Ministry of propaganda

Is it too much to ask that the Trump administration simply tells the damn truth?

That's all I ask.  Just stop lying.  I'm fine with having differences of opinion over policy.  For example, claiming that unhooking from fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy would be an unreasonable burden on our economy is not the same thing as saying climate change isn't occurring.

The first is a policy question we could discuss, and perhaps, come to consensus about.  The second is a lie.  And as long as you're simply lying about the facts, there is no discussion to be had.

Take, for example, the person who would have to be included in the top five most dangerous members of this regime; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He is an anti-science ideologue of the worst sort, and because of him the CDC is now limiting access to COVID-19 vaccinations and canceling funding for this year's flu vaccine -- including the potentially pandemic bird flu.

All part of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  Because horrible policies are just fine as long as you give them a snappy name, right?

Of course right.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the U. S. Air Force]

It doesn't end with anti-vaxx nonsense, either.  Just this week, RFK stated that gender-affirming care for individuals with gender dysphoria should be discontinued -- once again, flying in the face of scientific study after scientific study.  Ignore the science, he says; instead, listen to the directives from the government.

And what is the government suggesting instead?

Why, "conversion therapy."

Yep, the same thing that was touted to "cure homosexuality," and which (once again) study after study has shown to be (1) ineffective, and (2) psychologically damaging.  RFK's letter to healthcare providers states that they should uphold their oaths to "do no harm" by following a strategy that has been conclusively shown to do harm.

Then there's his report on "gold-standard" scientific research that allegedly supports his viewpoints on holistic health and the sins of Big Pharma -- which contains (1) dozens of citations that were identified as mischaracterized by the actual authors themselves, and (2) at least seven citations for studies that appear to be nonexistent.  In other words, RFK pulled the middle-school bibliography-boosting stunt of making up plausible-looking sources, taking others and claiming they said things they didn't actually say, and hoping like hell no one notices.

Well, someone noticed.  But did he retract the report and apologize?

Ha.  Of course he didn't.  This administration never apologizes for anything.  Confronted by their own blatant lies, they just double down, stamping their feet and saying "it is so true!", and rely on the fact that their supporters have no scientific training and very short memories.

Oh, and also this week, he promised a ban on federally-funded medical researchers from publishing in top-flight journals like Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Association.  Why?  Because they're "corrupt."  Instead, he wants them to publish in a journal he's going to run, after vetting researchers as "good, legitimate scientists" -- meaning, of course, that they agree with him.

Look, it's not (as I've said many times before) that I'm unaware of the problems inherent in the American medical system.  My wife is a nurse, so I hear about a lot of it from her, and I've witnessed the misery that friends and family members have gone through trying to navigate their way through predatory insurance companies, inefficient and understaffed medical care providers, and ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals.  I have one friend who's had a ton of chronic health problems, and has gone through the wringer with misprescribed medications and unmanaged side effects.

But RFK is making a bad situation much, much worse.  His outright lies and barrage of unapologetic misinformation are going to kill people, pure and simple.  But my guess is that no one is going to pull on the reins, because we can't stop a program called "Make America Healthy Again," right?  What, do you want to Make America Unhealthy Again?

Honestly, I put the lion's share of the blame here on the members of Congress who voted to approve his appointment to the Cabinet.  It's not like his views were some kind of a secret; we knew about incidents like his lies about the measles vaccine resulting in an epidemic in Samoa that killed eighty people.  The man goes way past "unqualified," into the territory of "outright dangerous."  He should never have been appointed, much less confirmed.

So this is episode #352,981 of "We Tried To Warn You."  And now we're seeing the results of that dreadful lapse of civic responsibility on the part of our elected officials.

All I can say is that insofar as you can, take care of your health.  Take precautions, get the vaccines that are available, and educate yourself using actual scientific research and not Ministry of Propaganda doublespeak.  Even so, my suspicion is that it's going to be a rough few years.

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

The imaginary scientist

The unfortunate reality is that in this "Age of Information," where we as a species have the ability to store, access, and transfer knowledge with a speed that fifty years ago would have been in the realm of science fiction, it is harder than ever to know what's true and what isn't.

The internet is as good a conduit of bullshit as it is of the truth.  Not only are there plenty of well-intentioned but ill-informed people, there are lots of folks who lie deliberately for their own ends -- monetary gain, power, influence, the dubious thrill of having pulled off a hoax, or just their "five minutes of fame."  It used to be that in order to be successful, these purveyors of bad information had to go to the trouble and expense of writing a book, or at least of finding a way to get speaking engagements.  Now that anyone with money and access can own a webpage, there's nothing stopping cranks, liars, hoaxers, and the rest from getting their message out there to the entire electronic world simultaneously.

