I have a commeter named Cedric, who appears to see the whole world as one big conspiracy to conspire and keeps talking about Vax machines – which I don’t think is fair on the Vax machines as they were good in their day.
However, I thought if Cedric had the chance to put his thoughts down in one article he might be able to make more sense than he has hitherto. However, this is what he sent me:
Dear Mike,
My point is simple. You have fallen into a pattern of science denial and abandoned any genuine skeptical methodology.
It would be nice if the people who fall victim to this actually could identify if for themselves…but that’s not the way it works.
So to objectively identify it, you need to compare real-life examples.
The climate denial blogosphere is the identical twin of the anti-vaxxer blogosphere which is in turn identical to the creationist blogosphere and the 9/11 Troofer blogosphere and all the rest.
If you are doing what they are doing then…that’s a clear sign you need to stop.
Sometimes it’s much easier to see glaring flaws in methodology when others do it as opposed to your own camp.
Get out of your comfort zone.
You are not an HIV denier, I trust? You understand that they are doing the whole skeptical thinking wrong?
Good. So….you are not like them.
You have better standards. They are not in your league etc.
That attitude is important. Because if (IF!!) you really are not the same as those wackaloons over there, then….logically, there will be no similarities between the statements you make and the sources of information you use or reject.
Take your typical wackaloon. Where does your wackaloon go to for their science info? Are they going to go to some blog or are they going to go to the mainstream scientific communities?
Think about it. That’s just one comparison. There are many, many others.
So…if they are not going to use the mainstream scientific communities, how are the wackaloons going to rationialize that?
How does an anti-vaxxer (for example) justify not paying any attention to the CDC?
Put yourself in their shoes for a moment.
You just know vaccines are bad. BAD, BAD, BAD! You are firm on that. Now someone likes me comes along and mentions the CDC….repeatedly. Mentions all the other medical science communities too.
How are you going to defend the indefensible?
You can’t just go “OH, the CDC? Ah, silly me. Didn’t realize they knew a lot about medicine and diseases and suchlike”
Nope.
You’ve got to reject it….somehow…anyhow.
Imagine the possible retorts you could come up with.
Seriously, think about it. What prime examples can you come up with? There’s lots to choose from.
Now switch the scenarios with say, a creationist.
Same deal as before.
How does the creationist rationalize all those scientific communities and the work the scientific consensus represents?
Well, he can just copy and paste the same retorts from the anti-vaxxer guy from before.
Job done.
Now do it for an HIV denier.
It will work.
How about a 9/11 Troofer? It will work.
How about a die-hard smoker who doesn’t believe all that liberal namby-pamby nonsense about lung cancer?
Yep, it will work.
Now take a random survey from your own blogosphere community.
It. Will. Work.
That should horrify you. That’s not ok.
Do as much research into science denial as you like. There are a variety of solid resources out there. They identify the patterns very clearly and cover all the commonalities. See if you agree with their analysis.
Let me leave you with some links to get you started. Compare them to each other. When you’ve done that, feel free to do a quick google and see if other groups..do exactly the same thing. They’re not doing science. That’s not science at all.
First, you should know about Project Steve.
http: //rationalwiki.org/wiki/Project_Steve
It would be nice if the people who fall victim to this actually could identify if for themselves…but that’s not the way it works.
So to objectively identify it, you need to compare real-life examples.
The climate denial blogosphere is the identical twin of the anti-vaxxer blogosphere which is in turn identical to the creationist blogosphere and the 9/11 Troofer blogosphere and all the rest.
If you are doing what they are doing then…that’s a clear sign you need to stop.
Sometimes it’s much easier to see glaring flaws in methodology when others do it as opposed to your own camp.
Get out of your comfort zone.
You are not an HIV denier, I trust? You understand that they are doing the whole skeptical thinking wrong?
Good. So….you are not like them.
You have better standards. They are not in your league etc.
That attitude is important. Because if (IF!!) you really are not the same as those wackaloons over there, then….logically, there will be no similarities between the statements you make and the sources of information you use or reject.
Take your typical wackaloon. Where does your wackaloon go to for their science info? Are they going to go to some blog or are they going to go to the mainstream scientific communities?
Think about it. That’s just one comparison. There are many, many others.
So…if they are not going to use the mainstream scientific communities, how are the wackaloons going to rationialize that?
How does an anti-vaxxer (for example) justify not paying any attention to the CDC?
