Social media dissociation

I suspect that many of my readers will resonate with my desire to fritter away less time on social media.

I don't mean the actual "social" part of social media.  I have friends whom I seldom if ever get to see, and especially since the pandemic started, visiting online is about my only opportunity.  I greatly value those conversations.  What I'm referring to is the aimless scrolling, looking for new content, any new content.  Trying to find a distraction even though I know that a dozen other things, from listening to some music, to playing with my dogs, to going for a run -- even weeding the garden -- will leave me feeling better.

But -- once again, as I'm sure many of you can attest -- it can be exceedingly hard to say "enough" and close the app.  It was one thing when your connectivity had to be via a desktop or laptop computer; but now that just about all of us (even me, Luddite though I am) are carrying around our social media addiction in our pockets, it's way too easy to say "just a few more minutes" and drop back into the world of scrolling.

One effect I've noticed it's had on me is a shortening of my attention span.  Something has to be absolutely immersive to keep my attention for over five minutes.  Two of my favorite YouTube science channels, the wonderful Veratasium and physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's awesome Science Without the Gobbledygook, have videos that average at about ten to twelve minutes long, and man... sometimes that is a struggle, however fascinating the topic.

I don't like this trend.  I won't say I've ever had the best of focus -- distractions and my wandering mind have been issues since I was in grade school -- but social media have made it considerably worse.  Frequently I think about how addicted I am to scrolling, and it's a real cause of worry.

But then I start scrolling again and forget all about it.

That last bit was the subject of a study from the University of Washington that was presented last month at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.  In, "'I Don’t Even Remember What I Read': How Design Influences Dissociation on Social Media," a team led by Amanda Baughan looked at how social media apps are actually designed to have this exact effect -- and that although we frequently call it an addiction, it is more accurately described as dissociation.

"Dissociation is defined by being completely absorbed in whatever it is you're doing," Baughan said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "But people only realize that they've dissociated in hindsight.  So once you exit dissociation there's sometimes this feeling of: 'How did I get here?'  It's like when people on social media realize: 'Oh my gosh, how did thirty minutes go by?  I just meant to check one notification.'"

Which is spot-on.  Even the title is a bullseye; after a half-hour on Twitter, I'd virtually always be hard-pressed to tell you the content of more than one or two of the tweets I looked at.  The time slips by, and it feels very much like I glance up at the clock, and three hours are gone without my having anything at all to show for it.

It always reminds me of a quote from C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters.  While I (obviously) don't buy into the theology, his analysis of time-wasting by the arch-demon Screwtape is scarily accurate:

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations.  As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.  You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.  You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him.  You can make him do nothing at all for long periods.  You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.  All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here [in hell], "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

That last line, especially, is a fair knockout, and it kind of makes me suspicious that social media may have been developed down in hell after all.

Baughan, however, says maybe we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves.  "I think people experience a lot of shame around social media use," she said.  "One of the things I like about this framing of 'dissociation' rather than 'addiction' is that it changes the narrative.  Instead of: 'I should be able to have more self-control,' it's more like: 'We all naturally dissociate in many ways throughout our day -- whether it's daydreaming or scrolling through Instagram, we stop paying attention to what's happening around us.'"

Even so, for a lot of us, it gets kind of obsessive at times.  It's worse when I'm anxious or depressed, when I crave a distraction not only from unpleasant external circumstances but from the workings of my own brain.  And it's problematic that when that occurs, the combination of depression and social media create a feedback loop that keeps me from seeking out activities -- which sometimes just means turning off the computer and doing something, anything, different -- that will actually shake me out of my low mood.

But she's right that shaming ourselves isn't productive, either.  Maybe a lot of us could benefit by some moderation in our screen time, but self-flagellation doesn't accomplish anything.  I'm not going to give up on social media entirely -- like I said, without it I would lose touch with too many contacts I value -- but setting myself some stricter time limits is probably a good idea.

And now that you've read this, maybe it's time for you to shut off the device, too.  What are you going to do instead?  I think I'll go for a run.

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Moodscrolling

I think one of the reason I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter is that my feed sounds way too much like my brain.

I do a lot of what I call "hamster-wheeling."  Just sitting there -- or, worse, lying in bed at night trying to sleep -- I get a running litany of disconnected thoughts that leap about my cerebral cortex like a kangaroo on crack.  Think about that, and look at this selection of tweets that I pulled from the first few scroll-downs of my feed this morning, and which I swear I'm not making up:

• I'm putting everyone on notice that I'm not taking any shit today.
• Wow, I've got bad gas.  My apologies to my coworkers.
• I'm on vacation why am I up at 6 AM scrolling on Twitter
• In England in the 1880s, "pants" was considered a dirty word.
• I wonder how Weeping Angels reproduce.  Do they fuck?  I'd fuck a Weeping Angel, even though I'd probably regret it.
• Super serious question.  Does anyone still eat grilled cheese sandwiches?
• A stranger at the gym just told me I should dye my beard because it's got gray in it.  WTF?
• Doo-dah, doo-dah, all the live-long day

The only tweets I didn't consider including were purely political ones and people hawking their own books, which admittedly make up a good percentage of the total.  But if you take those out, what's left is, in a word, bizarre.  In three words, it's really fucking bizarre.

Me, I find my hamster-wheeling thoughts annoying and pointless; I can't imagine that anyone else would want to hear them.  For criminy's sake, even I don't want to hear them.

So why the hell do I stay on Twitter?

I think part of it is insufficient motivation to do what it would take to delete my account, but part of it is that despite the weird, random content, I still find myself spending time just about every day scrolling through it. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons MatthewKeys, Twitter's San Francisco Headquarters, CC BY-SA 3.0]

I've noticed that my tendency to waste time on social media is inversely proportional to my mood.  When I'm in a good mood, I can always find more interesting things to do; when I'm low, I tend to sit and scan through Twitter and Facebook, sort of waiting for something to happen that will lift me up, get me interested, or at least distract me.

