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.

Bill Nye is enough of a scientist for me.

Recently I’ve seen an influx of people using a word that they don’t seem to exactly understand. I believe it’s a bit due to the loss of meaning. Earlier this week I mentioned it in my news feed, but figured I’d go a bit more in-depth here. That word is scientist. When I read a comment on youtube about Bill Nye not being a qualified scientist because he has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, it confused me.

Now I think I’ve realized why; I believe the term scientist doesn’t carry the same meaning the more people become scientifically literate, because the more people use the scientific method to understand their world the more they think like scientists, the more importance we place on the discipline they study. The problem arises when people misunderstand the difference between being an expert in a discipline of science and a general understanding of multiple disciplines of science, required in applied sciences. According to the definition of a scientist, you’re a scientist if you use the scientific method, so essentially anyone who is scientifically literate. However, most people seem opposed to referring to every scientifically literate individual as a scientist, which is kind of understandable, though for some people that seems to also leave out engineers, which it shouldn’t. Engineering is an applied science, it requires knowledge of many different disciplines of science. Most often It doesn’t require you to be an expert in one, but it does require you to understand what the experts have to say about their respective disciplines.

Now we can always talk about the big heroes of science, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, Albert Einstein, Galileo, ETC. We can all say they were definitely scientists, but they don’t exactly capture the idea of the everyday scientists. The major difference between how the world was for them and how it is now for us is drastically different. Today information is at your fingertips, you can find opinions, studies, and expert opinions just by clicking your mouse. It’s not too difficult to travel halfway across the world to speak with an expert personally about something you’re interested in, if you have the money. So to be an engineer no longer require you to have direct knowledge of the latest physics study, or experiment, you can just look it up in a few minutes and make your designs accordingly. You can gain intimate knowledge of these things with ease. A big problem to this, is there are also many people claiming to have a similar knowledge to experts, who have not done any of the research. So credibility is incredibly important. One must know and be able to trust their sources.

Bill Nye’s credibility is assaulted because he’s an actor, with “The Science Guy” being his acting persona, but Bill Nye is scientifically literate, and his acting person was mostly used to spread scientific literacy to a young audience. The reason Bill Nye is more trustworthy than another TV persona who has been in the headlines recently for not being entirely honest with his audience is, Bill Nye was not selling anything on his show. He merely explained things in a way that was easy to understand. In recent years, he’s almost been replaced by Neil deGrasse Tyson and his show cosmos.

Now, some of the topics he discussed on his show were a bit dated, and scientific understanding and his understanding has shifted in those areas. You see the interesting thing about scientifically literate people, is they often understand when they’ve made a mistake. If the evidence proves them wrong or to have misunderstood, they often correct themselves., and adjust to the new information they have. An example, Bill Nye used to be disinclined toward GMO foods, but after he discussed it with experts in the subject he changed his stance to be more accepting.

None of these things hurt his credibility, I feel it they strengthen it. Everyone has the right and ability to change their mind when it no longer agrees with their world view. Changing one’s opinion when new information is gathered is not pandering, it’s mature. People need to flexible with their ideals, because otherwise we begin to stagnate and cling to beliefs that hold little in the way of truth, or even benefit.

As I mentioned in news feed as a point of fact, Mayim Bialik is an actor and a Neuroscientist, she doesn’t lose her PhD by acting, it doesn’t hurt her credibility, just because she plays one on TV.

Now if were going to start dismissing scientists because they don’t have a formal degree in a discipline, then we’d also have to dismiss Michael Faraday, and I don’t know any scientifically literate individual worth his salt that would ever dismiss Michael Faraday. He never had a formal education and it actually hurt him in many areas later in life because he couldn’t do the math necessary to prove himself right. There’s a great episode of Cosmos all about him. You can find it on Netflix and should definitely check it out if you haven’t already. Bill Nye actually has better qualifications that Michael Faraday did, in fact, he has better qualifications than many famous scientists.

There are many areas of science that aren’t always considered science by some people: engineering, medicine, archeology, paleontology, and probably many others. A problem with current people’s understanding is that most scientists are known by their discipline and not simply as a scientist, as the term has become too broad and encompassing. Applied sciences require no less scientific understanding or thinking than theoretical sciences, differing perhaps, but not lesser.

I think another problem has to do with the term qualified. When really we should be looking for credibility, not qualifications. We want people who cite sources and so research to credible studies. People who don’t rely on misinformation or conjecture for their argument. When someone’s license gets stripped away for making bogus and harmful claims they become less credible. The most important thing about credibility is repetition; if they cannot repeat what they claimed to have done then their claim is likely bogus and noncredible. A singular event that happened only once with few witnesses that sound unbelievable, likely is.

Scientific thinking requires one to doubt and test everything before accepting anything. You can also accept what is presented by those you find credible, and so credibility is incredibly important to scientific fields. It’s also important to not unduly attack someone credibility. Lessening someone credibility for no reason only hurts our scientific literacy by causing distrust of those that we should be able to trust.

The fastest way to become famous as a scientist is to prove your colleagues wrong, so most people in scientific fields are pretty credible because they've usually done the legwork and had others double and triple checking their work for accuracy. Especially when they admit their mistakes. We should never attack someone’s credibility for admitting mistakes. Nor should they be used to discredit science in general.

People jumping the gun on discrediting scientists have allowed a foothold for pseudoscience. By throwing credibility into question over every claim, or retraction and claiming things like Big Pharma, Pseudoscience has been able to goad people into believing some of the most harmful nonsense in our history.

Science isn’t perfect and no scientist will ever claim it is. It’s a process for understanding our observable universe and deserves all the respect of such. I like to think I’m scientifically literate, I might be wrong as often as I’m right, but I try my best to understand the world around me, and it is only with science that I’ve ever felt remotely close to doing so.