The flood of nonsense

I'm going to say this straight up, in as unambiguous a fashion as I can manage:

Given the widespread availability of fact-checking websites, there is absolutely no excuse for passing along misinformation.

The topic comes up today because I recently ran into three claims online, which I present here in increasing order of ridiculousness, and in almost no cases were they accompanied by anyone saying, "But I don't think this is true."  I'm hoping that by highlighting these, I can accomplish two things -- putting a small dent in the number of people posting these claims on social media, and instilling at least a flicker of an intention to do better with what you choose to post in the future.

The first one I've mostly seen from my fellow Northeasterners, and has to do with a spider.  Here's the most common post I've seen about this:

This statement -- which is almost verbatim the headline used by a number of supposedly-reputable news sources -- is wildly misleading.  When you look into it, you find that the species in question is the joro spider (Trichonephila clavata), and while they are pretty big for a spider (the leg-span can be around ten centimeters), nothing else about them is dangerous.  They're native to China and Japan, where people live around them in apparent harmony; while they do have venom, like all spiders, it's of low toxicity.  They're actually rather docile and reluctant to bite, and if they do, it's no worse than a bee sting.

And, for fuck's sake, they can't fly.  Flying requires wings, and if you'll look closely at the above photograph, you will see they don't have any.  Their tiny young do what is called "ballooning" (again, something many spider species do), creating a few silk threads and then catching a breeze to travel to a new locale.  So while they're definitely an invasive exotic species, and ecologists are concerned about their potential for out-competing native spider species, they pose about as close to zero threat to humans as you could get.

So put away the goddamn flamethrowers.

The second claim has to do with the information you can get from the color of caps on your bottled water.  The idea here is that bottled water distributers have coded the caps -- blue caps are used for spring water, black caps for alkaline water, green caps for flavored water, and white caps for "processed water."

It's the last one that gave me a chuckle.  I damn sure hope the water you're drinking has been processed, and that Aquafina isn't just filling water bottles from the nearest river, screwing the caps on, and calling it good.  Apparently the impetus for the claim is that because consuming "highly-processed" food has been associated with some health issues, anything "processed" is bad for you, so you should avoid those bottles with white tops.

The whole thing, though, is complete nonsense.  There's no correlation between bottle top color and... anything.  All bottled water has been filtered and sterilized (and thus "processed").  And if you need a particular bottle top color to tell if you're drinking flavored water, there are some other issues you might want to address, preferably with your doctor.

The third, and most idiotic, of the claims I heard about from my friend, the wonderful writer Andrew Butters.  Like me, Andrew is a thoroughgoing science nerd, and frequently finds himself doing facepalms over some of the stupid stuff people fall for.  He sent me a link to a video by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about an actor named Terrence Howard, who recently wrote a book about his new model for physics that proves pretty much everything we'd thought is wrong.  The basis of his model -- I swear I am not making this up -- starts from the proposition that 1 x 1 is actually equal to 2.

So Howard clearly (1) failed third grade math class, and (2) apparently has been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.  And his "theory" (it makes me cringe even to use the word) would have vanished into the great murky morass of claims by unqualified laypeople to revolutionize all of science if it hadn't been for Joe Rogan, who gave the guy a platform and treated him as if he was the next Einstein.

Hossenfelder's takedown of Howard (and Rogan) is brilliantly acerbic, and is well worth watching in its entirety.  One line, though, stands out: "Joe Rogan isn't stupid, but he thinks his audience is."  Rogan's take on things is that Howard's ideas haven't caught on in the scientific community because the scientists are acting as gatekeepers -- rejecting ideas out of hand if they come from someone who is not In The Club.  This, of course, is nonsense; they aren't ignoring Howard's book because he's not a scientist, they're ignoring it because his claims are ridiculous.  This is not scientists acting as unfair gatekeepers; they simply know what the hell they're talking about because they've spent their entire careers studying it.

I had decided not to address Howard's claims, feeling that Hossenfelder did a masterful enough job by herself of knocking him and Rogan down simultaneously, and that anything I could add would be superfluous.  And, of course, given that Hossenfelder is a physicist, she is vastly more qualified than I am to address the physics end of it.  But since Andrew sent me the link, I've now seen Howard's claims pop up three more times, always along with some commentary about the Mean Nasty Scientists refusing to listen to an outsider, and this is why we don't trust the scientists, see?

Which, of course, made me see red, and is why you're reading about it here.  There's no grand conspiracy amongst the scientific establishment to silence amateurs; as we've seen here at Skeptophilia more than once, dedicated amateurs have made significant contributions to science.  No scientist would refuse to look at a revolutionary idea if it had merit.  Terrence Howard might well have mental problems, and be more to be pitied than censured, but Joe Rogan needs to just shut the hell up.

