When to debunk?

It’s another post I’ve been mulling for a while because I’ve been reading some dire stuff recently. Not merely bad but atrocious. There’s a feature on WordPress called Tag Surfer which means I can read an aggregated page of recent posts on specific tags. If you’re on WordPress and you put a post in the ‘History’ or ‘Science’ category there’s a fair chance I’ll read it. This is great when the posts are about History or Science. It’s less so when someone decides that they only need to read one book and they let someone else translate it from the Hebrew.

Bafflingly the worst stuff recently hasn’t been evolution, it’s been about Global Warming. There have been posts that have gleefully cited things like the expansion of a glacier in Pakistan, and then said the scientists are unreliable when they correlate this with climate change to global warming in the same paper. It is possible that you can agree with parts of a scientific paper, but it’s traditional to give reasons why you accept one part and not others. Simply saying the author is unreliable rules out the whole text.

Others have sagely pointed out that, like Evolution or Fox News, Global Warming doesn’t appear in the Bible. I assume Fox News has really low ratings among Good Christians in the Bible Belt.

What I haven’t understood is why this wave of emotion has been unleashed. At least not till now. Carl Feagans at Hot Cup of Joe gave the game away in his piece Pseudo-skepticism and Pseudo-Journalism about Global Warming. Global Warming is an Al Gore thing. It’s a good article and I suggest you read it because it shows the difference between scepticism and pseudo-scepticism. One person in the exchange is providing evidence and even links to show why they think what they think. The other… well don’t let me tell you what to think. Read it yourself.

There are debates you can sensibly have about Global Warming. For instance should we be spending money on mitigation or have things already gone too far and should we be concentrating out efforts on adaptation instead? Is carbon sequestration a good idea, or would pulling CO₂ from the atmosphere be treating a symptom rather than the ailment? But the debate about whether Global Warming is happening has moved beyond satire. I should explain for British readers. The video clip below is not intentionally humourous. It’s entirely straight-faced and paid for by the Competitive Enterprise Institute

At least I thought it had moved beyond satire. Homo Edax notes the effect that climate change is having on the Norwegian Blue.

So why haven’t there been many Lunatics like this have the vote – We’re all going to die!!! posts recently? It’s because I now have a new procedure for deciding whether or not to debunk a post. It’s something like this.

I’ll be honest I didn’t draw any further steps for the obvious reason but there are other questions to ask about responding to a bizarre assertion. Is it funny? An endearingly barking article is something I’m happy to share. Is it a common belief? If not is it nonetheless interesting? I can utterly disagree with someone without thinking they’re thick. Is the person a danger in the threatening lives with ludicrous claims sense of the word? But there are good reasons not to debunk.

One would be if the person is plainly picking a fight to stroke their own ego. Similarly is any engagement going to give someone undeserved publicity or encouragement? This is why I haven’t mentioned the press-releases to Eurekalert’s Biology channel from a ‘rogue Egyptologist’. If you’re that desperate to attract publicity then you should pay me to publicise your ill-formed ramblings.

This is where I think Ed Darrell may be mistaken in his post Inherently dishonest: Creationism. I don’t question his logic or his argument. I certainly don’t question the importance of his topic – I think children have a right to an education. I do however think that the target of his post is a waste of his talent. He tackles a list of requests from a chap who is… umm… sincere – for a given definition of sincere. The blog Ed Darrell discusses is 4Simpsons, which according to technorati has links from just two blogs. Ed Darrell has rewarded what he calls dishonesty with a third link and visitors aplenty coming to see what the fuss is about.

It’s something I can sympathise with. I recently read a post on how it’s a lie that you have to accept evolution to be a good scientist. After all Galileo wasn’t. Neither were Copernicus, Newton, Kepler, Francis Bacon, Aristotle… This went on for a hundred or so names, with – I think – one person who was around 80 alive in the 1930s when the modern synthesis was laying the foundations for current evolutionary theory. The guy was an electronics specialist. Most had died before Darwin published Origin of Species. My own approach to the same post would be to say “Gaah! Don’t you hate when people say you have to be able to turn on a PC to be a competent scientist these days. Here’s a list of scientists who had nothing to do with PCs – Galileo, Newton, Darwin…” which shows the same careful grasp of logic.

Now here’s the problem. How do you know I haven’t just invented a creationist straw-man for the purposes of an evil atheistic rant? I could link to him. But, so far, technorati shows just one inward link. Ironically this is from the entirely reasonable See You at Enceladus pointing out another error.

Incidentally Borne’s reply on that post which sneers at Babbler’s grammar contains six grammatical errors by my count, and I am no grammatical wizard.

I think a mindset where you validate yourself by your visitor count leads to a situation where cranks pick fights and the mere act of engaging proves they’re Important People. This is why I’ve sometimes left assertions I know are plainly false unchallenged on this site and why I don’t need to correct every pseudoscientific distortion I see. A lot of blogs are symptoms of poor science education not causes, and it’s the causes that I find more interesting. I could be making a mistake. Perhaps ignoring them and writing about a good book instead is letting them win.

Still, I see expending energy on something as a compliment and anyway it’s probably futile. The average reader of this site is not a dunce and is at least as capable as me at spotting the holes in pseudoscientific arguments.