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@moth
Rattled? Maybe, but not for the reasons you imply. The phrase 'linky dinky' got on my tits to the extent i felt uncomfortable sharing a thread with such a cringingly pathetic piece of rhetoric. I couldn't let it stand unchallenged and took the piss.
The earlier wounded pleas for fair assessment of your point of view at least had some hopeless logic to them. But that that simply isn't a reasonable expectation.
It is fine and rational for people to base their own opinions on the assertions of sources they trust. Working things out for yourself is great where it's practical, but very limiting as a policy. It makes a lot of sense to reuse other people's hard thought & hard-won experience to quickly increase your knowledge of a subject, but argument from authority is a rubbish basis for a debate.
The trouble is that given two people with slightly different prior beliefs about a subject and a stream of relevant infomation, it is possible for each to rationally arrive at the opposite conclusion. This comes right out of the maths of Bayesian probability, and seems to be an even stronger feature of the buggy approximation to probabalistic inference that most people run. It happens because a piece of information is also evidence of the trustworthiness of its source. I read your link, weighed the assertions it contains against the rest of my knowledge, and quickly lost all trust in you, Ian Pilmer and Paul Sheehan. Someone starting from different knowlege could just as rationally find the same assertions plausible and judge the three of you sound and insighful.
The more this goes on, the more it polarises an intitally continuous specturm of opinion into two opposing camps who don't believe a word the other says. Attacking the motivation of others is both symptom and further fuel for the fire.
So we have the weird situation that many of the good reasons that each of us holds our position are not good reasons for the other to change their minds, and your attempt to pass some of your reasons off as uncontroversial ends up annoying me.