This is probably one of my favorite articles ever written by my friend Dan at The Skeptical Libertarian. The answer is that the cost of misinformation is too large to ignore. It is real. It is devastating. It is counted in billions of dollars wasted on junk cures, in billions spent on treating preventable diseases. It is measured in lifetimes shortened, bodies crippled, eyes blinded, and children lost. The costs of medical conspiracy theories and baseless fear-mongering are immense and ghastly. Millions upon millions of people are hurt and killed because them every year. It is a veritable holocaust of ignorance. But it is a holocaust that is still happening, year after year, extinguishing countless of lives that could have been saved by good science, free markets, and sound policy. What we are facing is nothing less than genocidal stupidity, on a worldwide scale. Here I show how widespread pseudoscientific conspiracy theories have become and document just a few cases of the damage they have wrought.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 15:24:40 +0000