Misinformation vs. No Information

[Idran1701]

A discussion between Mike and I, spawning out of a chat room talk about Rick Bryanton's "Imagining the Tenth Dimension".

http://www.rpgww.org/MikeDiscussion.htm

[Kai]

I'll make the same comment here that I made in chat.

Anthropologists and archeologists complain about a lot of things. They complain about a lack of ethics from their coworkers, resulting in problems like looting archeological sites, and they complain about private collectors.

But they also complain about some things that might surprise you. They bitch to no end about how they're portrayed in the media. Mention CSI to a forensic anthropologist and they'll laugh at you. Say that you want to major in forensic science because you watch CSI and it looks cool and they'll gripe about you behind your back.

But it extends to things you might not expect. We actually had a group discussion at field school a couple of years ago about whether or not movies like the Indiana Jones series were harmful to the discipline. I mean, shit. Look what people will think archaeologists do. Fighting looters on moving circus trains, invading secluded temples to foreign gods and narrowly escaping death at the hands of their barbaric followers, and of course.... shooting Nazis.

I was asked if having movies like this around gave people the wrong idea about archaeology, and my answer to that question colors my opinion about this as well.

I don't think Indiana Jones is any more harmful to the discipline of archaeology than Star Wars is to, say, NASA. Sure. It's not accurate. Sure, it's not even remotely going to resemble what people in that discipline actually do and know and accomplish. But it gets people interested.

We would never be able to have the kind of pretentious "Oh, this movie got it wrong," discussions if things like theoretical math and physics weren't put on the pedestal that they are in our culture. I mean, physicists get so much funding and so much respect that they often seem to be viewed not as ordinary people with a certain education, but as magicians of some sort.

I happen to think that if the Cold War had never happened and physics were never popularized as the way we're going to defeat those damned Communists... it would never have gotten the government funding and media exposure it does now. And without those two things, where would the discipline be?

So I guess as awesome as it would be if there were no conflict between accuracy and intelligibility by laymen, there is. There really is. That conflict is what this discussion seems to me to be about, because if we all simply agree that it would be great to have everything perfect, there's no cause for debate.

The debate comes when you have to choose between two valuable things. I think it would be great if all information published could be both accurate and intelligible, and the tension between those two things is something that all scientific disciplines have to deal with. Don't believe me? Ask a geneticist how well she believes most people understand Darwin's theories and she'll probably just roll her eyes at you.

But would a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist or a biological anthropologist rather people have the wrong idea about evolution, or would she rather we not teach anything related to it until we can get it right?

Is it better to leave evolution out of the curriculum, or to accept that it's a tough concept for some people and hope that you can spur their interest? If you can get people interested, they're much more likely to someday learn the right way than they are if they're taught nothing at all on the basis that it's "too complicated?"

I, quite frankly, see no way to simplify complex subjects down to imagery and metaphor without losing accuracy. That's just the way it works. You have to fudge some things, oversimplify others, and reduce others down to more elementary concepts than they actually are.

It sucks, but until everyone is a physicist, a forensic anthropologist, a mathematician, a geneticist, an evolutionary biologist, and a philosopher and everything else these sacrifices will have to be made by somebody for somebody else's benefit.

[Idran1701]

That's true, Kai, but I think you're missing the level of misinformation this work is talking about. I wasn't talking about the loss of accuracy all analogies must have, I'm talking about a work that a) was written by someone with absolutely no physics credentials whatsoever, and b) quite frankly was completely meaningless and offered no actual insight whatsoever into physics. You talked about Indiana Jones, but this is more like if a biologist wrote a serious book about how archaeologists figured out the immigration of Egyptians into Central America because they both have pyramids.

[Kai]

That's definitely possible. I haven't read the book you're discussing, though I was familiar with other examples that were brought up, such as What the BLEEP.

However, despite the fact that ideally all published information in research fields would be accurate enough to be respected by experts, it can't be. Therefore the point of my post was that, when in conflict, intelligibility is more important than accuracy.

Resolving this conflict is obviously tricky, because accuracy is still valuable. In extreme cases, sacrificing a whole buttload of accuracy to make a point that (by then) is no longer valid, sure. That sucks. But those are extreme cases and exceptions don't negate rules.

Also.



Because I somehow managed not to include him in my last post.

[Idran1701]

That's not what I'm asking for, though. I'm not asking for everything published to be respected by experts, because that's pointless. Among other things, I'm asking for people that aren't experts to not publish books that imply they are, without actually pointing out the fact that they aren't. People like Bryanton, or the producers of WTBDWK, they're no better than Kevin Trudeau; the only difference is Bryanton's work isn't actually physically dangerous for people by making them neglect their health.


...Does Trudeau have a word filter here? Not sure if Brian would have stuck one in for him or not.