Put yourself in their shoes for a moment.
You just know vaccines are bad. BAD, BAD, BAD! You are firm on that. Now someone likes me comes along and mentions the CDC….repeatedly. Mentions all the other medical science communities too.
How are you going to defend the indefensible?
You can’t just go “OH, the CDC? Ah, silly me. Didn’t realize they knew a lot about medicine and diseases and suchlike”
Nope.
You’ve got to reject it….somehow…anyhow.
Imagine the possible retorts you could come up with.
Seriously, think about it. What prime examples can you come up with? There’s lots to choose from.
Now switch the scenarios with say, a creationist.
Same deal as before.
How does the creationist rationalize all those scientific communities and the work the scientific consensus represents?
Well, he can just copy and paste the same retorts from the anti-vaxxer guy from before.
Job done.
Now do it for an HIV denier.
It will work.
How about a 9/11 Troofer? It will work.
How about a die-hard smoker who doesn’t believe all that liberal namby-pamby nonsense about lung cancer?
Yep, it will work.
Now take a random survey from your own blogosphere community.
It. Will. Work.
That should horrify you. That’s not ok.
Do as much research into science denial as you like. There are a variety of solid resources out there. They identify the patterns very clearly and cover all the commonalities. See if you agree with their analysis.
Let me leave you with some links to get you started. Compare them to each other. When you’ve done that, feel free to do a quick google and see if other groups..do exactly the same thing. They’re not doing science. That’s not science at all.
First, you should know about Project Steve.
http: //rationalwiki.org/wiki/Project_Steve
Now for the comparisons:
List of Scientists Rejecting Evolution- Do they really?
List of Scientists Rejecting Evolution- Do they really?
https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty1Bo6GmPqM
32000 Scientists
https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py2XVILHUjQ
Please let me know what you think.
Cheers.
Cedric.
32000 Scientists
https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py2XVILHUjQ
Please let me know what you think.
Cheers.
Cedric.
What do I think? Seriously?
I keeping thinking: Cedric sounds like an Old English name, but I can’t remember seeing it any any old english documents. It ought to come from “Ced-ric” and rica is a strong man, but I don’t recognise “Ced”. And the issue is clarified checking online where I find that:
Cedric (French spelling: Cédric) is a masculine given name invented by Walter Scott in the 1819 novel Ivanhoe.[1]
The invented name is based on Cerdic, the name of a 6th-century Anglo-Saxon king (itself from Brittonic Coroticus).
So cerdic would be from ceosan (to choose) and dic (a dike), which makes a strange etymology of “chosen dike” or “chosen ditch”. This might be a pun akin to ager atque annus in Latin, which unfortunately is far too rude to print here (nor in any standard dictionary – so don’t bother looking!).
Cedric falls into the same pit the troofers etc fall into – it’s either all true or all false. The world doesn’t work that way.
So a realistic person might absolutely dismiss that Diana was murdered but conclude that some of the mistakes made by the French authorities might have been swept under the carpet. There might a conspiracy but a mundane one. Take the invasion of Iraq, was it a deliberate ploy to get the oil? No, For all Blair is a git, I think he genuinely thought taking out Saddam was a good thing. Might he and Bush been deliberately lax over the evidence of WMD? Sure, but at the same time they almost certainly thought he’d got them. And having gone to all the trouble of the war, was it likely they’d refuse the oil contracts? Ha, ha. Were there things done that will put people in deep, deep trouble? Maybe if Chilcott ever comes out we might know. Are vaccines a good thing? Most of them are but every now and then the medical profession drops the ball. Adjuvants (added to make vaccines more effecive) do have a question mark over them. People will die from taking vaccines. Fact. It’s no comfort to someone with a child with narcolepsy that statistically less children will die from the disease the child was vaccinated for. Breeze over those cases and you get a deserved reputation for not giving a damn about the public.
With all conspiracies there are grains of truth that get blown out of proportion, often because the authorities dismiss the public 99.9% of the time. By the time they realise that an issue is more that just the mutterings of the masses, the problem has escalated. Let’s be honest, governments DO cover stuff up. In the case of the UK government… badly. There’s no secret too big that someone here won’t blab. But because of stupid stuff they do and then get found out for, they get a reputation for deception. So we have callous and deceptive, and they wonder why the public doesn’t trust them?
