“The reality is that all scientists have personal ideologies, motivations and goals – all of which can potentially introduce bias into research. Scientific work should be evaluated on its merits, not on ‘conflicts of interest’ that may or may not exist,” wrote Elizabeth Whelan recently in Spiked Online.
Playing the card of ‘conflict of interest’ is perhaps playing the first rule of propaganda:
1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
Norman Davies in Europe a History, has written that theorists of propaganda have identified four other basic rules:
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the
unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure and by ‘psychological contagion’.
5. The rule of orchestration: endless repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
Many of these rules of propaganda are applied in various combinations on popular blogs – but I wonder how often they are recognized as such.
The rule of unanimity (no. 4) is perhaps the card most frequently played against my work on the Murray River and also often played against ‘climate skeptics’.
And I am reminded of Henry Miller’s joke:
“How can you tell whether a whale is a mammal or a fish?” a teacher asks her third-grade class.
“Take a vote?” pipes up one of the pupils.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
All of the methods that you have mentioned are tools of the skeptics not the scientists supporting GW.
Isn’t that a good example of #4?
Rog,
Not sure what you mean by ‘that’ as in “isn’t that a good example of #4”?
But to kick the discussion along a bit I offer that according to my oxford dictionary to ‘educate’ is to “train or instruct mentally and morally”. Thomas Khun in his seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explains how the scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the education initiation that prepares and licences the student for professional practice. If propaganda is the “organised propagation of a doctrine” then there is nothing to stop education in fact being the dissemination of propaganda. Yet we don’t normally use education and propaganda interchangeably, because we generally use education in the sense of systems that are open to challenge, rather than ones that are closed which is the realm of propaganda.
Jennifer I referred to elder’s unanimous statement.
Listening to last nights LNL, Professor Ian Lowe stated that all scientists are unanimous on climate change, except for the odd geologist (who speak only in units of 500 million years) and the Lavousier group (who now operate out of a phone box).
He then went onto connect climate change with excessive consumption, resource wars (hint hint Iraq), materialism and the two big baddies, the US and Australia (for not signing Kyoto)
I wondered
a) how many scientists are for and against climate change and
b) how scientific were the political extrapolations of Prof Lowe?
Geologists only deal in 500 million year units and we Lavoisier groupies operate out of a phone box?
A unit of geological time is 500 million years?
Presumably we are not able to subdivide geological time into smaller units then, in order to distinguish the Cainozoic era of 65 million years, the Mesozoic etc etc. On this point Professsor Ian Lowe seems unfamiliar with the topic.
As a matter of fact the standard geological unit of time is the second, as described in the SI standards.
Example – computing the dynamics of turbulent flow of rivers and streams – using a time unit of 500 million years would make such a physical phenomenon appear fossil-like.
As for accusing the Lavoisier Group operating out of a phone box, must be a pretty big phone box – I was going to say the Tardis but that was a police box – Telstra have removed all the phone boxes from Australia.
This url will clarify Professor Ian Lowe’s assertion that “all” scientists are unaminous on climate change
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Scienceletter.htm
Visit the ABC web site and this comment by Prof. Ian Lowe is published –
“Common sense tells us that we can’t go on indefinitely increasing our resource use and putting more pressure on natural systems. About half of the earth’s surface has now been transformed for human needs. Eventually the human population will be limited by the capacity of the earth’s natural systems. If we don’t find socially acceptable ways to stabilise the population, it will be limited by starvation, disease and warfare.”.
Half the earth’s surface has been transformed”. Considering 70% of the earth’s surface is comprised of ocean….
And if it is land, looking at a satellite image of Australia, the quantity “half” becomes somewhat inexact.
Thus when Prof. Ian Lowe states “all scientists”, we must bear in mind what he actually meant by this – because as he states “half the earth’s surface” when in fact it is more like perhaps half the land surface which makes it 15% of the earth’s surface, we may therefore interpret his qualifier “all” as 30% of scientists.
After all if half is 15% then full becomes 30%.
So there we have it – only 30% of scientists believe in climate change.
opulence and improvement, France is perhaps inferior to England. The free printable scrapbooking page layouts new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of’ labour which it can fvwrjutois
opulence and improvement, France is perhaps inferior to England. The free printable scrapbooking page layouts new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of’ labour which it can fvwrjutois