Post by rmarks1 on Nov 22, 2018 15:04:20 GMT -5
At least we can be thankful for Science.
Bob
Yet, increasingly, we are besieged by alternative truths. Climate change is a myth — a notion espoused by President Trump, despite all evidence to the contrary. The mass shootings in Parkland and Las Vegas were elaborately staged hoaxes, much like the moon landing, according to countless YouTube videos. The recent wildfires in California were started with lasers, by people scheming to reduce the population.
These and other nuggets of misinformation are shared and amplified by cynics, the credulous and bots, thriving on the air of false equivalence. And, online, they live forever. Andrew Wakefield’s research purporting to link vaccines to autism was discredited two decades ago, but it continues to circulate and infect, frightening parents into not vaccinating their children, and fueling the resurgence of measles. Over the weekend, several hundred people gathered in Denver for a two-day conference to celebrate and share their very sincere belief that Earth is flat.
The problem rests as much with the vector as with the virus. In March, a study in the journal Science found that a false story would propagate far more readily than a real story; it was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news, and it reached a cohort of 1,500 viewers several times faster. YouTube persistently tempts us to view videos even more extreme than whatever we’re watching at the moment. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy,” Guillaume Chaslot, one of the algorithm’s engineers, told the Guardian in March.
The result is a misinformation ecosystem in which everything is true, especially if you believe it to be so. Anyone and everyone is an expert, steered toward the facts they think they already know. It’s like a vast clothes dryer with a defective lint trap: As the lint accumulates, we begin draping ourselves in the fluff, confident that what we’re wearing counts as clothing. “I have no academic credentials,” one speaker at the flat-earth conference told the audience. “But I do have a cloak of credibility.”
The host under attack is inherently vulnerable. The scientific process is a human one, its facts messy, contingent, hard-fought and built through iteration. It doesn’t help that scientists occasionally promote fraudulent research, or that thousands of predatory journals exist online to publish research papers so meritless that even a computer algorithm could have written them.
What alternative truths exploit, and disguise, is the fact that science is a verb, not a noun. It is not the truth, but it is the best compass we have invented to guide us there. Indeed, it could be argued — right here, for instance — that science is the most optimistic endeavor that we have created for ourselves. Not all of its news will warm the heart: the mounting evidence of our warming planet, the vexing mutations of the influenza virus, the unavoidable signs that a black hole lies at the center of the galaxy, waiting to swallow us all.
But even these are triumphs. Every step in science is the mark of a species that is willing to challenge itself and press forward, seeking out wonder, identifying problems and solving them, looking inward by looking outward. That’s the task of science journalism, to tell that story, as well as keeping the enterprise accountable. Seriously, on the whole, science news is the best news you’re likely to read on any given day.
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/science-journalism-fake-news.html
These and other nuggets of misinformation are shared and amplified by cynics, the credulous and bots, thriving on the air of false equivalence. And, online, they live forever. Andrew Wakefield’s research purporting to link vaccines to autism was discredited two decades ago, but it continues to circulate and infect, frightening parents into not vaccinating their children, and fueling the resurgence of measles. Over the weekend, several hundred people gathered in Denver for a two-day conference to celebrate and share their very sincere belief that Earth is flat.
The problem rests as much with the vector as with the virus. In March, a study in the journal Science found that a false story would propagate far more readily than a real story; it was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news, and it reached a cohort of 1,500 viewers several times faster. YouTube persistently tempts us to view videos even more extreme than whatever we’re watching at the moment. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy,” Guillaume Chaslot, one of the algorithm’s engineers, told the Guardian in March.
The result is a misinformation ecosystem in which everything is true, especially if you believe it to be so. Anyone and everyone is an expert, steered toward the facts they think they already know. It’s like a vast clothes dryer with a defective lint trap: As the lint accumulates, we begin draping ourselves in the fluff, confident that what we’re wearing counts as clothing. “I have no academic credentials,” one speaker at the flat-earth conference told the audience. “But I do have a cloak of credibility.”
The host under attack is inherently vulnerable. The scientific process is a human one, its facts messy, contingent, hard-fought and built through iteration. It doesn’t help that scientists occasionally promote fraudulent research, or that thousands of predatory journals exist online to publish research papers so meritless that even a computer algorithm could have written them.
What alternative truths exploit, and disguise, is the fact that science is a verb, not a noun. It is not the truth, but it is the best compass we have invented to guide us there. Indeed, it could be argued — right here, for instance — that science is the most optimistic endeavor that we have created for ourselves. Not all of its news will warm the heart: the mounting evidence of our warming planet, the vexing mutations of the influenza virus, the unavoidable signs that a black hole lies at the center of the galaxy, waiting to swallow us all.
But even these are triumphs. Every step in science is the mark of a species that is willing to challenge itself and press forward, seeking out wonder, identifying problems and solving them, looking inward by looking outward. That’s the task of science journalism, to tell that story, as well as keeping the enterprise accountable. Seriously, on the whole, science news is the best news you’re likely to read on any given day.
www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/science-journalism-fake-news.html
Bob
