Reversing the backfire

I suspect a lot of us have been pining for some good news lately.

Between Kim Jong-Un bragging about his capacity for unleashing nuclear destruction on anyone who insults Dear Leader, to Donald Trump alternately bragging about the size of his genitals and saying that anyone who calls him childish is a stinky stupid poopy-face, to various natural disasters and human-made conflicts, it's all too easy to decide that the only acceptable response is to curl up into a fetal position and whimper softly.

So I was kind of tickled to run into a post made a couple of days ago by Dr. Steve Novella over at the wonderful blog NeuroLogica, which discusses a study that has found the backfire effect isn't significant -- at least under controlled conditions.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The paper, "The Elusive Backfire Effect: Mass Attitudes' Steadfast Factual Adherence" by Thomas Wood of Ohio State University and Ethan Porter of George Washington University, appeared over at the Social Science Research Network on January 2.  It suggests that the backfire effect -- the tendency of people to double down on erroneous beliefs when presented with factual evidence they're wrong -- might not be as pervasive as we'd thought.

The authors write:

Can citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their partisan and ideological attachments?  The “backfire effect,” described by Nyhan and Reifler (2010), says no: rather than simply ignoring factual information, presenting respondents with facts can compound their ignorance.  In their study, conservatives presented with factual information about the absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq became more convinced that such weapons had been found.  The present paper presents results from five experiments in which we enrolled more than 10,100 subjects and tested 52 issues of potential backfire.  Across all experiments, we found no corrections capable of triggering backfire, despite testing precisely the kinds of polarized issues where backfire should be expected.  Evidence of factual backfire is far more tenuous than prior research suggests.  By and large, citizens heed factual information, even when such information challenges their ideological commitments.

The encouraging thing about this is that it suggests ignorance is curable.  The initial studies  -- that strong, but incorrect, beliefs were damn near unfixable -- were nothing short of crushing.  When I first read the research by Nyhan and Reifler, my initial reaction was, "Why the hell am I bothering with this blog, then?"  (Not, I hasten to add, that I think I'm always right, or something; but since this blog's overarching theme is sussing out the truth by evaluating the evidence skeptically and dispassionately, the backfire effect kind of blows a giant hole in its efficacy.)

This recent research, however, gives me a ray of hope.  Novella, in his piece at NeuroLogica, says it with his typical eloquence:

If we passively go with the flow of our identity, we will tend to cocoon ourselves in a comfortable echochamber that will bathe us only in facts that have been curated for maximal ideological ease.  This feedback loop will not only maintain our ideology but polarize it, making us more radical, and less reasonable. 

Ideally, therefore, we should be emotionally aloof to any ideological identity, to any particular narrative or belief system.  Further, we should seek out information based upon how reliable it is, rather than how much it confirms what we already believe or want to belief.  In fact, to correct for this bias we should specifically seek out information that contradicts our current beliefs.

My only caveat about this whole thing is that even if the backfire effect is minor and rare, correcting false beliefs depends on people being exposed to the correct information in the first place.  I was just talking with my wife yesterday about the role Fox News has in insulating Donald Trump's diehard followers from accurate information about what he's saying and doing.  It not only shields them from anti-Trump editorializing and political spin; but it winnows out the actual quotes, video clips, and tweets, only giving listeners the ones that put him in a favorable light.  While the rest of the major networks are buzzing about the disastrous interview with Stephen Miller (who John Fugelsang hilariously called "Gerbil Goebbels") and Steve Bannon's implosion and the Michael Wolff book and Trump's asinine and infantile response to it, Fox News is doing a piece on investigating the Clinton Foundation.

Because that is clearly more relevant than what the President of the United States and his administration are doing.

So if people are being shielded from the facts, they never have the opportunity to self-correct, even if the backfire effect isn't as big a deal as we'd thought.

Anyhow, at least this is a glimmer of encouragement that humanity is potentially salvageable after all.  For which I am very thankful.  For one thing, being in a fetal position on the floor is uncomfortable, and confuses my dog, not that the latter is all that difficult.  For another, I kind of like writing this blog, and it'd be a bummer to throw in the towel.

SLAPPdown

One of the most frustrating things about the country I live in is the extent to which money drives policy.

So often, it doesn't matter if you're right; all that matters is whether you have enough cash to sway the people making the decisions.  Questions of justice, fairness, even of truth and falsity, are superseded by whoever can buy the most influence.

Every so often, though, someone will try to change that.  It's an uphill battle, of course.  Trying to reduce the influence of wealthy people is hard, because the people who want things to stay this way are... wealthy.  They've bought themselves into power, and will buy their way into remaining in power if they possibly can.

