Suzanne Crockett-Jones: I put this into the ‘I don’t understand your language, so I will assume you are making it up’ kind of thinking. Or as my sister once said [I am paraphrasing Bonnie] “It is not the rocks in his head, it is his pride in those rocks that gets to me.”

That’s a good shorthand; it’s not the rocks, it’s the pride in those rocks.

…and…you were rightfully picked apart over here.

Fascinating to me how you can take your own perfidy and blame it on others. In your world, conservatives are never to blame, no matter that they are the only ones in the room.

Anthony Watts is a crank. He’s a crackpot. Four out of the first five posts at his site when you asked me to look, were factually in error, or in the one case — you favorite, of course — just argumentatively wrong. No matter how fat you think Al Gore is, that says absolutely nothing about climate science, let alone do what you claim it does — refute Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning, and Nobel Peace Prize-winning claims, and make Anthony Watts a shining star.

Dunning Kruger absolutely applies to arguing in good faith, when one is arguing from a paucity of information, or in your case, dramatic bias that blinds one to the facts. That’s the point.

What an interesting attitude: “Even though I’m dead wrong, and my error will cost billions and kill hundreds of millions, I should be considered correct in my error, because my intentions were good — or at least, not really as evil as the results turned out to be.”

The post you’re defending, where Watts posted even more crackpottery than his usual stuff, a claim that life had been found in a meteorite, continues to be exposed as fraud. Watts is so far wrong that he can’t even recognize a complete fraud — no amount of disclaimer can excuse that. Turns out Watts’s source, Chandra Wickramasinghe, is not only a famous crackpot himself, but admits that he completely ignored the geologists who told him his rock is of earthly origin, and not even a meteorite. In true Dunning Kruger Effect form, he decided he knew better than the experts. Watts, who is a radio weatherman, decided he knew better than the experts who rejected the paper, and sided with the crank science journal that published it. I don’t know your science background, but you appear wholly unfamiliar with Watts and Greg Laden — Laden’s a practicing scientist — but you decided you know better than Laden, and sided with Watts.

I told you not to step in that dog pile. Pondering why I’d tell you that, you stepped in it. Now you claim I plotted to force you to soil your shoes, and that warning you away from it was part of the plot.

Don’t be surprised if Dunning or Kruger give you a call — not exactly out of the blue.

Bertrand Russell’s explanation of the Dunning Kruger Effect.

http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

According to the Heritage foundation, a very conservative organization, the United States is 10th in the world for economic freedom.

Have fun choking, Morgan.

You’ve now had two chances to show how Watts is all these bad things you claim him to be. The first time it turned out you misunderstood the point of a cartoon. The second time it turned out one of your fellow lefty bloggers concealed relevant information that would have refuted his point, and you either couldn’t or wouldn’t see through the deception. You’re oh for two here.

As I’ve observed before. This is not about changing your mind. I simply WON’T do that, whether I’m willing to try or not. It’s about how far one has to go, to make lefty ideas look like good ones, and as you’ve shown before one has to go very, very far. It seems the doctrine of “I know what I’m talking about, therefore anyone who has a different idea must not know what he’s talking about” is an important part of it. I’m also seeing, information itself must be viewed as a sort of contaminant; here and there, lefties brag about not watching something or not reading something, Laden refuses to provide links even to the target of his momentary ire. So I see why you don’t like Watts. When he provided a rebuttal to Laden, he provided links to everything, making it known what he thought, but then leaving it up to his leadership to come to their own conclusions.

What else am I to conclude, but that on Planet Liberal, that must be the wrong way to do it. It’s clear he hasn’t won any points with you, by doing it the correct and proper way. Why don’t you log in and let him know he isn’t fooling you, how you know he’s been duped, Laden is not a liar, etc. Maybe in that context you can state the case in a way I’ll understand it; or, someone over there can help clue me in. Because, as you’ve stated it here, I’m not at all sure why you seem to think Laden did a fair job with this. “The other guy did it too” or something, that’s about all I can glean from what you said…

There is only one note to be made, and it’s been made, not to worry about that.

Watts is still in error on the science of global warming, and it’s pretty crazy.

There is, coming to a conclusion different from yours. And then there is, being in error. Those are two different things.

Make whatever note you want to on the links issue. Watts is still in error on the science of global warming, and it’s pretty crazy.

——–

Morgan, go to Watts’s site and ask him why he doesn’t link to Greg Laden’s blog, nor to Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, nor to any of a thousand other sites that are critical of his errors.

If you want to complain about unfairness, speak to the more serious violators first, and don’t stand up for unfairness before you do.

NO, then. And you’d like to divert the attention to what-the-other-guy-did. Can’t say I’m surprised.

So noted.

Ask him why he doesn’t even allow trackbacks.

If you want to complain about unfairness, speak to the more serious violators first, and don’t stand up for unfairness before you do.

Is it a sin for me not to link to Watts? Then he’s the King of Sin. Why don’t you complain to him?

