I lurk on a quite a few science blogs--most over at scienceblogs.com.
One blog there--which I only discovered recently--has denialism, of all forms, as its focus: denialism blog.
The usual focus of this blog is, you guessed it, denialism in all its various forms: Holocaust denialism, Moon Landing denialism, those forms of denialism of the truth known as Conspiracy Theories. You name it, they've probably covered it.
Sometimes denialism blog focuses on related subjects--an blog on one such subject just appeared and it's worth reading.
It's about the Psychology of Crankery. Most of the blog is taken up with the results of a small section of interesting book on AIDS, Seth Kalichman's book "Denying AIDS", about:
the psychology of those who are susceptible to pseudoscientific belief.
Some interesting quotes from the blog that caught my attention (the whole blog entry, though long, is worth checking out).
After arguing that a denialist is a "suspicious person", by nature, the author quotes another researcher who says:
A suspicious person is a person who has something on his mind. He looks at the world with fixed and preoccupying expectation, and he searches repetitively, and only, for confirmation of it. He will not be persuaded to abandon his suspicion of some plan of action based on it. On the contrary, he will pay no attention to rational arguments except to find in them some aspect or feature that actually confirms his original view. Anyone who tries to influence or persuade a suspicious person will not only fail, but also, unless he is sensible enough to abandon his efforts early will, himself, become an object of the original suspicious idea.
I'd be interested in others take on the blog.
And, here is a thought that stopped me cold for a bit:
The insights offered by Shapiro are that denialists are not "lying" in the way that most anti-denialists portray them. The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality for sure, explaining why arguing or debating with a denialist gets you nowhere. But the denialist is not the evil plotter they are often portrayed as. Rather denialists are trapped in their denialism.
I have to remember this the next time I "meet" a denialist on DKos--these people are not liars in the conventional sense, and deserve better than to be called such.
And, why does it seem that CTers seem to hold a number of different CTs at the same time?
Moreover, Goertzel (1994) points out that, often, the proof offered as evidence for a conspiracy is not specific to one incident or issue, but is used to justify the general pattern. That a government is covering-up its involvement in the 9/11 attacks, for instance, goes to show that it is also covering-up the fact that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, or that national governments are involved in political assassination. Thus, the more conspiracy theories a monological thinker agrees with, the more she or he will accept and assimilate any new conspiracy theory that is proposed.
I will just say that this makes for fascinating reading, particularly when it talks about a study done in the UK providing tantalizing (but far from air-tight) clues about why denialists and CTers think they way they do, and what can be done about it in a public arena like DKos.
So what do these studies mean for our understanding of cranks? ...it suggests the possibility that crankery and denialism may be preventable by better explanation of statistics. Much of what we're dealing with is likely the development of shoddy intellectual shortcuts, and teaching people to avoid these shortcuts might go a long way towards the development and fixation on absurd conspiracy theories or paranormal beliefs.