The ladder of credibility

When I taught Critical Thinking in high school, one of the principles I harped on was "check your sources."

The difficulty is, I don't just mean "see where the claim is mentioned."  You also need to do the work of seeing if the source that mentions it is itself reputable.  But there's an additional complication that makes our job as skeptics way harder, and that's the handoff that occurs, one source to another, sometimes leaving a story light years from where it started.

Let's look at an example of this phenomenon, which is the strange claim that appeared in a 2023 paper in The Journal of World Science.  The paper was entitled "Concept of Time Travel and the Different Theories Making it Possible and the Implications of Time Travel," and was by three authors, one from Pakistan and two from a university in Indonesia.

The paper opens with a bang:

In March 2003, the FBI arrested 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin.  Newspapers reported that this man was so fortunate in the history of the Stock Market.  He invested $800, and within two weeks, it turned into $350 million.  The FBI suspected that he was running a scam.  That he was an inside trader.  When Andrew was questioned, he answered that he was a time traveler.  He claimed that he was a traveler from 250 years in the future and that he knew how the stocks would perform, so he invested in them and got the extraordinary result.  The FBI was convinced that he was lying, and when they investigated some more, they found that Before December 2002, there was no record of Carlssin.  Even more surprising was that on 3rd April, Carlssin had to appear in court for his bail hearing, but he had disappeared, never to be found again.  Was he a time traveler?

Well, first off, the odd diction, sentence fragments, and random capitalization should be a hint that something is amiss; reputable journals are usually pretty careful about this kind of thing.  It could be that (given the fact that none of the authors come from a predominantly English-speaking country) that was the fault of the translator(s), however, so we'll let that slide for now.

But if you read a little further, you find that the weirdness only intensifies:

The first way is to get a glimpse of the past by Teleporting from one place of the universe to another distant place in the universe with instant travel and then; through any strong Telescope and then look back on the Earth through it then, we can able to see how many lights year before our earth looks like, how much in the past we can see is dependent on our distance from Earth the far we are the far we can see in the Past (Rabounski & Borissova, 2022).  Because it takes a significant time for light to travel from one place to another, even with how fast light travels, if we talk about distance in light-years, it takes years for light to travel to some places.  So, if we could get somewhere before the light reaches there and then look back at the approaching light, the light would be from the past.  That is how we can see the past.

Simple!  Get to a distant planet faster than light, and look back at Earth through a telescope!  How come I didn't think of that?

But hey, it's in a scientific journal, right?  With source citations and everything! 

Someone shoulda told the Doctor.  He could have ditched the TARDIS altogether.

There's a wee problem, here, though.  The Andrew Carlssin story that started the paper, and which is repeatedly referred to throughout, ended up in The Journal of World Science after repeated handoffs wherein the claim incrementally worked its way up the ladder of credibility (and in fact, along the way showed up in a number of reasonably reliable news services, albeit usually in their "Odd Stories" or "Unsolved Mysteries" features).  But if you trace the thread from its appearance in a science journal in 2023 all the way back to its origins in 2003, you find out that the whole thing started...

... in The Weekly World News.

Yes, The Weekly World News, that wonderful tabloid famous for features about Taylor Swift secretly giving birth to Bigfoot's baby, and that a creature called Bat Boy is going to win the U. S. presidential election in 2032.  (My feeling at the moment is President Boy wouldn't be any worse than our current excuse for a leader.)

My conclusion from this is that there should be some kind of skeptic's version of "All Roads Lead to Rome" that goes, "All Bullshit Ultimately Leads Back to The Weekly World News."

Despite its antecedents, since then, the Carlssin story has appeared all over the place, usually with no mention of its absurd roots.  An example is a story in Medium that treats it as if it were one hundred percent real, and which along the way suggests that Greta Thunberg is also a time traveler.  "Many [people] wonder," the author says, "if she possesses the power to bend time itself."

What I wonder is who those "many people" are.  My thought is it's a little like how Trump says "I've heard from dozens of reputable sources..." immediately before he says something that amounts to "... this idiotic lie that I just now pulled out of my ass, and that you'd have to have the IQ of a bar of soap to believe."

To illustrate how this handoff can occur, I deliberately chose a ridiculous example that (I dearly hope) none of you would have believed regardless where you read it.  But the same thing happens with more serious claims.  You hear some statistic -- such as the claim that in the last eight months, U.S. policies have spurred seventeen trillion dollars of foreign investment into our country's industry -- and find it's quoted all over the place, including in reputable news services.  In this case, if you're reasonably savvy you might pick up on the red flag that the claim is more than a little bit implausible; seventeen trillion dollars is around one-fifth of the total gross national product of every nation on Earth combined.

