Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Denialism - A New Blog of Interest

I discovered a new blog called denialism.

Here's the first paragraph of their first post (note, due to a formatting issue on this post, you'll need to scroll down quite a bit to read the text):

Here at denialism blog, we're very interested in what makes people cranks. Not only how one defines crankish behavior, but literally how people develop unreasonable attitudes about the world in the face of evidence to the contrary. Our definition of a crank, loosely, is a person who has unreasonable ideas about established science or facts that will not relent in defending their own, often laughable, version of the truth. Central to the crank is the "overvalued idea". That is some idea they've incorporated into their world view that they will not relinquish for any reason. Common overvalued ideas that are a source of crankery range from bigotry, antisemitism(holocaust deniers), biblical literalism (creationists - especially YEC's), egotism (as it relates to the complete unwillingness to ever be proven wrong) or an indiscriminant obsession with possessing "controversial" or iconoclastic ideas. Some people just love believing in things that no one in their right mind does, out of some obscure idea that it makes them seem smart or different.

It looks to be an interesting read and it will provide a useful resource against all of what I call the "anti-information" or "disinformation" that is out there, as well as the tactics used to shut down or avoid cognent debate. I highly recommend it.

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