Those things don’t worry me. The things that your government are going to screw your life with are the ones they announce to the press. The BIG IDEAS. The medical super computer that will turn out to be a massive money pit and never work. The CCTV ‘police state’ that far from saving us from crime will be used by your local council to fine people who drop litter. The desire for politicians to be great philanthropists by giving your money away to their pet causes. They are things where politicians get excited. They become blind to the flaws in their grand schemes. They fawn over the people who front their pet cause – think Kids Company. They gloss over the concerns of others because they want their cause to succeed.
CAGW is like that. The idea of saving the planet tickled the politician’s egos. Like Cedric, they haven’t bothered to aquaint themselves with the facts. They’re deaf to any criticism. They surround themselves with a coterie of yes men and resent those who urge caution. The only thing that brings them back to the ground is money. Oh boy is AGW the biggest money pit of all (and the truth is irrespective of how much warming there might be). How much has already been spent with so little success?
CAGW is not all true or all false. AGW is real and proveable but the C, ‘catastrophic’ is not. The difference in what needs to be done for CAGW compared to AGW is immense. Incalcuable. Anyone who has the smallest inkling in what it will cost us (progress, health, not just money) should want, nay demand stringent controls of all the elements of the project. We need things like sensitivity pinned down so that we know how much time we’ve got and how hard we need to make life. Randomly throwing wads of cash at renewables we know don’t work is the act of mad men, not cautious people.
Few people like Cedric grasp that at the moment we have no alternatives to fossil fuels that would allow us even a semblance of our current progress. Down sizing they call it when people give up the City job and live a simpler, cheaper life in the country. When you do that with the economy you call it a recession and there’s no rose covered cottage to compensate. If it’s big enough and long enough you call it societal collapse.
Now who is going to vote for that? Who is even going to let politicians plan for that? What politician even thinks that might be the future? But what if it is? Even if we need a moderate amount of pain to reduce CO2 the public would need to be very co-operative. You don’t do that by dismissing the issues they have. You don’t insert ‘NASA’ or ‘consensus’ or ‘cancer’ into every other sentence and hope they’ll meekly do as they’re told. Because the public are very good at doing what they want. So far their response to reducing CO2 is a firm, if silent, ‘no.’ Perhaps a new tack might be in order?
Off topic. I worked on several Vax machines, about the size of a fridge freezer. They weren’t main frames they were something in between, weren’t they?
I’ve just bought a monster games PC that would probably out calculate all the computers there had ever been back then. It’s a weird thought. Can I recommend Unity 3D as the best toy ever. It’s the 3D graphics software I’ve been dreaming of since I got my first Acorn Atom when I was 13.
As I recall it was a big machine about the size of a washing machine, with the on/off switch hidden is some obscure location. It was my one and only brush with Unix.
We used to have them at University with one shared between 50 people. Kids these days just can’t imagine what it was like – a whole room of computer terminals all using the one single machine with a puny CO2 and memory.
What do I think? Seriously?
I keeping thinking: Cedric sounds…
Shame on you. You are evading.
If you have to insulate yourself from criticism in this manner, then that’s an indication of how weak your position is.
Step outside the bubble.
Look at the methodology used. It’s not science.
Let’s be honest, governments DO cover stuff up. In the case of the UK government… badly. There’s no secret too big that someone here won’t blab.
Which is why there’s no scam/conspiracy/hoax/criminal activity.
It’s not possible to organize a fake global scientific consensus.
There’s no mechanism.
If you are going to cover stuff up, there has to be…a way of physically doing it.
It won’t just magically happen by itself.
The idea of saving the planet tickled the politician’s egos. Like Cedric, they haven’t bothered to aquaint themselves with the facts.
NASA’s acquainted with facts. So is every single scientific community on the planet.
You can shake your fist in the air at mystery politicians for as long as you like.
It’s a safely vague target.
Doesn’t work when you get more specific, though.
NASA, remember?
There’s no mechanism for a conspiracy. It’s a problem of scale.
I’ve given you plenty of opportunity to have your say.
And if you had said anything worth commenting on I would have done so.
By the time I went to uni I owned an Atari. In theory I should have chosen an Amstrad PC as they were the future but I’m not sad I didn’t help Alan Sugar. The Atari had an early form of windows style desktop so in many ways was superior to the PCs of the day.
NASA 2
Consensus 1
Cancer 0
Conspiracy 2
I’ve given you plenty of opportunity to have your say.
And I appreciate that.
Seriously.
