Hype detector

There's a problem with online science directed at laypeople.

I was discussing this with a friend yesterday.  Although he and I both have a decent science background, we're both very much generalists by nature.  We're interested in many different topics, we're each kinda sorta vaguely good at maybe a dozen of them, but we're actual experts in none.  It's not that I think this is an inherently bad thing; having a broad knowledge base is part of why I was a good high school teacher.  I did a decent job teaching biology, but could still field the occasional pop fly into deep right about, say, the ancient history of Norway.

The issue centers around the fact that curious people like myself are attracted to what we don't know, so when we see something unusual and attention-grabbing, we want to click on it.  Couple this tendency with a second issue -- that when sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are monetized, it's based on the number of clicks (or the minutes watched) -- and you have what amounts to an attractive nuisance.

There are some sites that do their level best to present science as accurately and fairly as possible; two excellent examples are Neil deGrasse Tyson's YouTube channel StarTalk and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst's outstanding channel Dr. Becky.  (If you're interested in astronomy, you should subscribe to both of these immediately.)  But intermingled with those are hundreds of others that mix a smidgen of science with a heaping handful of sensationalized hype, designed to get you to say "WTF?" and click the link -- because that's how they get revenue.

I'm not going to give you any links -- they don't deserve it -- but a quick perusal of my "Recommended For You" YouTube videos this morning included the following:

• One claiming that Betelgeuse is ABOUT TO GO SUPERNOVA (capitalization theirs), with a caption of "Life on Earth Will Be Wiped Out?" and a photo of physicist Michio Kaku looking worried.
• "If You See the Sky Turn This Color, Run!" -- turns out it's the "green sky = tornado" thing, and when you strip away all the excess verbiage it boils down to the rather well-known fact that tornadoes are scary and you should avoid being in the middle of one.
• "99% of Humans Die -- Could It Happen Again?"  This one is about the Toba Eruption, the effects of which are far from settled in scientific circles, and the answer to the question is "I guess so, but it's not likely any time soon."
• "Why an Impossible Paradox Inside Black Holes Appears to Break Physics!"  This is about the "information paradox," which is certainly curious, but it (1) obviously isn't impossible because it exists, (2) isn't about the inside of black holes because by definition we don't know what happens in there, and (3) hasn't "broken physics" (although it did demonstrate that our knowledge of black holes is incomplete, which is hardly surprising).
• "Yellowstone Volcano Simulation!" -- heavy on the catastrophizing and AI-generated footage of people being vaporized, light on the science.  As I've pointed out here at Skeptophilia, there is no sign that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is anywhere near an eruption.

And so on and so forth.

The trouble is, science videos and webpages exist on a spectrum, with wonderful sites like Veritasium on one end and outright lunacy like the subject of yesterday's post (about people who have allegedly jumped through time and space and ended up back in the Carboniferous Period) on the other.  It's usually pretty obvious when you find one that's straight-up science; the total wackos are also generally easy to spot.

It's the ones in the middle that are troublesome.  They mix in just enough science to give them the façade of reliability, but stir it into a ton of flashy, sensationalized speculation.  Since minutes watched = dollars earned, these videos generally draw out the message; they're often way longer than the topic warrants, and are characterized by endless repetition.  (I watched one twenty-minute video on Cretaceous dinosaurs that must have said eight times, "a fearsome predator unlike anything we currently have on Earth"!)

It's hard to know what to do about this.  Even people who are intellectually curious and want to learn actual science like to be entertained; and there's nothing wrong with framing scientific content in a way that's engaging to the audience, something that the three outstanding sites I mentioned certainly do.  But the monetized social media model feeds into the practice of using science as clickbait, and therefore encourages content creators to exaggerate (or outright fabricate) the story to make it seem more exciting or edgy or dangerous than it actually is, with the result that people come away less well-informed than they went in.

Which is frustrating, but isn't going to change any time soon.  And I guess this sort of sensationalized garbage is nothing new; all that's changed is the delivery mode.  Growing up, every time I went through a grocery store checkout line I was assaulted by The Weekly World News, which featured headlines about BatBoy and the Lost Continent of Atlantis and Elvis Is Still Alive And Was Spotted In Tokyo, and I came away mostly unscathed.

So the important thing is teaching people how to tease apart the good science from the hype.  But honestly, it always has been.

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Schadenfreude in the morning

I just found out that Alex Jones has lost his platforms on Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.  And although I fully support the right to free speech, my reaction was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, sputter* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

The reason given is that he repeatedly broke their rules against hate speech and the incitement of violence.  The only thing surprising about this is how long it took them to act.  This is the man who claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre never occurred, that no children had been killed, and the parents were "crisis actors" hired by the Left to fake a mass murder.  The result was ongoing harassment of the grieving parents by idiots who believe everything that Jones says.  He said the same thing about the Parkland/Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, adding there that the teenage survivors were being paid by Democrats to agitate against the NRA -- because clearly, articulate and intelligent young people are not able to form opinions of their own without being bought off by cynical politicians.

