Anything goes on the internet

The "Special report: Living in denial" issue of the New Scientist (12 May 2010) has some interesting articles. Two excerpts below.

When a sceptic isn't a sceptic (by Michael Shermer):

A climate sceptic, for example, examines specific claims one by one, carefully considers the evidence for each, and is willing to follow the facts wherever they lead. A climate denier has a position staked out in advance, and sorts through the data employing "confirmation bias" - the tendency to look for and find confirmatory evidence for pre-existing beliefs and ignore or dismiss the rest.
(...)
It has, for example, become fashionable in some circles for anyone who dares to challenge the climate science "consensus" to be tarred as a denier and heaved into a vat of feathers. Do you believe in global warming? Answer with anything but an unequivocal yes and you risk being written off as a climate denier, in the same bag as Holocaust and evolution naysayers. (...) When I say "I believe in evolution" or "I believe in the big bang", this is something different from when I say, "I believe in a flat tax" or "I believe in liberal democracy".
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What sometimes happens is that people confuse these two types of questions - scientific and ideological. Sometimes the confusion is deliberate. Denial is one outcome. Thus, one practical way to distinguish between a sceptic and a denier is the extent to which they are willing to update their positions in response to new information.

Questioning science isn't blasphemy (Michael Fitzpatrick):

As philosopher Edward Skidelsky of the University of Exeter, UK, has argued, crying denialism is a form of ad hominem argument: "the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives". The expanding deployment of the concept, he argues, threatens to reverse one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment - "the liberation of historical and scientific inquiry from dogma". Don't get me wrong: the popular appeal of pseudoscience is undoubtedly a problem. But name-calling is neither a legitimate nor an effective response.
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Such attempts to combat pseudoscience by branding it a secular form of blasphemy are illiberal and intolerant. They are also ineffective, tending not only to reinforce cynicism about science but also to promote a distrust for scientific and medical authority that provides a rallying point for pseudoscience.

I also liked Jim Giles's article about how easy it is to spread a lie, and how hard to fix it nowadays.