Skepticism of Suite 101

Last updated 03/18/07.

Published on: January 28, 1998

I was pondering my next step in my progression of articles on skepticism, when a Suite 101 event dictated this topic, which I'm posting a little early.

Skepticism tests knowledge about two major subjects. (1) The objective world that we live in, which is relatively passive about our investigations. And (2) the social world that we live in, where the players may actively plan to subvert our acquisition and testing of knowledge. This article is about skepticism in our social world.

Suite101.com uses . . . contributing editors, to help guide members through the maze of information on the World Wide Web. (Suite 101 Press Kit)

What does this mean about the responsibilities of the contributing editors? What responsibility does Suite 101 have to ensure they fulfill theirs?

Imagine for a moment that Suite 101 receives and accepts an application for a contributing editor for biology. An important and general subject!

But those of us who flock to the new subject notice some peculiarities. The first article disputes that evolution has occurred. The links are to The Institute For Creation Research, the WatchTower Society, and other creationist-associated sites; but there are no links to other sorts of biology sites, let alone pro-evolution sites. An examination of the home page of this contributing editor reveals that he is Duane Gish, the founder and director of the Institute For Creation Research, and has written numerous very successful books.

Suite 101 representatives express great pleasure at lining up such a popular and significant contributing editor.

Is this going to help guide members through the maze of information on the World Wide Web? Or is it going to detour them towards one-sided, biased presentations?

A few people point out that the ICR is religious in nature, which Gish denies. They point out that Gish's works don't get much academic respect, which Gish denies, listing a few Christian colleges and other fundamentalists. They question whether Gish is really suitable for biology editor, which Gish responds to by declaring his years of experience. Gish in turn offers free copies of his books to his detractors while accusing them of lying and insinuating they are guilty of paranoia, libel, being nobodies, desiring censorship, etc. Gish further demands that they accept all burden of proof, apparently ignoring all previously mentioned facts and claims.

This is a very close analogy to what has actually transpired in the past week with the appointment of Bryan Johnson as contributing editor for International Economics.

Bryan works for the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, and has been allowed to select a very broad and controversial subject without giving any clue to his bias. Not only that, he gets to misrepresent it as "social science" when at best his work is political propaganda, and ought to go into the Politics section where even naive readers will understand that his writings ought to be treated with more skepticism than science usually warrants.

The faults of his site, accusations, and counter-accusations are detailed in these two discussions:
International Economics: a bad misbranding and
CONTROVERSY.

Given that Suite 101's purpose is to provide guides to the Web, nobody ought to argue that Bryan ought not to be a guide, because he's eminently suited to guide people through right-wing economic positions. However, should Suite 101 endorse him as a guide for a more general subject, such as International Economics, despite his observable biases? Why, for example, hasn't he got a link to the web page of MIT Professor Paul Krugman who has long ridiculed the economics work of the Heritage Foundation and other conservatives both academically and in popular works?

It doesn't make sense to try to force fair handling of issues on an unwilling editor. Better to have him accurately identify his biases, quit hogging the whole subject, and make room for countervailing positions. For example, Duane Gish would change "Biology" to "Creationism."

There are two issues of fairness here. The first is fairness to the readers of Suite 101, who ought to be able to trust that either their guides are relatively unbiased, or that the bias is clearly stated. The second is fairness to the other contributing editors: if Bryan gets to misrepresent his bias with a neutral-sounding subject like "International Economics" and claim that it is "social science," then all the editors should be able to compete in the selection of euphemisms and creative categories.

So, unless I see "International Economics" moved into Politics and renamed something like "Heritage International," I'm going to encourage my fellow editors to apply to creatively rename their topics. I think my topic needs a new category, "TRVTH," and a new name, "The Only TRUTH." Sounds fair to me.

Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.

— Arthur Hays Sulzberger Counter image omitted.