Dumping on Denial
New Scientist on “denialism”:
SPECIAL REPORT / DENIAL: From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march. Why are so many people refusing to accept what the evidence is telling them? Over the next 10 pages we look at the phenomenon in depth. What is denial? What attracts people to it? How does it start, and how does it spread? And finally, how should we respond to it?
First, they dispel any doubts that denialists are wrong wrong wrong:
All denialists see themselves as underdogs fighting a corrupt elite. …
How to be a denialist …. Six tactics that all denialist movements use: 1. Allege that there’s a conspiracy. … 2. Use fake experts. … 3. Cherry-pick the evidence. … 4. Create impossible standards for your opponents. … 5. Use logical fallacies. … 6. Falsely portray scientists as … divided … Insist “both sides” must be heard and cry censorship when “dissenting” arguments or experts are rejected. (more)
Eventually they offer solutions. Here are all remedies offered:
[Don’t] confuse these two types of questions – scientific and ideological. (more)
[Use] anecdote and appeals to emotion when speaking to lay audiences. (more)
Set the record straight. (more)
Stand up … with a full-throated debunking repeated often and everywhere. (more)
So if you saw yourself as an underdog fighting a corrupt elite, wouldn’t these four approaches win you over? Me neither. I’d be far more won over by betting market odds giving a low probability to my position, backed by folks who put their money where their mouth is. If that didn’t persuade me I’d at least see the betting system as less corrupt – it offers me big rewards when my side is proven right.
Now why do you think this betting solution is so much less appealing than “full throated debunking,” that it wasn’t even worth mentioning? If you think this solution just didn’t occur to them, do you think they’ll embrace it with enthusiasm if they are told? Me neither.
Sometimes the deniers are right:
http://ideosphere.com/fx-bi...
If futures markets were used against deniers, they would point to Y2Kdth and similar to support their denials. Just as AGW deniers point to early 20th century eugenics science.
Betting challenges against experts can sometimes undermine their credibility, like James Annon's challeges to Richard Lindzen on global warming.
Applying the inverse of the Kelly betting formula to the bids of person in a betting market should reveal an odds estimate that should align with what the person thinks about the future; this could be a sort of mathematical mind reader. It should reflect what they really believe as revealed in their presumed attempts to maximize their utility function. A metric for the distance between your money and your mouth.
As I was running some errands, it occurred to me that the snatches of the _New Scientist_ position presented here seem to suggest a Hansonesque blog post title observation, "denial is about being in the wrong political faction" or some such thing.
The lead sentence you quoted seems to illustrate that. "From climate change to vaccines, evolution to flu, denialists are on the march." Climate change economic risks and some strategies to reduce CO2 emissions are tied to policy about genetically modified organisms, especially GM crops. And numerate technically conservative strategies for producing energy while reducing CO2 emissions are closely tied to nuclear policy. Thus opposition to GM crops and nuclear power should be a very big deal by the official mindset of the _New Scientist_. So why pick on people who stand on silly objections to vaccines in preference to, say, people who stand on technically silly objections to proposals for nuclear waste storage? Maybe I move in the wrong circles, but my impression is that the technical consensus about the tractability of the nuclear waste storage/disposal problem[*] is stronger than the technical consensus that the expected damage from climate change caused by CO2 emissions justifies imposing very large energy consumption cuts, and other very large costs involved in rejiggering energy production technologies.
[*] E.g., "resolved: that the fundamental technical risks of depositing nuclear waste in a facility comparable to Yucca Mountain are not large compared to the risks associated with using coal to generate the corresponding amount of electrical energy." (Of course, that doesn't guarantee that nuclear waste policy can't be horribly screwed up in practice, just as "resolved: 1960s-era-technology syphilis treatment is fundamentally a good idea" doesn't guarantee you can't end up with the Tuskegee experiment. But climate change policy can be horribly screwed up too...)
(And alas, I can't see how to construct a tidy "Yucca Mountain facility works as designed" bet.)