[Archmage]

I'd never even heard of Trudeau before your post, but he's the exact same brand of quack as a lot of the others I'm so strongly opposed to. He claims there's a vast conspiracy in the medical world, implores consumers to exercise "freedom of choice" and pretends that he has access to miracle cures that real doctors are keeping hidden from patients because VAST GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY OMG!!!

It's true that this kind of statement being made by someone who lacks credentials (or someone who is actively a scam artist) is more dangerous, because it advocates a position that can make people ignore real medicine and neglect their health. There is, however, another level to this problem.

Considering that my primary professional concern is people's health, that's where I focus my opinion when it comes to judging this sort of thing. I think that a person's health directly affects his or her quality of life, so being likewise being misled regarding health care detracts from quality of life.

A lot of medical scams capitalize not only on the fact that the layman has little knowledge of medicine, but of science as a whole. I hate to turn this into a health fraud post, but it was inevitable to a certain extent. Consider:

Proponents of homeopathy claim that "quantum physics" proves that homeopathy is effective because "subatomic particles interact with one another in ways we do not completely understand." (A What the Bleep-ism, or at least, mentioned in the film.) Naturally, this is false; just because subatomic particles disobey Newtonian physics does not mean that molecules do.

A woman I encountered at work the other day asked me about pH test strips. When I asked her what she wanted to use them for since I couldn't find any, she said, "for myself, obviously." She wanted to test the pH of her own body fluids, presumably because someone (she said her "doctor"--no comment) told her she should. I've heard of this before--there is a school of (bullshit) thought that things like blood type and pH are guiding factors as to what sort of diet is best for a person. If she knew anything about basic chemistry and biology, she would know that blood is a very good buffer solution and that its pH does not vary significantly (and that if it did, she would be dead and unable to test herself).

Claims that "the government" is poisoning the water supply or that city-provided home tap water is contaminated with "invisible chemicals" are occasionally "proven" by methods such as using chlorine indicator test kits and electrodes. This is a great article on the subject, by the way. If the average person had any accurate understanding of chemistry, these sorts of scams would be less effective. The very fact that the word "chemical" evokes images of harmful solvents and mutagenic wastes instead of molecular structures of familiar compounds like water or sucrose suggests that the public is under-educated in the sciences.

I could go on forever. No one here disputes the fact that having knowledge of science (big, vague, overarching field) is useful. But where are people going to get their information about science, on the whole?

Most people do not read peer-reviewed journals. Many students opt not to read textbooks; why would the working man? All of the information that the lay public has about science will inevitably come from popular media--books, magazines (sometimes specifically devoted to science), television, and films.

The media is not primarily concerned with being educational. Education, clearly, does not sell. Instead, the media is interested in the fluffy bits that the majority of people who sit down to watch television want to see. They want the controversy behind science, not the facts!

The subject of ten dimensions, in particular, or string theory, does not seem to me like it is specifically too important to daily life. Much like relativity, these are poorly understood concepts by the lay public. However, the importance of relativity is not being disputed here; the primary question is "which is worse, bad information or no information?"

I think bad information is far worse, if only because people as a whole tend to believe the first thing that they hear about a subject and are not accustomed to readjusting their way of thinking about a subject.

Unfortunately, this is a lose-lose situation. Bad information cannot be completely eliminated, because there are always going to be people who can profit from bad information. And if there is no information, well, that's just it. There...is no information. However, if there is no bad information available in the form of popular media, the probability that a person's first exposure to a subject will be good information is much higher; in my field, this means that a patient will hear about medical treatments from his doctor, not from Prevention magazine or a health food store salesman. And a lot of information is so bad that it deserves no exposure at all because it is intentionally deceptive.

Last I checked, no one was using lies about string theory to sell anything, but I'm sure if they could figure out how to do it, someone would.

So I'm with Idran on this. It's an unfortunate side-effect of first amendment rights in America that people can publish books on whatever subject they want, promoting whatever they want, no matter what their credentials are. I don't think that people who have no knowledge about a subject should be able to pretend they have knowledge, because the layman is going to assume that if someone could write a book and get it published that whoever wrote it must be knowledgeable; much like some of the lay public assumes herbal products are effective for treating disease simply because they're available for sale. Even if the discussion of theoretical physics is somewhat different from the discussion of health care, there's something about "gee-whiz" science that sells--probably the gee-whiz factor--and all of these books/documentaries/etc. are produced with the dollar in mind, not the education of the consumer or the advancement of science on the whole. That much, in itself, seems to disqualify them as being valuable in any way.

[pd Rydia]

Worst? No information.

Eliminating misinformation, mind you, would get rid of every doctor ever.

