Responding to demagogues

The article by Vitaly Ginzburg ("Demagogues against Scientific Expertise," January/ February 2005) contained a disturbing suggestion near the end that I would hope scientific minds in general will sensibly reject. After spending much of the article bemoaning the advance of pseudoscience, Ginzburg shares an anecdote of how he once informed a journalist he would no longer answer the journalist's scientific questions while his publication continued to promote pseudoscience in the form of horoscopes. He goes on to suggest that a majority of members of the scientific community should take similar stands.

Perhaps I am too uneducated to see the logic here, but it seems to me this is a remarkably poorly thought-out strategy. Surely, the most effective way to combat pseudoscience lies in trying to spread science and rational thinking to the masses as often as one can in order to offset the avalanche of misinformation being promoted. To take the attitude that these publications are unworthy of the benefit of a true scientist's time is hard to see as anything but intellectual elitism. If those who oppose them retreat from the field, the demagogues Ginzburg so disdains simply win the war of ideas by default.

Charles Fusner

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

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