Moodscrolling, is the way I think of it.

I'm apparently not the only one.  A team at Fudan University (China) found that social media use and depression and anxiety were strongly correlated -- and that both had increased dramatically since the pandemic started.  It seems to be an unpleasant positive feedback loop; the worse things get and the more isolated we are, the more depressed and anxious we get (understandably), and the more we seek out contact on social media.  Which, because of its weird content, often outright nastiness, and partisan rancor (you should see some of the political tweets I decided not to post), makes us feel worse, and round and round it goes.  Breaking the cycle by forcing yourself to stand up and walk away from the computer is hard when you're already feeling down; especially so now that it's all available on our phones, so the option of consuming social media is seldom farther away than our own pockets.

It's not that I think it's all bad.  If it was, I would delete my account.  I've met some very nice people in Twitter communities I've joined -- fellow fiction writers and Doctor Who fans are two that come to mind.  Facebook, on the other hand, lets me stay in touch with dear friends whom I seldom get to see.  But there's no doubt that if you did a cost-benefit analysis -- the amount of time I spend on social media as compared to the positive stuff I get from it -- it would show numbers that are seriously in the red.

Walking away, though, takes willpower, and that's exactly what depressed and anxious people tend to lack.  The study I linked above, though, makes me more certain that's what I need to do.  The random, disjointed thoughts my own brain comes up with are enough; I don't need to see everyone else's.

Although I have to admit that the guy who posted about the Weeping Angels asks a good question.  Not only are they made of stone, they all appear to be female.  And if you watch Doctor Who, there certainly seems to be a lot of them.  For the record, though, I am not in the least interested in having sex with one, even if it turns out they're somehow capable of it.  Those things are seriously creepy.

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Birds of a feather

I should probably avoid social media altogether, given what a cesspit of ugliness it can be sometimes.

Unfortunately, it's provided the simplest way of keeping in touch with dear friends I seldom see, especially during the height of the pandemic (when I kind of wasn't seeing anyone).  But to say it amplifies the echo chamber effect is an understatement.  Not only do we tend to link on social media to like-minded folks (can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say that they'd unfriended someone solely because of some opinion or another, usually political), but with the few non-like-minded social media friends we have and keep, it takes so much energy to argue that most of us just sigh heavily, shrug our shoulders, and move on, even when confronted with opinions completely antithetical to our own.

Take, for example, what I saw posted yesterday -- a meme saying, "All I'm saying is, if my dog got three rabies shots and then still got rabies, I'd begin to get suspicious."  (It took all my willpower not to respond, "Oh, how I wish that was all you were saying.")  In any case, not only does the post trumpet zero understanding about how vaccinations and immunity work, it's back to the maddening phenomenon of a layperson thinking an opinion formed from watching Fox News and doing a ten-minute read of some guy's website constitutes "research."

If that wasn't bad enough, a friend-of-the-friend -- no one I know -- responded, "It's what comes from drinking the libtard kool-aid."  So, let's take the ignorant post and make it worse by slathering on some ugly vitriol demeaning half the residents of the country.

And what did I do in response?

Nothing.

I just didn't have the energy to get drawn in.  Plus, there's a sense of such argument being futile anyhow.  I seriously doubt anyone, in the history of the internet, has ever had their opinion changed by arguing a point online with a total stranger.

Only a few minutes after seeing the post, though, I stumbled on some research out of the University of Buffalo that contains at least a glimmer of hope; that the screeching you hear on social media isn't necessarily reflective of the attitudes that the majority of people have, because these platforms amplify the loudest voices -- not necessarily the ones that make the best sense, or are even the most common.

In a paper in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Yini Zhang, Fan Chen, and Karl Rohe looked at our tendency to form "flocks" on social media.  By studying the posts from 193,000 Twitter accounts, and the 1.3 million accounts those accounts follow, they were able to uncover patterns of tweets and retweets, and found the strongest-worded opinions were the ones that got liked and retweeted the most.  They called this phenomenon murmuration -- the term comes from the flocking behavior of starlings -- capturing the idea that online expression of opinions forms and shifts not based on actual changes in the information available, but on who is saying what, and how stridently.

"By identifying different flocks and examining the intensity, temporal pattern and content of their expression, we can gain deeper insights far beyond where liberals and conservatives stand on a certain issue," said study lead author Yini Zhang, in an interview in Science Daily.  "These flocks are segments of the population, defined not by demographic variables of questionable salience, like white women aged 18-29, but by their online connections and response to events.  As such, we can observe opinion variations within an ideological camp and opinions of people that might not be typically assumed to have an opinion on certain issues.  We see the flocks as naturally occurring, responding to things as they happen, in ways that take a conversational element into consideration."

The fact that the social media flocking doesn't mirror the range of opinion out there is heartening, to say the least.  "[S]ocial media public opinion is twice removed from the general public opinion measured by surveys," Zhang said.  "First, not everyone uses social media.  Second, among those who do, only a subset of them actually express opinions on social media.  They tend to be strongly opinionated and thus more willing to express their views publicly."

It's not just political discourse that can be volatile.  A friend of mine just got blasted on Facebook a couple of days ago, out of the blue, because she posts stuff intended to be inspirational or uplifting, and one of her Facebook friends accused her of being "self-righteous," and went on to lambaste her for her alleged holier-than-thou attitude.  The individual in question doesn't have a self-righteous bone in her whole body -- she might be the only person I know who has more of a tendency to anxious self-doubt than I do -- so it was a ridiculous accusation.  But it does exemplify the sad fact that a lot of us feel freer to be unkind to people online than we ever would face-to-face.  

