Today I want to return to a particular pet hate of mine that goes by the name of Critical Ignoring. But before I get into detail I would like to open with a quote from Google Gemini which I think perfectly encapsulates my concerns:

If a mainstream institution engages with Jit’s raw data on UK grid curtailment or logs onto a debate about Ridgway’s evaluation of the Matthew Effect, they have conceded that Cliscep is a rational interlocutor. They are forced to debate the numbers.

By branding the entire domain as a “climate denial website” from the outset, institutions can execute an intellectual excommunication. They signal to journalists, academics, and the public that the site’s content is inherently toxic, saving themselves from having to publicly untangle or answer the specific, uncomfortable questions the blog raises.

Ultimately, Cliscep is branded as a denial website because it operates in an environment where dissent from the institutional consensus has been fully pathologized. If you view the climate crisis as an immediate, existential threat to human civilization, any website that advocates for “slowing down,” “exercising caution,” or checking the economic math looks less like an alternative viewpoint and more like an act of active sabotage.

Basically, the problem is as follows: Although there may be a legitimate purpose behind critical ignoring (to provide a rationale for concentrating upon a manageable subset of the informational overload provided by the internet) it does so through acts of ‘intellectual excommunication’. These acts are designed to ensure that reliable sources are blessed whilst the unreliable receive their damnation to Room 101. How is this discrimination safely achieved? Well, as Gemini has just pointed out, it isn’t. This is because ‘dissent from the institutional consensus has been fully pathologized’. The logical difficulty should be obvious. In order to test whether the institutional consensus is correct, one needs to test the strength of arguments that challenge that consensus. However, critical ignoring requires that sites that do not carry institutional endorsement be labelled as untrustworthy and thereby ignored without examination of the counter-argument offered. The institutional consensus is left inviolate, which (in my book) should be reason enough to treat it with the utmost caution.

To illustrate the point being made, I would like to draw attention to a recent assertion that the advocates of critical ignoring would accept uncritically simply because it was made by sources that are presumed to be reliable. It is the claim that data suggests the May and June heatwaves killed about 2,700 people in England and Wales. It is a claim based upon research conducted by UCL and it has been widely reported by a number of sources, all of which would be on the list endorsed by the critical ignorance enthusiasts. Apart from the UCL itself, these sources include the BBC, the Guardian newspaper, the MET Office, and Sky News, to name but a few. These are all supposedly gold-standard sources that can be trusted to report the real story accurately. You don’t need to waste your time looking at the excommunicated blogs to see what they think the real story is. In fact, to do so would be a mistake, not just because it will expose you to misinformation but because it rewards ‘bad actors’ with your attention, which is what they are deemed to want more than anything else. Or so say the proponents of critical ignoring.

And yet, this strategy of critical ignoring would result in a failure to pick up on the essential word that all of the ‘trusted’ sources have failed to include in their accounts; all of them will tell you that the UCL research suggested a particular excess death rate, but none tell you that it incorrectly suggested the excess death rate. The reason why it is an incorrect suggestion is simple: the research is based upon UCL model predictions that are not borne out by actual ONS data. That is the real story that should be being reported, but it isn’t so because the UCL is treated as an organisation whose predictions have sufficient importance without having to be checked against real-world data. And how do I happen to know that UCL is wrong? It’s because I consult blogs that I have been told to ignore, such as Paul Homewood’s Not a Lot of People Know That, which points out that:

Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson from the University of Oxford’s Centre of Evidence Based Medicine say official death figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show no clear spike against the previous decade during the weeks covering the May and June heatwaves.

And whilst I’m at it, I might as well point out that Jaime Jessop, another of those supposedly unreliable purveyors of misinformation, has her own website in which she indicates that the UCL have some pretty strange ideas regarding the 2026 heatwave’s meteorological similarities with the 1976 heatwave, and even stranger opinions as to what is the most dangerous form of extreme weather (it’s actually cold weather, as any of the allegedly toxic websites can tell you). But you shouldn’t be looking at that, of course. It’s all fake news!

I’d like to think I am helping to put the record straight here, but of course I am not. How can anything I write on a ‘fake news’ website (Cliscep) help the cause of other websites that are branded as peddling fake news? The usurping of critical thinking by a so-called critical ignoring has made sure that it can’t. It is true that I have written on the dangers of the Matthew effect, and it is equally true that those concerns are authoritatively dismissed on the basis that they are being expressed by one of the intellectually excommunicated. But the sad fact is that the basis for such excommunication – the critical ignoring of a pathologized group – is just an extreme example of what can happen under the Matthew effect once the mainstream institutions have achieved such ascendancy that they can dictate (in the guise of innocent time management advice) who and who is not entitled to have a voice to be listened to. So, I’m sorry, but I am not a fan of critical ignoring and I imagine I never will be – not that that my opinion is anything that is supposed to concern you.