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A review by sinta
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread by Cailin O'Connor, James Owen Weatherall
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,”