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52 reviews for:
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
Cailin O'Connor, James Owen Weatherall
3.67 AVERAGE
52 reviews for:
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
Cailin O'Connor, James Owen Weatherall
3.67 AVERAGE
elise_dragon13's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
readlvlgreen's review against another edition
informative
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread is an educational text aimed towards a general media-dealing audience that explains the different methods that happens when misinformation becomes widespread in a society. This book reads like an easier version of a textbook while being an enjoyable read full of real world events. The purpose of this book is to teach about how false beliefs about misinformation can become permanent ideas in society and how to identify these things. There is a heavy focus on people and the different reasons why people spread false beliefs. This book does not condemn misinformation but instead wants to teach how to look out for it, which is very important for today's world that deals with information all the time.
The book consist of five parts, each is formatted by giving real world examples and explaining the different concepts that are happening in these examples. Each real world example is well researched and is the book's strongest point. The real world examples are what makes the book's concepts so easy to understand while also being an interesting to read. After reading this book, I felt that misinformation is a more human concept than I have before. We all have false beliefs and the spread of that IS misinformation whether we mean it or not. And it is so easy to look at misinformation and write it off but this book reminds you to find the innermost workings that is happening when misinformation spreads. In the end, The Misinformation Age reminds it's readers to look out into the world and see how spread of information is a complex process which you, a person in a society, is a part of everyday.
I fully recommend this book to anyone who is on the internet or consumes media, so I recommend this book to everyone. Even if you already have an idea about know how misinformation spreads, this book goes above by giving real world examples and braking each down to further explain the difference methods at play when it comes to misinformation. When you come across misinformation, there are so many personal reasons why someone would be willing to spread that. This book gives focus to the "people" side of misinformation and how society does play a role when it comes to misinformation. Since a lot of information is delivered through the internet, it is easy to forget that there is always a person behind that information who is spreading it. This book does a fantastic job of reminding you of that. The Misinformation Age is around five chapters of text (around 187 pages) and uses nontechnical vocabulary so it is a book that can be read in a few days or even one sitting.
The book consist of five parts, each is formatted by giving real world examples and explaining the different concepts that are happening in these examples. Each real world example is well researched and is the book's strongest point. The real world examples are what makes the book's concepts so easy to understand while also being an interesting to read. After reading this book, I felt that misinformation is a more human concept than I have before. We all have false beliefs and the spread of that IS misinformation whether we mean it or not. And it is so easy to look at misinformation and write it off but this book reminds you to find the innermost workings that is happening when misinformation spreads. In the end, The Misinformation Age reminds it's readers to look out into the world and see how spread of information is a complex process which you, a person in a society, is a part of everyday.
I fully recommend this book to anyone who is on the internet or consumes media, so I recommend this book to everyone. Even if you already have an idea about know how misinformation spreads, this book goes above by giving real world examples and braking each down to further explain the difference methods at play when it comes to misinformation. When you come across misinformation, there are so many personal reasons why someone would be willing to spread that. This book gives focus to the "people" side of misinformation and how society does play a role when it comes to misinformation. Since a lot of information is delivered through the internet, it is easy to forget that there is always a person behind that information who is spreading it. This book does a fantastic job of reminding you of that. The Misinformation Age is around five chapters of text (around 187 pages) and uses nontechnical vocabulary so it is a book that can be read in a few days or even one sitting.
sinta's review against another edition
3.0
A comprehensive review of key misinformation events and social modelling that supports the authors thesis that the false beliefs is the necessary evil we must accept in a society in order to reap the benefits of social cooperation in truth seeking.
I think the authors make their core argument well, but with little insight that is new (though perhaps it was in 2016…). I think they needed to put more work in to making the case for their proposals for a different form of democracy - a transition from majority-rules to deliberative democracy that truly accounts for scientific conclusions. We can all agree on the pitfalls of majority-rules, but I don’t think they quite built out the case for limiting “pure” democracy, or how we can prevent such a system being corrupted by the very people they are concerned about (e.g. industrial power, propagandists, motivated policymakers)
Page 2 How could it happen that, for centuries, European scholars could assert— with apparent certainty and seriousness—that lambs grew on trees?
Page 3 Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Re- leases Statement.” It was the single most-shared elec- tion-related news item on Facebook in the three months leading up to the election.
Page 7 to focus on individual psychology, or intelligence, is
Page 8 to badly misdiagnose how false beliefs persist and spread. It leads us to the wrong remedies. Many of our beliefs—perhaps most of them—have a more complex origin: we form them on the basis of what other people tell us. We trust and learn from one another.
