In an earlier post I eschewed a rant, because I figured I’d go too far afield from the original premise of teaching kids to argue. Chad’s post, The Loud Bigotry of Blog Conversations reminded me that I had this post tucked away on a shelf.

Chad makes an excellent point about blog discussions, which I think has a more general applicability:

I think the real minimum condition is a belief that both sides of the discussion are being carried on by reasonable people arguing in good faith. That is, the people on both sides are sincere in their statements, know their own minds, and are doing their best to behave in an ethical manner. They’re not taking extreme positions just to provoke people, they’re not cynically saying things that they don’t believe but think will sound good, and they’re not working toward morally repugnant goals (the enslavement or extermination of large groups of people, for example). People on both sides need to accept that their opponents are intelligent people who hold their beliefs for reasons that they find valid.

And I agree with this — there is a kind of intellectually honest argument that sadly doesn’t seem to take place very often. People long ago discovered that they can “win” an argument in more than one way, because there is more than one way of arguing.

In the Teaching Kids article the author gives the Greek labels, logos, ethos, and pathos — logic, character and emotion. Within science, we mostly use logic: show me the data, and that you’ve done a good experiment. Character isn’t too much of an issue, and neither is emotion — neither charm nor an emotional appeal is going to persuade you that my data are a good match to theory. Ethics does come into play here, though but it’s a rather steep function. If you have defrauded the scientific community in the past, you have a tough row to hoe to get back into their good graces. You can’t typically get by by being slightly less sleazy than someone else, though that seems to work in politics.

And where science crosses into politics, you get that sort of behavior. Science doesn’t boil down to popularity — 51% of the people may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but that does not make it so. But politics does depend on this, so if you are campaigning on the “Moon Cheese Means Energy Independence” platform, convincing people that the moon is made of green cheese, in any way possible, is in your best interest. And thus enter character- and emotion-driven arguments, lacking in logic and facts.

I don’t know if this always puts science and scientists at a disadvantage, but I think it often does. It’s not a fair fight when a moderately well-crafted lie can be used to counter established facts, and those that are monitoring the discussion cannot (or will not) recognize the dishonesty.