Left as an Exercise

With a title like Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, how could I resist? I dove right in, expecting an interesting discussion on the subject and hoping it’d be more substantive and useful than Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

I’ll be brief. Don’t bother. While Unscientific America was vapid and shallow, it at least provided an effective overview of the subject. Denialism, on the other hand, is nothing but case studies of health-related antiscience scares (from Vioxx to GMOs). Even the section on antivaccination is strangely lacking - I’ve seen blog posts and magazine articles that do a better job on the subject (irony alert: That second link is authored by Chris Mooney, who also wrote Unscientific America). Oh, and they do it without citing Gavin Menzies as an authority on Chinese history. (If you’ve never heard of the fellow, he’s as much a Chinese historian as Immanuel Velikovsky is an astrophysicist.)

There’s precious little discussion on denialism in Denialism, except by example - and all of the examples have a narrow focus (mistrust of medical and agricultural science). There’s nothing on your traditional denial movements (a parting shot on AIDS deniers and one mention of moon-landing hoaxers, but nothing on creationism) and, surprisingly, a dearth of information on the most well-known contemporary denial-orchestration movement of our time (the tobacco fiasco), nor the most dangerous (climate denial). There’s nothing prescriptive in it except an even more vapid cry for better scientific communication - in other words, Unscientific America, only even less clear (at least Mooney and Kirshenbaum had the courtesy to discuss the role of journalism here). The only positive thing I can say about it is that it spends ample time reminding us that antiscience denialism is not isolated to one side of the political spectrum - while the majority of the non-antivax denial movements nowadays are predominantly right-wing, anti-health denialism has always had its claws stuck in the left, which is quoted from extensively.

Save your time and money. If this material interests you, Doubt Is Their Product is a far, far better book on the subject, even without trying to be - it actually discusses not only the tactics involved, but the path of information and the methods used by professionals to reshape debate. (It even has a strong medical denialism bias, and it *still* outperforms Denialism as an overview!) I suppose Denialism might have a place on a health policy wonk’s bookshelf, but as for a student of denialism, give it a pass.

See also: Tom Philpot: ‘Denialism’ Misses Its Targets.