It will just have to go here then
Now sometimes a cunning plan turns out to be not so cunning after all. Mooney’s cunning plan of banning me from commenting on his blog so that my unkind questions and objections would no longer appear there is going to turn out to be a mistake, because it means I will post them here instead. This is penny wise and pound foolish. A comment on his blog would just get lost in the clutter of kwokkery and other nonsense there, and would not be on the main page in any case. A post here is on the main page for a month. So you see…he should have just settled for letting me ask questions there. The morally bankrupt path Does Not Pay.
They have yet another article, this time a long feature in The Nation. The first part of it is actually good – but at the end, oblivious to the many warnings and shouts of ‘Watch out! Danger!’, they return to their petty childish feud with PZ Myers yet again. They make fools of themselves yet again.
Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side–anti-vaccine advocates, anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.
This problem was on full display in the 2008 Weblog Awards, a popularity contest that featured a tight race for Best Science Blog. The two leading contestants: PZ Myers’s Pharyngula, the online clearinghouse for confrontational atheism, and Watts Up With That, written by former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts, a skeptic of the scientific conclusion that human activities have caused global warming. Both sites are polemical: one assaults religious faith; the other constantly attacks mainstream understanding of climate change.
In the end, Watts Up With That defeated Pharyngula, 14,150 votes to 12,238. The “science” contest came down to the religion-basher versus the misinformation-machine, and the misinformation-machine won. That speaks volumes about the form science commentary takes on the Internet.
No it doesn’t. It says almost nothing about the form science commentary takes on the Internet. Furthermore, PZ is not just a ‘religion-basher’; as not-yet-banned commenters pointed out, he does science too. Furthermore again, M&K omitted to mention that he told readers not to vote for Pharyngula because of the inclusion of pseudo-science in the contest. This is all too typical of their incomplete malicious distorted ‘reporting’ on people they don’t like.
Now that’s going to sit here festering for all of August. Such a pity.
OT, but funny: http://www.thespoof.com/magazine/index.cfm?eID=4715
*lol*
Thanks, Martin, that was much needed. :)
One quibble, though:
Chris Mooney is a professional science writer and co-writer of The Intersection, a blog where he writes about why people should buy his books.
It’s less about why people should buy his books and more about that people should buy his books. But well said nonetheless. :)
I would have concentrated on another bit in their article:
First, I’ll have to say that your analysis—which is, of course, more extensive than the paragraph quoted here—rings painfully true. The one conclusion I would jump to, though, by dint of seeming rather glaringly obvious, is that journalists simply have no idea how one forms an independent opinion. In that, one should add, they are in plentiful, if not exactly good, company.
The basic process is actually quite simple. One makes observations about the world that one interprets, necessarily, in terms of what one assumes about the world. Then, one checks those interpretations against a different set of observable facts. The key in this second step, however, is not to look for facts that would make sense in light of your interpretation but to look for such facts that would not make sense in light of your interpretation.
In the HIV example, it would not make sense for anti-viral drugs to work in AIDS patients, or for specific immunity against HIV to be due to mutated T-cell genes blocking virus particles from docking to the cells, or for the transmission to be inhibited by using condoms if AIDS was actually caused by some Juju up some mountain or other or even by looking in the general direction of a gay bar. That makes any of the made-up stories appreciably inferior to the scientifically corroborated story. It would blow any ideas of so-called ‘balance’ right out of the water. And anyone who actually explained the reasoning behind the science would not only further the cause of the public understanding of science, he would probably also improve his ratings. Because he would treat his audience like adults. In today’s media landscape, that kind of thing would stand out like a freshly groomed rottweiler in a pack of wet poodles.
Aww, rottweiler. Aww, poodles.
I may be missing the point.
:- )
On the original point, to be fair [why?], PZ does spend an awful lot of time bashing religion in terms which, if you are a centrist triangulator of some kind, can only be regarded as extremely unhelpful. Personally, I love it, but if you’re the kind of person who thinks that creotards are going to be brought round by speaking nicely to them, it would be hard not to disapprove forcefully of such stridency.
Just walking in the other chap’s shoes there for a moment, y’know…
» Ophelia:
Aww, rottweiler.
Don’t you know that they’re rather shrill creatures? How could anyone think that’s cute? You’re not helping!
Ophelia, I think this is festering right at the end of July. When I click on notes and comments, it says there’s nothing posted for August. But you probably already knew that.