The important point here is that it's easy to see the nastiness and foolishness on social media and conclude that this is the way the majority of the public believes and acts, but the Zhang et al. study suggests that the majority of the opinions of this sort are generated by a few strident people.  Only afterward do those posts act like a magnet to the like-minded followers they already had.

So as hard as it is to keep in mind sometimes, I maintain that the majority of people are actually quite nice, and want the same things we want -- safety, security, the basic necessities, health and happiness for our friends and family.  The ugly invective from people like the guy who made the "libtard" comment is far from a majority opinion, and shouldn't feed into a despairing sense that everyone is horrible.

The flocks, apparently, aren't led by the smartest birds, just the ones who squawk the loudest.  A lot of the rest are tagging along for the ride.  There's a broader population at the center, opinion-wise, than you'd think, judging by what you see on social media.  And when the birds step away from social media, most of them turn out to be ordinary tweeters just trying to stay with the flock-mates they feel the most comfortable with.

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Reinforcing outrage

I got onto social media some years ago for two main reasons; to stay in touch with people I don't get to see frequently (which since the pandemic has been pretty much everyone), and to have a platform for marketing my books.

I'm the first to admit that I'm kind of awful at the latter.  I hate marketing myself, and even though I know I won't be successful as an author if no one ever hears about my work, it goes against the years of childhood training in such winning strategies as "don't talk about yourself" and "don't brag" and (my favorite) "no one wants to hear about that" (usually applied to whatever my current main interest was).

I'm still on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, although for me the last-mentioned seems to mostly involve pics of my dog being cute.  It strikes me on a daily basis, though, how quickly non-dog-pic social media can devolve into a morass of hatefulness -- Twitter seems especially bad in that regard -- and also that I have no clue how the algorithms work that decide for you what you should and should not look at.  It's baffling to me that someone will post a fascinating link or trenchant commentary and get two "likes" and one retweet, and then someone else will post a pic of their lunch and it'll get shared far and wide.

So I haven't learned how to game the system, either to promote my books or to get a thousand retweets of a pic of my own lunch.  Maybe my posts aren't angry enough.  At least that seems to be the recommendation of a study at Yale University that was published last week in Science Advances, which found that expressions of moral outrage on Twitter are more often rewarded by likes and retweets than emotionally neutral ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons "Today Testing" (For derivative), Social Media Marketing Strategy, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Apparently, getting likes and retweets is the human equivalent of the bell ringing for Pavlov's dog.  When our posts are shared, it gives us incentive to post others like them.  And since political outrage gets responses, we tend to move in that direction over time.  Worse still, the effect is strongest for people who are political moderates, meaning the suspicion a lot of us have had for a while -- that social media feeds polarization -- looks like it's spot-on.

"Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” said Yale professor of psychology Molly Crockett, who co-authored the study.  "This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage...  Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement.  Given that moral outrage plays a crucial role in social and political change, we should be aware that tech companies, through the design of their platforms, have the ability to influence the success or failure of collective movements.  Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society.  Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time."

Which is troubling, if not unexpected.  Social media may not just be passively encouraging polarization, but deliberately exploiting our desire for approval.  In doing so, they are not just recording the trends, but actively influencing political outcomes.

It's scary how easily manipulated we are.  The catch-22 is that any attempt to rein in politically-incendiary material on social media runs immediately afoul of the rights of free speech; it took Facebook and Twitter ages to put the brakes on posts about the alleged danger of the COVID vaccines and the "Big Lie" claims of Donald Trump and his cronies that Joe Biden stole the election last November.  (A lot of those posts are still sneaking through, unfortunately.)  So if social media is feeding social media polarization with malice aforethought, the only reasonable response is to think twice about liking and sharing sketchy stuff -- and when in doubt, err on the side of not sharing it.

Either that, or exit social media entirely, something that several friends of mine have elected to do.  I'm reluctant -- there are people, especially on Facebook, who I'd probably lose touch with entirely without it -- but I don't spend much time on it, and (except for posting links to Skeptophilia every morning) hardly post at all.  What I do post is mostly intended for humor's sake; I avoid political stuff pretty much entirely.

So that's our discouraging, if unsurprising, research of the day.  It further reinforces my determination to spend as little time doomscrolling on Twitter as I can.  Not only do I not want to contribute to the nastiness, I don't need the reward of retweets pushing me any further into outrage.  I'm outraged enough as it is.

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Tweets and backfires

Let me ask you a hypothetical question.

You're over on Twitter, and you post a link making a political claim of some sort.  Shortly thereafter, you get responses demonstrating that the claim your link made is completely false.  Would you...

1. ... delete the tweet, apologize, and be more careful about what you post in the future?
2. ... shrug, say "Meh, whatever," and continue posting at the same frequency/with the same degree of care?
3. ... flip off the computer and afterward be more likely to post inflammatory and/or false claims?

I know this sounds like a setup, and it is, but seriously; why wouldn't everyone select answer #1?  As I discussed in a post just a few days ago, we all make mistakes, and we all hate the feeling of finding out we're in error.  So given that most animal species learn to avoid choices that lead to experiencing pain, why is the answer actually more commonly #3?

I'm not just making a wild claim up myself in order to have a topic to blog about.  The fact that most people increase their rate of promulgating disinformation after they've been caught at it is the subject of a paper that was presented last week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems called, "Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment."  The title could pretty much function as the abstract; in an analysis of two thousand Twitter users who post political tweets, the researchers looked at likelihood of posting false information after having errors pointed out online, and found, amazingly enough, a positive correlation.

"We find causal evidence that being corrected decreases the quality, and increases the partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets," the authors write.  "This suggests that being publicly corrected by another user shifts one's attention away from accuracy -- presenting an important challenge for social correction approaches."

