Arguing with facts against polemics and false claims

There is a lot of public discussion these days over pseudoscience, political conspiracy theories, crackpot history, malicious propgaganda and what the best ways to combat them may be.

One of the surprising findings of some studies is that in some fashion, provide correct information to debunk the false claims can have the effect of reinforcing belief in the false claim.

That has always struck me as intuitively wrong. I even suspect it's sometimes offered in politics in the US as a way to get Democrats to not bother to debunk the constant stream of misinformation and falsehood against Democrats from FOX News, Breitbart, Infowars, and various other rightwing media, including alt-right sources and foreign nations' propaganda operations.

Four scholars from the University of Illinois and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania published their results on their own study of that problem, Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation Psychological Science 28:11 (2017).

They found that in some cases, the reverse-debunking effect occurs, in which hearing the correct information can indeed reinforce the false belief. But it doesn't have to.

They offer the following suggestions for avoiding that result in the sense of a communication or linguistic strategy:

Recommendation 1: reduce the generation of arguments in line with the misinformation.

Recommendation 2: create conditions that facilitate scrutiny and counterarguing of misinformation.

Recommendation 3: correct misinformation with new detailed information but keep expectations low.

The first of the recommendations is the most troubling one. Because it suggests that the more detailed the argument against a set of misinformation is, the more likely the exchange is to strengthen the false belief. But this doesn't apply to casually held beliefs. As they explain, "The false beliefs on which we focus here occur when the audience initially believes misinformation and that misinformation persists or continues to exert psychological influence after it has been rebutted." If people hold a belief strongly and have thought and talked about the false enough have adduced multiple reasons for believing it, giving them a lot of arguments against it can kick off this proces: "when the elaboration process organizes, updates, and integrates elements of information, generating explanations in line with the initial misinformation, this process may create a network of confirming causal accounts about the misinformation in memory."

In other words, the harder people think about beliefs with which they had established an identification, the harder it may be for them to change their minds.

The second recommendations gets to the issue of framing, which has been much discussed in American politics, particularly i response to the work and recommendations of George Lakoff. Aside from providing an appropriate context for discussion, it also means providing not just facts rebutting the bad information but a new framework for understanding the matter, a different perspective.

Following from that, the third recommendation emphasizes providing the correct information as distinct from just refuting the bad. With a reminder that it won't always work! But other times it will.

The Annenberg Center provides a summary of the article here, "Debunking study suggests ways to counter misinformation and correct 'fake news'." ScienceDaily09/09/2017.

In the context of the immigration issue which is roiling the politics of the United States and the European Union, another implication of the first recommendation is important.

Speaking of this persistence-of-mistinformation effect, Stephan Lewandowsky notes, "one of the ways to get around that is to tell people not just that something is false, but tell them what's true. Alternative information makes it much easier to update your memory." (Susannah Locke interview, How to debunk false beliefs without having it backfire Vox 04/25/2018)

Lewandowsky also notes that the setting of a classroom-type situation is different from that in which political information and disinformation is often conveyed:

If you have a situation like a classroom where people are forced to sit down and pay attention, that's when more information is helpful. There's a lot of evidence of this in educational psychology.

Now the problem is in a sort of casual situation, people listening to the radio or having a superficial conversation — that's where the information deficit model doesn't apply. And superficially just throwing information at people probably will make them tune out. So you've got to be careful when you're talking about public discourse, TV, radio, media.

I've been thinking I should devote more posts to factual information on the immgration issue. Hearing the reality behind a strongly held belief that is associated with a person's political or cultural identity won't necessarily change their mind. But reality does matter!

The Austrian broadcaster ORF 2 program Im Zentrum carried a report last night (30.09.2018) on Politik und Pressefreiheit - Der Kampf um Macht und Wahrheit (video available at the link through October 7) on the status of press freedom in Austria today. It included Walter Rosenkranz, the head of the parliamentary club for the far-right FPÖ, which is the junior partner in the current national government; Beate Meinl-Reisinger, head of the NEOS party which holds seats in Parliament; Georg Wailand, the deputy chief editor of Austria's most widely circulated paper Kronen Zeitung; Armin Thurnher, publisher of the influential Vienna weekly Falter; and, Reinhard Kreissl, a sociologist of crime.

