I was linked to this study in the PLOS on the apparent spread of science denial and disinformation that has become symptomatic of the Internet Age.
Below are my somewhat lengthy comments in response to Twinxor’s concerns in the D&D thread. For the Record, PLOS is a legit peer-reviewed scientific journal, but is licensed under Creative Commons, so it free and open to the public. What’s more, they allow commentary by readers. I am thinking of revising this comments and attaching them to the article, so any editing advice would be appreciated.
Twinxor posted:
I can live with the existence of wackos with silly beliefs. The trouble is their influence – widespread doubt of HIV’s importance is very bad, because it leads people to ignore safe sex practices and a lot more people die. As I see it, the big challenge is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of science, which inoculates the public against conspiracy theory.
This is a strange claim to make, because the job of science is to demonstrate the reliability and correctness of its claims, and at least in these cases science has already done an admirable job of justifying its conclusions. Moreover, this article demonstrates that science is already well inoculated against pseudoscience, so much so that it can incorporate pseudoscientific practice as part of its dataset.
This suggests that science is not challenged by pseudoscience. Leaving aside the obviously huge problem of scientific funding, pseudoscience seems to present no epistemological problems for the status of science itself. If science is primarily an epistemological enterprise, then what’s the challenge?
The answer, I think, is mentioned in the title of the paper, but seems relatively absent from the article itself: namely, the effect of the ‘Internet Era’ on scientific practice. Before internet, people were obviously free to practice folk medicine and other pseudoscientific treatments for illness; in fact, you don’t have to go too far back in history to reach a point where such folk medicine was the norm. In the interest of brevity, I’ll greatly oversimplify history by dividing it into three ‘eras’. Call them the Folk Era, the Professional Era, and the Internet Era.
In the Folk Era, folk medicine (and folk science) dominated health (and scientific) practices. Even when more rigorous methods were available, they were not widely used and distributed for a variety of social and economic reasons. Folk Medicine was successful (in a memetic sense) because it is easy to transmit via verbal instruction and mimicry. Folk medicine does not mean bad medicine; folk medicine might work surprisingly well. But Folk medicine is infected by superstitious memes that propagate from a lack of systematic control and rigor.
The Professional Era is probably best marked by the radical successes in medicine and science in the past few centuries (think of the discovery of germs, penicillin, vaccines, etc). These practical successes gave Professionals the power to enforce systematic and rigorous control over the propagation of information. This doesn’t mean that Folk Medicine was eradicated, or that Professional Medicine was inoculated against Folk Medicine; people were still free to practice the old Folk Medicine. However, given the choice between the two paradigms, and the readily available success stories and overblown hype surrounding Professional Medicine (cf “Its time to close the book on infectious diseases.”), it is easy to see why the Professional Era memes were successful. But Professional Era medicine wasn’t merely successful, because the scientific practice itself guards the collected body of knowledge against infection by superstitious and other undesirable memes. (Note that science can’t guard against any particular person, even a scientist, from getting infected by these memes, but it can protect the collected body of knowledge itself.)
The Professional Era’s greatest strength proved to also be its greatest weakness in the Internet Era: that is, close control over the flow of information, and keeping that information in the hands of a few (‘elite’) professionals. The Internet engenders two radical changes in the paradigm: information is free and easily accessible, wresting it from the rigor of professionalism; and the transmission of information between individuals has become almost as easy as it was prior to the Professional Era, allowing people to coordinate and unify their practices as they did in the Folk Era without worrying about disruption from the Professionals.
As I said above, neither of these changes pose challenges to science or medicine as an epistemological enterprise. However, these changes do act as a kind of fertilizer for the superstitious memes that the Professional Era was otherwise able to avoid. When people have free access to information without systematic oversight or control, they believe that they are free to make up their own minds and generate their own conclusions from the information available. And when these free thinkers can coordinate their activity and present a united front against the established orthodoxy, those that were left feeling disenfranchised or helpless under the elitism of the Professional Era become particularly susceptible to infection from superstitious memes.
None of this should be new, but I hope it makes the role of internet explicit in the debate. So what do we do?
Many Internet critics plea for a return to professionalism, and decry the tyranny of amateurs on the Internet. Others, like Dennett, suggest a kind of Social Darwinism will eventually settle the matter: let the memes battle it out, and may the best meme win. Dennett’s suggestion seems superficially repulsive, because as you say it represents a real threat to lots of gullible but otherwise innocent people. On the other hand, if I’m right then this battle for memetic dominance isn’t going to pose a threat to science, and one might argue that our collective body of knowledge is more important than any individual, or even a whole lot of individuals.
I do think there is a third option, but it is subtle and hard to see because the internet is still so new. Part of the problem is that we are evaluating the debate taking place in the Internet Era with standards developed during the Professional Era. When a vocal minority voice their opinions, we still treat their opinions as worth consideration. We don’t quite think they are authorities, but we do think they are legitimate contenders for authority if their arguments bear fruit. In other words, the problem with the internet isn’t the tyranny of the amateur; it is actually quite the opposite– with the internet, everyone becomes a professional, because everyone is a potential candidate for the class of elites.