"Challenge" isn't the right word; it's more like "tendency that's so frustrating it makes anyone sensible want to punch a wall."  The researchers, Mohsen Mosleh (of the University of Exeter) and Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David Rand (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have identified the twenty-first century iteration of the backfire effect -- a well-studied phenomenon showing that being proven wrong makes you double down on whatever your claim was.  But here, it apparently makes you not only double down on that claim, but on every other unfounded opinion you have.

In what universe does being proven wrong make you more confident?

I swear, sometimes I don't understand human psychology at all.  Yeah, I guess you could explain it by saying that someone who has a dearly-held belief questioned is more motivated in subsequent behavior by the insecurity they're experiencing than by any commitment to the truth, but it still makes no sense to me.  The times I've been caught out in an error, either here at Skeptophilia or elsewhere, were profoundly humbling and (on occasion) outright humiliating, and the result was (1) I apologized for my error, and (2) I was a hell of a lot more careful what I posted thereafter.

What I didn't do was to say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

This does pose a quandary.  Faced with a false claim on social media, do we contradict it?  I don't have the energy to go after every piece of fake news I see; I usually limit myself to posts that are explicitly racist, sexist, or homophobic, because I can't in good conscience let that kind of bullshit go unchallenged.  But what if the outcome is said racist, sexist, or homophobe being more likely to post such claims in the future?

Not exactly the result I'm looking for, right there.

So that's our discouraging piece of research for today.  I honestly don't know what to do about a tendency that is so fundamentally irrational.  Despite all of our science and technology, a lot of our behavior still seems to be caveman-level.  "Ogg say bad thing about me.  Me bash Ogg with big rock."

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The guilt of the instigators

A number of years ago, I was talking with a friend about her recent divorce from a man who was a serial philanderer and emotional abuser, and from whom she had separated more than once, always taking him back when he promised reform.  At that point my own divorce was also recent history, and I asked her what she'd come away with after the experience.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, "I think the biggest lesson I learned is, when someone shows you who he truly is, believe it."

As of the time of this writing, the attempted coup against our government by armed rioters is only twenty-four hours old, and already I'm seeing the distraction campaign by Republicans getting into full swing.  "This isn't who we are," the official GOP Twitter account said.  Rudy Giuliani said "stop the violence" after having called for "trial by combat" only hours earlier.  Ivanka Trump asked for the rioters to leave peacefully -- but when the protests started, had said they are "American patriots."  Brit Hume speculated that they were "leftist Antifa in disguise" despite the fact that there are photographs, and the ones who have been identified are all well-known far-right agitators.  Ted Cruz asked for the rioters to disperse -- but still voted against certifying the results of a legitimate, fair election later that evening.  Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham both made speeches against the riots, the move to question the election, and Trump himself.  Twitter suspended Trump's account for twelve hours, supposedly "pending review for permanent deletion."  Several Trump staffers have resigned, and several more are expected to do so in the next day.  Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of Fox News said that Trump "acted very badly" in saying he loved the rioters and that they were "very special."

And on and on.

The problem is: it's too late.  It's way too fucking late to claim the moral high ground, to act as if they haven't supported an amoral psychopath for four years, making excuses for every insane thing he's done all along the way.  Without the support of these people he never would have been nominated, much less elected.  Especially infuriating is the sudden realization by Twitter and Fox News that they're complicit in violent insurrection -- that between the two of them, they created this monster.  Without Twitter and Fox News, and far-right commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Trump would have remained what he was -- a failed businessman and washed-up reality TV star.

And we've been warning for years that this was coming, that the lies and misinformation and polarization were going to have consequences.  I say "we" because I've been writing about the parallels between Trump's rise and Germany in the 1930s since he was nominated.  I was called an alarmist by people on both sides of the aisle.  The conservatives said Trump was a true patriot who cared deeply for the average American; the liberals said he was an incompetent but that the system of checks and balances was there to keep the reins on him.

But people like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz made sure the checks and balances were never invoked.  They gave Trump carte blanche.  Fox News helped matters along by making sure that any of the innumerable lies and outright insane statements Trump made never got aired, that the loyal viewers only ever saw things that painted him in a positive light.  They created a vision of a man who was a messiah, the only one who could save America from the godless evil liberals...

... and their followers believed it.

Stephen King said -- a long time ago -- "The people who have spent years sowing dragon's teeth seem surprised to find that they have grown an actual dragon."  Trump's enablers created this situation.  Each of them is as culpable as Trump is in what happened on January 6.  They are guilty of the deliberate, calculated deception of a significant percentage of the American citizenry, who were trained to discount every criticism of Trump they heard, and so now... discount every criticism of Trump they hear.

The mealy-mouthed tut-tutting about the violence in the Capitol (and in a number of state capitols as well) can not be allowed to get them off the hook for this.  I'm no expert in jurisprudence, so I am unqualified to weigh in over issues like whether the congresspeople who voted against certification of the election or who instigated the coup attempt could be expelled and/or prosecuted.  But doing nothing -- saying, "Oh, well, it's simmered down, we're okay now" -- will work about as well as when Susan Collins voted against removing Trump after he was impeached early last year, and said, "I think he's learned his lesson."

I guess he hasn't, Senator Collins.

If someone shows you who he truly is, believe it.

Undoing the damage this has done will not be easy or quick.  It'll still be with us long after the windows in the Capitol are replaced, the papers and files that were dumped on the floor are put back, the damage to furniture is repaired.  I don't envy the new administration the work they have ahead.  But if we don't want this to happen again -- which, I trust, is the hope of every American -- we cannot let the ones who did this get away with it.  And I'm not talking only about the participants in the riot.  I'm talking about the ones who created this situation, from Trump on down.  I'm talking about Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, the far-right commentators who built Trump up as a god-figure, the true believers who worship him.  I'm talking about the elected officials who coldly and hypocritically encouraged it -- some of them laughing up their sleeves in private about what a moron Trump is -- because they saw it as a way to fill their own pockets and keep their positions of power.

