Debunking Denialism
Modern life presents us with an apparent paradox: science has a strong cultural authority, yet primitive darkness is coming back in the shape of creationism, quack medicine, opposition to vaccination, HIV/AIDS denialism, anti-psychiatry and so on.
Debunking Denialism takes on the enemies of reason.
Article Library
If you want to read more content from Debunking Denialism, check out the article library, or the main content below.
Main Content
- Debunking Alternative Medicine
- Debunking Anti-psychiatry
- Debunking Opposition to Vaccines
- Debunking Biotechnology Fear Mongering
- Debunking Climate Change Denialism
- Debunking Holocaust Denial
- Debunking Conspiracy Theories about 9/11
- Debunking Creationism
- Debunking HIV/AIDS Denialism
- Debunking Physical Punishment of Childen
- Debunking Race Realism and Racism
- Debunking Misuse of Statistics
Additional Content
In the Spotlight
Recent Articles
- Shattering Academic Philosophy
- Swedish Anti-Vaccine Infection Parties for Measles and Rubella
- Fraud Psychic Sylvia Browne Proven Wrong Yet Again
- The Robustness of Scientific Skepticism
- Scientific Skepticism and One-liners
- How Skepchick Rebecca Watson Misuses Statistics
- Cold Facts about Gardasil? More like Intellectual Rigor Mortis
- Why Stephen Bond’s Case Against Skepticism Is Profoundly Unconvincing
- The Failure of Mysterian Complaints about Neuroesthetics
- The Statistical (but not Scientific) Ignorance of Phil Plait
- The Blow Job Refutation
- Questioning Evolution…by Spouting the Same Old Creationist Canards
- Evidence-Based Debunking
- An Intellectual Re-evaluation of the “Schrödinger’s Rapist” Analogy
- Responding to Incoherent Anti-Psychiatry Drivel
Links
- Academics Review
- AIDS Truth
- Bad Astronomy
- Bad Science
- C0nc0rdance
- Climate Denial Crock of the Week
- Correcting the AIDS Lies
- Deborah Lipstadt’s Blog
- Debunking the 9/11 Myths
- Evidence for Common Descent
- Evolutionsteori.se
- Expelled Exposed
- Holocaust Denial on Trial
- Homebirth Death Statistics
- How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic
- Hurt by Homebirth
- James Randi Educational Foundation
- Less Wrong
- Mayo Clinic
- National Center for Science Education
- NCSE Climate
- NeuroLogica Blog
- Oppose Naturopath Licensing
- Potholer54
- Potholer54debunks
- Quackwatch
- Real Climate
- Respectful Insolence
- Richard Carrier
- Science-Based Medicine
- Screw Loose Change
- Sense about Science
- Seth Kalichman's Blog
- Skeptical Science
- Skepticblog
- Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
- Talk Reason
- TalkOrigins Archive
- The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
- The Loom
- The Panda's Thumb
- The Skeptic's Dictionary
- The Skeptical OB
- Understanding Evolution
- Understanding Science
- Vaccininfo
- What's The Harm?
History
Spread the Word
Quotes
"I realize that 'complementary and alternative medicine' (CAM) or, what quackademics like to call it now, 'integrative medicine' (IM) is meant to refer to 'integrating' alternative therapies into SBM or 'complementing' SBM with a touch of the ol’ woo, but I could never manage to understand how 'integrating' quackery with SBM would do anything but weaken the scientific foundation of medicine."
- David Gorski, cancer surgeon and debunker of pseudoscience (source).
"Denialists [...] replace the rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment."
- Michael Specter, author and responsible science journalist (Denialism, pp. 2-3).
"If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven’t visited yet"
- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, rationality expert and AI researcher (source).
"As an aside, it is ironic that CAM proponents often simultaneously tout how individualized their treatment approach is, but then claim that one product or treatment can cure all cancer. Meanwhile they criticize the alleged cookie-cutter approach of mainstream medicine, which is actually producing a more and more individualized (and evidence-based) approach to such things as cancer."
- Steven Novella, neurologist and founder of the New England Skeptical Society. (source).
"While Galileo was a rebel, not all rebels are Galileo."
- Norman Levitt, mathematician and critic of anti-science postmodernism (quoted in Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets, p. 37).