Rosenkranz defended efforts by the FPÖ-led Interior Ministry to encourage police to publicize details about the backgrounds of people suspected in violent crimes. Which is consistent with anti-immigrant propaganda efforts to stigmatize immigrants as more likely to commit crimes than native Austrians, which the crime statistics consistently show is not the case. There was some discussion about crime statistics and how to interpret them, including discussion about how the crime rate has been declining in Austria. Rosenkranz used the discussion to try to associate rape in particular with immigrants. Meinl-Reisinge challenged him into admitting that the most common national origin of the foreign rapists is Germany. The xenophobes preferred image of foreign rapists is that of an Afghan, Arab, or African perpetrator. This is similar to Donald Trump's anti-Latino propaganda.

My impression was that the discussion got the point across to anyone in the audience actually paying attention that the impression left by xenophobic agitators that Austrians are increasingly in danger of violent crime and it is the fault of immigrants, both of which ideas are false. On the other hand, Rosenkranz did what he could to highlight the image of foreign rapists, which presumably also reinforced that narrative in some viewers' minds. Debunking is complicated.

Walter Hämmerle reports in Die Schwarzmaler Wiener Zeitung 29.09.2018 that according to the FPÖ-led Interior Ministry's information, there were 510 thousand criminal complaints in Austria in 2017, which "is the lowest number in ten years." He observes that the numbers that are there include some serious concerns, "but taken in themselves provide no rational justification for the general pessimism" and general security in Austria.

Trying to use PunditSpeak to critique uncritical thinking

Kurt Andersen has a new book coming out scheduled for a September release, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. An excerpt appears in the September 2017 Atlantic Monthly, under the title "How America Went Haywire."

I'm very much appreciative of the kind of debunking of pseudoscience and general hokum presented in accessible language that we find in publications like Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic. A big part of the impetus behind journals like those and similar efforts is the recognition that pseudoscientific beliefs have a great deal of influence among the general public. Including among the well educated.

Andersen's article is very much in that vein. And it does provide a good summary of some of the most significant factors among the propagation of anti-science beliefs in the United States in the last half century or so. Mystical fad philosophies in the 1960s. Fundamentalist religion. Academic analysis and critiques of the social bases of science. Faith healing. UFOs and alien abduction stories. The John Birch Society. JFK assassination conspiracy theories. Near death experiences. Extreme individualism. The Internet. The Esalen Institute. Fringe theories of mental illness. Hippies. Ivy League professors. Government deception over Vietnam and various other important issues.

Even with 24 pages in the print edition, that's obviously too much ground to cover in any great detail. But that's okay. It's not bad, as far as it goes.

But it also left me wondering just what he's describing. His arguments are very accessible, because they use language that we hear from TV and print pundits all the time. And that's part of the problem.

American pundits are often stunningly lazy. They rely heavily on familiar narratives. Most of which are framed to cause minimum discomfort to the comfortable. A two-word summary of the problem: David Brooks. Reflective analysis is not required. And, if it might derail the comfortable narratives, even detrimental.

Andersen's Atlantic article suffers from some of the common problems of mainstream punditry. Here's an example:

How widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think. But reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God — not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy.

He goes on to give other examples of seemingly nonscientific and uncritical thinking. But the one just quoted takes it for granted that the assent of survey participants to vague Christian religious ideas is evidence of not being "reality-based." But that isn't at all obvious from that quotation. For a Christian to agree that Genesis is the word of God doesn't mean that they accept Genesis as a scientific text or a literal description of history. I wondered in reading this if he was applying some sort of dogmatic atheist argument - "village atheist" would be a better description - that being a Christian means that a person has to be a fundamentalist Christian.