One of the worst aspects of this is the SLAPP -- strategic lawsuits against public participation.  SLAPPs are suits initiated by rich people or corporations for one reason only; to tie up their less well-heeled opponents in protracted, expensive legal battles.  The ones filing the SLAPP couldn't care less if they win.  Winning isn't the point.

Bankrupting their enemies is.

[image courtesy of photographer Brian Turner and the Wikimedia Commons]

The two most commons sorts of SLAPPs are those filed by industry against environmental organizations, and those by charlatans against their critics.  The cost for the legal feels to defend oneself against a frivolous lawsuit is astronomical, and it's often easier to cave in -- to stop the environmental activism, or withdraw the criticisms, than it is to pursue the defense in the courts.

Dr. Steven Novella, for example, has been dragged for several years through the ordeal of defending himself from a libel suit by Andrew Wakefield, author of the discredited study that linked vaccination to autism.  In spite of the fact that Wakefield's study was withdrawn by The Lancet as "utterly false," and Wakefield's devastating smackdown in 2010 by the British General Medical Board (Wakefield was convicted by the board of three dozen charges, including having acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research), he has still pursued a vindictive lawsuit against Novella, who has been one of his most outspoken critics.  Novella writes:

What I learned when I became the target of a SLAPP suit (that is still ongoing) is that anyone with money can take away your free speech at will. It works like this: if you express an opinion publicly that someone else doesn’t like because it is critical of them, their beliefs, their business, etc. then they can hire a lawyer and send you a cease and desist letter. You are now faced with a dilemma – take down your blog, article, podcast, video, or whatever and allow your free speech to be suppressed, or potentially face tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. 

Except for those few states with effective anti-SLAPP laws (California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Texas and the District of Columbia – Florida just passed one which has not yet gone into effect), if you refuse to remove your free speech and you get sued, then expect to spend large sums of money and years of your life defending your rights. Here’s the thing – even if the case against you has zero merit and no chance of winning in the end, the lawsuit is a financial game of chicken. There is no way to shut the case down early. There is no bar for meritless cases. 

The net effect of this is that if someone has money they can shut down your free speech at will. This, of course, has a chilling effect on free speech that can go way beyond the one instance of speech being targeted.

A similar case is that of Harvard medical researcher Dr. Pieter Cohen and three other scientists who are being sued by Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, Inc., for a scholarly paper they wrote regarding a supplement that may contain biologically significant doses of an amphetamine isomer.  Cohen et al. wrote:

Consumers of Acacia rigidula supplements may be exposed to pharmacological dosages of an amphetamine isomer that lacks evidence of safety in humans. The FDA should immediately warn consumers about BMPEA and take aggressive enforcement action to eliminate BMPEA in dietary supplements.

Hi-Tech has sued the researchers for a total of $200 million in compensatory and punitive damages for libel and slander.

Both the environmental and the free speech aspects of this practice are profoundly distressing to me.  The idea that rich corporations are driving our environmental policy and squelching the ability of scientists and writers to criticize, or even bring to light, what is going on, is something that should raise red flags for anyone who values the truth and fair play.  The implications cut deep; even as a blogger, I've had my worries about pissing someone off, and getting sued.  I can't afford the legal fees -- so whether I was in the right or in the wrong, such a lawsuit would have the effect of shutting me down pretty much instantaneously.

There's a hope, though; Representative Blake Farenthold (R-TX) has introduced a bill into congress called the SPEAK FREE Act, which would have the effect of establishing a procedural mechanism for dismissing frivolous lawsuits rather than pursuing them at the expense of the defendants.  The defendant has the right to file a motion showing "that the claim at issue arises from an oral or written statement or other expression by the defendant made in connection with an official proceeding or about a matter of public concern."  It then falls back on the plaintiff to demonstrate that his/her case has merit.  If that cannot be established, the case is summarily dismissed, and the court costs are borne by the plaintiff.

In other words, this acts as an anti-SLAPP law.  It takes nothing away from legitimate libel and slander suits; it simply makes it far harder for wealthy individuals or corporations to pursue frivolous lawsuits that have, as their sole aim, bankrupting the people they're attacking.

I strongly urge you to support this legislation.  You can find out ways to make your voice heard here.

So as disheartening as our Money-Talks system of government can be, here in the United States, it's encouraging that sometimes people stand up.  It happened only a couple of weeks ago, with the unprecedented slapdown of billionaire Harold Hamm, CEO of the petrochemical corporation Continental Resources, Inc.  Hamm had demanded that the University of Oklahoma fire scientists who were researching the connection between hydrofracking and earthquakes, reminding the administrators along the way of the huge amount of financial support he'd given the university.

The effort backfired.  An email from Larry Grillot, Dean of the College of Earth and Energy, was made public, and it said in part, "Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed."  Grillot came down on the side of the scientists, saying, "Foremost for us is academic freedom," and politely told Hamm to shove off.