"If chiropractic manipulation of the neck had been a pill, it would have been pulled by the [regulatory authorities]. Even if the risk for vascular injury is low, the risk is not outweighed by the a demonstrated benefit."
- Mats Reimer, Swedish pediatrician, scientific skeptic and blogger (source, my translation).
"It is so addictive to make videos to people like Fringe [an unreasonable race realist - Emil Karlsson's note] simply because of that pleasing wet snap that you hear inside your head every time you smash up their worldview and show it to be based on bullshit and half-truths. It is enjoyable. It is better than most drugs and I think that is why I make Youtube videos. It is interesting to see how people's minds work when they have a preconception they start with and then work from there as oppose to enter into something trying to actively not acknowledge any preconception and go were the evidence leads them."
- TheSkepticalHeretic, Youtube skeptic and debunker of race realists (source).
Oh how interesting. Causes me to remember the time I was raped in the Air Force, and then the time my birth mother told me she couldn’t tell me who my father is “because it was a rape.” That’s if I don’t think of the stuff my adoptive dad used to like doing out in the woods, first. There’s also the rapes that occurred to other girls on campus – oh wait, how many was it – while I was in college … Doesn’t feel like “incidence” or “prevalence” – how strange…I’m guessing from your thoughtful and sensitive article that you understand each time when people talk about rape that there might be victims right next to you…
Oh, and none of the first three events I mention were ever reported to police…but I can’t speak for others because I’m not one those radicals so I’m just going to end by reporting that I”m unsubscribing, bye, ’twas nice while it lasted….
I disproved a common anti-feminist “argument” that is used to minimize the problem of rape…and you think I was being insensitive to rape victims?
The “1 in 71 men have been raped” stat from the CDC survey doesn’t tell the whole story. It defines “rape” as the attacker penetrating the victim, which excludes women who use their vagina to rape a man (rape by envelopment) which is counted as “made to penetrate”. The very same survey says “1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else,” which is far more than 1 in 71. Also, the study says that 79.2% of male victims of “made to penetrate” reported only female perpetrators, meaning they were raped by a woman.
The above, lifetime stats do show a lower percentage of male victims (up to 1.4% rape by penetration + 4.8% made to penetrate = 6.2%) than female victims (18.3%) although it is far more than the 1 in 71 you stated. However, if you look at the report’s stats for the past 12 months, just as many number of men have been “forced to penetrate” as women were raped, meaning that if you properly define “made to penetrate” as rape, men were raped as often as women.
You did not actually address the argument I made in this blog post. Do you understand the difference between prevalence and incidence? Do you accept that the blogger Phil in Utah confused these two metrics in his arguments?
The 1 in 71 figure is not something I stated, but something I quoted from CDC. I also, after the quote, pointed out that this figure depends on the definition of rape. Did you manage to read that far?
The report does state that the life-time prevalence in being made to penetrate someone else is 4.8% and if we add that to 1/71, we do get 6.2%. This, however, is still a far cry from around 18%. In reality, the life-time prevalence of rape for men is irrelevant for the accurate characterization of the life-time rape prevalence of women. The fact that around 6% of men are raped does not mean that the 18% figure drops to 4% as Phil in Utah wants to have it.
For that particular year, it does seem as if the number of men who reported being forced to penetrate is about equal to the number of females who have been raped. However, that is a single data point and tells us nothing about how it looks overall. There may be certain days out of the year that the temperature in Sweden and Australia is the same. Does that mean that the two countries have identical climates? No. That means that it is better to look at longer time periods; that is why people care about life-time prevalence in the first place.
For life-time prevalence, it is about 5.5 million men who have been made to penetrate and about 22 million women who have been raped (pp. 18-19). So even when we define both as rape, women carry the stronger burden.
This is of course completely irrelevant to the point of my post, which was that the blogger Phil in Utah confuse prevalence with incidence.
My point is that your “1 in 71″ quote is misleading. Your offhand comment of “Now, rape prevalence will differ depending on how inclusive the definition of rape is…” does not make it even clear or even suggest that if rape is properly defined, the prevalence is far higher than 1 in 71 (actually 1 in 16). Instead, readers are being led to think “oh, only 1 in 71 men have been raped,” which is inaccurate.