But then you start tracking it backward, and you find out that it traces its origins to yet another instance of Donald Trump plucking a random number out of thin air to make himself look good, and the few news sources who are willing to challenge him on anything have identified it as a flat-out unadulterated lie.  The rest just passed it off as fact -- and then the handoff began, until the figure became so well-publicized that if you google "seventeen trillion dollars" the entire first page of hits is about the amazing windfall American businesses are receiving because of Trump's policies.

So it's not sufficient any more to say "I read it in The Wall Street Journal."  To be honest, it probably never was.  If you want to be certain of something, you have to figure out where the claim originated -- which can be difficult work.  But the alternative is trusting the knowledge and good intentions of the media source you use.

These days, that is seriously thin ice.

If you want to be informed, which I hope all of you do, watch your sources.  Find out where they got the information, and make sure the sort of twenty-year-long Game of Telephone that landed a time travel story from The Weekly World News in The Journal of World Science hasn't tempted you to believe something ludicrous.

Even if "many people" are saying it.

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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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The problem with research

If there's one phrase that torques the absolute hell out of me -- and just about every actual scientist out there -- it's, "Well, I did my research."

Oh, you did, did you?  What lab did you do your research in?  Or was it field work?  Let's see your data!  Which peer-reviewed journal published your research?  How many times has it been cited in other scientific journals?

Part of the problem, of course, is like a lot of words in the English language -- "theory" and "proof" are two examples that come to mind -- the word "research" is used one way by actual researchers and a different way by most other people.  We were taught the alternate definition of "research" in grade school, with being assigned "research papers," which meant "go out and look up stuff other people have found out on the topic, and summarize that in your own words."  There's a value to doing this; it's a good starting place to understanding a subject, and is honestly where we all began with scholarship.

The problem is -- and it exists even at the grade-school level of inquiry -- this kind of "research" is only as good as the sources you choose.  When I was a teacher, one of the hardest things to get students to understand was that all sources are not created equal.  A paper in Science, or even the layperson's version of it in Scientific American or Discover, is head-and-shoulders above the meanderings of Some Random Guy in his blog.  (And yes, I'm well aware that this pronouncement is being made by Some Random Guy in his blog.)

That doesn't mean those less-reputable sources are necessarily wrong, of course.  It's more that they can't be relied upon.  While papers in Science (and other comparable journals) are occasionally retracted for errors or inaccuracies, there is a vetting process that makes their likelihood of being correct vastly higher.  After all, any oddball with a computer can create a website, and post whatever they want on it, be it brilliant posts about cutting-edge science or the looniest of wingnuttery.

The confusion between the two definitions of the word research has the effect of increasing people's confidence in the kind we were all doing in middle school, and giving that low-level snooping about an undeserved gloss of reputability.  This was the upshot of a paper in Nature (peer-reviewed science, that), by Kevin Aslett of the University of Central Florida et al., entitled, "Online Searches to Evaluate Misinformation Can Increase Its Perceived Veracity."  Their results are kind of terrifying, if not unexpected given the "post-truth society" we've somehow slid into.  The authors write:

Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it... across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them...  We find that the search effect is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.  Our results indicate that those who search online to evaluate misinformation risk falling into data voids, or informational spaces in which there is corroborating evidence from low-quality sources. 

The tendency appears to be that when someone is "doing their research" on a controversial subject, what they do is an online search, pursued until they find two or three hits on sources that corroborate what they already believed, and that strengthens their conviction that they were right in the first place.  The study found that very little attention was usually given to the quality of those sources, or where those sources got the information themselves.  If it makes the "researcher" nod sagely and say, "Yeah, that's what I thought," it doesn't matter if the information came from NASA -- or from QAnon.

The problem is, a lot of those bogus sources can look convincing. 

Other times, of course, all you have to be able to do is add two-digit numbers to realize that they're full of shit.

People see data in some online source, and rarely consider (1) who collected the data and why, (2) how it was analyzed, (3) what information wasn't included in the analysis, and (4) whether it was verified, and if so how and by whom.  I first ran into the old joke about "73.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot" years ago, and it's still funny, even if our laughs are rather wry these days.  Sites like Natural News, Food Babe, Before It's News, Breitbart.com, Mercola.com, InfoWars, One America News, and even a few with scholarly-sounding names -- like The Society for Scientific Exploration, Evolution News, and The American College of Pediatricians are three examples -- are clearinghouses for fringe-y and discredited ideas, often backed up by data that's either cherry-picked and misrepresented, or from sources even further down the ladder of sketchy credibility.

Given how much bullshit is out there,  a lot of it well-hidden behind facts, figures, and fancy writing, it can be a challenge for laypeople (and I very much count myself amongst their numbers) to discern truth from fiction.  It's also an uphill struggle to fight against the very natural human tendency of confirmation bias; we all would love it if our cherished notions of how the world works were one hundred percent correct.  But if we want to make smart decisions, we all need to stop saying "I did my research" when all that "research" involved was a twenty-minute Google search to find the website of some random crank who confirmed what we already believed.