Page 9 we need to understand the social character of belief—and recognize that widespread falsehood is a necessary, but harmful, corollary to our most powerful tools for learning truths.
Page 10 Political propaganda, however, is just part of the problem. Often more dangerous—because we are less attuned to it—is industrial propaganda. This runs the gamut from advertising, which is ex- plicitly intended to influence beliefs, to concerted misinformation campaigns designed to undermine reliable evidence.
Page 11 It is only through a proper understanding of these social effects that
Page 12 one can fully understand how false beliefs with significant, real- world consequences persist, even in the face of evidence of their falsehood.
Page 14 What we see in these models is that even perfectly rational—albeit simple —agents who learn from others in their social network can fail to form true beliefs about the world, even when more than adequate evidence is available. In other words, individually rational agents can form groups that are not rational at all.28 This sort of disconnect between individual and group-level ra- tionality holds important morals for our understanding of human beliefs.
Page 16 One of our key arguments in this book is that we cannot under- stand changes in our political situation by focusing only on indi- viduals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs. Since the early 1990s, our social structures have shifted dramat- ically away from community-level, face-to-face interactions and to- ward online interactions.
Page 17 One of the most surpris- ing conclusions from the models we study in this book is that it is not necessary for propagandists to produce fraudulent results to in- fluence belief. Instead, by exerting influence on how legitimate, in- dependent scientific results are shared with the public, the would-be propagandist can substantially affect the public’s beliefs about sci- entific facts
Page 18 We think the interventions most likely to succeed involve radical and unlikely changes, such as the develop- ment of new regulatory frameworks to penalize the intentional cre- ation and distribution of fake news, similar to laws recently adopted in Germany to control hate speech on social media.33 And perhaps even more is needed—up to and including a reengineering of our basic democratic institutions.
Page 23 In this case, ozone concentrations had never been known to fall below a certain level, and there was no known process by which they could get that low. So the satellite team had designed its data-processing system to assume that any such data points were unreliable. The Antarctic expeditions revealed that the ozone hole resulted from a confluence of several factors—including some that no one had foreseen. One of the main contributors was the fact that the air above Antarctica is so cold that clouds there are composed of ice particles rather than water vapor. It turned out that these ice parti- cles remove nitric acid from the air, which in turn allows the chlo- rine released by CFCs to persist longer, increasing ozone depletion. Meanwhile, the continent’s weather patterns have a distinctive
Page 24 character: powerful, frigid winds circle the South Pole, forming what is known as a polar vortex. This vortex traps the air over Ant- arctica so that ozone from other regions of the atmosphere cannot easily mix in, and the chlorine present there cannot easily disperse. This led to chlorine levels much higher than anyone predicted, with little chance for the ozone to be replenished from elsewhere.
Page 27 And yet the industry kept asking for more—for certainty. DuPont’s stance is reminiscent of an argument most famously associated with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume—though similar arguments were made by the ancient Greeks.16 Suppose that, having observed some kind of regularity in the world, you would like to draw a general inference about it. For concrete- ness: Suppose you observe that the sun has risen every morning of your life. Can you infer that the sun always rises? Or, from the fact that you (growing up in the Northern Hemisphere, say) have only ever seen white swans, that every swan is white? Hume’s answer was an emphatic “no.”
