Wrapped in academic jargon like "epistemically detrimental dissent," a new science philosophy paper lays out four conditions to help differentiate between helpful criticism (that advances the state of science) and bad-faith, biased contrarianism (meant to hinder scientific progress, like tobacco companies disputing the smoking-cancer link).
According to the paper, dissent is "epistemically detrimental" if it meets the following four conditions: the real world consequences of dissent are severe; the dissent "violates established conventional standards" (is overtly biased); it protects industry/producers while putting the public at risk; and if the risks of consensus versus dissent "fall largely upon different parties."
So dissenting from a hypothesis with no real world impact is not inherently bad (because why would you bother faking criticism of an unimportant hypothesis), whereas dissenting from a hypothesis involving dangerous conditions may be bad faith and done to protect a particular party. If the dissent isn't up to par regarding academic standards and practices, then it may be biased and is therefore epistemically detrimental. If it's defending an actor engaged in some activity producing conditions that scientists hypothesize to be bad (like tobacco or fossil fuel industries) against a threat to the public, and if the public and producer face different risks, then it's a bad faith criticism and not advancing scientific understanding.
The conclusion is that attacks on climate science are likely "epistemically detrimental," meaning they work against the advancement of science. This is a very fancy way of saying that they're not helpful critiques (which is the essence of peer review) but more along the lines of political denial. Without spelling it out, the authors explain the difference between the work of actual skeptics and psuedoskeptic deniers.
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