No one is more imaginative than someone who refuses to admit the obvious.
As the Internet has brought about 24/7 global debate, it has also brought about rapid innovation in the field of dishonest, unrepentant attacks in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Here are some common strategies:
Source of attack
This isn’t new, but it’s certainly popular. this is a to that man With innovative additional features.
Classic form: “The conclusion from study X is wrong because it comes from discredited academic Y.”
But even disreputable people may be right about something. At best, “discredit” may mean more scrutiny of their claims – if they are dishonest rather than honestly wrong – but it is not an a priori assumption that they will always be wrong about everything.
Why is Academic Y known as disreputable? This is where things often get interesting. Like this:
Circular attacks on the source.
“Study X on the heritability of intelligence is wrong because it comes from discredited academic Y”
“Why do you say Y has a bad reputation?”
“Because he was writing about the heritability of intelligence!”
This is now a popular form of scientific denial, especially on issues that are increasingly undeniable and religiously denied—such as the heritability of intelligence, as well as all other psychological traits, non-socially constructed differences between the sexes, or the existence of gender.
You’ll notice that nowhere is there any reference to the truth or falsity of actual science – a priori rejections of arguments and authors are used as evidence for each other.
Similar circular buildings, whose scale rivals Avebury, Apple’s new campus and even Saturn’s rings, are also often used incorrectly support Position:
1. Acquire absurd beliefs.
2. Call the small fringe people who share it “experts.”
3. “The experts agree with me!”
That’s how you get “Scholars agree there are 98 genders” and “Scientists say the world will end in 12 years.”
Source tracking
as defined in accurate dictionarya sourcetroll is someone who is determined not to admit an obvious or well-established point under any circumstances, continuing to demand more evidence long after all reasonable standards of proof have been met.
To illustrate this point, consider the chess game I played in the Boy Scouts decades ago, playing it safe against the dumbest boys in the troop, and maybe even the multiverse.
I’m no Kasparov myself, and I’d still kill him pretty quickly – but the one rule he does know is that it’s impossible to take the king. So, after being checked, he takes another walking move – entering another checkmate situation. I told him the game was over. He said: “No, you can’t take away my king. That’s the rule”. So, foolishly, instead of rolling my eyes and walking away, or stabbing his hippocampus with a Swiss knife, I spent the next five minutes chasing his lone king around the board, from checkmate to checkmate, against his refusal to acknowledge the defeat that happened 40 moves ago.
Here’s how it works on the Internet.
“Saudi Arabia and the UAE use slave labor extensively”
“source?”
“Source 1; Source 2; Source 3”
“These are certainly isolated cases, are there any sources to substantiate your claims as ‘widespread’?”
“It’s an established fact, and everyone who has visited the region or is even remotely interested in the region knows that X, Y, and Z international organizations are working on this issue. It’s a fact. You might as well question gravity.”
“source?”
Source trolling is dangerous because pretending to be malicious and “just asking for evidence” makes any request for evidence sound like a malicious attack.
Next, there are two subtypes fallacy of association In the past, I even refused to deal with an uncomfortable thought because it was probably true:
tar in social group.
“Statement A was made by scholar B, who once said it with scholar C, who once said what D said, so it can be safely said that A is wrong.”
How can someone who has been seen in the same room as a disgraced author (see above) possibly be right about anything?
This is problematic transitivity, which is a very evil principle, but handy if you’re doing an investigation.
Believed by a bad person and therefore a bad belief, held only by other bad people.
The bad guy believes X, therefore X is wrong, and any arguments that might be used to support moral fallacy), whoever believes in X is a bad person.
“The Nazis sterilized the non-complex so that intelligence was not heritable, and if you consider studying it or citing the vast amount of evidence to prove that it actually is, you are Hitler”. If you haven’t seen this before, I congratulate you on staying away from social(ism)(pseudo)scientific Twitter. This is now the standard line for the left to deny science.
My Latin is almost certainly wrong, but since a fallacy needs a Latin name to enter the canon, I suggest “Malus credebat, ergo malo credo.” It is a bad belief to believe in bad people.
Moving from the correlation fallacy to new areas, there is this:
Requirements are proven.
Inspired by an argument Helen Pluckrose had with an interlocutor who basically said “You say evolution is correct, but the burden of proof is on you because you are the one making the positive claim,” The implicit meaning is obviously “In half a minute, summarize hundreds of thousands of pages and two hundred years of scholarship for me in a way that satisfies me—no matter what you say and I can’t—otherwise you’ll lose the argument by default.”
But asking for it in each particular case is just a delaying tactic when the evidence has already been presented on a civilized level. You don’t have to ask your supplier for the full theory of money every time you buy a croissant.
In fact, in this case, something like the law of inertia is a good analogy, and the burden of proof falls on those who disagree with the established view and wish to change the entire consensus of civilization – if someone tells you that gravity does not exist, even if they make a negative claim, the burden of proof will be on them, simply because they are making such a crazy claim in an attempt to overturn the established – which in this case is self-evident.
Like the chess anti-intellect (as opposed to the prodigy) in the story above, someone heard somewhere that the burden of proof lies on a positive claim, ignoring the rest of the rules. It would be more accurate to say that something like the law of inertia applies, and the burden of proof falls on those who want to make extraordinary changes in the shared understanding of the world—provided that the shared understanding is evidence-based and falsifiable.
Science denial today takes the form of trying to change the science of something, questioning and changing the rules (which would only double life expectancy and put a man on the moon) rather than proving and disproving hypotheses through the scientific method, within and following the rules – part of a wider trend of playing definitional and political games to avoid unwinnable substantive debates.
Postmodernism is evil. There is no “post” with a correct answer.
There’s too much prejudice and moralizing here, too many sacred cows and things that would be hard to accept if they were true, so they can’t be true. But “It’s not science because I don’t want it to be true” is contrary to the scientific view.
What needs to be clear is:
Error: “Good, therefore true.” (Infant Epistemology)
Equally wrong is: “It’s bad, therefore it’s true.” (Edgelord Epistemology)
Right: “Truth and goodness are orthogonal.” (The Epistemology of Honesty)
Nowadays, this is one of the standard modus operandi of bad guys. Redefining something they can’t beat, “fucking loving science” but neither understanding how it works nor really liking it the way it should work – to be fair, zero fucks about preconceived notions and people’s preferences for what would be kinda good if it were true.
PS: Bonus points if you understand why the cover picture is the Nile. (Denied. Got it?)
In related reading, here’s an article about one of three blogs on the internet that’s almost as good as Wisdomination:
polystyrene It is a fallacy not to support thinkers whose thoughts are like polished bronze in the noonday sun.
