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Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives | 
| Author: Michael Specter
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $15.34
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Seller: ceceralws
Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 417
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594202303
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.45
EAN: 9781594202308
ASIN: 1594202303
Publication Date: October 29, 2009 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Product Description
In this provocative and headline- making book, Michael Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its terrible toll on individuals and the planet.
In Denialism, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view had been that science is neither good nor bad-that it merely supplies information and that new information is always beneficial. Now, science is viewed as a political constituency that isn't always in our best interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In the United States a growing series of studies show that dietary supplements and "natural" cures have almost no value, and often cause harm. We still spend billions of dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded by platoons of security guards-such is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with animals. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance against disease have increasingly been seen as callous corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed.
As Michael Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against progress. The issues may be complex but the choices are not: Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind's greatest scientific advances-and our greatest need for them-that deal must be renewed.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 20
 Excellent look at an important subject November 19, 2009
Edward Durney (San Francisco)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In Denialism, Michael Specter takes an excellent look at an important subject. We tend to think that people get truth, unvarnished and untainted, from science. But no. From Vioxx to vaccines, what we think is true is not. Not because we are fooled by science. Instead, we fool ourselves.
Specter did his research on topics like organic foods, vitamins and supplements, and race and disease. That he is a staff writer on The New Yorker magazine shows -- he writes well on these topics. What he says is important and convincing. He deserves praise for that. (Although his style rubs me wrong. He writes himself into the book by using "I" a lot. Fine for a magazine article, at book-length that became annoying to me.)
My main complaint with the book? Specter goes too far in labeling denialism as the villain. He trots out the specter (sorry) of holocaust deniers -- those poor deluded souls -- and then finds similar deniers of facts from various fields of science. Denialism in science, he says, is threatening our society.
I don't buy that. Through the ages societies have struggled to cope with what science told them. We are no different. In the developed world, science's role has never been stronger. We could do better at sorting out fact from fiction. But overall, we're pretty good at it.
In spite of its faults, Denialism made me think. That made, for me, the book worth reading.
 If one easily checkable fact is wrong... what & how much else is? November 12, 2009
TCM
2 out of 19 found this review helpful
In an interview with NPR on Weekend Edition Saturday dated 11/7/09, Michael Specter said that homeopathy is not regulated by the FDA ([...]). He is wrong: Homeopathic drugs are recognized as drugs under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act ("FD&C Act"), 21 U.S.C. § 201 et seq. Section 201(g)(1) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. § 321(g)(1), which defines the term "drug" as "articles recognized in the official United States Pharmacopoeia, official Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia of the United States, or official National Formulary, (i) or any supplement to any of them . . . ." Just go search the internet for lots more. If he is wrong about this, such an easily checkable fact, what else and how much else is he wrong about?
 Excellent Book about Another Dimension of Conspiracy Theories November 9, 2009
maskirovka (Alexandria, Virginia)
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
If it weren't for the fact that "Denialism" has gotten unfairly reviewed by some people here who seem to have an axe to grind, I'd have given it four stars. But I figure that adding an extra star on my part offsets people who are themselves of the mindset the author writes about or people who think that the author is condescending in his tone (he didn't strike me as such).
I'm death on people who promote conspiracy theories, and "Denialism" definitely shows that the problem is much more widespread than just people who go on about the Kennedy Assassination or September 11...that there are many people who have paranoid conceptions of the pharmaceutical industry and vaccinations or who think that just because something was grown "naturally" it's automatically better for the world than a plant that is genetically modified to be pest-resistant or have more yield.
"Denialism" pours a lot of cold water on people who espouse such viewpoints, and yes, it is occasionally done in a strident fashion. But I can understand the author's frustration with people who link autism with vaccinations despite the flood tide of evidence to the contrary or who think it better that people in Africa starve to death rather than grow and eat genetically modified crops (I can hardly wait to read the negative comments that this paragraph alone is likely to trigger on my review).
To me, the best chapters are about vaccinations and the organic food cult. It blew me away to read that there are people out there who think "raw milk" (i.e. unpasteurized milk is somehow better for you than the regular stuff despite clear evidence showing that people can and do die from drinking the former instead of the latter). Similarly, I was shocked to read that vitamins and supplements that are routinely and aggressively marketed as cure-alls and preventatives for a variety of ailments come with a neat little disclaimer that states that none of these claims have been held up for scrutiny by the FDA.
My only criticisms of the book is that the author is a little too much in the tank for Obama (although he does lambaste a member of the Kennedy clan for incredible assertions about vaccinations). I really wonder what Obama's viewpoint is about medical evidence that shows that certain races are more susceptible to certain diseases and disorders (which is not politically correct to assert even in medical journals).