Remember, as the brilliant journalist Kathryn Schulz points out, that one of the most mind-expanding and liberating things we can say is, "I don't know.  Maybe I'm wrong."  And to start from that open-minded perspective and find out what the facts really are -- from the actual researchers.

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Looking out of the window

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, about how the best way to defang would-be fascists is to laugh directly into their faces, today we consider a second issue of political importance, to wit: why have the media completely dropped the ball with regards to fact-checking?

As British investigative journalist Nick Davies put it, "Journalists interview a woman in one room who says it's sunny.  Then they interview a man in another room who says it’s raining.  Your job, as a journalist, is not to simply write up what you have been told.  Your job is to look out of the damned window."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roger H. Goun from Brentwood, NH, USA, Reporter's notebook (2330323726), CC BY 2.0]

Instead, the trend has been for journalists to nod sagely as the person makes whatever lunatic pronouncement they're going on about at the moment, giving the impression to observers that it makes perfect sense -- and empowering said lunatic to repeat the claim again later, only louder.

Take, for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is odious for many reasons but not least because of his staunch resistance to taking measures toward containing COVID-19.  At a rally, DeSantis came out not only against vaccine mandates, but against the vaccine itself.  "Almost every study now has said with these new boosters, you're more likely to get infected with the bivalent booster."  Of course, the truth is that zero studies have said that, but because virtually no one called him on it, he said it again at a recent rally -- "Every booster you take, you’re more likely to get COVID as a result of it."

Not a single reporter raised a hand to question the veracity of that remark, or to ask him to name one single study that has supported the contention.  The scary thing is that this is a lie that could, and probably has, cost lives.

Then we have the time-honored approach of candidates and elected officials realizing they've overstepped, and then saying, basically, "You didn't hear me say what you just now heard me say," and the media letting them get away with it both times.  Take, for example, Tulsa mayoral candidate Brent VanNorman, who stated explicitly that we need to require elected leaders to be Christian:

I think that if you go back and study the history of our nation and our founding, the pulpit was the primary tool [during] the Revolutionary War [for] communicating to people.  But [also], public officials had to be Christians in many areas and we’ve gone so far away from that and we need to get back.

A couple of days later, at least he was asked to clarify his comments by the Tulsa World, and if he really did mean that only Christians should hold office (despite the fact that this is exactly what he said).  VanNorman's response was:

No, no, no, no.  My point would be that I think people that are informed by Christian values make good public servants and they have a servant’s heart.  And so I would hope that, as a result of my value system, in which I care for humanity and … I try to treat people with equality, I try to treat people with love, and there’s a moral foundation that gives me that I hope people would appreciate, and that I hope that my motives are pure in what I’m doing and I’m not doing them for the wrong reason.

I'd like to tell you that he was drowned out by people shouting, "But that isn't what you said!"  But that'd be a lie.

Last, we have the statement by Donald Trump to a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, that should scare the absolute shit out of everyone, left and right and center alike -- in which he says that if he's elected president, it'll be the last time you'll ever get to vote:

I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote.  And again Christians, get out and vote, just this time.  You won’t have to do it anymore.  Four more years you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine.  You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.  I love you, Christians...  I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote.  In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.

Trump's campaign and right-wing members of Congress seemed to realize immediately how this came across -- and what bad timing it was to say the silent part out loud.  Sure, this might be their intent, but stating it to a room full of people was... impolitic, to put it mildly.  The campaign issued a statement to "clarify" it (when to damn near everyone it was plenty clear enough already), saying he was referring to  the "importance of faith," "uniting the country," and "bringing prosperity."

No, what he was referring to was becoming dictator-for-life.  Is there another meaning of "you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians" that I'm unaware of?

Tom Cotton, Republican senator from Arkansas and de facto leader of the Trump Toady Coalition, went even further, saying that of course Trump had been joking.  "I think he’s obviously making a joke about how bad things had been under Joe Biden, and how good they’ll be if we send President Trump back to the White House so we can turn the country around," Cotton said in an interview on CNN's State of the Nation.  "And that’s what the American people know.  For four years, things were good with President Trump.  We had stable prices, a growing economy, peace and stability around the world."

Notwithstanding the obvious lie about Trump's statement being "a joke," Cotton's assessment of the four-year chaos of the Trump presidency comes directly from CloudCuckooLand.  But no one called him on it.

If that wasn't clear enough, Fox News's Laura Ingraham interviewed Trump on Monday -- surely a sympathetic audience if ever there was one -- and gave him multiple opportunities to walk back his statement, or at least moderate it to assuage some of the horrified criticisms.  Trump -- whose motto is "death before admitting an error" -- refused, and merely doubled down on his original statement.  When Ingraham saw that he wasn't going to back off, she did -- irresponsible, but considering Ingraham's track record, unsurprising.

