Don't Confuse Me With Facts

He said it
I believe it
that settles it.
.................Bumper sticker syllogism

There is no arguing with hard core ideologues because, as proclaimed by the above, they aren't interested in facts or logic. Like the bishop who reputely refused to look through Galileo's telescope (at the craters of the moon and the moons of Jupiter) for fear of losing his soul they actively avoid fact and logic. Their style of argumentation is very recognizable when it exists at all: insults, denial, cherry picking and conspiracy theories.

Ideologues of that stripe tend to be rare in science because, as Neils Bohr once put it, "we all have the advantage of having written papers that were subsequently proven wrong." Bohr was lucky enough to have lived in a heroic age. That advantage seems to have largely disappeared from theoretical physics these days, since experimental results relevant to the new theories are largely nonexistent. Maybe the LHC will find something good enough to prove something important wrong. I hope so, but I'm not confident.

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