Rumors and Other Nonsense

    I don’t think I’ll ever understand rumors, the need to spread them or the ease of which they are accepted. Rumors are as baseless as pseudoscience, in fact, they are one of the core pillars of pseudoscience, along with misnomers and misinformation. I believe that’s one of the reasons I wish people were more scientifically literate. Thinking scientifically requires you to doubt everything you hear until facts are presented from a credible source. Also a reason I advise people to look at a person’s credibility before believing what they claim.

    Part of the problems is it’s not that simple, one must not simply search for credit, they should discredit those who are display rampant disregard for facts and evidence. People who use words like “toxins” and “chemicals” liberally, with a seeming lack of understanding as to their meaning.

    There’s a children’s story, most people are familiar with, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. The moral of the story is to not discredit yourself, otherwise, they might not believe you when you need them to. The conundrum we have today is that people cry “wolf” constantly with seemly no consequence. We have a tv hosts giving potentially risky medical advice with no evidence whatsoever and is allowed to keep his license. We have people crying out against some of our more recent medical innovations, calling foul and risking the health of their children and many other around the country. Strange diets based on misinformation spread throughout our society, with ridiculous claims of health benefits.

    When people use fabricated, false, or purposely confusing data to push an agenda or spread rumors, it should hurt their credibility. In many cases, however, we see the opposite. Part of the reason why is our confirmation bias. It gives us a tendency to believe their information if we are inclined towards their agenda or rumor being true. An example would be the recent conservative claim that the United States of America was founded as a Christian Nation. A quote from John Adams, one of our founders, refutes that point, “The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” However, if you presented this to one who believe otherwise, they would eagerly try to shoot holes through that statement, even though, the quote is rather clear, and I could pull quotes from many other famous founders who agreed on the sentiment.

Another example would be anti-vaxxers, who have taken a stance, rather worryingly, against vaccines. When they are presented with evidence against their claims of harm, they often refute them claiming it’s a corporation dishing out large sums of money to any random person who claims vaccines are good for you. It doesn’t matter that the doctor behind the movement got his license revoked for advocating unsafe medical advice, and there’s never been a credible study to support any of the anti-vaxxers claims. The fact that every single credible medical professional is universally against the anti-vaxxer movement doesn’t seem to cause them to even question their position.

This is the strength and dangers of confirmation bias. People seek answers and when they think they have found them they immediately latch on the most seemingly sensible one, and that’s how pseudoscience works. It goes past your critical thinking by ambushing you when you’re weak: a child, a scared parent, unhappy with your physical appearance. Giving you hope and false promises or answers. After the initial feelings of relief of finding something that might help, confirmation bias sets in, and you slowly and progressively close your mind to the idea that you could be wrong. Worst part is nowadays the pushers of pseudoscience and such have plenty of pre-written reasons for why doubters of your new found belief, diet, or treatment might call it dangerous, silly, or nonsensical.

Pushers of pseudoscience have learned to capitalize on our confirmation bias and our vulnerabilities. They latch onto you like a parasite and feed you misinformation, ad hoc hypotheses, anything else to wipe away your doubts and to fight your doubters until your own personal motivated reasoning sets in and you do their work for them. You close your mind to the idea that you could ever be wrong and seek information to confirm your position and ignore all that disagrees.

All this can start from a rumor, someone saying one time of how something happened to them or someone they know. We can go, rather rapidly, from being a simple clear seemingly reasonable person to a complete loss of touch with reality, simply by believing a rumor. Recently we went from declaring a disease eradicated to having an outbreak of it, because of people’s personal belief not to vaccinate their children.

It would be bad enough at that point, but the problem is the backfire effect that occurs when you present facts against someone who has an incredibly strong confirmation bias. They lock even more strongly into their position and instead of seeing their position as being not credible, will instead find conspiracies of how the government or big corporations are simply trying to crush the movement because it goes against their stranglehold on the media, money, or the world!

Now there wouldn’t be a problem if it only affected a few people, but the more affected the more communal reinforcement you get, the more strongly one holds to their belief system. The more a rumor or silly belief spreads the harder it is to remove. When people start reinforcing each other, and ignoring facts, pushing facts at them, causes them to retreat to their echo chamber where only other people who share their beliefs are allowed. They build each other back up and reaffirm their biases.

To fight against such a steadfast belief might seem maddeningly futile, but it can only be won by continues fighting. People need to be educated, as educated as they can be. Science Literacy needs to be taught as a staple for education. Most importantly people must be taught the ways their cognition can form biases, how you can deceive yourself, and the dangers of doing so. The only weapon in the war against nonsense is education.