I've recently seen posts on social media lauding people like Walter Cronkite, who was one of the newscasters I remember well from when I was a kid.  He reported the news, and -- astonishingly -- you could not tell what his own political views were.  (To this day, I don't know if he was a conservative or a liberal, or somewhere in between.)  The watershed moment in the change we see from then to today was the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which opened the doors for the partisan, news-media-as-entertainment circus we have today.  I don't see any hope of its reinstitution, but we could go a long way toward repairing the damage if the people in news media reaffirmed their commitment to truth above politics.

Put more succinctly: it'd be nice if journalists started doing their fucking job.

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Conspiracy crackpots

Okay, y'all, can we agree to stop calling them conspiracy theories?  A theory is a scientific model backed up by experimentation and/or observation, which is consistent with everything we know about the topic in question.

These are not theories.  We need a new term.

Maybe conspiracy batshit lunacy.  I dunno, that's more accurate, but it's a little clunky.  I'll keep thinking on it.

The reason the topic comes up (again) is because of mega-pop-star Taylor Swift and her boyfriend Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, who will be playing in the Superbowl on February 11.  Well, Swift and Kelce made two huge mistakes, at least if you're a MAGA type; Swift endorsed Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election and is expected to endorse him again in 2024, and Kelce has appeared in commercials promoting the idea that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective.

Well.  You'd think they... I dunno.  I was gonna say "stomped all over the Constitution," but Trump himself basically did that.  Then I was going to say "threatened to drown small children," but Texas Governor Greg Abbott did that.  Then I was going to say "wanted to restrict freedom of speech," but Florida Governor (and failed presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis did that.

So comparisons kind of fail me.  Let's just say "You'd think they were really really really bad" and leave it there.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons va Rinaldi creator QS:P170,Q37885816, Taylor Swift 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0]

In any case, the ultra-right-wing types couldn't just shrug and say, "Taylor Swift is an American citizen and can vote for whom she likes, and Travis Kelce is free to promote the vaccine if he thinks it's the right thing to do."  Oh, no.  There has to be more to it than that.  The firestorm started almost as soon as Swift and Kelce announced they were dating, and Swift started showing up to Kelce's games.  Then Swift was named Time magazine's 2023 Person of the Year, and things really started rolling.

Here are a few quotes, to give you the idea of what sort of things are being batted about on far-right media:

• "I 'wonder' who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month.  And I 'wonder' if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.  Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next eight months." -- Vivek Ramaswamy
• "The Democratic Party and other powers are gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against Donald Trump." -- Jack Posobiec
• "Taylor Swift is an op.  It’s all fake.  You’re being played." -- Benny Johnson
• "The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open.  It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.  They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign." -- Laura Loomer
• "All the Swifties want is a swift abortion." -- Charlie Kirk
• The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce).  All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA.  Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.  It’s all been an op since day one."  -- Mike Crispi
• We're declaring a Holy War on Taylor Swift if she publicly backs the Democrats." -- an "unnamed source" quoting Donald Trump
• "Who thinks this country needs a lot more women like Alina Habba, and a lot less like Taylor Swift?" -- unsurprisingly, Alina Habba
• "Taylor Swift is a Pentagon psyop and a front for a covert political agenda." -- Jesse Watters

I could go on, but I probably don't need to.

What is astonishing to me is that very few folks listen to this and then say, "Okay, have you people been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars?  Or what?"  Evidently a significant fraction of Americans hear this stuff -- and think that it makes perfect sense.

Look, it's not that I don't know politics can get nasty, and that people -- certainly on both sides -- can do some really underhanded stuff to get elected.  But when a celebrity endorses Your Guy, and that's all hunky-dory and an example of a True American Standing Tall, but when a celebrity endorses The Other Guy it's gotta be a covert Pentagon psyop worthy of launching a Holy War, you might just want to check your thought processes for bias.

At least some mainstream media outlets are branding this wingnuttery for what it is.  CNN, in its article on the issue (linked above), labeled this stuff "loony thinking bearing little resemblance to reality," and that's not bad considering that CNN doesn't exactly have a sterling track record of calling out lunacy when they see it.  In fact, there's a good case to be made that back in 2015 the mainstream media created Donald Trump as a viable candidate by treating him as if he were one, instead of labeling him what he is right from the get-go -- an incompetent compulsive liar, a serial philanderer, a sexual predator, and a "businessman" who has a list of failed businesses as long as my arm.  But because his incendiary theatrics got listeners and readers, they uncritically publicized everything he said and did in order to keep readers and viewers engaged -- and that's a large part of why we're in the situation we now are.

At least -- maybe -- some media sources have learned their lesson.