Page 28 Philosophers of science, such as Larry Laudan and P. Kyle Stan- ford, have argued that these past failures of science should make us very cautious in accepting current scientific theories as true. Their argument is sometimes called the “pessimistic meta-induction”: a careful look at the long history of scientific error should make us confident that current theories are also erroneous.19
Page 29 Perhaps we can never be certain about anything, but that does not mean we cannot be more or less confident Ultimately, we care about truth (at least scientific truth) inas- much as true beliefs allow us to act successfully in the world. We care about knowledge because of the role that what we know—or at least, what we strongly believe to be true—plays in the choices we make, either individually or collectively. And recognizing this rela- tionship between our beliefs and our choices is the key, not to solv- ing the Problem of Induction, but to setting it aside. When it comes to the question of what we should do, we need to set general skepticism aside and act on the basis of the evidence we have. As Hume himself put it, “A wise man . . . pro- portions his belief to the evidence.”20
Page 30 There is a formula, known as Bayes’ rule, that allows you to calculate what your degree of belief, or credence, should be after learning of some evidence, taking into account what you believed before you saw the evidence and how likely the evidence was.22
Page 31 In 1962, Thomas Kuhn, a physicist-turned-historian, published a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.25 Scientists would identify problems, apply well-known methods to solve them, run experiments to test their
Page 32 solutions, and gradually build their repertoire of bits of nature tamed by their work. Kuhn used the term “normal science” to describe this gradual progress. All normal science, Kuhn argued, occurs within some paradigm, with its own rules for identifying and solving problems and its own standards of evidence A scientific revolution is a change of paradigm: a radical discon- tinuity, not only in background theory, but in scientists’ whole way of seeing the world. Changes of paradigm could change not only theory, but also what counts as evidence—and in some cases, Kuhn argued, even the results of experiments changed when paradigms changed.27
Page 33 Kuhn’s work raised the possibility that to understand science, we had to recognize it as a human enterprise, with a complex his- tory and rich sociological features that could affect the ideas scien- tists developed and defended. Ruth Schwartz Cowan and sociologist Donald McKenzie outline how the whole field of statistics emerged when Karl Pearson and Francis Gal- ton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) attempted to quantify various mark- ers of racial superiority.31 Michel Foucault argued that modern psychiatry was an instrument of subjugation, a way of segregating “problematic” members of society from the rest of the population.32 The modern clinic, he argued, was descended from the medieval leper colony and played a similar role in society.
Page 36 This all changed in 1974—the same year that Rowland and Mo- lina discovered that CFCs deplete ozone. That year, Gene Likens, a professor at Cornell, and F. Herbert Bormann, a professor at Yale, published a research article in the scientific journal Science in which they defended a startling conclusion: the rain and snow falling on virtually the entire northeastern United States had become acidic—
Page 37 much more acidic than elsewhere in the country, and more acidic than in the same region twenty years previously.
Page 41 1994 book called Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quar- rels with Science. Written by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition argued that the sociologists and philosophers who purported to analyze science were generally in-
Page 42 competent to evaluate the work they were responding to. The au- thors argued that many of the arguments in the science studies lit- erature were not just ill-informed but downright incoherent. One of the ideologies that Gross and Levitt associated with the academic left—and criticized harshly—was what they called “radi- cal environmentalism,” personified by Jeremy Rifkin, an American author and activist who was famous for drawing attention to ozone depletion, acid rain, and global warming in the 1970s and 1980s.56
Page 43 our beliefs play a particular role in guiding action.
Page 44 When we say, in what fol- lows, that a belief is “true,” this is all we mean; likewise, a “false” belief is one that does not bear this relationship to evidence and successful action.) The views of scientists on issues of public interest—from questions concerning the envi- ronment, to the safety and efficacy of drugs and other pharmaceu- ticals, to the risks associated with new technology— have a special status not because of the authority of the people who hold them, but because the views themselves are informed by the best evidence we have.
Page 52 1998 by econo- mists Venkatesh Bala and Sanjeev Goyal. It is a mathematical model in which individuals learn about their world both by observing it and by listening to their neighbors. Kevin Zollman, now at Carnegie Mellon University, used it to represent scientists and their networks of interaction
Page 53 The basic setup of Bala and Goyal’s model is that there is a group of simple agents—highly idealized representations of scientists, or knowledge seekers—who are trying to choose between two actions and who use information gathered by themselves and by others to make this choice. The two actions are assumed to differ in how likely they are to yield a desired outcome. each scientist develops beliefs based not only on the outcomes of their own actions, but also on those of their colleagues and friends.
Page 59 What we want to understand is this: Under what circumstances do networks of scientists converge to false beliefs?
Page 63 This trade-off, where connections propagate true beliefs but also open channels for the spread of misleading evidence, means that sometimes it is actually better for a group of scientists to com- municate less, especially when they work on a hard problem. This phenomenon, in which scientists improve their beliefs by failing to communicate, is known as the “Zollman effect,” some temporary diversity of be- liefs is crucial for a scientific community.
Page 64 we add to the model the fact that scientists some- times test the alternative theory—they sporadically or accidentally perform action B, even though they generally do not expect it to be better—they can overcome the Zollman effect,
Page 69 The term “polarization” originated in physics to describe the way some electromagnetic waves propagate in two oppositely oriented ways.
