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Comment by INGELRII | Hacker News Reader

There is a great book: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"

Two things to learn from the book:

1) The are same people and organizations behind many science related denials: DDT, tobacco, SDI defenders, acid rain, ozone hole, and climate change denial are linked to same group of people. They try to "maintain the controversy" and "keep the debate alive".

2) The usual suspects don't do this just for the money. Sure, they take money from business sponsors, but the merchants of doubt themselves are not purely cynical operatives and money grabbers. There is type of Manichaean paranoia and ideology behind it. It's related to cold war mentality and free market fundamentalism.

George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) was one of the centers of this ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall_Institute

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Another good book in that vein, but more in the political arena (think tanks etc.) is Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.

This is the book that caused me the greatest despair about our current political system. Short of rolling back Citizens United, I can't imagine an effective counter strategy.

Correction: Union -> United

Citizens United

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Yes. The Supreme Court has two very memorable recent decisions that cause us to question the viability of our (2 party) democracy.

1) Bush v. Gore 2000: only time the court ever issued a decision, knowing that it was totally vaporous, and said this should not be used as future precedent. The entire point of the court is to set precedent.

2) Citizens United: continuing the notion that companies deserve as much protection as people.

Pair those together and it becomes hard to claim that the US is a democracy at all. The court has some other notoriously bad decisions, but I hope they eventually come down on the side of democracy in regards to gerrymandering, despite the recent rulings.

You understand that a contrary ruling on Citizens United would also allow the government to shut down numerous organizations advocating for addressing climate change? If the government can ban a political movie about Hilary Clinton (which is what was at issue in Citizens United), it can ban a political movie about Trump’s effect on climate change.

You’re using ban like this was something about the government silencing someone, definitely a free speech issue. But that case was about campaign finance and the ability to control how much money, spending, etc., could be used in an election.

You’re being disingenuous to say the least.

Edit: btw I am not a lawyer, and so this is of course my lay persons opinion.

> You’re using ban like this was something about the government silencing someone, definitely a free speech issue.

It was.

> But that case was about campaign finance and the ability to control how much money, spending, etc., could be used in an election.

It wasn't.

The law in question in CU banned corporations (including non-profit corporations) and unions from paying for any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that mentions a candidate within 60 days of a general election of 30 days of a primary.

A non-profit wanted to air a film critical of a candidate. They were prohibited by that law from buying air time to show to their film, or even from buying ads advertising the availability of the film. They sued to overturn the law.

The case did not involve nor did the ruling change the law on campaign finance.

> paying for any broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that mentions a candidate within 60 days of a general election of 30 days of a primary.

> The case did not involve nor did the ruling change the law on campaign finance.

You’re right. And I was inaccurate. What we’re discussing is the rise and unregulated use of PACs and Super PACs to influence elections.

This is an issue for fair elections and democracy.

The slippery slope? Totally unimpressed.

Ultamist positions (NRA, ACLU, BBV) are useful thought experiments, defining the boundaries. To better understand the problem domain. And utterly impractical.

Any idea taken to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite, highlighting the absurdity.

Freedom Speeches™, like Freedom Markets™, reject compromise, deny the existence of other concerns, eschew balance. They're terrible policies for actual governance. Toxic.

As we now see.

I must apologize. I somehow forgot that Citizens United was about corporate personhood.

I can kinda understand how someone lacking any sense of balance, nuance, history could support Freedom Speeches™. That money is speech, and more money means more freedom, booyah. Some people are just wired to believe that might makes right.

But believing that corporations have the same rights, but none of the pesky responsibilities & obligations, as natural persons really is just misanthropic.

While I don’t doubt your assertion that a select few are responsible for the bulk of the push-back on such issues, I think it’s good to have some resistance. Humans are so prone to wishful thinking and following consensus, it can be healthy to keep the debate alive longer than one might think necessary. It helps one clarify your position to yourself, for one.

How is flooding a consensus forming process with information that is known to be false possibly helpful with improving the accuracy of the process?

Precisely because “known to be false” is debatable. Known by who? To what certainty? Etc.

The context in this thread was fabricated, known to be false doubt, so, no, that is not debatable.

