Just watched the Cobert Report. The amazing thing is I was pondering this evening exactly what Dr Agre was saying about scientists needing to come out of the closet. Unbelievable!
I was listening to a liberal radio show and the host was going on and on about the horrible mercury we are poisoning kids with in vaccines yadda yadda yadda. It makes me ill to hear that nonsense on the public airwaves where it will convince yet another parent to withhold life saving vaccines from their children. And the host had no concept of who is or isn't an expert or even knowledgeable about the subject. The result is you have an ignorant individual blabbing the worst bad medicine and the host reinforcing everything as if it were valid and factual.
Since I have heard this misinformation over and over, I thought that calling in or posting on the show's web page wasn't going to have any more effect than the last time I tried to correct this information. So I started thinking about what the underlying issues really were here.
It was rather easy to figure out. Scientists are invisible. The anti-vaccine crowd just like many anti-science groups think the evil government or evil corporations control all the scientific information. These anti-science people either don't realize there are scientists that are not in government or big pharma or the anti-science people don't know the science people even exist.
And that was exactly the message Dr Agre was relaying!
Think my ESP experience qualifies for James Randi's million?
I am even more convinced the SEA is going to become an important group, and, if they can get their message out, it is indeed the right message. Scientists need to distinguish themselves as a reliable source. When the conspiracy people think government controls all scientific research results, we have to let the CTers know scientists control that information, not corporations and government. Every time some slanted or biased research is uncovered, we should be making it clear the reason it was uncovered is because science cannot be so easily manipulated. Single studies may have fabricated results, but science looks for the repeatable results before drawing real conclusions.