Jones, who has run InfoWars for many years, has spouted this kind of bullshit for as long as I can remember.  (Check out RationalWiki if you'd like to see a concise list of the insane ideas he's touted on his show.)  People call him a "Right-wing conspiracy theorist," which is an all-too-kind euphemism for "liar."  I'm fully convinced Jones knows exactly what he's doing; he whips up controversy because it gets viewers, gets clicks on his website, gets customers to buy his "male-enhancement" pills (no, I'm not making this up).  If there was any doubt about the fact that he's a con man and not a true believer, it was removed when Jones's lawyer, during the custody trial between Jones and his ex-wife, said Jones was "a performance artist playing a character."  In one of the many lawsuits Jones has faced, the defense attorney said, "No reasonable person would believe what Jones says" -- implying that if people are hoodwinked, it's their own fault.

Maybe.  I am neither qualified, nor interested, in debating the finer points of law surrounding culpability.  All I can say is that giving Alex Jones fewer platforms for spreading his sewage is unequivocally a good thing.  And I'm happy to say that Jones himself is taking it in his usual measured, dignified, thoughtful fashion.  I saw a YouTube clip showing his reaction when he heard the news, and because he also lost his YouTube channel *brief pause to stop guffawing again* I can't post a link to it, so here's the next closest thing.

I think we can all agree that we want Alex to know we're sending him our thoughts and prayers.

I'm not expecting his banishment to have much effect on the fans of InfoWars, or at least not right away.  After all, his claim (and the claims of his lawyers) that he was an actor -- i.e., he didn't actually believe everything he was saying -- hardly made a dent.  But given that these people have the attention span of a gnat -- and, apparently, the IQ of one as well -- it shouldn't take long for them to forget all about Jones and tune into some other conspiracy-touting nutjob.  Maybe Sean Hannity.  Or Ann Coulter.  (She's still around, isn't she?  I keep waiting for someone to dump a bucket of water on her and make her melt.)

But a tremendous amount of the toxic garbage making its way into the narrative of the extreme Right can be traced back to Jones, and if this really is sayonara, I'm glad to see him go.  Notwithstanding that he has been a fertile source of topics for Skeptophilia -- I've lost track of the number of times he's appeared here -- anything we can do to reduce the pollution stream is a good thing.

So there's a little tasty schadenfreude to go with your morning coffee.  Given how desperate I've been for good news, it's nice to be able to pass along some.  I don't really think this means Alex Jones will shut up -- nothing could accomplish that -- but at least it may mean that fewer people will be listening.

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This week's book recommendation is especially for people who are fond of historical whodunnits; The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  It chronicles the attempts by Dr. John Snow to find the cause of, and stop, the horrifying cholera epidemic in London in 1854.

London of the mid-nineteenth century was an awful place.  It was filled with crashing poverty, and the lack of any kind of sanitation made it reeking, filthy, and disease-ridden.  Then, in the summer of 1854, people in the Broad Street area started coming down with the horrible intestinal disease cholera (if you don't know what cholera does to you, think of a bout of stomach flu bad enough to dehydrate you to death in 24 hours).  And one man thought he knew what was causing it -- and how to put an end to it.

How he did this is nothing short of fascinating, and the way he worked through to a solution a triumph of logic and rationality.  It's a brilliant read for anyone interested in history, medicine, or epidemiology -- or who just want to learn a little bit more about how people lived back in the day.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The Skeptophilia YouTube channel is live!

Hi all,

I'm back from the writers' retreat in Arkansas, wherein I got to schmooze with my publisher and other fiction writers, and generally enjoy being around like-minded folks.  I'll be back with a new Skeptophilia post on Monday, but I wanted to do a short announcement today that we've got a new feature...

... drumroll...

The Official Skeptophilia YouTube Channel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Anthony Cramp, Fireworks - Adelaide Skyshow 2010, CC BY 2.0]

You'll get to hear me doing some musing on topics from profound to silly (most of the first ones are silly, for what it's worth), just like I do every day here at Skepto.  We'll try to have a new one up every other Thursday; for now, we've got five videos up as a starter.  If you like them -- and we very much hope you do -- leave us a thumbs-up and/or subscribe to our channel.  As with the blog, if you have any suggestions for topics you'd like me to cover, drop me an email.

Now toddle over to YouTube and check us out.  Hope they cheer up your day.  See you for real in a couple of days!

cheers,

Gordon

Natural smackdown

For today's piping hot serving of schadenfreude, we have: YouTube has terminated Mike Adams's account.

Adams, you probably know, is the wingnut who founded Natural News, which is the world's biggest clearinghouse for loony alt-med claims and unfounded conspiracy theories about things like "toxins."  Amongst other completely wacko ideas, Adams claims that:

• AIDS is not caused by HIV.
• Infectious diseases in general are not caused by germs.
• We're all being poisoned by "chemtrails."
• Evidence-based medical research is a huge shell game being played by doctors, scientists, and "Big Pharma," with the aim of keeping us sick so they can keep making money.
• GMOs are all hazardous to human health.
• Homeopathy works.

