Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think
nautil.us
nautil.us
I am hoping that this was meant in jest.
But if you look at some of the other comments in the article -- science should be funded through the government, industries that would otherwise contribute to scientific research should instead be taxed -- I'm not so sure how un-Big Brotherish these authors are.
(Yes, obviously, the government already funds a good deal of science, but it sounds as if they're arguing that science funding should all be funneled through the government.)
Modern philosophers are mostly pro-democratic for a number of reasons. They have to invent mental tricks to make democracy compatible with what they think is right. "Ministry of information" or separating voting (based on values) from decision making (based on facts) are examples of such tricks.
IMO, if we value democracy, we'll have to agree that decisions taken democratically will sometimes be wrong. The only way to fix that without compromising the democracy, is to raise the level of an average citizen's education.
It is also very frustrating when you think you discover what is true and what is false and have to deal with people who you think are not as smart as you are. The effects of this can be observed in social media discussions on both sides of the political divide, as well as in the words of the people in this article.
It's funny watching how something said in jest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL-KXisUCtU) is turned into yet another meme about how conservatives are stupid, followed by a lecture about misinformation in media.
"Please tell me the ministry of information was just a flippant remark -- I hope that you will never promote such an idea. It sounds great, in a world run by honest individuals. But, No - not ever - has humanity demonstrated that this would be a good idea."
Her response:
"Yes, of course a joke. I need to learn to be more careful on the record."
-- Bad joke, but better than the alternative.
The piece leads with the story about how Pete Hegseth declared that germs aren't real, and the interview begins with O'Conner and Weatherall joking about how people like Hegseth come to hold "wacky false beliefs."
But Hegseth was asked about the remark and said of course it was a joke.
So ... Hegseth makes a joke about science that O'Conner and Weatherall didn't perceive as a joke, and then O'Conner makes a joke about how a ministry of truth could help address the problem with people like Hegseth -- and that doesn't necessarily come off as a joke.
I guess the key takeaway for all of us is that it can be easy to assume a joke is not a joke if doing so confirms some of our pre-existing views. So ... give people the benefit of the doubt until they erase all doubt?
excerpt from usa today:
Hegseth says the joke is a call-out to germ obsessors to lighten up. "My half-hearted commentary to the point is, we live in a society where people walk around with bottles of Purell in their pockets, and they sanitize 19,000 times a day as if that’s going to save their life," he said. "I take care of myself and all that, but I don’t obsess over everything all the time."
The truth is all here. Will it help though?
No smiling people, no BS 3D animations "inside the body", no BS claims.
Want to advertise a drug? Just post a "boring voice" style of what you drug does, what its name is, what the possible complications are, etc.
It may not work very well with news though: you cannot ban witness interviews, live reporting and other stuff which may get very colorful and emotional.
The one variable here is that the private market does what it wants. So if government 'takes' a larger proportion of the funding 'market' it really means the private market chose.
Now, making private research illegal...
That just isn't true. The federal government funds no where near the majority of r&d, not even the majority of basic research.
Data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. ...
Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country’s spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits.
Those private sector efforts are now the dominant form of research activity in the United States, with business spending $3 on research for every $1 invested by the U.S. government.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-governm...
I guess I was talking about funding research, not actually doing it.
Research that is privately funded but published, as an example.
Most of the research we're talking about from your data I assume is not published. I.e. not really research... (If I can go that far.) And I'm not trying to argue a technicality here to win an argument.
Industry has specific problems, scientific findings are often ancillary to other work, i.e. problem solving. Can't tell people to stop solving problems and making discoveries.
Or can you???
Examples might include: eliminating pharma patents or capping pharma prices to 2x the raw materials and manufacturing costs.
Not always military either: Concorde, APT(Pendolino) and TGV, Ariane, hovercraft, nuclear etc.
I'd link Wikipedia, but the entry on UK's National Research Development Corporation is comically short, and I can't find anything for the French equivalent on English wiki. Can't even remember the name of the equivalent US programme to link that.
Nevertheless a lot of significant science and the products that stemmed from that, that wouldn't get done otherwise, came with government funding. It's a good part of the positive image of science in the immediate post war years.
I would love to see some of those huge blue sky national science projects make a return.
EDIT: Atrocious grammar.
I think the concern is about all science funding being funneled through the government.
O'Connor says science should be funded either by "the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry" -- as if the government isn't influenced!
Weatherall floats the idea of "taking the money [private organizations] would be spending and redirecting it [through taxes] to an organization that was selecting who was getting funded independently."
In my mind, government funding is at least as capricious as industry funding. Government budgets related to science research get slashed all the time for reasons totally unrelated to the quality of the work being performed or its potential impact on society.
So I think you can both be very strongly in favor of government funding of these national science projects (e.g. NASA) and yet very reluctant to have the government be the sole arbiter of what gets funded.
Thing is, I suspect government in the 1960s could have set up an independent body to oversee science funding, that actually was independent, and had a level of trust by both scientists and the public. On both sides of the Atlantic, by either political party, though my knowledge of US is somewhat more limited.
Today? I don't think I, or pretty much anyone, trusts either public or private. What's left? A BDFL? Well, first find the benevolent dictator I suppose, few of the current crop are benevolent. At which point I don't know how to fix it.
1. Points out a problem that is fundamentally rooted in human psychology.
2. Proposes that the solution is to have the government take it over.
More seriously, all problems are rooted in human psychology because technology is now good enough for us to live in a utopia if we could only manage to stop turning it against ourselves. So, really that pattern is just proposing that the government take something over, you get the first step for free.
I'm more inclined to agree with the aphorism that government is the problem, not the solution.
