of evidence to show that they do. What percentage of people who take them as prescribed over 5 years will benefit from having done so? Less than 10%. Is it therefore fair to say that most of the time statins don't work. (Work defined as preventing nasty end points like death or stroke not proxy markers like blood levels of triglycerides).
What I didn't see was the Anti-Business and Pro-Business Models that accept science selectively to justify what is basically a political position. So you get people who,
ReplyDelete1) Accept the science of climate change but reject the science of GMOs. Perhaps what they're really doing is using science selectively to justify their distrust of BigOil and BigAg. I find this quite common among socially aware, left of centre intellectuals.
2) Reject the science of climate change but accept the science of GMOs. Using science selectively to justify their beliefs in the market or something. This is the one that looks most like following the money or some kind of pro business as usual conspiracy. Pro-BigOil and BigAg. Not at all uncommon for a certain kind of right of centre person to enjoy all the benefits of science and technology but to deny one specific area because it might be saying they can't keep it all.
These are obviously simplifications and there's loads of maybe out there and mixing and matching of beliefs. And plenty of apparently educated, informed people who even hold scientific positions and careers, cherry picking which science they accept and which they don't. Or cherry picking science papers to justify their beliefs.
+Julian Bond Is it possible to do enough science to be certain about climate change, vaccines and GMOs? I think that at some point it just comes down to trust. How many years of study to understand climate science enough to have a valid opinion? How much of that study is transferable to an opinion on fracking, nuclear energy or vaccines?
ReplyDeleteI accept that vaccines are generally safe, that man made climate change is real, that GM crops offer benefits. To pretend that I do so because I've read all the papers relating to the subject is untrue, to suggest that I'd understand them even if I did read them would be pushing it. In our own fields we might be pretty good - but a lot of the rest is based on trust.
So why the selective trust? Because this is not uncommon.
ReplyDeletepaul beard then it comes down to risks and benefits. Opponents of particular technologies magnify the risks and downplay the benefits, proponents do the reverse. To get a balanced picture of risk and benefit we must rely on scientific consensus. We invoke this idea often enough for climate change but somehow don't credit this approach for GMOs. Why is that?
ReplyDeletepaul beard what GMO mistakes or failures would those be?
ReplyDeletepaul beard hence my position that GMOs are safe until shown otherwise.
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich Different life experiences influence decisions. Safe until proven otherwise is a concept that scary to anyone who has seen the results of thalidomide. I also thought that safety was investigated as part of the process. The safety testing of GMOs does sound like an interesting problem though.
ReplyDeleteJeff Green there's a selection bias there. For every thalidomide (thankfully not many) there are hundreds of safe and effective medicines that have saved many lives. Again, risk/reward balance.
ReplyDeleteLev Osherovich Most prospective medicines fail to make it to market, there is no presumption of safe until proved otherwise.Even then some end. up being recalled.
ReplyDeleteJeff Green I'm referring to the ones that have been approved. As you know, thalidomide remains on the formulary, but for a different indication than originally.
ReplyDeletepaul beard no question that FDA determination of safety is not a guarantee, but rather a best estimate. Precisely because of thalidomide, the bar has risen to a very high level. Any safety signal in a drug trial is taken very severly, often scotching the approval process outright. But even drugs that show safety problems in testing have been approved with restrictions on who can use them and how. In the case of GMOs, there has been literally zero signs of danger in any credible studies (those few studies in which safety signals have been observed have glaring methodological flaws). So back again to risk benefit. At this point, the benefits of GM agriculture are tangible, while the risks are intangible. By any reasonable standard they pass the safety bar, which is what every regulatory agency that has examined GMO approval petitions has concluded. Is it hypothetically possible that we are incurring unknown risks by growing or consuming GMOs? Yes. But we cannot measure the level of risk we are incurring. All we can say is that we haven't seen any safety signals yet. Should we apply the Precautionary Principle for GMOs? Only if we apply the same principle for other technologies with similar safety profiles. Using this reasoning, cell phones, microwaves and power lines ought to be labelled as possibly causing cancer.
ReplyDelete