Skeptics' Circle — Puzzling evidence
The latest edition of Skeptics’ Circle has just been posted at Infophilia.The theme is logic puzzles. This issue will require some hard thinking. As the host says: “After all, logic is one of the best razors against irrational thinking, and like any razor it needs to be periodically sharpened.”
This terrific edition is for true skeptics and people not afraid to think critically about real issues confronting us today. It features articles addressing things like chemical fears in perfumes, “optimal nutrition” and pregnancy weight gain as a target of obesity hysteria (no, it wasn’t written by JFS). Thank you for including my article on electromagnetic woo infiltrating public health guidelines. Oh, on a related note, Think Geek has just released new Wi-fi detector shirts.
One of the most entertaining articles was by Skeptico entitled “The Woo Handbook.” It is the perfect illustration of the fallacies of logic that scientists encounter regularly whenever they’re attempting to debunk popular myths — but not just from woos and internet trolls, but even from skeptics who aren’t skeptical and scientists who aren’t scientific. It’s a fun and enlightening read, with a serious point, and begins:
My fellow woos – this handbook will enable to you debate effectively with skeptics on the web, or at least irritate them for a bit. Read and absorb its contents and you should be able to debate with skeptics without having to know any actual “science” or anything hard like that. And lets face it, if we wanted to study hard stuff and learn any actual facts or evidence, we’d be real scientists and not woos. And where would be the fun in that?
Before you start though, you should remember that skeptics have many things on their side. Things like evidence, facts, logic. But don’t despair. If you follow the techniques described below it may seem like you have a valid argument more often that you would imagine, given your actual lack of knowledge, evidence or facts. Good luck, and I’m visualizing your success.
Here are the main points to successfully annoying debating with skeptics: ....
These are all worth reading and thinking about, but a few gems are:
3. If the skeptic has scientific studies that appear to support his point of view, you should point out that scientific studies have been wrong before....
4. Remember, your personal experience is always more valid than their scientific studies (or your lack of them). Anecdotes will convince more people you’re right than any number of “studies”, so have a couple ready. It doesn’t matter if they’re true – you’re on the internet so no one knows who you are and can check them anyway....
5. Move the goalposts. For example, if you’re claiming that Thimerosal in vaccines causes autism, and the skeptic points to a lack of studies that support this (or the continued increase in autism even though Thimerosal has been removed from vaccines), just start talking about other environmental sources of mercury....
8. Question the motives of everyone. A scientist writing a paper must be getting funding from somewhere, after all. If you can’t find actual evidence of nefarious motives or conflicts of interest, no matter – just claim the conflicts exist. That’ll be enough in most cases....
16. Drop into the argument the fact that hundreds of years ago we didn’t know radio waves existed, but they obviously did exist, so how does the skeptic know that “qi” (or whatever) does not exist today? If nothing else, that’ll change the subject....
He did leave out the one that goes: “But everyone believes this is true, so it must be.”
:)
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