Page 70 our country and our lives. Scientific beliefs, on the other hand, are supposed to be value-free (arguments from Chapter 1 notwith- standing). In an ideal science, thinkers adopt beliefs that are sup- ported by evidence, regardless of their social consequences. In fact, this is not how science works. Scientists are people values come into play in determining which beliefs they support and which theories they adopt.52
Page 72 Jeffrey’s rule,” after Princeton philosopher Dick Jef- frey, who proposed it. Jeffrey’s rule takes into account an agent’s degree of uncertainty about some piece of evidence when determin- ing what the agent’s new credence should be. In an- other version, the scientists could think that the scientists who dis- agree too much are corrupt or otherwise trying to mislead them and therefore assume that the evidence they have shared is actively fabricated. scientists regularly split into polarized groups holding different beliefs, with each side trusting the evidence of only those who already agree with them.
Page 75 many psychologists have shown that people tend to search out and pay attention to only the evidence that accords with their current beliefs. This is known as “confirmation bias”— reasoning by which we tend to confirm our current beliefs—and it is a variety of what is sometimes called “motivated reasoning.”
Page 78 Semmelweis Childbed fever, he concluded, was a result of “cadaverous particles” transferred via the student doctors’ hands. After he started requiring regular hand-washing with a chlorinated solution, the clinic’s death rate plummeted. his fellow physicians—principally upper-class gentlemen—were offended by the implication that their hands were unclean, and they questioned the scientific basis
Page 80 15 percent of Trump supporters chose the photo with the clearly smaller crowd.
Page 82 the probability that the whole group will get the right answer by voting increases as you add more and more voters. This suggests that there are cases when it is actually a good idea to accept your own fallibil- ity and go with the majority opinion But trusting the judgments of others does not always work so neatly when these judgments are not actually independent of each other. UCLA economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, for instance, have described a phenomenon known as an “information cascade,” by which a belief can spread through a group despite the presence of strong evidence to the contrary.70 In these cases, incorrect statements of belief can snowball as people’s judgments are influenced by others in their social environment.
Page 84 research on conformity bias suggests that we care about more than just the best action. At least in some settings, it seems we also care about agreeing with other people. In fact, in some cases we are pre- pared to deny our beliefs, or the evidence of our senses, to better fit in with those around us.
Page 86 Conformity nips the spread of good new ideas in the bud.
Page 90 The difference between cases in which beliefs really matter and in which they are more abstract can help us understand some mod- ern instances of false belief as well. When beliefs are not very im- portant to action, they can come to take the role of a kind of social signal. They tell people what group you belong to—and help you get whatever benefits might accrue from membership in that group.
Page 91 In the conformity case, disturbing people’s social networks and connecting them with different groups should help rehabilitate those with false beliefs. But when people polarize because of mis- trust, such an intervention would generally fail—and it might make polarization worse. In the real world, both effects seem to be at work, in which case interventions will need to be sensitive to both explanations for false belief.
Page 95 It would be impossible, using any legitimate scientific method, to generate a robust and convincing body of evidence demonstrating that smoking is safe. But that was not the goal. The goal was rather to create the appearance of uncertainty: to find, fund, and promote research that muddied the waters, made the existing evidence seems less definitive, and gave policy makers and tobacco users just enough cover to ignore the scientific consen- sus.
Page 97 From April 1917 until Au- gust 1919, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) conducted a systematic campaign to sell US participation in the war to the American public.17 The CPI produced films, posters, and printed publications, and it had offices in ten countries, including the United
Page 98 States. In some cases it fed newspapers outright lies about Ameri- can activities in Europ The sugar industry invested heavily in supporting and promoting research on the health risks of fat, to deflect attention from the greater risks of sugar Who is behind the long-term resistance to legalizing marijuana for recrea-
Page 99 tional use? Many interests are involved, but alcohol trade groups have taken a particularly strong and effective stand.
Page 104 biased production.” This strategy, which may seem obvious, involves directly funding, and in some cases performing, industry-sponsored research. If in- dustrial forces control the production of research, they can select what gets published and what gets discarded or ignored
Page 107 the propagandist does not fabricate any data. They are performing real science, at least in the sense that they actually perform the experiments they report, and they do so using the same standards and methods as the scientists. They just publish the results selectively. Experiments that do not yield exciting results often go unpublished, or are rel- egated to minor journals where they are rarely read publication bias” or the “file drawer effect,”
I think the authors make their core argument well, but with little insight that is new (though perhaps it was in 2016…). I think they needed to put more work in to making the case for their proposals for a different form of democracy - a transition from majority-rules to deliberative democracy that truly accounts for scientific conclusions. We can all agree on the pitfalls of majority-rules, but I don’t think they quite built out the case for limiting “pure” democracy, or how we can prevent such a system being corrupted by the very people they are concerned about (e.g. industrial power, propagandists, motivated policymakers)
Page 2 How could it happen that, for centuries, European scholars could assert— with apparent certainty and seriousness—that lambs grew on trees?