Only, I gave you those links for a reason. It demonstrates methodology.
Identical methodology.
It’s a well documented, flawed form of arguing science that multiple different groups go off and do in order to confuse and bamboozle a gullible public.
Why are you behaving this way?
Do you actually approve of this kind of thing?
“Why are you behaving this way?”
Aren’t people fickle, doing stuff their way instead of yours?
I eventually bought myself an archimedes. It was literally five years or more ahead of dos machines. The technology was incredible as shown by the continued use of the RISC processor in phones.
What it lacked was UK government support – who to be frank were a bunch of incompetent fools and they should all be ashamed of what they did to British industry.
Well, why?
There’s no need to get all huffy and puffy.
Skeptical thinking, remember?
If you argue in a particular way, then you condone that method.
And each government since. They’ve all been sniffy about industry. I’m hoping the recession has put an end to it. It was a bit of a slap to the side of their collective heads to realise that we were teetering on the edge of all our eggs being in the banking basket. China has the opposite problem.
Your only brush with unix? You poor chump, don’t you know about the unix conspiracy?. unix is behind all kinds of things, or at least behind the scenes. Early DVRs ran linux. many cell phones do, too. The last I looked, Macs are actually built on top of unix. Many IBM mainframes run AIX, and of course miscellaneous workstations. It’s a fine foundation for solid systems. And you can load it up on your PC on top of Windows, with Cygwin.
Programming the thing is another story, of course. If that isn’t what you do 24×7, you don’t want to mess with it. But there it is Bwah hah.
Never heard of the Unix conspiracy.
Unix is not that dissimilar to Linux – at least I found the little Unix I could remember really helpful getting linux to work.
My first computer training was on an old IBM at college. I remember the “floppy disk” was 24″ in diameter and held 4096k (if I remember right.) The programming language was Fortran IV and the entry method was via card punch reader.
All I will say is you have not lived until you’ve spent days figuring out your program, spent hours entering it into the card punch (no typos allowed … better be able to type better than hunt & peck) then run the process to cold start the bloody beast, get it ready to accept your program and … then have the card reader go nuts and fill the room with confetti. I never knew a stack of cards approx 1 inch thick could create that much confetti.
The first computer I ever personally owned was a Commodore Vic-20. Aw, those were the days.
Somewhere in the loft I’ve still got some punched cards and ticker tape, but I think my first program was one to produce prime numbers around 1973. It was on a teleprinter attached by phone to a government computer.
And around 1985 – I produced an early version of a virus BY MISTAKE. I made a batch program that ran each time I logged in. Unfortunately the last time I set it to run, I forgot to set the flag that stopped the batch file itself triggering another login.
Apparently the University computer did nothing all that night apart from run my login in program. The next day I had something like 1000 messages which I had to delete individually before I could get on.
I was post punch cards but I confess to singing along with my tape recorder as it loaded. Grrrrrr arrrrhhhh eeeeeeeee. I did use Fortran at Uni but I cut my teeth in Basic, by learning how to cheat games I played with my brother.
One of my more egrarious goof ups was in a program that monitored real time process controllers 24/7. As part of the program (written in basic and compiled) there was an error trap that was supposed to recover from any bug. One line was written to save a copy of the line# and error code to disk. However, I had by mistake used C; (C semi-colon instead of C colon) in the file descriptor, and it was also supposed to print out on a line printer the same info. Since it could not save to disk, the result was a complete brand new box full of computer paper which contained nothing but “Error in line # xxxx” filling every page… every time that program hit that line with the semi-colon instead of the colon. Which it did until the printer stopped printing because it was out of paper.
Took me a long time to live that one down.
My first computer ran forth. Or in forth: computer my first forth ran.
Given that it was Cedric who brought up Vax machines, he’s been very quiet on the subject. I know the Vax was more 90s than 70s and 80s but we’re just discussing the evolution of the issue. It’s important to examine how things come about in order to understand why they emerge.
Or is he just bemused by people conflating totally different things that have the weakest of links?
OMG, we are so stupid. Cedric wasn’t talking about Vax machines, he was talking about Vax machines. Oh I’ve got one of those now. I wash my carpets with it. Very noisy.
Boy, do I feel a fool.
I was kind of leaving it to Cedric to explain about these vax things – so that he could feel he had contributed to the conversation.
But apparently even leaving an open door for him to show huge knowledge on the subject doesn’t work.