More on epistemic closure...

[elfs]

The closing of the American Mind marches on:

Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world's scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world's governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.

It's a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it's an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it's true that the world's scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt. These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they've generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything! Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.

Scientific claims are now subject to ideological disputation. Rush Limbaugh is telling millions of people that they've taken the red pill and everything they once knew and could trust is a lie. They've woken up outside the Matrix and he is their corpulent, drug-addicted, thrice-divorced Morpheus. What could go wrong?

Comments

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

Cui bono? The people doing the research have to eat, too. When the funding for climate research mostly comes from government grants, there is a certain amount of pressure, whether stated or not, to produce results that support a conclusion about the global climate that does not make the government look like they're going to cost the public trillions of dollars for no benefit, either from throwing money directly down a rathole or from imposing costly requirements on the public that won't have any measurable effect, or they stand to lose any chance of future funding from the government. Everyone's got an agenda; it's difficult to distinguish a bias toward the intentions of whomever is paying for the research from what the data itself shows when there are such huge error bars in the data.