But to return to my original point, these are not theories.  They are one of two things:

1. deliberately crazy-sounding ideas thrown out by cynical individuals who don't actually believe what they're saying, but say it anyhow because they know it'll keep the public tuned in; or
2. wild ramblings from people who think this stuff actually makes sense, in which case -- to borrow a line from C. S. Lewis -- "they're on the level of a man who says he is a poached egg."

And in neither case should we give them the slightest bit of attention, short of laughing directly into their faces.  Which is, honestly, what I'm hoping to accomplish here.

How about the Conspiracy Comedy Channel?  That at least captures the spirit of it.

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Reversing the core

I get really frustrated with science news reporting sometimes.

I mean, on the one hand, it's better that laypeople get exposed to science somehow, instead of the usual fare of the mainstream media, which is mostly stories about seriously depressing political stuff and the latest antics of celebrities.  But there's a problem with science reporting, and it's the combination of a lack of depth in understanding by the reporters, and a more deliberate desire to create clickbaity headlines and suck people in.

Take, for example, the perfectly legitimate (although not universally accepted) piece of research that appeared on January 23 in Nature Geoscience, suggesting that the Earth's inner core oscillates in its rotational speed with respect to the rest of the planet -- first going a little faster, then slowing a bit until its rotational rate matches Earth's angular velocity, then slowing further so the rest of the planet for a time outruns the core.  Then it speeds up, and does the whole thing in reverse.  The reason -- again, if it actually happens, which is still a matter of discussion amongst the experts -- is that the speed-up/slowdown occurs because of a combination of friction with the outer core, the effects of the magnetic field, and the pull of gravity from the massive mantle that lies outside it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CharlesC, Earth cutaway, CC BY-SA 3.0]

That's not how this story got reported, though.  I've now seen it several times in different mainstream media, and universally, they claim that what's happening is that the inner core has stopped, and started to spin the other way -- i.e. the inner core is now rotating once a day, but in the opposite direction from the rest of the Earth.

This is flat-out impossible.  Let's start with the fact that the inner core has a mass of about 110,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.  A mass that huge, spinning on its axis once a day, has a stupendous amount of angular momentum.  To stop the rotation of that humongous ball of nickel and iron would take an unimaginable amount of torque, and that's not even counting overcoming the drag that would be exerted by the outer core as you tried to make the inner core slow down.  (I could calculate how much, but it's just another huge number and in any case I don't feel like it, so suffice it to say it's "a shitload of torque.")  Then, to accelerate it so it's rotating at its original rate but in the opposite direction would take that much torque again.

Where's the energy coming from to do all that?

Here, the fault partly lies with the scientists; they did use the words "reversing direction" in their press release, but what they meant was "reversing direction with respect to the motion of the rest of the Earth."  I get that relative motion can be confusing to visualize -- but giving people the impression that something has stopped the inner core of the Earth and started it rotating in the opposite direction gives new meaning to "inaccurate reporting."

Worse still, I'm already seeing the woo-woos latch onto this and claim that it's a sign of the apocalypse, that the Evil Scientists™ are somehow doing this deliberately to destroy the Earth, that it's gonna make the magnetic field collapse and trigger a mass extinction, and that it's why the climate has been so bonkers lately.  (Anything but blame our rampant fossil fuel use, apparently.)  Notwithstanding that if you read the actual paper, you'll find that (1) whatever this phenomenon is, it's been going on for ages, (2) it represents a really small shift in the inner core's angular velocity, and (3) it probably won't have any major effects on we ordinary human beings.  After all, (4) the scientists have only recently figured out it's happening, and (5) not all of them believe it is happening.

So let's just all calm down a bit, okay?

In any case, I'd really appreciate it if the people reporting science stories in the mainstream media would actually read the damn papers they're reporting on.  It'd make the job of us skeptics a hell of a lot easier.  Thanks bunches.

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Mental poison

Here in the United States, we just went through another election.  There are still several races left unsettled, but the outcome seems to be that neither side got the drubbing the other side wanted, and we're still going to be stuck on the gridlock-inducing razor's edge for another couple of years at least.

For me the most frustrating part of politics is watching how people form their opinions.  Ever since the repeal of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine back in 1987, media has devolved into a morass of partisan rhetoric.  Long gone are the days of the honorable Walter Cronkite, who was so dedicated to honesty and balance that to this day I don't know what party he himself belonged to.  No longer can we simply turn on the news and expect to hear the news.  Politically-motivated spin, not to mention careful selection (and omission) of certain news items, guarantees that if you get on your favorite media channel, you'll hear only stories that support what you already believed.

Whether or not those beliefs actually are true.

To take one particularly ridiculous example, consider commentator Joe Rogan's claim that "woke schools" are providing litter boxes for elementary school students who "identify as cats."  Rogan later admitted that he lied, and a thorough investigation showed that the story is entirely false -- but not before New Hampshire Republican Senate candidate Don Bolduc used it as a talking point against schools' attempts to honor transgender students' identities.