So this termination is actually a big deal.  The account's entire library of videos was deleted, meaning that if someone linked or embedded one of them on a secondary site or blog, they will now show as "This Video Is No Longer Available."

Before you start yelling at me about the First Amendment and free speech, allow me to state for the record that "Free Speech" doesn't mean you have the right to say anything, anywhere, with no consequences.  I can claim the First Amendment protects my right to tell my boss to fuck off, and no court in the land will side with me if I'm fired.  YouTube quite rightly has rules to play by, and if someone's account violates those rules, it is entirely within their purview to delete their videos.

Adams, predictably, had a complete meltdown, just like he did when Google took steps to stop him from gaming their search engine optimization software to propel his links to the top of search pages.  He, of course, claimed that the action taken was not because he violated one of Google's policies; this was a targeted attack against his message.  And now YouTube has joined the ranks of the persecutors.  Adams said:

In the latest gross violation of free speech committed by radical left-wing tech giants, YouTube has now deleted the entire Health Ranger video channel, wiping out over 1,700 videos covering everything from nutrition, natural medicine, history, science and current events. 

Over the last two weeks, YouTube has been on a censorship rampage that’s apparently run by the SPLC, a radical left-wing hate group that despises Christianity, the Second Amendment and patriots in particular.  Hundreds of prominent conservative video channels have been targeted for termination by YouTube, leading many independent media leaders like myself to call for government regulation of YouTube to protect free speech and end the tyranny.

The SPLC, allow me to point out, is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, hate crimes, and extremists in the United States, and only gets involved with YouTube if there's a video that promotes ethnic, racial, or religious hatred.  So targeting the SPLC is nothing short of bizarre.

But the long and short of it is, YouTube is a privately owned, for-profit company, and there is no reason in the world that it should have to host Mike Adams's nutcake screeds if the Board of Directors says it doesn't want to, any more than I should have to allow Adams to do a guest post on Skeptophilia because he claims it's his right under the First Amendment.  So in fact, what he's doing right now is whining because he flouted the rules and got caught at it, and is trying to deflect the blame on the liberals and tech giants and (for fuck's sake) the SPLC.

Myself, I have to admit my reaction to this was: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  Much as I advocate for the right of free expression and the principle of caveat emptor, it really would be a better world if we had fewer people making crazy and potentially dangerous claims.  So I'm afraid I can't work up much sympathy for Adams.  In fact, what I really wish is that he would take Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Gwyneth Paltrow along with him.  That would really be some schadenfreude I could get behind.

Laptops of the ancients

Every once in a while, I run into a crazy claim that is so weird that it's actually kind of charming.

That was my reaction to an article sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, about a guy who thinks that there are images from Ancient Greece that show people using laptop computers.

Those images include this marble sculpture:

And this black-on-red ware vase:

In case that isn't sufficiently convincing, we're told that the sculpture even has cable connection ports:

Once again illustrating that you can't misinterpret it if I tell you what it is ahead of time.

The whole thing is the brainchild (to use the term loosely) of YouTube contributor StillSpeakingOut, who seems pretty convinced. "I can’t help but think," StillSpeakingOut tells us, "that Erich von Däniken had been right all this time and that most of these myths of magical artifacts given by the gods to a very restricted group of individuals in ancient civilizations were high-tech devices similar to what we have today...  I am not saying that this is depicting an ancient laptop computer, but when I look at the sculpture I can’t help but think about the Oracle of Delphi, which was supposed to allow the priests to connect with the gods to retrieve advanced information and various aspects."

No, labeling the diagram with a red arrow and the text "Laptop?" is definitely not saying that the sculpture depicts a laptop, presumably by virtue of adding the question mark.

Of course, those silly old rationalist historians have been quick to squelch the whole idea of the Ancient Greeks inventing wifi.  The "laptop" depicted in both pieces, they say, is actually one of the following:

• a wax tablet, used for writing
• a jewelry box
• a mirror

But I think we can all agree that when it comes to speculating over the identity of an object in a piece of ancient art, one should definitely choose the answer that requires you to believe that the ancients had a piece of technology that they didn't, in fact, have.

Because if you think the Ancient Greeks had laptops, it kind of brings up a few questions, you know?  Like why haven't we found any traces of them in archaeological dig sites?  Where are depictions of all of the other things that you'd need to make a laptop go, like modems, routers, cables, and a mechanism for producing electricity?

And most damning of all, if the Greeks had computers, why is there no mention in their literature of people spending their free time sending each other comical pictures of cats and poorly-spelled memes suggesting that people of the opposite political party are brainless, spineless, heartless, soulless, and depraved?

When you think about it, all you have in both pieces of art are objects made of two flat things hinged together, and it's not like laptops are the only possibility for that configuration.

So I'm not buying it.  And I'm especially not impressed that as support, StillSpeakingOut brought up Erich von Däniken, who kind of sucks as an expert witness, given that he thinks that Odin, Thor, Loki et al. were aliens from another planet.  Sad to say, but the prosaic answer is almost certainly right, and the folks depicted in the art work were almost certainly not checking their Biblos-prosópou, which is as close as I can get to the Ancient Greek equivalent of "Facebook."