Page 3 Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Re- leases Statement.” It was the single most-shared elec- tion-related news item on Facebook in the three months leading up to the election.
Page 7 to focus on individual psychology, or intelligence, is
Page 8 to badly misdiagnose how false beliefs persist and spread. It leads us to the wrong remedies. Many of our beliefs—perhaps most of them—have a more complex origin: we form them on the basis of what other people tell us. We trust and learn from one another.
Page 9 we need to understand the social character of belief—and recognize that widespread falsehood is a necessary, but harmful, corollary to our most powerful tools for learning truths.
Page 10 Political propaganda, however, is just part of the problem. Often more dangerous—because we are less attuned to it—is industrial propaganda. This runs the gamut from advertising, which is ex- plicitly intended to influence beliefs, to concerted misinformation campaigns designed to undermine reliable evidence.
Page 11 It is only through a proper understanding of these social effects that
Page 12 one can fully understand how false beliefs with significant, real- world consequences persist, even in the face of evidence of their falsehood.
Page 14 What we see in these models is that even perfectly rational—albeit simple —agents who learn from others in their social network can fail to form true beliefs about the world, even when more than adequate evidence is available. In other words, individually rational agents can form groups that are not rational at all.28 This sort of disconnect between individual and group-level ra- tionality holds important morals for our understanding of human beliefs.
Page 16 One of our key arguments in this book is that we cannot under- stand changes in our political situation by focusing only on indi- viduals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs. Since the early 1990s, our social structures have shifted dramat- ically away from community-level, face-to-face interactions and to- ward online interactions.
Page 17 One of the most surpris- ing conclusions from the models we study in this book is that it is not necessary for propagandists to produce fraudulent results to in- fluence belief. Instead, by exerting influence on how legitimate, in- dependent scientific results are shared with the public, the would-be propagandist can substantially affect the public’s beliefs about sci- entific facts
Page 18 We think the interventions most likely to succeed involve radical and unlikely changes, such as the develop- ment of new regulatory frameworks to penalize the intentional cre- ation and distribution of fake news, similar to laws recently adopted in Germany to control hate speech on social media.33 And perhaps even more is needed—up to and including a reengineering of our basic democratic institutions.
Page 23 In this case, ozone concentrations had never been known to fall below a certain level, and there was no known process by which they could get that low. So the satellite team had designed its data-processing system to assume that any such data points were unreliable. The Antarctic expeditions revealed that the ozone hole resulted from a confluence of several factors—including some that no one had foreseen. One of the main contributors was the fact that the air above Antarctica is so cold that clouds there are composed of ice particles rather than water vapor. It turned out that these ice parti- cles remove nitric acid from the air, which in turn allows the chlo- rine released by CFCs to persist longer, increasing ozone depletion. Meanwhile, the continent’s weather patterns have a distinctive
Page 24 character: powerful, frigid winds circle the South Pole, forming what is known as a polar vortex. This vortex traps the air over Ant- arctica so that ozone from other regions of the atmosphere cannot easily mix in, and the chlorine present there cannot easily disperse. This led to chlorine levels much higher than anyone predicted, with little chance for the ozone to be replenished from elsewhere.
Page 27 And yet the industry kept asking for more—for certainty. DuPont’s stance is reminiscent of an argument most famously associated with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume—though similar arguments were made by the ancient Greeks.16 Suppose that, having observed some kind of regularity in the world, you would like to draw a general inference about it. For concrete- ness: Suppose you observe that the sun has risen every morning of your life. Can you infer that the sun always rises? Or, from the fact that you (growing up in the Northern Hemisphere, say) have only ever seen white swans, that every swan is white? Hume’s answer was an emphatic “no.”