This announcement was tempered, however, by the passage immediately afterwards of two bills in the Oklahoma state congress that makes it illegal for community governments to ban fracking.  So the news, as always, was a mixed bag.

But the University's stance, and the anti-SLAPP bill, are both important steps toward reducing the influence that money has on policy.  We have a long way to go before our government can be called anything but a plutocracy; but we should all support any movement in the right direction.

COPE, Kansas, and the battle over evolution (again)

It's with a sense of "Oy, here we go again" that I must tell you that a group of parents in Kansas calling themselves COPE (Citizens for Objective Public Education) have sued the Kansas State Board of Education for adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, which explicitly endorse the teaching of evolution.

Here's the gist of the suit:

The Plaintiffs, consisting of students, parents and Kansas resident taxpayers, and a representative organization, complain that the adoption by the Defendant State Board of Education on June 11, 2013 of Next Generation Science Standards, dated April 2013 (the Standards; http://www.nextgenscience.org/) and the related Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas, (2012;
(http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165#), incorporated therein by reference (the "Framework" with the Framework and Standards referred to herein as the “F&S”) will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview (the “Worldview”) in violation of the Establishment, Free Exercise, and Speech Clauses of the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment.

So it's pretty much same old, same old.  They never get tired of the game, somehow, despite their repeated defeats, most tellingly the stinging slapdown they got in the Kitzmiller vs. the Dover Area School Board decision of 2005, which read, in part:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID [Intelligent Design] arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community...  It is additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural phenomena...  ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

So, yeah.  Ouchie-wawa.  But if you're on a Holy Crusade, you never accept defeat.  So they're back at it again, with (one hopes) the same results in store for them.

What makes this more interesting, though, is a piece on the subject by the eminent neurologist, writer, and skeptic Steven Novella, in his wonderful blog NeuroLogica.  The post, entitled "Kansas Citizens Vote to Reject Science," is (of course) a thorough rebuke of the motives and rationality of COPE and any members of the judiciary who might agree with them, but it contained a passage that made me frown a little:

Science does not require non-theism. It does not even require naturalism. Science merely proceeds as if the world is naturalistic, that there is cause and effect and nothing magical that violates cause and effect. This is called methodological naturalism – science is a set of methods that work within a naturalistic framework of cause and effect.

Science is officially agnostic, however, toward any deeper philosophical conclusions about whether or not anything supernatural actual exists. It simply relegates such questions outside the sphere of science.

This does not mean that philosophers cannot rely on empirical evidence and scientific notions to argue for a naturalistic universe. That is my personal belief – the simplest explanation for why we cannot know about anything supernatural, and why science works within the assumption of naturalism, is because naturalism is actually true. But science does not require that belief.

While I agree with him insofar as his views speak of religion in general, I disagree entirely when they are applied to specific religions.  And, after all, almost no one belongs to a "religion in general."  There are religions that see no conflict whatsoever between science and a belief in god (the Unitarians, for example).  There are others which very much do.  So it's all very well to say that "science is officially agnostic... about whether or not anything supernatural exists," but when push comes to shove and science runs headlong into religion, a Southern Baptist (for example) is going to have to decide where (s)he stands on the matter.

It's a little disingenuous, I think, for Dr. Novella (however much I respect him and approve of his views) to say that mandating the teaching of evolution in public schools is outside of the purview of religion, just as religion is outside of the purview of science.  But if part of your religious belief is that god created the world in six days, six-thousand-odd years ago, then my saying that the Earth is six or so billion years old, that organisms have evolved into the forms we have today, that there was no Great Flood, and so on, certainly has religious implications.  By stating that the latter are to be taught in science classes -- and I believe, of course, that they should be -- I am stating, not so subtly, that your religion is wrong on those points.

You can surely see how both viewpoints can't be true.

So, however much we'd like to accept the Stephen Jay Gould idea of non-overlapping magisteria -- that science and religion both have their places, and those places do not intersect -- there is a significant percentage of Americans who don't see it that way.  Young-Earth creationists, in particular, are completely correct in seeing scientific statements as affecting, and in many cases negating, their religious claims.

To them, scientific statements are religious statements.  Not that science and religion have the same methods; in fact, precisely because they don't.  They have accepted the religious way of knowing as the ultimate truth -- anything that comes into conflict with that, then, must be false and evil.

Now don't get me wrong; I think the members of COPE are a bunch of irrational nitwits.  Their stance about evolution is demonstrably incorrect.  However, that doesn't mean that their claim -- that teaching their children evolution is a practice that carries with it an intrinsic statement about their religion -- is false as well.