Now, I'm firmly of the belief that most every doctor wants to help her patients. However, that doesn't mean they're any good at it. I've had a lot of shitty doctors--more than the number of helpful doctors I've had--and misinformation is one of the biggest issues in that consideration (taking a place well above the stereotypical ego factor). And I've had a lot of doctors.

There is no infallible source of information, you understand--misinformation is available not just through quacks. People have biases, people don't have the time to study the newest information, people can't know all cross-disciplinary stuff. And, frankly, not everything is known.


Yes, I realize you're not talking about experts who really do care, really know a lot, but can't know everything. That's still enough to cause irreparable harm (think psychiatry, where multiple misdiagnoses turns off the patient from seeking treatment for years or life, or giving a medication wrong for the particular illness or person can lead to the exact opposite of the desired results).


Drawing a line at some arbitrary place of "this is too misinformative," with book publishing, would be pretty impractical. I can't see that being implemented without providing a hindrance to actual experts--not to mention the rest of folks--when someone wanted it to be. Book publishing really ought to be as free as possible.


As for Trudeau? I read a scathing review of his first book before I ever encountered it on shelves, in a newspaper somewhere. I wasn't looking for it (the review). It sucks that books like that are out there, and that people believe them--and that a portion of those who believe them want to believe them in spite of other evidence--but in practicality, it's the price to pay for letting people publish books. Which is a good thing.

I wouldn't mind book reviews being more readily available. Much like video game reviews. I consume both voraciously, yet have to go a-hunting for reviews (which oft-times seem ever-so-slightly biased).

[Archmage]

It's evident that free speech cannot practically be shut down, and I prefer to err on permissiveness rather than restrictiveness when it comes to personal rights. I have a tendency to come back to medicine when debate about science occurs if only because it's my field and the thing I feel most qualified (not necessarily completely qualified, just most qualified) to speak about. However, I realize that not everything can be pulled back to the medical field.

Basically, it's my opinion that misinformation is always bad from a purely theoretical standpoint. It would be way better if there were no misinformation. But suppressing all opinions to shut down what is functionally the opinion of radical hacks is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This may seem like a 180 from my earlier statements (without any apparent justification), but Kai and I talked IRL for a while about the subject and I've decided to clarify my position a little.

If misinformation is potentially harmful, it should be suppressed. Otherwise, it's just a nuisance. Misconceptions about string theory are not going to kill anyone. If I distributed pamphlets about how liquid bleach was in fact an excellent cocktail mixer (the government just doesn't want you to know) and people bought into it, they would be harmed or potentially die. If I provided amateur advice about how to fix an engine that caused a car to fault and injured a driver, that would be bad. And to come full circle to medicine, if I told people to stop chemotherapy and take high doses of vitamins and herbs instead, that would be bad.

So the whole thing is very context-sensitive. When is it actually harmful for someone to have bad information? I can think of a lot of examples in which knowledge of science would save someone from fraud, but because of my comparatively limited knowledge they're basically all medically-related issues, which as Ashley pointed out, no one is going to dispute; lying about medicine is bad.

But this thread didn't start with medicine, and at this point it's not really necessary for me to keep discussing medicine. I'm going to have to backpedal a bit here and recall something I first learned in high school chemistry--molecular orbital theory.

Elementary and middle school chemistry is integrated in with a greater picture of "science" in most cases. The model of the atom that is taught for the purposes of these courses is the electron shell model. You may remember this, and it may be all you remember if you never took chem beyond that (or simply forgot it). The basic gist is that each "layer" of an atom's electron "shells" can contain a certain number of electrons, with layer 1 maxing out at two and all subsequent shells maxing out at 8. An atom is stable when its outermost shell is filled, so all chemical reactions are attempting to put 8 electrons in the outermost shell to stabilize it.

This is not a complete picture of what's going on in an electron, obviously. It's not completely wrong, but it omits a lot of details that are crucial to, well, somebody. The most important thing it screws up details the positioning of electrons in transition metals--it's simply not possible to portray and correctly understand electron activity in transition metals without "graduating" to molecular orbital theory.

I recall learning MO theory and originally being somewhat bitter that I had been taught the "wrong" way to think about the structure of the atom. However, I later came to understand that it's possible that I wouldn't have understood MO theory without being able to use the incomplete and flawed shell theory as a jumping-off point. This is probably the best example of where "misinformation "was actually ultimately helpful; it was basically a simplified explanation intended to get grade-schoolers to understand a complex theory's rudiments before explaining how something really worked.

But is this really the case? It's quite probable that I (and a lot of other people) could've "gotten" MO theory without being misled for what equates to over a year of chemistry "lies." A week or so would probably have been sufficient. This is probably more a flaw of the school system than anything else, but it comes to mind as an example where misinformation was ultimately used to teach.

This raises another curious question; what qualifies as misinformation? Is an incomplete picture misinformation, or only something that is directly contradictory to "truth?"