Yes, I accept that Phil in Utah confused incidence and prevalence, just like most discussions of the CDC study, outside of MRA sites, have confused rape with being penetrated and ignored the “made to penetrate” numbers.
Egalitarian, this may be an example of ‘violent agreement’, where both you and Karlsson agree on the facts, but differ only in some secondary feature (in this case, emphasis on which part of the topic). So it may look like you disagree with Karlsson, but I don’t think you do, actually.
It’s just that the prevalence or non-prevalence in males is *irrelevant* to the main point of Karlsson’s article. For you, it may be an important issue that you want to pursue, but for the purpose of this article, Karlsson’s quoting of the 1 in 71 is merely incidental (he could have left it out entirely and still made his entire point), and not part of his argument.
I do happen to agree with you on one point, that by quoting it out of context, and not explaining the context thoroughly, some people *may* go on to use that as a basis to claim, “Oh, it’s only 1 in 71.” *But*, if they did do this, then they would be guilty of perhaps even worse fallacies: Cherry picking, quote mining, etc. Needless to say, Karlsson would debunk their misleading quote just as thoroughly as he’s debunking this current fallacy of misusing statistics. It would not be the fault of Emil Karlsson, but the fault of the quote-miner.
However, as I myself try to practice not repeating false/misleading information, I could see that you would have a stylistic argument that it is ‘better’ either not to quote the 1 in 71 at all, or to only quote it in complete context. I just don’t see that as an ethical issue. I think Karlsson’s article is clear enough on its own (I was not mislead, myself), so I would understand if he felt no need to modify or amend it on this issue. (And I have been picky about misleading wording in articles before (recently, in fact), so I’m not merely dismissing your point. I just don’t think it ‘crosses the line’ in this instance.)
@Egalitarian,
it should be obvious that these figures refer to rape as defined in the CDC report itself. Had I made a post that focused on the difference in rape statistics between men and women, I should have posted and discussed the definitions used. But this was not the point of the post.
The concept of “rape as properly defined” is not uncontroversial (at what level of intoxication are people unable to give informed consent? Does subtle psychological manipulation count? etc.) and it is certainly not as easy as you make it out to be.
Even using the most inclusive definition of rape possible from the CDC data (i.e. rape + other sexual violence):
Women:
Rape: 21,840,000
Other Sexual Violence: 53,174,000
= ~75 million victims
Men:
Rape: 1,581,000
Other Sexual Violence (this includes being made to penetrate): 25,130,000
= ~27 million victims
This data is from life-time prevalence. For the past 12 months in 2010 cannot be reliably compared because the estimate for men where not included because of relative standard error > 30% or cell size < 20%.
So in order to get the numbers to come out the way you want them to, you would be required to, with the figures already known, define rape in such a way that the figures come out the way you need them to. In other words, you would decide your own result.
Thaumas,
You are right, I don’t disagree with Karlsson on the facts, but I would argue that quoting the “1 in 71″ number for men is just as misleading as mistaking incidence with prevalence. Misleading statistics have the same impact whether they are due to factual errors, incorrect interpretations, or questionable definitions. I agree that it would have been reasonable to leave out the “1 in 71″ number entirely.
If I had written
…then I am sure someone would have accused me of trying to cover up the rape of men or minimizing the rape of men by quoting selectively.
I guess there are some cases where you just can’t win.
I think you’re right, there, Emil. You can’t please everyone. The main thing is that you quoted it correctly (though perhaps not perfectly; and perfection is a rotten standard to live by anyway), and provided a link for people to check on their own. That’s completely fair, in my personal opinion. You didn’t actively misrepresent anything, and you’re aware of the subtleties of the reports and the statistics, and even gave notice that the numbers depend on the definitions used.
@Egalitarian, I’m not unsympathetic to your desire not to mislead in this way, but I respectfully disagree that Karlsson’s quoting is “just as misleading as mistaking incidence with prevalence”, due to the fact that the quoting was a) incidental, not actually relevant to his point, and b) surrounded by enough warnings (e.g. that rates depend on definitions) and references (link to the original research) that an intellectually honest and responsible person would not reasonably use such an incidental quotation without first double-checking the source.
