I’ll repeat with what I concluded in Part 1, but more succinctly: for an authoritative storyteller to mesmerize an audience, the story must never contain an element where the audience blurts out, “wait a minute, what you just said can’t be right,” otherwise whatever point there was to the story disappears at the exact same moment when the storyteller’s credibility implodes.

If the storyteller’s credibility implodes, it will not matter how good the story is. As a storyteller, one might have written a good manuscript; maybe the person would have even hired proofreading services in London or at their place to get the manuscript ready; talked to publishing houses or even contacted editors. But all this might just go in vain if the credibility of the storyteller implodes. It will just have a negative impact on the story and the one who is writing it to mesmerize the audience.

Now, see how Harvard History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes‘ inadvertently elicits that exact response from her audience, via her tale of the events which led her to explore the notion that skeptic climate scientists operate in a manner parallel to what ‘expert shills’ did for the tobacco industry. Continue reading →