If I present my argument in a manner that intellectually dishonest and/or distorts your position, you can call me out on that without going ad hominem.

It serves not to disinterest the public, but the debater as it avoids the actual argument, with a side dish of confusion to the public.

It is however notable for often being used by those without actual arguments and thus should always be countered by an argument for your cause combined with one against theirs. But if left un-countered it might however get a life on its own and while this might be less true in science, it it killing in politics (see the electability 'arguments').

It can be a viable argument if bias is overly dominant in the research but is always supporting and never a single argument.

note: This is an opinion, like most 'arguments' are.

In an ideal world where everyone was a rational, disinterested superhuman who devoted themselves to a scientific pursuit of truth, only ever focusing on arguments would be the perfect approach.

Unfortunately there do exist people who deliberately and knowingly bullshit other people in order to get what they want. Such people absolutely win from a policy of "attack the argument, not the person" because their goal is not to further understanding or even win arguments, it's to confuse people into acting a certain way ... often paralysing them into inaction by creating the appearance of an unending debate.

Thus refuting one bullshit argument simply results in two more popping up to replace it. Even if some people remember the first argument that was refuted, this doesn't help, because:

• Lots of other people won't remember the names of who was involved, or won't be aware of the previous arguments at all.

• Of the people who do remember, the fact that a debate was happening at all may be taken as evidence that the people involved must be "experts", and thus the fact that they lost the argument doesn't necessarily reduce their credibility.

• If someone was a good enough bullshitter to require a response in the first place, they will probably be good enough at it a second time to ensure that if they get no response, some people will start to assume they must be correct.

This can rapidly turn into complete defeat by the people who are actually making reasonable points because they simply become exhausted and burn out faced with an unending wall of plausible sounding nonsense, which then eventually replaces reality with itself.

I've seen this problem play out in brutally sharp detail not so long ago. The people involved knew they were bullshitting, but didn't care because in their eyes it was all for the greater good.

The only solution to this is, in fact, to attack the credibility of the people doing it once they have repeatedly made absurd or invalid arguments, because otherwise it's much harder for people to learn to tune them out.

So yes, for some people there are some financial interest. But I would say this is not the main factor. If you have defended an idea for a long time, maybe you have sacrificed some part of your life like family or friend to your passion, and at some point it becomes so tied to your identity, that it must be impossible to realize how wrong your were.

The latter is true for any kind of belief, religious, political or even scientific.

[1] http://creationmuseum.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_%28radio_host%29#Fi...

Why not money? Most of them built a career that is celebrated, while being lousy scientists, by playing the Creationist card and appealing to particular political/religious publics. And working for similarly minded organizations and "research" institutes.

>If you say religious belief, you'd be right, but it's not a terribly effective criticism because the majority of U.S. scientists are religious, too.

That would be relevant only if they let their religion influence their science. Which a computer scientist or a chemist doesn't have to, or at least as much as a evolutionary biologist.

Plus, some people simply can't suspend disbelief of self-organizing systems. I have to wonder if there was trauma in science class for many of them at one point.

When I mentioned (as a 5th grade student ) to a 5th-grade student that evolution isn't exclusive to Creation , he burst into tears.

In general, highly charismatic religion seems somehow related to the general changes of the 1960s, coupled with some more sinister uses of mass media. I have to wonder if decades of television have made people addicted to willing suspension of disbelief of a particularly unexamined kind.