Confusionism

Krugman's latest brings up a great point that I often have a hard time dealing with while talking to my friends; the whole mastery of spreading confusion or "white noise" about certain facts. There is no doubt in the scientific community about global warming, yet I hear otherwise very intelligent people claiming that there is. Corporations like ExxonMobile have a vested interest in the science coming out a certain way, so they fund "scientists" to say that global warming doesn't exist. By the way, as you pay $3 a gallon, poor ExxonMobile still managed to squeak by and make a paltry $7.6 billion in profit last quarter. Well, with all the extra cash, they get to buy quite a bit, including the lobbyists that wrote the next energy bill that gives them even more money. (How could this happen?) Besides outright buying politicians, they can outright buy their facts, sometimes straight from the White House's own editorial board. And the media is too lazy or too fearful to distinguish fact from bullshit for their readers/viewers. This is how the Swift Boaters got to spread their lies and muddy the water against Kerry. This is how Rove gets to muddy the water about his involvement in Plamegate. And this is why very smart people are still up in the air about global warrming. The machines are powerful enough to construct and spread their own facts, and the media is a willing accomplice.
Will evolution be the next "theory" they muddy?

Here's Krugman:

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?