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.

If you want to read more content from Debunking Denialism, check out the article library, or the main content below.

• Why Jerry Coyne is Still Wrong about Antidepressants
• Debunking the new Duesberg HIV/AIDS Denialist “paper” in IJAE
• Stefan Molyneux’s Unfortunate Spiraling into Anti-Psychiatry
• Anti-Vaccine Propaganda at The Sovereign Independent

"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).