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If you're a first time visitor (or just generally confused), here's an explanation: Originally this blog was titled "The Tree of Knowledge" and was full of my exhortations and explanations about various social issues. Now they aren't so much explanations as Tourette's like interjections, because I started to find the research exhausting.

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Monday, November 09, 2009

Gender Wars and Objectivity

This piece in XX Factor is interesting and scary.

What I think is also interesting is an issue I see coming up in the comments that goes along with what I wrote when I came back from Australia a couple of years ago: the lack of trust in the objectivity of the journalist. Though I do not have objections or doubts about what has been presented by Katheryn Joyce, it has become so expected that journalists are writing (and scientists are researching) from their own inherent biases that people can dismiss any evidence that goes against their own preferred notions as being the presentation of people trying to unfairly sway the argument. For example, when confronted with the fact that all peer-reviewed articles found in scientific journals support the conclusion that there is extreme anthropogenic global warming, the naysayers argue that there is conspiracy within the scientific community to reject any evidence that goes against global warming and that any who dare to argue are immediately and unfairly blackballed. Conservatives don't trust the Washington Post and Liberals won't rely on the Washington Times for information. I for one have difficulty trusting anyone to give me a completely objective reporting and end up being swayed by personal pathos and whatever empirical observations I am able to draw from my own limited experience to decide where I stand on an issue, which makes any sort of open debate difficult.