Page 28 Philosophers of science, such as Larry Laudan and P. Kyle Stan- ford, have argued that these past failures of science should make us very cautious in accepting current scientific theories as true. Their argument is sometimes called the “pessimistic meta-induction”: a careful look at the long history of scientific error should make us confident that current theories are also erroneous.19
Page 29 Perhaps we can never be certain about anything, but that does not mean we cannot be more or less confident Ultimately, we care about truth (at least scientific truth) inas- much as true beliefs allow us to act successfully in the world. We care about knowledge because of the role that what we know—or at least, what we strongly believe to be true—plays in the choices we make, either individually or collectively. And recognizing this rela- tionship between our beliefs and our choices is the key, not to solv- ing the Problem of Induction, but to setting it aside. When it comes to the question of what we should do, we need to set general skepticism aside and act on the basis of the evidence we have. As Hume himself put it, “A wise man . . . pro- portions his belief to the evidence.”20
Page 30 There is a formula, known as Bayes’ rule, that allows you to calculate what your degree of belief, or credence, should be after learning of some evidence, taking into account what you believed before you saw the evidence and how likely the evidence was.22
Page 31 In 1962, Thomas Kuhn, a physicist-turned-historian, published a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.25 Scientists would identify problems, apply well-known methods to solve them, run experiments to test their
Page 32 solutions, and gradually build their repertoire of bits of nature tamed by their work. Kuhn used the term “normal science” to describe this gradual progress. All normal science, Kuhn argued, occurs within some paradigm, with its own rules for identifying and solving problems and its own standards of evidence A scientific revolution is a change of paradigm: a radical discon- tinuity, not only in background theory, but in scientists’ whole way of seeing the world. Changes of paradigm could change not only theory, but also what counts as evidence—and in some cases, Kuhn argued, even the results of experiments changed when paradigms changed.27
Page 33 Kuhn’s work raised the possibility that to understand science, we had to recognize it as a human enterprise, with a complex his- tory and rich sociological features that could affect the ideas scien- tists developed and defended. Ruth Schwartz Cowan and sociologist Donald McKenzie outline how the whole field of statistics emerged when Karl Pearson and Francis Gal- ton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) attempted to quantify various mark- ers of racial superiority.31 Michel Foucault argued that modern psychiatry was an instrument of subjugation, a way of segregating “problematic” members of society from the rest of the population.32 The modern clinic, he argued, was descended from the medieval leper colony and played a similar role in society.
Page 36 This all changed in 1974—the same year that Rowland and Mo- lina discovered that CFCs deplete ozone. That year, Gene Likens, a professor at Cornell, and F. Herbert Bormann, a professor at Yale, published a research article in the scientific journal Science in which they defended a startling conclusion: the rain and snow falling on virtually the entire northeastern United States had become acidic—
Page 37 much more acidic than elsewhere in the country, and more acidic than in the same region twenty years previously.
Page 41 1994 book called Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quar- rels with Science. Written by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition argued that the sociologists and philosophers who purported to analyze science were generally in-
Page 42 competent to evaluate the work they were responding to. The au- thors argued that many of the arguments in the science studies lit- erature were not just ill-informed but downright incoherent. One of the ideologies that Gross and Levitt associated with the academic left—and criticized harshly—was what they called “radi- cal environmentalism,” personified by Jeremy Rifkin, an American author and activist who was famous for drawing attention to ozone depletion, acid rain, and global warming in the 1970s and 1980s.56
Page 43 our beliefs play a particular role in guiding action.
Page 44 When we say, in what fol- lows, that a belief is “true,” this is all we mean; likewise, a “false” belief is one that does not bear this relationship to evidence and successful action.) The views of scientists on issues of public interest—from questions concerning the envi- ronment, to the safety and efficacy of drugs and other pharmaceu- ticals, to the risks associated with new technology— have a special status not because of the authority of the people who hold them, but because the views themselves are informed by the best evidence we have.
Page 52 1998 by econo- mists Venkatesh Bala and Sanjeev Goyal. It is a mathematical model in which individuals learn about their world both by observing it and by listening to their neighbors. Kevin Zollman, now at Carnegie Mellon University, used it to represent scientists and their networks of interaction
Page 53 The basic setup of Bala and Goyal’s model is that there is a group of simple agents—highly idealized representations of scientists, or knowledge seekers—who are trying to choose between two actions and who use information gathered by themselves and by others to make this choice. The two actions are assumed to differ in how likely they are to yield a desired outcome. each scientist develops beliefs based not only on the outcomes of their own actions, but also on those of their colleagues and friends.
Page 59 What we want to understand is this: Under what circumstances do networks of scientists converge to false beliefs?
Page 63 This trade-off, where connections propagate true beliefs but also open channels for the spread of misleading evidence, means that sometimes it is actually better for a group of scientists to com- municate less, especially when they work on a hard problem. This phenomenon, in which scientists improve their beliefs by failing to communicate, is known as the “Zollman effect,” some temporary diversity of be- liefs is crucial for a scientific community.