The solution, of course, is to realize that not every voice is a candidate for authority, and that the standards of the Professional Era do not disappear when information is wide spread. But that doesn’t mean that we should try to close up Pandora’s Box, either; we couldn’t even if we tried. What we need is a way of easily and reliably evaluating information on the internet, and a systematic way of tracing information to its source. The Internet doesn’t replace the standards of the Professional Era, but those standards do need to be expanded, because we need a way of systematically tracking information once it is out of the control of the Professionals.
When you look at it in this light, the problem seems much less overwhelming. Specifically, internet resources like Wikipedia are explicitly involved in the project of systematically tracking public information. And anyone who wants to know about the HIV/AIDS controversy can see a whole page and systematic discussion of the controversy. If they still want to indulge their superstitions, that’s up to them.
The only caveat is that mainstream media sources, hungry for scandal and controversy, pay inordinate attention to these pseudoscientific debates. The social and political power these media sources hold throws a big fat wrench into the battle of the memes, and provides a clear example of a big deficiency in the Professionalism model. But that’s a subject for another post.
Pseudo means false. Science is a process, a methodology practiced to arrive at reliable conclusisons based on empirical data. It is not about epistimology. The knowledge is not the important thing; it is the process, the rigors of the methodology that makes a practice scientific. I can see no reason to use false science as part of a legitimate data set. It would be like using play dough to make a pie. It would taste like a shity pie made by some amatuer baker.
I think you are confused. I said science is an epistemological enterprise; it is a method for acquiring knowledge. My claim was that pseudoscience represents no threat to science’s ability to acquire knowledge, and that in fact science is so well inoculated against pseudoscience that science can actually engage in the practice of studying psuedoscience as an interesting and curious phenomenon in the world. I said that the PLOS article is an example of such a study.
Obviously I didn’t mean that science can incorporate psuedoscience as part of its methodology.
Perhaps. But Pseudoscience isn’t really the sort of thing that science should concern itself with at all. Wouldn’t any such study of pseudo-science be some kind of anthropological, psychological, sociological endeavour and as such be pseudo-science itself?
Jesus, Ian. That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.
Never mind your ignorant dismissal of legitimate fields of study. The idea that a particular aspect of human behavior is somehow off limits to scientific inquiry is itself antithetical to scientific methodology.
All I’m sayin’ Daniel is that when people start taking pseudoscience seriously then we have a problem. Human behaviour is all well and good but the study must fit the methodology before it can be legitimate scientific inquiry not the other way around.
Did you even read the article? Did you even click the link and glance at the article? Because you are talking straight out your ass. The article under discussion takes pseudoscience very seriously.
Tell me what methodological problems you have with the study, since you apparently are fit to judge what counts as science.
The article reaffirms that: “The scientific community must collectively defend and promote the role of science in society, and combat the growing problem of scientific illiteracy.” Now, if you are calling some theory that is not well tested pseudoscience I do not think that is productive (nor do I see the word “psuedoscience” used as often in the article as in your post). Since consensus science is bad science it makes sense to test these unpopular theories. In this we agree, only I would not call it taking “pseudoscicence as something worth investigating and explaining” I would call it testing a hypothesis. I’d imagine all of this confusion was due to your liberal use of the word “pseudoscience”.
“What we need is a way of easily and reliably evaluating information on the internet.” How? I’m not sure what you’re proposing. A ratings system? Would it even matter if there was a way to easily and reliably evaluate information on the internet? Crackpots will be crackpots will be crackpots, and they never seem to lack a base of hangeroners who jump at the opportunity to lap up harmful bullshit.
What I see is a line in the sand. While I haven’t come up with a name for our side, the opposition could easily adopt: People Against Ever Using Their Brains for Critical Thought.
This movement includes all of your fundies and conspiracy theorists and most celebrities and journalists.
The internet has simply made this line in the sand clear to everybody. No amount of evidence in the world can sway dolts.
Not a ratings system, but a tracking system. Professionals still have the most reliable way for evaluating the accuracy of information, but that doesn’t mean we need to restrict access to information to only the qualified elites. Because amateurs are by definition not in a position to evaluate information on their own, the idea is simply to track how information propagates, so we can trace all information to its source. All reliable information will either be traced back to professionals, or will have passed through the hands of professionals along the way. I am suggesting that we can have information that can remain outside professional control, while still relying on professionals to evaluate and assess that information.
Really, I am proposing nothing more than a more generic, though perhaps more technologically sophisticated, way of citing sources. But citing sources is something done within academic and professional circles. I am explicitly not proposing that everyone become an academic, and that everyone must be held to the standards of professional writing. Rather, there should be a way of automatically tracking the propagation of memes so that the public can exploit the standards of evaluation employed by professionals.
Contrary to popular opinion, I want to argue that Wikipedia is exactly this kind of tracking application. Not only does all information remain public on Wikipedia, including disputes over accuracy, but all information is tracked and traced as it changes over time. Notice that this doesn’t necessarily require that people are held responsible for the information they propagate (although of course accountability is possible), because holding people responsible is just a way of holding everyone to professional standards. Rather, the Wiki model demonstrates that when information is enriched with a personal history, it becomes extremely easy to tag and sort through the information for quality control without the need for any professionals. Data enrichment, or data tracking, could serve as exactly the kind of information pesticide called for by critics of Internet Amateurs, while still leaving room for amateurs in the public discussion, and ensuring that information remains free.