The ladder of credibility

When I taught Critical Thinking in high school, one of the principles I harped on was "check your sources."

The difficulty is, I don't just mean "see where the claim is mentioned."  You also need to do the work of seeing if the source that mentions it is itself reputable.  But there's an additional complication that makes our job as skeptics way harder, and that's the handoff that occurs, one source to another, sometimes leaving a story light years from where it started.

Let's look at an example of this phenomenon, which is the strange claim that appeared in a 2023 paper in The Journal of World Science.  The paper was entitled "Concept of Time Travel and the Different Theories Making it Possible and the Implications of Time Travel," and was by three authors, one from Pakistan and two from a university in Indonesia.

The paper opens with a bang:

In March 2003, the FBI arrested 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin.  Newspapers reported that this man was so fortunate in the history of the Stock Market.  He invested $800, and within two weeks, it turned into $350 million.  The FBI suspected that he was running a scam.  That he was an inside trader.  When Andrew was questioned, he answered that he was a time traveler.  He claimed that he was a traveler from 250 years in the future and that he knew how the stocks would perform, so he invested in them and got the extraordinary result.  The FBI was convinced that he was lying, and when they investigated some more, they found that Before December 2002, there was no record of Carlssin.  Even more surprising was that on 3rd April, Carlssin had to appear in court for his bail hearing, but he had disappeared, never to be found again.  Was he a time traveler?

Well, first off, the odd diction, sentence fragments, and random capitalization should be a hint that something is amiss; reputable journals are usually pretty careful about this kind of thing.  It could be that (given the fact that none of the authors come from a predominantly English-speaking country) that was the fault of the translator(s), however, so we'll let that slide for now.

But if you read a little further, you find that the weirdness only intensifies:

The first way is to get a glimpse of the past by Teleporting from one place of the universe to another distant place in the universe with instant travel and then; through any strong Telescope and then look back on the Earth through it then, we can able to see how many lights year before our earth looks like, how much in the past we can see is dependent on our distance from Earth the far we are the far we can see in the Past (Rabounski & Borissova, 2022).  Because it takes a significant time for light to travel from one place to another, even with how fast light travels, if we talk about distance in light-years, it takes years for light to travel to some places.  So, if we could get somewhere before the light reaches there and then look back at the approaching light, the light would be from the past.  That is how we can see the past.

Simple!  Get to a distant planet faster than light, and look back at Earth through a telescope!  How come I didn't think of that?

But hey, it's in a scientific journal, right?  With source citations and everything! 

Someone shoulda told the Doctor.  He could have ditched the TARDIS altogether.

There's a wee problem, here, though.  The Andrew Carlssin story that started the paper, and which is repeatedly referred to throughout, ended up in The Journal of World Science after repeated handoffs wherein the claim incrementally worked its way up the ladder of credibility (and in fact, along the way showed up in a number of reasonably reliable news services, albeit usually in their "Odd Stories" or "Unsolved Mysteries" features).  But if you trace the thread from its appearance in a science journal in 2023 all the way back to its origins in 2003, you find out that the whole thing started...

... in The Weekly World News.

Yes, The Weekly World News, that wonderful tabloid famous for features about Taylor Swift secretly giving birth to Bigfoot's baby, and that a creature called Bat Boy is going to win the U. S. presidential election in 2032.  (My feeling at the moment is President Boy wouldn't be any worse than our current excuse for a leader.)

My conclusion from this is that there should be some kind of skeptic's version of "All Roads Lead to Rome" that goes, "All Bullshit Ultimately Leads Back to The Weekly World News."

Despite its antecedents, since then, the Carlssin story has appeared all over the place, usually with no mention of its absurd roots.  An example is a story in Medium that treats it as if it were one hundred percent real, and which along the way suggests that Greta Thunberg is also a time traveler.  "Many [people] wonder," the author says, "if she possesses the power to bend time itself."

What I wonder is who those "many people" are.  My thought is it's a little like how Trump says "I've heard from dozens of reputable sources..." immediately before he says something that amounts to "... this idiotic lie that I just now pulled out of my ass, and that you'd have to have the IQ of a bar of soap to believe."

To illustrate how this handoff can occur, I deliberately chose a ridiculous example that (I dearly hope) none of you would have believed regardless where you read it.  But the same thing happens with more serious claims.  You hear some statistic -- such as the claim that in the last eight months, U.S. policies have spurred seventeen trillion dollars of foreign investment into our country's industry -- and find it's quoted all over the place, including in reputable news services.  In this case, if you're reasonably savvy you might pick up on the red flag that the claim is more than a little bit implausible; seventeen trillion dollars is around one-fifth of the total gross national product of every nation on Earth combined.

But then you start tracking it backward, and you find out that it traces its origins to yet another instance of Donald Trump plucking a random number out of thin air to make himself look good, and the few news sources who are willing to challenge him on anything have identified it as a flat-out unadulterated lie.  The rest just passed it off as fact -- and then the handoff began, until the figure became so well-publicized that if you google "seventeen trillion dollars" the entire first page of hits is about the amazing windfall American businesses are receiving because of Trump's policies.

So it's not sufficient any more to say "I read it in The Wall Street Journal."  To be honest, it probably never was.  If you want to be certain of something, you have to figure out where the claim originated -- which can be difficult work.  But the alternative is trusting the knowledge and good intentions of the media source you use.

These days, that is seriously thin ice.

If you want to be informed, which I hope all of you do, watch your sources.  Find out where they got the information, and make sure the sort of twenty-year-long Game of Telephone that landed a time travel story from The Weekly World News in The Journal of World Science hasn't tempted you to believe something ludicrous.

Even if "many people" are saying it.

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