We need reform, and that doesn't mean accepting that the Democrats have all the answers.  They don't.  It means stopping the continual stream of self-aggrandizing lies.  It means refusing to throw away anything that doesn't immediately appeal to your biases as "fake news."  It means turning off the television and radio and depriving the media that thrives on polarization of the only thing they care about, which is cash from sponsors. 

And it means holding people accountable for what they say or do.  Every damn time.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Content creation mania

While I don't want to excuse mental laziness, I think it's understandable sometimes if laypeople come to the conclusion that for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.

I ran into a good example of this over at Science Daily yesterday, when I read an article about the modern penchant for "creating content" wherever we go -- by which they mean things like taking photos and posting them on social media, tweeting or Facebook posting during experiences like concerts, sports events, and political rallies, and just in general never doing anything without letting the world know about it.

I'm not a social media addict by any stretch of the imagination, but I know I have that tendency sometimes myself.  I've tried to avoid Twitter ever since the presidential race really heated up, because I very quickly got sick of all the posturing and snarling and TWEETS IN ALL CAPS from people who should know better but apparently have the decorum and propriety of Attila the Hun.  I find Instagram a lot more fun because it's all photographs, and there's less opportunity for vitriol.  Even so, I still post on both pretty regularly, even if I don't reach the level of Continuous Live-Stream Commentary some people do.  (For what it's worth, I'm on Twitter @TalesOfWhoa and Instagram @skygazer227.  You're welcome to follow me on either or both.  Be forewarned if you follow me on Instagram, however, you'll mostly see pics of my dogs, gardens, pottery projects, and various running-related stuff.)

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The content-creation study, which appeared in the Journal of Marketing and was a team effort between researchers at Rutgers and New York Universities, found that contrary to the usual conventional wisdom that if you want to really enjoy something you should put away your phone, enjoyment and appreciation of experience increases when people are allowed to do things like tweet, Facebook post, or take and post photographs.  "In contrast to popular press advice," said study co-author Gabriela Tonietto, "this research uncovers an important benefit of technology's role in our daily lives... by generating content relevant to ongoing experiences, people can use technology in a way that complements, rather than interferes with, their experiences."

The problem is, this runs afoul of other studies that have shown social media engagement to be directly proportional to depression, anxiety, and disconnection from face-to-face contact with others.  A quick search will give you as many links as you like, to peer-reviewed research -- not just quick-takes in popular magazines -- warning of the dangers of spending time on social media.  Pick any one of these and you'll come away with the impression that whatever facet of social media the study looked at was the root of all modern psychiatric disorders.

Humans, though, are complex.  We don't categorize easily.  Social media might well create a sense of isolation in some and foster connectedness in others.  One person might derive real enjoyment from posting her vacation photos on Instagram; another might berate himself for how few "likes" he'd gotten.  There's also the problem of mistaking correlation for causation in all of these studies.  The people who report social media boosting their enjoyment might well be those who were well-adjusted to start with, for whom social media was simply another fun way to connect with friends and acquaintances; the people for whom it generates depression, anxiety, or addictive behavior could have had those tendencies beforehand, and the all-too-common desperation for "likes" simply made it all worse.  A paper in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking back in 2014 admitted this up front:

During the past decade, online social networking has caused profound changes in the way people communicate and interact.  It is unclear, however, whether some of these changes may affect certain normal aspects of human behavior and cause psychiatric disorders.  Several studies have indicated that the prolonged use of social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, may be related to signs and symptoms of depression.  In addition, some authors have indicated that certain SNS activities might be associated with low self-esteem, especially in children and adolescents.  Other studies have presented opposite results in terms of positive impact of social networking on self-esteem.  The relationship between SNS use and mental problems to this day remains controversial, and research on this issue is faced with numerous challenges.

So I'm always inclined to view research on social and psychological trends with a bit of a weather eye.  Well-conducted research into the workings of our own psychology and sociology can be fascinating, but humans are complicated beasts and confounding factors are legion.  The upshot of the social media studies for me can be summarized in a Marie Kondo-ism: "does it spark joy?"  If posting photos of your pets' latest antics on Instagram boosts your enjoyment, have at it.  If you like pretending to be a color commentator on Twitter while watching your favorite team play, go for it.  If it all makes you feel depressed, anxious, or alone, maybe it is time to put away the phone.

In any case, I'm going to wind this up, because I need to share the link to today's post on Facebook and Twitter.  My public awaits.  And if I don't post on time, my like-total for the day will be low, and we can't have that.

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The doctor, Donald Trump, and demon sex

As I have mentioned more than once, there's pretty good evidence lately that the aliens who are in charge of the computer simulation we're all trapped in have gotten bored and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us.

For example, consider Dr. Stella Immanuel.  Dr. Immanuel has recently become a darling of the pro-Trump faction for her claims that she's cured people with active COVID-19 infections through a combination of hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax (the antibiotic in the "Z-Pak"), and zinc.  She was one of the leading voices at a "summit" hosted by a group calling itself "America's Frontline Doctors," which I have to admit has more gravitas than the more accurate "America's Batshit Conspiracy Theorists."  The misinformation flew at the "summit," including not only that COVID-19 was curable using hydroxychloroquine (multiple studies have found it to have no positive effects on the course of the illness, and a plethora of nasty side effects, some of which can be fatal), but that the pandemic itself was overblown and that masks aren't necessary to prevent its spread.

Trump, of course, loves Dr. Immanuel, because her message is identical to the one he's been pushing for months.  He tweeted a link to a video of Dr. Immanuel defending her coronavirus misinformation, and Donald Jr. retweeted it, calling it a "Must watch!!!"  Then the powers-that-be at both Twitter and Facebook, showing a rare burst of ethical behavior, deleted her video, tagged tweets promoting it as "containing misinformation," and most surprising of all, locked Donald Jr.'s Twitter account for twelve hours.

