Your argument that worries about concussions are misguided because they ignore credible science is greatly weakened when you parallel the argument about concussions with climate change."Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals
1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities."
The problem with the age of "scientism" you identify stems from a trend among many that media organizations, political views, scientific statements that confirm the desired position are valid, yet those that disagree by definition are coming from biased or corrupted sources.
According to your argument it is acceptable to pick and choose minority supporting scientific studies regarding climate change, but it is not acceptable to do it for concussions.
http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Take a cruise over to the CE board, where probably 80% of the posters think the earth is not warming, despite all the evidence to the contrary (and I'm sure very few of them think any global warming is due to human activity) . They actually believe there is some vast "liberal conspiracy" in play, which is downright silly, since climatologists aren't any more "liberal" than the general population, as far as I know. Not surprising, since that board skews about 80% towards the right and most conservatives think global warming is a some sort of hoax (just like most don't believe in evolution). Any climatologist has to acknowledge that it's possible that the theory and models are incorrect, because that's how science works, but people who reject the global warming consensus of climatologists because they think that there's some sort of conspiracy involved are simply loons.
It is true, however, that non-climatologists and other scientists are not nearly as convinced that human-induced global warming is ongoing (although at least most of them are arguing the science). The NY Times did an interesting article on this last year, comparing how opinions were fairly evenly split amongst meteorologists (whereas the vast majority of climatologists are convinced anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, is real). However, meteorologists are not experts in climate - climatologists are (they're very different sciences, as I've posted about, in depth, before).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/science/earth/30warming.html?_r=0
Having said all that, Saran's "problem" is that he actually is "picking and choosing" minority "skeptical" views over the consensus majority view in both the global warming and CTE debates. The Maroon article, is the skeptic viewpoint - of course, writtten by a guy who's been assocated with the Steelers and the NFL for decades. While he makes good points about more research being needed (CTE research is truly in its infancy, as opposed to global warming research), he's certainly at odds with many of the experts in the field.
In particular, his last sentence in his abstract, "Our review reveals significant limitations of the current CTE case reporting and questions the widespread existence of CTE in contact sports," is looking pretty bad in light of recent studies showing that the vast majority of NFL players have been found, after death, to have CTE:
"Researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University have now identified the degenerative disease known as
chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in 96 percent of NFL players that they’ve examined and in 79 percent of all football players. The disease is widely believed to stem from repetitive trauma to the head, and can lead to conditions such as memory loss, depression and dementia."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/a...-nfl-players-test-positive-for-brain-disease/
Sure, it's possible that there was some element of selection bias here (i.e., the players selected aren't representative of all players), but if one doesn't find these stats to at least be alarming, then one's head is already buried deep in the sand. Maybe CTE is only "bad" for a small number of people or maybe the NFL's focus on reducing concussions and treating actual concussions much more safely ("concussion protocol") will reduce the incidence and severity of CTE, but people, like Saran, who bury their head in the sand on this one (and global warming) are simply being ignorant.