"I wish I was making this up," Bolduc said, with unintentional irony, to audiences who by and large swallowed the whole story hook, line, and sinker.  (Hearteningly, Bolduc lost his race on Tuesday to Democratic incumbent Maggie Hassan, by a ten percent margin.)

The media has gotten to where it controls, rather than just reporting on, political issues.  The whole system has been turned on its head -- with disastrous consequences.

If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at this study that appeared in the journal Memory last month.  In "Partisan Bias in False Memories for Misinformation About the 2021 U.S. Capitol Riot," researchers Dustin Calvillo, Justin Harris, and Whitney Hawkins of California State University - San Marcos describe something alarming; eighty percent of a group of over 220 volunteers "recalled" at least one false memory about the January 6, 2021 riot.  Further, the false memories Democrats recalled were almost always pro-Democrat, and the false memories Republicans recalled were almost always pro-Republican.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sagearbor, Donkey and elephant - democrat blue and republican red - polygon rough, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"The main takeaway from this study is that different people can have very different memories of the same event," Calvillo said, in an interview in PsyPost.  "People tend to remember details of events that paint themselves and their social groups in a positive light.  Accuracy of memory is important to learn from previous events.  This partisan bias hinders that learning...  Understanding factors related to false memories of real-world political events is an important step in reducing false beliefs that complicate finding solutions to public policy problems.  If people do not remember an event similarly, consensus on defining the problem becomes difficult."

Achieving consensus, though, doesn't just depend on fighting confirmation bias -- our tendency to accept slim or questionable evidence if it supports what we already believed (a fault we are all prone to, at least to some degree).  It depends critically on fighting deliberately skewed media.  Somehow we have got to get a handle on the forces that have turned public media into a non-stop conduit of partial truths, conscious omissions of the facts, and outright lies.  Until we reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, or something like it, there will be no way to halt the stream of poison that is widening the divide between Right and Left in this country -- and no way to be certain that when you turn on the news, what you're hearing is the truth.

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Perception and suggestion

One topic that has come up over and over again here at Skeptophilia is the rather unsettling idea that the high opinion most of us have of our perceptions and memories is entirely unjustified.  Every time we're tempted to say "I saw it with my own eyes" or "of course it happened that way, I remember it," it should be a red flag reminding us of how inaccurate our brains actually are.

Now, to be fair, they work well enough.  It'd be a pretty significant evolutionary disadvantage if our sensory processing organs and memory storage were as likely to be wrong as right.  But a system that is built to work along the lines of "meh, it's good enough to get by, at least by comparison to everyone else" -- and let's face it, that's kind of how evolution works -- is inevitably going to miss a lot.  "Our experience of reality," said neuroscientist David Eagleman, "is constrained by our biology."  He talks about the umwelt -- the world as experienced by a particular organism -- and points out that each species picks up a different tiny slice of all the potential sensory inputs that are out there, and effectively misses everything else.

It also means that even of the inputs in our particular umwelt, the brain is going to make an executive decision regarding which bits are important to pay attention to.  People with normal hearing (for example) are being bombarded constantly by background sounds, which for most of us most of the time, we ignore as irrelevant.  In my intro to neuroscience classes, I used to point this out by asking students how many of them were aware (prior to my asking the question) of the sound of the fan running in the heater.  Afterward, of course, they were; beforehand, the sound waves were striking their ears and triggering nerve signals to the brain just like any other noise, but the brain was basically saying "that's not important."   (Once it's pointed out, of course, you can't not hear it; one of my students came into my room four days later, scowled at me, and said, "I'm still hearing the heater.  Thanks a lot.")

The point here is that we are about as far away from precision reality-recording equipment as you can get.  What we perceive and recall is a small fraction of what's actually out there, and is remembered only incompletely and inaccurately.

The Doors of Perception by Alan Levine [Image licensed under the Creative Commons cogdogblog, Doors of Perception (15354754466), CC BY 2.0]

Worst of all, what we do perceive and recall is also modified by what we think we should be perceiving and recalling.  This point was underscored by some cool new research done by a team led by Hernán Aniló at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, which showed that all it takes is a simple (false) suggestion of what we're seeing to foul up our perception completely.

The experiment was simple and elegant.  Subjects were shown a screen with an image of a hundred dots colored either blue or yellow.  Some of the screens had exactly fifty of each; others were sixty/forty (one way or the other).  The volunteers were then asked to estimate the proportions of the colors on a sequence of different screens, and to give an assessment of how confident they were in their guess.

The twist is that half of the group was given a "hint" -- a statement that in some of the screens, one of the colors was twice as frequent as the other.  (Which, of course, is never true.)  And this "hint" caused the subjects not only to mis-estimate the color frequencies, but to be more confident in their wrong guesses, especially in volunteers for whom a post-test showed a high inclination toward social suggestibility.

