Logic Lesson: One person is crazy, therefore a whole subject is crazy
How do you decide whether a scientific claim is correct?
Virginia H. Shanahan and Andrew Bolt each demonstrate a quick, easy way to make that decision:
If you can find even one person who (A) is mentally ill and (B) babbles about the subject, then the whole subject is crazy.
Bolt writes in the July 9, 2008 issue of the Herald Sun:
PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” - and they haven’t even yet got to [Australian Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.
“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne… The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”
But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.
The Shanahan/Bolt method of evaluating science is far quicker, and far easier, than the method (”painstaking research”) it replaces.
(Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing the Wolf/Salo study to our attention.)