Something similar would apply to his comment about the belief that “angels and demons are active in the world.” This is one that I liberal Protestants would be unlikely to agree to. Conservative Protestants would be more likely to. Although they also tend to regard angels active in the world as "idolatrous" Catholic notions. Pentecostals tend to accept the reality of demon activity and faith healing, as well as the ritual of exorcism.

The Catholic case is more complicated, not least because it's a nearly 2000-year-old organization by the Church's traditional count, in which Jesus' disciple Peter was the first Pope. And in theory, the Church never changes its doctrines. It only develops fuller and more accurate interpretations and elaborations of them. So various positions can be rejected in practice while leaving them "on the books" in theory. So exorcism, for instance, is still officially sanctioned by the Church, but under far more restrictive rules than the wilder version the Pentecostals practice.

So it's likely that a significant number of respondents could agree to the angels-and-demons question out of a general recognition that their church believes in them in some way without taking it seriously that there could be disembodied spirits flying through the air meddling in the material world. And some may take angels and demons as some kind of metaphor without assuming that an angel will catch someone falling out of a window or that demons cause the common cold.

I would certainly agree that religious beliefs are a significant contributor to antiscientific outlooks. But survey results do not analyze themselves. Drawing conclusions like Andersen does in that passage requires more analysis than the passage above indicates.

He draws similarly sweeping conclusions in this passage:

The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals — postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists — turned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team.

A analysis worth of Bobo Brooks himself. Both Sides Do It! But that passage is actually mostly stock conservative rhetoric. And since nobody but academics or specialized geeks could describe the difference between "epistemic relativists" and "descriptive relativists," he's basically just saying that all these here college perfessers and their high-highfalutin ideas are jest gittin' ever'body confused. What cain't we look at thangs in the good ole common-sense way Granpa did? Somebody should write a country song about it:

By the way, if you are actually curious about that catalog of wooly-minded academic theories, here is what I found with a quick search of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

• Postpositivism: "We're sorry. Your query retrieved no results." Using "postpositist" yields one link, to Analytic Feminism.
• Poststructuralism: This one gives various references, including: Homosexuality; Colonialism; Feminist Perspectives on the Self; Identity Politics; Philosophy of Liberation; Analytic Feminism; Existentialism; Max Horkheimer
• Social constructivism: This one gives several results, including Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction and The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge.
• Post-empiricism: Also several results, including Rationalism vs. Empiricism
• Epistemic relativism: Three of the refernces here probably related to Andersen's gripes: Social Epistemology, Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, and Historicist Theories of Scientific Rationality
• Cognitive relativism: You can check out Culture and Cognitive Science.
• Descriptive relativism: Try The Pure Theory of Law, which actually has a description of the term.

It would be an interesting exercise, at least for academics or philosophy geeks, to trace how any one of these academic philosophies contributed to, say, belief in UFOs or susceptibility to Rush Limbaugh's hate rants against "feminazis." That's not to say that academic theories don't wind up having wider affects in society. But it seems that the lack of familiarity of any kind of theory of cognition or how to evaluate sources would be more likely culprits.

Again, not everything that would be treated as Deep Thought by TV pundits actually has substance.

As a final example here, he makes statements about the unique qualities of Americanism of the sort that our Pod Pundits love:

Why are we like this?

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

Yes, it is a short answer. And one that leaves the readers scratching their heads if they stop to think about it. What, belief in UFOs and conspiracy theories are special afflictions of Americans? Well, we are Exceptional, you know!

The climate-denial charge about a 1970s global cooling consensus

The title on this Guardian article is a little misleading, Brian Cox: scientists giving false sense of debate on climate change by Karl Mathiesen 09/03/2014. Because it's mainly about physicist Brian Cox talking about how bad climate denial is:

He [Cox] said the strategy of challenging the science of climate change was dangerous because it promoted the idea that science was political and up for debate. This weakens the position of science as a reliable basis for deciding how to respond to the world, he said.

"I always regret it when knowledge becomes controversial. It’s clearly a bad thing, for knowledge to be controversial. We can trace back through history the times when knowledge was considered to be controversial. And that’s what we are actually saying when we talk about climate change. We’re saying that there’s something inherently problematic with knowledge.

