How Humanity Has Failed to Address the Threat of Constant Misinformation

You can’t make an informed decision about anything if you don’t know the facts

One of the best decisions I ever made was to pick up a minor in physics to go along with my English major. At some point during class or a lab, it would usually come up that I was the only English major in the group. That led to a few quizzical looks, but both my fellow students and my teachers came to appreciate my unique perspective.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could return to the understanding that our diverse perspectives should be a source of strength rather than conflict?

I once asked the professor if the universe appeared flat when perceived through the reference frame of light. This was during a lecture on “length contraction,” a phenomenon that’s derived from special relativity. We had a problem that involved a pole vaulter carrying a pole that was longer than a barn. We had to calculate how close to the speed of light the pole vaulter would have to run to get the pole to fit inside.

This made me wonder if distance doesn’t exist at all as far as light is concerned, or time for that matter. I was just trying to comprehend the nature of special relativity as a college student should. But when I asked the professor, he looked at me like I’d broken his brain. He couldn’t answer me, and became visibly uncomfortable. After class, a lot of the students wanted to discuss the idea.

This was back when we were young, idealistic, and still believed we could solve all the world’s problems. We never solved them of course, but at least we used to try.

The most profound realization you have when studying the scientific method is how often your predictions are completely wrong. We’d go into experiments with an expectation about what we’d find. It’s a discordant moment when you do the math and recognize the truth is the opposite of what you predicted.

You’re left frustrated and scratching your head.

Eventually, you get sick of doing the same calculations over and over, and you decide to adopt another working theory and try again. Actually running the numbers goes a long way towards eroding stubbornly held beliefs. But even when you know science and you’ve done the math, beliefs can be persistent. Ultimately you do it because you become tired of failing.

Recently my wife finished up her master’s degree, and I had another close encounter with the chasm that exists between presumed beliefs and what literature, experiments, and data can actually support.

My wife did many of her classes in the evenings on her computer, and sometimes she’d send me a video she thought was interesting. It surprised me to discover that much of her master’s program consisted of finding and evaluating scholarly sources. A lot of the work she did reminded me of what I was told as an English major. The new wrinkle in her master’s program involved having a look at the methodology for data collection and evaluation.

I discovered it was good to have a reminder to consider sources and to be mindful of bias. Keeping your mind trained requires the same diligence as maintaining your physical fitness. Even as a person who is familiar with the futility of clinging to false presumptions, and who knows how to find scholarly sources, there are still times when I mistakenly share information that’s simply not true.

Part of the problem is that a lot has changed since I was in college. We didn’t get email until I was in my senior year. Smart phones were a concept that only existed in science fiction. If you wanted to learn about something, you had to go to the library and research.

Today, people get a lot of their information from dubious screenshots or memes that are shared on social media. I’m as guilty as anyone of seeing something that made me emotional enough to hit “share” without fully comprehending the consequences of my action.

We are exposed to a constant scroll of misleading information. I’ve come to believe that words have an influence on you simply because they pass before your eyes. Even if you’re not consciously aware of reading them, messages can sink in and inform your beliefs. Once those beliefs take root, it’s difficult to get rid of them.

The only process is to sit down and do the math and think judiciously about the information you’ve been told. Nobody likes doing the math. It’s far easier and more pleasant to believe something that isn’t true. That is, right up until the moment the Earth drops away from beneath your feet.

Today, I write on a variety of platforms with tens of thousands of followers. Often, I find myself the target of odd comments. These comments come from profiles with strange names, no picture, and no followers.

I don’t think the general public understands the extent to which fake accounts influence our perception of reality. I’m sure there are many people who don’t get responses to the things they post. Perhaps these writers are quite delighted to receive any comment at all. It can be heartbreaking to make them realize that they’ve been interacting not with a human being, but with some form of malicious bot.

The thing about arguing with artificial intelligence is that you can’t win, all you can do is minimize how much you lose. The more you argue, the more time you waste that could have been better spent in some productive enterprise.

The problem is that even if you write a thoughtful article that’s well-researched and supported by respectable sources, the impact of your work can be substantially eroded by the presence of artificial comments.

Again, I turn to my own behavior to support this. There are times when I’ll read something online, and then I’ll go to the comments for an impression from the general public. The problem is that, on most platforms, you have no way to verify whether or not the comments you read represent a legitimate perspective or are part of some exercise in social engineering.

I’ve tried to convey to my own children the need to take ownership of what they think. That seems like a silly thing to say, but it’s profoundly important. There are scams everywhere, and it’s easy to fall into one if you’re not mindful.

Last year, a highly intelligent friend of mine got caught up in a scam from an email that appeared to come from his bank. He confessed that before it happened to him, he thought that the only people who fell for such things were foolish and gullible. Having “done the math” in a sense, he’d come to discard his original presumption.

We need to all be aware that human beings are vulnerable to deceptions. Misinformation has become much more prevalent and accessible. Unfortunately, our media and our public school system teach about misinformation using a methodology from before the era of cell phones. Sometimes they don’t mention it at all.

That’s inadequate.

In the past, I suspect that there were relatively few instances of people falling victim to some kind of nefarious scheme after doing research in the library. Today, people get caught up in false assumptions all the time.

We’re not generally inclined to dwell on our mistakes and those times when we’ve been fooled. That’s why I appreciated the insights my wife shared from her class. I needed the refresher, and I think that the general public might need one periodically as well.

I feel that one of the main problems confronting our society is the ease with which dubious content is delivered to the general public. Every time I’m out in my community, I see somebody casually walking along with their nose in their cell phone.

We used to say, “Don’t believe everything you read.” For some reason, that phrase seems to have been swapped out for, “I have a right to my personal beliefs.”

But if your beliefs have been constructed on the foundation of random words from dubious sources that have appeared on your social media account, are they really your beliefs? Furthermore, this situation has devolved to the point where it’s commonly considered impolite to challenge inaccurate statements. The idea of “fact checking” is often viewed with contempt.

Shouldn’t we consider the impact of our collective failure to defend the truth? As parents, don’t we have any right to insist that only accurate information is presented to our children?

Lately, I’ve encountered a lot of people who feel hopeless. They insist that nothing ever gets better, no matter what we do. I understand their despair. I experienced it as an undergraduate when, no matter how many times I ran the calculations, the numbers didn’t support my predictions.

You’ll never get different results if you always do the same thing.

The only way forward is to go through the uncomfortable process of trying a new approach. Sometimes that can be challenging. Read the literature, study the data, evaluate the methodology.

Cultivate a more flexible ideology with a focus on finding answers rather than affixing blame.

We should consider making the dangers of misinformation a greater point of emphasis in our society. This will ensure everyone is empowered to cast aside their perpetual frustration and assist in the discovery of practical solutions.

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