When I taught a high school course in critical thinking, one of my mantras was "check your sources."  If you find a claim online, where did it come from?  What is the originator's background -- does it seem like (s)he has sufficient knowledge and expertise?  Has it been checked and corroborated by others?  If it's from a journal, is it a peer-reviewed source -- or one of the all-too-common "pay to play" journals that will take damn near anything you write if you're willing to pay them to do it?  Does it line up with what we already know from science and history?  (Another mantra was "nearly every time someone claims 'this new theory will overturn everything we know about physics!', it turns out to be wrong.")

None of this guarantees that the claim is correct, of course; but using those questions as general guidelines will help you to navigate the intellectual minefield of science representation on the internet.

Except when it doesn't.

As an example of this, have you heard of Camille Noûs?

I hadn't, until I read a troubling story that appeared last week in Nature, written by Cathleen O'Grady.  Camille Nôus first showed up as a signatory on an open letter about science policy in France early last year, and since then has been listed as a co-author on no fewer than 180 different papers.  She?  He? -- the name "Camille" could be either, which I don't think is accidental -- has been racking up citation after citation, in a wide range of unrelated fields, including astrophysics, ecology, chemistry, and molecular biology.

Pretty impressive accomplishments in the world of research, where increasing specialization has resulted in what a friend of mine described as "researchers knowing more and more about less and less until finally they'll know everything about nothing."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Yakuzakorat, Scientists are working in the lab.9, CC BY 4.0]

This same narrowing of focus is why the red flag of Camille Noûs's ubiquity would never become apparent to many scientists; they might find the name over and over in papers from their field of evolutionary biology, for example, and not realize -- probably never even see -- that Noûs had also, astonishingly, co-authored papers in medical biochemistry.

So what's going on here?

By this point, it probably will come as no shock that Camille Noûs doesn't exist.  The last name "Noûs" was chosen because "nous" means "we" in French, and is also a play on the Greek word νοῦς, which means "reason."  Noûs was the brainchild of  RogueESR, a French science advocacy group, as a way to personify collective efforts and knock the elitist attitude of some leading scientists down a peg.  RogueESR protested the cost-saving approach by many research institutions of eliminating tenure-track positions and making just about all available openings temporary, project-specific research, and they decided to come up with a moniker representing the human, group-cooperative side of science.

"Hundreds of articles will make this name the top author on the planet," they wrote in a newsletter, "with the consequence of distorting certain bibliometric statistics and demonstrating the absurdity of individual quantitative assessment."

Well, okay, I get the point.  At its best, science is a collective effort, and one should never lose sight of the fact that behind every technical paper there are creative, curious human minds who shouldn't be treated as expendable and replaceable cogs in a machine.  But the problem is, if you can't trust a paper in a major peer-reviewed journal to print the truth, who can you trust?  Yes, sometimes scientists make mistakes, and papers have to be retracted; but admitting an error, and publishing something that is known to be false up-front, are hardly the same thing.

Some journals are taking a stance on this issue, and are refusing to accept papers with Noûs's name on the list of authors, or at least agreeing to publish only if the name is removed.  But the fact that Noûs is already listed as an author on 180 papers -- and those papers are being cited in other papers, and round and round and round -- means that the imaginary author won't disappear any time soon.

While I certainly agree with the motives behind the protest, this is an ethically questionable way of approaching it.  There is already enough distrust of science and scientists by the general public; the very last thing we need is researchers including an out-and-out lie in their papers, however noble their intentions, however tongue-in-cheek the lie is.

The people who are joining the protest and adding Noûs to their author list need to find another way to make their opinions on the issue heard.

The reason we critical thinking non-scientists always want people to go to the peer-reviewed research is because it is -- or should be -- the gold standard for representing the best, most thoroughly-tested, most comprehensive and accurate knowledge we currently have.  The Camille Noûs stunt weakens the whole enterprise.  "The campaign is naïve and ethically questionable," said Lisa Rasmussen, a bioethicist at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte.  "It flouts the basic principle of taking responsibility alongside the credit of authorship."

Which is it exactly.  I'll still rely on research in journals like Science and Nature when I want to be certain of my facts, but the whole incident brings home the unfortunate fact that even when you do your best to check your sources, you can still be led astray.  Science, however rigorous its methods, is still a human pursuit, and like all human pursuits, can be subject to bias, misjudgment, error -- and outright falsification, however well-intentioned.

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

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

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