Oh, a rare Diane sighting! Hi there, nice to see you!
Sozboe wrote:The article is about autism, but the title observation and the last paragraph strike a more general chord with me. It's something we've seen here over and over again -- it doesn't seem to matter what the studies and the data show.
Why?
Two suggestions: 1) Because, to steal a line from Frank Apisa, admitting that you don't know something (like, what causes authism, are there WMDs in Iraq, do frankenfoods kill, should America ratify Kyoto) is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. Few people have that strength, especially when it comes to problems they have a big stake in and little control over. It feels much better to hang on to
some explanation, true or false, and act on it. Once you're at this point, you have a sunk investment in the theory, and don't want to be disturbed with the facts.
2) Being super-concerned about something always proves, to yourself and to others, that you are a responsible person who cares. It doesn't make much of a difference if the concern is founded in reality or in fantasy. What makes all the difference is your concern itself. The most extreme example I ever saw of this is the
International Herald Tribune's reporting on Jews in Germany over the 80s.
The International Herald Tribune, then a European joint-venture of the
New York Times and the
Washington Post, generally reported news throughout the world in the same way as its parent newspapers: no nonsense, double-fact-checked, super-informative, rational. The only exceptions were developments in Palestine, and about two or three horror stories a year about how a Jew got harrassed by proto-Nazis in German government offices.
Every time this happened, concerned German publications like
Spiegel or
Zeit researched the story, and every time, it turned out to be made up at random by the
IHT's source, or so exaggerated it might as well have been. My only explanation for this strange anomaly is that since Jews make up the vast majority of the staff at these two newspapers, their internal group dynamics turned concern about Nazis into a shibboleth of responsibility: So strong was the shibboleth that it turned out overriding even the famous fact-checking machines at the
Washington Post and the
New York Times. And again, once you have put the reputation of your newspaper behind it, you don't really
want to be informed that you have fallen for a ruse, and that you were not responsible as you thought, but just gullible. (And don't get me started on the Op-Eds to go with those stories. Anyone remember Arthur Rosenthal?)