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

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more