Oh I get it, so that’s why he doesn’t link to Watts, even to give his readers the benefit of reading first-hand what he seeks to criticize. He must come from that weird Planet Liberal, where it is thought that people become smarter when they are deprived of information. That might explain why I’ve found it rather difficult to get any information across to you, on occasion.

I’ve noticed a lot of liberals labor under this misconception: You’re smarter if you can dismiss information more quickly, ideally before any of it sinks in. This would logically mean, at the extreme end of the spectrum, those among us who are the wisest are the ones who haven’t taken the time to learn a single thing. Especially if they form incendiary opinions about things they have never inspected first-hand, off in that direction lies true sagely wisdom.

I don’t suppose you and I can agree to what is plainly obvious here, that Laden would have been doing a fairer job criticizing Watts, and offering his readers the common respect that should’ve been expected, if he at least included all these irrelevant disclaimers that Watts put in his piece? So the readers could make up their OWN minds about whether Watts had been duped. I don’t suppose you’ll concede just that much. Probably way too much to ask.

Anthony Watts is using your same argument:

I know, right?

Anthony Watts, of the science-denialist Whats Up with That blog, has got his shorts in a knot because of a post I wrote indicating that he is a boob. He is upset because in a screen shot of him talking about a totally absurd pseudo-scientific claim that should have been rejected out of hand, I failed to include enough of the post to show that he was skeptical about the claim.

Let me be very very clear: This is not a claim to be skeptical about. This is a Teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars claim. A person who has reported debunked claims about alien life again and again, reporting in a fake scientific journal, has made an absurd claim. To understand the level of absurdity check out PZ Myers post, written after mine, which goes into more detail about the “journal.”

I did not need to show that Anthony Watts was skeptical because that wasn’t the point. The point was that it was funny that he was looking at this claim at all.

That’s the treacherous situation involved with feeling instead of thinking, you end up being like the pot calling the kettle black.

No mirrors in your house today?

That’s why it’s important to do what I did, think, locate the source of the complaint, read it for yourself.

You’re late to the party, by years, especially with regard to the many attacks on science by Anthony Watts. Thinking for yourself does NOT mean disagreeing with all other opinion. Thinking for yourself does NOT mean making a knee-jerk assessment that what Ed Darrell says is wrong.

Think? That would be good. Still waiting for you to demonstrate it, but not waiting for you to lead the way.

When the interested reader does this, it emerges that Watt’s link to the story was full of conditions, “if”‘s, grains of salt…he wasn’t duped by anybody.

To science, quoting Wickramasinghe on such an issue, written up in that journal, is a lot like citing a rabid dog on the dangers of drinking water. We know what the answer will be, we know it will be biased, and we know it will be wrong.

Putting qualifiers in on such a story doesn’t spend the reader’s time well, nor respect the reader in any way. If you know it’s wrong with a 99% confidence level, the wise thing to do would be to ignore the story unless and until it is confirmed.

Otherwise, it’s just spreading crazy.

Telling the truth is a lot more than saying “this may or may not be accurate,” before repeating a falsehood.

Neither would any readers of his who happened to be following the story, although that’s what this Laden character worked hard to make it look like.

Leftism == group-think. Foolish, foolish group-think.

Anti-leftism=knee-jerk group think that drags us through the swamps of error, reducing chances we’ll ever find the truth.

I’m amused that you think a call for accuracy is somehow “leftist.” Is that your confession that the facts don’t matter? Between the lines, and sometimes not between the lines, that’s what you’ve been arguing.

It’s also mighty clear that this is the operating philosophy of many on the so-called American right: Wrong about climate science, wrong about air pollution, wrong about family planning, wrong about preventing teen-age pregnancy, wrong about economics, wrong about education, wrong about taxes, wrong about America’s best days being past (they are not), wrong on civil dissent, wrong on the Constitution, wrong on history, and — God save us, because God knows the GOP can’t — wrong on the distributive principle of multiplication.

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said “We can always count on the Americans to do the right thing — after they have tried everything else.” Our future much depends on our short-circuiting that aphorism, and getting to the facts, getting the facts right, and doing the right thing without wasting time and without wasting resources by trying all the wrong things first.

I regret you don’t share my urgency on the need for accuracy, and action.

The American right’s motto: “FIRE! Ready, aim.”

I’m sure it feels like they don’t. It felt so darn good to think you got him nailed and were able to taint his rep as a science guy, and it felt good to envision him as a dupe being taken in by things, while you & the people who agree with you can float above all of it, keeping your heads while everyone else is losing theirs.

That’s the treacherous situation involved with feeling instead of thinking, you end up being like the pot calling the kettle black. That’s why it’s important to do what I did, think, locate the source of the complaint, read it for yourself. When the interested reader does this, it emerges that Watt’s link to the story was full of conditions, “if”‘s, grains of salt…he wasn’t duped by anybody. Neither would any readers of his who happened to be following the story, although that’s what this Laden character worked hard to make it look like.

Leftism == group-think. Foolish, foolish group-think.

That’s just one more chunk of crazy Watts promotes.

It’s the whole gestalt of crazy that bothers me. You even got sucked into it briefly — and you were working to be skeptical.

Nothing to be gained from linking to Watts in this discussion.