Known by experts of the field, the ones most qualified to evaluate claims of the field. The experts of this field are in strong consensus, to such a high degree of certainty that it's basically established fact.

As an engineer and a scientific thinker I agree with having some skepticism. After all we try to “disprove“ hypotheses in science.

However, what we are suffering from as a species at the moment is more related to what Bertrand Russell described as:

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.”

Some resistance is definitely necessary if you care about whether the claims being made are true, yes. For example, take this article about the oceans supposedly soaking up much more heat than previously thought, which made it to HN a year or so ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 The comments are full of people confidently taking it as yet more inevitable evidence that we're even more doomed than previously thought, we need to overthrow the entire system of global industry, etc.

The article was retracted, followed by the underlying study. One of those pesky members of the climate denial movement spotted that they'd messed up their calculations, and the authors basically copped to this. This shouldn't have been necessary. They were using a bizarre, indirect method to try and estimate something we'd already measured directly, and got an answer that contradicted that existing measurement. The first assumption should've been that their method was wrong and it should've taken a hell of a lot of evidence to overcome it, but there's such a strong bias towards claims of climate doom that it got a spot in Nature and uncritical regurgitation in the global press instead. (Part of the problem is that Nature has a general bias towards shocking, novel claims that leads to them publishing dubious work, but it's hard to imagine them being so gung-ho about work leaning in the opposite direction.)

Naturally, most people who read the existing coverage will never see the retractions and will continue to be influenced by the now-retracted claim.

Primary difference is good faith and bad faith. Most denialism is bad faith and doesn’t make honest retractions.

The distinction you'll find leads your 2nd paragraph: the study was retracted.

The climate denial movement never budges a nanometer on any of its points. The scientific movement admits its mistakes and errors.

And yes, there's dispute in small details of the matter. The grander narrative has been clear since the 19th century. No, not a typo. Not since the 20th, but the 19th.

I'm pretty sure they have budged on some of their points, and that folks have taken this as proof they admit they're entirely wrong, but putting that aside for a moment...

Suppose for a moment that the scientists hadn't budged. That they'd listened to all the folks who say that climate change deniers are simply liars who aren't worth listening to and not even bothered to look at their complaints. Who would you believe - the Nature-published scientists or the evil climate denial movement? Because unless you'd be willing to believe the deniers over the mainstream scientific community, it seems like we're in unfalsifiable territory here, where if the mainstream scientists admit they're wrong it proves they're right, and if they don't it also proves they're right.

"Let's suppose what didn't happen and assume it did...."

Science, as a process, is a process at arriving at truths. It's fundamentally dialectic, as opposed to rhetorical, the profession practiced by many around the denial movement, several in this thread.

Naomi Oreskes' name has already been mentioned here. In addition to writing on climate (and ozone/CFCs, tobacco, lead, asbestos, etc., etc., etc.) denial, she's written on the history of one of the more amazing feats of collective mind-changing in science: the adoption of the theory of plate tectonics, or continental drift, as it was first called.

When proposed, the theory was ridiculed as completely crackpot. But what happened was that more and more evidence, and mechanisms, turned up. And, yes, over the course of about a half century, many of the original objectors died. But from roughly 1915 to 1965, established views changed from believing that the continents had always occupied their current positions to the understanding that they very much had not.

Geography, geology, fossils, radioactive decay (as both heat source and clock), undersea surveys, earthquake faults, seismic analysis. The preponderance of evidence changed minds.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/plate-tectonics-an-insiders-h...

https://www.worldcat.org/title/rejection-of-continental-drif...

So the scientific process actually is extremely accountable & includes ideas like pushback through processes like peer review. There are bad studies but this is the classic case of getting no credit for the good job done 99% of the time and hyper focus on the mistakes that occur 1% of the time. People here would (rightfully) quit a job in that environment, they’d label it toxic, and they’d be right.

Not all push back is equal... does it really helpful to "keep the debate alive" by pushing back on the idea that the earth is not flat?

This is a critical component of manufacturing consent.

It ain’t just the right, the center have their own propaganda-like think tanks that work closely with the DNC.

But, we are in a post-fact era. Expect this to get much worse.

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