Navigating between truth, Truth, and garbage in a post-truth world
Note: To make a point here, all the references for this chapter are taken only from the Internet. Yes, that Internet.
The Oxford Dictionary word for 2016 was “Post-Truth.” That really rings a bell with us. We are both persistently astounded at seeing transparently untruthful things on cable TV and the Internet. The word “crap” comes to mind far too often as we watch something on TV that doesn’t jive with a previous video, or when we hear about “alternative facts.” I’m sure this doesn’t surprise most of our readers – that’s in part why you picked up this book. We constantly get questions from people who ask us for advice after seeing garbage science or fake news on the Internet; one recent example was how did dinosaurs and humans deal with each other in times past, or variants on that idea. An article in New York magazine titled “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” (Max Read, New York magazine, Dec. 26, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html )… makes it ever more clear how little we can trust the information on the Internet. Keep in mind that there are MANY reputable scientists, legal scholars, reporters, federal agencies (including our own US Geological Survey), and others trying to make real (as opposed to alternative) facts available to all of us. However, our own anecdotal experience, strongly supported by Read’s article, suggests that there are probably the same number of charlatans, uninformed and self-anointed visionaries, amoral political hacks, Russian trolls, and malevolent know-nothings who are front-loading their garbage onto the internet.
What can any of us do about this problem of sorting trash and falsehoods from truth? The short answer is that it’s not that hard if you think a bit about it. If we use peer-reviewed and citation-listed scientific literature, we have a pretty good chance to get at the truth, at least for scientific questions. If we ask an actress about the efficacy of child vaccinations, we get what we asked for (remember the old saying “consider the source.”). Certainly, we can easily answer questions from people about dinosaurs interacting with humans. In case this issue is new to you, dinosaurs went extinct about 66,000,000 years ago, and the first recognizably human ancestors first appeared about 195,000 years ago (John Pickrell, 2006, “Timeline – Human Evolution, New Scientist, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9989-timeline-human-evolution/ ).
That wasn’t so hard to find, actually. To answer the human-dinosaur question we simply searched the Internet – and restricted our reading to articles that came from reputable (e.g., peer-reviewed and citation-indexed) scientific journals. Note that we said “peer-reviewed and citation-indexed” journals. There are so many hucksters in the world trying to get rich without working for it that it probably would also not surprise you to learn that a few so-called academics, mostly in Third-World countries, have found that they can invite beginning young scientists to submit papers to their “journals.” Ahem, for a “modest fee.” There are many young scientists trying desperately to get ahead in their profession, to get a job, or to obtain that coveted faculty tenure. One so-called “academic” in Egypt was reported to have “earned” over $1,000,000 a year by selling publication promises. He simply dumped anything submitted to him on the internet and charged a fee that was NOT modest. He didn’t bother to arrange for or arbitrate peer review for any of it. He just collected fees. He has refused to answer questions from real academics and reputable journal editors like Nature or Science who are investigating him. When discovered, he just creates another slightly-familiar-sounding journal name and starts soliciting again. Academic dishonesty seems here to be a fully-functional business model.
You probably would also not be surprised to know that real academics find this kind of practice both abhorrent and immoral. It threatens their own real science! One tack that they have taken to isolate this cancer on science is to use “Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers” (https://beallslist.weebly.com/). It is an amazingly long list of fake science journals that grows every month
How did Beall develop his list? One of us is an associate editor of the scientific journal “Exploration Geophysics” (http://www.publish.csiro.au/eg ). It’s not hard to do some quick research and ascertain that this journal is citation-indexed – in other words, it is a journal that is rated for how many times its articles are referenced in other scientific work, a key marker for academic esteem and quality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Citation_Index ).
Back to the original question. We rather quickly found that dinosaurs could not possibly have interacted with humans. That’s easy, you say – anyone who has taken a science class or two already knew that. But let’s turn to the broader world. What about things posted by Russian, American, and Chinese trolls in an attempt to influence and subvert the American (Ukrainian, British, French, Austrian, Indian, Pakistani, Italian… you fill in your favorite country here) democratic process? How can we figure out what’s true, what’s True, and what is NOT true? This takes a bit more effort, but you can still figure it out. To start with the particular question of the influence of Russian trolls in the 2016 American election cycle, we went to The House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence (https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/ ). Yes, if you have followed the political news, you will recall that there was once a highly partisan divide in that very same Select Committee, with a former Chair attempting to report their investigations directly and secretly to the White House (a major ethical as well as professional violation), and even block subpoenas by the minority congresspeople on that committee for transparent political gain. Nevertheless, the staff of the Select Committee quietly put their heads down and just gathered and analyzed all the available data – and in their report (link above) they outline exactly what the “Internet Research Agency (IRA)—the notorious Russian ‘troll farm” actually did.
Note that we did not go to Breitbart “News” or the Sean Hannity Show to answer this question, nor did we go to the other political extreme, for example Slate or the comedians of the Daily Show. We all might feel safer, dealing with political claims, to look at some of the sources that are more politically neutral, such as MSNBC, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal to get our answers.
Well, you ask, where did we come up with that rating? The Pew Research Center, actually (https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 ). The Pew Research Center has existed for generations, and famously guards the integrity of its polls and investigations. The Center is bequest-funded and beholden to no one. There is no “pay to play” here. We thus went to a source that we felt had their own credibility on the line as perceived arbiters of truth. If you are interested, they are also referenced by (trusted by) the University of Michigan (https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444). Here is their scaling of political reliability of (American, national-level) media:
Perceived ideological placement of media. You can trust things found in the Green Box.
Well OK, but what are we to do about other questions that might arise? Perhaps there are reports about some ordinary person finding the long-lost (you fill in the blank here with anything weird). That feels good because it is by an ordinary person – like me! Perhaps someone else reports that a certain politician (fill in those words with a name of choice) said such-and-such a nasty thing. That feels good because I’ve already formed an opinion that the politician in question is a terrible person. The problem with the Internet is that it tends to feed our confirmation bias. That means that we naturally gravitate to stories that support our personal theories. We tend to accept a fact as real data, when it turns out to be just a single point of data, and not representative of the larger world out there – it is not evidence.
For a quick training session on navigating our modern “post-truth” world, check out this video: Alex Edmans, a finance professor in London, gave a talk at TEDxLondonBusinessSchool titled “What to trust in a post-truth world.” (https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_edmans_what_to_trust_in_a_post_truth_world/transcript?language=en#t-1029117).
This talk includes three critical tips:
Tip #1: Actively seek other viewpoints. Aristotle wrote, “The mark of an educated man is the ability to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it.” Stephen R. Covey wrote, “Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.” And finally, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already. But the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.”
Do you only get your news from Comedy Central or Fox News? Then you are part of the problem – because rather little of this is actually news.
Tip #2: Listen to experts. Would you prefer to get teeth-whitening tips from a hairdresser? Vaccination advice from an actress? Or would you instead rather trust peer-reviewed evidence from experts? Think about this: who would you trust your eye-surgery to?
Tip #3: Be very, very careful with what you share. Don’t add to the garbage gyres in the middle of the Pacific Ocean… or in the middle of the Internet.
By virtue of the fact that you, the reader, have gotten this far in our book, we have confidence that with the few examples we have listed here, you can find (and undoubtedly have already found) a pretty good approximation of the truth. Remember, as you do so, that we made a distinction early on about levels of truth, and we provided you with two definitions: things that are true, and things that are True. That is, the former are things perceived to be correct now, while the latter are things that can withstand the test of time and stand forever.