Well, I take anything Azimov says with a grain of salt. He was hardly a model of virtue or wisdom about much of anything except writing and chemistry. He was a great fiction writer but his personal life was a mess. He was uh, promiscuous to put it mildly and to put it more accurately a sex-addict.
That quote applies to a large and growing extent to the AGW movement, which struggles each moment to substitute reality with what the fanatics pushing the movement SAY about reality.
We bother because deductive reasoning is imperative to any meritocracy.
The faux-intellectual movement has always existed because they are part and parcel of what GI Gurdjieff called the "hasnamussen" of Humanity ( who drive every despotic, regressive cultural movement). That term translates into, "those who are least qualified to lead others who yet seek control over others most vigorously and ruthlessly."
Another term for those who do not value truth or honor is cacogens. That word derives from Latin "caco" (filth, excrement, lowly) and gen (type).
There is an aspect of dysfunctional personalities in which the subject's ego inflates in order to convince others that they are worthy or great men(using sophistic dialectic/inductive/abductive reasoning), and in so doing convince themselves. Much like con men who somehow convince themselves of all of the lies they tell others.
Expand that to an entire political movement and you have the modern Democrat party and sadly a significant component of the Republican establishment.