"Don’t undermine the science just because you don’t like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society."

He does have some advice for scientists talking about this, trying to work around the limitations of average science literacy among popular audiences.

On of the climate deniers' zombie talking points that keeps lurching around is that idea that them smarty-pants scientists a few years ago were saying that the world was getting colder, not warmer.

Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley and John Fleck address this piece of propaganda in "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" Bulletin of the American Meterological Society Sept 2008.

As they report, in the 1970s when the climate science as we know it today was in its formative stage, there was an broad assumption that a a longterm cooling trend was underway (end note references omitted):

Efforts to accumulate and organize global temperature records began in the 1870s. The first analysis to show long-term warming trends was published in 1938. However, such analyses were not updated very often. Indeed, the Earth appeared to have been cooling for more than 2 decades when scientists first took note of the change in trend in the 1960s. The seminal work was done by J. Murray Mitchell, who, in 1963, presented the first up-to-date temperature reconstruction showing that a global cooling trend had begun in the 1940s. Mitchell used data from nearly 200 weather stations, collected by the World Weather Records project under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, to calculate latitudinal average temperature. His analysis showed that global temperatures had increased fairly steadily from the 1880s, the start of his record, until about 1940, before the start of a steady multidecade cooling.

By the early 1970s, when Mitchell updated his work, the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood. The first satellite records showed increasing snow and ice cover across the Northern Hemisphere from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. This trend was capped by unusually severe winters in Asia and parts of North America in 1972 and 1973 which pushed the issue into the public consciousness. The new data about global temperatures came amid growing concerns about world food supplies, triggering fears that a planetary cooling trend might threaten humanity's ability to feed itself. It was not long, however, before scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s trend found that it was not necessarily a global phenomenon. Yes, globally averaged temperatures were cooling, but this was largely due to changes in the Northern Hemisphere. A closer examination of Southern Hemisphere data revealed thermometers heading in the opposite direction. [my emphasis]

Here's where some minimal scientific literacy is needed to make any kind of reasonable judgment on this.

At that time, there were indications of significant and previously unrecongized shifts in global temperatures. Those shifts could have major implications for human life and civilization, e.g., how they affect food supplies. So scientists and policy makers recognized they needed more study.

As Peterson et al also report (end note references omitted):

In 1965, when U.S. President Lyndon Johnson asked the members of his President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) to report on the potential problems of environmental pollution, climate change was not on the national agenda. The polluting effects of detergents and municipal sewage, the chronic problems associated with urban air pollution, and the risks associated with pesticides dominated public discourse about humanity’s impact on the environment. However, in a 23-page appendix, which today appears prescient, the committee’s Environmental Pollution Panel laid out the following stark scenario: emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels could rapidly reshape Earth's climate. [my emphasis]

It was a new problem in 1965, in the sense that the available instruments and actual studies were showing it to be a matter of concern.

And they explain that work was also being done at that time on historical studies of longterm climate variations in the past. An engineer and geophysicist named Milutin Milankovitch had speculated as early as 1930 "that that highly regular changes in the tilt of Earth's axis and the eccentricity of its orbit around the sun would change the distribution of sunlight hitting the Earth' surface, leading to the waxing and waning of ice ages." (Peterson et al's summary)

Further research over the following decades had shown the validity of the notion "by the late 1970s."

Because Milankovitch's astronomical metronome was predictable over thousands of years, climate scientists could now begin talking about predicting the onset of the next ice age. And they did. Members of the Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction (CLIMAP) project lived up to their project’s name with a "prediction" of sorts; in the absence of possible anthropogenic warming, "the long-term trend over the next several thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." (Peterson et al, end note references omitted) [my emphasis]

Research also showed that some kinds of particulates generated by human activity had a cooling effect at the same time that fossil fuel burning tended to raise temperatures.

