Skip to main content

How to Talk to a Science Denier - Lee McIntyre ***

Anyone who has friends in the US probably has at least one who could be described as a science denier. Lee McIntyre offers us the intriguing promise of delivering 'Conservations with flat earthers, climate deniers and others who defy reason.' 

There are certainly elements of this present, which is when the book really comes alive, but the problem for the reader is that (not entirely the author's fault) it doesn't deliver on that promise. The majority of the book, which doesn't involve such conversations, but rather McIntyre's pondering on the matter, seems often to go round and round in circles on the difficulty of doing anything about science deniers' beliefs.

Unfortunately, though McIntyre does get to speak to flat Earthers, he fails to meet any climate change deniers (frankly, he doesn’t try hard - rather than go to a Trump rally, for example, he accesses a self-selected group from a mining community). Similarly his idea of going to a Whole Foods store to talk to GMO science deniers is thwarted by COVID, so he tries a friend who once tried to treat his headache by re-aligning his chakras rather than his requested ibuprofen. She turns out not to be a GMO science denier - making this a bit of a waste of space. A more anti-GMO friend gives more value for money - but even so he isn’t the kind of extreme believer McIntyre uncovers among the flat Earthers.

One thing that worries me is that McIntyre doesn’t seem to see the irony of flying from the US to the Maldives to see how they’re threatened by climate change - I’m sorry, carbon offsetting is just another way of saying there's one rule for the rich - this book is all about how to get the message across, and the only way to do that is to stop flying. Like all too many academics, McIntyre seems to go more for 'do as I say, not as I do' when it comes to responding to climate change.

We spend quite a while trying to discover if there are liberal science deniers (outcome there probably are), but there is no real coverage of liberal science denial in anti-nuclear sentiment and support for organic farming (except in a passing reference to nuclear in a quote from Michael Shermer). This perhaps is reflected in the way McIntyre tiptoes around the sensibilities of liberal science deniers who are anti-GMO - he clearly thinks they’re on a par with climate change deniers, but gives them an easier ride by far. 

When it comes to solutions, the book indentifies the key tools of science deniers such as cherry picking, expecting science to deliver the definitive truth and conspiracy theories, but does not give any great ways to deal with a resistant denier who simply says they don't believe your data and you can't prove it, except by winning their trust with a lengthy engagement - which is fine for the occasional friend but it is hard to see how it could help such a divided US, the country which seems to have a particularly big issue with this problem, especially because it seems to be a matter of identity there, rather than logic.

Overall, the book has a worthy aim, but doesn't do what it says on the cover - and fails to do so in a way that isn't particularly readable.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more