Some thoughts about denialism

Before we can democratize the institutions, processes and findings of science, we have to democratize thinking. That is, a major percentage of the cognitive processes that are reflected in popular belief and public discourse are not of a nature that leads to truth. Really getting to the roots of why people are so bad at thinking, which we usually imagine to be the one thing we really do well and which we fancy distinguishes us from lesser creatures, is beyond the scope of a blog post and could well be a life's work.

Many people have set out to catalog common forms of fallacy. Here is one commendable effort, although on careful reading I find that the author has managed to embed a couple of his own. Well, clear thinking isn't easy, and that's one explanation for why it's often in short supply -- sheer laziness. But that's just the beginning.

The NYT dedicated this week's Science section to the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. John Schwarz offers a glimpse of the movement, still going strong, that insists the whole thing was a hoax. What an odd belief to cling to -- think of the massive conspiracy required to convince the world that people had walked on the moon on six separate occasions. What is the motive? Why has no one of the hundreds, or more likely many thousands of necessary co-conspirators never come forward? And of course, as soon as anyone knowledgable looks at their evidence it is immediately clear that it is transparently wrong and ridiculous. (A couple of hints: the reason shadows on the earth, as on the moon, are not pitch black has nothing to do with the atmosphere. It's because of scattering of light from solid surfaces. And, the reason shadows do not all point in precisely the same direction, on the moon as on the earth, is because the terrain is not flat, but rather presents varying angles to the sun.)

But evidence and argument make not a dent in denialists, whether the subject is the moon landing, anthropogenic climate change, or evolution. Conspiracies of thousands or millions of scientists are deemed far more plausible than an unwanted conclusion. As it turns out, the Christian fundamentalists actually consider this a feature, not a bug, and they are proud of it. They call their preferred mode of reasoning Vertical Thinking. There's even a "Christian" magazine for young people called Vertical Thinking, but I'm not going to link to it.

The basic idea behind vertical thinking is that you start with your conclusion -- e.g., God, six days of creation 6,000 years ago -- and then you interpret whatever facts you come across so as to conform with your conclusion. If a fact seems not to fit, that's by definition impossible so there must be something wrong with your observation or some arbitrary explanation for it must be found. (E.g., God put those fossils there to test our faith.) Horizontal thinking, which Mike Huckabee and his friends decry, is when you look at a bunch of facts and you try to reason out the most likely explanation for them. New facts may require a reorganization of your arguments and new conclusions. Then so be it.

The advantage of vertical thinking is that you can hang out with all your like-minded buddies, in the church, the bar, or the Internet, and share your regard for each other and your contempt for all those who do not Believe in the Truth. So again, it comes back to a kind of laziness, complicated by cowardice. But this is really a developmental disability. It is constructed in childhood, by our parents, by the way they instruct us and model the human attributes of thought and belief. For an adult to unlearn the delusions of childhood is very difficult.

I should add that some people develop bizarre fixed ideas as adults, which is no doubt the typical story of the moon landing deniers. I don't actually know why that happens. I happen to think that moon landing denial is sufficiently bizarre to qualify as a delusion and might merit a diagnosis, but actually what is and is not a psychotic delusion is purely a matter of social convention. 6,000-year-old earth does not qualify, but Ted Kaczynski's intellectually defensible belief that industrialization was a disaster for humanity did, and was so certified in a court of law. As far as I'm concerned, Ted is just a violent fanatic on behalf of reasonable ideas, whereas creationists are completely nuts. Update: Lest anyone misunderstand me, Kaczynski was convicted for his actions, but found insane by reason of his beliefs, and therefore spared the death penalty. You could look it up. His actions may have been insane, but his beliefs were not.

The point of all this rambling is that we need to equip more people with better critical thinking faculties. That ought to be the main point of education, and it's quite possibly the biggest and most important challenge we face as a species. We can't solve our problems if people refuse to understand them.