Dr. Immanuel, though, follows Trump's model in more than just espousing ridiculous pseudoscience; her personal motto is apparently "Death before admitting error."  After her video was taken down, she and Trump both doubled down on her position.  Dr. Immanuel threatened divine intervention, saying that Jesus Christ would destroy Facebook's servers if the video wasn't restored.  (They didn't, and he didn't.)  Trump, on the other hand, took a more mundane approach, if not substantially more sane.  "I can tell you this, she was on air along with many other doctors," he said.  "They were big fans of hydroxychloroquine and I thought she was very impressive in the sense that from where she came, I don't know which country she comes from, but she said that she's had tremendous success with hundreds of different patients, and I thought her voice was an important voice, but I know nothing about her."

The bizarre ideas of this "important voice" go far beyond misinformation about COVID-19, however.  Dr. Immanuel is a veritable fountain of loony beliefs, which include the following:

• The medical establishment is working on medicines that are created from extraterrestrial DNA.
• Gynecological disorders occur when women have dreams about having sex with demons.  It's the "demon sperm" that causes the problem.
• Wet dreams cause erectile dysfunction, once again because they're accompanied by images of having sex.  With demon women, of course.
• The demons themselves, though, aren't just in it for the kicks, but because that's how they reproduce.  "They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm," Immanuel said in a sermon at the church she runs in Houston, Texas, called "Firepower Ministries."  "Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a woman and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves."
• She calls herself a "wealth transfer coach."  Presumably that means transferring wealth from your bank account to hers.
• The Illuminati (of course the Illuminati are involved) are trying to destroy the world, and the main way they're doing this has to do with gay marriage.  Don't ask me how that works.
• Part of the government is being run by aliens who are reptilian in appearance, and oddly enough, I don't think she meant Mitch McConnell.
• Scientists are currently working on a vaccine to prevent people from being religious.
• Even children's toys are suspect.  She calls Pokémon "eastern demons," and has a special hatred for the Magic 8-Ball, which is a "psychic object used to start children in witchcraft."  (Sorry, Dr. Immanuel, "My sources say no.")

So this is the person that Donald Trump called "spectacular" and "very respected."

Then others took up the outcry.  Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, said that because Dr. Immanuel and Donald Trump were saying the same thing, she was being "attacked, ridiculed, and discredited" in a deliberate effort to damage Trump's reputation.  (Not, apparently, because what she was saying was certifiable horseshit.)  Simone Gold, one of the leaders of America's Frontline Doctors, said that social media was committing a crime by "censoring Physicians from speaking about COVID-19 and Hydroxychloroquine."  Radio host Mark Levin criticized several media outlets, such as The Daily Beast, for being part of a "vicious smear machine" -- because they'd quoted Dr. Immanuel verbatim.

As for the doctors who refuse to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus infections, Dr. Immanuel said, "You’re no different than a murderer.  You’re no different than Hitler."

Here we have a person who in a sane world would be looked at as a wacko, more to be pitied than censured, but because Donald Trump says he likes her, Trump-supporters nationwide suddenly act as if she's the next Jonas Salk.  (Oh, and simultaneously, they cast Dr. Anthony Fauci -- one of the world's experts in communicable disease research -- as a fool at best and an evil mastermind at worst, for saying such things as "wear a mask in public" and "don't take medications that don't work and can also kill you.")

So that's the upside-down world we currently live in.  I'd like to tell you that things will sort themselves out and that wiser and saner heads will ultimately prevail, but if there's one thing I've learned in the past four years, it's that predicting what will happen next is a loser's game.  I even tried asking the best source I have, hoping to get some clarity, desperately seeking a reason to believe that things will improve soon.

But all it would say is "Reply hazy, try again."

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Bad moon rising

It's been a good while since I've written a post about a story that's just plain loony.

Maybe it's because here in the United States, it's not so funny any more because the loonies appear to be in charge of the place, led by a man who spent ten minutes in an interview bragging about how he had successfully passed a test to detect dementia.  ("The doctors were amazed," he said.)

But yesterday I ran into a story that was so completely wacky that I would be remiss in not bringing it to your attention.  As with so many strange things lately, it began on TikTok, the bizarre social media site wherein people upload short videos of themselves doing dances or singing songs or whatnot.  Me, I don't honestly see the point.  It was ages before I was even willing to get on Instagram, and mostly what I do there is upload photographs of my dogs, my garden, and stuff about running.  (If you want to see pics of my dogs etc., you can follow me @skygazer227.)

Be that as it may, TikTok is wildly popular.  It has remained popular despite allegations that the app contains some kind of spyware from China.  TikTok users have been credited with reserving hundreds of seats at Donald Trump's Tulsa rally and then not showing up.  And apparently, it is also the host of a "vibrant witch community," which is called, I shit you not, "WitchTok."

But this is where things start to get a little weird.  Because a rumor started to circulate on "WitchTok" that a group of "baby witches" had put a hex on the Moon.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Luc Viatour, Full Moon Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It's unclear how the rumor got started, but once it did, it gained a life of its own, spreading to those estimable conduits for bizarre bullshit, Twitter and Reddit.  When the elder witches who were panicking about the thing tried to find out who these alleged "baby witches" were, they were unsuccessful.

For most of us, this would have been sufficient to conclude that there was nothing to the rumor, and to say, "Ha-ha, what a silly thing I almost fell for, right there."  But no.  The apparent absence of the "baby witches" could only mean one thing, they said: the hex on the Moon had backfired and killed all the "baby witches."

