Debunking Denialism

A common thread that runs through most kinds of pseudoscience is that the proponents are being suppressed and threatened by a vast conspiracy involving the government and/or the scientific community. Intelligent design creationists believe that the “Darwinist establishment” is deliberately rejecting scientifically solid papers critical of evolution from getting published in scientific journals. 9/11 truthers claim that evidence showing that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is an inside job is being covered-up by elements within the U. S. government. Anti-psychiatry cranks assert that modern psychiatry is an evil conspiracy between pharmaceutical companies and the government in order to keep the citizens as sheep while stealing their money. Those who reject the existence and impact of anthropogenic global warming allege that it is just a delusion in order to impose a global carbon tax.

While it is more exciting with government cover-ups, shadowy agencies and conspiracy theories and more satisfying to explain being rejected and ridicules by the mainstream science than to acknowledge the mundane truth, there is one fatal flaw. These purported conspiracies quickly grow to unfathomable and absurd proportions. For instance, if 9/11 was an inside job, then the conspiracy behind it must include thousands of politicians, public sector employees, journalists, engineers, aviation experts and scientists. The question then becomes: why have the information about the existence and nature of such a conspiracy not leaked to the public? Surely, it is pretty much a practically impossible task to pay off thousands of people to keep quiet? Thus, we find ourselves holding a very powerful counterargument against any conspiracy theory. If it existed, we would probably have known about it.

A tweet by someone called William K. Wolfrum illustrated this general counterargument nicely:

In other words, if the government could not even keep a sexual act between the President and a woman working at the White House a secret, it seems very unlikely that they would be able to keep the vast conspiracies that any number of pseudosciences require. This is different from an appeal to ignorance. The claim is not “we cannot imagine how the conspiracy would be kept secret, therefore it would not be (and therefore it does not exist)”, but rather that large organizations, whether associated with the government or the scientific community, has such a poor track record of keeping secrets that it seems very unlikely that they could pull something like that off.

The benefits with the blow job refutation is that it is a strong, general rebuttal to any conspiracy theory, regardless if it is about 9/11, vaccines, HIV or global climate change. So it works like a universal acid, corroding through the absurd pretense of most anti-science conspiracy theories.

However, the counterargument has an important limitation: it is not specific enough to counteract the psychological appeal of individual conspiracy theories. In other words, it does not provide any positive explanation for the alleged discrepancies (“how do you explain THAT!?”) that proponents of different forms of pseudoscience appeal to to make their case. Therefore, while it can successfully stand alone as an intellectual defeater of most conspiracy theories, it has an emotional blind spot that needs to be supported by refutations specific for the arguments for any given conspiracy theory.

Despite this limitation, the blow job refutation is a powerful tool in the skeptic’s debunking kit.