Page 64 we add to the model the fact that scientists some- times test the alternative theory—they sporadically or accidentally perform action B, even though they generally do not expect it to be better—they can overcome the Zollman effect,
Page 69 The term “polarization” originated in physics to describe the way some electromagnetic waves propagate in two oppositely oriented ways.
Page 70 our country and our lives. Scientific beliefs, on the other hand, are supposed to be value-free (arguments from Chapter 1 notwith- standing). In an ideal science, thinkers adopt beliefs that are sup- ported by evidence, regardless of their social consequences. In fact, this is not how science works. Scientists are people values come into play in determining which beliefs they support and which theories they adopt.52
Page 72 Jeffrey’s rule,” after Princeton philosopher Dick Jef- frey, who proposed it. Jeffrey’s rule takes into account an agent’s degree of uncertainty about some piece of evidence when determin- ing what the agent’s new credence should be. In an- other version, the scientists could think that the scientists who dis- agree too much are corrupt or otherwise trying to mislead them and therefore assume that the evidence they have shared is actively fabricated. scientists regularly split into polarized groups holding different beliefs, with each side trusting the evidence of only those who already agree with them.
Page 75 many psychologists have shown that people tend to search out and pay attention to only the evidence that accords with their current beliefs. This is known as “confirmation bias”— reasoning by which we tend to confirm our current beliefs—and it is a variety of what is sometimes called “motivated reasoning.”
Page 78 Semmelweis Childbed fever, he concluded, was a result of “cadaverous particles” transferred via the student doctors’ hands. After he started requiring regular hand-washing with a chlorinated solution, the clinic’s death rate plummeted. his fellow physicians—principally upper-class gentlemen—were offended by the implication that their hands were unclean, and they questioned the scientific basis
Page 80 15 percent of Trump supporters chose the photo with the clearly smaller crowd.
Page 82 the probability that the whole group will get the right answer by voting increases as you add more and more voters. This suggests that there are cases when it is actually a good idea to accept your own fallibil- ity and go with the majority opinion But trusting the judgments of others does not always work so neatly when these judgments are not actually independent of each other. UCLA economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, for instance, have described a phenomenon known as an “information cascade,” by which a belief can spread through a group despite the presence of strong evidence to the contrary.70 In these cases, incorrect statements of belief can snowball as people’s judgments are influenced by others in their social environment.
Page 84 research on conformity bias suggests that we care about more than just the best action. At least in some settings, it seems we also care about agreeing with other people. In fact, in some cases we are pre- pared to deny our beliefs, or the evidence of our senses, to better fit in with those around us.
Page 86 Conformity nips the spread of good new ideas in the bud.
Page 90 The difference between cases in which beliefs really matter and in which they are more abstract can help us understand some mod- ern instances of false belief as well. When beliefs are not very im- portant to action, they can come to take the role of a kind of social signal. They tell people what group you belong to—and help you get whatever benefits might accrue from membership in that group.
Page 91 In the conformity case, disturbing people’s social networks and connecting them with different groups should help rehabilitate those with false beliefs. But when people polarize because of mis- trust, such an intervention would generally fail—and it might make polarization worse. In the real world, both effects seem to be at work, in which case interventions will need to be sensitive to both explanations for false belief.
Page 95 It would be impossible, using any legitimate scientific method, to generate a robust and convincing body of evidence demonstrating that smoking is safe. But that was not the goal. The goal was rather to create the appearance of uncertainty: to find, fund, and promote research that muddied the waters, made the existing evidence seems less definitive, and gave policy makers and tobacco users just enough cover to ignore the scientific consen- sus.
Page 97 From April 1917 until Au- gust 1919, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) conducted a systematic campaign to sell US participation in the war to the American public.17 The CPI produced films, posters, and printed publications, and it had offices in ten countries, including the United
Page 98 States. In some cases it fed newspapers outright lies about Ameri- can activities in Europ The sugar industry invested heavily in supporting and promoting research on the health risks of fat, to deflect attention from the greater risks of sugar Who is behind the long-term resistance to legalizing marijuana for recrea-
Page 99 tional use? Many interests are involved, but alcohol trade groups have taken a particularly strong and effective stand.
