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Sunday, August 18, 2013

HP "Skeptic" Is A DeNiAr

He posted under the name The Skeptic here.

I answered most of his points within that blog, but I intentionally ignored one due to time:

"So the goal of scientists is to relieve people of the burden of having to think for themselves? What is this mythical “consensus” you keep referring to? In fact, 60% of radiation scientists believe that a threshold model is most accurately describes low dose effects, while only 16% favor a linear no-threshold model (Silva CL, et al. 2007)."

His first moronic question was in response to my point that we have scientific consensus bodies so that the average person doesn't have to be a master of all the sciences.

This is a traditional ploy of science denialists...that people should decide for themselves after the denialist has fomented doubt on the science.  Convenient.

His second point, that "60% of radiation scientists believe..." was the point I didn't want to take the time to look up then.

I could only get an abstract of that particular cited study, but I found essentially the same one in The Health Physics Journal.  Here's a link to that abstract.  I can't link you to the article, but I'll pull a sentence out of it:

"We reiterate here that this is not a reflection of the views of specialists in radiation biology; it is a distribution from (a) sample of a broad cross-section of subscribers to Science, all of who have earned a PhD (or equivalent)."

Emphasis mine.

The dishonesty boggles.

Note:  Even if it did reflect the views of specialists in radiation biology that is irrelevant.  The best of the best are the ones who are elected to consensus bodies.  The others are challenged to produce evidence to shift the consensus.

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