And for the love of Gauss, that 1 x 1 = 1 can be derived in one step from one of the fundamental axioms of arithmetic.

So.  Anyhow.  I need to finish this up and go have a nice cup of tea and calm down.  But do me a favor, Gentle Readers.  If you see this kind of nonsense online, please please puhleeeez don't forward it.  If you feel comfortable doing so, tell the original poster "this is incorrect, and here's why."  And if you run into any odd claims online, do a two-minute fact check before you post them yourself.  Snopes and FactCheck.org remain two of the best places to find out if claims are true; there's no excuse for not using them.

Let's all do what we can to stem the tide of misinformation, before we all drown in it.

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The dangers of pseudoarchaeology

One of my ongoing peeves is that so many people put more faith in popular media claims than in what the scientists themselves are saying.

This can take many forms.  We have the straw-man approach, usually done with some agenda in mind, where someone will completely mischaracterize the science in order to convince people of a particular claim, and for some reason said people never think to find out what the scientists actually have to say on the matter.  (One example that especially sets my teeth on edge is the young-Earth creationists who say that the Big Bang model means "nothing exploded and created everything" and forthwith dismiss it as nonsense.)

An even more common form this takes is the current passion many people have for shows like Monster Quest and Ancient Aliens and Ghost Hunters, which aim to convince viewers that there is strong evidence for claims when there is actually little or none at all.  This kind of thing is remarkably hard to fight; when you have a charismatic figure who is trying to convince you that the Norse gods were actually superpowerful extraterrestrial visitors, and supporting that claim with evidence that is cherry-picked at best and entirely fabricated at worst, non-scientists can be suckered remarkably easily.

But "hard to fight" doesn't mean "give up," at least to archaeologist David Anderson of Radford University (Virginia).  Because he has absolutely had it with goofy claims that misrepresent the actual evidence, and is publicly calling out the people who do it.

Anderson's quest started in February, when a claim was made on The Joe Rogan Experience that a famous piece of Mayan art, from the sarcophagus of Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, who died in 683 C.E., showed him ascending into the skies in a spaceship:

It's one of the favorite pieces of evidence from the "Ancient Aliens" crowd.  But the problem is, it's wrong -- not only from the standpoint that there almost certainly were no "Ancient Aliens."  They evidently never bothered to ask an actual expert in Mayan archaeology, because that's not even what the art is trying to depict. Anderson was infuriated enough that he responded to Rogan in a tweet: "Dear @joerogan… [the piece of Mayan art you mentioned] depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death."  The "rocket" beneath the king's body, Anderson explains, is a depiction of the underworld, and the rest of the "spaceship" is a "world tree" -- a common image in Mayan art, not to mention art from other cultures.

Rogan, to his credit, thanked Anderson for the correction, but some of his fans weren't so thrilled, and railed against Anderson as being a "mainstream archaeologist" (because that's bad, apparently) who was actively trying to suppress the truth about ancient aliens for some reason.  Anderson, for his part, is adamant that archaeologists and other scientists need to be better at calling out pseudoscience and the people who are promoting it.  He cites a study done at Chapman University (California) showing that 57% of Americans polled in 2018 believe in Atlantis (up from 40% in 2016) and 41% believe that aliens visited the Earth in antiquity and made contact with early human civilizations (up from 27%).

Anderson says, and I agree, that this is a serious problem, not only because of how high the raw numbers are, but because of the trend.  I know it's not really a scientist's job to make sure the public understands his/her research, but given the amount of bullshit out there (not to mention the general anti-science bent of the current administration), it's increasingly important.

You may wonder why I'm so passionate about this, and be thinking, "Okay, I see the problem with people doubting climate science, but what's the harm of people believing in ancient aliens?  It's harmless."  Which is true, up to a point.  But the problem is, once you've decided that evidence -- and the amount and quality thereof -- is no longer the sine qua non for support of a claim, you've gone onto some seriously thin ice.  Taking a leap into pseudoscience in one realm makes it all that much easier to jump into other unsupported craziness.  Consider, for example, the study that came out of the University of Queensland that found a strong correlation between being an anti-vaxxer and accepting conspiracy theories such as the ones surrounding the JFK assassination.

So learning some science and critical thinking are insulation against being suckered by counterfactual nonsense of all kinds.  Which is why yes, I do care that people are making false claims about a piece of Mayan artwork... and so should you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)