Gwangi Valley - Lost Blog of the Gwangi

Growing up I heard a phrase that, while crass, has stuck with me. “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one and yours stinks.”

I would add, “Quite possibly, you’re also an asshole.” Maybe that’s just me. But I often find that pure opinion, the uninformed sort in particular, can be a parsimonious and troublesome commodity in the marketplace of knowledge. And I enjoy a good smackdown as much as the next asshole.

A participant in this year’s Conference on World Affairs recently commented how he had observed a woman hastily leave a panel discussion which featured SETI’s Seth Shostak because, she exclaimed, they were “biased” against the UFO crowd (more on this term in a moment). She was irate that ‘both sides’ of the story weren’t being represented by this scientist and his fellow panel members. The other side, of course, being her side.

The problem here is not this panel ignoring her camp’s compelling evidence and silencing their ’side’ of the story. The problem here is that there is not, for all intents and purposes, another side to the story. There is no existing credible evidence to support the notion that extraterrestrials have ever visited Earth; much less that they continually do so. This is who I mean by “the UFO crowd”. Technically, a U.F.O. is any unidentified flying object, terrestrial in origin or not. However, popular culture has co-opted the term to mean the ships of visitors who are not of this planet. It’s not accurate, but it’s in general use, right or not. And popular culture has given it a sense of credibility, as well, that it does not deserve. It also seems to have made them huffy and panel-fleeing.

Much like the less-than-accurate use of the term “UFO” to describe only extarterrestrial craft, those who hold the beliefs this woman apparently does are also perpetuating their own falsity. In this case, a logical fallacy known as “the false compromise”. The false compromise is, it may shock some to know, quite commonplace to us Westerners. We’re often presented with it on the news or in groups or at work. The false compromise is this notion that ‘both sides of the story’ are not being represented. We see it fairly often these days when the ‘intelligent design’ proponents weigh in against evolution. The former gets a free pass to compete as an equal against the latter simply because, the reporter assures us, both sides of the debate need to be heard. That and religiously related issues always get a free pass unless there’s some unsavory moral or sexual aspect involved.

The problem here being, of course, that the intelligent design crowd has no science to back up their idea, while evolution and natural selection are backed by decades of evidence and experimentation and is considered beyond reproach in the natural sciences. So, there is no ‘other side’ here, except in the court of public opinion. And opinion, as Hippocrates pointed out, does not breed knowledge. That is science’s job. And here we get to the crux of the matter:

Merely having an opinion does not make your opinion as inherently valid as any other, no matter how fervently you believe it. Your opinion may quite possibly be demonstrably wrong or otherwise indefensible based on evidence (or lack thereof). In short, to have a ’side’ to a story, your side must be as credible as all others, not merely your favoured belief… and that’s good enough. Far too often the media will present another ’side’, an alternate view of an issue lacking in credibility, simply because they do not understand the subject well enough to make a proper judgement. And sometimes they do it for entertainment value. But this cultural acceptance of such un-balanced reporting does not mean that it must carry over into instances where the subject matter IS understood by the participants.

Just because your local news wants to talk about UFO sightings doesn’t mean Seth Shostak does. Why? Because Mr. Shostak understands that the evidence in favour of extraterrestrial visitation is… sorely lacking, to say the least. He’s no more likely to want to spend his panel time discussing UFO sightings than your doctor is likely to be amenable to discussing leeches as a viable treatment for your edema. Neither is scientifically practical based on evidence. Now, while the lowly leech has returned to favour in helping restore circulation to re-attached appendages and while a great many scientists believe that there is a mathematical probability, verging on certainty, that life must surely exist elsewhere in the universe, neither of these lends credibility to leeches for dropsy or a constant visitation of Earth by aliens.

Yet, still, the argument persists, loudly at times, that scientists are ‘controlling the microphone’ or practicing a one-sided argument when it comes to UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation. They are initiating and argument for suppressed evidence against established science, yet they can provide no compelling evidence which would put them on an equal footing; give them an equal ’side’ of the argument.

And, until such time as they can step up to the challenge, I suppose they’ll continue to huffily exit panels and conferences where their thin arguments are not given equal weighting against the heavy tome of science.

Ella Rache

PS - Interested in learning more about logical fallacies? Have a squiz: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/