Page 104 biased production.” This strategy, which may seem obvious, involves directly funding, and in some cases performing, industry-sponsored research. If in- dustrial forces control the production of research, they can select what gets published and what gets discarded or ignored
Page 107 the propagandist does not fabricate any data. They are performing real science, at least in the sense that they actually perform the experiments they report, and they do so using the same standards and methods as the scientists. They just publish the results selectively. Experiments that do not yield exciting results often go unpublished, or are rel- egated to minor journals where they are rarely read publication bias” or the “file drawer effect,”
rcpadilha's review against another edition
5.0
Um livro fundamental para efetivamente entender algumas das dinâmicas que mais afetam o nosso dia-a-dia do ponto de vista social e político. Em um momento histórico em que tudo parece questionável, em que as instituições que sempre foram base da nossa sociedade e do meio de vida que construímos, é imprescindível possuir um claro discernimento do que se constitui verdade, o que é fato e o que pode estar aberto ou não para interpretação, discussão e opinião.
De forma muito clara, didática e direta, a autora mostra como é possível desviar, distorcer e corromper até mesmo os métodos científicos para implementar narrativas que defendam interesses escusos, o lucro acima de qualquer consequência e a manutenção e conquista de poder a qualquer custo.
Uma leitura indispensável para entender a sociedade que vivemos e, principalmente, podermos agir e interferir na construção de um novo conceito de democracia.
De forma muito clara, didática e direta, a autora mostra como é possível desviar, distorcer e corromper até mesmo os métodos científicos para implementar narrativas que defendam interesses escusos, o lucro acima de qualquer consequência e a manutenção e conquista de poder a qualquer custo.
Uma leitura indispensável para entender a sociedade que vivemos e, principalmente, podermos agir e interferir na construção de um novo conceito de democracia.
femmecheng's review against another edition
3.0
"Our point, rather, is that the mere existence of contrarians or (apparent) controversy is not itself a story, nor does it justify equal time for all parties to a disagreement. And the publication of a surprising or contrary-to-expectation research article is not in and of itself newsworthy."
"Individual actions that, taken on their own, are justified, conductive to truth, and even rational, can have troubling consequences in a broader context. Individuals exercising judgement over whom to trust, and updating their beliefs in a way that is responsive to those judgments, ultimately contribute to polarization and the breakdown of fruitful exchanges."
"Individual actions that, taken on their own, are justified, conductive to truth, and even rational, can have troubling consequences in a broader context. Individuals exercising judgement over whom to trust, and updating their beliefs in a way that is responsive to those judgments, ultimately contribute to polarization and the breakdown of fruitful exchanges."
mad_taylh's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
"Most of us get our false beliefs from the same places we get our true ones, and if we want the good stuff, we risk getting the bad as well."
diemelanie's review against another edition
4.0
Bei diesem Buch liegt Schwerpunkt in der Konsensbildung in der Wissenschaft, über die die Autoren geforscht haben. Diese Erkenntnisse werden erst im letzten Teil des Buches noch auf die Meinungbildung in Medien und Öffentlichkeit übertragen. Dennoch ist das Buch sehr spannend zu lesen, was auch an den vielen anschaulichen Beispielen für die Ursachen und Verbreitung von Fehlannahmen in der Wissenschaft liegt.
Leider muss ich gestehen, dass viele der Erkenntnisse aus der Untersuchung der Meinungsbildung in wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaften meine Grundannahme einer absolut"objektiven" Wahrheitsfindung in der Wissenschaft (besonders auch in den Naturwissenschaften) schwer erschüttert haben. Zugleich wird gezeigt, wie leicht sich die Ergebnisse von Forschung schon durch die Vergabe von Forschungsmittel und PR-Studien manipulieren lassen.
Leider muss ich gestehen, dass viele der Erkenntnisse aus der Untersuchung der Meinungsbildung in wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaften meine Grundannahme einer absolut"objektiven" Wahrheitsfindung in der Wissenschaft (besonders auch in den Naturwissenschaften) schwer erschüttert haben. Zugleich wird gezeigt, wie leicht sich die Ergebnisse von Forschung schon durch die Vergabe von Forschungsmittel und PR-Studien manipulieren lassen.
speedwellblues's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
YES FIVE STAR YAAAY!!! Please read. Loooove the use of visual aids in this too,, makes the concepts easier to digest if you’re not necessarily Phil-minded.
mlgardner1's review against another edition
3.0
This book was not what I expected and is probably 80 percent about the scientific method and errors that can occur in scientific understanding. Some of it was interesting but I think it got bogged down in some of the details. Also I disagree with the early premise that there may be no such thing as "truth." I do think some of the suggestions more related to news misinformation at the end are a bit dated at this point.