So long and thanks for all the links
It’s sad about Denis Dutton. ALDaily is all in black.
Denis was a friend to B&W, from very early in its career – about three months into it, I think. He added it to Favorites, and soon after that he started linking to articles. He helped B&W get an audience.
It is melancholy that he’s gone.
I was expecting this to say just that he’d stopped blogging, not that he’d stopped living. What a bummer. Sorry, Ophelia.
I know, same here, Dan – I saw something on Twitter this morning (one of the rare times I checked it, as it happens) from Nigel Warburton, and thought he meant Denis had retired from ALD. A bummer indeed.
Sorry to hear this.
I first learned of aldaily when I attended one of Edward Tufte’s seminars and he mentioned it as a paragon of good web design. I started visiting it daily from that point on, and it was from aldaily that I learned of B&W. Both websites have been informative and entertaining, and have influenced my thinking in valuable ways.
-CM
I was shocked to hear of his death. A&L Daily and B&W are the first two sites I visit every day. I also discovered this site from the sidebar link on a&l. Denis was a large influence to me and the development of my critical thinking abilities when I was growing up. The world is a poorer place without him.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: So long and thanks for all the links http://dlvr.it/CL4Dy […]
Aldaily is how I discovered your site Ophelia.
Well there you go – Denis is still sending readers this way.
Thanks again Denis.
For that matter, come to think of it, ALD is basically what finally persuaded me that this strange new “internet” thingy was worthwhile after all. I was a very late adopter, and I’d been half-heartedly browsing now and then for awhile, then one day I found ALD and started exploring and…saw the light.
I know this is a bad time, and I do feel that Denis Dutton was an internet pioneer and a paragon of good design and he was an early and active opponent of postmodern relativism as it applies to science. But…given the praise ALD has been receiving, I think it also needs to be acknowledged that Dutton used his contrarianism as an excuse to promote global warming denial, screeds against “scientism”, and sundry other antiscientific views that happened to be in the political conservative camp. It’s not that these articles sometimes appeared — given the breadth and volume of ALD and its mission to cover alternative viewpoints it was inevitable — but especially on global warming it seemed that if there was an antiscientific opinion piece published in a major newspaper anywhere, then Dutton would link to with a glowing description, even if the article turned out to be ignorant dissembling of the most craven kind.
The final straw was when ALD gave an overwhelmingly positive link to the Bad Science Awards given out by a business newspaper written by journalists who obviously thought that any attempt to regulate industry = bad science. In a year that included Simon Singh being sued for libel by chiropractors, dodgy fish oil “trials” in the UK, deliberate undermining of scientific advice on drugs policy by populist health ministers, the rise of creationist politicians in the Republican Party, the Pope’s anti-condom campaign, Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccination tirades (egged on by Oprah), and indeed hundreds of excellent examples of Bad Science, these writers decided that among the worst science of the year was that EPA reopened an investigation into a substance that had been declared safe previously, even though the original review was around a decade old and new, potentially worrying evidence had been published in respected scientific journals.
This linking to poor argumentation become increasingly difficult for me to forgive, especially as it was almost always directed towards conservative and pro-industry thinking. I went from being an avid daily reader of ALD to an occasional visitor when I had exhausted my usual sources (like Butterflies and Wheels) but still wanted some more reading material.
I am sad that Dutton has died and my sympathies are with his family, friends, and colleagues. I also hope that ALD continues to thrive. But I can’t feel as positively towards ALD as many others seem to (and indeed as I once used to) unless it changes course and applies its quality filter to all stripes of politics.
Chris, no, that’s all right. I agree, in fact. I seldom checked ALD myself any more, and that’s why. (It’s also why I didn’t know about the Bad Sci item.) But…I also owe Dutton, and still feel grateful.