We need government precisely because humans are not angels. We need someone to restrain human tendencies toward violence, toward fraud, and so on.
But as you point out, the government isn't composed of angels, either. So we need the government to restrain the people, but we also need to restrain the government.
Well, that and Goodhart’s Law.
As society grows more integrated and specialized you need to tackle the fundamental problems in human psychology.
Only things that seem to have work long term are forms, rules, procedures, formalities, .. in other words, mechanism or algorithm. Market economy, private property, democracy, decision making, law and order, all of these are just mechanisms that try to squeeze peoples behaviour and interactions into forms that work.
So yes, government is a big part of making it work.
Benefits include level playing field, transparency, accountability, recourse thru a fair & impartial court system.
Sadly, regulatory capture remains an unsolved problem, necessitating constant vigilance.
The problem is very well known. Without any proposed soluation, the article would be very uninteresting.
Maybe the idea is designing an efficient bureaucracy that prevents the agents acting within it from corrupting it.
I think making clear the mutual benefits of eudaemonia is a way we can progress towards more equality.
The problem is that insurance products you can buy don't cover that risk (and people have to rely on other dodges to keep their premiums reasonable, like insurance pooling) — and that's market failure.
That's a BS solution, you don't shop around when you need emergency medial treatment, because you're in the middle of a medical emergency. You might not even be conscious.
And lets say you're a weirdo who spent hours researching ahead of time, chose the "best" ER, and etched your choice onto one of those medical alert bracelets. That does you no good when you're away from home, or even just across town.
Yeah, there are certain cases where market-based healthcare reforms could probably do a lot of good (especially around outpatient and elective stuff), but "the market" and "letting the market work" are not the solution to all problems.
Hence the only question about global warming is how to cut CO2 emissions, and almost nothing on things like how to mitigate it effectively using science (like we did with everything else that was threatening us, from hunger to infections).
Epistemology is sorely lacking in public discourse. We should seek to nurture a healthy skepticism as the first impulse in all public debate.
I'd say most of the societal disagreements we're having right now are largely rooted in epistemology as well. Rarely are low level details discussed, and rarely is the truth of the "facts" scrutinized or examined at a level where we could gain some genuine confidence that what the general public, politicians, and & news media thinks & repeats is true, is actually true.
When I think about my own kids, what I want them to get more than anything else is an ability to think critically, and scientifically. People are people, and we’ll always fall prey to emotional appeals and distraction, but critical thinking and the scientific method are our way out of the fog.
The other aspect is compartmentalization of science, and general information overload. It’s hard to keep up with every new study, and it’s hard to reach a deep level of understanding across such a wide array of scientific disciplines. It is why we rely on experts.
We’re in a crisis due to lack of trust in the experts. Part of it is because we’ve become so removed from science we don’t know who trust. The other part is that industry has become quite effective at manipulating experts to work in their interests, eroding trust.
The simple fix? I have no idea. The long view? We need to raise a generation of kids who know how to apply the scientific method, think critically, and filter through the ever growing mountain of information we’re bombarded with on a daily basis.
However, this idea is terrible:
O’Connor: Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what’s true.
We've long known that believability is rooted in the esteem we hold for the messenger. The art of persuasion, sales, rhetoric, diplomacy, courtship, etc.
What's new is understanding the role of context, or the lack of it.
Someone recently pointed out the virality of twitter (at the extreme) is enabled by the lack of context.
Use web of trust and digital signatures to add citations and ownership (copyright) to every tweet, post, image, video. Then you know precisely who said what. And if you really care about "the truth", you can follow the chain of citations back to the original source and data.
There are millions of demonstrably-false ideas floating around. I live 30 miles from an Alien Welcome Center...a place devoted to welcoming aliens when they appear.
The problem is when fringe ideas become weaponised into culture at large.
This article seems to focus more on the individual cases of misinformation rather than the more general social problem - finding ways to fight remarkable falsehood with dull truth.
What if people's values depend on what they think is true?
"There was a recent study of Wikipedia that showed the most accurate and high quality articles were produced by an ideologically heterogeneous, diverse set of editors and writers. Does that square with your findings?"
I don't watch cable news, but something tells me that the example of a princeton grad on foxnews not believing in germs is distorted or misconstrued. What's the context there? Was it in the context of "you don't have to use anti-bacterial soap" or did the guy truly say he doesn't believe in germs. It would have been great if author provided a link to the video so we can see the context.
O’Connor: "I’ve been worried about climate change since I was 5 years old, and here we are 30 years later and still not doing anything about it."
I think there is climate change ( with or without ) humans, but something tells me this "philosopher" isn't an unbiased thinker or writer. Especially if one was obsessed with this since they were 5 years old. What kid worries about climate change as a kindegartner. Makes me question this person's upbringing.
-- How should science be funded?
"Through the government or some kind of body held to very high standards of not being influenced by industry."
Because governments are infallible? Because governments ( nazi germany, soviet union, china, japan, US, etc ) have such amazing track records? Even if we accept governments are infallible, how are we going to keep industry from influencing government? This is the problem with academics who have never worked and have worried about climate change since they were 5 years old. They know nothing of the real world.
-- What are the best tools for good information?
"Maybe we should have something like a ministry of information to decide what’s true."
Normally, I'd assume the person is joking, but the sad thing is you can't really tell from an academic working in UC Irvine.
So much of the "mis/dis" information rhetoric is "mis/dis" information themselves. As philosophers, you'd think they would say teach the kids logic, reason and history rather than "joking" about ministry of information.
Killing the messenger with bad news has a long tradition. Especially if it's bad news for everyone.