I'm also chary of his implied assertion that anyone who doesn't believe that climate change threatens the survival of mankind is in the denialist camp. I for one don't doubt that man can have an extremely negative impact on climate and the environment. I'm just not sold on the idea that all climate change is down to mankind instead of nature and that humanity should embark on monumental economic outlays to deal with the problem and change its ways and behavior on a scope that has never been attempted before. I'm also alienated by people who do believe that this is all necessary and their tendency to demonize people who don't agree with them as stupid or corrupt.
But overall, "Denialism" is a cold breath of fresh air and anyone who is truly open-minded will benefit from reading it.
Vaporings November 5, 2009
Harry Eagar (Maui)
11 out of 28 found this review helpful
If you are attempting to write a book about "Denialism," it would be a good idea to:
1.Define denialism.
2.Explain how denialists get that way.
3.Avoid being a denialist yourself.
Michael Specter does not do any of these things. Failing the first two makes his book a vapid exercise in not much. Failing the third turns it into a tooth-grinding exercise in stupidity.
Although Specter never defines denialism, we know from other sources what it is. It originated in the epithet "Holocaust denier," a kind of denial that all of us can join in deriding. Later, though, it became a term of abuse directed at - primarily - anyone who hasn't drunk the global-warming Kool-Aid.
A physician named Mark Hoofnagle has even made some attempt to elevate disagreeing with Al Gore into a medical condition.
Since Specter nods approvingly at Hoofnagle's blog (without, for some reason, naming him), we can safely assume that Specter's view of denialism is like Hoofnagle's: We are not in realms of disagreement in which arguments are advanced for or against. If one is skeptical, then he is a denialist and this is not merely error but sin. Condemnation, a la the Holy Inquisition, follows.
Specter limits himself to denialists in the medical field, about which he writes for the New Yorker. He attacks six kinds of error, and, as it happens, he is right about all six.
That is, the anti-vaccinationists, chiropractors, homeopaths etc. really are confused; but Specter makes no real attempt to examine what their errors are. They do not accept experimental science, and that's enough to condemn them.
What he does do is present a superficial description of what orthodox opinion is - something that could easily be found in better form elsewhere, never failing to drop names and let us know he has visited the offices and research labs of the top people.
But since this purports to be a book about denialism, not about the current state of the practice of medicine, we would expect to learn how denialists came to their idiosyncratic misunderstandings. Nothing of the sort is offered, and while Specter is on cocktail-party terms with all the top people, he has never talked to denialists or tried to understand what they are thinking.
The closest he comes to offering an explanation is to tell us that people who fear seek easy answers.
Perhaps. But I will bet that the path to denialism was different for Andrew Weil, a graduate of the medical school at Harvard, than it was for Jenny McCarthy, a professional bimbo.
For Specter, both are denialists. What more could we want to know about them?
However one gets to be a denialist, it requires either the acceptance of some theory ungrounded in observation and experiment (like homeopathy), or failure to examine a theory that has a good deal of experimental testing underpinning it (like vaccination).
That is, to become a vaccine denialist, you can either deny the well-established fact that vaccines work; or
you can claim, against piles of evidence, that they do harm, such as causing autism.
Considering that Specter says he decided not to examine the vast reaches of denialism, he could usefully have failed to mention climate. Like most alarmists, he just cannot let it go.
When it comes to global warming, he is no denialist but a fervent acceptist. We are assured that we are "smothering" the atmosphere, and many other bad things.
Unlike vaccination, the theory of anthropogenic global warming is not based on observations (there are no global surface temperature observations earlier than the 21st century), nor on a battery of unequivocal experimentation. With a theory as poorly supported as anthropogenic global warming, the error is not denialism but acceptism.
Certainly, Specter makes no attempt to state on what grounds AGW should be accepted, or, more to the point here, what experiments or observations contradict the well-informed skeptics.
Not a refutation of irrational thinking that hinders scientific process/didn't make a very effective argument November 5, 2009
Hedera Femme (USA)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
I wish this book had matched with its title more; I had expected something more related to how science has been undermined by different groups in America, particularly religious ones, as well as by propaganda from corporations whose agendas favor continuing our policy of environmental destruction. It wasn't exactly this.
What I found was a not quite cogent argument against people skeptical of pharmaceutical companies and agra-business, which is a legitimate concern, since those companies exist to make money before advancing science, though because public image matters, they occasionally try and placate some of those concerns.
This book makes some good points for trusting scientists working for corporations (though not with much backup of evidence), and makes some other ones that make less sense and come across as "blindly trust corporations. they care about your best interests" Very little had to do with science as a process and the principles and theories that have been developed over the last centuries and are slowly being eroded by religious zealots among other anti-science movements.
Good title.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 20
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