As easily-understood as the experiment is, it has some profound implications.  "Information is circulating with unprecedented speed, and it even finds its way into our social feeds against our will sometimes," Aniló said.  "It’s becoming increasingly difficult to observe events without having to go through some level of information on those events beforehand (e.g. buying a shirt, but not before reading its reviews online).  What we are looking at in our research here is how much the information you receive is going to contribute to the construction of your perceptual reality, and fundamentally, what are the individual psychological features that condition the impact that that information will have in shaping what you see and think, whether you like it or not.  Of course, we are not talking about enormous effects that can completely distort the world around you (e.g., no amount of false/imprecise information can make you misperceive a small bird as a 3-ton truck), but what our study shows is that, provided you are permeable enough to social influence (which we all are, the key here being how much), then false information can slightly shift your perception in whatever direction the information points."

What this means, of course, is that we have to be constantly aware of our built-in capacity for being fooled.  And although we clearly vary in that capacity, we shouldn't fall for believing "I'm seeing reality, it's everyone else who is wrong."  The truth is, we're all prone to inaccurate perception and recall, and all capable of having the power of suggestion alter what we see.  "Perception is a complex construction, and information is never an innocent bystander in this process," Anlló said.  "Always be informed, but make sure that your sources are of high quality, and trustworthy.  Importantly, when I say high-quality I do not mean a source that you may trust because of emotional reasons or social links, but rather by the accuracy of the information they provide and the soundness of the evidence.  Indeed, our experiment shows that your level of suggestibility to your social environment (how much you dress like your friends, or feel influenced by their taste in music) will also predict your permeability to perceptual changes triggered by false information.  This, much like many other cognitive biases, is part of the human experience, and essentially nothing to worry about.  Being susceptible to your social environment is actually a great thing that makes us humans thrive as a species, we just need to be aware of it and try our best to limit our exposure to bad information."

The most alarming thing of all, of course, is that the people who run today's news media are well aware of this capacity, and use it to reinforce the perception by their consumers that only they are providing accurate information.  "Listen to us," they tell us, "because everyone else is lying to you."  The truth is, there is no unbiased media; given that their profits are driven by telling viewers the bit of the news that supports what they think the viewers already want to believe, they have exactly zero incentive to provide anything like balance.  The only cure is to stay as aware as we can of our own capacity for being fooled, and to stick as close to the actual facts as possible (and, conversely, as far away as possible from the talking heads and spin-meisters who dominate the nightly news on pretty much whichever channel you choose).

If our perceptions of something as simple and concrete as the number of colored dots on a screen can be strongly influenced by a quick and inaccurate "hint," how much easier is it to alter our perception of the world with respect to complex and emotionally-laden issues -- especially when there's a powerful profit motive on the part of the people giving us the hints?

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Words, words, words

In Dorothy Sayers' novel Gaudy Night, set (and written) in 1930s England, a group of Oxford University dons are the targets of threats and violence by a deranged individual.  The motive of the perpetrator (spoiler alert!) turns out to be that one of the dons had, years earlier, caught the perpetrator's spouse in academic dishonesty, and the spouse had been dismissed from his position, and ultimately committed suicide.

Near the end of the novel, the main character, Harriet Vane, experiences a great deal of conflict over the resolution of the mystery.  Which individual was really at fault?  Was it the woman who made the threats, a widow whose grief drove her to threaten those she felt were smug, ivory-tower intellectuals who cared nothing for the love and devotion of a wife for her husband?  Was it her husband, who knowingly committed academic fraud?  Or was it the don who had exposed the husband's "crime" -- which was withholding evidence contrary to his thesis in a paper?  Is that a sin that's worth a life?

The perpetrator, when found out, snarls at the dons, "... (C)ouldn't you leave my man alone?  He told a lie about somebody who was dead and dust hundreds of years ago.  Nobody was the worse for that.  Was a dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness?  You broke him and killed him -- all for nothing."  The don whose words led to the man's dismissal, and ultimately his suicide, says, "I knew nothing of (his suicide) until now...  I had no choice in the matter.  I could not foresee the consequences... but even if I had..."  She trails off, making it clear that in her view, her words had to be spoken, that academic integrity was a mandate -- even if that stance left a human being in ruins.

It's not, really, a very happy story.  One is left feeling, at the end of the book, that the incident left only losers, no winners.

The same is true of the tragedy that happened in Buffalo, New York last Saturday.

The accused shooter, eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron, drove for two and a half hours from his home in Conklin, New York, allegedly motivated by trying to find the neighborhood with the highest proportion of Black residents.   He is clearly a seriously disturbed individual.  While in high school, he was investigated by Broome County police for threatening his classmates; ultimately the investigation was closed, with Gendron saying he had been "joking."  One of his former teachers reported that she had asked him for his plans after graduation, and he told her, "I want to murder and commit suicide."  It's a little appalling that someone like him was able to procure body armor and three guns -- including an XM-15 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, which is banned in New York state -- without setting off enough red flags to stop a freight train.  I'm not intending to discuss the issue of gun laws, however.  What I want to look at is what created Payton Gendron.  Because at the center of his rage were nothing more than words.  Words, words, words.

