Xpost @ johnquiggin.com
There's a simpler but also more seductive quality with argument from authority.  In simple biological terms, gaining knowledge requires energy expenditure.  This means that the value of any knowledge gained must be totted up against the energy expended to produce it.  In our evolutionary history - ie the integrated period of our brain evolution - starvation was a regular threat.  Simply running a large brain requires 20% of our energy, many other very successful mammals use considerably less.  This produces a quite different knowledge strategy to what you might find in an epistemology text.

We prize cheap information.  We congratulate ourselves in having got to the "gist" of a situation on very limited information.  The Climategate emails was a perfect example of this: virtually no one read the thousands of emails involved but a lot of people were willing to regard the three words "hide the decline" - without context - as as incontrovertible proof that the researchers involved were crooks, and QED that the other thousands of climate researchers were too.  No doubt they congratulated themselves on their incisive intellectual capabilities in forming this judgement.  This is "gisting" gone crazy.  If it weren't so tragic it might be funny.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not limited to anti-AGW types, it's everywhere. 

This is also the key reason why science took so long to get off the ground: sitting around for days, months or years try to find outliers that disprove hypotheses just isn't on in a nutritionally limited environment.  Our brains contain Baysian inference circuitry gated by some pretty worldwise energy expenditure calculations.

The argument from authority strategy is an energy saving knowledge strategy that is built-in or natural to us.  The basic logic: "X says so, X has a pile of goodies/status, therefore X is probably right" is obviously logical piffle but is a reasonable biological strategy, in an evolutionary sense.  Unfortunately, we (in general, not you or I :) are not that good at distinguishing where the pile of goodies came from and whether obtaining them required any relevant mental or physical effort at all.

Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Geoffrey Miller: Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Our instinctive way of thinking about insanity — our intuitive psychiatry — is dead wrong... There's a scientific consensus that personality traits can be well-described by five main dimensions of variation. These "Big Five" personality traits are called openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The Big Five are all normally distributed in a bell curve, statistically independent of each other, genetically heritable, stable across the life-course, unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends, and found in other species such as chimpanzees. They predict a wide range of behavior in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics.

Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits. Over-conscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other "impulse control disorders". Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders. Low extraversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders. Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder. High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia. Twin studies show that these links between personality traits and mental illnesses exist not just at the behavioral level, but at the genetic level. And parents who are somewhat extreme on a personality trait are much more likely to have a child with the associated mental illness.

Nuclear deaths, revised

This article from The New Matilda estimates Chernobly related deaths at between 15,000 and 60,000 on the basis of  that cancers are linear to exposure and that there is no safe low exposure level as assumed by some of the more extreme positions on the pro-nuclear side:

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates a total collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts over 50 years from Chernobyl fallout (see the IAEA Bulletin, Vol.38, No.1, 1996). A standard risk estimate from the International Commission on Radiological Protection is 0.05 fatal cancers per Sievert. Multiply those figures and we get an estimated 30,000 fatal cancers. Now let’s recall that, according to the BEIR report, the LNT model may overstate risks or understate them by a factor of two. Thus the estimated death toll ranges from something less than 30,000 — up to 60,000.

http://newmatilda.com/2011/04/07/do-we-know-chernobyl-death-toll

This kinda fries the graph I quoted in the previous post.