Well, with all the "baby witches" dead, surely that would put an end to it, right?  If you believe that, you don't know how social media works.  This made the rumor spread faster, with other witches claiming that they were the ones who'd hexed the Moon, not the "baby witches," and next they'd go after the Sun.  Some said that not only was the Moon hexed by these evildoers, but so were the "fae," the non-human denizens of fairyland, and admittedly this would be a pretty nasty thing to do if the fae actually existed.  One Twitter user, @heartij, cautioned that all this was walking on some pretty thin ice.  "Upsetting deities is the last thing any rational practitioner would want to do," they said, and I can't disagree with that, although none of this seems to have much to do with anything I'd call "rational."

@heartij added rather darkly, "the people behind the hex are more than likely being handled accordingly."

Others said that there was nothing to worry about, that the Moon was perfectly capable of withstanding being hexed, and that everything would settle down once the stars went into a better alignment.  "The Moon is a celestial being which controls us," said Ally Cooke, a trainee priestess.  "We’re currently in a new Moon that takes place in the sign of Cancer, which explains why so many practicing witches report disconnects with the Moon or personal odd feelings, but they’re confusing them with evidence for malpractice.  This new Moon is centered around releasing, and Cancer is a water sign, so emotions are running high at this time."

Makes perfect sense to me.

My first inclination upon reading this was to point out that through all this, the Moon has continued to circle around the Earth completely unchanged, and in fact not even looking a little worried.  But upon reading a bunch of the posts from WitchTok members and commenters on Reddit and Twitter, it became apparent that they're not saying anything physical has happened to the Moon.  It's all just invisible "bad energies" and "negative frequencies" aimed in the Moon's general direction.  But my question is -- forgive me if I'm naïve -- if (1) the hex itself operates by some mechanism that is invisible, and (2) it hasn't had any apparent result, how do you know it happened?

I guess we're back to "personal odd feelings."  For whatever that's worth.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Me, I find it a refreshing change of pace from stories about elected officials who studied at the Boss Tweed School of Ethics and a president who thinks you get extra points for successfully saying "person, woman, man, camera, TV" from memory.  Compared with that, witches trying to stop other witches from aiming invisible hexes at distant astronomical objects is honestly a welcome diversion.

*****************************

Being in the middle of a pandemic, we're constantly being urged to wash our hands and/or use hand sanitizer.  It's not a bad idea, of course; multiple studies have shown that communicable diseases spread far less readily if people take the simple precaution of a thirty-second hand-washing with soap.

But as a culture, we're pretty obsessed with cleanliness.  Consider how many commercial products -- soaps, shampoos, body washes, and so on -- are dedicated solely to cleaning our skin.  Then there are all the products intended to return back to our skin and hair what the first set of products removed; the whole range of conditioners, softeners, lotions, and oils.

How much of this is necessary, or even beneficial?  That's the topic of the new book Clean: The New Science of Skin by doctor and journalist James Hamblin, who considers all of this and more -- the role of hyper-cleanliness in allergies, asthma, and eczema, and fascinating and recently-discovered information about our skin microbiome, the bacteria that colonize our skin and which are actually beneficial to our overall health.  Along the way, he questions things a lot of us take for granted... such as whether we should be showering daily.

It's a fascinating read, and looks at the question from a data-based, scientific standpoint.  Hamblin has put together the most recent evidence on how we should treat the surfaces of our own bodies -- and asks questions that are sure to generate a wealth of discussion.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Defeating the trolls

I'm a firm believer in the idea that most people, most of the time, are trying as hard as they can to do the right thing.

Yes, we often differ about what that right thing is.  Yes, sometimes we try and fail.  But my point is, we are usually working to do the best we can for ourselves and our loved ones.

But.

There is a minority of people who, to put it bluntly, are assholes.  These are the people who can't stand it if others get recognition, are furious when their pet ideas turn out to be wrong, or are simply spiteful and nasty.  And that ugly minority can, unfortunately, be extremely loud at times.

Look at what happened last week to Dr. Katie Bouman, the astrophysicist who spearheaded the project to generate the world's first actual photograph of a black hole.

You'd think that anyone with a scientific bent would have been thrilled, both for her and because of the extraordinary image she helped create.  And honestly, most of us were.  But there was a handful of trolls who couldn't stand the fact that she was getting accolades for her work -- and that she showed great modesty in highlighting the work of the rest of her team.

"No one algorithm or person made this image," Dr. Bouman wrote.  "It required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat.  It has been truly an honor, and I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you all."

So said trolls decided that this was Dr. Bouman's way of admitting she really hadn't had much to do with the research, and set out to destroy her reputation.

Fake Twitter accounts and YouTube channels started popping up, all with the aim of casting doubt on her role in the project.  Many of them focused on her colleague Andrew Chael, who it was implied had done nearly all the research, which was then swiped by Bouman.  Chael himself was having none of it; he posted on Twitter a complete disavowal of the claim, and a demand that the attacks on Dr. Bouman stop.

The trolls then created a fake account in Chael's name and accelerated the nastiness.

Nota bene: if your opinion about something is on such shaky ground that in order to get people to believe it, you have to create a fake Twitter account, impersonate someone else, and then lie outright, you might want to consider whether you're right in the first place.

Twitter, to its credit (a credit that it must be said it often doesn't deserve), pulled the fake accounts as fast as it could, but not before there were thousands of people who had followed them, and tens of thousands of times that the false messages had been retweeted.  As with most false claims, it's damn hard to fix the damage once the claim is out there, regardless of how many times it's debunked, retracted, or deleted.  Witness the ongoing anti-vaxx idiocy, due largely to Andrew Wakefield, whose "studies" were withdrawn and whose work has been shown to be worthless.  Witness "chemtrails," whose genesis was due to a misquoted number on a Louisiana news broadcast.  Witness the ten thousand (literally) public lies Donald Trump has uttered in the last three years.

Undoing all that would be about as easy as putting toothpaste back into a tube.

