On May 7, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Bruce Bostwick <[email protected]
> wrote:
On May 6, 2009, at 5:57 PM, William Goodall wrote:
Anti-evolutionist Don McLeroy, a dentist and chair of the Texas
State Board of Education, testified at Friday's hearing: "I disagree
with these experts. Someone has got to stand up to experts."
Especially people who .. you know .. lack any kind of scientific
expertise at all?
I guess it helps if you go in already knowing what you believe and
determined not to let objective reality get in the way ..
I think this sort of thing has been unfortunately encouraged by
rules and policies like the Fairness Doctrine, which was based on
the well-intentioned, but seriously flawed, idea that every argument
automatically has a legitimate counter-argument. Thus we get all
sorts of "experts" to offer "the other viewpoint" on all sorts of
things. On issues where there are many legitimate opinions, this
kind of thinking dilutes them to just two. Big media has encouraged
this sort of non-thinking.
Nick
And one other unintended consequence of the Fairness Doctrine is that
the "expert" for the "other viewpoint" is often given the illusion of
a level of legitimacy that he/she would never have had without that
national media exposure, which can in turn make it far more difficult
to counter that argument than it really should be from the actual
validity of the argument itself.
"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to
true happiness." -- Bertrand Russell
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