Dave, sure – I realize that PZ is what triangulators don’t like. But then…if they think he’s so harmful, one would think they would want to try to keep him a secret rather than shouting about him in national magazines.
Brian yeh I know, I’m going to move it by changing the date. There was no point in doing that yesterday because then it would have been invisible.
Are you serious? They’ve actually banned a genuine participant in the debate from their blog? That’s ridiculous.
Yup. It is, isn’t it.
Back when PZ was expelled from Expelled, Mooney (along with Randy Olsen and Matt Nisbet) all accused him of helping the movie. They claimed he helped Expelled by getting publicity (eg in the NYT) when PZ had nothing to sell, but Ben Stein did.
Now, Mooney has something to sell (his book), and he has attacked PZ (who has nothing to sell) in both Newsweek and The Nation. And over some incredibly petty things (Crackergate and the Weblog Awards? Are you kidding me?). My guess is that most Newsweek and Nation readers have no idea who PZ is and have never heard of Crackergate or the Weblog Awards before Mooney mentioned them.
Many people have speculated about whether Mooney is attacking PZ in order to promote his book. I couldn’t say for sure, but his tactics surely mirror some of the thinking that he and his associates have exhibited in the past.
Quite. It’s not possible to say for sure why Mooney is doing this (I think it’s Mooney rather than Kirshenbaum, because of the past history), but it is possible to say other things about it, such as that it looks obsessive and out of proportion, as well as childish and (as PZ said) unprofessional. It looks weird – stupid, over the top, compulsive, unreasonable, irrational, especially for someone who talks a lot about bridging gaps and healing divides. One is thus motivated to speculate on his reasons. I tend to think it’s mostly just what it looks like – stupid petty childish fit-pitching. Mooney’s a vulgar man, and he’s not clever enough to stop demonstrating that in public.
Not wanting to misrepresent anyone’s point of view, I went through some of the older posts at Scienceblogs.com to be sure that Mooney and the others really made the types of claims I remembered them making.
And then check out Randy Olsen’s comments about the Expelled incident from a podcast here:
http://scienceblogs.com/shiftingbaselines/2008/05/skepticality_podcast_gives_ran.php
Thanks Wes. That’s pretty instructive.
They seem to think that by taking a lesson from PZ’s playbook, i.e., doing the “nasty” approach, they’re set for glory. But the way things are going, the incipient debate will end up being “M/K vs. PZ Myers” instead of “science vs. creationism”.
I don’t absolve Kirshenbaum of any of the nonsense. They wrote the book together, and that’s that; it’s no good to treat her like a mere bystander when she’s behind the wheel.
But the book isn’t all there is – the Nisbet-Mooney stuff goes back before Kirshenbaum, and Mooney is still doing a lot of it himself via the blog posts. I don’t necessarily absolve her, because I don’t know, but I mention Mooney on his own because his role is on the record.
I’m well aware of the Nisbet command to “lay low” and let other people talk. That would be hard to forget.
Mooney now disavows Nisbet – but I fail to see any daylight between them when it comes to behavior.
I also don’t accept that PZ’s approach is “nasty” – not in the sense that theirs is.
To be clear, my “nasty v. nice” phrasing is meant to be a (cute, albeit obnoxious) shorthand for “confrontational v. anodyne”. Certainly there’s a difference between Myers-nasty and M/K-nasty: Myers flouts niceness within limits, while M/K are oblivious to their nastiness while pretending to be nice.
Re: criticism. I should explain that my stake in the debate was aroused only quite recently, primarily through your blog posts, and with no prior relationship whatsoever with either author. (Nor any stake in the blogosphere, for that matter — albeit, granted, I am a sometime B&W contributor). I don’t know who this Nisbet character is, for instance, though Wes’s post above suggests he is some well-known twit. And I don’t even have much prior knowledge of what pre-July Intersection posts look like. So I’m admittedly behind a veil of ignorance of a kind, as my interest and knowledge is restricted more or less to the past month, though I now include Wes’s transcripts in my opinions.