As far as why anyone would be such a complete dick as to attack Dr. Bouman, most people are attributing it to sexism -- that the trolls couldn't believe that a woman had made such an achievement, and set out to prove that she'd relied on her male colleagues and then stole their glory.  Sadly, this explanation for the trolls' behavior is entirely plausible.  Despite considerable advances, it's still difficult for women to succeed in science.  Consider the 2017 study that showed teams led by women only receive 7% of the total grant money allocations, and a team led by a woman receives on average 40% of the money that a similar project receives if led by a man.  These figures are appalling, even if you take into account that only 17% of working scientists in physics and engineering are female -- the fields with the lowest diversity.

Which is itself appalling.

So this disgusting episode is yet another reason to be careful about what you believe online.  Double, triple, quadruple-check your sources before you pass along links.  That is especially true if the link supports something you're already inclined to believe; we all fall prey to confirmation bias.

Despite all this, I still think that humanity is, in the majority, good.  But being good means you speak up against the ugly minority who are determined to attack, demean, and degrade others.  Defeating the trolls takes an effort by all of us.  To paraphrase Edmund Burke (the paraphrase is to remove the sexist verbiage, the irony of which does not escape me): "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that the good do nothing."

**********************************

Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Fast forward

In today's contribution from the Unintentional Irony Department, we have: a study out of the University of Buffalo that examined the pervasiveness of false information on Twitter, which a Twitter user summarized incorrectly, then posted the inaccurate summary...  on Twitter.

The study, which appeared in the May 11 issue of the journal Natural Hazards, looked at the responses of people who interacted with tweeted false information following Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon shootings.  What they found was interesting, if a little disheartening.  Of the people who chose to respond to the false tweets:

• 86 to 91 percent of the users fostered the spread of the false news, either by retweeting or "liking" the original tweet;
• 5 to 9 percent looked for confirmation, most often by retweeting and requesting anyone who had accurate information to respond.
• 1 to 9 percent were dubious right from the get-go, and said they had information indicating the original tweet was incorrect.

So it's kind of discouraging that given tweets the researchers knew were false, only around ten percent of the people who chose to respond even asked the question of whether the content of the tweet was factually correct.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ibrahim.ID, Socialmedia-pm, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Jun Zhuang, lead author of the study, was up front about how alarming this is.  "These findings are important because they show how easily people are deceived during times when they are most vulnerable and the role social media platforms play in these deceptions," Zhuang said.  However, he also pointed out what was the first thing that occurred to me when I read the study.  "[However], it's possible that many people saw these tweets, decided they were inaccurate and chose not to engage."

Which, despite my frequently combative attitude here at Skeptophilia, is how I usually approach that sort of thing online.  I've found that posting rebuttals to total strangers seldom accomplishes anything, more often than not resulting in your being called a know-it-all or a deluded mouthpiece for the [fill in with your favorite political party] or simply a hopeless dunderhead.  So my guess is -- and it is just a surmise -- that the people who actually chose to interact with the tweets in question were (1) a minority, and (2) heavily skewed toward ones who already had a tendency to believe the claim in question.

In other words, yet another example of confirmation bias.

Which is what makes where I found out about this study even more wryly amusing.  Because I got the link to the Zhuang et al. study on Twitter -- from a tweet that said, "STUDY SHOWS THAT 90% OF WHAT YOU READ ON TWITTER IS FALSE!"

Well, as I hope I don't need to point out to loyal readers of Skeptophilia, that is actually not what the study said.  Not even remotely.  So a tweet saying that 90% of what's on Twitter is false was false itself.

And, for the record, I didn't respond to it, unless you consider this post a response, which I suppose it is.

What compounds this whole thing is the tendency of people to retweet (or repost) links after only having read the headline -- witness the Science Post article with the headline, "Study: 70% of Facebook Users Only Read the Headline of Science Stories Before Commenting," which was shared all over the place, despite the fact that the article contained no links to any studies, just repeated the claim in the headline, and followed up with several iterations of "Lorem Ipsum:"

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.  Nullam consectetur ipsum sit amet sem vestibulum eleifend.  Donec sed metus nisi.  Quisque ultricies nulla a risus facilisis vestibulum.  Ut luctus feugiat nisi, eget molestie magna faucibus vitae.  Morbi luctus orci eget semper fringilla.  Proin vestibulum neque a ultrices aliquet.  Fusce imperdiet purus in euismod accumsan.  Suspendisse potenti.  Nullam efficitur feugiat nibh, at pellentesque mauris.  Suspendisse potenti.  Maecenas efficitur urna velit, ut gravida enim vestibulum eu.  Nullam suscipit finibus tellus convallis lacinia.  Aenean ex nunc, posuere sit amet mauris ac, venenatis efficitur nulla.  Nam auctor eros eu libero rutrum, ac tristique nunc tincidunt.  Mauris eu turpis rutrum mi scelerisque volutpat.

I wonder how many people shared that article after only reading the headline.

Speaking of irony.

So anyway, I'll just beseech you once again to read the whole article before you evaluate it, and evaluate the whole article before you share it.  Ask questions.  Look for supporting information.  Consult such fact-checking sites as Snopes and PolitiFact.  Consider source bias -- and the natural tendency to confirmation bias we all have.

Because the last thing we need is more people blindly fast-forwarding fake news.

***********************

This week's recommended book is an obscure little tome that I first ran into in college.  It's about a scientific hoax -- some chemists who claimed to have discovered what they called "polywater," a polymerized form of water that was highly viscous and stayed liquid from -70 F to 500 F or above.  The book is a fascinating, and often funny, account of an incident that combines confirmation bias with wishful thinking with willful misrepresentation of the evidence.  Anyone who's interested in the history of science or simply in how easy it is to fool the overeager -- you should put Polywater by Felix Franks on your reading list.