These studies made great strides in the 1970s. As Peterson et al report (end note references omitted):

In July 1979 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Jule Charney, one of the pioneers of climate modeling, brought together a panel of experts under the U.S. National Research Council to sort out the state of the science. The panel's work has become iconic as a foundation for the enterprise of climate change study that followed. Such reports are a traditional approach within the United States for eliciting expert views on scientific questions of political and public policy importance. In this case, the panel concluded that the potential damage from greenhouse gases was real and should not be ignored. The potential for cooling, the threat of aerosols, or the possibility of an ice age shows up nowhere in the report. Warming from doubled CO2 of 1.5°–4.5°C was possible, the panel reported. While there were huge uncertainties, Verner Suomi, chairman of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, wrote in the report's foreword that he believed there was enough evidence to support action: "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late". Clearly, if a national report in the 1970s advocates urgent action to address global warming, then the scientific consensus of the 1970s was not global cooling.

In the sound-bite, fact-free culture of FOX News and Republican hate radio, though, this history gets boiled down to, "Aw, them scientists don't know what they're talkin' about. They used to say the earth was coolin' off, now they say it's gittin' hotter."

That way, you don't have to learn to pronounce words like "Milankovitch."

Of course, the people who grind out climate denial papers for the Koch Brothers or other fossil fuel industry sugar-daddies can come up with highfalutin language to nitpick the findings of actual climate scientists. The science denial is science denial.

To quote Brian Cox again, "Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society."

Tags: global climate change, pseudoscience, science denial

Creationism, quack medicine and the solidarity of the conmen, the gullible and the superstitious

Jann Bellamy in CAM and Creationism: Separated at Birth? Science-Based Medicine 11/01/2012 takes note3 of the affinity between advocates of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine), aka, medical quackery, and Creationism:

I imagine some of those who promote CAM diagnostic methods and treatments would be perfectly happy being associated with Intelligent Design or any of its previous iterations, such as creationism. After all, if you think all interpretations of how the world works are equally valid you are not likely to quibble with the idea that God created the earth in 6 days any more than you would argue with acupuncture’s meridians and qi. And some CAM providers are so deficient in scientific training we can well imagine they might view the creation of man from clay as a plausible explanation of human evolution. On the other hand, if you are in, say, academic medicine, you would likely bristle at the idea that you have anything in common with an ID [Intelligent Design creationsim] proponent. Even some of those in the Health Care Freedom movement, who endorse the concept that all treatments, no matter how implausible or ineffective, should be available to anyone who wants them, would probably draw the line at the notion that their arguments are no better than those which supposedly support ID.

She notes the religious/superstitious basis of creationism, even when it's pretending to be science. (One thing often misunderstood about Christian fundamentalism is that it insists on being scientifically legitimate, though its image of science is typically a grotesque caricature.)

ID, on the other hand, is exclusively a fundamentalist Christian concept, although with variations within that single ideology. (Mainstream Christianity does not reject evolution as an explanation for the origins of life.) As explained on the NCSE website, which I highly recommend, there are several types of anti-evolution creationists with differing points of view. (Below is but a rough summary and may somewhat conflate the various subtypes in the interest of brevity.)

Originally, anti-evolution creationists argued that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Thus, if the Bible says that God created the sun, moon and stars on day four of creation, then that is exactly what happened. That was fine as long as those views were confined to religious settings. But the creationists wanted to go further by banning the teaching of evolution and teaching creationism in public schools. Here they ran into trouble in the form of the First Amendment and courts consistently held that creationism is religion, not science, and could not be taught in science classes. The creationists regrouped and invented "creation science," which argued that the creation story is actually supported by good science. That didn’t fly as an end-run around the Constitution so they came up with Intelligent Design, which attempts to expurgate creationism of all religious language. ID argues, as the name suggests, that science supports the existence of an Intelligent Designer (code for God) and that Darwinian evolution (which is, after all, "just a theory") is full of holes so, by default, ID correctly explains the origin of life. [my emphasis]

I first saw the bumper sticker "Gravity Is Just A Theory" in a photo with Pete Seeger somewhere.

Tags: alternative medicine, creationism, pseudoscience