Book: Denialism - How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet

A rather predictable but fun read about the dangers of climate change denial, vaccine terrorists, GMO fear mongers, etc.

One interesting point in the chapter on GMOs I'm reading now, is that Africa, the continent that needs GMOs the most, is resisting them due to ignorance and superstition. The author states that little can be done to alleviate Africa's frequent and recurring famines until regime change brings more enlightened government to failed-state countries like Chad, Nigeria and Congo.

I wonder what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing behind the scenes on that issue? That would make a fascinating report.

Their 2014 annual report more-or-less addresses this issue obliquely.

Bill Gates wrote:

There is a double standard at work here. I’ve heard people calling on the government to shut down some aid program if one dollar of corruption is found. On the other hand, four of the past seven governors of Illinois have gone to prison for corruption, and to my knowledge no one has demanded that Illinois schools be shut down or its highways closed.

What the author calls "denialism" was called "anti-intellectualism" in the 1950s.  It's been around a long, long time.

I did not realize however that Senator Tom Harkin had created a government agency to investigate & regulate quack medicine, called NCCAM the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  He funneled several hundred million dollars of taxpayer money into promoting hokum.

Anti-intellectualism takes many forms:
* quack medicine
* New Age, holistic, crystals, auras, Chakras, qi gong, faith healing, snake handling, Christian Science, Scientology, etc.
* vitamins and supplements, a multi-billion dollar industry
* climate change denial
* holocaust denial
* HIV-AIDS link denial, a huge problem in sub-Saharan Africa
* $1500 one-directional stereo cables
* People who claim that stereo components -- up to and including cabling -- need to be "broken in" before they sound right
* Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey, who promote the fiction that vaccines cause autism
* The NRA, who promote several fictions about guns
* So-called "organic" foods, which are neither organic nor safe(r)
* Religion

I heard the tail end of a NPR report last night about the Pope, apparently he said something about "opening a dialog between faith and reason" and I thought, Jesus Christ, how can anyone say that with a straight face?  It's only because of the prevailing anti-intellectualism in our society that "unreason" is given a place at the table.

Be careful that you don't confuse plain old stupidity with anti-intellectualism.
Is "denialism" a word? It shouldn't be.

No, I disagree. Stupidity implies that the person doesn't know any better. In the case of the NRA, the health foods industry, the supplements industry, "bleeding edge" stereo components, and most of the rest, they are DEFINITELY selling snake oil, knowing full well it's snake oil.

As far as the Pope and Jim Carrey, I do believe they absolutely believe their own BS -- not from stupidity, but from willful blindness to countervailing evidence.

I wonder, can this possibly be true? It rings apocryphal:

Quote :

Iceland might seem like an odd place to search for answers to complex questions about race and genetics. The country has three hundred thousand residents, all of whom are so genetically similar that telephone numbers are organized by first names in the Reykjavik phone book.

The phone book thing is true. But it has more to do with Icelandic naming customs than with genetics, exactly.

Icelandic name

Tell me if my thinking here is flawed.

In the chapter on bioengineering, Michael Specter (great name for the author of a cautionary book!) speaks of the future possibility of engineering carbon-based biofuels, some long hydrocarbon chains to replace the rapidly-diminishing supply of dead dinosaurs.  (Actually flora not fauna, but I'm reverting to common usage here.)

However his tale of endless supplies of cost-free fuel strikes me as a fundamental violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.  You can't get something for nothing, there is no perpetual motion, there is no free energy.

If a way is engineered to create artificial oil, it only stands to reason that the energy required to create it -- by however method -- will always be slightly MORE than the energy you get out of it.  

The only reason the Industrial Revolution has proceeded apace is that we are tapping energy that has been stored underground for many millions of years.  That is not the same as creating new synthetic fuels.

Right?

If the creation process is purely mechanical, then I think you're correct. We would have to come up with something that draws on external energy with little incremental cost. For example, bacteria that eat shit and excrete oil, or something like that. Then you can get around the restriction. (You feed in a lot more shit than the oil that you take out, so you aren't getting something for nothing in the thermodynamic sense, but the shit doesn't cost you much compared to the value of the oil, so you get something for nothing in the profit/loss sense.)