Rebranding ideas that have been outright rejected by experts in the field as "controversial" implies that there is substantial argument when there is not. It's like if you said, "This is a controversial idea, but the printing press was never invented."

There's no actual controversy there. No one really needs to refute you. You're just wrong.

But if all of the newspapers and magazines take you at your word, and you get to go on television every week and tell people that the printing press was never invented, then we've got a problem. Still not a controversy, but a significant problem.

Because now it looks like there is a controversy. The fact that you are one person against an entire field is obscured by your prominence. The question is suddenly open to laypeople.

WAS the printing press invented? On the one hand, all the scholarship on the topic says it was. On the other, I just saw two guys on TV and one said it was and the other said it wasn't. Sounds like some questions remain.

This is basically how reporting on cranks goes. Climate change, transphobic questions, etc.: you have non experts who are wrong and they're getting a lot of airtime in which they are treated as though they are equally qualified to the experts who oppose them.

For approximately thirty years, reporting on climate change treated a few cranks as one side of a controversial question. It wasn't controversial. Experts agreed to a degree that experts almost never agree.

But both sides reporting required that you bring in a guy with a science degree who's trying to prove that there were dinosaurs on the Ark and you sit him down across from a climate scientist and you hear them both out.

I want to laugh at the patently ridiculous "Journal of Controversial Ideas," but it's rebranding bigotry as an academic controversy and the damage that can do is incalculable. We lost so many years of climate action.

I just want to note that the things these people are saying about race and gender and ability are basically "the printing press was never invented."

I would like to see an op-ed on this, and I *may* pitch it, but I think it would be better written by someone who has more at stake. And perhaps more science knowledge.

Reading that Singer interview has me fired up. Oof.