He wrote a 180-page manifesto that mirrors the "Great Replacement" theory of Jean-Renaud Camus, that the leftists are deliberately crafting policy to replace people of White European descent with immigrants and People of Color.  Gendron made no secret of his views and his intentions.  He had accounts on social media outlets Discord and Twitch; on the former he had a to-do list of preparations for the attack, and he used the latter to livestream the attack itself.  He identified all people of color as the danger, not just immigrants --  after all, the Black people he deliberately chose as targets were just as much American citizens as he is, and almost certainly their ancestors had been here for hundreds of years. 

Gendron himself has no problem explaining why he did what he did.  He told investigators, "I simply became racist after I learned the truth."

But he didn't come up with that "truth" himself; others put it there.  Others fed him those lies and distortions, and in his twisted, faulty logic he bought them wholesale.  Gendron himself is, of course, ultimately the one responsible for the shootings; but what blame lies with the people who, whatever their motives, broadcast the ideologies he espoused?

Tucker Carlson, for example, makes his opinion crystal-clear.  Last year he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly for a radio broadcast, and he said, "'The Great Replacement' theory is, in fact, not a theory.  It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president, and in one sentence, it’s this: Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that.  We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us."

He's not the only one.  Representative Steve King of Iowa said, "The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal -- that’s not objectively true…  We’ve been fed that information for the past twenty-five years, and we’re not going to become a greater nation if we continue to do that."  Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller posted a photograph of George Soros on Facebook with the caption, "Start the race war."  Fox News host Laura Ingraham isn't exactly subtle, either.  "Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they're changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like," she said on her show in 2019.  "From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed.  Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love."

After the shooting, people like Carlson were blasted for using their positions as pundits to stoke fear, rage, and violence -- and very quickly, they responded in kind, absolving themselves of any responsibility.  "The truth about Payton Gendron does tell you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership," Carlson said, the day after the shooting.  "Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting, before all of the bodies of those ten murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.  'They did it!' they said, immediately...  So, what is hate speech?  Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate.  So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud.  That’s what they’re telling you.  That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time."

Which packs a lot of terrifying rhetoric into one paragraph.  First, no sensible person, left, right, or center, defines hate speech as "speech our leaders hate."  The Supreme Court itself has given the term a clear definition: "abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation."  Second -- sure, Gendron is mentally ill, but that's not why he targeted Black people for murder.  Lots of people have mental illness (I've blogged here more than once about my own struggles with it), and very few of them murder people.  Blaming mental illness for Gendron's actions is just a way for Carlson to deflect any criticism leveled at him for the results of what he has said vehemently and repeatedly.

Third, virtually no one -- once again, regardless of political stripe -- is trying to stop people from expressing their political views.  The vast majority of us agree with British writer Evelyn Hall, "I disagree with what you've said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  Conservative commentator and former GOP Representative Joe Walsh, who -- despite the fact that we'd probably disagree on a lot of things -- is one of the most honest, honorable voices we have today, said, "Try being nonpartisan for a day.  Call out stuff that’s wrong, stupid, or dishonest no matter where it comes from.  Even if it comes from your side. Just try it."  And he summarized Tucker Carlson's self-defense as follows: "[Carlson basically told] his audience that THEY are the victims.  Not the ten innocent souls killed in Buffalo.  Nope, Tucker’s audience are the real victims here...  [His attitude is] 'I don’t even know what white replacement theory is.  All I know is America is becoming less and less white.  And that’s a really bad thing.  But that makes me a racist?  For just stating facts?'"

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ivan Radic, A colorful Stop Racism sign (50115127871), CC BY 2.0

Of course, all Carlson, Ingraham, et al. are trying to accomplish are two things; to use emotionally-charged language in order to make their own opinions sound unassailable, and to generate such a negative spin on their opponents' thinking that listeners are left believing that only morons could possibly agree with them.  

I'm appalled not just because these political hacks are using this tragedy to hammer in their own views with an increasingly polarized citizenry; but because they are doing this, willfully blind to the end results of their words, just like the Oxford don in Gaudy Night whose dedication to the nth degree of academic integrity made her blind to the human cost of her actions.  Words are tools, and they are using them with as much thought and responsibility as a five-year-old with a chainsaw.

I will end with a devout hope for healing for the Buffalo community that has lost ten of its people, and that the families of those who died will be able to find consolation in the outpouring of sympathy from the vast majority of Americans who still value compassion over political rhetoric.  And to the ideologues who are using this tragedy as a platform to defend their own repugnant views, I can only say: shut the hell up.

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