So as much as I wish we would stop pussyfooting around and playing nice with these people, the Establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  At first glance, this would clearly seem to place religion in the context of a personal practice -- making any public mandate of a religious point of view illegal.  But what if, as in this case, kids are being made to learn, and to treat as truth, a viewpoint that directly contradicts their religious beliefs?

How is that itself not a religious statement?

I dunno.  Makes me glad I'm not a judge.  Despite my inclination to tell the members of COPE, "Hey, y'all just get yourselves back to the 17th century where you belong, I'm sure there are some witches y'all need to take care of back there," I'm not sure it's that easy.  I hope that this latest lawsuit goes the way of Kitzmiller vs. Dover, but however it's decided, I don't think the war is over quite yet.

Getting to the point

There is one alternative medicine modality that I've always been hesitant to criticize.  That hesitancy has come from the fact that it is widespread, so widespread that I know a dozen people who have used it and reported positive results.  Even though I could see no biologically sound reason why it would work the way its practitioners claimed, it's always seemed to me to fall into that gray area of "things that may work for some as-yet unknown reason."

That modality is acupuncture.  I get asked about it regularly, both in my Biology classes and in my Critical Thinking classes, and I've usually shrugged, and said, "Well, I don't believe in prana and chakras and the rest of it, but could acupuncture be triggering some positive response, in some way we have yet to elucidate?  Sure.  People used medicinal plants long before they understood pharmacology, and the fact that they attributed the plants' success at treating disease to good magic or benevolent spirits doesn't mean that the plants didn't work.  It could be the same here."

Well, I can't make that claim any more.

Just last week, David Colquhoun (University College of London) and Steven Novella (Yale School of Medicine) published a paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia (available here) that evaluates the results of every controlled study of acupuncture in the past ten years, and reaches the following conclusion:

The outcome of this research, we propose, is that the benefits of acupuncture, if any, are too small and too transient to be of any clinical significance.  It seems that acupuncture is little or no more than a theatrical placebo... 

The best controlled studies show a clear pattern – with acupuncture the outcome does not depend on needle location or even needle insertion. Since these variables are what define "acupuncture" the only sensible conclusion is that acupuncture does not work. Everything else is the expected noise of clinical trials, and this noise seems particularly high with acupuncture research. The most parsimonious conclusion is that with acupuncture there is no signal, only noise.

The interests of medicine would be best-served if we emulated the Chinese Emperor Dao Guang and issued an edict stating that acupuncture and moxibustion should no longer be used in clinical practice. 

I have to admit that when I read this paper, my first reaction was to wince.  Part of me, I suppose, really wanted acupuncture to work -- even if we had no idea how it worked, the idea that you could alleviate pain (or anxiety, or insomnia, or depression) simply by sticking someone with little needles seemed preferable to telling people that they simply had to live with chronic conditions if standard medical treatment failed.  But one of the harsher sides of the rationalist view is that you go wherever the evidence drives you, even if you don't want to.  And after reading the paper by Colquhoun and Novella, and taking a look at their sources, I am brought to the inescapable conclusion that they are correct.

It's frequently that way, though, isn't it?  I think most of us, even the most hard-nosed skeptics in the world, would be delighted if some of the wild things the woo-woos claim turned out to be true.  Being a biologist, I would be thrilled if there were surviving proto-hominids like Sasquatch or surviving dinosaurs like Nessie, Champ, Mokele-Mbembe, Kelpies, and the Bunyip.  A convincing demonstration of intelligent alien life would be about the coolest thing I can imagine.  Even the existence of an afterlife is something I'd be mighty happy about (as long as it wasn't the being-tortured-by-Satan-for-all-eternity variety).

But, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."  And it appears that in the case of acupuncture, the Colquhoun/Novella study conclusively demonstrates that there's nothing much there besides the placebo effect -- sorry though I am to have to say so.

Of course, that doesn't mean that acupuncturists are going to go out of business any time soon.  There are still a lot of true believers out there, and they can pull in clients from odd sources, sometimes.  Just last week, the veterinarians at a Tel Aviv zoo decided to call in acupuncturists because their attempts to treat a chronic ear infection in one of the zoo animals had failed.  The patient?

A fourteen-year-old Sumatran tiger.

Now that's some conviction in your beliefs.  You think acupuncture works?  Here, go stick some needles in this live tiger.

Be that as it may, apparently they anesthetized the tiger beforehand (smart move), and the acupuncturists all survived unscathed.  No word yet on whether Kitty's ears have stopped hurting.  My guess, given the Colquhoun/Novella study, is no, since the placebo effect doesn't work too well on cats.

Although to be fair, judging by my success rate at giving pills to my own cats, traditional veterinary medicine generates its own, unique set of problems as well.