That intellectually *dishonest* or careless people might misuse it that way is not the fault of Karlsson, but of such people themselves. And, as yet, such misuse of Karlsson’s quote is currently only hypothetical, and not actual; so again, I can’t say as he’s done anything wrong or unethical here. This is simply not on the same level as the misuse/misunderstanding of statistics regarding incidence and prevalence.
The only occurrence of the 1 in 17 figure is *within* the quote itself, and Karlsson does not refer to it at all in his own words. He is not using it inappropriately, because he is not *using* it at all, except as incidental context of a quote about *another* statistic.
“Misleading statistics have the same impact whether they are due to factual errors, incorrect interpretations, or questionable definitions.”
I agree, but we should (IMO) focus our efforts on correcting actual misuses of such statistics, and on the people who actively use them inappropriately. I disagree that Karlsson’s quote here qualifies as an actual misuse of statistics, due to the reasons I gave above.
And also, to repeat: If people wander on by and read random numbers from webpages and use that kind of unskeptical and uninformed method to base their worldviews upon, then *that* is the real problem — people thinking and acting irrationally and unreasonably. *That* is the problem I am focused on correcting. If people were better skeptics and critical thinkers (which is not actually that hard to do), then this entire side-issue you brought up would be an entirely moot point. Emil Karlsson’s article here is one example of an effort to help address that problem. As such, IMO it’s part of the solution, not part of the problem. We would all do well to think as clearly as possible on such contentious issues such as this one. That’s the point.
Very sorry to hear about your experiences, Mipochka. I hope more people feel brave enough to bring about such experiences to light. It is very important.
Unfortunately, I think you may be burning a good bridge here, perhaps without realizing it. Just as it’s important to hear about the experiences of people who have been raped, it is also important to understand and use the science and statistics that have studied rape incidence and prevalence correctly.
That is the job that Karlsson’s article above does so well, and I do not think I’m alone when I say that I found his analysis very helpful, which makes me more confident to speak out against the misuse of such statistics in the future.
The reason this kind of analysis is important *in addition to* personal experience reports such as yours, is that one of the best ways to defuse an ongoing argument with people who are entrenched in their positions (such as some MRAs, and also some ‘radical’ feminists — but really any person entrenched in any position) is to appeal directly to the best evidence we have available about the objective reality of the macro-scale situation, such as by examining statistics about rape from national, international, or scientific studies.
When people are entrenched, they go back and forth, “I’m right!” “No, I’m right!” with no way of resolving the conflict, *because* they do not rely on reliable evidence to come to their positions. It is only when people are forced to account for their positions by appealing directly to evidence that we can have a strong hope of resolving the conflict.
The more people rely on their own personal convictions, the worse the disagreement gets. The more people rely on reliable, objective evidence of the actual *reality* of the situation, the more people will come to agreement *about* that reality.
Karlsson’s article here (and his whole blog, really) is using this strategy to find out what the reliable primary sources of information (government studies, international studies, scientific studies, etc.) and to debunk the claims made by people who wrongly ignore and deny what’s *real* in favour of what they want to believe.
In the end, reality always wins, so the side(s) that embrace reality are going to be proven right again and again. Karlsson is on the side of reality (and me too, or so I strive to be, anyway), so it’s unfortunate that you seem to be burning this bridge with him when he’s really on your side. I hope you reconsider, sometime.
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I’ve read the article most of the discussion but come away not knowing what to believe! Can we get a summary of the best information available which is as fair as possible? Incidence of rape per year for male and female which uses the fairest definition(s) as possible is a solid start.
Before that is possible, we have to establish what definitions are fair.
I’m all ears.
I don’t mean that I personally know what definitions are most reasonable. It is just the first step in the process before you can look at incidence.
One important question would be, is the definition of rape by the CDC the same as those in the penal codes? Considering the US has many different penal codes, that would strike me as almost impossible.
You say, “Obviously you can be subjected to a crime even though you are not aware that it is considered a crime”. True, but if a large part of the population disagrees with the law – which theorically, in a democracy, should be the expression of the will of the population – then who’s “wrong”, the law or the population?
I am not an expert on the American legal system, but I think rape is a state crime and so definitions could potentially vary across states.
Even if a large part of the population disagrees with a law, the law is still active until it has been overturned. The USA is a constitutional republic, not a direct democracy.