Absolutely spot on piece in the Irish Times by John Gibbons. There’s no more need to give credence to someone who denies global warming or MMR without evidence, than to someone who denies the moon landings or Elvis’s death.

Commentators thus feel free to “pick a result from anywhere you like, and if it suits your agenda, then that’s that: nobody can take it away from you with their clever words because it’s all just game-playing, it just depends on who you ask”.

This may be harmless fun when it comes to Elvis sightings, but in the teeth of humanity’s profoundest existential crisis in 100 centuries, misleading the public is reckless. The real purpose of the scientific method, according to author Robert Pirsig, “is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know”.

Full piece here.

Part of the problem is the obsession in the media with ‘balance’. It’s the feeling that they must appear to be neutral in all things, so as to be a trusted source of news. That works fine when you are talking about opinion pieces, moderate political parties and the like, but it fails when you are talking about the scientific consensus or the extreme fringes. In these situations, news organisations need to be prepared to make a judgement call. It’s actively harmful to present global warming as if there’s a meaningful scientific debate surrounding it. It’s harmful to reduce herd immunity by publishing scare stories around MMR based on one tiny study group. It’s one thing to debate a controversy, it’s another to create a controversy to debate.

Simply being ridiculed and having their theories drawn into doubt by the majority of experts does not make that person an innovative genius.

“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”