Fracking freaks me out - Dan Kahan

Dan Kahan, 13 March, while riding to the defence of the Liberal Republic of Science:

The lack of familiarity with an emerging technology is a good thing to keep in mind when a group of people who are well-informed about and highly interested in a novel technology get together to talk about (among other things) “public attitudes” towards it.

Precisely because those people are well-informed and highly-interested, they will have been exposed to a very unrepresentative sample of opinions toward the technology, and are vulnerable for that reason to grossly overestimate the extent to which the risks it poses are a genuine matter of public dispute.

This effect, moreover, will be magnified if those people, disregarding the biased nature of the samples that are the basis of their own observations, talk a lot to themselves and credit one another’s reports about who believes what and why about what is in fact a boutiquey issue in which most ordinary people don’t have views one way or the other.

This was one of the point’s I stressed in “yesterday’s” post, which noted the echo-chamber amplification of misimpressions about the extent and partisan nature of conflict over GM foods. People who know a lot about it—particularly ones who write about it for the media and on-line—take it as gospel that the public is “polarized,” when in fact they just aren’t.

Why would they be? Most of them have no idea what GM foods are either (not to mention that they are consuming platefulls of them at pretty much every meal)...

@ www.culturalcognition.net - Cultural Cognition Blog - Fracking freaks me out:

Go there please, and read the whole story.