From Library Babel Fish, August 5, 2010
I just had to do some housecleaning among my RSS feeds. Some of my favorite blogs had moved from ScienceBlogs to Scientopia in the wake of PepsiGate. (If this -gate is unfamiliar, here it is in a nutshell: Bloggers who wrote for a respected science blog aggregation site were upset when the management offered paid blog space to corporate spokesfolks – in particular a Pepsi blog on nutrition – without distinguishing it from the other blogs, which many bloggers felt unethically blurred the line between science commentary and advertising. Though ScienceBlogs relented, the damage was done.)
It made me revisit a rather savage description of the situation published in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday. Virginia Heffernan, who writes a kind of “tech/fashion” feature for the magazine, thought the bloggers who were making such a fuss unfairly used their status as scientists to engage in classist anti-Christian bigotry. “Hammering away at an ideology,” she wrote, “substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd . . . science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word ‘science’ and from occasional invocations of ‘peer-reviewed’ thises and thats.”
In a comment to a blog post analyzing her unusually dyspeptic analysis, she explained that she has no training in science, but was surprised that scientists would engage in the kind of grudge matches that are so common on political blogs. She also issued a correction of sorts: among a handful of blogs she recommended in her article, she hadn’t realized one of them was a vehicle for denying human culpability in global warming. As she put it, it was a well-written blog with lovely images and she “frankly didn’t recognize the weatherspeak on the blog as ‘denialist’; I didn’t even know about denialism.”
Yet she recommended it, and the purpose of her weekly feature is to point out what’s new, what’s cool, and what to check out online. I think we have a trifecta, here: a tarnished teakettle complaining about a pot calling a kettle black.
All of which made me think about writing and reading and one too often neglected part of “information literacy” (a phrase I don’t much like, but which seems to have become the dominant shorthand for being able find and use information critically in the pursuit of inquiry of all kinds), the part that has to do with ethics and epistemology. One goal of a liberal education is that our students embrace a disposition to interpret critically, value evidence, and not only let their minds be changed by it, but be willing to represent issues fairly when they make a claim. We don’t want them to rush to judgment. We don’t want them to cherry-pick evidence. We don’t want them to ignore facts that are inconvenient, or engage in unfair oversimplification of issues in o