With that restriction in mind, I treat them as equal partners and no less. Any of my strong judgments have been largely a reaction to their silencing techniques on Intersection, their misrepresentations and lapses there. (UA itself is unconvincing, and not worth reading, but it didn’t make me do anything angry except maybe a few marginal notations.) And while my views are negative, they don’t pick one of them out as a bad character over the other. Wes quotes them both above (in the context of reviews of Expelled) on their views on matters of confrontation and publicity, and they’re certainly on the same page, which supports something like the “oblivious nastiness” interpretation that I led in with. Also, they do stagger relevant postings between them on Intersection; i.e., they’ve been frequently critiqued for passing over negative criticisms in their blog posts, and Kirshenbaum does that just as much as Mooney (i.e., Kirshenbaum was the author of the recent post that failed to mention that Jason’s review is largely negative). They might as well both be the same person for the purposes of critique.
So ultimately at the present moment I think that she’s a grown woman who co-wrote a book and whose regular contributions have (as far as I can see) the same problematic elements as Chris’s. Given that, it seems to me that if we’re not willing to apply the same standard to both, then we’d have to revise whether or not we think they’ve done any wrongs in the first place.
Anyway, while of course I’m open to the possibility that I’m in error, I’d need more specifics.
Benjamin, I think that’s a fair assessment. Mooney/Nisbet and PZ have been at it for years with disputes over ‘Framing Science’ (the name of Nisbets blog, btw, which I’m not linking to because it sucks–day after day of nauseating self-promotion. Find it on Scienceblogs if you want), so there was certainly already some established animosity/mutual lack of respect between the two camps.
I’m not aware of any personal conflict between Sheril and PZ prior to the whole ‘Expelled from Expelled!’ debacle, but she jumped into the fray at that point as a full partner. After the ‘shut up PZ’ post from Nisbet (excerpted by Wes, above), PZ responded with a hearty ‘Fuck you, Nisbet’ and Sheril clutched her pearls and scolded him thusly in a post entitled “PZ Myers, Mind Your Manners”:
A few months later, The Great Desecration(aka Crackergate) occurred, and, no doubt, Mooney and Kirschbaum began scribbling furiously in their ‘PowerPuff Girls’ notebooks late into the night to produce the first draft of what would become the execrable UA
So yeah, Sheril’s history of PZ angst doesn’t go as far back as her co-author’s, but she’s far from an innocent bystander. Moreover, if she disagreed with any of the disingenuous, dishonorable tactics that Chris Mooney has been employing circa the release of UA, you’d think she would have piped up by now. As it is, her silence speaks volumes.
With apologies for cross-posting:
Josh S: interestingly, Jason included this tidbit in his response to your comment at Evolution Blog:
So I guess Sheril is completely blameless after all! Huzzah!
:D
Thanks for the laugh, Jennifer. The mental image made my day.
Sheril has been guilty in these debates, too. Her sanctimonious demand for a public apology from PZ Myers is an excellent example. In Sheril-World, it’s okay for Nisbet to insult PZ all day long, but very uncivil for PZ to respond in kind.
He’s really not well-known outside of readers of PZ’s blog. He’s been pushing this idea of “framing” science for a while. I think John Wilkins said it best when he described framing as a good idea run amok. It eventually reached the point where Nisbet (supported by Mooney and Kirshenbaum) was issuing bi-weekly supercilious demands for PZ to silence himself. He then went on to needlessly attacking David Gorsky and Mark Hoofnagel. As far as I can tell, Nisbet seems to believe that the best way to promote science communication consists of three steps:
1.) Insist that you know The Way to communicate science, and that there is no other way.
2.) Refuse to define clearly just what The Way is.
3.) Promote The Way by attacking anyone who does not follow The Way.
If anyone missed this post from Almost Diamonds (the saga of how ERV-Abbie finally lost patience with Mooney et al), it’s very instructive as well:
http://almostdiamonds.blogspot.com/2009/07/todays-question.html
“My guess is that most Newsweek and Nation readers have no idea who PZ is and have never heard of Crackergate or the Weblog Awards before Mooney mentioned them.”
M&K seemingly fail to realize just how boring Internet drama is to anyone not directly involved.
Well one good (if solipsistic) thing came out of UA: I became more engrossed in your writing. I was only peripherally (shamefully) aware of your writing before. Your comments at The Intersection, Coyne’s blog and so on have really hooked me with your incisive style. Thanks.
And now back to lurky admiration.
It was all my cunning plan to get more readers!
:- )
(But seriously – very kind of you to say so.)
Ophelia, what about opening a thread just for deleted or terminally held comments from The Limbo Palace? They just disappeared another one of mine, in the thread about a “terrific piece” by Peter Kareiva about framing.