Is it worth responding to family members who have got hold of right-wing disinformation, or should I just let it go?
It's now not just my dad but also my (gay, English) cousin -- slightly younger than me. Le Palme d'Face.
(For a bit of context: I've never been close with either of them. See also #LwaC.)
[...] but you never answered my question: when and how do we decide that a theory is without substantial merit?
This is very much a key question when it comes to politicized science.
For instance, we can dismiss anyone trying to introduce "flat earth theory" or "intelligent design" as justification for a political position, let alone for scientific discussion. It's not that we can't ever question our beliefs about those things; it's just that the evidence is in, the "debate" has already happened, and scientific orthodoxy came down on the other side (the earth is round; present life evolved from simpler forms via natural selection) -- so if someone wants to reintroduce them as legitimate issues worthy of debate, they have some heavy lifting to do.
I would characterize this heavy lifting as requiring the following:
That's the simplest case for challenging orthodoxy; the situation is a bit more nuanced with an item like The Bell Curve (TBC).
While the scientific debate has been had and many of the book's conclusions have been rejected as bad science, it's also true that it may include some perfectly valid statements which have simply been taken out of context and used in misleadingly political ways.
If you're arguing, for example, that TBC has been unfairly written off for political reasons, then, you need to be clear about which specific parts of it (conclusions or statements) you're referring to and whether you're challenging the orthodoxy on those items or merely pointing out that they've been unreasonably politicized despite being valid.
Note that you can't just go saying "this book is unfairly maligned" -- because as a whole, it was maligned for very good reasons. If there are particular parts of it which you believe to be salvageable, you need to make it clear that you're not trying to defend the book as a whole.
If (on the other hand) you believe that it's valid as a whole, then you're asking for settled orthodoxy to be re-examined on numerous points -- which requires the rather heavier lifting above for each of those points.
W.
(This discussion started with the item I linked and responded to here on CWRE.)
2023-04-06 Some ideas can’t be challenged and ‘speech is violence.’ Really? (John Staddon, Carolina Journal [FB share])
My response:
There's a lot to unpack in this; I'll admit I'm struggling to figure out the chain of logic.
We start out with a Trump-appointed judge being invited to speak at Stanford (why?). Students speak against this, and the event is cancelled. JS then makes allusions to speech being equated to violence, but he gives no exact quotes (at least not at that stage of the argument) to explain how this sequence of events relates to that equivalence nor does he even make it clear whether his statement that "Clearly speech can equal violence, and the speaker bears total responsibility for any effects it has on them" is intended ironically or sincerely.
In the next paragraph, he's suddenly talking about "the woke revolution" -- which is of course a fiction created by the right wing ("woke" being a trigger-word to create, in the mind of the audience, a negative association with whatever is being so labelled, bypassing any critical thinking that might be engaged if more meaningful words were used), but even granting for the sake of argument that it's a real thing and also a problem, how does the former connect to the latter?
Perhaps this is explained later in the essay, but I feel like the lack of explanation is itself intended to make the reader feel inferior if they aren't clever enough to immediately see the connection for themselves -- doubtless leading many whose feelings have already been activated by the word "woke" to nod their heads and mutter angrily under their breath without any attempt at critical analysis.
Is there actually a logical argument being made here? If so, what is it?
Woozle Hypertwin